Donald R. Wolfensberger
Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars
Introduction
What kind of institutional legacy has Newt Gingrich left the House after just two short terms as Speaker? Obviously, his place in history has already been assured by his single-minded determination and instrumental role in bringing Republicans into a majority in Congress for the first time in 40 years, and in keeping them there for more than a single term for the first time in 68 years. But his mixed success inside the House as a legislative and political leader, culminating in his hasty departure under fire from his own troops, will always cast doubt on his overall effectiveness as Speaker.
Gingrich never fully recovered from the political damage inflicted by the government shutdowns of 1995 and 1996, his long ethics ordeal and reprimand, and the abortive backbench coup against him in July 1997. I would submit, however, that notwithstanding these setbacks, his lasting impact on the institution may ultimately prove to be more significant than most contemporary observers are willing to concede.
Keep in mind that Speaker Thomas Brackett Reed's greatest legacy is considered to be "Reed's Rules," a set of parliamentary rulings he issued from the chair in 1890 to end minority obstructionism and which he then codified in House Rules as chairman of the Rules Committee. Republicans still lost control of the House in that year's mid-term elections and did not gain back control until 1895. Reed served just two more terms as Speaker before resigning in1899 because he was out of step with his own party over President William McKinley's imperial policies.
Reed's speakership is a reminder that a legacy is not so much what you've accomplished as it is what you've left behind that is of value to future generations, or, in the case of a Speaker, to future Congresses. Time and history are the ultimate judges of a person's lasting legacy.
Notwithstanding that caveat, it is always a fun, if not fair, game to preempt history's judgment with instant, pop analysis. In that vein, I argue that Newt Gingrich may well have left a much more positive legacy than the immediate, bitter aftertaste of his reign may suggest. The key to the Gingrich legacy's potential can be found in the revolutionary critique of Congress embodied in the Contract With America (and earlier Republican pronouncements), and in the corrective remedies Republicans proposed and adopted to put the nation's legislature back on a sound and credible public footing.
The Minority Blueprint for a New House
The central premise of the Republicans' manifesto was that the House had become corrupted by the majority Democrats' arrogance of power and that it therefore required a major overhaul if it was to regain the people's trust and confidence. What was needed, Republicans suggested, was a greater degree of openness, accountability, responsiveness, and deliberation. What was at stake was nothing less than the institution's integrity, credibility and effectiveness. Newt Gingrich helped to lay the groundwork for this new House order, though his tactics and strategies as Speaker in pursuit of short term legislative gains often detracted from its realization.
It may seem unfair, at first, to saddle Speaker Gingrich with accountability for the kind of House that Republicans planned and pined for while in the minority. Still, one of the central themes of the Conservative Opportunity Society (COS), which Gingrich and others formed in 1982, was its portrayal of a corrupt House in which the majority's arrogance was regularly reflected in procedural abuses of deliberative process, not to mention of a beleaguered minority. Not only were committee decisions being undermined by the leadership's "post-committee adjustments," but members were increasingly being prevented from offering House floor amendments by restrictive special rules. Moreover, the minority was even being denied an opportunity on many major bills of offering its final alternative in a motion to recommit. Given this posture, it is not surprising that most of the Republicans' reform efforts were aimed at restoring a more deliberative process both in committee and on the floor.
With the imminent retirement of Minority Leader Bob Michel in 1994, and Gingrich the all-but assured successor, the Gingrich-inspired Contract With America became the Republicans' campaign and governing platform. In no uncertain terms, from its opening paragraphs, the Contract reiterated the long-held Republican criticism of the Democratically-controlled House that had been popularized over the years by COS members in their late-night, "special order" speeches carried live by C-SPAN from the House floor.
In its opening three paragraphs the Contract promised not just a detailed, national policy agenda, but "to restore the bonds of trust between the people and their elected representatives. . . to bring the House a new majority that will transform the way the House works . . . .to restore accountability to Congress. . . . end its cycle of scandal and disgrace. . . . [and] make us all proud again of the way free people govern themselves."1
To this end, the Contract promised that on the opening day of the 104th Congress the House would adopt eight major rules changes and pass a bill (the Congressional Accountability Act) to transform the institution. On the historic, 14-hour legislative day of January 4-5, 1995, House Republicans not only kept those nine promises, with separate votes on each; they adopted another 23 changes in House rules. Almost all of the recorded votes drew substantial Democratic support.
