Note 40. The Congressional Committee Systems, Briefly
An enduring feature of Congress is its committee system. Until recent years, most important legislation originated in a standing committee, most of the details of legislation were approved in committee, and standing committee members usually dominated floor and conference action. When legislation dies, it still usually does so in committee.
In recent decades, committees have lost some of the autonomy they had gained in the middle of the twentieth century. A more assertive membership, increasingly polarized parties, stronger party leadership, and new checks on committee leadership, among other factors, reduced the level of independence once held by committees and their leaders. Many important bills have been negotiated by top party leaders, with committee members playing a secondary role. Committees, however, retain a considerable amount of power within their issue domains. They process the vast majority of legislation that is approved by the House and Senate, still encourage the development of specialized expertise among members, and hold most of the staff with relevant expertise on issues within their jurisdictions.
Modern congressional committees have two formal functions: (1) collecting information through hearings and investigations and (2) drafting and reporting legislation. Committee hearings are Congress’s primary means for formally receiving the testimony of representatives of the executive branch, organized interest groups, independent experts, the general public, and, occasionally, movie stars. Congress usually relies on committees to investigate disasters (natural or human-made), scandals in government or elsewhere, or policy crises. Informally, congressional hearings provide opportunities for legislators to publicize causes and receive media attention. In Note 2, Figure 2-1, I illustrated the frequency of committee meetings and hearings between 1955 and 2018. While committees remain active, they have become far less central to the daily lives of legislators than they were 1970s and 1980s.
Types of Committees
The House and Senate have developed several types of committees to perform these informational and legislative functions. All committees can hold hearings and investigate policy problems that fall within their jurisdiction. However, not all committees have the right to receive and report legislation, and not all committees are standing or permanent committees. An up-to-date list of committees can be found here. Full membership lists are here for the House and here for the Senate.
Standing committees have legislative authority and permanent status. Their legislative jurisdiction is specified in chamber rules and precedents, and they write and report legislation on any matter within their jurisdiction. Committee members, and particularly chairs, are territorial about their committees’ jurisdiction and resist efforts to reduce or reallocate their jurisdiction. As a result, with a few important exceptions, changes to the committee systems of the House and Senate have been incremental. The full list of standing committees is provided in Tables 40-2 and 40-3 at the end of this essay.
Ad hoc committees may be created and appointed to design and report legislation, but they are temporary and often dissolve either at a specified date or after reporting the legislation for which they were created. Since 1975, the Speaker of the House has been permitted to appoint ad hoc committees with House approval. Although this authority has been used infrequently, it extends additional referral alternatives to the Speaker.
Conference committeesare appointed to resolve the differences between House and Senate versions of legislation. The Constitution requires that legislation be approved in identical form by both chambers before it is sent to the president. Although the Constitution is silent about the way in which the two chambers are to resolve their differences, conference committees were an almost immediate solution to this problem in the earliest Congresses. Although inter-chamber differences can be resolved in other ways, conference committees have historically been used for particularly important legislation. Conference committees have wide, but not unlimited, discretion to redesign legislation in their efforts to gain House and Senate approval. In theory, conference committees are bound to the differences between the House and Senate legislation. In practice, however, it is not uncommon for conference committees to insert provisions into legislation that did not appear in either chamber’s final legislation and remove provisions that were agreed on by both chambers. When a majority of House conferees and a majority of Senate conferees agree, a conference committee issues a report that must be approved by both houses before the bill can be sent to the president. Conference committees dissolve as soon as one house takes action on the conference report.
Joint committees are permanent but lack legislative authority. Joint committees are composed of members from both chambers, and the chairs alternate between the chambers from Congress to Congress. The Joint Economic Committee frequently conducts highly publicized hearings on economic affairs, and the Joint Committee on Taxation serves primarily as a holding company for a respected staff of economists whose economic forecasts and reports on fiscal policy matters are frequently cited. The Joint Committee on Printing performs the more ministerial duty of overseeing the Government Publishing Office; the Joint Committee on the Library oversees the Library of Congress. Bills are not referred to joint committees, and joint committees cannot report legislation to the floor. The Joint Committee on Atomic Energy (1946–1977) was the only joint committee to date with authority to report legislation.
Select, or special, committees are, in principle, temporary committees without legislative authority. They may be used to study problems that fall under the jurisdiction of several standing committees, to symbolize Congress’s commitment to major constituency groups, or simply to reward particular legislators. Select committees have been used for several prominent investigations since 1970, including the Senate’s 1973 investigation of the Watergate break-in and cover-up and the 1987 House and Senate investigation of the Iran-Contra affair. Major reforms of congressional rules and organizations have originated in select committees.
