Welcome back. We are really glad you're spending
some time with us today. Yeah, absolutely. Thanks
for being here. If you're tuning in, we know
exactly who you are. You're the learner. You're
the kind of person who wants to, well, you want
to cut through the daily noise, bypass all those
talking heads on cable news and figure out how
things actually work behind the scenes. Getting
to the actual mechanics of it all. Exactly. And
today we're going to look at the ultimate behind
the scenes machinery of the United States government.
We are talking about congressional committees.
Which I know I know it sounds incredibly dry
at first glance. Oh, totally. I mean, congressional
procedure sounds like the title of a textbook
you'd use to prop up a wobbly table. It really
does. But this deep dive is going to reveal it
as the secret hidden engine of the entire country.
Our mission today is. to figure out how these
groups act as literal little legislatures, you
know, how they evolve from these tiny temporary
working groups into massive impenetrable power
centers. And why understanding them is honestly
the ultimate shortcut to being a well -informed
citizen. Yeah. To set the stage, I found this
quote in our sources from Woodrow Wilson. And
it just it perfectly captures the reality of
Washington. He wrote, it is not far from the
truth to say that Congress in session is Congress
on public exhibition, whilst Congress in its
committee rooms is Congress at work. What's fascinating
here is that the entire system is built on a
very practical, if unspoken, admission. Which
is what? That no single member of Congress can
possibly be an expert on everything. Right. Yeah.
I mean, you can't have a deep, nuanced understanding
of, say, nuclear submarine procurement in the
morning and then expertly rewrite agricultural
subsidies in the afternoon. It's just not possible
given the sheer scope of modern government. No
one has that kind of bandwidth. Exactly. And
that's why these committees exist. They provide
absolutely vital, specialized informational services
to the rest of the parent body. They're essentially
functional subunits. Breaking down the workload.
Right. They gather information, they compare
different legislative alternatives, and they
monitor the performance of the executive branch,
which we usually refer to as oversight. Plus,
they investigate allegations of wrongdoing. Think
of them as the eyes. the ears and the highly
specialized brains of the legislative branch.
OK, let's unpack this, because the sheer amount
of power these committees have over the legislative
process is just staggering. Oh, it really is.
They're essentially the bouncers of Congress.
The bouncers. I like that. Well, it's true. If
a piece of legislation wants to get onto the
floor for a vote, it almost always has to get
past them first. They absolutely dominate the
drafting and the honing of all the fine details
of the bills. before they're ever laid before
the rest of the members. They hold all the cards
early on. Which made me wonder, while reading
our sources, what happens if a committee just
decides they don't like a bill? Can they just
sit on it forever? In most cases, yeah. Yes,
they can. They can just quietly let it die in
a desk drawer. But there is a workaround in the
House of Representatives, though it's incredibly
difficult to pull off. It's called the discharge
petition. The discharge petition. Right. It's
a highly technical, really laborious procedure.
And it's designed to force a bill out of a committee
and bring it directly onto the floor for a vote.
Even if the committee doesn't want it to. Even
if that committee hasn't issued a report or if
the congressional leadership explicitly hasn't
given their consent. It's essentially a fail
safe mechanism for the broader membership to
bypass those committee gatekeepers if they feel
a popular bill is being unfairly held hostage.
But the reality of actually using that failsafe
is pretty grim. The sources have this aha statistic
that completely shifts how you view the balance
of power. Let's hear it. So between the years
1995 and 2007, there were 73 of these discharge
petitions submitted to the full House. OK, 73
attempts to bypass the committees. Right. Care
to guess how many were actually successful in
securing a definitive yay or nay vote for a bill?
Out of 73. I mean, I know the data, but it's.
Shockingly low. Yeah. Just one out of 73 made
it through. Which completely shatters the illusion
that a regular member of Congress can just show
up. Rally a few friends and pass a bill, doesn't
it? It totally does. If you aren't on the relevant
committee, you're mostly locked out of the process.