To make committees more deliberative and accountable, the rules changes eliminated proxy voting and rolling quorums, reduced the number of committees and subcommittees, capped the number of member assignments to such panels, and required that all substantive roll call votes be published in committee reports. To ensure greater openness, committees could no longer close their meetings for any reason; now only national security and personal privacy matters could justify closed sessions. Likewise, TV coverage of public meetings and hearings no longer depended on a majority vote of approval for access; now it was automatic.
To curb the growth of committee powers, a three-term limit was placed on committee and subcommittee chairs. The Speaker was limited to four terms. To encourage greater responsibility, committees were required to formulate and adopt oversight agendas at the beginning of each Congress and account for them in their final activity reports. To reverse the growth of semi-autonomous subcommittees, committee chairmen were given full authority over all subcommittee appointments and staff. Moreover, the total number of House committee staff was reduced by one-third from the previous Congress.
To give the Speaker greater control over the committee process, joint bill referrals were abolished. And while split and sequential bill referrals were retained, "primary" committees were designated to ensure greater accountability. The Speaker was given greater flexibility in referrals, especially in setting deadlines for reporting. Republicans also promised more openness in floor amendments, and the minority party was guaranteed a final opportunity to offer its preferred amendment to bills on the floor in the motion to recommit - a right dating back to 1909 that recent Speakers had undermined by relying on an obscure precedent from 1934.
House Reform and the Governing Realities
It is not my contention that House Republicans came close to achieving their ideal of a transformed House overnight, notwithstanding all the hoopla and successes on opening day of putting their framework in place. In fact, the House took some backward steps from its aim to make the committee system more deliberative and responsible. The processing of the ten items (actually about two dozen bills) of the Contract With America during the first 100 days of the 104th Congress was not a pretty sight if you are looking for deliberative democracy at its finest.
But I submit that the Contract period was aberrational, to put it mildly. It was the legislative sausage factory running full tilt - three shifts a day. Committees were pressed to rush their bills to the House on an accelerated timetable - hearings and deliberative markups be damned. After all, the Contract promised to bring its bills to the floor in much the same form as originally written back in September 1994, before the new Congress even convened. There was little leeway for committees to make changes. Those that tried were reversed by the leadership. The Contract may have been a brilliant campaign document, but its preordained specificity did not allow the new committees and their chairmen to learn the legislative ropes they should have climbed. One could even argue that the Contract drill encouraged bad habits, both at the committee and leadership levels. It was only a year later that committees could begin to settle into a more measured and deliberative existence, but by then the leadership agenda was minimal, with a just a few major accomplishments to ward off the "do nothing" label.
Things improved slightly in the 105th Congress, mainly because the leadership recognized it was not prudent to pursue a Contract II. Committee activity and influence gained some, as the leadership loosened its tight reins on committee chairmen. However, even with the advent of a budget surplus after 1997, the agenda was still dominated by budgetary considerations and actions. Now the problem was how to allocate the surplus rather than how to reduce the deficit.
Notwithstanding ballooning revenues, Congress was still living under unrealistically tight spending ceilings. The focus was on Social Security lock-boxes, tax cuts, and the appropriations battles, all of which still tended to squeeze out the authorizing committees when it came to floor consideration. The appropriations battles were not just with the president, his Democratic loyalists in the House, and with the Senate. The House majority leadership also had to contend with rearguard sniping from its own hardline, fiscal conservatives.
It was Gingrich's new willingness to compromise with his own committees, political factions, the Senate, and the president, that led to an abortive coup attempt from Republican backbenchers in July 1997, with some of the leadership implicated as co-conspirators. The lessons that Gingrich had learned from the 1995-96 debacle seemed to be to compromise, declare victory, and get out of town and back to the campaign trail to consolidate majority control - even if it meant increasing spending (as happened in the massive omnibus final appropriations bill in 1998). That did not sit well with the hard-core, conservative ideologues who came to Congress to reduce government, not to pump it up.