Unfortunately, committee nomenclature can be misleading. For example, the House and Senate have each made their Select Intelligence Committee permanent and granted it the power to report legislation. Moreover, some standing committees, such as the House Committee on Homeland Security, began as select committees and gained standing status later. In 1993, under pressure to streamline the legislative process and reduce spending, the House abolished its Select Committee on Aging, Hunger, Narcotics Abuse and Control, and its Select Committee on Children, Youth, and Families. The Senate maintains a Special Committee on Aging, which studies issues relevant to the elderly, in addition to the Select Committee on Ethics, which handles ethics violations of senators and staffs.
Subcommittees
Nearly all standing committees have chosen to create subcommittees, dividing the jurisdiction of the full committee into five or six parts. The role of the subcommittees varies from committee to committee, but in most cases subcommittees conduct hearings. In some cases, subcommittees regularly consider legislation and report bills to the full committee. The committee lists in Tables 40-2 and 40-3 at the end of this essay indicate the number of subcommittees created by standing committees in 2023.
Assignment Limits
In each chamber, committee seats are filled on the basis of recommendations from each party. For example, the House rule states that “the House shall fill a vacancy on a standing committee by election on the nomination of the respective party caucus or conference.” To accomplish this, each House and Senate party has its own committee on committees, often called a steering committee, which is responsible for making committee lists.
House Limits
For the first time in 1995, as proposed by the new Republican majority that year, the House adopted a rule restricting the number of committee assignments its members may hold. The two parties had had internal rules, but the Republicans imposed the new rule and it has remained in place since. The rule prohibits a member from holding more than two standing committee assignments and more than four subcommittee assignments on standing committees. The two parties supplement this restriction by treating five committees (Appropriations, Energy and Commerce, Financial Services, Rules, and Ways and Means) as “exclusive” committees. Members serving on these committees are not permitted to hold seats on other committees. Both parties also identify “exempt” committees (Select Committee on Intelligence and Ethics) that do not count against a member’s committee membership limit.
In recent years, both House parties have become less inclined to grant exemptions to their limits on assignments. Traditionally, members have received exemptions with relative ease and have been allowed to maintain them indefinitely. However, leaders of both House parties grew frustrated with the number of members who expected to receive exemptions and retain coveted extra seats. Restricting exemptions allows party leaders to distribute desirable committee assignments to more members.
Senate Limits
Since the 1970s, Senate rules have restricted the number and type of committee assignments that senators may receive. A senator may sit on no more than two of the twelve most important committees and the Select Committee on Intelligence (“A” committees) and is limited to an appointment to only one of four other standing committees, the Special Committee on Aging, or the Joint Economic Committee (“B” committees). There is no restriction for seats on the Select Committee on Ethics, the Committee on Indian Affairs, and the Joint Committee on Taxation (“C” committees). A senator may sit on no more than three subcommittees of any “A” committee (Appropriations members are exempt from this restriction) and no more than two subcommittees of any “B” committee. Moreover, a senator cannot serve as a chair or ranking member of more than two subcommittees.
Both parties have adopted rules that further restrict membership on “A” committees. Senators are not permitted to sit on more than one of the “Super A” or “Big Four” committees, which include Appropriations, Armed Services, Finance, and Foreign Relations (for Republicans only). Both parties also stipulate (by rule for the Republicans and tradition for the Democrats) that same-state senators cannot serve on the same committee when they belong to the same party. The Senate occasionally grants exemptions to these assignment limitations at the request of the parties. Since the 1950s, both Senate parties have observed the practice of granting every senator a seat on one of the top four committees before any senator gets two such seats. The practice is called the “Johnson rule,” after Lyndon Johnson (D-Texas), the Democratic leader who initiated the practice.
The Power of Modern Committees
It is convenient to consider two forms of power: the ability to pass legislation in the face of opposition and the ability to block action on legislation that is favored by a majority of members. Committees enjoy a limited degree of both forms of power.
Positive Power
Committees’ powers are expressly or implicitly granted to them by the parent chambers and parties. Their continued existence and parliamentary privileges depend on the sufferance of the parent houses and parties. The parent chambers formally approve all committee assignments, but the parties construct the committee lists that are routinely ratified by the chambers. This function gives the parties a source of leverage with committee members and allows the parties – and, most important, the majority parties – to regulate the behavior of committee members through formal and informal rules. For the most part, committees must function procedurally and substantively in ways that are consistent with the expectations of their parent chambers and parties.
To gain passage of legislation that might not otherwise pass, committees may exploit four sources of potential positive committee power: (1) persuasion on the basis of superior argument and information about the merits of legislation, (2) leverage acquired through threats of unfavorable action on members’ bills if they fail to cooperate with a committee on its agenda, (3) strategic packaging of unpopular legislative provisions with more popular provisions to win floor majorities, and (4) domination of conference committees to gain chamber endorsement of policy provisions favored by the committee.
