Hearings of the
Subcommittee on Rules and Organization of the House

PROPOSALS FROM THE SECOND
BIPARTISAN CONGRESSIONAL RETREAT

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Thursday, April 29, 1999

The subcommittee met, pursuant to call, at 9:30 a.m. in Room H-313, The Capitol, Hon. John Linder [chairman of the subcommittee] presiding.

Present: Representatives Linder, Sessions, Reynolds, Dreier and Hall. Also Present: Goss, Pryce, Hastings and Myrick.

Mr. Linder. The meeting of the subcommittee will come to order. I am pleased to convene this hearing of the Subcommittee on Rules and Organization of the House. We are here to review the level of civility here in Congress and reflect on some of the recommendations that were discussed at the bipartisan congressional retreat in March of this year.

Whenever we begin to talk about civility and our working relationship, I am reminded of what Bill Hudnut said on first being elected to Congress. He said the first phone call he received was from a lady in his district complaining about garbage collection. He said, "Ma'am, I have just been elected to serve you in the Congress of the United States of America. Don't you think you should call the Sanitation Department?" She said, "I really didn't want to go that high."

Humility tends often to be in short supply around here. A little humility and decency to others, not because they are Members of Congress, but because they are people will go a long way.

I think it should be noted, and I believe Dr. Jamieson would concur, that we do generally work well together. In one particular instance during the consideration of the 1996 telecommunications bill, many Members on both sides worked together late into the night to agree on what amendments to put forth in that bill. I recall sitting down with John Dingell at 1:30 in the morning on the floor of the House explaining to him why we couldn't put in certain amendments and asking him which ones he had to have, and in about 15 minutes we worked out the amendments that would be in the rule in that bill. Often that is done on the floor, but goes unnoticed by the public.

However, many times what people believe to be incivility on C-SPAN is actually the open exchange of honest debate. Democrats honestly believe in certain ideas; Republicans honestly believe in certain ideas. We are sent here by our constituents to hammer out legislation, and our differing beliefs many times simply result in honest and vigorous debate.

In an institution like the House of Representatives, this kind of exchange of views must be expected. Tony Hall, for example, and I honestly differ on some policy issues. A good partisan debate is a sign that our system of deliberative government is sound. However, most of us would agree that the general working relationship would be enhanced if the focus of debate would remain on the wisdom of the arguments rather than on casting aspersions or assigning blame.

Nonetheless, I am pleased to note that Capitol Hill no longer serves as a site for settling a debate with a duel at 10 paces or a caning on the Senate floor. As Dr. Jamieson testified last year, incivility in the House is very rare, and while events such as the bipartisan congressional retreat in Hershey are helpful to the level of discourse, wholesale changes are not necessary.

Regarding some of the proposed changes, it should be noted that the first rules of decorum were laid out during the first Congress only 7 days after it was first convened in 1789, and many times Members make unknowing violations of these set rules of the House because they have not studied the House rules well.

One parliamentary method in Jefferson's Manual states that if a Member finds it difficult to get attention, "it is not the inclination of the House to hear him, and that by conversation or any other noise they endeavor to drown out his voice, it is his most prudent way to submit to the pleasure of the House, and sit down; for it scarcely ever happens that they are guilty of this piece of ill manners without sufficient reason, or inattention to a Member who says anything worth their hearing."

While this parliamentary method has not been enforced since the early 1800s, the premise is something that people should be aware of when considering a speech beyond the scope of that being considered on the House floor.

Mr. Linder. At this point I would like to yield to the Chairman of the Rules committee, Mr. Dreier.

Mr. Dreier. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. Let me say it is a pleasure to be here, and it is important to note that we have begun this hearing 30 minutes before the 1-minute speeches begin. So for those of you who followed last year's testimony Kathleen Jamieson and I have talked about it several times when we had to recess and then ultimately adjourn this entire proceeding because of things that were taking place on the House floor, so we are hoping that we will be able to get through this hearing without any challenges there.

Let me express my appreciation to the Pew Charitable Trusts and to the Aspen Institute and to the Congressional Institute for having pursued and encouraged this second retreat, and I think that the witnesses that we have here today and all those who are involved in organizing the bipartisan retreat are to be commended, and I want to say that I was privileged to be able to attend. I wasn't able to attend the last one, the first one, but I was privileged to be at this one.

I really found it to be useful in many ways. First, it was, as Chairman Linder has said, an opportunity for people to break down those barriers that we often see so that we can meet family members, have a chance to socialize, which used to be the norm around here, but obviously is no longer. And then from the perspective of this committee, there was a great deal of discussion breakout groups about developing new mechanisms to foster a better environment of cooperation around here; not necessarily bipartisanship, but, Mr. Linder has said, to make sure that while we engage in vigorous debate, which is what the framers wanted us to do, I believe at the same time to avoid the kinds of altercations that have taken place in years past.

I have spent a great deal of time on this issue. I have served when former colleague Bob Walker was here. He and I are the only two in the room who served in 1993 when it was known as the Joint Committee on the Organization of Congress. And we spent a great deal of time discussing many of the issues that will be raised here today. The unfortunate thing is following the work of that, we had 37 hearings, loads and loads of witnesses. It was a long and drawn out process, but it ended up being very partisan and acrimonious. We ended up doing virtually nothing from that, although I am happy to say that many of the proposals that emerged from the Joint Committee on the Organization of Congress in 1993 have been implemented and I think have worked out rather well.

So I just would like to say that it is -- I thank you all very much for your work, and I thank all the others who are going to be testifying for the time and energy that they have put into what I think is a very, very important issue for all of us and for the process of deliberative democracy.

Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. Linder. Thank you.

Mr. Linder. Mr. Hall.

Mr. Hall. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I have a statement; I would like for it to be in the record.

I would just simply say I would like to thank the organizers for a tremendous job. I was not at the first, but I was at the second retreat, and I thought it was great. I think that we can talk about all the procedural things that we want, like putting 1-minutes at the end of the day, which I think is good. I think that we ought to have a couple of committees that are of a bipartisan nature to discuss issues the committees wouldn=t have ability to authorize or appropriate, but could hold hearings on things that normally don't get taken up, such as humanitarian. I have an interest in that. I think we should have a humanitarian committee.

