Melissa Harris-Perry: It's The Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry.

Ilhan Omar: What is the work of the Foreign Affairs Committee? It is not to cosign the stated foreign policy of whatever administration is in power. It's about oversight.

Melissa Harris-Perry: That's democratic representative, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota. She's speaking here on the house floor ahead of a vote that ousted her from her seat on the Foreign Affairs Committee. Now, this happened about a week after truth-adverse New York Congressman George Santos finally stepped down from his committee assignments. Beneath the political intrigue of these high profile committee shakeups was a pretty basic question.

Ilhan Omar: What is the work of the Foreign Affairs Committee?

Melissa Harris-Perry: Not just the Foreign Affairs Committee, what's the work of all congressional committees?

Maya Kornberg: Congress is a big institution and it has a thousand different things that it needs to do. It needs to delegate, and it does this through committees.

Melissa Harris-Perry: This is Maya Kornberg, research fellow on the elections and government program at the Brennan Center for Justice. She's author of a new book, Inside Congressional Committees: Function and Dysfunction in the Legislative Process.

Maya Kornberg: Committees are really a way in which Congress apportions responsibility for dealing with certain issues, and they are also a way of decentralizing power within the chamber. More legislators can be involved in the process through committees. Traditionally, committees are really where, as Woodrow Wilson said, the real work of Congress gets done, they are where bills are written and amended, they're where Congress hears from witnesses and members of the public and really does the work of putting together legislation.

Melissa Harris-Perry: That sounds really productive, but your title suggests that perhaps there's not just function, but also dysfunction in this process?

Maya Kornberg: Yes. Over the last few decades, committees have really lost power as institutions within Congress. The party leadership has really usurped control within the chamber and committees are frequently circumvented. Bills are pushed down really, really quickly with very little time for hearings and sometimes not even that much time for members to read the pieces of legislation and pushed quickly to a vote. This is increasingly what is happening.

Committees have also lost their staff that they rely on in order to specialize. They have several thousand fewer staff today than they did a few decades ago, and they have lost their autonomy as deliberative and specializing bodies. There is dysfunction and a real loss of committee power.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I want to walk through some of this. Why have congressional committees become less powerful?

Maya Kornberg: What we see in Congress, and this is really true internationally in legislatures, is an inverse relationship between the power of parties and party leadership and the power of committees as organizing bodies within a legislature. There's a push and pull in that power dynamic. Generally speaking, when the speaker has more power and the parties have more power, committees have less power and vice versa. What we've seen is that over the course of the past several decades, the speaker has really gained control over deciding who the committee chairs will be.

Also, there is more staff, as I mentioned, under the speaker and the parties than there are devoted to committees. Now staff matter tremendously. They are really the backbone of the way that things get done. Staff are the ones who are crafting legislation, who are sitting in these hearings. Without staff, it is very difficult for committees to do their job correctly.

In addition to the committee staff, Congress also lost a very important congressional support agency in the 1990s, the Office of Technology Assessment, which was defunded by Newt Gingrich in the '90s in one of his many efforts to strip committees and individual members of their power. This office provided a lot of support to Congress to understand really complex technical issues. That has led to some of the degradation that I talk about in the book.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I want to dig in on this a bit because put Newt Gingrich against Kevin McCarthy and you have a very different sense of the strength of a leader. Given the challenges that Speaker McCarthy has, is this potentially an opportunity for restrengthening of congressional committees relative to the speaker?

Maya Kornberg: Yes, I think it's a really interesting time to be thinking about this because Speaker McCarthy is not the strongest leader. He is facing the threat of the motion to vacate, as we saw in all of the strife leading up to the speaker vote, a divided party. Historically, when there's weaker party leadership, there is space for committees to come in and to take some of this power back.

The other thing that I think is really interesting at this time is that we see chairs of key committees that do not have that much experience in Congress. Members like Mark Green of the security committee, and Chairman Smith on Ways and Means, and Arrington on budget, these are key committees, they have combined less than 20 years of experience in Congress.

This is another thing that is usually a marker of change in Congress. When we have new blood in Congress, new members and also new people in positions of leadership, there's real space organizationally for change. We saw this with the so-called class of '74. The large group of freshmen members elected in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal that led to a lot of changes. We saw this in 2018 when there were a large group of new members and this led to the House Modernization Committee, which looked at ways to change dynamics within the chamber. I think now there's also an interesting moment of change because of the dynamics and because of the individual members involved.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I'm interested to hear, with what you're seeing and your analysis of committees, the extent to which the assignment and then the work that the committees do allows for the political goals of the individual members who are part of the committee.

Maya Kornberg: In the book, I look at different kinds of committees. There are A-list committees, committees that everyone wants to be on. What makes a committee an A-list committee? Well, there's a number of reasons. Obviously, committees vary in their jurisdictions and in their relative power to be charged with key pieces of spending and of budget. Also, committees have real fundraising power because, as I mentioned, they vary in their degree of power within the chamber. They're also a sign of how Congress apportion responsibility.

The leadership, which is increasingly powerful, as I mentioned, in terms of deciding committee chairmanship, that didn't used to be the case to the extent that it is today, can also decide who sits on which committee and who then is also the chair or the ranking member of each committee. This really gives legislators power not just in terms of how they can be involved in the process, but also fundraising and other things that help them maintain their space in the legislature.

