Party Leadership

In reflecting on party leadership—at that point, Democratic leadership—in Congress in 1994, the bruising budget battle of the year before was very much on my mind. I spoke in terms of “responsible party government,” not only because of Woodrow Wilson's important (if somewhat idiosyncratic) contribution to that school of thought and my own political science background, but because I was at that moment part of the effort to make unified Democratic control of Congress and the presidency work effectively. We whipped numerous measures, some of them long-stalled, to passage: Family and Medical Leave, “Motor Voter,” national service, a background check for gun purchases, an NIH reauthorization freeing research from ideological constraints, and major crime and deficit reduction initiatives. Yet the budget and crime victories came after long struggles that revealed deep divisions among Democrats, and President Bill Clinton's health care and welfare reform proposals died ingloriously, contributing greatly to the party's negative image going into the 1994 elections.

Republicans have run a tighter ship and have generally been rewarded politically, although it may turn out that the present essay, like the one I offered 11 years ago, is appearing on the eve of major shifts in party fortunes. In any event, Republicans have taken the consolidation of leadership control in the House and partisan unity in supporting a Republican administration far beyond what we Democrats aspired to, much less achieved. Newt Gingrich took major steps beyond the Democrats' leadership-strengthening moves of the 1970s and 1980s with regard to the appointment of committee chairs and members and control of committee and House agendas. This did not significantly change under Dennis Hastert, despite his professed desire to return to the “regular order”; the consolidation of leadership control over the past decade has reached levels not seen since the days of Thomas B. Reed and Joseph G. Cannon.

With the accession of George W. Bush, a Republican president determined to govern from the “right-in” rather than the “center-out,” GOP control took on a harder edge in terms of tactics designed to eliminate dependence on or participation by Democrats, while keeping the narrow Republican majority in line. Most obvious is the practice of going to the floor with a narrow whip count and holding the vote open as long as necessary to cajole the last few Republican members to vote “yes.” The most notorious example was the vote on the Republicans' privatized Medicare drug benefit, held open for almost three hours on November 22, 2003. But the tactic was utilized as recently as last October on the post-Katrina bill dealing with refinery construction and price-gouging.¹

A second tactic is to bring bills to the floor under increasingly restrictive rules. The incidence of completely closed rules that preclude the offering of any amendments whatsoever, including the traditional minority substitute, went from 9% in the last Democratic Congress (103^rd) to 22% in the 106^th and 107^th to 28% in the 108^th.²

A third tactic is to exclude Democrats from House-Senate conference deliberations. The watershed year was 2003, after the Republicans gained control of the Senate as well as the House and the presidency. The poster boy for the practice is Ways and Means chairman Bill Thomas, who told House Democratic conferees on the Medicare prescription drug bill that sessions would be cancelled if they showed up. Here too, the practice continues to the present: the budget reconciliation “conference” that produced additional cuts for food stamps, student loans, Medicaid, and child support in late 2005 mainly consisted of backstairs negotiations among Republican leaders. No debates were held nor votes taken on matters such as reducing by $22 billion the savings proposed by the Senate in subsidies for insurance companies and HMOs to entice them to offer privatized Medicare plans.³

Fourth, the Republican leadership has intervened in and preempted committee decisions with increasing frequency. This has had a particular impact on Democratic members of committees with a history of partisan cooperation—Appropriations, certainly, but also Transportation and Infrastructure, Armed Services, and others—but it has also reduced the quantity and quality of congressional deliberation and has discouraged independence of the executive.

In sum, Republicans have “manipulated the process to serve partisan interests far beyond what the Democrats did during their 40-year reign in the House” (Mann and Ornstein forthcoming, v–41; see also Quirk and Binder 2005, 540). In late 2005, I joined with a “Gang of Four”—led by Dave Obey (D-WI) and including Barney Frank (D-MA) and Tom Allen (D-ME)—in introducing a comprehensive reform proposal that targeted a number of partisan excesses (H. Res. 659). In anticipating the unfolding of the Jack Abramoff scandal and the subsequent desire of the Republican leadership to “get well” by proposing a reform agenda, we wanted to make certain that attention was paid to how the House was being run. The Republican tendency was to focus narrowly on lobbying abuses and congressional travel. But as Ornstein and Mann (2006) stressed:

Our reform package thus included proposals to end protracted roll calls; to require that conference committees actually meet, deliberate, and vote; to prohibit the addition of provisions to conference reports that were not approved by the actual conference; to end abuses of appropriations and other earmarks and of “self-executing” rules that add substantive provisions to procedural motions; and to ensure that members and staff have time to examine complex bills before votes are taken on them. We stressed that we were speaking not merely as aggrieved minority members, but as members concerned about the legitimacy and effectiveness of the institution as a whole. We also made clear that the rules we proposed were those we would hope and expect to live by whether we were in the minority or in leadership.

