Boffoblog: Our Sectarian House

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Our Sectarian House

The way the House handled the intelligence reform bill last week gave the Washington Post a hook to consider the partisan manner in which Dennis Hastert manages the chamber. He said afterward that he would not rely on Democrats to pass the legislation if a majority of his own party was opposed.

While it might appear obvious that a speaker is partisan, the holder of the office performs dual roles. On the one hand, the speaker is elected by the whole House, is in the line of succession for the presidency, and manages the business of the House. On the other hand, he is typically (though not always) elected strictly along partisan lines, is the top officer for his party within the chamber, and has additional power within its caucus such as in the naming of committee chairs and members. In other words, the speaker performs both secular and sectarian duties.

This speaker is no different in performing both roles, but what is different than most recent speakers -- even Newt Gingrich -- is the extent to which the sectarian is emphasized over the secular, the partisan over the interests of the House or of the nation. In the case of intelligence reform, Hastert decided that rather than pass a bill the House clearly would have supported, but which had more Democratic backers than Republican, he would not bring it to the floor.

Ordinarily, it is the prerogative of the speaker to bring a conference report to the floor for final disposition. It is true that with a majority of the House behind the bill, supporters could find alternate procedural avenues to bring it to the floor. The late date would make such maneuvers all but impossible. More importantly, the current House leadership has shown itself on many occasions more than willing to play hardball, most recently just last week as Joshua Marshall reports, and in this case would have little hesitation in punishing members of their own party who usurped the Speaker's power.

In fact, the story of the growing partisanship of the House is more subtle and interesting than the Post story describes. Take a common measure of partisanship in Congress, the party unity vote. This is when at least half of one party oppose at least half of the other party on a vote. As you can see, this is not a terribly stringent standard since it still permits a great number of defections from each party. Yet, perhaps to our surprise, there have been far fewer party unity votes under the Republicans than there were under the Democrats just prior to the takeover -- 64% of all House roll calls in the Democratic 103rd, but only 42% in the Republican 107th (I don't have final figures for the 108th yet). Does this mean that the Republicans are much less partisan than the Democrats were?

This is why we shouldn't always take anecdotes or figures like these at face value. Let's consider this a little more deeply. The Republicans came into the majority with a legitimate beef that the Democrats had been high handed in their management of the House. One way to see this is in terms of the special rules adopted which set the terms of debate for a given bill or set of bills, including whether any amendments would be permitted, and if so, whose. Fewer than half of the special rules under the Democrats (44%) were of the "open" or "modified open" variety, meaning that amendments could be offered relatively freely on the floor.

Nevertheless, despite promises by the Republicans that they would open up the process, promises which they did keep for the most part early in their tenure, now deliberation is far more closed than it had even been under the Democrats in recent memory. In the 107th, the proportion of open and modified open rules had fallen to 37%. At the same time, the proportion of closed rules -- ones where no amendments would be permitted at all -- had more than doubled, from 9% in the 103rd to 22% in the 107th.

How do we reconcile these two facts, that there are fewer party unity votes now than before, but deliberation is more likely to shut out amendments? Don Wolfensberger, director of the Congress Project at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, provides an answer and it involves the suspension of the rules.

Measures considered under suspension of the rules require 2/3rds support for passage, there is little time allocated for debate, and all amending apart from a single manager's amendment is barred. For the most part, it is used for minor and relatively nonpartisan or bipartisan bills. Democrats, reacting to the fewer opportunities afforded the minority to affect legislation, demanded in late 1997 that the Republicans permit more bills from the minority to be considered under suspension. This would permit minor, district-oriented bills to pass given that it was increasingly difficult to get such provisions included in the majority's legislation. To push the demand, Democrats blocked a series of Republican bills brought up under suspension, sending the signal that the procedure could not work without bipartisan accommodation.

In response, the number of bills considered under suspension has increased, and the proportion sponsored by Democrats has also increased. Whereas 56% of all measures passed in the Democratic 103rd were approved under suspension, 79% in the Republican 107th were passed that way. This makes the House seem less partisan than it was since such bills require bipartisan support to pass. Suspension has been used, Wolfensberger argues, largely to defuse objections within both parties, but especially among Democrats, due to the more aggressive use of special rules to shut off amendments and debate on major legislation.

However, because suspension is used for relatively minor legislation, it amounts to window dressing. On major legislation like the intelligence bill, Hastert runs a very tight ship indeed, and when bills are reported by committee to the floor, they come up with nearly airtight restrictions on amendments and deliberation. This is why the story of partisanship under Hastert runs deeper than the intelligence bill and the Post story discusses. The House hasn't seen this level of partisan leadership in a century. This makes the Senate and especially the moderate Republicans in the Senate more important than ever for slowing this right-wing steamroller.

04:08 PM in Politics | Permalink

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November 27, 2004

Our Sectarian House

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