to those who desire to be heard with regard to pending questions; and no
one can demand a hearing as of right. On the contrary, they are
privileged and accustomed to hold their sessions in absolute secrecy. It
is made a breach of order for any member to allude on the floor of the
House to anything that has taken place in committee, "unless by a
written report sanctioned by a majority of the Committee;" and there is
no place in the regular order of business for a motion instructing a
Committee to conduct its investigations with open doors. Accordingly, it
is only by the concession of the Committees that arguments are made
before them.
When they do suffer themselves to be approached, moreover, they
generally extend the leave to others besides their fellow-congressmen.
The Committee on Commerce consents to listen to prominent railroad
officials upon the subject of the regulation of freight charges and
fares; and scores of interested persons telegraph inquiries to the
chairman of the Committee of Ways and Means as to the time at which they
are to be permitted to present to the Committee their views upon the
revision of the tariff. The speeches made before the Committees at their
open sessions are, therefore, scarcely of such a kind as would be
instructive to the public, and on that account worth publishing. They
are as a rule the pleas of special pleaders, the arguments of advocates.
They have about them none of the searching, critical, illuminating
character of the higher order of parliamentary debate, in which men are
pitted against each other as equals, and urged to sharp contest and
masterful strife by the inspiration of political principle and personal
ambition, through the rivalry of parties and the competition of
policies. They represent a joust between antagonistic interests, not a
contest of principles. They could scarcely either inform or elevate
public opinion, even if they were to obtain its heed.
For the instruction and elevation of public opinion, in regard to
national affairs, there is needed something more than special pleas for
special privileges. There is needed public discussion of a peculiar
sort: a discussion by the sovereign legislative body itself, a
discussion in which every feature of each mooted point of policy shall
be distinctly brought out, and every argument of significance pushed to
the farthest point of insistence, by recognized leaders in that body;
and, above all, a discussion upon which something--something of interest
or importance, some pressing question of administration or of law, the
fate of a party or the success of a conspicuous politician--evidently
depends. It is only a discussion of this sort that the public will heed;
no other sort will impress it.
There could, therefore, be no more unwelcome revelation to one who has
anything approaching a statesman-like appreciation of the essential
conditions of intelligent self-government than just that which must
inevitably be made to every one who candidly examines our congressional
system; namely, that, under that system, such discussion is impossible.
There are, to begin with, physical and _architectural_ reasons why
business-like debate of public affairs by the House of Representatives
is out of the question. To those who visit the galleries of the
representative chamber during a session of the House these reasons are
as obvious as they are astonishing. It would be natural to expect that a
body which meets ostensibly for consultation and deliberation should
hold its sittings in a room small enough to admit of an easy interchange
of views and a ready concert of action, where its members would be
brought into close, sympathetic contact; and it is nothing less than
astonishing to find it spread at large through the vast spaces of such a
chamber as the hall of the House of Representatives, where there are no
close ranks of cooperating parties, but each member has a roomy desk and
an easy revolving chair; where broad aisles spread and stretch
themselves; where ample, soft-carpeted areas lie about the spacious
desks of the Speaker and clerks; where deep galleries reach back from
the outer limits of the wide passages which lie beyond "the bar": an
immense, capacious chamber, disposing its giant dimensions freely
beneath the great level lacunar ceiling through whose glass panels the
full light of day pours in. The most vivid impression the visitor gets
in looking over that vast hall is the impression of space. A speaker
must needs have a voice like O'Connell's, the practical visitor is apt
to think, as he sits in the gallery, to fill even the silent spaces of
that room; how much more to overcome the disorderly noises that buzz and
rattle through it when the representatives are assembled,--a voice
clear, sonorous, dominant, like the voice of a clarion. One who speaks
there with the voice and lungs of the ordinary mortal must content
himself with the audience of those members in his own immediate
neighborhood, whose ears he rudely assails in vehement efforts to
command the attention of those beyond them, and who, therefore, cannot
choose but hear him.
