90% of proposed bills die in committee. What happens in there??
Today's episode consists of two parts. First, the Schoolhouse Rock definition of congressional committees (what they do and why we have them) and second, an exploration of money, power, lobbying, and a secret point system for deciding who gets to be on one. This episode features the voices of Dan Cassino, Professor of Political Science at Farleigh Dickinson University and Leah Rosenstiel, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Vanderbilt University.
Click here for a graphic organizer for students to fill out while they listen to the episode.
For anyone who is interested in the DCCC point system for advancement in the party, here is the article from The Intercept discussing the “dues” requested by members of Congress, and here is the point calculation metric:
Transcript
committees final.mp3
Nick Capodice: To all of our listeners out there, I just want to let you know, Hannah and I read every single review of our show.
Hannah McCarthy: It's true.
Nick Capodice: And there's one review left by a user called GeekMe, and I look at it probably once a week.
Hannah McCarthy: Which one is that?
Nick Capodice: It says, Here, I'll read it. It says, quote, I love the work that you guys do and have learned a lot, but it's become increasingly obvious that the way it's supposed to work is just [00:00:30] window dressing or talking a good game compared to how things really get done. Hmm. You've seen that one, right?
Hannah McCarthy: Yeah,
Nick Capodice: That review haunts me. It sits like the raven and stares at me when you and I talk about executive orders or declaring war, almost any topic because we've got the rules for how our government works. It's in the tagline for our show. And then there's the way those rules are bent, and I fear that today's episode has the potential [00:01:00] to make geek me really frustrated. You're listening to Civics 101, I'm Nick Capodice,
Hannah McCarthy: I'm Hannah McCarthy,
Nick Capodice: And today we're talking about committees, congressional committees. What they do, why we have them and who gets to be on them. If you glean one thing from this episode, it should be; Committees are super important. Woodrow Wilson, before he was president, once said "Congress in session is Congress on public exhibition whilst [00:01:30] Congress and its committee rooms is Congress at work." And then he went on to say, "I do not know how better to describe our form of government in a single phrase than calling it a government by the chairman of the Standing Committees of Congress." And Hannah, let's just ditch the world of cynicism for a hot second and embrace pure, unbridled optimism.
Dan Cassino: I'm not. I'm not a cynical person. We're not cynical people talking about government. What do members of Congress want?
Nick Capodice: You know him. You love him. At least I do. [00:02:00] Dan Cassino, Professor of Government and Politics at Fairleigh Dickinson University. Before we talk about what committees are, I want to start with a much broader question. Why do people even enter politics?
Dan Cassino: We assume everyone in government has something they're trying to do. They've got policy they're trying to push. There's something that they believe is good for our country they're trying to get done. Cool. So that's your that's your biggest need. But how do you get that? Well, first you need to get power. When you get power, then you can do that. So you have to get power and the power will get you to your policy [00:02:30] goals. Well, how do you get power? Well you have to get reelected, right. If you don't get reelected, you're never going to be able to do anything. If you're not able to do anything, you don't get any power you're talking about actually get your policy goals done. So members of Congress, we can argue, are single minded, rational seekers of reelection because reelection will get them towards all their other goals. Being on a good committee helps you get reelected.
Hannah McCarthy: Wait, how does that help you get reelected?
Nick Capodice: That is something I hope to convey by the end of the show, Hannah. So what I want to do is, you know, we talk about stuff and then we do a break and we ask people [00:03:00] to sign up for our newsletter and then we say, OK, we're back.
Hannah McCarthy: I do.
Nick Capodice: Yeah. What I'd like to do for the first half of the show is to hold on to this good faith Civics 101 breakdown of committees. And then in the second half, I'm going to talk about money, lobbyists, and a secret point system.
Hannah McCarthy: A secret point system!
Nick Capodice: Yeah. So let's start at the very beginning, almost every bill that is written in Congress is referred to a relevant committee. [00:03:30] There are 20 permanent standing committees in the House, 16 in the Senate and four joint committees, which have members from both the House and the Senate. Each committee has a chair. Very important role. The chair of a committee always belongs to the party that controls that Chamber of Congress, for example, as of this recording February 2022, the Democratic Party controls both the House and the Senate, meaning all committee chairs are Democrats. And each committee has subcommittees. Those are smaller committees that work in one [00:04:00] specific subset of the larger committee, and each of those has a chair. And as to what these committees do, here is Leah Rosenstiel, Professor of political science at Vanderbilt University.
