be instructed or elevated by the debates of Congress, not only because
there are few debates seriously undertaken by Congress, but principally
because no one not professionally interested in the daily course of
legislation cares to read what is said by the debaters when Congress
does stop to talk, inasmuch as nothing depends upon the issue of the
discussion. The ordinary citizen cannot be induced to pay much heed to
the details, or even to the main principles, of law-making, unless
something else more interesting than the law itself be involved in the
pending decision of the law-makers. If the fortunes of a party or the
power of a great political leader are staked upon the final vote, he
will listen with the keenest interest to all that the principal actors
may have to say, and absorb much instruction in so doing; but if no such
things hang in the balance, he will not turn from his business to
listen; and if the true issues are not brought out in eager public
contests which catch his ear because of their immediate personal
interest, but must be sought amidst the information which can be made
complete only by reading scores of newspapers, he will certainly never
find them or care for them, and there is small use in printing a
"Record" which he will not read.
I know not how better to describe our form of government in a single
phrase than by calling it a government by the chairmen of the Standing
Committees of Congress. This disintegrate ministry, as it figures on the
floor of the House of Representatives, has many peculiarities. In the
first place, it is made up of the elders of the assembly; for, by
custom, seniority in congressional service determines the bestowal of
the principal chairmanships; in the second place, it is constituted of
selfish and warring elements; for chairman fights against chairman for
use of the time of the assembly, though the most part of them are
inferior to the chairman of Ways and Means, and all are subordinate to
the chairman of the Committee on Appropriations; in the third place,
instead of being composed of the associated leaders of Congress, it
consists of the dissociated heads of forty-eight "little legislatures"
(to borrow Senator Hoar's apt name for the Committees); and, in the
fourth place, it is instituted by appointment from Mr. Speaker, who is,
by intention, the chief judicial, rather than the chief political,
officer of the House.
It is highly interesting to note the extraordinary power accruing to Mr.
Speaker through this pregnant prerogative of appointing the Standing
Committees of the House. That power is, as it were, the central and
characteristic inconvenience and anomaly of our constitutional system,
and on that account excites both the curiosity and the wonder of the
student of institutions. The most esteemed writers upon our Constitution
have failed to observe, not only that the Standing Committees are the
most essential machinery of our governmental system, but also that the
Speaker of the House of Representatives is the most powerful functionary
of that system. So sovereign is he within the wide sphere of his
influence that one could wish for accurate knowledge as to the actual
extent of his power. But Mr. Speaker's powers cannot be known
accurately, because they vary with the character of Mr. Speaker. All
Speakers have, of late years especially, been potent factors in
legislation, but some have, by reason of greater energy or less
conscience, made more use of their opportunities than have others.
The Speaker's privilege of appointing the Standing Committees is nearly
as old as Congress itself. At first the House tried the plan of
balloting for its more important Committees, ordering, in April, 1789,
that the Speaker should appoint only those Committees which should
consist of not more than three members; but less than a year's
experience of this method of organizing seems to have furnished
satisfactory proof of its impracticability, and in January, 1790, the
present rule was adopted: that "All committees shall be appointed by the
Speaker, unless otherwise specially directed by the House." The rules of
one House of Representatives are not, however, necessarily the rules of
the next. No rule lives save by biennial readoption. Each newly-elected
House meets without rules for its governance, and amongst the first acts
of its first session is usually the adoption of the resolution that the
rules of its predecessor shall be its own rules, subject, of course, to
such revisions as it may, from time to time, see fit to make. Mr.
Speaker's power of appointment, accordingly, always awaits the passage
of this resolution; but it never waits in vain, for no House, however
foolish in other respects, has yet been foolish enough to make fresh
trial of electing its Committees. That mode may do well enough for the
cool and leisurely Senate, but it is not for the hasty and turbulent
House.
It must always, of course, have seemed eminently desirable to all
thoughtful and experienced men that Mr. Speaker should be no more than
the judicial guide and moderator of the proceedings of the House,
keeping apart from the heated controversies of party warfare, and
exercising none but an impartial influence upon the course of
legislation; and probably when he was first invested with the power of
appointment it was thought possible that he could exercise that great
prerogative without allowing his personal views upon questions of public
policy to control or even affect his choice. But it must very soon have
appeared that it was too much to expect of a man who had it within his
power to direct affairs that he should subdue all purpose to do so, and
should make all appointments with an eye to regarding every preference
but his own; and when that did become evident, the rule was undoubtedly
retained only because none better could be devised. Besides, in the
early years of the Constitution the Committees were very far from
having the power they now possess. Business did not then hurry too fast
for discussion, and the House was in the habit of scrutinizing the
reports of the Committees much more critically than it now pretends to
do. It deliberated in its open sessions as well as in its private
committee-rooms, and the functionary who appointed its committees was
simply the nominator of its advisers, not, as is the Speaker of to-day,
the nominor of its rulers.
