Heather Cox Richardson:
From Cafe and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is Now & Then. I’m Heather Cox Richardson.
Joanne Freeman:
And I’m Joanne Freeman. Before I talk about what we’re going to talk about today, one brief word and that is they are drilling outside my apartment. And so the drilling will be a major character potentially of our episode today. Just wanted you to know, not your ears.
Heather Cox Richardson:
Wait, wait, Joanne, are you saying we’re going to drill down into a topic?
Joanne Freeman:
Indeed, Heather.
Heather Cox Richardson:
Oh, man, we’re already in such trouble.
Joanne Freeman:
We are. We’re in deep trouble. But we’re going to be in deep trouble about something specific and that is, we’re going to be talking about Congressional committees. Now, obviously one of the reasons why we’re talking about this has to do with the fact that they’ve been in the news recently with a new Congress, with a new speaker, Kevin McCarthy, and with now people being put on committees and various objections being raised. And then most recently, representative Ilhan Omar, the democrat from Minnesota, was removed from the House Foreign Affairs Committee in a party-line vote ostensibly because of past remarks that she made, which were deemed anti-Semitic.
What we want to talk about today is what committees actually do, why they’re important, how that has changed over time, and what’s going on in those committees that actually shapes our process of governance. Part of what we’ll talk about early on is the 19th century in which not only was there a lot going on in these committees, but they were secret. They were private and kept away from the press. So basically this is part of our political process that although we think about membership, we don’t necessarily think about its role in actual governance very much.
Heather Cox Richardson:
And I love this topic because it’s one of those things that shows up in the news all the time, who’s on what committee, and the committee did this, and the committee did that. And nobody really talks about how incredibly important those committees are and who sits on those committees. And my great example of that was that, if you actually watch the Nixon-Kennedy debates, a lot of those debates are about what committees they sit on. And nowadays you can’t imagine presidential contenders saying, “Well, you were only on the subcommittee of the blah, blah, blah.” And it was such a big deal then because people understood how Congress worked.
And the ways that committees have played into our political process, at least over the last six years and certainly before that, is really important to the way things have happened. The fact that Representative Omar has been voted off the Foreign Affairs Committee is a very big deal because of the committee she was voted off of, and we’ll talk about the different kinds of committees. But it’s also worth pointing out that speaker McCarthy does have power to decide who is on a select committee, which means that he was able to toss off of the House Intelligence Committee two of the people who have been very active on it and have built up a great deal of knowledge over time about it, including Adam Schiff, a democrat from California who chaired the committee and has been on the committee for a very long time, and crucially was one of the leaders of using that committee to investigate the connections between the Trump campaign and Russia.
And many people see this as an attempt to protect Donald Trump, because the intelligence committee under the Trump years did a lot of things that harked back to some of its earlier days in terms of politicization. But that control over who sits on committees is ultimately a form of control over what actually gets done and how it gets done. So a lot of the sausage making on committees is enormously important, and it’s really important to understand how it’s done, why it’s done, and how it can be used or misused.
Joanne Freeman:
And I also will say, I’ll point listeners back to an episode we did in the past. We did actually do a past episode on speakers of the House, in which we didn’t necessarily focus on committees, but that will reinforce some of what it is that we’re talking about here.
Heather Cox Richardson:
Because in part, when we talk about a powerful speaker at least, we are talking about speakers who know how to move those little levers in such a way that they create consensus and they move the ball forward by using the rules of the House and the committees of the House. And when we talk about weaker speakers, which would be a great name for a rock band by the way, we’re often talking about people who don’t use those things very well. And of course in the present, with McCarthy’s removal of Schiff and Swalwell from the intelligence committee, but also getting the House to vote against Omar, which took a lot of “political oxygen” as somebody said, and created yet more problems for the speaker, might not have been worth the power he invested in it.
One of the other things that I guess we have to mention is that while he was busy taking Adam Schiff off of the Intelligence Committee in the House, speaker McCarthy also assigned representative George Santos from New York to committees. He has recused himself from serving on committees while there is still an investigation into him, but if you’ve used it as a grandstanding moment, it’s only natural that somebody’s going to say, “Wait a minute, you’re taking Adam Schiff off Intelligence and you’re putting George Santos on science, space, and technology and on the small-business committee,” which again are not necessarily the most important committees like Ways and Means is. And yet they do a lot of important work.
Joanne Freeman:
They do the work as we’re going to talk about in just a moment. That’s where a lot of the work happens is off the floor in these committees. So we might giggle at some of the committees that we could name that sound like as though they’re trivial, but if there’s a committee, there’s a reason for that committee and it can have an impact and often does.