Leah Rosenstiel: Broadly speaking, right, of course, Congress writes and enacts legislation. But it's a huge body, and it's really hard to have, in the case of the Senate, one hundred people all agreeing on what should go in a bill and even when you're writing the initial bill, what to do. It also really doesn't make sense to [00:04:30] have one hundred people all try to become experts on education policy or agriculture policy. Right. So the idea of congressional committees is just a simple division of labor, where you have committees that typically have a jurisdiction specific policy areas they're responsible for. They often do a lot of the drafting of initial legislation bills then pass through committee before getting enacted by the chamber.
Hannah McCarthy: So the people [00:05:00] on these committees do know a little more than the average bear about specific topics.
Nick Capodice: Yeah, and you often get people serving on committees from states that really care about those topics.
Leah Rosenstiel: There's some evidence in political science that the committees that you choose to serve on reflect the needs of your constituents. So if you look for example at the Senate Agriculture Committee, that's a committee that typically is made up of members who represent states that have more [00:05:30] farming industry, right, that are more rural. And that sort of makes sense. Why would you want to serve on the Senate Agriculture Committee? Because your constituents care about those types of issues.
Nick Capodice: Hannah, name a state that comes to mind if I say something like cattle farming,
Hannah McCarthy: I don't know. Maybe Nebraska.
Nick Capodice: Yeah. Congressman Don Bacon from Nebraska's 2nd District. He serves on the Subcommittee on Livestock and Foreign Agriculture. He's also on three other subcommittees.
Hannah McCarthy: Oh you can be on more [00:06:00] than one subcommittee.
Nick Capodice: Oh yeah, the House has over one hundred subcommittees, so most members are on at least two
Hannah McCarthy: All right bills are proposed in both chambers. But who decides which committee those bills go to?
Nick Capodice: All right, let's do a quick how a bill becomes a law recap. Listen to that full episode, by the way, folks. First up, a bill is proposed.
Dan Cassino: You have proposed a bill. You put that bill in the hopper. Right now often it's a physical hopper, in the state of Arizona, it's actually, they have a little plastic frog on top of it because [00:06:30] it's a hopper right? It hops. So you put that bill in there, the bill that goes the speaker. The speaker then assigns that bill to go to a particular committee. Now, if they want you, they can assign it to more than one committee. But that's seen as a slight against the two committees because it means you don't trust either of these committees.
Nick Capodice: Technically, the speaker of the House determines which committee or committees get the bill, and in the Senate, it's the presiding officer. But most of the time that decision is made by the House or Senate parliamentarian. That is a job [00:07:00] that will get its own episode soon. But in brief, it's a nonpartisan member of Congress who advises everyone else on rules and procedures,
Dan Cassino: So it gets referred to committee. The committee chair then gets that bill and about 90 percent of the time they just ignore it. They just pay no attention to it. They throw it out. They, you know, they turn to kindling whatever. They pay no attention to whatsoever.
Hannah McCarthy: Now this is the main thing that I knew about committees, that it is the place that bills go to die.
Nick Capodice: It's a statistic I never tire of repeating and a very slightly congress to Congress, but usually about [00:07:30] two to four percent of proposed bills become laws. 90 percent of proposed bills die in committee.
Dan Cassino: This means that chairs of committees and subcommittees have enormous amounts of power. That is, if I'm chairing a committee and I don't like a bill, I just ignore it and it's dead. There's nothing anyone can do about it. I just don't report the the bill out.
Hannah McCarthy: If a bill is in committee and the chair refuses to report it out as and bring it to the floor for a vote, is there no way that Congress can force it out?
Nick Capodice: There is, and we've mentioned it in other episodes. [00:08:00] It's called a discharge petition, but it is exceptionally rare, Dan said. More often, if there's a desire for a bill to make it out of committee, the Speaker of the House just says to the committee chair, Come on, pal. And it comes out.
Hannah McCarthy: Let's assume, then, that we've got a rare bill that is not ignored by the chair. What happens in the committee chambers with one of those bills?
Nick Capodice: Well, it sounds like this.
Archival: I thank you, Mr. Chairman. Let me just reiterate the fact that this bill does not address [00:08:30] the issue of wild horses. It deals only with domestic horses slaughtered for human consumption like we call the rule. Mr. Aderholt, Mr. Aderholt. No, Mr. Aguilar. Mr. Aguilar. I, Mr. Amodei. Mr. Amodei. No, Mr. Bishop. Mr. Bishop. Yes, Mr. Coburn.