The positive power of committees has weakened in recent decades as party caucuses and leaders have asserted more influence in policy making. As I reported in Notes 2, 14, 15, and 22, majority party leaders construct the floor agenda for their chambers, taken an active role in negotiating key features of major bills, and often are the central players in negotiating with the leaders of the other chamber and the president. Committees are sometime left to counseling party leaders and providing staff to draft the details of legislation. Moreover, as observed in Note 2, the use of conference committees has virtually disappeared as more legislation has been packaged in large bills negotiated directly by top House and Senate party leaders.
Negative Power
The negative power of standing committees rests in their ability to control newly introduced legislation and to obstruct alternative routes to the floor. The ability to obstruct action is often referred to as “gatekeeping” in theories of politics. A fair generalization is that committees’ negative power is stronger in the House than the Senate.
In the House, negative power is supported by rules that give committees near-monopoly control over newly introduced legislation and make circumventing committees difficult. House Rule 10 requires that all legislation relating to a committee’s jurisdiction be referred to that committee, a rule that has been in place since 1880. Before 1975, the single committee with the most relevant jurisdiction would receive the referral, a process that often involved direct conflicts between committees with related jurisdictions. Since 1975, the rule has provided for multiple referrals by granting to the Speaker the authority to refer legislation to each committee with relevant jurisdiction. Monopoly control by single committees was broken by the new rule, but the practice of referring nearly all legislation to committee remains in place. The gatekeeping power of committees was strengthened at the outset of the 116th Congress (2019-2020) with rules changes that prevent the Rules Committee from reporting legislation that was not previously considered by the committee with jurisdiction over the legislation, an increasingly common practice in recent years.
Committees’ blocking power is enhanced by their domination of conference committees. The wide latitude extended to conferences to design the final form of legislation gives committee members another opportunity to wield negative powers. Committee members appointed to conference can, and frequently do, delete provisions they find objectionable. Because conference reports cannot be amended when sent to the House and Senate floors, it is difficult to reverse a conference committee’s surgical removal of legislative provisions. Conferees also can take the more drastic step of refusing to file a conference report, thus blocking the legislation in its entirety, at least temporarily.
Circumventing Committees
Circumventing House committees is difficult but not impossible under House rules. The House operates under a germaneness rule that requires a floor amendment to be relevant to the section of the bill or resolution it seeks to modify. Therefore, it is difficult to bring to the floor a policy proposal in the form of an amendment, thereby circumventing committee referral, given that a related bill or resolution must already be on the floor and open to amendment. The germaneness rule can be waived, but only if a special rule from the Rules Committee is approved by a majority on the House floor. The Speaker’s control of the Rules Committee means that this approach is unlikely to work without the Speaker’s cooperation.
House rules provide additional means for bringing legislation to the floor. At certain times, members may move to suspend the rules to consider a measure blocked by a committee. Going this route is usually not feasible without the consent of the party leadership and relevant committee because the member must be recognized by the Speaker to make the motion and two-thirds of the House must support it.
Another route is to gain a special rule from the Rules Committee to discharge a measure from committee. This route requires Rules Committee support and majority support in the House for the special rule. The Speaker’s cooperation is typically required to gain Rules Committee action on such a rule.
Alternatively, party leaders occasionally circumvent committees by drafting legislation themselves or by delegating this responsibility to task forces or special committees. Task forces are ad hoc panels typically created by party leaders to carry out legislative duties. Party leaders may use task forces if they are concerned that a committee with jurisdiction will perform unsatisfactorily. For example, they may fear that the committee will not reach an agreement in a timely fashion or that it will produce a bill that either cannot pass the chamber or will not satisfy majority party members. When legislation is drafted in a task force, party leaders determine which members are charged with drafting the legislation and, in the House, can and often do exclude minority party members from the process.
In addition, House members may seek to discharge a measure from a committee that fails to report it within thirty days of referral. Any member may file a discharge petition, which requires the signatures of 218 members. Once the petition receives the necessary number of signatures, it is placed on the Discharge Calendar for a seven-legislative-day waiting period. Following the waiting period, any member who signed the discharge petition may announce his or her intention to offer a motion to discharge, after which, under a rule adopted in 2019, the Speaker is required to schedule consideration of the motion within two legislative days. Should a majority of the members present vote in favor of the motion, the committee is discharged of the given measure. At this point, a subsequent motion may be offered that calls up the discharged measure for immediate consideration. Many members are hesitant to encourage the use of discharge petitions because doing so threatens the power of their own committees. Nevertheless, there has been more interest in discharge petitions since late 1993, when the House voted to make public the names of members who sign them. Public disclosure makes it easier to generate public or interest group pressure on members to sign petitions.