Heather Cox Richardson:
And we’ll talk now about the different kinds of committees, but think about it, they are literally that, they are committees. So, if you spend your Congressional time on the agriculture committee, which is one of my favorite ones. I have favorites.
Joanne Freeman:
Okay, wait, wait, wait. You have a favorite committee.
Heather Cox Richardson:
Actually, yes, I have favorite committees. And it is one of the things that used to make me tear my hair out is that while you could get a record of what happened in Congress, committee deliberations were secret. And every time they closed those doors, I would be like, “No. No, I need to know what you’re going to be talking about because this is where it really is going to happen.” And you could piece it together from the newspapers because people would leak, but you didn’t have a record of what happened in committee.
Joanne Freeman:
So there’s three different kinds. There are standing committees which are permanent committees, and the members of standing committees are formally selected by the whole House or the whole Senate, but the appointments are almost always made by their respective parties in the 19th century, or for at least part of it, sometimes by the speakers. Most standing committees have a set number of members from each party and are created by Congressional resolutions and they tend to select legislative proposals to be debated by Congress. They provide oversight for agencies that fall within their jurisdiction and usually recommend funding levels for programs that fall within their purview.
Heather Cox Richardson:
So the Agriculture Committee for example.
Joanne Freeman:
Or Foreign Affairs,
Heather Cox Richardson:
Yeah, but I’m talking about the important ones.
Joanne Freeman:
Oh, silly me.
Heather Cox Richardson:
That was a joke everybody. Foreign Affairs was actually the most important.
Joanne Freeman:
Ways and means too, but yes.
Heather Cox Richardson:
Foreign Affairs Committee was the most important Senate committee in the 19th century, and Ways and Means in the House. And agriculture was important, but I was just being a jerk. Okay, so there’s standing committees and then…
Joanne Freeman:
Then there are select committees whose members are usually appointed by the Speaker of the House or the Senate majority leader. Most of them are temporary or have been temporary. There are some permanent select committees including, for example, the House and Senate Intelligence Committees.
Heather Cox Richardson:
That’s always a surprise to people, is that the intelligence committees are select committees. They’re not standing committees, although they don’t disappear. But that means who is on them is appointed differently and that’s why McCarthy could toss off Swalwell and Schiff, which he very well likely could not have done if those had been a standing committee. So that’s a weird distinction.
Joanne Freeman:
Not on his own… yeah.
Heather Cox Richardson:
Yeah. That’s a weird distinction is that even though it always exists, it is not technically a standing committee. It’s a select committee and the speaker gets to decide who’s on it.
Joanne Freeman:
And then finally the third kind of committee is a joint committee. And logically enough, given that name, joint committees include members of both the House and the Senate. They tend to be focused on bureaucratic or administrative matters.
Heather Cox Richardson:
And I love joint committees because I mean everyone thinks about the joint committee on reconstruction, which is the one that just…
Joanne Freeman:
Maybe not everybody. This is a total Heather and Joanne nerd episode.
Heather Cox Richardson:
All right. Well they do things that come up with the 14th Amendment, but the reason the joint committees are especially interesting is because they usually operate when the House and the Senate disagree about something. So if you’re trying to figure out who stands where on an issue, the House will have passed something that says, “We’re going to do A.” And the Senate will say, “No freaking chance we’re going to do A. We’re going to do H.” And it’s rarely Z. They’re both together, but they’re disagreeing about a lot of stuff. So for example, one of the important things that they fight about a lot is the percentage of somebody’s income that should be an income tax. So by watching what the joint committee does, it’s bureaucratic, but it’s bureaucratic with a really big purpose. The whole rise of the committee system is fascinating, but it’s worth pointing out that by the end of the 19th century with the rise of committees, Woodrow Wilson, who is going to be president and who is very concerned in the time he writes a book called Congressional Government about how committees have become too powerful.
He says, “I know not how better to describe our form of government in a single phrase than by calling it a government by the chairman of the standing committees of Congress.” And that’s actually a really important observation because while people tend to even still to focus on what the Congress does, the whole point is that nothing gets to the Congress until it has been through the committees. Quite literally you introduce something and the House sends it to a committee and it can get just bottling stuff up in committees so it never gets out, makes a huge difference to what actually goes in front of the Congress.
Joanne Freeman:
And Wilson actually said a statement about this very thing, which ends up being in any book that you read that talks about the history or the working of Congress, he says, “Congress in session is Congress on public exhibition, whilst Congress and its committee rooms is Congress at work.” So I’ve seen that only several hundred times in working on Congress over the last 17 years.
Heather Cox Richardson:
So let’s walk through how they’re created, because they’re obviously not in the Constitution and they become such a hugely important part of our system. Where do they come from?
