Parties and Procedural Choice in the House Rules Committee

Moffett, Kenneth W.

doi:10.1080/07343469.2011.642056

Cited by 7 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 37 publications

(80 reference statements)

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“…First, the Rules Committee can use its scheduling power to provide restrictive special rules to proposals that shift existing status quo points the majority party opposes and deny rules for proposals that shift status quo points away from the majority party. Consistent with this, most analyses of special rules have found that restrictive rules are used primarily to advance bills that favor the majority party Huber 1996, 1997;Marshall 2002Marshall , 2005Moffett 2012;Sinclair 1994). 2 Second, through its control over the Rules Committee, the majority party can construct restrictive rules that bar amendments that would allow proposals to collapse to the policy preferences of the floor median.…”

Section: Existing Work On Special Rulesmentioning

confidence: 83%

The Cost of Majority‐Party Bias: Amending Activity under Structured Rules

Lynch¹,

Madonna²,

Roberts

2016

Legislative Studies Qtrly

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All major legislation in the House necessitates a special rule from the Rules Committee before it can be brought to the chamber floor. These rules often strictly limit floor amendments to bills considered by the House. Scholars of political parties have argued that the House majority party can bias policy output away from the floor median through its usage of restrictive rules. In this article, we argue that in order to secure the passage of restrictive rules, the majority often makes concessions to centrist legislators through the amending process. We examine this theory using a newly collected data set that includes all amendments considered by the Rules Committee during the construction of structured rules in the 109th, 110th, and 111th Congresses (2005)(2006)(2007)(2008)(2009)(2010). Our results are mixed, but they do suggest that moderate members of the majority party often receive concessions via amendments for their support of the majority party's agenda-setting regime.Despite Congress having a reputation as an institution beset by partisan gridlock, the modern day US House of Representatives is a quite efficient legislative machine. In contrast to the more deliberate Senate, cohesive majorities can and do process legislation through the House while using precious little plenary time. The primary procedural tool that allows this kind of legislative efficiency is the special rule. The House Committee on Rules issues simple, yet flexible, resolutions that allow the chamber to choose bills to be considered and establish the terms and length of debate on bills. These special rules can increase legislative efficiency by limiting the time allowed for debate and restricting the number, as well as the content, of amendments allowed to be considered. The permissiveness of rules can range from those that allow all germane amendments (i.e., open rules) to those that allow a limited set of

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Section: Existing Work On Special Rulesmentioning

confidence: 83%

The Cost of Majority‐Party Bias: Amending Activity under Structured Rules

Lynch¹,

Madonna²,

Roberts

2016

Legislative Studies Qtrly

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“…To maintain its status quo, the majority party, especially in the House, has the ability to control the legislative schedule (Sinclair 1995;Cox and McCubbins 2005). The majority's scheduling power further extends to control-through the House Rules Committee, where it enjoys a supermajority-how much time might be spent considering a measure, whether amendments are allowed, and how many amendments are approved for consideration (Schickler and Pearson 2009;Moffett 2012;Meinke 2021). Since the majority wants to maintain its majority and they control the agenda, they are often loath to allow the partisan minority the opportunity to influence legislation once it reaches the floor (Richman 2015).…”

Section: Partisanshipmentioning

confidence: 99%

Amending Ethics Committee Sanction Recommendations in the House of Representatives

Straus

2022

Public Integrity

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The Constitution provides Congress with the power to punish and discipline its Members. Since the 90 th Congress (1967Congress ( -1968, the House Ethics Committee has been authorized to investigate allegations of misconduct and recommend punishments. This paper examines seven instances where the House Ethics Committee has recommended a punishment and the House has considered an amendment to increase or decrease the proposed sanction. Using a combination of case studies and a roll call vote data, this paper finds that demographic similarities between the accused and the voting Member (race, party, and state delegation), partisanship, and serving on the Ethics Committee influence whether a Member might choose to support an alternative sanction. For amendments that proposes an increased penalty, same state delegation (negative effect), co-partisanship (positive effect), race (positive effect), ideology (positive effect), and type of scandal (negative effect) matter. For decreased penalties, same state delegation (positive effect), race (positive effect), and ideology (negative effect) matter. For all amendments, being an Ethics Committee member is a strongly negative predictor. These findings imply that committee members attempt to protect the committee's recommendation, that demographic similarities matter when Members are making sanction decisions, and that ideology is a driving factor in deciding to support a change in ethics penalty.

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“…Although Krehbiel (1991Krehbiel ( , 1997 finds support for this hypothesis from analysing rule assignments in the 98 th and 99 th Congresses, subsequent empirical studies based on far more data provide little corroboration (e.g. Marshall, 2002;Moffett, 2004;Roberts, 2010;Thorson et al, 2007). In particular, Marshall (2002) finds that the effect of preference divergence between the chamber and a standing committee on the use of a closed rule is not only positive (in contrast to the sign implied by the preference outlier hypothesis) but also statistically significant for the 104 th -105 th Congresses.…”

Section: Reassessing Krehbiel's Hypothesesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The role of procedural commitment in informational theories of legislative organization

Chiou

2011

Journal of Theoretical Politics

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Contrary to codified procedures, almost all informational theories of legislative organization assume that the House floor commits to a special rule for floor consideration prior to a committee proposal. Employing Gilligan and Krehbiel’s (1989b) theoretical framework, we demonstrate that whether or not to assume this procedural commitment has a profound impact on our understanding of how the floor can structure the committee’s incentives to reveal information. In particular, we find that several of Krehbiel’s (1991) primary hypotheses, particularly that regarding preference outliers, generally do not hold without procedural commitment. Underscoring the key role of procedural commitment in informational theories, our results not only open up important avenues through which to construct a more defensible foundation for informational theory but also offer the hope of reconciling discrepancies between theoretical predictions and empirical regularities.

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Parties and Procedural Choice in the House Rules Committee

Cited by 7 publications

References 37 publications

The Cost of Majority‐Party Bias: Amending Activity under Structured Rules

The Cost of Majority‐Party Bias: Amending Activity under Structured Rules

Amending Ethics Committee Sanction Recommendations in the House of Representatives

The role of procedural commitment in informational theories of legislative organization

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