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National Affairs: The House’s Key Committee Bows to No Man

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TIME

RULES & ITS RULERS

IN the gaudy legends of the House Rules Committee, Kansas Republican Philip Campbell occupies a niche as the crustiest of that committee’s traditionally crusty chairmen. In the early 1920s Campbell sported a Napoleonic curl in the middle of his forehead and had a personality to match, using the obstructive powers of the Rules Committee to block any legislation that he took a dislike to. When he saw fit, Campbell defied a majority of his own committee. If other committee members passed a resolution okaying a bill for floor action against his wishes, he would exercise a personal “pocket veto” by putting the bill in his pocket and refusing to call up the resolution on the House floor.

Formidable obstructive powers still repose in the House Rules Committee—and in its chairman, if he has enough committee votes behind him. Over the years the committee’s frequent roadblocks have exasperated and angered Presidents and Congressmen bent on getting programs enacted, but its powers have survived undipped because Rules performs an indispensable function in the lawmaking process. Essentially, the Rules Committee serves as the House’s traffic-control device, as necessary as traffic lights at big-city intersections. The House has 437 members, who among them introduce several thousand bills every year. Under an old House rule, every member has a theoretical right to speak for one hour on every bill that comes to the floor. Without firm traffic control, the legislative process would swiftly collapse into chaos. To exercise that control, the Rules Committee is equipped with powers to 1) decide whether a bill gets to the floor at all, 2) fix a maximum number of hours for debate on any particular bill, 3) set “gag rules” to restrict amendments to pending legislation.

In keeping with its great powers, Rules has privileges not accorded to any other House committee: it can, at any time, bring any bill it chooses before the House, and it can meet “without special leave” while the House is in session. Largely through its efforts the House, despite its much larger membership, is more efficient than the Senate.

During the first several decades of the U.S. Congress, the Rules Committee had little work and no power. The House of Representatives had a manageable number of members (65 in the first Congress, in 1789) and a limited range of business, so traffic control was not a compelling need. But as the membership of the House and the role of the Federal Government expanded, the Rules Committee grew in importance and power. From 1858, the Speaker of the House was a member of the committee, and ambitious Speakers made it an instrument of their own power. Maine’s Thomas Reed, Speaker in 1889-91 and again in 1895-99, used to decide the business of the five-member Rules Committee with his two fellow Republicans without even bothering to meet with the two Democratic members. “Gentlemen,” he would say, when it came time to inform the Democrats of the decision, “we have decided to perpetrate the following outrage.” When a House rebellion in 1909-11 upset the autocratic rule of Speaker “Uncle Joe” Cannon, one of the victorious rebels’ basic reforms was to deprive the Speaker of his place on the Rules Committee.

But the revolt against Cannon left the Rules Committee’s powers intact. In the 1920s. Democrats grumbled that under Republican Chairman Campbell the committee was a “cemetery where all Democratic measures are interred.” In 1931 a Democratic Congressman complained that New York’s Bertrand Snell, Republican chairman of the Rules Committee, was more powerful than the President, since Snell could “choke to death any piece of legislation” before it got to the floor.

Despite its curmudgeonly chairmen, Rules used to be fairly responsive to the will of the majority party; it was the minority party that took the beating. But in 1937 came a basic change. Franklin Roosevelt, in the midst of his attempt to pack the Supreme Court, helped Texas Congressman Sam Rayburn win election as Democratic floor leader (and heir to the speakership), defeating Rules Committee Chairman John O’Connor of New York, for the job. Ready to rebel anyway against F.D.R.’s liberalism, three Southern Democratic members of Rules, plus Chairman O’Connor, started joining up with committee Republicans to block New Deal legislation.* Among the rebels: Virginia’s Howard Worth Smith, now Rules Committee chairman. The 1937 revolt was the beginning of the conservative coalition that has controlled Rules ever since—owing little and giving little to the Speaker.

* In F.D.R.’s famed retaliatory purge attempt in the 1938 elections, he succeeded in beating O’Connor, though the other Congressmen on the purge list won re-election.

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