Joanne Freeman:
The founders weren’t pontificating about committees, they were talking about creating the Constitution. They begin to be created when Congress is a working institution. Logically enough, one of the first committees’s rules, when you look at Congress and what it’s doing in these early years, a lot of what it’s doing, it’s legislating, doing very important work. It’s also trying to figure out how the heck it’s supposed to run. And that changes dramatically over the course of its history. When you look at what some of the members of the early Congress said, for example, representative Fisher Ames, it’s one of my favorite Congressmen. Now we’re we’re totally going to be nerding out for the entire episode here. Fisher Ames was known for being able to make people cry when he gave addresses.
Heather Cox Richardson:
Crying because he humiliated them or because they were emotionally…
Joanne Freeman:
No. They were emotionally… This is the age of crying men. Someone would say something moving and then suddenly the room was sobbing. And Fisher Ames was a master really of the sobbing Congress. Yeah, he was renowned for this.
Heather Cox Richardson:
Wait. Wait, wait. Even while your guys are running around being macho, they turn around and start crying over Congressional speech?
Joanne Freeman:
No, the crying is early and my macho dudes are a couple decades later.
Heather Cox Richardson:
Huh.
Joanne Freeman:
They’re no longer sobbing in 1830. In July of 1789, he writes to a friend and talks about why he’d rather work in committees than in the full House. He says, “A select committee would soon correct little impropriety. Our great committee,” meaning the House, “is too unwieldy for this operation. A great, clumsy machine is applied to the slightest and most delicate operations–the hoof of an elephant to the strokes of mezzotinto.”
So one of the interesting questions about committees, and this takes a totally different turn as we move ahead in time, but initially there is some resistance to the ideas of committees because they seem to be moving things into private, they seem to be pulling things away from the whole… They seem to be places where sneaky things can happen. And so there are some people that are very zealous about… Heather is laughing.
Heather Cox Richardson:
And who might those people be?
Joanne Freeman:
It’s the Jeffersonian Republicans.
Heather Cox Richardson:
But the fact that it’s Virginia who says, “No, we don’t want committees. We want to make sure we have our finger in every single little pie,” is perfect. I mean it just tells you so much about the whole makeup of the early government.
Joanne Freeman:
Once again, you’re making me defend Jefferson and the Jeffersonian Republicans. But part of it is also, they are the party that is against centralized power. They are the party that are uncomfortable with the strong national government. So that’s not going to make them big fans of this either.
Heather Cox Richardson:
Their big concern is that you’re going to lose control of the government to little cabals and if you have committee meetings, which quite frankly is exactly what happens in the late 19th century, so they’re not entirely off. But I just love that you’ve got Ames there like, “We need committees,” and the Virginians being like, “Nah, over our dead bodies.”
Joanne Freeman:
Well, and Ames is the guy who says Virginia is stiff and touchy against any change of the committee of the whole, meaning Congress as a whole. The Virginians are for watching and checking power. They see evils in embryo are terrified with possibilities and are eager to establish rights and to explain principles to such a degree that you would think them enthusiasts and triflers. So committees are suspect to some. Ames thinks they’d be more effective according to him. Virginians in particular don’t know what’s going on in those committee rooms. And the fact of the matter is, generally speaking, when you look at the first half of the 19th century and look at committees to see what’s going on, the fact of the matter is they were closed to the press. They were places where things could happen. And this really gets into piecing things together territory. There’s someone in the 19th century who calls them committee rooms “The Black Holes of the Capitol” because you never know what’s going on there,
Heather Cox Richardson:
Which has two sides, right? On the one hand, you can make things happen in there that make people at the time and historians later on going, “what just happened? Who did what? How will we ever find out?” And that’s when you’re scouring the newspapers trying to figure out if there’s been a leak. And on the other hand it means that people can cut deals and they can negotiate and they can maybe say things in anger or in creativity that they would never want to see in the press.
Joanne Freeman:
Precisely. They can do a lot of things. It gives them a lot of room. Henry Wise of Virginia, who is my most frequent fighter in the work that I’ve done, he mentions on the floor of the House recent committee meeting that he was at in which a member of the committee threatened to beat whoever disagreed with him in the room. And someone on the floor says to Wise, “You’re exposing the secrets of the prison house before the world. Don’t talk about what happens in committee rooms.” So they were useful because they were private and they were dangerous because they were private. And the most dangerous committees of all were select committees because they were seemingly temporary, which means people could misbehave in all kinds of ways. So again, if you’re thinking about the working of government, these places were important because they were secret, because they were private and you could do handy useful things there and you could do not so useful in the handy things there.