Melissa Harris-Perry: How do we fix congressional committees? Well, you're going to have to keep listening. That's next on The Takeaway. It's The Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry, and I'm still with Maya Kornberg from the Brennan Center for Justice, talking about her new book, Inside Congressional Committees: Function and Dysfunction in the Legislative Process. Now, Maya says that dysfunction on committees is not only a threat to the democratic process, but to the quality of governance itself.

Maya Kornberg: A strong democracy and a strong Congress needs strong committees. There's a few reasons for that. They are really the space where Congress can get things done. Secondly, committees are also a space for Congress to hear from different vantage points on an issue and hear a range of American voices. They're a space where members of the public can come in and testify and share their experiences. Lastly, committees are really important bipartisan space in an increasingly partisan congress.

This is important right now because members used to live in Washington DC. They used to send their kids to the same schools maybe and have more opportunities to interact outside of work. Right now that is less and less the case. Most members do not live in Washington DC, they commute back and forth and spend a lot of their time outside of Washington. Committees are a space where members from both parties come together on a regular basis to do committee work, and therefore, they have a real potential, which I discussed in the book, as a space for personal connection between members.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Tell us about the learning function of committees.

Maya Kornberg: Committees can still serve as an educational platform for members to learn about specific issues. This is most likely the further away you are from a vote or a piece of legislation being passed. Committees that are discussing something that has already been colored bipartisanship and where there's a vote next week, there's going to be less openness to actually be learning about the topic. There are many hearings that still happen today where that's not the case.

One of the examples that I share in the book is about a genetic engineering hearing in the House Science Committee. This was back in 2015. This was a new technology. I use it as a case study in the book about a hearing where really it provided some crucial education to the committee about an area of science that they would then need to oversee, and fund, and regulate, and needed to understand the basic ins and outs of, and so they brought together a group of experts to speak to them. There was real space for learning and engagement on an issue that these members were not specialized on. This can be the case, particularly in instances where we don't see the partisan theatrics of some of the hearings that we know very well on television.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I do wonder, as you're pointing out here, is there value to a certain level of secrecy for committees? Maybe secrecy is the wrong word, but at least being a little bit more out of the site of the public so that maybe some of these deals can be cut when there's such hot partisan politics?

Maya Kornberg: Yes, I think it's definitely a very complicated issue with television cameras. They were first introduced in the 1980s, and since then, we've really seen the impact of television cameras on hearings and on congressional work in general. It provides a tool for members to then clip some of what they're saying and use it as a sound bite and encourages a lot of theatricality. In hearings where you don't have tens of millions of people tuning in like you do sometimes, that do not have a big audience, there is a lot more space for members to just genuinely be engaging on the issue.

I also talk in the book about what I call more informal hearings. These are roundtables, or briefings, or field hearings outside of Congress that take members outside of the theatricality of the grandiose hearing rooms and really allow for more of this give and take that is so necessary in order to be forging relationships, in order to be reaching deals on certain things, and in order to be genuinely learning and understanding things. I think that there is a lot more space for a lot of productive things to happen in some of these different and less theatrical settings. That being said, of course, they serve a really important space to encourage the transparency that is so crucial to democracy.

Melissa Harris-Perry: How do we fix congressional committees?

Maya Kornberg: One of the things that I talk about is the importance of staff. Right now Congress does not just have several thousand fewer staff than it did several decades ago, but it also has a staff that is overwhelmingly white, largely from affluent backgrounds as a result of the hiring pipeline that starts with unpaid internships. We have a staff that is on average in their mid-20s and not specialized necessarily in some of the very, very complex topics that Congress needs to legislate about.

When you have a staff that is not specialized, that doesn't necessarily have a PhD in water policy, or a real specialty in antitrust law, or all of these very nuanced issues, then that makes more space for lobbyists to come in and manipulate the staff and infiltrate the process in many ways.

Maya Kornberg: The other thing that Congress should think about is rethinking hearing formats. One of the things that I discuss in the book are examples of things like the Agriculture Committee's 2018 Farm Bill Listening tour, where they went around the country and they just had open mic sessions with local farmers and members of the community. There was a lot more space for the give and take, more witnesses to come in, and more folks to be sharing their perspectives with the committee, and also for members to be engaging with each other across party lines outside of the ranker and the partisanship that we see in Congress today.

During COVID-19, we saw more digital hearings. Digital hearings similarly change the kind of dynamic, they make space for witnesses who don't necessarily have the funds to travel to Washington DC to come in and testify, and they make space for a different kind of conversation when everyone is Zooming in from their living room. There is also a potential for bipartisanship.

One of the things that the recent House Select Committee on Modernization, which has now become a permanent subcommittee of the House Admin Committee, has advocated for is creating more spaces for relationship building. Simple things like bipartisan co-working spaces for the staff, bipartisan briefings, bipartisan roundtables, bipartisan onboarding processes, just more space for members to really be engaging with each other and building these relationships that are so crucial and yet so lacking in Congress today.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Maya Kornberg is author of Inside Congressional Committees: Function and Dysfunction in the Legislative Process. Maya, thanks so much for taking the time.

Maya Kornberg: Thank you so much for having me.

Copyright © 2023 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.