It is plain, therefore, that the office of Speaker of the House of
Representatives is in its present estate a constitutional phenomenon of
the first importance, deserving a very thorough and critical
examination. If I have succeeded, in what I have already said, in making
clear the extraordinary power of the Committees in directing
legislation, it may now go without the saying that he who appoints those
Committees is an autocrat of the first magnitude. There could be no
clearer proof of the great political weight of the Speaker's high
commission in this regard than the keen strife which every two years
takes place over the election to the speakership, and the intense
interest excited throughout the country as to the choice to be made. Of
late years, the newspapers have had almost as much to say about the
rival candidates for that office as about the candidates for the
presidency itself, having come to look upon the selection made as a sure
index of the policy to be expected in legislation.
The Speaker is of course chosen by the party which commands the majority
in the House, and it has sometimes been the effort of scheming,
self-seeking men of that majority to secure the elevation of some friend
or tool of their own to that office, from which he can render them
service of the most substantial and acceptable sort. But, although these
intrigues have occasionally resulted in the election of a man of
insignificant parts and doubtful character, the choice has usually
fallen upon some representative party man of well-known antecedents and
clearly-avowed opinions; for the House cannot, and will not willingly,
put up with the intolerable inconvenience of a weak Speaker, and the
majority are urged by self-respect and by all the weightiest
considerations of expediency, as well as by a regard for the interests
of the public business, to place one of their accredited leaders in the
chair. If there be differences of opinion within the party, a choice
between leaders becomes a choice between policies and assumes the
greatest significance. The Speaker is expected to constitute the
Committees in accordance with his own political views, and this or that
candidate is preferred by his party, not at all because of any supposed
superiority of knowledge of the precedents and laws of parliamentary
usage, but because of his more popular opinions concerning the leading
questions of the day.
Mr. Speaker, too, generally uses his powers as freely and imperatively
as he is expected to use them. He unhesitatingly acts as the legislative
chief of his party, organizing the Committees in the interest of this or
that policy, not covertly and on the sly, as one who does something of
which he is ashamed, but openly and confidently, as one who does his
duty. Nor does his official connection with the Committees cease upon
their appointment. It is his care to facilitate their control of the
business of the House, by recognizing during the consideration of a
report only those members with whom the reporting committee-man has
agreed to share his time, and by keeping all who address the House
within the strictest letter of the rules as to the length of their
speeches, as well as by enforcing all those other restrictions which
forbid independent action on the part of individual members. He must see
to it that the Committees have their own way. In so doing he is not
exercising arbitrary powers which circumstances and the habits of the
assembly enable him safely to arrogate; he is simply enforcing the plain
letter and satisfying the evident spirit of the rules.
A student of Roman law and institutions, looking at the Rules of the
House of Representatives through glasses unaccustomed to search out
aught but antiquities, might be excused for claiming that he found in
the customs of the House a striking reproduction of Roman legislative
methods. The Roman assembly, he would remind us, could not vote and
debate at the same time; it had no privileges of amendment, but had to
adopt every law as a whole or reject it as a whole; and no private
member had a right to introduce a bill, that being the exclusive
prerogative of the magistrates. But though he might establish a parallel
satisfactory to himself between the magistrates of Rome and the
Committees at Washington, and between the undebatable, unamendable laws
of the ancient, and the undebated, unamended laws of the modern,
republic, he could hardly find in the later system that compensating
advantage which scholars have noted as giving to Roman legislation a
clearness and technical perfection such as is to be found in none of the
modern codes. Since Roman laws could not be amended in their passage,
and must carry their meaning plainly to the comprehension of the
commons, clear and brief drafting was cultivated as of the first
necessity in drawing up measures which were first to gain popular
approval and then to succeed or fail in accomplishing their ends
according as they proved workable or impracticable.
No such comparison of our own with other systems can, however, find any
favor in the eyes of a certain class of Americans who pride themselves
upon being nothing if not patriotic, and who can consequently find no
higher praise for the peculiar devices of committee government than that
they are our own invention. "An ill-favored thing, sir, but mine own."
