Congress needs to reclaim its role in policymaking

At least two major shifts await the 119th House. First, President-elect Trump promises to create a government efficiency commission aimed at substantially paring back the size of executive branch agencies. Second, the 119th Congress will be the first to begin since the Supreme Court overturned its 1984 Chevron decision, which had demanded judicial deference to agencies’ interpretations of congressional statutes.

Each reform has the potential to help reverse the decades-long process of policy influence, shifting away from elected members to executive branch officials. But to meet the moment, the new House needs to update its rules and procedures so that committees and members have greater incentives to invest in lawmaking. The Constitution places Congress at the center of the policy process, and for too long it has abdicated this responsibility.

Our bipartisan task force report, Revitalizing the House — produced by a group of former House members, staffers and other experts — details a set of recommendations designed to meet the moment. For instance, we propose a new procedure, "Guaranteed Regular Order," that would enable standing committees to advance to the floor at least one major bill a year that has sufficient committee support and endured a robust committee process including markups and hearings.

Other reforms improve parliamentary features such as the amendments process, discharge petition and calendar in ways that would incentivize members to invest in lawmaking by building strong majorities of support.

What motivates these recommendations? An overriding impetus is that over time, too much policymaking has shifted from the legislative to the executive branch. As just one data point, the annual number of pages of the Federal Register, which documents presidential unilateral policymaking and agency rulemaking, has grown by over 50 percent in the past four decades. By comparison, over the same period, the percentage of committee hearings focused on legislation has dropped by half.

Consistent with these trends, the House floor is increasingly unlikely to take up bills reported out of committee; as recently as 2004, close to 80 percent of legislation reported out of committee received a vote whereas in the most recently completed Congress, less than 60 percent did. If members know committee bills are unlikely even to be given a chance for a vote, they rationally spend time on other pursuits while policy issues that should be decided by elected representatives end up falling into the laps of agency officials.

The shift to policymaking through the administrative state has been accompanied by a significant decline in Americans’ trust in our government and institutions, including Congress, regardless of which party holds power or individuals’ partisan leanings. Likewise, Americans increasingly report antipathy to fellow Americans from the other party. While the sources of these trends are myriad and difficult to tease out from each other, the current state of affairs whereby the presidential vote is close to a 50-50 split but policymaking is concentrated with whichever party takes the White House is hardly conducive to fostering trust or reducing polarization.

By comparison, the deal-making and negotiation process associated with Congress, while typically messy, facilitates input from a multitude of representatives directly accountable to voters and results in more durable policy.   

The delegation of power to the administrative state has been accompanied by the centralization of power in House leadership of both parties to control lawmaking at the expense of committees and members. An argument against our proposals could be that the leadership feels the current system works well for party unity. By including former leadership staff on our task force and incorporating their expertise, we made efforts to avoid proposals that we thought would be nonstarters with the leadership.

Moreover, we would argue that the centralization of lawmaking to leadership has not only disincentivized committees and members from investing sufficiently in the nitty-gritty of lawmaking but has also contributed to recurring leadership fights in the Republican Party, with two Speakers being forcefully removed in recent years. And while the Democratic Party has avoided the leadership turnover, they too have enabled power to shift to the executive.

Whoever the next Speaker is, they — and at the time of writing it appears likely to be Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.) — will have the first crack at leading Congress from the beginning of the session. We believe the leaders, and the members electing them, should insist on rules and procedures that reward committees’ and members’ efforts at solving America’s most pressing problems. The House can and should take back its role as the people’s chamber at the heart of policymaking.

Brandice Canes-Wrone is professor of political science and the Maurice R. Greenberg Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. Matthew Chervenak is founder and CEO of the Sunwater Institute.