Nick Capodice: That is a snip from a five hour video of the House Appropriations Committee marking up a bill from July of twenty seventeen. [00:09:00]
Leah Rosenstiel: If they want to move the bill forward, they might consider holding some hearings where they bring in different people, right, experts, stakeholders, to talk about the issue. Then the committee can do what's called a markup. The committee actually meets and they go through and they offer amendments to the bill and mark it up and make changes.
Dan Cassino: Sometimes if it's a good bill, they look at it and go, OK, there's an idea here we could take, and they either rewrite the entire bill or they take elements of it and add it to another bill they're going to do anyway. And [00:09:30] this is what's the markup process is in the committees and subcommittees in the House. They actually totally rewrite the bill based on their expertise, what they're hearing from lobbyists, what they're hearing from the executive branch.
Leah Rosenstiel: They then vote on that markup bill. And if it passes right, if it gets a majority of committee members, then they refer it to the floor and then it gets considered and can get passed right. And then if it passes both chambers and get signed by the president, it becomes law.
Hannah McCarthy: Now this is pretty clear cut to me committees [00:10:00] or groups of people in the House and Senate with specific areas of interest and expertise who debate, study, alter and most often ignore proposed legislation.
Nick Capodice: Bingo a dingo. I'm not going to actually say bingo at Dingo. I thought it was funny at the time.
Hannah McCarthy: It seems like serving on a committee is a lot of work. Dan said It gives you power, but how?
Nick Capodice: Oh, OK, OK. I think [00:10:30] we've got the Schoolhouse Rock portion all settled here Hannah. So let's take a quick break and jump into the dark waters of who really gets to be on committees and why serving on one can be the most important thing you do in your political career.
Hannah McCarthy: You're listening to Civics 101. We are talking about committees. But before we get back to it, I want to let listeners know that they might like our newsletter extra credit. It [00:11:00] comes out twice a month and Nick assures me that he will provide a list of least desirable to most desirable committees in our next issue. You can subscribe at the top of our website civics101podcast.org. Ok, so as promised, Nick, we're back to it, we're talking committees. Lay it on me, who gets to be on these committees and why does that matter?
Nick Capodice: I'll start with a brief, brief history. There were small select committees in the late 1800s in America, but in short, [00:11:30] our current committee structure is pretty modern. There was a big legislative reorganization in 1946 in response to what opponents of Franklin Roosevelt felt was his overreach of presidential power. And to comprehend committees. Dan Cassino told me there is a term we should learn called information asymmetry.
Dan Cassino: So this is a concept from economics I think is really important for people to understand why it comes to Congress. So information asymmetry is the problem that arises when the person I'm hiring to do something knows [00:12:00] more than I do. So I take my car to the auto shop, if I am dealing with a dishonest auto mechanic, they can say, you know, your frambulator is completely shot. And as a white guy in his 40s, I'm going to Oh yeah, no, I thought it might be the frambulator. You're right, that's how much they're going to cost to fix my frambulator? Because they know more than I do. There's an information asymmetry so they can take advantage of me. So how do I stop that? Well I get a second opinion right? I can learn about these things. The problem Congress faced was the government had [00:12:30] gotten so complex with doing so many things that they didn't know... Congress leaders in Congress didn't know everything the government was doing. They didn't know what the president was up to.
Nick Capodice: President Roosevelt signed over three thousand seven hundred executive orders. Congress just didn't know what he was up to. There were so many orders and bills and agencies that Republican members in Congress in 1946 said enough, and they created the committee system that resembles what we have today, a system that divides the labor of understanding what Congress [00:13:00] is doing.
Hannah McCarthy: All right. So how do we pick who gets to be on these committees?
Nick Capodice: Here's Leah Rosenstiel again.
Leah Rosenstiel: It used to be the case that committee chairs were determined solely based on seniority. So if you've been in Congress for a long time, you get to be the committee chair, provided they're in the majority party.
Nick Capodice: But here's the problem with that seniority system, Hannah. Democrats controlled the House for a solid 40 year stretch, starting in nineteen fifty five. Did you know that? 40 years?
Hannah McCarthy: I didn't.
Nick Capodice: And the members of Congress [00:13:30] who kept getting reelected and therefore always had seniority were from this group known as Southern Democrats or Dixiecrats. This is a group that was conservative, pro-segregation, anti civil rights legislation and did not share policy positions with the rest of the Democratic Party. So the seniority system was abandoned. A new system has been implemented to choose who goes on what committee, and this is important because some committees are more desirable than others to be on.