And if we look at the historical analysis, this
fragmentation has been recognized for a really
long time. Back in 1961, the American scholar
George B. Galloway wrote a famous piece called
History of the House of Representatives. Oh,
right. He observed that, in practice, Congress
rarely functions as a unified institution. Instead,
it functions as a collection of semi -autonomous
committees that seldom act in unison. I try to
picture that. It's not one big, cohesive body
making decisions for the country, but rather
this collection of tiny, independent fiefdoms
fiercely guarding their own turf. Precisely.
And the growth in their autonomy, along with
the way their jurisdictions constantly overlap
and bump into each other, it actually fragments
the overall power of the Senate and the House.
Meaning Congress weakens itself. Yes, exactly.
This is a crucial point for anyone trying to
understand American politics. This internal dispersion
of power can seriously weaken the legislative
branch relative to the other two branches of
the federal government. So relative to the president
and the Supreme Court. Right. When Congress can't
get out of its own way because the committees
are fighting over jurisdiction or just flat out
refusing to release bills, it interferes with
the adoption of any coherent, unified legislative
program. It leaves a vacuum. And nature pours
a vacuum. Exactly. And the executive branch or
the judiciary often ends up filling it. It's
wild to think about the government operating
like 200 competing startups under one roof. That's
a great way to look at it. And what makes it
even more fascinating is that it wasn't always
like this. The history of how these committees
evolved is just full of these bizarre, deeply
human quirks. Oh, the early days were completely
different. Yeah. If we rewind all the way back
to the very first Congress in 1789, the landscape
was totally unreal. Right. They didn't have permanent
standing committees doing everything. No. The
first Senate committee was established in April
of 1789, and its only job was just to draw up
rules of procedure. Just setting the ground rules.
Yeah. Back then, they operated almost entirely
with temporary select committees. They were small,
usually just three to five members, and they
were highly responsive to the entire Senate.
Because they had to be. Right. And once they
finished their specific task, they just dissolved.
Get this. The absolute largest committee in that
entire first Congress had 11 members. And what
was their monumental task? Its sole purpose was
just to figure out what the salary should be
for the president and the vice president. That
is amazing. Yeah. And the House of Representatives
had a very similar origin story, actually. Their
first committee was appointed that same month,
April 1789, just to prepare standing rules and
outline the duties of a sergeant at arms. Very
administrative stuff. Right. Because initially.
the House relied heavily on something called
the Committee of the Whole to handle the bolt
of their legislative issues. Wait, I saw that
term in the sources. The Committee of the Whole.
That's basically when the entire House of Representatives
drops its normal, rigid parliamentary rules and
meets as one giant committee just to debate and
tweak a bill more freely, right? Exactly. It's
a way to streamline debate without the strict
procedural hurdles of a formal House session.
So everyone is just hashing it out together.
Yes, but they quickly realized... that having
the entire membership debate, every single nuance
of every single bill, was incredibly inefficient.
I can only imagine the arguments. They needed
smaller groups to provide detailed advice on
specific, thorny topics. A great example from
the source material is the origin of the famous
Committee on Ways and Means. The Tax Committee.
Right. In July 1789, there was a major heated
debate over the creation of the brand new Treasury
Department. They were nervous about it. Very.
Members of the House were deeply paranoid about
giving this new executive department too much
unchecked authority over revenue proposals. So
they established the Committee on Ways and Means
specifically to keep an eye on the money. Just
to watch the Treasury. Yes. But initially, it
only existed for two months before dissolving.
It wasn't until 1801 that it became a permanent...
Standing Committee. Wow. And today, of course,
it's one of the most powerful panels in Congress
controlling taxation and tariffs. But as the
country grew, so did the committees. And the
reasons for that growth weren't always rooted
in high minded Democratic ideals. No, definitely
not. Here's where it gets really interesting.
By the year 1906, the Senate maintained 66 standing
and select committees. That's a lot of committees
for a much smaller Senate. Right. Just to put
that into perspective, that was actually eight
more committees than there were members of the
majority party at the time. It's absurd. And
the reason for this massive sudden bloat wasn't
a sudden explosion in legislative workload. It
was a real estate hustle. A literal grab for
office space. Yes. Before the Russell Senate
office building was built, senators didn't actually
have their own private office spaces. So the
system adapted. Many of these committees were
created solely to provide a senator with a dedicated
room they could use as an office. The system
was essentially generating phantom legislative
panels just to allocate. physical desks and chairs.
