Congressional committees, in other words, largely control the legislative process by deciding which bills come to a vote and by framing the language of each bill before it is debated. Provide students with background on the organization and operation of Congressional committees, using resources available through the U.
Congress website. A schedule of Congressional committee hearings can be used to identify topics currently under consideration. Begin by viewing the Library of Congress video on Congressional Committees.
Have students research the committees and subcommittees upon which their Congressional representatives serve, using library resources or the resources available through the U. Divide the class into small groups and have each group prepare a report on one of the committees or subcommittees upon which one of your Congressional representatives serves, including the size of the committee, its jurisdiction, and whether your representative has a leadership post on the committee. Encourage students to include as well information about legislation currently before the committee.
They can find this information using library resources or through the U. Congress Committee Reports page. After students present their reports, discuss how committee assignments can affect a Congressional representative's ability to effectively represent his or her constituents.
After exploring these questions, have students debate the extent to which a Congressional representative's committee vote may be more influential than his or her vote on the floor of the House or Senate.
Which vote has more impact on legislation? In this regard, have students consider President Woodrow Wilson's observation that "Congress in session is Congress on public exhibition, whilst Congress in its committee-rooms is Congress at work. Conclude by having students consider how the structure and function of Congressional committees reflects some of the fundamental principles of federalism.
For a broad discussion of federalism, have students read The Federalist No. Have students imagine, for example, that they are members of a Congressional committee that is considering a bill with special importance for the people of your community.
Skip to main content. The Constitution requires that both the House and Senate agree to identical legislative text before it is sent to the president for a signature. Therefore, a conference committee is a temporary, bicameral House and Senate committee established to resolve differences between two versions of a bill. During this process, Republican and Democratic members of the House and Senate appointed by the majority leadership of both chambers work through differences and then send a final product back to each chamber.
Once the conference report comes back to the House and Senate for approval, it cannot be amended. The process for standing committees is different from the process for conference committees. Standing committees usually hold public hearings to receive testimony from experts and other affected parties to figure out how best to craft a policy. Conference committees, however, move directly into working out differences between the House and Senate-passed versions of the legislation after appointing members of the conference committees called conferees.
While conference committee meetings are also supposed to be open, the committee can vote to hold meetings behind closed doors, and often does. Standing committees will hold markups , a process in which permanent committee members make changes to a proposed bill. During this process and floor consideration if permitted , the committee still determines the scope of the legislation. But conference committees are composed of both House and Senate members temporarily appointed to resolve differences between two pieces of legislation within an existing scope of policies.
When a bill is introduced in either chamber of Congress House or Senate , it is referred to different committees depending on what the bill proposes to do. These are called committees of jurisdiction. Conferees are generally members of the committee s of jurisdiction for the bill under consideration. But conference committees also include members of leadership for both chambers as a means of advancing the political and policy priorities of each.
And so all of their actions are going to be motivated by trying to maximize the grant amount that their state is getting. And when forming coalitions, whoever is making the proposal is going to want to select the, quote unquote, cheapest coalition.
So in other words, they want to find coalition members that are going to allow them to maximize their grant amounts. So first, the theory shows that states with similar characteristics are going to be cheaper to include in the winning coalition.
And the reason for this is that funding is allocated based on a formula using state characteristics such as population or poverty. So states with similar characteristics are going to receive similar grant amounts.
If you have a formula based on population, states with similar population levels are going to receive similar levels of funding.
And so if I represent a smaller state such as Vermont, then the formula that really benefits my constituents is also going to benefit similar states, such as Rhode Island or New Hampshire, but not places like California or Texas.
And then the second prediction that comes out of the model is that states that are doing poorly under the status quo policy are going to also be cheaper to include in the winning coalition. And so as a result, the status quo policy is going to really impact what formula gets enacted because legislators are always going to compare proposals to the status quo policy and the legislators that are doing poorly under the status quo are therefore going to be the ones that want to change it.
Empirically, I do actually find evidence for both of these claims. So looking at amendments that are offered by senators on the Senate floor to grant formulas, I find that states that are doing worse under the status quo and states that have similar population levels to the proposer state are more likely to be included in the winning coalition. Matt Grossmann: We hear more about earmarks, but these matter more, and are just as political.
