How Is the Speaker of the House of Representatives

Learning Outcomes

By the end of this department, you lot will be able to:

• Explain the division of labor in the Business firm and in the Senate
• Describe the way congressional committees develop and accelerate legislation

Non all the business organization of Congress involves bickering, political infighting, government shutdowns, and Machiavellian maneuvering. Congress does actually become work done. Traditionally, information technology does this work in a very methodical mode. In this section, we volition explore how Congress functions at the leadership and committee levels. Nosotros will acquire how the party leadership controls their conferences and how the many committees within Congress create legislation that tin then exist moved forward or die on the flooring.

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PARTY LEADERSHIP

The political party leadership in Congress controls the actions of Congress. Leaders are elected by the two-party conferences in each bedchamber. In the Business firm of Representatives, these are the Firm Democratic Conference and the House Republican Conference. These conferences meet regularly and separately not but to elect their leaders only also to discuss important issues and strategies for moving policy frontward. Based on the number of members in each conference, one conference becomes the majority conference and the other becomes the minority briefing. Independents like Senator Bernie Sanders will typically join one or the other major party conference, every bit a affair of practicality and often based on ideological affinity. Without the membership to elect their own leadership, independents would have a very difficult time getting things washed in Congress unless they had a relationship with the leaders.

Despite the power of the conferences, nonetheless, the most important leadership position in the Firm is actually elected past the entire body of representatives. This position is called the Speaker of the House and is the only House officer mentioned in the Constitution. The Constitution does not require the Speaker to be a member of the Firm, although to date, all l-four Speakers have been. The Speaker is the presiding officer, the administrative head of the Firm, the partisan leader of the majority party in the House, and an elected representative of a single congressional district. As a testament to the importance of the Speaker, since 1947, the holder of this position has been second in line to succeed the president in an emergency, later on the vice president.

Effigy 1. Republican Mitch McConnell of Kentucky (a), the majority leader in the Senate, and Democrat Nancy Pelosi of California (b), the Speaker of the Business firm, are the most powerful congressional leaders in their respective chambers.

The Speaker serves until his or her party loses, or until he or she is voted out of the position or chooses to step down. Republican Speaker John Boehner became the latest Speaker to walk away from the position when it appeared his position was in jeopardy. This effect shows how the party conference (or caucus) oversees the leadership every bit much as, if not more than, the leadership oversees the party membership in the bedchamber. The Speaker is invested with quite a bit of power, such as the ability to assign bills to committees and decide when a beak will be presented to the floor for a vote. The Speaker as well rules on House procedures, often delegating authority for certain duties to other members. He or she appoints members and chairs to committees, creates select committees to fulfill a specific purpose and then disband, and can even select a fellow member to exist speaker pro tempore, who acts as Speaker in the Speaker'due south absence. Finally, when the Senate joins the House in a joint session, the Speaker presides over these sessions, because they are usually held in the House of Representatives.

Below the Speaker, the majority and minority conferences each elect 2 leadership positions arranged in hierarchical order. At the elevation of the bureaucracy are the floor leaders of each party. These are generally referred to as the majority and minority leaders. The minority leader has a visible if not always a powerful position. As the official leader of the opposition, he or she technically holds the rank closest to that of the Speaker, makes strategy decisions, and attempts to keep order inside the minority. Even so, the majority rules the twenty-four hours in the House, like a cartel. On the majority side, because it holds the speakership, the majority leader also has considerable power. Historically, moreover, the bulk leader tends to be in the all-time position to assume the speakership when the current Speaker steps down.

Below these leaders are the 2 political party's respective whips. A whip's job, as the name suggests, is to whip up votes and otherwise enforce party bailiwick. Whips make the rounds in Congress, telling members the position of the leadership and the collective voting strategy, and sometimes they moving ridge various carrots and sticks in front of recalcitrant members to bring them in line. The balance of the leadership positions in the House include a scattering of chairs and assistantships.

Like the House, the Senate as well has majority and minority leaders and whips, each with duties very similar to those of their counterparts in the House. Unlike the Business firm, however, the Senate doesn't have a Speaker. The duties and powers held by the Speaker in the House autumn to the majority leader in the Senate. Another difference is that, co-ordinate to the U.S. Constitution, the Senate'south president is actually the elected vice president of the Us, only he or she may vote only in case of a tie. Apart from this and very few other exceptions, the president of the Senate does non really operate in the Senate. Instead, the Constitution allows for the Senate to choose a president pro tempore —usually the nearly senior senator of the majority party—who presides over the Senate. Despite the title, the job is largely a formal and powerless part. The existent power in the Senate is in the hands of the bulk leader and the minority leader. Like the Speaker of the Business firm, the majority leader is the chief spokesperson for the majority political party, but unlike in the House he or she does not run the floor alone. Because of the traditions of unlimited debate and the filibuster, the majority and minority leaders often occupy the floor together in an endeavour to keep things moving along. At times, their interactions are intense and partisan, merely for the Senate to get things done, they must cooperate to get the sixty votes needed to run this super-bulk legislative institution.