It's hilarious. It really is a remarkable detail
that shows how mundane logistical needs can warp
a government structure. My favorite anecdote
from the sources perfectly captures this absurdity.
The little fillet story. Yes. It involves a freshman
senator named Robert La Follette from Wisconsin.
Oh, guy. Right. He shows up in Washington around
this time, bright eyed and ready to work. And
the party leadership assigns him to chair the
committee to investigate the condition of the
Potomac Riverfront at Washington. Such a specific,
long title. And he goes on record saying he had
these grand sweeping visions of rolling up his
sleeves, drafting legislation and cleaning up
the whole riverfront. Until he started asking
around about his new committee's history. Yeah.
He quickly discovered that in the entire existence
of this committee, it had never received a single
bill to consider. Not one. Furthermore, it had
never held a single meeting. The entire thing
was a fiction created so someone could have a
room with a door that closed. I mean, imagine
getting elected to the United States Senate.
You pack up your family, move to Washington,
and your leadership puts you in charge of a fake
river committee. Just so you have a place to
sit. And the bloat just continued to get worse
before it got better. By 1920, the congressional
directory listed nearly 80 committees in the
Senate. They literally had a committee on the
disposition of useless papers in the executive
departments. The useless papers committee. They
had senators whose official jurisdiction was
essentially throwing away old receipts. It's
incredible. But human pragmatism finally intervened.
On May 27, 1920, the Russell Senate office building
officially opened its doors. Suddenly, every
member of the Senate was assigned their own actual
private office space. And wouldn't you know it,
once they all had their desks. The Senate very
quietly went ahead and abolished 42 committees.
Just wiped some out. Gone. The physical architecture
of Washington literally shaped the legislative
structure of the government for decades. It's
amusing, but it also highlights a serious structural
flaw, right? They couldn't just keep operating
based on who needed a desk or who wanted a fancy
title. No, absolutely not. The system was an
administrative disaster and desperately needed
modernization. The modern structure, as we read.
recognize it today really stems from the Legislative
Reorganization Act of 1946. 1946. Right. This
was the most ambitious restructuring since the
system was first developed in the 18th century.
It massively streamlined things. They slashed
a number of House committees from 48 down to
19. That's a huge cut. And the Senate committees
went from 33 down to 15. But more importantly,
it codified the jurisdictions of all these committees
by rule. Ah, so they wrote down exactly who does
what. Exactly. which was an attempt to minimize
all those messy turf wars we talked about earlier.
So that cleaned up the map, but there was another
major shift later on, right? The 1970 Act. Yes,
the Legislative Reorganization Act of 1970. While
the 1946 Act was about efficiency, the 1970 Act
was aimed at transparency. It wanted to open
Congress up to more public visibility. Making
things more open. Right. For instance, it introduced
recorded teller votes in that committee of the
whole we discussed earlier. Meaning members actually
had to go on the record so the public could see
exactly how they were voting rather than just
shouting yay or nay in an anonymous crowd. Precisely.
Accountability. It also allowed minority party
members to call their own witnesses during committee
hearings, ensuring that the majority party couldn't
just create an echo chamber. That's a pretty
big deal for fairness. It is. And as a structural
addition, it established the Senate Committee
on Veterans Affairs. Which brings us to the landscape
today. If you look at Congress now, the ecosystem
is divided into a few main types of panels. Let's
run through them. First, you have standing committees.
These are the permanent heavyweights, like appropriations,
agriculture, or ways and means. Because they
have actual legislative jurisdiction, they consider
bills and monitor agencies. The core machinery.
Right. Then you have select or special committees.
These are usually established to examine emerging
issues that don't neatly fit into existing boundaries
or to conduct very specific investigations. Like
a temporary task force. Exactly. Then there are
joint committees, which pull members from both
chambers, the House and the Senate. Currently,
there are only four joint committees. Right.
Economic, library, printing, and taxation. Yep.
And finally, conference committees. These are
ad hoc, temporary groups formed specifically
to hash out a compromise when the House and the
Senate pass competing slightly different versions
of the same bill. To merge them together. Right.