Under the circumstances, it is perhaps not surprising that I have had some second thoughts about responsible party government. But the fact is that those second thoughts began years ago and were refined in the crucible of 1993–1994 as well as during Democrats' years in the wilderness. The second thoughts do not bespeak a reversal: I continue to believe in the virtues of party discipline in the House and to try to help achieve it on our side of the aisle. It is basically a good thing that both parties have gained strength and solidarity in the modern House, opening up productive, cooperative roles for individual members, overcoming fragmentation, and enabling the majority to rule. But there are balances to be struck and excesses to be avoided, and the current iteration of party government should give us pause in at least three respects.

First, there are legitimate issues of fairness and institutional openness—to the participation and contributions of Democratic members and to the interests of the districts (almost half of the country) that we represent. Second, reminders abound that unified party control and other systems and mechanisms favored by champions of government efficiency from Wilson's day forward can in fact magnify the effects of irresponsibility and error if badly used. They certainly do not guarantee the enactment of coherent or sustainable policies. Consider the budget process: it made possible serious fiscal course corrections in 1990, 1993, and 1997, but for most of its history, including the last five years, it has facilitated what David Stockman (1987, 409) termed “fiscal excesses that had never before been imagined.” Efficient structures are no substitute for responsible leadership, and they may enable irresponsible or inept leaders to do far more damage. It is therefore important to temper party efficiency and discipline with processes that foster diverse input, due deliberation, and the building of consensus.⁴

Third, Congress needs a bipartisan as well as a partisan capacity. The sharply partisan approach of President Bush and congressional leaders arguably has decreased rather than increased their ability to handle areas such as trade and energy effectively.⁵

Certainly it bodes poorly for our ability to deal with the major “dedistributive” issues—notably deficit reduction and entitlement reform—that loom over the horizon.⁶ Is it remotely conceivable that anything resembling the 1990 bipartisan budget agreement could be concluded in Washington today, even though today's budget crisis is more serious? One problem is that this President Bush, unlike his father, barely acknowledges the problem. But even if he did, the partisan divide is so wide, and the mechanisms of collaboration so atrophied, as to make a 1990-style bipartisan agreement almost unthinkable. Nor does 1993 offer a reliable alternative model. In retrospect, that budget plan, passed with Democratic “heavy lifting” alone, appears even more remarkable than it did at the time. But it was that experience that decisively convinced me that for the major dedistributive issues we face, we must keep the mechanisms of bipartisan communication and cooperation—as well as those of majority-party mobilization—in working order if we are to govern successfully. It is that bipartisan capacity that we have at least temporarily lost in the current era, and it is a dangerous loss.

Committee Decline

Woodrow Wilson portrayed committees as at once dominating the work and the power structure of Congress and exemplifying its defects as a governing institution. In 1994 I offered a contrasting view of the role of committees in giving members incentives to engagement, fostering expertise and deliberation, and facilitating oversight of executive agencies and programs (Price 1995, 9–13). Today all of those functions are in decline.

Most House committee chairs have considerably less autonomy than their Democratic counterparts had before 1994—a function of how they are appointed and reappointed, of term limits, and of the leadership's degree of intervention and control. In turn, senior majority positions on most committees have been devalued: there is less for senior members to determine in terms of committee direction; the chairman's frame of reference has likely shifted from his or her committee peers to party leaders; and the authority and resources of subcommittee chairs have been reduced. Senior members on the minority side are less likely to be drawn into collaborative relationships, and they are often under pressures of their own to maintain partisan distinctiveness. Junior members from both parties will rarely be more than bit players, counted on for their votes but not much more.

