Just One of Those Things: Parties and Exclusive Committees in the U.S. House

• In Event: American Political Development

Abstract

When and why did House parties identify exclusive committees? Political science and congressional accounts provide inadequate and misleading answers to the question. This report provides missing detail and offers a historical perspective on party efforts to arrange standing committees in the period since the revolt against Speaker Joseph Cannon in 1909-1910. In doing so, the narrative offers a foundation for explaining party efforts to meet individual, state, factional, and party demands to control key committees. The modern exclusive committees (Appropriations, Rules, and Ways and Means) did not become defined until the 1950s, but the identification by the two parties of a set of exclusive committees for which a one-assignment limitation applied began decades earlier, long before the Legislative Reorganization Act of 1946 placed a one-assignment limitation in House rules. In recent decades, the parties have loosened restrictions to the point that, while continuing to recognize a category of exclusive committees, there are no fully exclusive committees remaining in practice.

Authors

• Steven S. Smith, Arizona State University

• Patrick Rickert, Rollins College