Rep. McGovern: A Different Approach in the Rules Committee
RULES
Worcester Telegram & Gazette
Priyanka Dayal
Boston University Washington News Service
March 30, 2007
WASHINGTON, March 30 – Every time he takes his seat in the cramped Rules Committee room on Capitol Hill, Worcester Democrat James P. McGovern is fulfilling his mentor’s dying wish.
His mentor was the late J. Joseph Moakley, a widely admired congressman from Boston and former chairman of the committee. Through every discussion, debate and dispute, Mr. Moakley’s portrait stares down at Mr. McGovern.
In 2001, Mr. McGovern recalled, when Mr. Moakley learned he was dying of leukemia, he had one request: he wanted Mr. McGovern, a former aide, to have his spot on the committee. His wish was granted, keeping a Massachusetts voice on one of the most important committees in Congress, which clears all legislation for debate on the House floor.
When Mr. Moakley gave his Rules seat to Mr. McGovern, he propelled the Worcester congressman to a critical role in the machinery of the Democratic Party on Capitol Hill. The Rules Committee, often called the “traffic cop” of the House, is a tool the House Speaker and party leaders use to assert majority rule and block initiatives from the minority.
While it is largely mysterious to people outside the Capitol, in power and influence, it is one of the most important panels in Congress: In the highly-structured House, it is the Rules Committee that sets the terms for debating legislation on the floor – deciding, for example, how long debate will last and whether amendments will be allowed.
And while Mr. McGovern is the second-ranking Democrat on the panel, he does not always hew the party line expected of its members. Mr. McGovern and other Democrats say that when Republicans ran the House, they violated traditional standards of openness and fairness.
Democrats, he said, are fairer than were Republicans, but “we’re not as open as I’d like.”
The Democrats, who gained control of the committee when the majority switched in the 2006 election, sometimes may disagree on how to structure or amend a bill. But Rules Democrats never act independently. If there is discord within the party, they don’t let the public see it. They are agents of the Speaker, party loyalists, who speak with one voice.
Unlike some Democrats, who prefer to set rules that guarantee a party victory, Mr. McGovern said his party members should be open to hearing Republican ideas.
“We need to be more accommodating to different points of view – even if that means we lose a few votes,” he said. “I think that would help greatly in increasing civility in the House.”
But Rules Committee Chairwoman Louise M. Slaughter, a New York Democrat, said she will be aggressive in pushing through the Democratic agenda.
“I don’t want to lose any votes,” she said. “I’m pretty much a stickler on that.”
Rules Committee meetings are often characterized by sharp interchanges where members of both parties accuse each other of ignoring the opposition or using underhanded tactics. Some members like to talk more than others. Mr. McGovern tends to listen more than he talks.
During a day of back-to-back meetings and debate sessions, Mr. McGovern stopped by his office, a spacious room with a narrow window view of the Capitol dome. Magic Marker drawings from his children deck the walls, hanging next to framed photographs of congressmen and presidents.
Mr. McGovern is exhausted from attending a four-hour Rules Committee meeting the night before, which ended at 1 a.m. “There’s never a downtime,” he said.
“I’m on my ninth cup of coffee,” he said, cracking a tired grin. “I spend more time in that little committee room…”
“…than in your own bed,” chimed Michael D. Mershon, his press secretary. Mr. McGovern nodded in agreement.
Tired, Mr. McGovern was clearly excited by his newfound ability to influence every important piece of legislation in the House.
John Samples, director of the Center for Representative Government at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think-tank, said that while he does not doubt Mr. McGovern’s sincerity regarding being fair and open to Republicans, he questioned the extent to which McGovern can make it happen. This kind of approach would be in direct conflict with the Democrats’ efforts to push through their agenda, he noted.
“I don’t think it would take many losses to change his opinion,” Mr. Samples said, “and if he tried to act on it, [House Speaker Nancy P. Pelosi] would try to change his mind very quickly.”
“I would not expect for any length of time that there would be any effort to allow minority party participation,” he added. “The leader and the new majority wish to be successful, and to be successful, they have to control the agenda.”
Mr. McGovern said he likes serving on Rules because it gives him the power to fight for the issues he cares about. But this can be challenging. The Rules Committee meets more often than any other House committee, and members must be able grasp bills spanning issues from foreign affairs to energy to education. On all these bills, the members communicate constantly with the speaker.
“It’s highly extraordinary that [Mr. McGovern] got a seat on the Rules Committee as early as he did in his career,” said Marc C. Miller, an associate professor of government at Clark University who studies Congress and is on sabbatical in Washington, D.C., this year. “It’s absolutely incredible that he would get that as such a junior member.”
Massachusetts has a long history with the Rules Committee. Four decades ago, the late Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill, a Democratic congressman from Boston, was chairman of the committee, a position he used to vault himself into party leadership, eventually becoming Speaker of the House. Mr. Moakley chaired the committee in the 1990s. Mr. McGovern, now serving his sixth term in Congress, is the vice chairman.
Mr. McGovern said he tries to emulate his mentor and close friend, Mr. Moakley, by building personal relationships with members of Congress on both sides of the aisle, and by not taking himself too seriously. He worked for Mr. Moakley as a senior aide for 14 years, spending several of those years in the Rules Committee.
When Mr. Moakley chaired the committee, relationships between the two parties were more cordial than they are today, according to Mr. Samples. But that’s because Democrats were so comfortable with their majority that they didn’t feel the need to be as combative as they are today.
“It was easier to be nice when the other guy didn’t have a chance of winning,” he said.
Mrs. Slaughter called Mr. McGovern “an extraordinary member” who has had “the best training in the world” working with Mr. Moakley. “Jim is so capable and so bright… everything that a committee like Rules needs,” she said.
Unlike other congressional committees, where the percentage of Democrats and Republicans reflects the ratio in the House, the Rules Committee always has nine members in the majority and four in the minority. The system is designed to give the majority iron control of House proceedings.
Close observers of Congress say it’s too early to tell if the new Rules Committee is running things differently from the committee led by Republicans, who were in the majority for the last 12 years.
“The Democrats are enjoying the honeymoon period,” said Sherwood L. Boehlert, a centrist former Republican congressman from Utica, N.Y., who did not run for re-election in 2006 after serving 24 years in the House.
When Republicans held the House, the leadership was often hammered for holding late-night and early-morning meetings in efforts to keep Democrats out of the decision-making process. When Democrats returned to the majority this year, they vowed to keep the rules process more open and limit meetings to the “light of day.”
“The Democrats are doing things about the way they said they would do, and how people think they should be done,” Mr. Boehlert said. “They haven’t had any 3 a.m. meetings, but they haven’t faced any significant controversies yet” either.
Still, most substantial conversations among committee members happen behind closed doors. “Nobody in the Rules Committee is going to open everything up entirely, because that isn’t how Congress works,” said Karin Walser, who served as press secretary to Mr. Moakley until his death in 2001.
Ms. Walser said polarization of the parties is preventing the kind of personal relationships that used to exist among congressmen when Mr. Moakley chaired the committee.
“Joe Moakley came from a world in which members of Congress would disagree during the day, then go out for dinner together or play golf. It was not the partisan world that it is now,” she said.
“Worcester is incredibly lucky to have a representative on the Rules Committee,” she said.
Jessica Arriens contributed to this report.
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