Can the House Freedom Caucus revive the ‘People’s House’?

Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), the Speaker in waiting, reportedly has promised to shift some power over policymaking back to committees. This is good to hear. The history of the House of Representatives over the past 50 years is a story of power flowing upward to the Speaker.  

As Don Wolfensberger recently pointed out in this publication, for much of the 20th century, the House was a place where members of both parties had opportunities to bargain with one another to forge bipartisan compromises that pleased voters generally. The process was often messy with bills being debated and amended in committee and then on the floor, but it tended to work. Legislators got to be lawmakers, and the Speaker was very much a facilitator who partnered with the committee chairs to get things done.  

For various reasons, unfortunately, Democrats and then Republicans chose to abandon that bottom-up, pluralistic approach in favor of more of a winner-take-all model of governing. The House’s rules were changed to give the Speaker greater sway over who became committee chairs and who sat on the Rules Committee. Majority legislators also began to rely heavily on the Speaker to fundraise for them, and to declare the party’s legislative agenda. Getting a bill passed devolved into a top-down exercise led by the Speaker, his leadership team, and the Rules Committee. They would craft bills, often omnibuses, and present them to the chamber for an up or down vote.  

This shift to a Speaker-centric chamber has coincided with rising, reflexive partisanship in the House. The causality has worked both ways. Rising partisanship among members creates incentives to give more power to the Speaker in hopes they can ram bills through the chamber. But this “Just win, baby” way of governing further inflames partisanship by pressuring both majority and minority legislators to vote with the party no matter what.  

For sure, McCarthy is not the first leader who promised to shift back some power. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), for example, tried returning to regular order wherein bills get debated in committees and also on the floor of the House. These efforts inevitably peter out. Legislators panic when the media reports on how messy things are in the House, and give back authority to the Speaker in hopes he can restore order and keep the party in the majority.  

This time, however, could be different. The House Freedom Caucus (HFC), that rabble-rousing group of a few dozen righties, is pressuring McCarthy to give rank-and-file legislators more power. It has been reported that the House Freedom Caucus publicly issued a memorandum on “restoring the people’s voice in Congress” this past July. Among the requests for rule changes was making committees more independent from the Speaker by allowing committee members to choose their chair. The HFC memorandum also calls for legislators to be re-empowered to offer amendments from the floor and to be granted five days to read any legislation called up for a vote. 

Let anyone think they were kidding, last month the HFC doubled down by releasing a guide to new members of the House. It tells incoming congressmen the hard truths about life in a top-down House. 

“The state of affairs in the U.S. House of Representatives has steadily deteriorated over recent decades —  to the point at which the balance of power is so lopsided that members of Congress find themselves with no meaningful role in policymaking. … The result is the ‘People’s House’ serves almost everyone in Washington except the American People.” 

The guide acidly informs the naive naif that a new legislator would be wrong to imagine her committee assignment will be based on her life experiences. No, “committee assignments are based on perceived loyalty to leadership and whether you agree to meet a fundraising quota.”  

The guide, which was authored by HFC leader Rep. Scott Perry, (R-Pa.), urges new members to help the HFC be the change by coming to D.C. prepared to fight to change House Rules. New legislators can do that during mid-November’s House GOP meetings to select the next Speaker and craft the rules for the new Congress. These are the moments, the guide explains, where regular legislators have leverage. 

McCarthy is well aware of what is being asked of him. He also knows that the HFC sent packing the two previous Republican Speakers, Ryan and John Boehner (R-Ohio). Certainly, he may feel he can work through this situation by pitching a few bones to the House Freedom Caucus but otherwise keeping the same leadership-dominated model.  

But that would be a mistake and an opportunity missed. Remember, legislators gave up their power in the hopes that a Speaker-dominated House would enable a party to create a lasting majority. That approach has not worked well. Control of the House has flipped from one party to the other four times since 1995. Moreover, no Speaker has served more than four consecutive years since 2007. And after the end of Tip O’Neill’s (D-Mass.) decade-long reign in 1987, the average Speaker’s term has been a mere four and a half years.  

And one look at the sprawling administrative state and colossal deficits and debt shows this model certainly has not produced conservative results. 

So perhaps the wise and conservative thing to do would be to return to the earlier model of a member-driven House of Representatives. Let legislature be lawmakers, and let the People’s House return to being the messy but functional entity it once was. 

Kevin R. Kosar (@kevinrkosar) is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He is the coeditor of “Congress Overwhelmed: Congressional Capacity and Prospects for Reform“ (University of Chicago Press, 2020). He hosts the Understanding Congress podcast.