But nevertheless, the bottom line, I believe, with the retreats is if we can't build relationships with each other, if we don't go out of our way to be friendly to one another, we can attempt all the procedures that we want. I think one of the last things I said to the small group that I was in, and the facilitators were wonderful, is each Member of Congress should adopt somebody across the aisle before the end of this Congress. Each Democrat should adopt a Republican, each Republican should adopt a Democrat and make it your business to get to know them. Go out to dinner with them, maybe go into their districts, get to know their family. If we would do that, just 15 people would do it, we are going to have a much better place around here.

I really appreciate all that you are doing and the facilitators and the sponsors. It was a wonderful retreat. A lot of people say when they came back after the first week, they still saw some antagonism and bitterness. How can you expect for things to develop in 1 week? It takes months, years to build a relationship. And that is what we have to do is work on the long term. Thank you very much.

Mr. Linder. Thank you.

Mr. Linder. Mr. Goss.

Mr. Goss. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Do you want us to wait for questions --

Mr. Linder. If you would like to make a statement.

Mr. Goss. I have some very high admiration for the people assembled here, and thank you very much for your efforts. I want each of you to know that. I think it is very important that we have leadership in this area, and I think you are doing us a favor for the institution. I have some very serious thoughts about where the culprits may lie, and I will talk to those points when we get to questions, if we are going to have an opportunity for questions, rather than making an opening speech.

But I thank you for doing it. You are not the only ones working on this, fortunately, but we do need some kind of a nucleus, which I think is very, very helpful.

Mr. Linder. Mr. Sessions.

Mr. Sessions. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I, too, want to thank those of you who work on this very important endeavor. My first day in the House was the swearing in of Speaker Gingrich several years ago, and it was one of the most tumultuous days of work that has ever occurred in the House, and that was the first day I arrived.

I think I remembered something that day that I was taught probably when I was in kindergarten; that is, those who throw stones should not live in glass houses. And I reminded myself that day that I lived in a glass house, and I think every Member of Congress does, and when you start throwing stones at someone else's house, they will throw them back.

And I think that if we, through your efforts, understand that the institution must survive us despite our failures, despite our high times or low times, and that there are people out there who need to have confidence that we can do our business in a more civil and forthright way, and I think that that is when you will be successful, but I think it is going to take every one of us.

And I appreciate and respect what you are doing, and I will tell you that in the heat of the battle, we all get engaged, but we have got to remember where that line is and how far we should go, what the rules of the House are, and why they are there. And the civility is not just for us, it is for the continuity of this experiment called constitutional government.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. Linder. Before introducing the first panel, I would like to mention that a better awareness of the rules will allow members and staff to better participate in proceedings of the House in a civil manner. To further this goal, the Rules Committee has developed a comprehensive parliamentary training program for Members and staff and an expanded World Wide Web site at http://www.house.gov/rules to serve as a source of parliamentary and legislative information.

Our first panel is comprised of four co-chairs of the second bipartisan congressional retreat: Representatives Ray LaHood, Tom Sawyer, Amo Houghton and Anna Eshoo.

Like the first retreat, the March 1999 retreat was designed to seek a greater degree of civility, mutual respect, and, when possible, bipartisanship among Members of the House of Representatives in order to foster an environment in which vigorous debate and mutual respect can coexist. Through the retreat, these four Members have tried to improve the quality of discourse in American society, both public and private, and create a more civil and productive work environment while allowing vigorous debate to flourish.

Today's hearing is designed to hear your results on the second bipartisan retreat.

Mr. Linder. Ray, any remarks you may have prepared, you can put them in the record, and feel free to summarize your statement.

STATEMENT OF HON. RAY LaHOOD, A REPRESENTATIVE IN CONGRESS FROM THE STATE OF ILLINOIS

Mr. LaHood. Let me just say a very few remarks and thank both you and Chairman Dreier for holding this hearing today. It helps us to highlight the important work that a number of Members of the House think is important, which is trying to figure out how we can work together to accomplish our goals, which all of us come here to do, to serve and to solve the country's problems, and to try and figure out ways that we can do it in a bipartisan, civil way.

The first retreat was successful in many ways. In part, as documented by Kathleen Hall Jamieson, who is here and will be addressing the Rules Committee shortly, but she actually did a study a year after the first Hershey retreat and documented with some empirical evidence that the level of civility had risen, and the incidence of incivility had been lowered, as the way that she documented it. So obviously we were very pleased about that.

And, like Chairman Dreier, I also want to thank Pew and Aspen and the Congressional Institute. We could not do what we have been able to do on two occasions with taxpayers' money. It just simply would not have set the right kind of tone that we wanted, and in order to do it, we had to reach out to the Pew Charitable Trusts and the talented people at Aspen and the Congressional Institute to make this happen. So we are in their debt for the resources and the talented people that they provided to help us make this happen.

Our first retreat was highlighted by the remarkable speech given by David McCullough, and he really did set the tone for our first retreat, and I think it was memorable, and it is -- we had the occasion to put it in the record.

This year we had the occasion to hear from the outstanding leader from Ireland, John Hume, and I was struck probably more than anything else by what he said, that politics is about relationships. And I will never forget that he said that because I think that in essence is what all of us want to do around here is develop relationships so we can get things done.

And that is what really Hershey in essence is about. It is a Member-driven opportunity where Members can really get to know one another and develop relationships that I believe will last well beyond our careers here in Congress and also talk about institutional things that perhaps we should be doing to really change the institution to make it either more family-friendly, more Member-friendly, more legislative-friendly.

And I have had the good experience this year of being appointed to the Intelligence Committee and under the wonderful leadership of Porter Goss. I think that is the most bipartisan committee I have ever served on because of the leadership that Porter exhibits, but also because of Julian Dixon and the leadership he exhibits. It truly is a bipartisan committee and one that I think should be looked to around here as a model of a committee that can be bipartisan and really trying to deal with some very, very significant problems.

I think two things have changed this year that really helped the second bipartisan retreat succeed. Number one, on the first day when the Democratic leader handed the gavel to our new Speaker and said, let's bury the hatchet, and when our new Speaker came down to the floor of the House and on his inaugural speech before all of us set the right tone in talking about reaching across the aisle.