The discharge petition may appear to be the most promising route for circumventing committees because it does not require the assistance of the Rules Committee or the Speaker. In fact, between 1931 and 2018, 670 discharge petitions were filed, but the petitions gained the required number of signatures only forty-nine times. Of the forty-nine instances in which discharge petitions gained the necessary 218 signatures, the motion to discharge carried on only twenty-seven occasions, and the discharged measure went on to pass the House only nineteen times. However, the threatened use of discharge petitions, special rules, and suspension of the rules occasionally has stimulated committees to act in accordance with the floor majority’s preferences. For example, between 1931 and 1994 there were fifteen cases in which the needed 218 signatures were acquired on a discharge petition, but the majority leadership called up the legislation for consideration by other means.
In 2019, the House adopted a new path for circumventing committees and even the majority party leadership. The new rule, advocated by moderates in both parties, allows legislation that is sponsored by at least 290 members to get time on the floor for debate and a vote. The rule provides that, for each week in which the House convenes, the Speaker designate at least one measure on the new Consensus Calendar for floor consideration that week, if there is a measure on the calendar. The threshold of 290 is not accidental—it is two-thirds of the 435 seats, which is the number required to override a presidential veto if all members are present and voting, and successful overrides usually require members of both parties to be sponsors. The rule does not apply after September 30 before an election. The rule has been used a few times, but often a bill is considered some other way by the time it might be considered on the floor under this rule.
The Senate’s rules make it easier for members to bypass committees. Senate committees lack much of the negative power that House committees enjoy. Although measures are routinely referred to Senate committees after their introduction, a senator may object to a referral and keep a measure on the calendar for floor consideration. Furthermore, the Senate lacks a germaneness rule for most measures, so senators are able to circumvent committees by offering whole bills as amendments to unrelated legislation. Senators often hesitate to support efforts to bypass a committee in this way, but it is a procedural route that is used much more frequently than are the more complicated House procedures for circumventing committees. Moreover, most conference reports are potentially subject to filibusters in the Senate, giving Senate minorities a source of bargaining leverage over committee members at the conference stage that does not exist in the House.
Nevertheless, in practice, Senate committees retain some blocking power. Calling up a measure from the calendar requires the cooperation of the majority leader, who usually sides with the committee chair on procedural matters. If the majority leader cooperates, committee members, like all senators, may filibuster or threaten to filibuster unfriendly legislation. Consequently, successful circumvention of a committee on a controversial matter often requires the support of at least sixty senators, the number needed to invoke cloture.
Nongermane amendments are troublesome for Senate committees, but they can often be set aside by a motion to table. A successful motion to table kills the amendment. Because a tabling motion is not debatable (and therefore cannot be filibustered) and is a procedural question, it may attract more votes than would be cast against the amendment itself. Moreover, the members of conference committees often drop adopted nongermane amendments in conference. In short, under most circumstances, committees in both chambers – but especially in the House – exercise considerable negative power. Circumventing committees requires special effort and is usually possible only with the cooperation of the majority party leadership.
Partisan Bias
A partisan bias is introduced in committee decision making when the majority party reserves for itself a larger proportion of committee seats than it has in the full chamber. This is a small but consistent bias across Congresses for House committees. It is seldom a problem in the Senate. The reason: A House majority party can impose its will on the minority party when the House adopts its committee list resolutions by simple majority vote; in the Senate, the minority can filibuster a committee list resolution that it believes unfairly advantages the majority party. In the 118th Congress (2023-2024), the overall advantage for the majority Republicans is 4.5 percent (51.0 to 55.5 percent), as is shown in Tables 40-2 and 40-3. This represents just over one seat per committee for most committees. For the majority party, this means giving another member a desirable assignment and a margin of control that might be needed to win votes when members are absent or even voting against the party.[1]
This small advantage, which was 4.8 percent in the 117th Congress (2021-2022) when Democrats were in the majority, has become larger than at any time in at least the last four decades. A reasonable hypothesis is that small majority parties feel insecure with the small committee majorities that would parallel full chamber proportions so they give themselves an extra seat on most committees. Deep partisanship, no doubt, makes the decision to pad their numbers in committee easier to justify.
For a few House committees—House Administration, Rules, and Ways and Means—the majority party gives itself an even greater advantage (and has been doing so for decades). House Administration has jurisdiction over committee budgets, election and campaign finance legislation, and contested elections. Rules writes special rules that set the floor agenda for major legislation (Note 20) and Ways and Means manages tax, trade, Social Security, and Medicare issues. These more disproportionate committee majorities assure the majority party that is controls committee action that the majority party considers vital to its interests.
[1] Committee party ratios are provided in CRS reports for the House and Senate.