Heather Cox Richardson:
Nefarious is the word you’re looking for.
Joanne Freeman:
I think that is indeed the word I’m looking for.
Heather Cox Richardson:
But again, to think a little bit about how they act and why they remain so important is that just as you say, because the press is not supposed to be there, although there will be leaks to the press from committees always, because they’re not supposed to be there, they tend to focus on the public speeches on the public face.
Joanne Freeman:
We’ve talked now several times about piecing things together from the 19th century. Think about the fact that with databases, all these years later, sometimes it’s still impossible to tell what was happening in those committees. So they were private and the press was kept out. And other than people like Henry Wise leaking things on the floor, or people in private correspondence, there was some degree of secrecy maintained because there were things there that actually literally nobody wanted other people to know about.
Heather Cox Richardson:
So now, what about the Senate? Because we talked about the House committees. The Senate is way smaller, so they must be later coming up with committees, right?
Joanne Freeman:
So indeed. The Senate, because it’s smaller in the ways that we’ve been talking about, they often were using select committees until 1816. They were slower to develop standing committees because they didn’t necessarily need them. And one of the interesting things generally about Congress is that sometimes one house will see what’s going on in the other and then copy it, and we’ll see that a little bit today in different committees. But this is a case in which the Senate didn’t need them and then decided it did, and it was already going on in the other house.
Heather Cox Richardson:
The fact that the Senate is smaller really matters. It matters for a bunch of things. One of the reasons we still have the filibuster of course because they’re operating on committees. Basically the most powerful senators did everything, is that right?
Joanne Freeman:
The most powerful senators certainly had a huge influence, partly because it was a smaller body and thus it was easier to have a big personal influence there. At the time when you had standing committees, it dramatically changed the way that the Senate worked. And now instead of the full Senate being able to reach agreement on legislation and then creating a select committee to perfect it, bills introduced to the Senate were immediately sent off to a standing committee for first consideration. And so, the committees in the Senate are taking the lead in determining what the Senate was going to do.
Heather Cox Richardson:
And developing expertise. If you sat on a Senate for a really long time, and that was… When we talked about Wilbur Mills and the troubles he got himself into and how he was Mr. Ways and Means. I’m sorry, he was in the House, of course. But the fact that he was really the Ways and Means Committee, so when he got into personal trouble, it dramatically changed the legislation that could get through Congress, was really an indication, I think, of how incredibly important the expertise that these people develop on these committees is so central to the way they do business.
Joanne Freeman:
But here’s a point underlying everything, off the cuff, you might think that we’re just talking about institutions, but in a way the message that we keep coming back to again and again and again is that that committees show the personal dimension, the personal dynamics, the ways in which people can actually have a great influence. So it’s a good reminder that the infrastructure of Congress, the institutional components of it aren’t necessarily a sign that it runs in some a mechanized way. There’re ways for people to work together, but the people themselves, the dynamic of both houses of Congress centers around people and often powerful people. And we certainly see that now, but that’s always been the case.
Heather Cox Richardson:
The example that we’re going to use of the way committees make a huge difference to the country is the way that committees operated under Speaker of the House, Thomas B. Reid of Maine in the late 19th century. And we’ve talked about him before as a powerful speaker and the things he did, but what we wanted to talk about today was that Reid, as speaker used the rules of the House always to benefit his own party. He was a Republican and they were trying desperately in this period to protect the tariff that is sort of a wall of essentially taxes on foreign products. And the late 19th century industrialists love them because it permitted them to collude to raise prices. So this becomes the hot issue of the late 19th century. And he really uses everything he possibly can to make sure that even though the American people have started to turn against tariffs, that the Republican party can continue to protect them.
And one of the ways he does that is he stacks the House Committee on Ways and Means. And the Committee on Ways and Means is they change the name slightly in the 20th century. And every time I see people calling it the Ways and Means Committee, it kills me because it was the House Committee on Ways and Means. Okay, I got that off my system. It was the House Committee on Ways and Means. And he stacked that committee with pro-business Republicans because a lot of Western Republicans were like, “Eh, we’re not so keen on this tariff anymore either.” And he did that by, for example, a 13-member committee and he puts two people from New York on it and one person for the entire South, which hates tariffs. Then at the head of it, he puts William McKinley. And William McKinley is from Ohio. He’s a staunchly pro-tariff guy.