I just had a meeting recently with some of the staff of the Speaker's office, and since the second bipartisan retreat, I know that Speaker Hastert and Mr. Gephardt have met on no less than five occasions in person and talked on the telephone. They have probably had more communication together on issues in trying to resolve things in a bipartisan way than certainly was done previously.

So that has been a big assist, the fact that the Speaker has set the right tone, the Democratic leader has set the right tone, and I would say the second thing that is in our favor in trying to bring about civility and the ability of people to work together is the freshman class.

Many of the freshmen that came here came with the idea they want to get something done. Many of them came from the experience of having worked with both Democrats and Republicans in the legislature. And they came here with the idea that the only way to accomplish something is in a bipartisan way and working together. And this is a renewal of our institution when we have 40 new Members come here almost unanimous in their opinion that they want to work together. So that really has been a great assist.

I think the leadership -- we can talk about a lot of things, but if we don't have a leadership at the top, it makes it difficult. And the fact that we have a renewal of new Members, 40 new Members who have come here with the notion of wanting to work together, it enhances our ability to do what we want to do.

So let me just conclude by saying we do have recommendations, and I don't want to presume to present them here today because we -- our group really wants to meet with the Speaker and the Democratic leader and lay those out, and I would be happy to submit those for the record once we had a chance to meet with the Speaker, which we hope to do in the next week or so, and also the Democratic leader. And I am sorry, I don't really want to get specific on those today, because in fairness to them, we have to get them to really buy into them if we are going to accomplish anything, and that meeting will -- those meetings will be held very soon, and I would be happy to submit those recommendations then for the record. Thank you very much.

Mr. Linder. Mr. Sawyer.

Mr. Sawyer. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you for having this hearing. I want to thank you and your colleagues who are here to take part in this. Ray really hit a great deal squarely the important points that we all came here to say, but let me make a couple of additional observations, if I might.

First of all, I think it is fair to say that the first Hershey was an experiment. The second one built on the things that we knew could come, good things that could come from that kind of gathering, but it was also done in a far more difficult environment than the first Hershey was, and for that reason the efforts that Members made to make it succeed, I think, have the potential to be even more lasting.

Second, we mentioned rules; you did, Mr. Chairman. One of Jefferson's observations in the introduction of his rules is it really doesn't matter so much what the rules are, but rather that we have them so we can observe them, and that they have their own unifying effect. It is one of the things that makes this hearing today particularly important.

We heard mention of our mediators. My wife is off in Tulsa taking a course presently in mediation, and she showed me her textbook, and I said, well, you know the author of that textbook. She said, I don't. We spent about 10 hours with him several weeks ago. She said, I did not. I said, well, he was our facilitator at Hershey. She was just stunned because of the way that the text had been held out to her by her professor. It really bespeaks the quality of personnel that we are a part of that.

It really will take every one of us, as Mr. Sessions suggested. It took all of us to make Hershey succeed. It will take all of us here to give real life to the work that we want to have go on here. It is an experiment, and it will succeed only if we really have that bone-deep understanding that democracy is difficult. It takes continuous effort, and that isn't something that comes in 1 day.

We had 187 registered participants among the membership, just a handful short of what we had in 1997. And an even larger number of Members in the past brought their spouses and their families. Their work is every bit as important as that of the Members. It not only humanized the gathering in a way that we sometimes do not do for ourselves, but it brought a sense of legitimacy that every Member brings from their home district to this place with all of our differences to the point of view that we care deeply about.

It could not have been more important, so I am going to reemphasize what Ray said, that Speaker Hastert and Leader Gephardt not only supported this, but came, took an active part in meetings, and engaged not only with their own Members, but across the aisle with the younger Members who would otherwise perhaps not have the opportunity to meet with the high leadership of both sides of this institution in that way.

The fact that it wasn't easy meant that some of the discussions were far more uncomfortable than in the first Hershey and perhaps more important for that reason.

Finally, just let me say that it is important to recognize the Hershey that weekend is not an end in itself; that whatever it is, it is a process that will take continuous effort, and that your interest in this, Mr. Chairman, is a part of that effort.

Like Ray, we hope to meet very shortly with the leadership on both sides and return to you with the kind of coherent recommendations that we believe can actually be accomplished in Congress this year.

Mr. Linder. We'd be happy to have them.

Mr. Linder. Amo.

STATEMENT OF HON. AMO HOUGHTON, A REPRESENTATIVE IN CONGRESS FROM THE STATE OF NEW YORK

Mr. Houghton. Thank you. I would like to thank you very much for letting us be here. I won't be long.

A lot of things have been said that I think all of us agree with. I would like to say to Mr. Sessions, however, that those of us who live in glass houses like people throwing stones because it improves the glass business.

Mr. Sessions. Mr. Chairman, I stand corrected.

Mr. Houghton. Now, the -- I have a note here. It says the purpose of the hearing is to examine proposals for improving civility that emerged from the March retreat in Hershey, and as Ray has said, we don't have those. We can't talk about that specifically, but I will just make one comment.

This is not an unusual occurrence. It happens all the time. I mean, all of us who have been in any other endeavor, particularly business, that happens annually. It happens all the time. Why does it happen? Because you want to get people together and talk on an informal basis.

I am usually an end product, bottom line, let's get to the crux, but not so in this case because the process was more important, the process of being able to relate to one another and in a different way.

I don't ever talk to the people on either side of me in the corridor. We have had a couple of parties of staff members, unusual in our building. We just don't do it. We are so busy. And I really feel that if there was ever any evidence of the importance of communications, it is in Littleton, Colorado.

The importance of communicating and talking and talking, and I just can't overemphasize the fact that this should be an annual event or a semiannual event. I appreciate all the people who put their effort into this thing. But more importantly I suppose that the critical thing is the example. I mean, the fact that you are willing to have meetings like this to put a fine point on it, I think it is great. It is only through things like that, that this thing is going to succeed. Thank you.

Mr. Linder. Thank you, Amo.

Mr. Linder. Anna.

STATEMENT OF HON. ANNA ESHOO, A REPRESENTATIVE IN CONGRESS FROM THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA

Ms. Eshoo. Good morning, Mr. Chairman. Thank you for having us here, Chairman Dreier, Mr. Goss and all the members of the committee. It is an honor to be invited to come up here to discuss and offer at least some of our observations about the second Hershey.