I make these generalizations knowing quite well that there is considerable diversity in performance and practice among committees, and even on the same committee from one endeavor to another. Let me also emphasize: I am not inclined to idealize the committee-party balance under Democratic leadership. I thought that our party leaders deferred inordinately to senior committee leaders, and I will want to see some changes when we regain the majority. Still, I believe that the decline in committee (and ultimately institutional) capacity under Republican leadership is real. When political scientists get around to what they call “operationalizing” committee decline, they will find abundant evidence overall of a less substantive, sustained, or self-starting legislative role.

Congressional scholars are already decrying the deterioration of congressional deliberation, mainly implicating weakened and subservient committees (Mann and Ornstein forthcoming, v–34–45; Quirk 2005, 330–342). Woodrow Wilson did the same, although he attributed the abysmal quality of congressional debate to the ascendance of the committees rather than to their decline. Wilson readily conceded the utility of strong committees in rendering Congress a “facile statute-devising machine.” But he valued the lawmaking function far less than “the instruction and guidance in political affairs which the people might receive from a body which kept all national concerns suffused in a broad daylight of discussion” (Wilson 1885, 193, 195). By this standard, committee government fared poorly. Much of what committees did was hidden from public view, but even their open discussions, Wilson wrote, were seldom “instructive to the public.”

One who sees, as I do, greater value than Wilson saw in Congress' legislative and oversight functions and in the contributions committees make to their performance, is less likely to denigrate the deliberation antecedent to those functions, even if it sometimes becomes technical and fails to scale the rhetorical heights. But I wonder: has committee decline brought forth the kind of “common counsel” to which Wilson aspired? Committee bills now hew more closely to party and administration priorities, and their public justification no doubt draws on broader ideological themes. But hearings are often cursory and markups abbreviated. Deliberation and debate among committee members are often displaced by backstage interactions among a few committee leaders, administration officials, lobbyists, and staff. “Chairmen's marks” are often summarily approved with little justification and less debate. I would suggest that the current performance of most committees falls as far short of Wilson's standards as it does of supporting effective lawmaking and oversight. Party leadership strength and committee vitality can be mutually reinforcing, but they are currently locked in something close to a zero-sum relationship. Discussions of leadership strategy and institutional reform, both inside and outside Congress, should give a high priority to recalibrating this balance and reinvigorating the committee system.

Congressional—Executive Balances

Reflecting 11 years ago on Woodrow Wilson's portrayal of committees as the dominant force in Congress and Congress as the dominant force in the federal establishment—virtually taking “into its own hands all the substantial powers of government” (Wilson 1885, 49; see also 44, 53–54, 69)—I did not anticipate that we were in serious danger of moving to the opposite extremes. In fact, in that fleeting period of unified Democratic control, I was interested in tilting the balances toward less committee autonomy and more effective cooperation between Congress and the White House in enacting a Democratic program. Obviously, the dynamics soon shifted, with the Republican leadership consolidating power within the House and settling in for what proved to be a six-year exercise of checks and balances with President Clinton. That period, bracketed by government shutdowns and a partisan impeachment, displayed more than enough unproductive standoffs and partisan excesses. As messy as it often was, however, it measures up relatively well—in terms of the constitutional balance of power and modulated, sustainable policy outcomes—when compared to the period of unified Republican control that followed.

Consider the budget process, for example, both the positive outcomes realized and the fiscal excesses avoided, during this period of divided government. The 1997 budget agreement was less heroic in some respects than single-party plans might have been. Democrats swallowed more upper-bracket tax cuts than they wanted as part of the package, while Republicans cut Medicare and domestic discretionary spending less deeply and accepted a new health insurance program for children. But the cross-partisan accommodations also mitigated the dedistributive character of the package and increased both its legitimacy in the eyes of the public and its political viability.

The 1997 agreement was not replicated in any of the other five years; the usual pattern was budgetary standoffs and protracted end-of-session inter-branch negotiations. But even this ragged process produced outcomes that, I would argue, were more balanced and responsible than the budget outcomes of the George W. Bush years. Republicans did not get all the tax cuts they wanted; Democrats did not get as much funding as they wanted for domestic priorities; and Clinton maneuvered both into declaring the Social Security portion of the surplus off limits, to be used only for debt reduction. Checks and balances, in other words, insulated budget politics from extreme outcomes. After 2000, that insulation was gone. The budget process that had been designed to promote fiscal balance and to give Congress its own tools for responsible budgeting was instead utilized to render Congress subservient to the Bush agenda, facilitating tax cuts and other policies which took the country over the cliff fiscally in remarkably short order (Price 2004, 157–173).