It is of this magnitude of the hall of the representatives that those
news telegrams are significant which speak of an interesting or witty
speech in Congress as having drawn about the speaker listeners from all
parts of the House. As one of our most noted wits would say, a member
must needs take a Sabbath day's journey to get within easy hearing
distance of a speaker who is addressing the House from the opposite
side of the hall; for besides the space there are the noises
intervening, the noises of loud talking and of the clapping of hands for
the pages, making the task of the member who is speaking "very like
trying to address the people in the omnibuses from the curbstone in
front of the Astor House."[21]
But these physical limitations to debate, though serious and real, are
amongst the least important, because they are amongst the least
insuperable. If effective and business-like public discussions were
considered indispensable by Congress, or even desirable, the present
chamber could readily be divided into two halls: the one a commodious
reading-room where the members might chat and write at ease as they now
do in the House itself; and the other a smaller room suitable for debate
and earnest business. This, in fact, has been several times proposed,
but the House does not feel that there is any urgency about providing
facilities for debate, because it sees no reason to desire an increase
of speech-making, in view of the fact that, notwithstanding all the
limitations now put upon discussion, its business moves much too slowly.
The early Congresses had time to talk; Congresses of to-day have not.
Before that wing of the Capitol was built in which the representative
chamber now is, the House used to sit in the much smaller room, now
empty save for the statuary to whose exhibition it is devoted; and there
much speech-making went on from day to day; there Calhoun and Randolph
and Webster and Clay won their reputations as statesmen and orators. So
earnest and interesting were the debates of those days, indeed, that the
principal speeches delivered in Congress seem to have been usually
printed at length in the metropolitan journals.[22] But the number and
length of the speeches was even then very much deplored; and so early as
1828 a writer in the "North American Review" condemns what he calls "the
habit of congressional debating," with the air of one who speaks against
some abuse which every one acknowledges to be a nuisance.[23] Eleven
years later a contributor to the "Democratic Review"[24] declared that
it had "been gravely charged upon" Mr. Samuel Cushman, then a member of
the Twenty-fifth Congress from New Hampshire, "that he moves the
previous question. Truly," continues the essayist, "he does, and for
that very service, if he had never done anything else, he deserves a
monument as a public benefactor. One man who can arrest a tedious,
long-winded, factious, time-killing debate, is worth forty who can
provoke or keep one up. It requires some moral courage, some spirit, and
some tact also, to move the previous question, and to move it, too, at
precisely the right point of time."
This ardent and generous defense of Mr. Cushman against the odious
accusation of moving the previous question would doubtless be
exquisitely amusing to the chairman of one of the Standing Committees of
the Forty-eighth Congress, to whom the previous question seems one of
the commonest necessities of life. But, after all, he ought not to laugh
at the ingenuous essayist, for that was not the heyday of the rules;
they then simply served and did not tyrannize over the House. They did
not then have the opportunity of empire afforded them by the scantiness
of time which hurries the House, and the weight of business which
oppresses it; and they were at a greater disadvantage in a room where
oratory was possible than they are in a vast chamber where the orator's
voice is drowned amidst the noises of disorderly inattention. Nowadays
would-be debaters are easily thrust out of Congress and forced to resort
to the printing-office; are compelled to content themselves with
speaking from the pages of the "Record" instead of from their places in
the House. Some people who live very far from Washington may imagine
that the speeches which are spread at large in the columns of the
"Congressional Record," or which their representative sends them in
pamphlet form, were actually delivered in Congress; but every one else
knows that they were not; that Congress is constantly granting leave to
its members to insert in the official reports of the proceedings
speeches which it never heard and does not care to hear, but which it is
not averse from printing at the public expense, if it is desirable that
constituents and the country at large should read them. It will not
stand between a member and his constituents so long as it can indulge
the one and satisfy the others without any inconvenience to itself or
any serious drain upon the resources of the Treasury. The public printer
does not object.
But there are other reasons still more organic than these why the
debates of Congress cannot, under our present system, have that serious
purpose of search into the merits of policies and that definite and
determinate party--or, if you will, partisan--aim without which they can
never be effective for the instruction of public opinion, or the
cleansing of political action. The chief of these reasons, because the
parent of all the rest, is that there are in Congress no authoritative
leaders who are the recognized spokesmen of their parties. Power is
nowhere concentrated; it is rather deliberately and of set policy
scattered amongst many small chiefs. It is divided up, as it were, into
forty-seven seigniories, in each of which a Standing Committee is the
court-baron and its chairman lord-proprietor. These petty barons, some
of them not a little powerful, but none of them within reach of the full
powers of rule, may at will exercise an almost despotic sway within
their own shires, and may sometimes threaten to convulse even the realm
itself; but both their mutual jealousies and their brief and restricted
opportunities forbid their combining, and each is very far from the
office of common leader.