And he also interprets the rules in such a way that it means that because McKinley’s at the head of the Ways and Means Committee, he’s also going to have a seat on the Rules Committee. So William McKinley, who’s totally this party pro-business party boss guy, is not only the chair of the Ways and Means Committee, he’s also on the Rules Committee. So obviously he’s going to change the rules of the House in order to get through what he wants on Ways and Means. And even when this happened, people at the time are like, “The House is doing business with no rules at all.” Because basically McKinley and the Speaker of the House, Reid, are calling all the shots and they continue to use those two things, McKinley and both of those roles to get what the Republican party wants.
Joanne Freeman:
There’s a reason why Reid was called “Czar Reid”, right? Because he really had power and was wielding it as speaker.
Heather Cox Richardson:
So McKinley, who people have very mixed feelings about even at the time, there’s some great quotes about him. Somebody writes to him in early 1890 when the Republicans have promised to reform the tariff, but they’re actually going to raise the tariff really significantly in October of that year. A friend of his writes to McKinley and he says, “I’ve heard a rumor that you’re going to give up your House on Ways and Means in order to be chair of the Judiciary Committee.” Now the Judiciary Committee is another enormously important committee because it’s in charge obviously of laws and the enforcement of laws and judiciary is one of the places in the 19th, and I would actually argue through the 20th and maybe even to the present, where political careers were made or broken. And McKinley wrote back and he said, “Why on earth would I give up Ways and Means for Judiciary?”
He says, “A place on Ways and Means is a far more interest to my district and has more to do with its material interest than any other committee.” And he talks about his district in Ohio, but what he’s really doing is in that seat, at the chair of Ways and Means, with his other seat on Rules, he can do exactly what the big business Republicans want. First of all, he’s going to be able to push through in 1890 new tariff that business loves and everybody else hates. So the Republicans are going to get shellacked in the 1890 election, but it’s also going to make him absolutely the face of big business protection, the Republican party. And that is quite literally going to be his stepping stone to the presidency.
Joanne Freeman:
Because think about what we’ve been saying all along. If the committees are where the work is taking place and you are a person with great power over the committees, regardless of what you’re doing on the floor, you are going to be a person with a great deal of influence. And as you just suggested, that is one way to garner political power and potentially elective power.
Heather Cox Richardson:
I will point out that what becomes known in 1890 as the McKinley Tariff and what ends up being so incredibly unpopular among the democrats and the alliance members that are going to become populists, that they throw the Republicans out of power in 1890 and lead to the election of Grover Cleveland in 1892, that by becoming as the chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, the face of a certain interpretation of the way government should behave, the legislation it should pass, there are things I don’t like to talk about in public, but there is no doubt that McKinley’s end at the end of a pistol by Leon Czolgosz is directly related to the work he did with the McKinley Tariff and the idea that he was pushing through a certain vision of government that was generally unpopular and that he was really the face of that.
And when Czolgosz assassinates him, he does so in the belief that people like McKinley must be stopped. And again, it gets all tangled up at the time with the fears of anarchists around the world. And you usually see people saying, “Oh, well Czolgosz was an anarchist.” That’s debatable. What is not debatable is Czolgosz’s position on so many of the currents of the day, which was real fear that the government and its committees had been taken over by people like McKinley. So this is one of those cases where it was this committee work that made the man and perhaps also broke the man.
Joanne Freeman:
I will also add totally peripheral, but it’s been in my head through the entire Czolgosz part of this. If you are not out there in listening land, familiar with Steven Sondheim’s musical Assassins, it’s pretty amazing. And there’s a whole song about Czolgosz, “Czolgosz working man.” And he talks about in the song working his way to the head of the line in the USA, right? That’s what you can do in the USA, you can actually push your way up to the head of the line and it won’t necessarily be these big men who always have big deals of power. So I highly recommend that. And I love the song, but I lo also love the musical because of the way in which it weaves very specific moments in history into a musical.
Heather Cox Richardson:
Do you know, I haven’t seen that and I would love to because I loved Sarah Vowell’s Assassination Vacation. And if it ever comes to New York, you and I definitely should go, for sure.
Joanne Freeman:
I’ve seen it twice here in New York, but if it comes back. You’ll be the person I’ll go to see it with. Promise. Promise.
Heather Cox Richardson:
All right. So if that’s an example of the ways in which, no pun intended, a committee assignment can affect the country and perhaps a person as well. More recently, one of the things that you can see by looking at committees in their formation is how the Congress has changed and how the country has changed. So in the 19th century, as I say, Senate foreign Affairs was enormously important. Judiciary when they are introducing and passing and not passing a lot of amendments to the Constitution is incredibly important. Ways and Means is always important because that’s where the money legislation comes from. But in the 20th century, there’s a new move to make Congresspeople accountable to the people. And that’s a really interesting moment.
Joanne Freeman:
And it is, as we’ve talked about here before. If you’re talking about functional democratic government, accountability is at the top of the list.