Let me just give you a few of my observations. My colleagues have done, of course, an outstanding job of giving you theirs, and we will shortly be making recommendations and meeting with the leaders of the House to give them what the Members really came up with, because I don't think the idea that this is Member-driven can or should ever be lost. I think that that is really the heart of the effort.

Number one, what the Pew Charitable Trusts and Aspen did for us and with us, we can't thank them enough for that. For me, in going to what seemed to be endless meetings, which are necessary, I was always struck with the faith, the confidence and the respect and regard that they have for this institution and this body. You know, there are so many small details. There are things that you don't like when you go to a meeting. You think why did so-and-so say whatever they said. I would always pull back and think to myself, isn't it extraordinary what they are willing to invest in us because they have such a belief in this place and what we are capable of doing. So I really want to underscore that. Of course, they brought together a team of professionals that we simply would not have been able to do ourselves, given the time restraints that we operate under.

Number two, what the Members really came up with out of the working sessions, which was the heart of the effort, if I were to make an observation, on the Democratic side, it was more process-oriented. They talked about ratios. They talked about the operations of the House, which I guess is not so surprising for the parties in the Minority. And so if I were to cluster ideas, I think they came more under process for the Democrats. The Republicans spoke more to the things that are not quite so tangible, but how people conduct themselves, how they speak to one another. I don't want to say that it was strictly one thing for one party and one for the other, but if you are going to do groupings, I think that it came to us that way.

Thirdly, what Amo said is that B he has such wisdom B we have to have something that brings us together. It is not easy ever to demonize someone when you see them playing on the floor with their children, and so for us not only to participate, but to observe people in a very casual setting with their families, with their spouses, and the participation of the families, I think that those are lasting memories and thoughts of one another. So when we gather back on the floor of the House, and I look across the floor and I see someone, I don't just see them in the context in which they are operating, but in the context of Hershey, and I think that that is a very important one. Families are certainly the basis of our society. We are a family here, but it was rewarding to see people operating with their families and being with them.

So this has been a very rewarding experience for me. I look forward to working on future Hersheys. I think it is very important. It is a complement to the effort of all of the Members that were involved that the Rules Committee has this interest, and I hope that after we offer our recommendations to the leadership of the House, that we can come back and work with you here. I was delighted when the invitation came to the office, and I thank you for your interest.

Mr. Linder. Thank you.

Mr. Linder. Someone once told me that relationships began to unravel in the House, or not be put together is a better way to put it, when they went to electronic voting because prior to that, people milled around the House floor for 45 minutes to an hour and visited with each other waiting for their name to be called. It strikes me that people also used to move to Washington with their families to live here, and now we live on airplanes. A significant number of Members are gone the moment the last vote is cast on Thursday afternoon, or whenever the final vote occurs, and arrive just before the first vote is cast on Tuesday. And I think the schedules Amo talked about, the schedules have us absolutely moving at a pretty fast pace. Any comments?

Mr. Houghton. If I could make a comment. You know, there are all sorts of mechanical structural things. I mean, if I could just take a minute. My grandfather was a Congressman in 1918, and he talked about the same types of things. Families moved here. They had their identity here. There was sort of a camaraderie. The pace seemed to be just entirely different.

But you know, those things aside, I think it is the example of the leadership. I mean, it is true in a corporation, it is true in a church, it is true in a law office that if the leaders insist on this happening, not that you are not partisan in your own way, but insist on doing the business of government in a civil way, it just filters down to everything, and I feel this is happening, and I think that the fact that you are taking the time to do this puts a stamp of approval; very, very important.

Mr. Linder. If some sort of an ad hoc entity were created by this committee, which is one of the recommendations that came up, is Congress so unique that it must look outside of Congress for inspiration and leadership?

Mr. Sawyer. I don't know that it is unique or that we have to. I simply think that from time to time it is wise. We are a body that comes together for the sake of reflecting the Nation more broadly. And so I think from time to time it makes sense to look to the Nation for guidance as we seek to represent them in this very special place.

Ms. Eshoo. I think the individuals that came to the retreat this year and spoke to us, anyone that was there was moved. They were inspired. I mean, to hear John Hume, and you are with these individuals, they are mortal. They are human beings. No one is perfect, and yet the examples that have come from our Nation that inspired John Hume to do what he has done, and I think anyone that walked back to their room or had a quiet moment thought, I, too, am a leader. I, too, have a responsibility.

I think that it is -- we don't have enough time to reflect, or we don't speak to those things or have people that will inspire us. So I think that between John Hume, Doris Kearns Goodwin and Sam Waterston, they were each one unique. Each one has done things that are extraordinary in their own profession that they moved us to a higher plain.

So I think that it would be absolutely wonderful, it would be delicious to have people come here from time to time from, quote, the outside. I think we need that. We are hungry for it. I think it is the same thing that one can equate with a spiritual refreshment. We need that to renew our spirits as Members because there are so many things that go on here, just the nature of the work that is grinding, but there isn't any question in my mind that there are those that are amongst us that can inspire us. I think that there are people within this institution that can inspire us. We have hidden treasures here, and just as we look to one another to strengthen relationships with what you said, Tony, maybe we should have some mini-retreats on some evening here where someone from the institution speaks to Members. We don't know what people are made up of here.

Mr. Houghton. I think there are two levels here. One is the working together, and, two, respecting each other's opinion and liking one another and judging them in the context of who they are rather than who they are as part of a team.

The other thing that I think we learn from, whether it is John Hume or whether it was David McCullough or something, lifting our sights. That is what I think outsiders can do. What is your responsibility as representatives of this great Nation? And I think those two things we are constantly wrestling with.

Mr. Dreier. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. Thank you all for your testimony.

Let me be very direct here. This is the Speaker's committee. We are representatives of the leadership here as members of this committee, and we have already seen a litany of recommendations that have emerged from the retreat, the news conference that you all had talked about them, in this Roll Call article that you have seen, and what I would like -- I know that the other witnesses, the other panels here, are going to be talking specifically about a number of the recommendations, and so I would like to in light of that ask you all to raise some of those points, because they are going to be discussed here, I know, from what I have seen of the testimony of the other witnesses that will be coming forward.

I can go through the list of those and ask specific questions about them, but I would like to hear, if I could, some general comments on the things that you outlined in the news conference that you have had following the retreat, if you would.

