Renovating the House - Congress

National Review, Dec 19, 1994 by Rich Lowry

AFTER the Republican takeover of the House, 14-term Indiana Representative John Myers found himself within reach of one of Congress's sweetest plums: chairmanship of the House Appropriations Committee. With its opportunities for loose spending and self-aggrandizement, Appropriations is perhaps the most congressional of all congressional committees. The only Republican with more seniority, Joseph McDade (Pa.), is under indictment, and no one could question Myers's inside-Washington skills. Last year, when the Penny-Kasich spending cuts threatened to knock $90 billion out of the federal budget, Myers sent a letter to colleagues warning of local projects that might get axed if Penny-Kasich were to pass. Thanks to such pressure tactics, the deficit-reduction measure failed by 6 votes.

But this is just the sort of effectiveness the 104th Congress can do without. The Penny-Kasich letter helped prompt soon-to-be-speaker Newt Gingrich to pass over Myers for Appropriations. The plum is landing in the hands of the fifth most senior Republican on the committee, Representative Bob Livingston (La.), a hard-nosed conservative who promises to make Appropriations decidedly less juicy. "Appropriations was always a great committee because you could increase funding for this or that," says Livingston. "Now we're going to be cutting programs." Myers, meanwhile, could take some consolation from the fact that he was in line for the chairmanship of the Post Office and Civil Service Committee--except that it's now slated for elimination.

A new order is emerging in Washington, and it looks a lot like Newt Gingrich: young, energetic, combative. Gingrich had promised a 100-day legislative blitz if the GOP won majority status, and in the weeks since the election he has begun marshaling his forces. Gingrich seems likely to model his speakership after that of Joseph Cannon, the iron-fisted leader of a Republican House at the beginning of the century. His lieutenants will be the boldest and fittest. Gradualists need not apply. Carlos Moorhead, the 72-year-old congressman from California, is universally liked but has never been considered a street fighter; he has been passed over for chairmanship of both the Judiciary Committee and the Energy and Commerce Committee. Gingrich is remaking Congress in the ideological and risk-taking image of his Contract with America.

For thirty years Congress has been wired for exactly the opposite: the plodding expansion of the welfare state. Old bulls like Henry Waxman (D., Calif.) became entrenched in committees where they gradually expanded their jurisdictional power and grabbed whatever additional authority and dollars they could for the programs within their purview; throughout the 1980s, from his perch on the Health and Environment Subcommittee of the Energy and Commerce Committee, Waxman quietly expanded Medicaid into the behemoth it is today. John Dingell, former chairman of the full Energy and Commerce Committee, is another textbook example; his committee was a jurisdictional black hole, sucking in all surrounding power until it had influence over about 40 per cent of House legislation. Not every Democrat could be a Dingell, of course, but they could aspire--hence the proliferation of subcommittees.

Comfy Chairs

THE line among Republicans has always been: when in doubt, call a Democrat "Mr. Chairman." All told, there were more than 250 committees and subcommittees in the 103rd Congress. A committee would often give birth to as many as 6 subcommittees. "Every time you increase the number of committees, you increase the power structures," says likely Majority Leader Dick Armey (Tex.). The ethic that has governed the Democrats has been power building." Each subcommittee became a part of the "iron triangle," the nexus committees, special interests, and Executive Branch agencies. The upshot was generally more power for the agency, more government assistance for the special interest, and more contributions for the committee chairman. Most Democrats had at least one empire to build.

One goal of the Republican transition is to start dismantling this machinery. "We want to try to build an institutional structure that doesn't have all these temptations built into it," says Armey. First on the chopping block is a third of committee staff. (General Capitol Hill staff is likely to get slashed too, including such anachronisms as elevator operators, ice delivery men, and typewriter repairmen. Democratic staff in Dingell's empire will go from 115 to 17. The effect is more than symbolic. "Their fulltime employment was just trashing the market economy and the Republican Party," says a GOP staffer. You take a thousand of these people and throw them out of work, that alone is going to make a tremendous difference."

Next is the committees themselves. Republicans are already committed to getting rid of three of them: Post Office and Civil Service, District of Columbia, and Merchant Marine and Fisheries--not exactly revolutionary moves, but important symbolic breaks in the continuum of committee growth. Altogether, Republicans hope to get down to at most 18 committees (from the current 23) with no more than 5 subcommittees each. That will reduce some of the special-interest pressure points, avoid 'joint referrals' (in which a bill passes through more than one committee and gets festooned with extraneous provisions), and lessen opportunities for empire building. There might even be a committee devoted to empire disassembly. Under the chairmanship of conservative Chris Cox (Calif.), the Governmental Operations Committee's Subcommittee on Commerce, Consumer, and Monetary Affairs may be renamed the Economic Productivity Subcommittee and devoted to examining stifling regulations.