Heather Cox Richardson:
You see, Joanne, you never talk about that.
Joanne Freeman:
I know. I never talk about accountability. She snickered. If you’re going to give people power, then they are accountable for that power because you have given it to them. And so an ethics committee creating ethics committees that are injecting this into the government, it is a really interesting moment and it’s a gesture that in part has meaning regardless of what happens in the committees. But the fact that these committees are created midway into the 20th century. It’s a sign about the times and it’s also a sign about open recognition of the fact that this needs to be addressed.
Heather Cox Richardson:
And there is also, I think a recognition that Congress can’t be an old boys’ club anymore. And that really shows in the creation of the Senate Ethics Committee, which was created in response to the secretary of the majority leader, a man named Bobby Baker. He was Secretary to the Senate Majority Leader in the 1950s and early 1960s, including during Lyndon Johnson’s tenure. And in late 1963, think of everything going on in 1963, what the Senate Rules Committee begins to investigate is Baker’s financial dealings. Now, he’s the secretary to the majority leader, who’s of course trying to whip up votes, right?
And they accused Bakker of bribery and of arranging sexual favors for legislators in exchange for their votes. He had apparently run a private members’ group called the Quorum Club from the Carroll Arms Hotel, which is near to the Senate office building. And this had gone on for a while, and certainly the stories of what happened in Congress had been out there for probably since the beginning, certainly since the 19th century, the stories of the wheeling and dealing that went on to get votes in Congress and that not all of it was above board. But by ’63 using sexual favors to get votes was the thing that was not going to fly any longer.
Joanne Freeman:
So in ’64, the Senate Rules Committee returns a rather scathing report on Baker and it advocates for a good number of reforms, including the creation of an internal code of ethics of pay raise, thank you very much, mixed right in there, and the creation of a permanent and bipartisan Senate Select Committee on Standards and Conduct. Liberal Republican Kentucky Senator John Sherman Cooper led the quest to create the committee. And he emphasized the fact that the committee was not supposed to be just a punitive body, but it was also going to be oriented towards deciding which transgressions warranted further investigation and attention. So he actually said one of the greatest duties of such a committee would be to have the judgment to know what it should investigate and what it should not. So it is having an important defining function as well as a symbolic function and a legislative function.
Heather Cox Richardson:
Well, and I love one of the first cases it takes on because it says so much about that moment and about this changing idea of, “Well, we are the Congressman. We can do whatever is we think is appropriate.”
Joanne Freeman:
Is that your Congress voice?
Heather Cox Richardson:
It’s my Congress voice. That’s why I’ve never been elected. The first thing they take on concerns, Connecticut Senator Thomas Dodd. Now, in the first few years of the 1960s, he’d made almost half a million dollars in campaign fundraiser contributions. Now, again, this is before the great inflation of the 1970s. So I mean half a million dollars is a lot of money now, but it was a really lot of money then. And he had done it primarily through tax-free gifts that had been given a testimonial dinners called Dodd Day Dinners.
Joanne Freeman:
Well, those were the Dodd Days.
Heather Cox Richardson:
Yeah. Well, you know what? Actually that’s not a bad… I wish refer to the period as the Dodd Days. And people went to these. I mean, Lyndon Johnson, who was vice president at the time, actually went to one of them. But he used the money not for his political campaigns, but for his personal debts and for his personal expenditures, including a mortgage on a 140 acres state in North Stonington, Connecticut, in order to buy liquor for his Senate office. He would take his family to the West Virginia racetracks. He paid for a ghost writer for one of his books. He even paid for airfare to take his dog from Connecticut to Washington DC.
Joanne Freeman:
He was using that money for liquor for his Senate office, which pretty much takes you right back to like 1830, 1840, 1850 when during evening sessions, committee rooms would become bars and Congress would pay for the booze. They always had a way to refer to it that wasn’t booze. It was like “overnight refreshments” or “special liquids” or some goofy thing that they would call it.
Heather Cox Richardson:
I hear overnight refreshments, I think donuts, and I’m like, “I’m in. I’m so in.” But that says something right there, the idea of cigars and liquor…
Joanne Freeman:
Exactly.
Heather Cox Richardson:
It just says the only people who are going to come in here are my old friends. And the moment it changed, and that was not going to be an option any longer. And so the Ethics Committee holds a couple of rounds of hearings on Dodd. And the reason I think this is such a wonderful moment is because he attacks the committee and the Senate itself for paying the attention that they are to his finances. The Senate actually holds a full Senate trial of him in 1967, and he says, “How many times do you want to hang me? Be done with it. Do away with me. In the twilight of my life, and that will be the end of me. This idea that I deserve this. I’m a senator. You can’t do this to me. This is how we do business.” And yet…
Joanne Freeman:
That too, though, longstanding eternal, “You can’t charge me with this.”