Mr. LaHood. It is premature, I think, Mr. Chairman, for us to really -- I don't want to sit here in front of all these media people here and say, these are the five things we are going to recommend to your committee or we are going to recommend to the House or the Speaker, because in reality we are -- the four of us are going to go to the Speaker and the Democratic leader, and we are going to say, these are the things that were recommended at Hershey, but there also has to be a comfort level. There has to be a comfort level in the Speaker's office and the Democratic leader's office that these things are accomplishable. And if they are not accomplishable, then I think it raises a lot of false hopes for us to throw out a whole lot of things that perhaps were recommended when in reality we know they are not going to be accomplished. And I think it would be unfair to the Speaker and to other leaders for us to say, yeah, these are the five things that we have agreed on until we can test the temperature with people who are going to help us implement those.

Mr. Sawyer. Let me make an observation. It is important. What Ray says I think really goes to the chance of succeeding with this. The role that both of the leaders play in developing the work that came out of Hershey is central to its likelihood of success. There is another component, and that is that 2 years ago we produced scores and scores of recommendations. They all had validity to them. Some were more practical than others, but we worked very hard this time to focus and limit the number of recommendations so that they would be within grasp to achieve. And if there is a single quality to them, it is that they are -- that they are more practically focused and more limited in number for the sake of having real achievement of them rather than simply throwing out as many as we did 2 years ago.

Mr. Dreier. Anybody have any comment on those?

Okay. We will look forward to that.

Mr. Sawyer. Thank you.

Mr. Linder. Mr. Hall.

Mr. Hall. I thought the best thing about the retreat was when the groups broke up into small groups of 15, 18, 20 people. You had facilitators there, including Members of Congress and the wives and the spouses. I think that was very important because the wives and the spouses were vulnerable, and they got their husbands or wives to be vulnerable. And then things started to break down a little bit from the standpoint that they started to share some of the problems that they have not only with marriage, but how this job can tear them apart, and the pressures that we put on each other, and how we sometimes hurt each other during campaigns and the negative aspect of it.

I thought that aspect of it was so good, was so personal. Most, at least in the group that I was in, were very willing to share a lot of very personal things, and I thought that is where you start to really develop.

I think it is just going to take time. If you just keep pushing more of those kinds of things, I think after a while when we get to know one another, there will be Members that will start to trust each other. One of the difficult things about being a politician is Democrats versus Republicans. Let me tell you, when you are taught to be an island, Democrats don't trust Democrats, Republicans don't trust Republicans. And until you break it all down, start to trust, that is when the good ideas are going to start coming out.

But that is going to take time. And if we can have the patience to keep up with this, it will change. I believe that. But we have got to develop the trust, and only through these small group retreats will that work.

Mr. Linder. Mr. Goss.

Mr. Goss. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I know that you have accentuated the positives, which is entirely appropriate, but I want to look at what I consider as some of the mischief that causes us problems. I don't do it in a negative way. I try to do it in a realistic way.

The one that comes to mind most recently might be the problems in the southern Balkans we are seeing. It has not been easy in the southern Balkans, but until events about 10 years ago started, people who didn't like each other were living side by side. When they introduced a mischiefmaker and some new chemistry, we suddenly had a problem, and when that mischiefmaker decided he needed to have even more chemistry, we have an even worse problem.

So what I am going to be referring to a little bit is what I call the wedge drivers. I think driving wedges is an art form, technique, a science, a skill, a problem, anything you want to call it, but it is a reality in the institutions in Washington. There is motivation to drive wedges. When you look at what the motivation is, you can find what I call culprits. Again, I am not pointing fingers. I am just trying to be realistic.

Ray has said some very nice things, which I appreciate, about the Intelligence Committee and the fact we are able to run it on a bipartisan basis, and the reason that has happened so far is it is a lot easier to do it for two simple reasons. We don't have C-SPAN, and what we say stays in the room, so it is not coming back at you in a 15-second bite in some election down the road. That takes a huge weight off of us.

I am not suggesting we do anything about the first amendment, but I am suggesting there are people out there in the media who are in competition, who are more interested in getting the sale or the higher rating or whatever it is that you measure your success in these days. It is certainly not accuracy and going on about their business. So I think that is a problem, and I haven't a clue how to deal with it. As I said, we have a ready-made solution in the Intelligence Committee because we don't talk about what we do, so that is easy.

The second thing I want to talk about is I think it is both process and trust. I think the Ethics Committee in the 105^th Congress clearly was in deep trouble, and the process was being abused. I think most of us would agree.

I think what happens, we did come up with some new procedures, and for the most part in the 105th, the new procedures worked pretty well. And also Members, I think, had had enough of the warfare of taking -- using the Ethics Committee as the place to go have a political war. But I think it was both process and I think also the leadership of Mr. Berman and Mr. Hansen had a lot to do with it. So I don't think it is any one thing. I think it is all of the things where you do have a positive outcome.

In going back to another culprit, which I, too, have two or three other culprits that bother me a little bit. One was the idea that sort of reduced Members of Congress to sack cloth and ashes mentality that was out there, and somehow if we were at Hershey or actually taking time away from our busy profession on taxpayers' time to be talking about ourselves or our family or our relationships or our problems, that that was really an unwarranted perk. I know some of you experienced this. So you are going to Hershey. Oh, wow, it must be nice. There is some of that problem, and frankly I think that is just a question of standing up and being courageous and saying, folks, this all matters, and how we do the Nation's business counts.

I am making a small call for political courage to do that and at the same time an agreement that nobody will take shots, because every time somebody does a good deed around here there is a temptation to make sure it does not go unpunished -- that no good deed goes unpunished is the philosophy.

The last thing I would say, we really do have an industry, and it is a win an election industry. It is clearly a very important part of it, and all of us spend a certain part of our time dealing with the partisanship piece of winning elections. I think that can be done in a genteel and acceptable and a civil way, that most people could talk about elections at dinner tables in an enlightened and positive way of substance.

Most elections these days seem to have gotten down to what can you read in 30 seconds that you remember for about 15 seconds, but it is the negative sensational piece. The opponent research, the scoring points at someone else's expense has really generated now, I think, an atmosphere that erodes the trust that Mr. Hall was speaking about. I don't know how you deal with it, but I think it would be unrealistic to think that we can continue to live in an institution like this, a campus-like institution like this, that does have family aspects to it.

