Back in the mid-1960s, the growing consensus was that committees had too much power while leadership had too little. This feeling was especially strong among liberal Democrats, who saw conservative Southern Democrats from safe seats bottling up civil rights bills. Because committees were run by a seniority system, party leaders had few powers to discipline senior committee chairs.
As liberals came to comprise a larger share of the majority Democratic caucus in the 1970s (particularly after the 1974 election), Democrats changed the rules to give the caucus and then the leadership more control over committee assignments and floor procedures, in order to bypass unrepresentative committee chairs.
Over the decades, leaders of both parties have also used increasingly restrictive floor procedures, limiting opportunities for rank-and-file members to participate and further marginalizing committees. Much of this was accelerated when Newt Gingrich came to power in 1995. He drastically slashed budgets for the committees, concentrated much more power in the leadership, and took a much more active role in appointing committee chairs. Boehner simply carried on this tradition. He has controlled the floor process and committee assignments closely as speaker.
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Putting policymaking back in committees is hardly a radical suggestion. It's pretty much what the establishment Bipartisan Policy Center's Commission on Political Reform recommended in a report last year. The BPC noted that "routine circumvention of the formal committee process" was contributing to the "dysfunction" in Washington: "Committee chairs and members feel disenfranchised by the fact that many important pieces of legislation are crafted on the cusp of
a deadline by congressional leaders without the benefit
of a committee process."
The report went on to note: "The weakening of the committee system in Congress has had a very deleterious effect: it has deprived Congress of the opportunity to build stronger networks of expertise and experience, limited opportunities for collaboration and team-building, and contributed to a sense of disenfranchisement among many rank-and-file members."