Dan Cassino: So [00:14:00] at the high end, you know the House you're going to have four we call AAA committees. These are committees that everyone wants to be on. And so that's Ways and Means. So taxes. Appropriations, spending said taxes, energy and commerce, because, you know, oil companies and all that, and financial services. So those are your AAA committees everyone wants to be on. And they're a scarce resource. Not everyone gets to be on those committees.
Nick Capodice: The next level down is committees that are pretty good, right? Like [00:14:30] like agriculture, especially if you represent a state with a lot of farms. The House Armed Services Committee is pretty great. They say. You can work on bills that use defense spending and you can build a military base in your state and then...
Dan Cassino: Imagine you've really upset some people. Boy, they don't want you anywhere near anything important. You're going to be on, and yes, the year of our Lord two thousand twenty two we still call it this, Indian Affairs. People don't really want to be on that committee. Not a lot of money and not really a lot you can do in many districts. [00:15:00]
Nick Capodice: By the way, both Dan and Leah said that the problematically named Committee on Indian Affairs is less desirable because it is underfunded, limited in terms of action and sees very little interest from lobbying groups. And below that, at the very bottom of the desirability list are the joint committees.
Dan Cassino: These are committees that are split between the House and the Senate, so the joint committees mostly exist as a way to hold on to staff members. And so this is going to be things like the [00:15:30] Economic Committee, the Joint Committee, Economic Committee and the Joint Taxation Committee.
Nick Capodice: And Hannah. There are joint committees that I don't think you've even heard of.
Dan Cassino: I know it sounds like it'd be fun to be on the library committee. It is not fun to be on the library committee. But there is a library committee and there is a printing committee to deal with the actual printing of laws.
Hannah McCarthy: Come on, there's a printing committee
Nick Capodice: There is! Chaired by none other than former presidential candidate Senator Amy Klobuchar,
Archival: The [00:16:00] vice chair. I know that Zo can't be there, but maybe we could submit, is this OK? Well, submit her remarks. For the record.
Nick Capodice: That honestly is the only video I could find of a meeting of the Joint Committee on Printing, a meeting that lasted four minutes.
Archival: The opinion of the chair. The ayes have it. The rules of the committee are adopted and Senator Wicker You just voted to abolish the filibuster. I'm kidding. That's right. That is not true. That was please strike that from the record.
Nick Capodice: And finally, there are special committees [00:16:30] tied to investigations and ethics. And those aren't terribly desirable because unless you think it's going to get you good media attention, you don't want to be in charge of getting your fellow members of Congress in trouble.
Hannah McCarthy: Okay, back to those super desirable committees, though. What is it that makes them so special?
Dan Cassino: The reason they're called AAA is because so many people care about them. There's big money behind them. People are going to want to lobby you, they're going to want to talk to you, and you can charge them a lot of money for access to you. Now, there's very little evidence that members of Congress actually change [00:17:00] their votes based on what they hear from lobbyists. But what lobbies can do is put things on your agenda. And so this is what lobbyists are mostly paying for lobby when lobbyists are paying a lot of money. It's not bribes. It is paying for access, right? I'm going to be able to pigeonhole you and talk to you, and that's going to take a $5000 plate dinner. If I'm going to seated next to you and now I can talk to you and tell you about this one little thing I'm worried about. And that puts it on your radar.
Hannah McCarthy: I know Dan said it's not bribery. It's paying for access, but it just sounds [00:17:30] like a lot of bribery.
Leah Rosenstiel: I should first say that, of course, bribery is illegal in the United States, right? So that's not something that we hope lobbyists are engaging in, right? There are some bribery cases, but right that is illegal. But there is absolutely evidence that members of key committees do get lobbied more right. If you're trying to lobby on an issue and you know that the committee has power over the issue. You should, of course, be lobbying the committee chair and the other committee members.
Dan Cassino: So if you are one of these [00:18:00] committees, you wind up having a lot more access to lobbyists who will pay a lot of money to get in good with you. So that means you can raise a lot of money, which means you can get reelected, which means you get power, which means you get policy.