It also has very important professional aspects if mischiefmakers are constantly trying to take advantage of those wedges and throw us at each other's throats. I don't know how you deal with the people outside. I haven't figured how you go off campus to deal with this, but I do think the defense part of this is an important part. I would welcome any observations. I am sorry for my long dissertation.

Mr. Houghton. I think you can't do anything about the press. We pay a terrible penalty, but we wouldn't want a country without it. It is almost like growing up and being exposed to all sorts of literature which you are not sure you want your children to read, but they have got to learn to live with it.

As far as talking about ourselves, you know, I was always accused of putting the employees ahead of the stockholders in business, and as I sit here, damn right I do. How the hell do you think products are made? How do you think the money is made for you? It is the fact that we are talking about ourselves, which we so seldom do, I don't have any problem in discussing that at all.

As far as the win industry is concerned, I always remember the story that Joe Fowler told about President Johnson and there was -- there was some issue that came up, and I forget what it was, and he said, you know, if we do this, it is going -- it is going to give terrific demands of the Republicans. We can't do that. And Johnson said, listen, is it right for the Nation? If it is, we ought to do it. We will get them later.

And you know, that is always the sort of psychology, but every so often -- and I was really disappointed in this vote yesterday that it shouldn't have been a partisan vote. There should have been no partisanship, but we continue to work down that way, but the important thing is to be able, I think, in terms of overcoming the mischiefmakers, to sort of separate what is important for the country and what really is important for you as a member of the blue team as compared to the red team.

Mr. Goss. I agree. The American flag always has to fly on top, but sometimes it is hard to figure out what else is attached to it.

Mr. Sawyer. I think you really have said an enormous amount in a very short period of time. I would like to comment on one facet of what you were talking about. This and many of the other things we struggle to do in Congress to make it be the kind of place that we are proud of really saw its breakdown, as you and I know, in one brief period of time in the Ethics Committee. But that has been restored in no small way, but it took real effort.

In a similar way, what you said about what Hershey was supposed to be about I think is important. It has been said before, but it bears repeating. It was not about being nice to one another. That really doesn't have very much to do with it. In a larger sense, it is not even about being bipartisan. It is -- it was a bipartisan retreat, but only because you have to come together in a bipartisan setting to do these things, but it was about much more than that.

Bipartisanship is a nice side benefit from time to time where it is appropriate, but this place is about a hard contest of ideas, and we shouldn't be reluctant to recognize that. It wasn't even about civility, although certainly that was a focus of the first Hershey, and civility is important. This really goes beyond civility. It goes to all those things we need to do to make this place work, and if civility helps, and I think it does, then that is good. If bipartisanship from time to time is a useful tool, then that is good. And if being nice can help do all of these things, that is okay, too, but that is really not what it is about. It is about making this place work in the broader interest of the Nation.

Ms. Eshoo. I want to touch on something that I think is operational as we talk about these things, that if, in fact, some of these issues are broached, and you touched on some of the toughest ones, Porter, that you are somehow naive, you are not a good politician, you are not operational, and I think that, as I stated in my opening statement to you, or testimony or whatever you want to call it, is that this is all Member-driven. If, in fact, there were more Members that said to the leaders what you just said here, it would -- many of these things would begin to take hold, not that they would necessarily happen right away, but they'd be taken seriously.

One of the things that I was certainly made aware of as I went to Members and said -- encouraged them to come, and as each person has said here, this go-around was much tougher because the House had put itself through hell, I was accused of being naive. Oh, I can't believe you are working on this. Why would you be doing this? Because I think it is important to do, and I think it is important that you are there.

So I think that each one of us, as we have these things inside of us, they have to be expressed to our leaders. They have to be expressed in the middle of a caucus meeting. If any one of us thinks someone is getting over the line, we have to have the courage of our convictions and stand up and say so. And I think that some of the things that you touched on need to be raised with our leaders. Now, whether they take the ball and run with it -- I mean, if they do, great. If they don't, I think we have to stay at it. I think we have to stay at it and say, these are things that we think are very important.

Campaigns: we have fewer and fewer people voting in the country. Maybe it does have something to do with their being turned off with how they see people conducting themselves.

So I welcome what you said. I think we have to take it very seriously, and I have said to some of my colleagues, why would you go on such and such a program where all they do is yell? I mean, I had one of the people that runs the program call me, and they called five or six times. It was during the impeachment. And I thought, I am the one that has to call this person back. And I did say to him, I hope you are sitting down and you have your seat belt fastened. I don't think your program fits with the dignity of my constituents. That is why I am not going to come on. I am not a Girl Scout, but on the other hand, it is diminishing.

So I think that we have to say so more often and get rid of this notion that when we do, that we are naive, that we are not good politicians, and that we are not operational.

Mr. LaHood. Mr. Chairman, I am involved in another program called Everyone Wins. It is a reading program, and in about 15 minutes they are going to start a year-end program that I have to emcee. It is at John Tyler School here. If I could excuse myself, I would appreciate that.

But let me just say, I have been around politics for 20 years. I have worked for two former Members. I worked for Mr. Michel, who was a leader. And this institution is driven by the people who are here.

Porter, what I said about the Intelligence Committee I didn't say because you are here or that you are the Chairman. I said it because of the way you run the committee. And we all serve on committees around here, and whoever is the Chair of that committee sets the tone. We all know what that means, and who our leaders are set our tone around here. And this institution is driven by the people who run the committees and who are in leadership positions, and if they set the tone where people can have their say and do it in a civil way, then it is done that way. And if they don't, it is not. And I don't think it makes any difference whether the media is in the room or out of the room.

I have the highest regard for Julian Dixon because I remember him when he was the Chair of the Ethics Committee when the Democrats were in control. The way he distinguished himself by the way he ran the committee, it was done very professionally. I will never forget that, and that is the way you can set a tone here whether you are in the Majority or you are in the Minority. So if the right tone is set in a committee or by a leader, it filters down, and people get the message very quickly. And I am sorry, I do have to excuse myself.

Mr. Linder. You are excused.

Ms. Pryce.

Ms. Pryce. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I am sorry I could not have been at Hershey. That is one place I really wanted to be in this case, and your good work there. And I have a statement I will just submit for the record.