So all told, today we're looking at 22 permanent
committees in the House, 20 in the Senate, and
those four joint committees. But even with all
that historical reorganization, Congress still
managed to leave some massive loopholes open.
Wait, really? What kind of loopholes? Well, in
1993, Congress... Congress established a temporary
joint committee on the Organization of Congress
to review how well the system was functioning.
And they discovered a major flaw in that original
1946 reform. The one that streamlined everything.
Yes. While it limited the top level committees,
it completely failed to limit the number of subcommittees
allowed on any one committee. Hang on. So they
just nested the bloat further down the chain.
That's exactly what happened. They just hid the
bloat one level deeper. Unbelievable. Today.
The House of Representatives has tried to address
this by generally limiting each full committee
to five subcommittees. There are a few major
exceptions because of workload appropriations
has 12 subcommittees, armed services has seven,
foreign affairs has seven, and transportation
and infrastructure has six. OK, so the House
has some limits. What about the Senate? In the
Senate, there are absolutely no limits on the
number of subcommittees they can create. Ah,
zero. So the web of who is responsible for what
just keeps subtly expanding. Right. Which naturally
brings up a fundamental question for anyone listening.
How do you actually get on one of these? Ah,
the assignment process. Yeah. If you somehow
win an election and get to Congress, how do you
make sure you get assigned to a committee that
actually matters to you and your voters instead
of getting stuck on the modern equivalent of
the useless papers committee? Well, formally,
the appointment procedure is made by a vote of
the whole Senate or the whole House. Formally.
But informally. In reality, the choices are entirely
dictated by the political parties. Generally,
the party leadership tries to honor the preferences
of the individual members, giving priority based
heavily on seniority. So the longer you've been
there, the better your pick. Exactly. And in
terms of numbers, each party is allocated seats
on a committee in rough proportion to their overall
strength in the chamber. So if a party holds
60 percent of the Senate, they generally get
60 percent of the seats on the various committees.
Makes sense. But there are two major exceptions
in the House, which we should remain totally
impartial about, just stating the facts of the
rules here. On the House Rules Committee, the
majority party automatically fills nine of the
13 seats, regardless of their overall margin
in the chamber. Nine out of 13. That gives them
massive outsized control over the floor schedule.
It does. It's an incredibly powerful tool for
the majority. And on the House Ethics Committee,
each party gets an exact equal number of seats
to ensure balance on disciplinary matters. That
makes total sense for ethics. Now, the part about
how members justify their requests to their party
leadership is fascinating, and it has huge implications.
The request letters. Yeah. Our sources highlight
an analysis of U .S. House of Representative
Committee request letters from six different
congresses, specifically spanning from the early
1970s to the late 1980s. What did they find?
The researchers found that about 80 percent of
the justifications members gave for wanting a
specific assignment fell into just three buckets.
OK. Prior professional experience, geography
and electoral considerations. So basically what
they know. where they're from and what will get
them reelected. Exactly. For example, members
who request an assignment to the House Armed
Services Committee overwhelmingly have a significant
military presence or active military bases right
in their home district. Right. Meanwhile, members
who request to be on the House Interior Committee
almost always come from sparsely populated western
areas with a lot of land held in public trust.
It makes complete logical sense from a representative
standpoint. I mean, members want to be on the
panels that most directly impact the voters who
elected them. It's how they prove they're delivering
value to their home district. Delivering the
goods back home. Exactly. Think about what that
practically means for the rest of the country.
It means that the policies being drafted in these
little legislatures are heavily skewed by the
specific regional or professional biases of the
members who self -selected beyond them. Oh, wow.
I see where you're going with this. You do not
have a perfectly randomized cross -section of
America drafting national agricultural policy.
You have representatives almost exclusively from
agricultural districts drafting it. That's such
a crucial dynamic. If you live in a major city,
your grocery prices are heavily influenced by
a farm bill written almost entirely by people
representing rural farm states because they're
the only ones who fought to get on the Agriculture
Committee. Right. It creates a very specific
tilt to the legislation. But. Beyond the geographic
bias, there's a darker structural trend happening
with these committees that our sources point
out, and it actively threatens their ability
to do any of this work effectively. Yeah. And
if we connect this to the bigger picture, we're
seeing a massive decline in institutional capacity.