No one will readily believe, however, that congressmen--even those of
them who belong to this dutiful class--cherish a very loving admiration
for the discipline to which they are nowadays subjected. As the
accomplished librarian of Congress has declared, "the general conviction
may be said to exist, that, under the great control over legislation and
current business by the Speaker, and by the powerful Committee on
Appropriations, combined with the rigor of the Rules of the House, there
is less and less opportunity for individual members to make any
influential mark in legislation. Independence and ability are repressed
under the tyranny of the rules, and practically the power of the popular
branch of Congress is concentrated in the Speaker and a few--very
few--expert parliamentarians." And of course members of Congress see
this. "We have but three forces in this House," exclaimed a jocose
member from the Pacific coast, "the Brahmins of the Committee of Ways
and Means--not the brains but the Brahmins of the House; the
white-button mandarins of the Appropriations Committee; the dignified
oligarchy called the Committee on Rules; the Speaker of the House; and
the illustrious gentleman from Indiana." Naturally all men of
independent spirit chafe under the arbitrary restraints of such a
system, and it would be much more philosophical to conclude that they
let it stand because they can devise nothing better, than that they
adhere to its inconvenient practices because of their admiration for it
as an American invention.
However that may be, the number of those who misuse the rules is greater
than the number of those who strive to reform them. One of the most
startling of the prevalent abuses is the hasty passage of bills under a
suspension of the rules, a device "by means of which," says Senator
Hoar, "a large proportion, perhaps the majority, of the bills which pass
the House are carried through." This practice may be very clearly
understood by following further Mr. Hoar's own words: "Every Monday
after the morning hour, and at any time during the last ten days of a
session, motions to suspend the rules are in order. At these times any
member may move to suspend the rules and pass any proposed bill. It
requires two thirds of the members voting to adopt such a motion. Upon
it no debate or amendment is in order. In this way, if two thirds of the
body agree, a bill is by a single vote, without discussion and without
change, passed through all the necessary stages, and made a law, so far
as the House of Representatives can accomplish it; and in this mode
hundreds of measures of vital importance receive, near the close of an
exhausting session, without being debated, amended, printed, or
understood, the constitutional assent of the representatives of the
American people."
One very obvious comment to be made upon habits of procedure so palpably
pernicious is, that nothing could be more natural under rules which
repress individual action with so much stringency. Then, too, the mills
of the Committees are known to grind slowly, and a very quick and easy
way of getting rid of minor items of business is to let particular
bills, of apparently innocent meaning or laudable intent, run through
without commitment. There must be some outlet, too, through which the
waters of delayed and accumulated business may be drained off as the end
of a session draws near. Members who know how to take the House at an
indulgent moment, and can in a few words make out a _prima facie_ case
for the action they urge, can almost always secure a suspension of the
rules.
To speak very plainly, it is wonderful that under such a system of
government legislation is not oftener at sixes and sevens than it
actually is. The infinitely varied and various interests of fifty
millions of active people would be hard enough to harmonize and serve,
one would think, were parties efficiently organized in the pursuit of
definite, steady, consistent policies; and it is therefore simply
amazing to find how few outrageously and fatally foolish, how few bad or
disastrous, things have been done by means of our disintegrate methods
of legislation. The Committees of the House to whom the principal topics
of legislation are allotted number more than thirty. We are ruled by a
score and a half of "little legislatures." Our legislation is
conglomerate, not homogeneous. The doings of one and the same Congress
are foolish in pieces and wise in spots. They can never, except by
accident, have any common features. Some of the Committees are made up
of strong men, the majority of them of weak men; and the weak are as
influential as the strong. The country can get the counsel and guidance
of its ablest representatives only upon one or two subjects; upon the
rest it must be content with the impotent service of the feeble. Only a
very small part of its most important business can be done well; the
system provides for having the rest of it done miserably, and the whole
of it taken together done at haphazard. There could be no more
interesting problem in the doctrine of chances than that of reckoning
the probabilities of there being any common features of principle in the
legislation of an opening session. It might lighten and divert the
leisure of some ingenious mathematician to attempt the calculation.
It was probably some such reflections as these which suggested the
proposal, made not long since in the House, that there should be
appointed, along with the usual Standing Committees, a new committee
which should be known as the Executive Committee of the House, and
should be empowered to examine and sort all the bills reported favorably
by the other Standing Committees, and bring them forward in what might
seem to it the order of their importance; a committee which should, in
short, digest pending measures and guide the House in arranging its
order of business. But it is seriously to be doubted whether such an
addition to the present organization would do more than tighten the
tyranny of committee rule and still further restrict freedom of debate
and action. A committee to superintend committees would add very little
to the efficiency of the House, and would certainly contribute nothing
towards unifying legislation, unless the new committee were to be given
the power, not yet thought of, of revising the work of the present
Standing Committees. Such an executive committee is not quite the device
needed.