Mr. Linder. Without objection.

Ms. Pryce. I can't really add much to what has been said. I just want to congratulate you all. Especially I think it has been difficult for Democrats, and you had a hard job this time around especially, and civility is something that is -- requires effort. It is an ongoing process. It requires a sustained, continued doggedness that you have demonstrated. And, Amo and Ray, you know, you are valued friends and wonderful Members, but you two really had a hard time this time, and I just want to give you my personal congratulations.

And I just wanted to add one thing because it has hit me just in this last week. This has to be Member-driven, but we can't forget about the staff element either. We just had an incident in my own office which created considerable problems for me, and it was just completely baffling how political our staff can be if we aren't careful in how a lot of things that we don't even know about are going on at a different level.

And so we want to -- I would like to make a plea that we don't forget about the staff in this whole thing. It has to be leader-driven, and we have to be on top of it, and I am happy to do my part, very small part I can do on our side of leadership to make some of these things come to fruition, but I don't want us ever forget the footwork down here is done by our staff, and sometimes we need to just really be vigilant about what is going on.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Mrs. Myrick. I also appreciate your work. I wasn't able to be there. I ended up in bed with the flu. Those things happen, but I did go a few years before, and it was extremely beneficial. There is no question it is necessary. What you are doing is really important, and I hope you keep -- I introduced the civility resolution last year in trying to just say can we be more conscious of how we treat one another and what we do. If each one of us personally would take that on, look at the difference it would make.

So anyway, thanks for what you are doing. I am glad to help in any way I can.

Mr. Linder. Mr. Sessions.

Mr. Sawyer. Could I just make an observation? Thank you for those comments. Let me say something I hope you'll take home. Your husband's contribution 2 years ago was one of the most vivid and indelible and important and constructive contributions that was made the entire time. He was candid and direct, and it made a great deal of difference.

Mrs. Myrick. He is always candid.

Mr. Sessions. Chairman LaHood started to address part of what I think is a question I have got, and I think it is interesting that they sit me next to Sue in this committee. And it has to do generally with what I thought is adult supervision. I have seen -- and so here is my question. Do you believe you are going to address -- all four of you will go to Speaker Hastert and Majority Leader Gephardt together?

Mr. Sawyer. Yes.

Ms. Eshoo. Together.

Mr. Sessions. Would you also consider giving each one of them, in other words, Leader Gephardt and Speaker Hastert, your own internal advisement about how within your own conferences you believe that that is important also? The reason why I say is because it appears to me we do not have -- we are peers in our own conferences, and we don't have adult supervision sometimes in our own areas. I mean, I have seen nobody is responsible for some -- nobody mentors somebody else. Nobody is somebody's Dutch uncle. Nobody is there. We are all just -- you are on your own.

And I have seen some mentoring going on. I mean, my Chairmen, not only Chairman Linder, but Chairman Dreier, are trying to help me, and I think it would be important for you to say to your own leadership, look, we think that mentoring should go on and that there should be some bit within our own conference.

Said another way, I was a football player, and we engaged in practice sometimes in some rough practices and using our own team, and after a while you want to say, save that for the other side, but you have got to have some internal respect for yourself, as Ray said, even when the cameras aren't around and when media is not there, and I think there needs to be some internal adult supervision other than just when we are on the floor and what anybody says they are okay for. It happens in practice when you are in your own conference or caucus. It happens when we are on the floor, because I think it has a lot to do with it. So I hope you will address it.

That is the question: Would you consider addressing that individually, Amo, you and Ray, to the Speaker, and I am not saying discipline where everybody has to fall in line. I am talking about the ability to mentor, provide some feedback, at least from leadership, put your arm around somebody and showing them a better or different way. And I think it would be important on the Democratic side, too. Perhaps you already have that. I don't know.

Ms. Eshoo. We are not that organized.

Mr. Sessions. As Will Rogers said, if you are not part of anything organized, you are a Democrat. That is okay. I would say that that accusation could fall on us, too. I think there needs to be some mentoring or adult supervision, and I have found that among my peers on this committee, and I have taken it, I think, in the right way, and I think it was dished out in the right way. I would hope that you would do that.

Mr. Houghton. I agree with you. You know, these two people sitting beside me are mentoring all the time. I mean, I have heard Anna so many times say, they don't say that. That is not right. That is not what we are about here. Things like this. Tom does the same thing.

I think another thing is that there is something about conferences which tend to be sort of locker room type of things, and you build up sort of a hate, and anybody who wants to step up and say, wait a minute, I mean, let's step back a little bit, I am not sure this is the right thing, now they are almost drowned out. So I think those two things can happen, not only what you said, but also suggest to the leadership to lead in a conference and let other people express themselves and don't get so hyper.

Mr. Sessions. I am not sure -- I can see, in my opinion, why that is important. You have got to build unity. It is free. You have got to have that. I am simply suggesting that even in your own conference, you can't call somebody whatever you want. That is all I am saying. I am not saying you can't get wrapped up, but don't tear up the locker room before you go out there, but then we are not also out there to rip the guts out of the other side. We are out there to carefully articulate and show the difference, and I am just saying I hope that somehow there will be some mentoring.

I think mentoring is really what you hear me say, and it is because -- I mean, I look to people on my committee to do the same for me. I mean, I have looked at Tom and asked Tom for very -- I think we have got to be in that circumstance. The fact of the matter, he tells me I am wrong a lot. I still listen to him, but I think with a sense of humor, but that we have got to get to a point where our leadership truly is leadership, and they can put their arm around without saying, that is -- I can't do that. So I will include that privately.

Mr. Sawyer. We will do that.

Mr. Chairman, if I might. We used to do that. We used to have -- Tony Hall was mine.

Mr. Sessions. He did a good job.

Mr. Sawyer. I really appreciate that. But we need to get back to doing those things. We have forgotten how to do it not because we are not wise enough to do them, it is just because we are preoccupied with some other things.

Mr. Sessions. I think there is some bit of truth to that, and I think when you approach somebody, then you will know whether they like you or not, and then you learn how that happens.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. Linder. Mr. Reynolds.