Institutional capacity, meaning their ability
to actually get the work done? Yes. Between 1994
and 2014, overall committee staffing across Congress
was slashed by 35 percent. 35? Let's really think
about what a 35 % cut looks like on a random
Tuesday afternoon for a representative. It's
devastating. You've got phones ringing off the
hook from angry constituents. Dozen different
crises happening globally and suddenly you literally
don't have the policy experts, the researchers
or the investigators in your office to actually
read or write complex legislation. And the data
totally reflects that paralysis. Yeah. In the
1970s, the House held around 6 ,000 hearings
a year. 6 ,000. By 1994, that number had dropped
to 4 ,000. Oh. And by 2014, it was down to just
over 2 ,000 hearings a year. Wow. That's a two
-thirds drop in the number of times these committees
are formally gathering information, interviewing
experts, and conducting oversight on the executive
branch. Which means they're flying blind compared
to a few decades ago. Completely flying blind.
The implications are profound. And according
to our sources, commentators from across the
political spectrum have expressed deep concern
about this. There is a genuine bipartisan worry
regarding the loss of committee capacity to independently
research and develop legislative initiatives.
Because if they aren't doing the research, who
is? Exactly. When committees lose their staff
and hold fewer hearings, the work doesn't just
disappear. The vacuum gets filled. There's that
vacuum again. Right. They become increasingly
reliant on outside lobbyists, special interest
groups, or the executive branch itself to provide
them with information and sometimes even draft
the legislation for them. They just hand them
the bill to pass. It fundamentally shifts the
balance of power away from the elected representatives
and toward unelected influence groups. Just presenting
the facts of the structural shift here. But it's
a massive change in how Washington works. So
what does this all mean? Let's bring this all
the way home for you, the listener. Yeah, let's
tie it together. The next time you're watching
the news and you hear some frustrated anchor
talking about a vital piece of legislation being
stuck in Congress, I want you to look past the
grandstanding on the Senate floor. The public
exhibition. as Wilson called it. Exactly. The
real story is almost certainly happening in one
of these 200 semi -autonomous committees or subcommittees.
They are the ultimate gatekeepers. They hold
the keys. They are heavily influenced by the
specific local geographies of the members sitting
on them. And crucially, they are severely understaffed
compared to just a few decades ago, heavily reliant
on outside help and holding a fraction of the
hearings they used to. Understanding that hidden
machinery completely changes how you view the
successes, the failures and the gridlock of the
federal government. It's the engine under the
hood. It really does alter your perspective.
And to leave you with a final thought to mull
over, I want to revisit that discharge petition
we discussed earlier. Oh, right. That rare mechanism
to bypass the powerful committee gatekeepers.
Yes. During the depths of the Great Depression
in 1932, the situation in the country was so
desperate that a reform movement in the House
actually succeeded in temporarily changing the
rules. What did they do? They dropped the number
of signatures required on a discharge petition
from a constitutional majority of 218 down to
just 145. Wow. That meant a mere one -third of
the House membership could force a bill out of
a stalled committee and onto the floor for a
vote. That is a massive shift in power away from
the leadership and toward the regular members.
It was huge. But it was incredibly short -lived.
By 1935, a counterattack led by what the sources
explicitly called the intra -house oligarchy.
Intra -house oligarchy? Essentially a small group
of powerful insiders who controlled the flow
of things. They abolished the reform. They successfully
raised the threshold back up to 218. Put the
genie back in the bottle. Exactly. It was the
last across -the -board change in the autonomy
of house standing committees. Fascinating. Consider
how different modern American history might look
today if that 1932 rule had survived. If a mere
one -third of the House could bypass the powerful
committee gatekeepers and force a floor vote
at any time, would the legislative gridlock we
hear so much about even exist? Or would it just
be a free -for -all? Right. Would it result in
a completely different kind of chaos with hundreds
of bills fled in the floor every week? What a
question to end on. It just goes to show how
obscure, seemingly boring procedural rules from
a century ago shape the reality we live in every
single day. They really do. Thank you so much
for joining us on this deep dive. Keep digging,
stay curious, and we'll see you next time as
we continue to unpack the hidden machinery of
our world. Take care.