I know that to some this scheme of distributed power and disintegrated
rule seems a very excellent device whereby we are enabled to escape a
dangerous "one-man power" and an untoward concentration of functions;
and it is very easy to see and appreciate the considerations which make
this view of committee government so popular. It is based upon a very
proper and salutary fear of _irresponsible_ power; and those who most
resolutely maintain it always fight from the position that all
leadership in legislation is hard to restrain in proportion to its size
and to the strength of its prerogatives, and that to divide it is to
make it manageable. They aver, besides, that the less a man has to
do--that is to say, the more he is confined to single departments and to
definite details--the more intelligent and thorough will his work be.
They like the Committees, therefore, just because they are many and
weak, being quite willing to abide their being despotic within their
narrow spheres.
It seems evident, however, when the question is looked at from another
stand-point, that, as a matter of fact and experience, the more power is
divided the more irresponsible it becomes. A mighty baron who can call
half the country to arms is watched with greater jealousy, and,
therefore, restrained with more vigilant care than is ever vouchsafed
the feeble master of a single and solitary castle. The one cannot stir
abroad upon an innocent pleasure jaunt without attracting the suspicious
attention of the whole country-side; the other may vex and harry his
entire neighborhood without fear of let or hindrance. It is ever the
little foxes that spoil the grapes. At any rate, to turn back from
illustration to the facts of the argument, it is plain enough that the
petty character of the leadership of each Committee contributes towards
making its despotism sure by making its duties uninteresting. The
Senate almost always discusses its business with considerable
thoroughness; and even the House, whether by common consent or by reason
of such persistent "filibustering" on the part of the minority as
compels the reporting Committee and the majority to grant time for talk,
sometimes stops to debate committee reports at length; but nobody,
except, perhaps, newspaper editors, finds these debates interesting
reading.
Why is it that many intelligent and patriotic people throughout this
country, from Virginia to California,--people who, beyond all question,
love their State and the Union more than they love our cousin state over
sea,--subscribe for the London papers in order to devour the
parliamentary debates, and yet would never think of troubling themselves
to make tedious progress through a single copy of the "Congressional
Record"? Is it because they are captivated by the old-world dignity of
royal England with its nobility and its court pageantry, or because of a
vulgar desire to appear better versed than their neighbors in foreign
affairs, and to affect familiarity with British statesmen? No; of course
not. It is because the parliamentary debates are interesting and ours
are not. In the British House of Commons the functions and privileges of
our Standing Committees are all concentrated in the hands of the
Ministry, who have, besides, some prerogatives of leadership which even
our Committees do not possess, so that they carry all responsibility as
well as great power, and all debate wears an intense personal and party
interest. Every important discussion is an arraignment of the Ministry
by the Opposition,--an arraignment of the majority by the minority; and
every important vote is a party defeat and a party triumph. The whole
conduct of the government turns upon what is said in the Commons,
because the revelations of debate often change votes, and a Ministry
loses hold upon power as it loses hold upon the confidence of the
Commons. This great Standing Committee goes out whenever it crosses the
will of the majority. It is, therefore, for these very simple and
obvious reasons that the parliamentary debates are read on this side of
the water in preference to the congressional debates. They affect the
ministers, who are very conspicuous persons, and in whom, therefore, all
the intelligent world is interested; and they determine the course of
politics in a great empire. The season of a parliamentary debate is a
great field day on which Liberals and Conservatives pit their full
forces against each other, and people like to watch the issues of the
contest.
Our congressional debates, on the contrary, have no tithe of this
interest, because they have no tithe of such significance and
importance. The committee reports, upon which the debates take place,
are backed by neither party; they represent merely the recommendations
of a small body of members belonging to both parties, and are quite as
likely to divide the vote of the party to which the majority of the
Committee belong as they are to meet with opposition from the other side
of the chamber. If they are carried, it is no party triumph; if they are
lost, it is no party discomfiture. They are no more than the proposals
of a mixed Committee, and may be rejected without political
inconvenience to either party or reproof to the Committee; just as they
may be passed without compliment to the Committee or political advantage
to either side of the House. Neither party has any great stake in the
controversy. The only importance that can attach to the vote must hang
upon its relation to the next general election. If the report concern a
question which is at the time so much in the public eye that all action
upon it is likely to be marked and remembered against the day of popular
action, parties are careful to vote as solidly as possible on what they
conceive to be the safe side; but all other reports are disposed of
without much thought of their influence upon the fortunes of distant
elections, because that influence is remote and problematical.
