Order in the House?

Any part of government that doesn’t re-examine itself periodically is unlikely to function well. Disregard for tradition and disrespect for institutional knowledge doesn’t usually work well, either.

Every 20 years it seems a group of junior members of the House, emboldened by populist election results, decide to challenge the current “order” in the House. It happened in 1974, again in 1994 when Newt Gingrich was swept into power, and in 2014 with the Tea Party’s effort to control the House GOP Conference and oust Speaker Boehner (R-Ohio).  

{mosads}In the House, the rules—if they are followed—govern process and are designed to bring order to the proceedings of the House.

During debate in the House, when things can get a little rambunctious, Members may be heard to shout, “Regular order!” What does that mean? Do we really want it, and is true order even possible?                                     

Constitution Day is today, September 17. Many people forget that on this day in 1787 the framers signed the final draft of the Constitution establishing the United States House of Representatives and Senate.

At the time, the idea of a republican government accountable to a sovereign people was a revolutionary concept. A groundbreaking idea then, it has inspired countless democracy movements since. Sadly, many citizens are unaware of what happened on September 17, and how those historic events affect them.

Today, “inspiring” probably isn’t the first word that comes to mind when Americans think about government or Congress.  Polls give politicians the lowest approval rating in recent history.

We believe Constitution Day is the perfect occasion to examine the way the House has changed in the last couple of generations and to see where it is headed.

Not understanding history or how our political life got to its current state is a mistake. Some pivotal movements transformed Congress.

Scholars portray the election of 1974 as a breaking point in American politics. More than 90 new men and women were elected to the 94^th Congress; 80 percent of them were Democrats, who gained 49 seats as a party. 

Soon after the election, these new legislators joined with veteran reformers to make dramatic changes to the rules that governed their huge Caucus and the House itself. The democratizing reforms unseated some chairmen and undercut the coalition of southern Democrats and conservative Republicans that had controlled the House for decades.  

The impacts of the reforms on Congress and on the relationship between the parties were impossible to fully appreciate at the time. In time, some of the reforms crafted to empower a repressed liberal majority in the Democratic Caucus were employed by a new breed of Republicans no longer resigned to a permanent minority. 

Twenty years later, recorded votes and televised floor proceedings—coupled with over-reaching by Democrats—set the stage for the 1994 election and the GOP takeover of the 104^th Congress. This election advanced Speaker Gingrich’s “Contract with America,” and the Republicans took control of both chambers for the first time since 1954. 

Disenchantment with entrenched power in Congress provided the next foil for dramatic change. The influx of Tea Party adherents in 2010 and further GOP gains in the 2014 have placed Republicans in charge on both sides of the Capitol in the 114^th Congress. The Tea Party has been impatient with the previous “order” in the House.

The days of fighting and drinking on the House Floor may be behind us, but now we have social media and the Internet serving as weapons of choice for many politicians. Vitriol, distrust, lack of collegiality and the excesses of campaign spending loom large as “contributing” factors to the public’s frustration with the People’s branch.

This Constitution Day, timely relief may be found at a symposium called “Order in the House?” hosted by the University of Maryland’s College of Behavioral and Social Sciences and the U. S. Association of Former Members of Congress. We will look at the lessons learned from the 94th to the 114th Congresses and explore prospects for improvement.

We hope that meaningful observations about the past reforms may provide useful suggestions for the current Congress, and provoke interest in bringing order to the House once again.

Morris is chair of the Department of Government and Politics, University of Maryland. Skaggs served in the House from 1987 to 1999.