And so there is a lot of research that shows that committee members are able to procure more funding for their states, but most of this research focuses on earmarks or pork barrel spending.
Matt Grossmann: Looking at education funding, she finds large effects of committees. Leah Rosenstiel: I find evidence that committees play a really important role in the design of grant programs. So looking at grant programs from the department of education since , I find that states represented by the Senate committee with jurisdiction over education received substantially more grant funding.
These are fairly sizable effects. So, many of these grant programs receive billions of dollars annually. So a five and a half percent increase in your grant amount could easily be millions of additional dollars for your state every year.
Leah Rosenstiel: There are a number of grants in aid included in the COVID relief bills in addition to the stimulus checks, which I think have gotten probably the most press. A lot of this debate did appear to be along partisan lines.
So in a lot of cases, they are just using formulas that were already in law or taking parts of those formulas. So in a lot of ways, the distribution of funding here is actually going to look pretty similar to the distribution of funding that you get from this particularistic politics within committees.
Matt Grossmann: Politics still looks distributive. Leah Rosenstiel: I think the politics surrounding the distribution of federal grants has not actually changed very much. So the debates over these formulas look pretty similar today to how they did 50 years ago. But one thing that has changed is that programs get reauthorized much less often than they used to.
So committees are doing less than they used to, but when they do actually reauthorize these bills, the politics looks similar. But Congress is still designing and altering grant programs and committees are still playing a really important role in this process.
Matt Grossmann: Lewallen agrees that committee still help with distributive politics. Jonathan Lewallen: So I do find that, even though with the exception of the government affairs committee, most committees have decreased their legislative activity. Relative to each other, I find that committees like natural resources, the other committees that we think of as largely distributive, still are holding more legislative hearings than some of the other hearings that we think of as involved in more regulatory policy or redistributive policy.
And so, I think the committee positions are definitely a way for members to insert those provisions or direct those grants to their states, again, at those kind of pre enactment stages.
So while the policy is being formulated in committee, I think, having those committee seats definitely is valuable. And I think that also ties in to the chapter I have on the stratified Congress. And so, yeah, I think that would increase the value of those committee seats for you and for your districts and for your states. Matt Grossmann: And Rosenstiel agrees that lots of what Congress does now is just adjustment.
Leah Rosenstiel: A lot of these grant programs, although not all, were created in the sixties and seventies. And typically these programs come up for reauthorization every few years. Pretty often the formulas, when programs come up for reauthorization, Congress does talk about changing formulas. Matt Grossmann: Distributive politics matters on top of parties because parties contain very different states.
I think parties affect everything that is going on in Congress. But I think when it comes to grants and the allocation of funds in particular, in these formulas of how much each state is going to get, it really is a much more distributive game. California and Texas actually a very similar characteristics and tend to benefit from the same types of programs. And these effects do hold even when you account for co partisanship or something like that.
They are, in fact, truly legislators trying to maximize funding for their states. I do think parties matter a lot in other aspects of the grant programs. How much should the use of funds be restricted? What are the requirements for getting funding?
What types of programs do we want? Do we want redistributive programs? Do you want more education programs? Do you want fewer education programs? And so all of those debates look much more partisan. But when it comes to these allocation formulas, it really is a distributive story. Matt Grossmann: Lewallen says scholars used to see parties solving the problems of committees, but they created new ones.
Jonathan Lewallen: The prevailing view in political science, at least among folks who study Congress, is that a decentralized committee system slows the process down.
It makes lawmaking too piecemeal. And that parties and party leaders are really the folks who can provide that and help Congress respond more quickly and more appropriately to events and to these large complex issues. And so, as you say, there was this trade-off where parties and party government was seen as a solution to the problem of committee governance or the several problems that come with committee government.
And then if the majority party in particular has an easier time passing its legislation, then that filters out to the public. The public has an easier time distinguishing between who the two parties are and what they want, what their agendas are. And that will make it easier and better for us as citizens to know who to vote for. When a lot of the political scientists who were expressing dissatisfaction with committee government were writing, it was that period where the Democrats were just going to be in the majority for the foreseeable future.
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