A Radical Plan for Simplifying the Missouri House
The Current System:
As of 2016, there are a total of 76 committees in the House. The House has 163 members, which means there’s nearly one committee for every two members. That’s too many.
Nineteen of those committees are “joint” committees. Most of the Joint Committees were created by statute. Since they do relatively little, we’ll ignore them.
We’ll also ignore the two “special committees”, which were temporarily created to address an urgent topic in the state. Neither of them appear to be doing anything in the current session.
That leaves 55 committees.
Those committees fall into roughly four types:
1) Standing Committees.
There are 32 Standing Committees, plus 3 Clerical Committees (more on them later). Each Standing Committee has a topic assigned to it, like education, agriculture, insurance, etc.
When a bill is filed, the House Speaker assigns it to a Standing Committee. If a Standing Committee – particularly its chairman – is hostile to a bill, the bill won’t come to a House vote. It will disappear, never to be seen again.
Standing Committees control topics that are often vague or overlapping. “Emerging Issues” is a prime example. These poorly-defined responsibilities allow the Speaker to assign a bill where he or she wants. Trusted chairmen sometimes get more bills, while lesser chairmen end up twiddling their thumbs. The workload becomes very uneven, with some chairmen assigned only three bills, while others have forty.
All Standing Committees must submit their bills to their designated Select Committee for final approval.
2) Select Committees.
There are 13 Select Committees in the House. Every Standing Committee is required to send its final draft of a bill to an assigned Select Committee. The Select Committee then reviews the bill, and decides whether to send it to the floor, to amend it, or to bury it.
Obviously, the Select Committees are very powerful. They have the final say on all bills before they reach the Majority Floor Leader.
The Select Committee on Fiscal Review does not oversee any other committee, but is likewise not subject to any oversight.
3) Appropriations Committees.
Appropriations Committees are a lot like Standing Committees, except for two things. First, they only work with a few bills. Second, these bills are all about spending money.
Appropriations Committees deal solely with the state’s budget – who gets what, and how much. This makes them a great deal more powerful than other committees.
There are currently 7 Appropriations Committees, which all report to a single Select Committee on the Budget.
4) Clerical Committees.
There are three Clerical Committees. They do not usually pass legislation. Instead, they deal with internal matters of the House.
Administration and Accounts handles supplies, office and intern assignments, and so forth. The Ethics Committee reviews complaints between House members. The Rules Committee is fairly important. It has some influence over how a bill get debated.
There is no Select Committee to oversee the Clerical Committees.
Finally, there are the House Leaders. The Speaker is by far the most powerful of these. Next come the Floor Leaders, who set the day-to-day schedule for the House, act as spokesmen for their party, and control committee memberships for their party. All of these positions also have an assistant and one or two supporting Officers.
These people essentially control who gets to review a bill, and when (or if) a bill comes to a vote. A bill will not pass without the approval of the House leadership.
Problems with the Current System
Our General Assembly supposedly represents a gathering of citizen-legislators. Since they each speak on behalf of an equal number of people, they should have an equal voice. That doesn’t happen.
The current system doesn’t come close. In fact, I would say that:
· It is hierarchical. There are bosses and grunts. This goes directly against the idea of equal voices in the legislature.
· It is opaque. The system is convoluted and steeped in jargon, which discriminates against outsiders and newcomers.
· It is partisan. Party power, and the two-party system, are embedded in the rules. Independent action is replaced with party politics.
· It is elitist. The system panders to experts, senior members, and a lobbyist culture. Laws are not written for the public’s understanding or benefit. The average citizen – and by extension the citizen-legislator – is implicitly deemed too ignorant to understand the “complex” issues that loom over him.
A Proposal for Change
To fix these problems, serious changes are needed. Above all else, the system needs to be simplified. There also needs to be an equal chance for members to contribute and be heard. Finally, the system needs to be more populist and less geared toward elite interests.
A sample proposal for the House is depicted below, where the number of committees that make laws is cut by two-thirds, from 55 down to 17.
The prominent features of this new plan are as follows:
· Limited filings. Each legislator is only allowed to file two bills each during a regular session. This would limit the total bills to no more than 326, rather than the 1,000 or more that crop up in the current system.
· Limited memberships. There are only 16 Regular Committees, with 10 members each, for a total of 160 people. A legislator may only serve on one committee, so that everyone has equal memberships. The Speaker, Speaker Pro Tem, and Floor Leader will serve on the Budget Committee.
· Even authority in the budget. Responsibility for crafting the budget will be divided evenly between all 16 committees. Final drafts are sent to the Budget Committee, which will consist of the House leaders and the vice-chair from every Regular Committee.
· Chairman cannot bury bills. Upon receiving a bill, a chairman must hold hearings within a week, and submit recommendations to the sponsor within two weeks.
· No appointed positions. All committee chairs, the Speaker, Speaker Pro Tem, and Floor Leader are elected at the start of the session. Ballots will use a preference-based voting system that elects all 19 positions at once. Vice-chairs are elected by the membership of each committee.
· Limited tenure. House leaders and committee chairmen may only serve in their capacity for one full term. They are not eligible to be elected to any of these positions for the remainder of their lives.
· Committees have no topic. Each committee is named after its chairman (e.g., “The Smith Committee”). Bills do not get assigned by topic; therefore, special interests are not able to target a specific committee during a session. Likewise, a small group of legislators are not able to monopolize a segment of policy based on their claims to expert knowledge.
· Bills are assigned evenly. All pre-filed bills are bid upon by the committee chairs during a “draft day” at the start of a session. Bills with multiple bids go to the committee that has the lowest number of bills currently assigned. If there is a tie, the bill is assigned randomly by lot. Bills filed later in the session are similarly bid upon, once per week, with preference given to the committees with less work.
· Bill sponsors have the final say. All changes to a bill must be submitted to the sponsors. The sponsors then have three days to either unanimously accept the changes, to accept them with conditions, or to reject them. If the sponsors cannot agree within three days, this counts as a rejection. Rejection means that the bill goes to the calendar as originally drafted, with a committee recommendation of “Do Not Pass”.
· A 750-word limit. Bills may not have more than 750 words. Amendments cannot break this limit – if you put too much in, you have to take something out. Appropriations bills are an exception, and have no limit.
As you can see, the plan is to put a lid on the “legal spam” that has infected our government, and to distribute power as evenly as possible.
Of course, there are always drawbacks. One of the main disadvantages of this system is that it does not allow legislators to gravitate toward committees in their area of expertise. Having the “best” people reviewing a bill, however, is less important than ensuring that laws are drafted in a free-thinking, principled setting.