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Watch this video to larn more about congressional leadership.

THE COMMITTEE SYSTEM

With 535 members in Congress and a seemingly space number of domestic, international, economic, agricultural, regulatory, criminal, and military bug to deal with at whatever given moment, the 2 chambers must split their piece of work based on specialization. Congress does this through the committee arrangement. Specialized committees (or subcommittees) in both the House and the Senate are where bills originate and near of the work that sets the congressional agenda takes place. Committees are roughly approximate to a bureaucratic department in the executive branch. There are well over 2 hundred committees, subcommittees, select committees, and joint committees in the Congress. The core committees are called standing committees. In that location are twenty continuing committees in the Business firm and xvi in the Senate.

Congressional Standing and Permanent Select Committees
House of Representatives	Senate
Agriculture	Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry
Appropriations	Appropriations
Armed Services	Armed forces
Budget	Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs
Education and Labor	Upkeep
Free energy and Commerce	Commerce, Science, and Transportation
Ethics	Energy and Natural Resources
Financial Services	Environment and Public Works
Foreign Diplomacy	Ethics (select)
Homeland Security	Finance
House Administration	Foreign Relations
Intelligence (select)	Health, Education, Labor and Pensions
Judiciary	Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs
Natural Resources	Indian Affairs
Oversight and Government Reform	Intelligence (select)
Rules	Judiciary
Scientific discipline, Space, and Technology	Rules and Administration
Pocket-sized Business	Pocket-sized Business organisation and Entrepreneurship
Transportation and Infrastructure	Veterans' Affairs
Veterans' Affairs
Ways and Means

Members of both parties compete for positions on various committees. These positions are typically filled past majority and minority members to roughly judge the ratio of majority to minority members in the respective chambers, although committees are chaired by members of the majority party. Committees and their chairs take a lot of power in the legislative process, including the ability to stop a pecker from going to the floor (the total bedroom) for a vote. Indeed, nigh bills die in committee. But when a committee is eager to develop legislation, it takes a number of methodical steps. Information technology volition accomplish out to relevant agencies for comment on resolutions to the trouble at hand, such as past holding hearings with experts to collect information. In the Senate, committee hearings are also held to confirm presidential appointments. After the data has been collected, the committee meets to discuss amendments and legislative language. Finally, the committee will send the beak to the full chamber along with a committee written report. The report provides the majority opinion near why the bill should exist passed, a minority view to the contrary, and estimates of the proposed law'due south cost and impact.

Figure 2. On July 13, 2009, Supreme Courtroom justice Sonia Sotomayor began the first twenty-four hours of her confirmation hearings before the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary. The Senate Judiciary Commission is 1 of the oldest of the sixteen standing committees in the Senate.

4 types of committees exist in the Firm and the Senate. The beginning is the standing, or permanent, commission. This committee is the outset telephone call for proposed bills, fewer than 10 percent of which are reported out of committee to the floor. The second type is the articulation committee. Joint committee members are appointed from both the House and the Senate, and are charged with exploring a few key problems, such every bit the economic system and taxation. However, joint committees take no pecker-referral authority whatsoever—they are informational just. A conference commission is used to reconcile dissimilar bills passed in both the Business firm and the Senate. The conference committees are appointed on an advertisement hoc basis as necessary when a neb passes the House and Senate in unlike forms. Conference committees are sometimes skipped in the interest of expedience, in which one of the chambers relents to the other chamber. For case, the Business firm demurred to the Senate over the Affordable Care Act instead of going to boxing in a conference committee. Yet, briefing committees are the norm on most major pieces of legislation. A contempo instance is the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, passed in December. Finally, ad hoc, special, or select committees are temporary committees ready up to address specific topics. These types of committees often acquit special investigations, such as on aging or ethics.