The election of a Republican president was a watershed event in terms of the character of Republican governance of the House. Exclusionary tactics escalated, and centralized power was deployed uncritically in service of the White House agenda. Bill Connelly (2002, ix–xi) has suggested an interesting parallel between Newt Gingrich's speakership and Wilson's notion of congressionally-centered party government. Does the parallelism continue between the changes of 2001 and Wilson's shift, by the time he wrote Constitutional Government in the United States (1908), to a model of governance centered on the presidency? Whatever one makes of such comparisons, the fact is that President Bush's approach to Congress has been, in Mann and Ornstein's (forthcoming, I–22) terms, “both partisan and executive-centered. [Bush] eschewed serious negotiations with Democrats on the substance of policy and aggressively sought to expand executive power vis-à-vis the Congress.” Speaker Hastert and other Republican leaders proved quite compliant. “Strong majority leadership in Congress led not to vigorous exertion of Congressional authority and responsibility but to a general obeisance to presidential initiative and passivity in the face of presidential power.”⁷

Not everyone expected this of Bush, who had campaigned as a “compassionate conservative” and touted his ability to work with Democrats. But with few exceptions Bush chose to cater to his conservative base and to govern from the “right-in.” House leaders put together their winning majorities the same way, attuned as they were to the conservative “majority of the majority” within the Republican Conference. Far from the collision course some had predicted, Bush, Hastert, and Majority Leader Tom DeLay collaborated in passing the purest (i.e., most conservative) version of their agenda items in the House, so as to start as far to the right as possible in dealing with the Senate, whether that body was under Democratic or Republican control. This was not a mission that permitted much in the way of legislative initiative or independence on the part of House members and committees; indeed, it required measures to regiment Republicans and marginalize Democrats that went considerably beyond Gingrich's practice.

No congressional function has atrophied under unified Republican control more than oversight of the executive. This has become a major sore point among Democrats, as evidenced by Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid's invoking of an obscure rule in late 2005 to convene an executive session to light a fire under the Intelligence Committee's investigation of the possible manipulation or misrepresentation of intelligence before the Iraq War. In the House, Democrats questioned the majority's willingness to fully air the administration's failures in responding to Hurricane Katrina, holding out for an independent investigative body on the 9/11 Commission model, or at least an equally divided select committee with each side having subpoena authority.

These partisan challenges had considerable provocation. The list of legitimate oversight inquiries foregone—many of them explicitly blocked after Democratic requests—is long and varied: the conduct of Vice President Dick Cheney's task force on energy, the administration's suppression of cost estimates for its Medicare prescription drug plan, contractor abuses in Iraq, the formulation and execution of administration policies on detainee abuse, and so forth. It is true, of course, that the majority party almost always has weaker incentives to conduct vigorous oversight when the president is of the same party. But one need only recall William Fulbright's (D-AR) stewardship of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee or the willingness of John Moss (D-CA) and John Dingell (D-MI) of the House Commerce Committee to take on Republican and Democratic administrations alike, to appreciate the extent to which partisan loyalty and deference to a Republican president have trumped any sense of institutional identity or constitutional responsibility since President Bush took office.⁸

So it turns out that Congressional Government still stimulates and provokes. That was true amidst the struggles of 1994 and it is true today, when Wilson's determination to get beyond the “literary theory” and to assess how the constitutional balance of powers was actually working has taken on fresh urgency (Wilson 1885, 31, 53–55). The parallels to our own time are inexact and the prescriptions not always convincing. But the topics that, with Wilson's help, I have raised in this essay—hyper-partisanship in running the Congress; the decline of congressional committees and, with them, of a capacity for deliberation; and a decisive shift in power and prerogative toward the executive—are compelling and consequential. They are worthy subjects for “common counsel,” and it is time for our country's political leaders, scholars, and citizens to take heed.