In a word, the national parties do not act in Congress under the
restraint of a sense of immediate responsibility. Responsibility is
spread thin; and no vote or debate can gather it. It rests not so much
upon parties as upon individuals; and it rests upon individuals in no
such way as would make it either just or efficacious to visit upon them
the iniquity of any legislative act. Looking at government from a
practical and business-like, rather than from a theoretical and
abstractly-ethical point of view,--treating the business of government
as a business,--it seems to be unquestionably and in a high degree
desirable that all legislation should distinctly represent the action of
parties as parties. I know that it has been proposed by enthusiastic,
but not too practical, reformers to do away with parties by some
legerdemain of governmental reconstruction, accompanied and supplemented
by some rehabilitation, devoutly to be wished, of the virtues least
commonly controlling in fallen human nature; but it seems to me that it
would be more difficult and less desirable than these amiable persons
suppose to conduct a government of the many by means of any other device
than party organization, and that the great need is, not to get rid of
parties, but to find and use some expedient by which they can be managed
and made amenable from day to day to public opinion. Plainly this
cannot be effected by punishing here and there a member of Congress who
has voted for a flagrantly dishonest appropriation bill, or an obnoxious
measure relating to the tariff. Unless the punishment can be extended to
the party--if any such be recognizable--with which these members have
voted, no advantage has been won for self-government, and no triumph has
been gained by public opinion. It should be desired that parties should
act in distinct organizations, in accordance with avowed principles,
under easily recognized leaders, in order that the voters might be able
to declare by their ballots, not only their condemnation of any past
policy, by withdrawing all support from the party responsible for it;
but also and particularly their will as to the future administration of
the government, by bringing into power a party pledged to the adoption
of an acceptable policy.
It is, therefore, a fact of the most serious consequence that by our
system of congressional rule no such means of controlling legislation is
afforded. Outside of Congress the organization of the national parties
is exceedingly well-defined and tangible; no one could wish it, and few
could imagine it, more so; but within Congress it is obscure and
intangible. Our parties marshal their adherents with the strictest
possible discipline for the purpose of carrying elections, but their
discipline is very slack and indefinite in dealing with legislation. At
least there is within Congress no _visible_, and therefore no
_controllable_ party organization. The only bond of cohesion is the
caucus, which occasionally whips a party together for cooperative action
against the time for casting its vote upon some critical question. There
is always a majority and a minority, indeed, but the legislation of a
session does not represent the policy of either; it is simply an
aggregate of the bills recommended by Committees composed of members
from both sides of the House, and it is known to be usually, not the
work of the majority men upon the Committees, but compromise conclusions
bearing some shade or tinge of each of the variously-colored opinions
and wishes of the committee-men of both parties.
It is plainly the representation of both parties on the Committees that
makes party responsibility indistinct and organized party action almost
impossible. If the Committees were composed entirely of members of the
majority, and were thus constituted representatives of the party in
power, the whole course of congressional proceedings would
unquestionably take on a very different aspect. There would then
certainly be a compact opposition to face the organized majority.
Committee reports would be taken to represent the views of the party in
power, and, instead of the scattered, unconcerted opposition, without
plan or leaders, which now sometimes subjects the propositions of the
Committees to vexatious hindrances and delays, there would spring up
debate under skillful masters of opposition, who could drill their
partisans for effective warfare and give shape and meaning to the
purposes of the minority. But of course there can be no such definite
division of forces so long as the efficient machinery of legislation is
in the hands of both parties at once; so long as the parties are mingled
and harnessed together in a common organization.
It may be said, therefore, that very few of the measures which come
before Congress are party measures. They are, at any rate, not brought
in as party measures. They are indorsed by select bodies of members
chosen with a view to constituting an impartial board of examination for
the judicial and thorough consideration of each subject of legislation;
no member of one of these Committees is warranted in revealing any of
the disagreements of the committee-room or the proportions of the votes
there taken; and no color is meant to be given to the supposition that
the reports made are intended to advance any party interest. Indeed,
only a very slight examination of the measures which originate with the
Committees is necessary to show that most of them are framed with a view
to securing their easy passage by giving them as neutral and inoffensive
a character as possible. The manifest object is to dress them to the
liking of all factions.
Under such circumstances, neither the failure nor the success of any
policy inaugurated by one of the Committees can fairly be charged to the
account of either party. The Committee acted honestly, no doubt, and as
they thought best; and there can, of course, be no assurance that, by
taking away its congressional majority from the party to which the
greater number of the committee-men belong, a Committee could be secured
which would act better or differently.