Heather Cox Richardson:
I’m a senator.
Joanne Freeman:
“I’m a senator. I’m a Congressman. I can do whatever I want. How dare you.” And the ways in which people say that and have always said that out in the open, right? “Yeah, I know there’s a committee. I know there are rules. I know, I know, I know, I know. But I am who I am.”
Heather Cox Richardson:
But it didn’t fly in the 1960s in the way that it would’ve in the 1860s. The Senate voted 92 to 5 to censure him for conduct, which is contrary to accepted morals, derogates from the public trust expected of a senator and tends to bring the Senate into dishonor and disrepute. Well, and I love that journalist, William S. White, had no use for the Senate Ethics Committee in case he said that… And again, an old throwback idea here, he says that basically this is a way to try and criminalize people’s characters and you can’t do that.
He says, “The new trait is a widespread credo that every problem dealing with human betterment can best be solved by passing resolutions or creating formulas which only the demonstrably wicked will thereafter refuse to follow. There is, in plain fact, no possible way to make any man a US senator, a garage mechanic, or even a minister of the cloth. An honorable and ethical man inside himself save his own personal conscience and his own sense of taste and restraint.” And again, this idea that well can’t possibly legislate morality. And yet of course, once you put up fences around behavior in the Senate and in the second the House, in fact, yes, people did at least stop acting unethically in those particular ways.
Joanne Freeman:
And as in so many other instances, if you draw a line in the sand, if you say, “Beyond this, you cannot do.” If people choose to cross that line, they might be doing the same thing that they did before, but now they’re going to know that they’re crossing a line that may inspire some to not do it, but it’s a much better way to operate it. It removes part at least of this, “You can’t attack me. You’re just attacking me because you don’t like me.” It’s like, “Well, no, actually you crossed the line. We have now made a line.” And that’s significant in the working of Congress.
Heather Cox Richardson:
Well, I’m going to throw that back at you and suggest that what it does is it creates a line that people who are not in Congress can look at and say, “Hold on. You can’t do this. This is not okay.” And one of the things we’ve been dealing with with ethics questions for the last long period is that the American people have often said, “Hey, wait a minute here. You can’t do that.” And that has really gotten ignored by the people who were supposed to enforce it. In part because those are not in the committees, but the places that were supposed to enforce it were underfunded or whatever. But in part because those lines and what the committees do has not been as prominent as it was in the 1960s.
Joanne Freeman:
And that hits on a major point about Congress pretty much over time. It may not seem this way, but Congress more often is reactive than proactive. Very often it’s reacting. And in this case, if you’re drawing a line and the public knows in some way that there are lines now, if there is a response suggesting that people know and care about that line being drawn, there’s more chance something will get acted on. Because again, there’s a public display, public opinion is at the heart of any democratic government.
Heather Cox Richardson:
So the House is going to create its own Ethics Committee shortly thereafter for similar reasons. Now, one of the other really important recent committees. And I’m sorry, I’ve been joking about my favorite being the Agriculture Committee. And I think maybe that’s wrong because I think my favorite committees, at least right now, are the House and Senate Intelligence Committees. And they come from their own moment. They grow out of the post Watergate examination of the intelligence community in the previous period and the excesses of that. One of the things that Watergate exposes is the degree to which that control in the White House of Foreign Affairs has corrupted the US government.
Joanne Freeman:
So the Senate Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence grew out of what was known as the Church Committee, formerly known as the Senate Select Committee to study governmental operations with respect to intelligence activities. It’s clear what it does, but they’re stringing together a lot of words there.
Heather Cox Richardson:
Can I just say that’s my real complaint about committees because it’s like they find as many words as they possibly can. And if you’re trying to write about them, you have to use the whole title. If I could introduce one frivolous thing to Congress, it would be that they would have really short titles for people like me.
Joanne Freeman:
Well, I worked for a little while in the government and coming up with the nifty nickname for everything, the Rico Pico Wawa, whatever the string of letters was, and everyone would know, “Oh yeah, the blah, blah committee,” because of all these words. Now, the temporary committee led by Idaho Democratic Senator Frank Church began a 15-month investigation early in 1975.. And they released a report in April of 1976, detailing abuses by the CIA, the FBI, and other intelligence agencies that included disclosures of illegal electronic surveillance, mail being opened, and assassination plots against foreign leaders.
