Interview: Jason Roberts

Chris Nehls: Hi, this is Chris Nehls with the American Governance Institute. Thanks for joining us again. I’m here with Professor Jason Roberts at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is one of the co-authors of a great new paper that includes some reform recommendations for the House called Renewing the House of Representatives: How a More Participatory Legislative Process Could Benefit Both Members and Leaders.This was put out by Protect Democracy United and R Street. And Professor Roberts provided some of the historical perspective that is in the paper. You can go over to congressionalrenewal.org to download the paper if you’re interested, and I’ll try to remember to put a link in the, the transcript of this podcast if you’re interested in reading it.But, um, figured we’d take some time today to chat with Professor Roberts about the history of House rules and how we got to the situation we’re in where things are pretty locked down and members are very frustrated. That’s certainly been the case in the past in the House. And it’s important to remember as we go into the next Congress that the rules have changed dramatically over time, and Jason knows a lot about that, so we’ll start there.So thanks for joining me.Jason Roberts: It’s a pleasure to be here.Nehls: You crammed a whole lot of, of context into a, a short section, which is very hard to do. And you did it exceedingly well. So, I appreciate that work. And one of the things that you are trying to get across is that there have been these pendulum swings back and forth between really strong leadership control and decentralization in the history of the House, and that these things have been the result of member frustrations and, the need to set agendas by leadership, and the- these two things have kind of been in tension over time.So why don’t we just start there and talk about how that cycle has worked in congressional history, at least going back to the post-bellum period.Roberts: Yeah, that’s exactly right. I mean, immediately post-bellum, the House was very chaotic, didn’t have a lot of order to it at all. And that really changes under the speakership of Thomas Brackett Reed of Maine. He was at his heart a majoritarian, and he really went to the mat to put a series of majoritarian reforms. He got rid of this thing called the disappearing quorum, where the minority party would be present in the chamber and not voting in order to deny the majority the ability to do business. He ends that and really starts the process of using special rules that we think of today, and just really fundamentally made the House a majority rule institution for the first time.That then carried on under one of his successors, Joseph Cannon of Illinois. Cannon was known as a czar, as was Reed, and Cannon took this even further. He appointed the committees. He was chair of the Rules Committee. He really tried to lead the House like a dictator, and eventually that came back to bite him. A group of Republicans allied with some Democratic friends of theirs and stripped him of many of his powers in the early part of the 20th century.And that was really the last time we had as strong of a central leadership control as we have now. We sort of, muddled through something called the king caucus era, where Democrats tried to rule through their caucus and that didn’t work particularly well. Then most of the 20th century, you have a very divided Democratic majority party between their Southern component and their Northern component, and they just weren’t really interested in, in centralizing power in the leadership because they had such diverse interests.And we really don’t see that pick up again then until the 1970s.Nehls: Great. Yeah. So what, what changes came about in the ‘70s then?Roberts: Well, there’s a couple things going on. A little bit before that, you start to see northern, more liberal Democrats come into the party and say, hey, this, this system’s not working for us. The southerners control all the committees because of the seniority system. They control the Rules Committee. We have a majority in the caucus for things we wanna do, and there’s not really an outlet for us to do this.So, they begin to agitate for change, and you see this, some of this happens in the ‘60s. You see the, the expansion of the rules committee to weaken the power of Judge Smith of Virginia. But then it’s really in the 1970s that this takes off, and when they start voting for committee chairs by secret ballot, and that takes away the strong grip of seniority and really starts to get to make sure that the people in leadership in the party are gonna have to be responsive to what