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Committee Assignments in the House of Representatives*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2014

Nicholas A. Masters
Nicholas A. Masters*
Affiliation:
Washington University (St. Louis)
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Extract

Any attempt to understand the legislative process, or to reckon how well it fulfills its purported functions, calls for a careful consideration of the relationships among congressmen. The beginning weeks of the first session of every congress are dominated by the internal politics of one phase of those relationships, the assignment of members to committees. Since congressmen devote most of their energies—constituents' errands apart—to the committees on which they serve, the political stakes in securing a suitable assignment are high. Competition for the more coveted posts is intense in both houses; compromises and adjustments are necessary. Members contest with each other over particularly desirable assignments; less frequently, one member challenges the entire body, as when Senator Wayne Morse fought for his committee assignments in 1953.

The processes and patterns of committee assignments have been only generally discussed by political scientists and journalists. Perhaps the reason for this is too ready an acceptance of the supposition that these assignments are made primarily on the basis of seniority. Continuous service, it is true, insures a member of his place on a committee once he is assigned, but seniority may have very little to do with transfers to other committees, and it has virtually nothing to do with the assignment of freshman members. On what basis, then, are assignments made? Surely, not on the basis of simple random selection.

A recent student sees the committee assignment process as analogous to working out a “giant jig saw puzzle” in which the committees-on-committees observe certain limitations.

Type
Studies in Congressional Organization
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 55 , Issue 2 , June 1961 , pp. 345 - 357
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1961

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Footnotes

*

This study was made possible by the support of the Ford Foundation and Wayne State University. Neither of them, of course, is responsible for any errors of fact or interpretation.

References

1 Huitt, Ralph K., “The Morse Committee Assignment Controversy: A Study in Senate Norms,” this Review (06, 1957), pp. 313–329 Google Scholar

2 Goodwin, George Jr., “The Seniority System in Congress,” this Review (06, 1959), pp. 412–436 Google Scholar.

3 Data have been derived from unstructured interviews with members and staffs of the various committees, personal letters and similar papers, official documents of various types, and personal observations. I interviewed members of the committees-on-committees, deans of state delegations, and other members affected by the decisions. The survey covered the 80th through the 86th Congresses, with special attention to the 86th.

4 The Congressional Party: A Case Study (New York, 1959), p. 195 Google Scholar.

5 In the 87th Congress a serious conflict arose over the Rules Committee ratio. There was newspaper talk of “purging” two ranking Democratic members, Colmer and Whitten, both from Mississippi, who had supported the Dixiecrat presidential candidacy of Mississippi's Governor Barnett in the 1960 campaign, and who regularly voted with Chairman Howard Smith in the coalition of southern Democrats and conservative Republicans that controlled theRules Committee. But Speaker Rayburn, in order to break the “stranglehold” the coalition would have over the impending legislation of the Kennedy Administration, advocated instead an increase in the Committee's size. The conflict was resolved in Rayburn's favor by a narrow margin with the entire House participating in the vote. The subsequent appointments, however, were made along the lines suggested in this article.

6 “The Role of the Representative: Some Empirical Observations on the Theory of Edmund Burke,” this Review, Vol. 53 (09 1959), pp. 742–756 Google Scholar.

7 Cf. Scher, Seymour, “Congressional Committee Members as Independent Agency Overseers: A Case Study,” this Review, Vol. 54 (12 1960), pp. 911–920 Google Scholar.

8 Truman, op. cit., p. 279.

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