Committee hearings can become politically driven public spectacles. Consider the House Select Commission on Benghazi, the committee assembled by Republicans to farther investigate the 2011 attacks on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya. This prolonged investigation became particularly partisan as Republicans trained their guns on so-secretarial assistant of state Hillary Clinton, who was running for the presidency at the time. In 2 multi-hr hearings in which Secretary Clinton was the merely witness, Republicans tended to grandstand in the hopes of gaining political reward or tripping her up, while Democrats tended to utilize their fourth dimension to ridicule Republicans.^[ane] In the stop, the long hearings uncovered little more than the elevated state of partisanship in the Firm, which had scarcely been a hush-hush earlier.

Figure 3. On Oct 22, 2015, former Secretary of Country Hillary Clinton testified for the 2nd time before the House Select Committee on Benghazi, answering questions from members for more than eight hours.

Members of Congress bring to their roles a diversity of specific experiences, interests, and levels of expertise, and attempt to match these to committee positions. For example, House members from states with large agricultural interests volition typically seek positions on the Agronomics Committee. Senate members with a background in banking or finance may seek positions on the Senate Finance Committee. Members can asking these positions from their chambers' corresponding leadership, and the leadership also selects the commission chairs.

Committee chairs are very powerful. They command the committee's budget and cull when the committee will meet, when information technology will hold hearings, and even whether it volition consider a bill. A chair tin can convene a meeting when members of the minority are absent or curb a coming together when things are not progressing every bit the majority leadership wishes. Chairs can hear a pecker even when the balance of the committee objects. They do not remain in these powerful positions indefinitely, however. In the House, rules prevent committee chairs from serving more than half-dozen sequent years and from serving every bit the chair of a subcommittee at the same time. A senator may serve only 6 years as chair of a commission merely may, in some instances, too serve equally a chair or ranking member of another committee.

Figure 4. In 2016, Republican Chuck Grassley of Iowa (a), the chair of the Senate Judiciary Commission, refused to hold hearings on the nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court, despite the urging of his committee colleagues. In the meantime, Garland met with numerous senators, such as Republican Susan Collins of Maine (b). Equally of Election Day, no hearings had been held, and Garland's nomination expired on Jan 3, 2017. Just ten days subsequently his inauguration, Republican president Donald Trump announced his nomination of Neil Gorsuch to the Court. Gorsuch was confirmed in April 2017, despite a filibuster by the Democrats.

Because the Senate is much smaller than the House, senators hold more committee assignments than House members. There are sixteen standing committees in the Senate, and each position must exist filled. In dissimilarity, in the House, with 435 members and only twenty standing committees, commission members take time to pursue a more in-depth review of a policy. House members historically defer to the decisions of committees, while senators tend to view committee decisions as recommendations, ofttimes seeking additional discussion that could pb to changes.

LINK TO LEARNING

Accept a look at the scores of committees in the House and Senate. The late Business firm Speaker Tip O'Neill once quipped that if you didn't know a new Business firm member's name, you lot could just call him Mr. Chairperson.

Summary

The leader of the House is the Speaker, who likewise typically the leader of the majority party. In the Senate, the leader is called the majority leader. The minorities in each chamber also have leaders who help create and human action on party strategies. The majority leadership in each bedchamber controls the important committees where legislature is written, amended, and prepared for the floor.

Endeavor It

THINK It OVER

• Explicate how the committees demonstrate a partitioning of labor in Congress based on specialization.

Glossary

Conference Committee

a special type of joint committee that reconciles dissimilar bills passed in the Business firm and Senate so a single bill results

Joint Commission

a legislative committee consisting of members from both chambers that investigates certain topics only lacks bill referral authorisation

Majority Leader

the leader of the majority party in either the Firm or Senate; in the House, the majority leader serves nether the Speaker of the Business firm, in the Senate, the majority leader is the functional leader and chief spokesperson for the majority political party

Minority Leader

the party member who directs the activities of the minority party on the floor of either the House or the Senate

President Pro Tempore

the senator who acts in the absence of the actual president of the Senate, who is besides the vice president of the United States; the president pro tempore is normally the most senior senator of the majority political party

Select Committee

a small legislative committee created to fulfill a specific purpose and so disbanded; likewise chosen an ad hoc, or special, commission

Speaker of the House

the presiding officer of the Firm of Representatives and the leader of the majority political party; the Speaker is 2nd in the presidential line of succession, after the vice president

Standing Committee

a permanent legislative committee that meets regularly

Whip

in the House and in the Senate, a high leadership position whose primary duty is to enforce voting discipline in the chambers and conferences

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Source: https://courses.lumenlearning.com/os-government2e/chapter/house-and-senate-organizations/

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