Extreme Centralization. The legislative agenda of the House is (and always has been) controlled by the Speaker and the Committee on Rules.[*] Kuttner explained that, unlike their predecessors, Tom DeLay and House Speaker Dennis Hastert (whose chief of staff, Scott Palmer, he considered “as powerful as DeLay”) practically write laws themselves. “Drastic revisions to bills approved by committee are characteristically added by the leadership, often late in the evening,” Kuttner observed. “Under the House rules, 48 hours are supposed to elapse before floor action. But in 2003, the leadership, 57 percent of the time, wrote rules declaring bills to be ‘emergency’ measures, allowing them to be considered with as little as 30 minutes’ notice. On several measures, members literally did not know what they were voting for.”
No Amendments. When the GOP took control of the House they promised they would do better than the Democrats, assuring all “that at least 70 percent of bills would come to the floor with rules permitting amendments.” That did not happen; in fact, the opposite occurred. The “proportion of bills prohibiting amendments has steadily increased,” from 56 percent the first year Republicans took control to 76 percent when Kuttner last examined them. Even these numbers understate the situation, Kuttner explained, since “all major bills now come to the floor with rules prohibiting amendments.”
One-Party Conferences. The Republican-controlled Senate has not yet stopped floor amendments, so when a Senate bill differs from a House bill, members are appointed by each body to confer and resolve the differences. Republicans, however, have cut both House and Senate Democrats out of the conferences. The Republicans meet, work out any differences, and then send a nonamendable bill back to each body for a quick up-or-down vote. Kuttner noted that members may be given a day to study bills exceeding a thousand pages, with “much of it written from scratch in conference.” This is a practice that was once considered unacceptable by both parties.
No Legislative Hearings. Obviously, when laws are written in conference committee meetings, they have not been discussed during hearings. Even when hearings are held at the committee level, however, Republicans frequently write laws without any input from Democrats, and they vote down any Democratic efforts to amend legislation in committee. Under Republicans, many laws are literally written by the special interests the laws seek to “regulate,” an extraordinary outsourcing of the legislative process.
Appropriations Bill Abuses. If annual appropriations bills are not enacted, the government runs out of money and must close down. When Newt Gingrich shut down the government in 1995, pressuring President Clinton in a game of political chicken that Gingrich lost, lawmakers were notified that the public would not tolerate such games. Appropriations bills must pass—a president dare not veto such legislation, regardless of what objectionable provisions it might contain. Accordingly, Republicans add to these bills an endless array of spending for pet pork-barrel projects. As one commentator noted, Republicans are spending “worse than drunken sailors.”[23] Under GOP congressional leadership, “earmarked” (meaning pork) spending has soared. According to the Wall Street Journal, at the end of 2005 there were a staggering 13,998 earmarked expenses, costing $27.3 billion. When the Republicans took control in 1995 there were only 1,439 earmarked items. Needless to say, there is nothing conservative in these fiscal actions but there is much that is authoritarian about the wanton spending by these Republicans.
In early 2006, Norman Ornstein, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and Thomas E. Mann, a senior fellow at The Brookings Institution, both men longtime experts on Congress and partisans for good government, also spoke out about the authoritarianism in the House, in an op-ed for the New York Times: “Over the past five years, the rules and norms that govern Congressional deliberation, debate and voting, have routinely been violated, especially in the House of Representatives, and in ways that mark a dramatic break from custom.” Ornstein and Mann pointed out that House Republicans have far exceeded any overeaching by Democrats. “We saw similar abuses leading to similar patterns of corruption during the Democrats’ majority reign,” they said. “But they were neither as widespread nor as audacious as those we have seen in the past few years.”[24]
Gingrich’s departure from Congress in 1998 changed nothing, for his precedent became the base upon which Tom DeLay built his House, making the operation even more authoritarian. The removal of DeLay from leadership of Congress in a swirl of scandal in early 2006 likewise did not change the undemocratic and highly authoritarian nature of the House, notwithstanding promises by the new leadership to the contrary. The election of John Boehner of Ohio to DeLay’s former majority leader post has changed nothing about the way House Republicans are conducting business. Boehner, like DeLay, has close ties to lobbyists; in fact, he once passed out money from the tobacco industry on the floor. Boehner has been part of the authoritarian power structure of the House for too long. All he offers is a fresh face and a more television-friendly manner.
Despite the increasingly flagrant erosion of once deliberative practices, Democrats have refused to complain. After writing Worse Than Watergate I asked a number of Democrats why they had not raised the issue during the 2004 campaign of Bush and Cheney’s excessive secrecy. From those at the top of John Kerry’s presidential campaign staff to several Democratic congressional candidates, I received the same answer: Secrecy is “process,” which they are convinced interests no voters. Robert Kuttner also found Democrats reluctant to make an issue of these antidemocratic and authoritarian tactics. “Democrats are ambivalent about taking this issue to the country or to the press because many are convinced that nobody cares about ‘process’ issues,” Kuttner reported. “The whole thing sounds like inside baseball, or worse, like losers whining.” Yet in 1910, when Speaker Joe Cannon played similar games, Kuttner noted, “it was a very big deal indeed,” and when the press investigated, public outrage toppled him.[25] I know several Republicans who are also troubled by their colleagues’ activities, but as good right-wing authoritarian followers they have remained silent and compliant. And the processes of the House may well spread to the Senate, if Republicans maintain control, because more and more members of the House are being elected to the Senate.
House Republicans have gone beyond raising money from well-heeled conservative sources as a means to better finance their candidates, and beyond rough campaign tactics, to hold their majority status. They have, in effect, literally rigged the system. Today House seats are amazingly secure, because Republicans have designed a strategy to give themselves safe congressional districts; once again Democrats remain silent because they do not want to be seen as whiners, or to raise process issues. When the Congressional Quarterly reported that in 2004, only 29 of 435 House races were truly competitive, and of those only 13 were “really close races,” the Economist declared, “The sheer uncompetitiveness of most House races takes one’s breath away…. In 2002, just four incumbents lost to challengers at the polls (another four lost in primaries). North Korea might be proud of this incumbent re-election rate: 99%.” How did this happen? the Economist inquired. The answer is as old as the nation, but with the use of computers, the process has become much more refined: “By gerrymandering to cram Democrats into a smaller number of super-safe seats [primarily in urban areas] while spreading Republicans into a large number of ‘designer districts’ which they win by 55–60%,” the investigators discovered. They pointed to the “particularly brutal” redistricting engineered by Tom DeLay in Texas, which earned him an indictment for “money laundering,” a serious felony charge under Texas law.[26]
*
The Committee on Rules was created by the first Congress. Unlike in the Senate, where unlimited debate is permitted, legislation in the much larger House (currently at 435 members) proceeds to the floor pursuant to a rule issued by the Rules Committee. This committee lays out the procedures for legislation on the floor, governing the length of debate and the nature of any proposed amendments. Rules are voted on by the House, and it is well known that DeLay considered votes on rules to be tests of party loyalty. Any House Republican who defied DeLay stood to suffer (e.g., lose his or her committee assignments and campaign funds, or face a DeLay-sponsored primary opponent in the next election).