The church committee ultimately said that the committee reendorses the concept of vigorous Senate oversight to review the conduct of domestic security activities through a new permanent intelligence oversight committee. So on May 19th, 1976, the Senate voted 72 to 22 in favor of creating a 15-member permanent committee with eight senators from the majority and seven senators from the minority. Opposition came entirely from Republicans and Southern Democrats, many of whom were particularly disturbed by the committee’s legislative jurisdiction over the National Security Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency.
Heather Cox Richardson:
And again, worth pointing out that the opposition is coming from the Republicans. And of course, the church committee is looking at many of the things that the administration under Republican Richard Nixon did, and they like those things. That’s actually a really important moment because of the ways in which the Nixon administration had used foreign apparatus in its own interest as well in what it considered to be the nation’s interest. And I’m not just talking about in Southeast Asia, but also things that they engaged in with Pinochet, for example, in Chile.
They create the committee and the Democrats are in the majority. And they put Hawaiian Senator Daniel Inouye on it to service the first chair of the committee. And he pledged this. He said, “I pledge that the security of this country will not be compromised by the work of this committee. I pledge that the CIA and other intelligence agencies will not violate the civil rights of any American.” And he was really a genius move to put him on this committee because he was of course representative of minority himself and he had also been very badly wounded in World War II. So the idea that he was somehow going to sell out America of the communists was not, at that point, something that was going to fly. They’re going to try and say that much later on about his career.
Joanne Freeman:
As an example of someone who is supporting the larger meaning of this new committee. You have centrist Republican, Illinois Senator Charles Percy who said, “The intelligence vote was indicative of a fresh attitude in the Senate characterized by openness and aggressive participation. It has many facets. Committee chairman, while still influential, no longer rule their committees with an iron hand, nor are a majority of them any longer from a single region, the South.” So he sees this as indicating or echoing a new spirit in the Senate, a new kind of open spirit in the Senate.
Heather Cox Richardson:
And that’s a really important point that I think echoes to the present. And that is in the middle of the 1970s with the dramatic changes in the Democratic Party because of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, for example among other things. Senate committees in the early 20th Century had been absolutely dominated by Southern Democrats. And we’ve talked about this here before too because they tended to stay in office for 6,000 years and because committee chairs were assigned according to seniority. So in the middle of the seventies when they start to say, “Okay, you can have your whatever committee, but we’re going to create some new committees that are bipartisan and trying to come to grips with post-World War II politics, it’s because theoretically going to be more inclusive and that it’s going to be a much better reflection of a number of different regions in the country.” This is actually a good thing, not a bad thing.
And in contrast to that, people who liked the concentration of power in a small number of hands were furious about this. After the creation of the Senate Intelligence Committee. The House doesn’t immediately create a permanent select committee. It sets up a temporary committee known as the Pike Committee because it’s chaired by New York Democratic representative Otis Pike, who wanted there to be a permanent intelligence committee. And when the Pike Committee starts looking at documents that are shared with it, some of them get leaked to Daniel Schorr who’s a journalist, and they appear in the Village Voice. And when that happens, people like Henry Kissinger who was Secretary of State under Nixon, say, “Oh, this is really bad news because people are going to start leaking intelligence documents in really partisan ways that are going to really create havoc for our national security and our domestic politics.” That’s a really interesting point. The House goes on actually to create its own permanent Select Intelligence Committee, but the leaking of intelligence documents is actually going to continue to be a really important feature of partisanship going forward.
Joanne Freeman:
So what’s interesting about that is, and we’ve basically seen this throughout this episode, we started out by saying that these committees are where the actual ground level work takes place. I mentioned a little while back that in some ways, particularly the creation of Ethics and Intelligence Committees shows Congress as a reactive institution. And we’re certainly seeing in some ways how the membership, putting people on committees, taking people off committees can be a strong public statement of sorts, can be perhaps a statement of a revenge or certainly a indication of what the party in power is doing concerning the government and concerning the people who were in power before. So the question now is, what happens beyond that? Some people now are talking about this moment is a moment when particularly Republicans, in some way or another, they’re being reactive against the Democrats who came before.
In one sense, that means that Congress and the committees are echoing the state of the nation in an interesting way because that’s what the Republicans are doing generally. The bigger question really is, what are these committees going to do? And in a way, that’s the point I’d like to end on today, because we’ve been talking about their membership and their function. We’ve been talking about how they’ve evolved over time. We’ve been talking about how we don’t normally recognize what they do and that they’re important. But in a way, what we forget to focus on and what we really should be focusing on right now is what these committees are going to do and how they’re going to do it. We need to get past the moment that we’re in, which is really still a membership moment, and really look up close and think about the work that they are doing and the work that they are not doing, and what the impact of that will be.