Apparently committee government is but one of many experiments in the
direction of the realization of an idea best expressed--so far as my
reading shows--by John Stuart Mill; and is too much like other
experiments to be quite as original and unique as some people would like
to believe. There is, said Mr. Mill, a "distinction between the function
of _making_ laws, for which a numerous popular assembly is radically
unfit, and that of _getting good laws made_, which is its proper duty,
and cannot be satisfactorily fulfilled by any other authority;" and
there is, consequently, "need of a legislative commission, as a
permanent part of the constitution of a free country; consisting of a
small number of highly-trained political minds, on whom, when parliament
has determined that a law shall be made, the task of making it should be
devolved; parliament retaining the power of passing or rejecting the
bill when drawn up, but not of altering it otherwise than by sending
proposed amendments to be dealt with by the commission."[25] It would
seem, as I have said, that committee government is one form of the
effort, now making by all self-governing peoples, to set up a
satisfactory legislative commission somewhat after this order; and it
might appear to some as if the proposed executive committee were a
slight approximation to that form of the effort which is typified in the
legislative functions of the British cabinet. It cannot, of course, be
claimed that the forty-eight legislative commissions of the House of
Representatives always answer the purpose when the House wants to get
good laws made, or that each of them consists invariably of "a small
number of highly-trained political minds;" but everybody sees that to
say that they fall short of realizing the ideal would be nothing less
than hypercritical.
In saying that our committee government has, germinally, some of the
features of the British system, in which the ministers of the crown, the
cabinet, are chosen from amongst the leaders of the parliamentary
majority, and act not only as advisers of the sovereign but also as the
great standing committee or "legislative commission" of the House of
Commons, guiding its business and digesting its graver matters of
legislation, I mean, of course, only that both systems represent the
common necessity of setting apart some small body, or bodies, of
legislative guides through whom a "big meeting" may get laws made. The
difference between our device and the British is that we have a
Standing Committee, drawn from both parties, for the consideration of
each topic of legislation, whereas our English cousins have but a single
standing committee that is charged with the origination of
legislation,--a committee composed of the men who are recognized as the
leaders of the party dominant in the state, and who serve at the same
time as the political heads of the executive departments of the
government.
The British system is perfected party government. No effort is made in
the Commons, such as is made in the House of Representatives in the
composition of the Committees, to give the minority a share in
law-making. Our minorities are strongly represented on the Standing
Committees; the minority in the Commons is not represented at all in the
cabinet. It is this feature of closely organized party government,
whereby the responsibility for legislation is saddled upon the majority,
which, as I have already pointed out, gives to the debates and action of
parliament an interest altogether denied to the proceedings of Congress.
All legislation is made a contest for party supremacy, and if
legislation goes wrong, or the majority becomes discontented with the
course of policy, there is nothing for it but that the ministers should
resign and give place to the leaders of the Opposition, unless a new
election should procure for them a recruited following. Under such a
system mere silent voting is out of the question; debate is a primary
necessity. It brings the representatives of the people and the ministers
of the Crown face to face. The principal measures of each session
originate with the ministers, and embody the policy of the
administration. Unlike the reports of our Standing Committees, which are
intended to be simply the digested substance of the more sensible bills
introduced by private members, the bills introduced into the House of
Commons by the cabinet embody the definite schemes of the government;
and the fact that the Ministry is made up of the leaders of the majority
and represents always the principles of its party, makes the minority
only the more anxious to have a chance to criticise its proposals.
Cabinet government is a device for bringing the executive and
legislative branches into harmony and cooperation without uniting or
confusing their functions. It is as if the majority in the Commons
deputized its leaders to act as the advisers of the Crown and the
superintendents of the public business, in order that they might have
the advantage of administrative knowledge and training in advising
legislation and drafting laws to be submitted to parliament. This
arrangement enlists the majority in behalf of successful administration
without giving the ministers any power to coerce or arbitrarily
influence legislative action. Each session of the Lords and Commons
becomes a grand inquest into the affairs of the empire. The two estates
sit as it were in committee on the management of the public
business--sit with open doors, and spare themselves no fatigue in
securing for every interest represented a full, fair, and impartial
hearing.