Nick Capodice: It makes you look good when you're a chair of a committee that passes a popular piece of legislation, you can then give campaign speeches and say, "I am the one who got this bill through that gave jobs to thousands of folks in Wisconsin." You're just seen as an effective politician if you do that. And one more thing I'll add [00:18:30] about these coveted committees. If you had been on one, if you had been a chair, when your career in Congress is over. You can then say, You know what? I know a lot of people who still serve on that committee, and I know a lot about how that committee works. Maybe I could become one of those lobbyists, and they often do. It's referred to as Washington's revolving door of lobbying. And as an example, Billy Tauzin, a former chair of the Energy and Commerce Committee, which deals [00:19:00] with promotional standards for drug companies interestingly enough, he became a lobbyist for pharmaceutical companies and made nineteen point three million dollars in four years.
Hannah McCarthy: Nick, if it's not seniority anymore, who does get to be on these committees?
Nick Capodice: Both parties have what's called a steering committee, which chooses where people go.
Dan Cassino: The steering committee answers directly to the speaker and they're going to put people on these committees. People actually apply, say which committee they want to get on to. And the steering [00:19:30] committee will entertain those. But it really is up to the speaker who gets on which committees and the way you do. It is in the Democrats. You have a point system.
Hannah McCarthy: Oh, you weren't joking about the point system?
Nick Capodice: I wasn't. It's a literal point system. Doing certain actions for your party gets your points. Hosting a fundraiser that gets over fifteen thousand to the DCCC gets you five points. Traveling to a district to campaign to flip it from red to blue gets you three points and so [00:20:00] on. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has the most points at two hundred and seventy nine, and lots of folks had zero points.
Dan Cassino: They've gamified getting on committees and getting favors from leadership. So the big thing that gets you points is giving lots of money to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. So the more money you give to the D Triple C or in the case of Republicans, the Republican Congressional Campaign Committee, the more points you get now Republicans, as far as we know these are all these things are, oh, by the way, secret. They [00:20:30] don't tell you this. We just get leaks occasionally. So we actually have leaks from the Democrats in 2019 detailing their entire point system. Republicans, we think, is similar, but we don't actually have the full leaks from them.
Hannah McCarthy: And how much money are we talking here?
Nick Capodice: Well, I encourage listeners to read the full member dues report that was leaked in August of twenty nineteen. I'm going to put a link to it on the episode page of our website, civics101podcast.org. But members of those elite committees were expected to pay $600000 a year.
Hannah McCarthy: What?
Hannah McCarthy: While we [00:21:00] don't have a dues sheet for the National Republican Congressional Committee, a report from the Brookings Institute in 2017 laid out that it was very similar, one former Republican House rep was quoted as saying, "Every time you walk into an NRCC meeting, a giant gosh darn tally sheet is on prominent display that lists your name and how much you've given or haven't. It's a huge wall of shame."
Hannah McCarthy: Do they pay these dues from, like their personal bank accounts? I don't get it. Where does [00:21:30] this money come from?
Nick Capodice: Yeah. No way, Dan said Washington is a lot like Broadway. You never put your own money on the show. What you do is you transfer money from your campaign funds to the NRCC or D Triple C, or you just hold a fundraiser and say, don't put my name on the check, put the campaign committee on the checks instead.
Hannah McCarthy: So what happens if a member of Congress does not pay their committee dues?
Dan Cassino: That means that when it comes to decide who's going to move up into these scare spots that everyone wants? Well, [00:22:00] if you haven't paying your dues, it's not going to happen to you. You're not going to move up in the leadership ranks.
Nick Capodice: Notably, one member of the House has in recent years openly refused to pay her dues to the DCCC.
Archival: Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is infuriating the Democrat establishment by refusing to pay party dues while bankrolling left wing challengers to the party.
Nick Capodice: Member of Congress Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez refused to even register with the D Triple C, and she tweeted quote, I give quite a bit [00:22:30] to fellow Dems. We fundraised over 300000 for others more than my dues. But as to how this action will affect her political career, we have absolutely no idea.
Hannah McCarthy: Alright, geekme, how you feelin?
Nick Capodice: Civics101@nhpr.org geekme. Drop us a line. . [00:23:00]
Nick Capodice: That's committees, folks, the place where, as Wilson said, Congress is at work. Today's episode was produced by me Nick Capodice with You Hannah McCarthy. Thank you.
Hannah McCarthy: Thank you. Our staff includes Christina Phillips and Jacqui Fulton. Rebecca Lavoie is our executive producer and only eats her salad with a fork.
Nick Capodice: Music in this episode by Jessie Gallagher Junior85 ProleteR, Dyalla, Divkid, Scott Gratton, Corey Gray, Kevin McCloud and the GOAT Chris Zabriskie
Hannah McCarthy: Civics 101 is a production of NHPR, New Hampshire Public Radio. [00:23:30]