The politics of House procedures during these tumultuous four years involved patching together winning coalitions in order to pass the special rules for consideration of bills, and, more importantly, to take whatever procedural and political steps necessary to pass essential legislation. This entailed endless hours of meetings with individual members and small groups. Gingrich's big dream of being a transformational leader was quickly reduced to being a transactional leader consumed with brokering deals to hold his troops together and keep peace in the family.
A New Openness
Part of the implicit Republican reform platform was a more open floor amendment process. Rules Committee chairman-designate Jerry Solomon announced in November 1994 his goal of 70 percent open rules - a reversal of the Democrats' 30 percent open rules in the 103rd Congress. The actual results fell far short of that goal, with 58 percent and 54 percent open or modified open rules in the 104th and 105th Congresses, compared to 44 percent in the 103rd Congress. One of the innovations Republicans used that qualified as a modified open rule was to provide overall time caps on the amendment process - forcing Democrats to prioritize their amendments rather than have Republicans dictate to them which amendments they could offer.
Perhaps Gingrich's most assured legacy is an initiative he took before the 104th Congress even convened to create the Library of Congress THOMAS website for all legislative information. Taken together with the new rules for greater accountability in committee and on the floor, the innovation has probably done more for congressional openness and public understanding of its operations and activities than any change since the advent of televised House floor debates in 1979.
Selecting Committee Chairmen
Another Gingrich legacy of major import is his assertiveness in the selection of committee chairmen. Under his conference rules he had been given greater control over the party steering committee that nominates committee members and chairmen. But he preempted its decisions by announcing his choices for chairmen before the committee even met, skipping over more senior members in three instances. The precedent set by this action is more significant than the Democratic Caucus's rejection of three committee chairmen in 1974. It established a clearly defined relationship between the leadership and committee chairmen, just as term limits on committee and subcommittee chairmen dispelled any notions of holding gavels in perpetuity.
These assertions of leadership prerogatives were further supplemented by signed loyalty pledges to the caucus by Appropriations Committee and subcommittee chairmen (the so-called "cardinals") and the subordination of all majority committee staff to the Speaker's chief-of-staff. Taken together, these steps left no question about the primacy of party over committee.
Conclusion
What in the House that Newt built might presage an enduring legacy? I would suggest that it is the combined thrust of a set of formal and informal rules and practices which, if left in place and allowed to work, could make the House a better legislative body. The thrust of the Republicans' changes was to make the House and its committees more open, accountable, deliberative and responsive than they had been under Democratic control. The changes also gave the Speaker greater authority and flexibility in dealing with committees and ensured greater committee accountability and responsiveness to the party caucus.
The 104th-106th Congresses have not been a sufficient test of whether the rules changes can achieve the vision and potential contemplated with their adoption. The intense partisanship generated by narrow majorities and the resulting struggles between the parties for chamber control have deferred for now the kind of environment in which more deliberative lawmaking can take place. Once the struggle for control is less contentious and consuming, and one party or the other has a firmer, working majority, there can be a truer test of whether this more deliberative and consensus oriented legislature is a realistic possibility. Importantly, though, the groundwork and rules pointing towards its realization have been laid.
In April of this year, House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt surprised some of his fellow Democrats when he told a transition planning group that if they retook control of the House he was prepared to accept the entire package of House rules changes made by Republicans in 1995. According to his top aides, Gephardt felt the changes had brought much needed reform to the House and that their acceptance by Democrats would signal a new era of bipartisanship and collegiality in the chamber.2
This is another sign that Gingrich's legacy may have some enduring value. Whether the rest of the Democratic Caucus members, especially aspiring committee chairs, go along with Gephardt if they retake control, will be a major test of whether the Gingrich speakership has had a positive and lasting influence on the institution.
1. Ed Gillespie and Bob Schellhas, eds., Contract With America: The Bold Plan by Rep. Newt Gingrich, Rep. Dick Armey, and the House Republicans to Change the Nation (Washington: Republican National Committee, 1994), 7-8.
2. Ethan Wallison, "Gephardt Embracing Institutional Reforms: Leader Might Back Limits on Panel Chairmen," Roll Call, Thursday, April 8, 2000, 1.