Mr. Reynolds. Mr. Chairman, I come from the New York State Legislature; civility is already improved by landing here in Congress. And when you are next-door neighbor to Amo Houghton and Jack Quinn, it raises my goal of just trying to be a kinder and gentler listening colleague of those two fine gentlemen.

Not being an expert in Congress, I am an expert at State and local government because I came up through the ranks of town board, county legislature in an urban county, and rose through the ranks in becoming a leader in the State legislature. There is a deterioration of camaraderie and civility at all levels of government in the legislative bodies. And 25 years ago when I first was elected, it has changed.

At the age of 23 as a young staffer, I watched the State legislature change dramatically and have listened very carefully here to the changes that have transpired in this Congress. And I think when Ray talks about leadership and committee chairs can help set the tenor, there is no question about it, but it also comes from the standard that the institution demands of itself. And so as I look at this thing, it becomes 435 Members both in the assistance of its leadership and its Chairs, but also the standard we expect of ourselves to function on.

And in the State legislature, at one time your word was your bond. That now is replaced by MOUs between house leaders and Governors in order to drive us. Campaigns now have interaction not only of consultants, who are uncaring as to the human element after an election, as well as some of our campaign committees. I have been part of those. I understand those. So you take either professionals or uncaring individuals after an election, there are very deep scars, and then the individuals that were affected as candidates whether they won or lost, somebody, a character assassination, both parties are to blame.

And I sometimes look at rank and file Members almost like party leaders in getting the committee structure, almost battling Democrats, Republican committeemen in wars. And yet generals talk to generals where war leaders were talking on the direction they were going while they allow the battle.

Sometimes legislative bodies find themselves in similar B I was disturbed when coming in orientation that B Dick Gephardt was the Minority Leader versus the Speaker in my House B when Dick told me that only eight times he has spoken directly to the Speaker of the House from 104th, 105th Congress personally. Eight times. You can't run a house like that. There are times where I didn't have a lot in common with my Speaker, but I assure you eight times in those 4 to 6 years was not even on the radar scope of how much you have to sit down and work the stuff through.

So I just B when I look at all levels of government, we have deteriorated from what our forefathers lived under in the great debates of civility. And I think while Hershey has now got us focused on this, it is going to take every rank and file Member pushing up into our Chairmen and our leadership that the institution wants to set a higher expectation and standard than we do. And it is going to take a lot of hard work and the adjustment, I guess, for the new millennium than what we have seen as lifestyles have changed here.

My friend Bob McConnell was here. He moved here. Most of the western New York delegation commutes. Probably two-thirds of this House commutes. The camaraderie of the State legislature is superior to here based on just schedule differences of trying to even see friends in a similar orbit, and I think when we look at scheduling some of that, some Members have said that when they have gone on official business travel, they built relationships. Some have used a baseball team. Some have used Hershey. Some have used the walk from the same side of the office building.

I think one of the things we also should look at is how we build that interaction of Members. Greg Meeks and I, two former assemblymen, one from Queens and the other from upstate New York, try to meet regularly just to talk about New York and problems or needs -- I think we need to, from both leadership and from the cochairs of this group and from those trying to orientate new Members coming in here, we need to find more ways where there is that cross-pollination of Members that is not just Hershey or some of the thoughts that came from Hershey to try to perpetuate it, but a constant look of how do we cross-pollinate Members to talk about what makes them tick, why their district has certain needs that maybe the other Member had no idea.

It was tough enough for me to learn 62 counties where people came from within the State of New York, let alone 435 spread across the country. You get them mixed up, whether they are in California or Idaho, whether there are significant differences as to what those concerns might be. I think there needs to be a real effort of -- both a demand of us increasing our standard of expectation, but also constantly looking for ways to cross-pollinate Members from parties, from different walks of life, from different generations. And I don't think it is an easy task, but I think it is one that all of us have to be willing to roll up our sleeves and do.

Mr. Linder. Thank you all.

Ms. Eshoo. Thank you very much.

Mr. Houghton. Thank you very much.

Mr. Sawyer. Thank you.

Mr. Linder. Dr. Jamieson. Our next panel consists solely of the dean of the Annenberg School for Communications and the Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Jamieson has written reports on civility in the House of Representatives in 1997, 1998, and 1999. She testified before the Rules Committee in 1997 under the leadership of Chairman Dreier, and we welcome you back to follow up on your findings. Dr. Jamieson, you may submit your report or summarize or do whatever you like.

STATEMENT OF KATHLEEN HALL JAMIESON, PROFESSOR AND DEAN, ANNENBERG SCHOOL FOR COMMUNICATION, UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA

Ms. Jamieson. Let me try to hit the high points. When a member of staff called and said I was going to be a panel, that was the first for me. I would like to thank him for adding some variety to my academic life.

The first thing that I would like to stress is that civility remains the norm in the House. It is the norm of the House even in those times in which we have aberrations, as we had the last time we were together.

Interestingly, that combination of circumstances produced the perception that that session of Congress was much more uncivil than it was. That was an aberrational moment, and one that did not repeat itself throughout the 105th.

The focus of the report that we did for the second Hershey retreat was on two questions. The first was, what can we say about the impact, if any, of the Hershey retreat; and the second was, what do we know across the new measures that we have developed about the problem, if there is one, and when it occurred, if it did.

The first indication that we had that the Hershey retreat was having an impact was that people were talking about Hershey on the floor of the House. We made a list of times that Hershey was mentioned and asked what was going on in those mentions. Specifically what we found was that civility as a norm was becoming embodied in the metaphor of Hershey. And so we make the assumption based on the evidence that we put forward to you in that report as well as the document we prepared for the committee that part of what the Hershey retreat did was gave a name to a norm. In moments that are troubling, Members can evoke the name Hershey, and by doing that raise the salience of the norm.

Secondly, we found instances in which the taking down process began and then was stopped because someone specifically invoked the principal of comity or invoked Hershey. So we have a second piece of evidence that the norm became more salient when in such troubling moments, someone evokes it to stop a process that can be highly disruptive.

As you know, when the taking down process goes all the way to a vote, the system isn't working well. The system is intended to have the offensive comment withdrawn when it is pointed to, not having someone hunker down and fight all the way through a vote. So when one sees the process being stopped in the interim, and one is evoking Hershey, one assumes that Hershey did something that is productive.

That said, we found before the Hershey retreat that Congress had already returned to historical norms after the first session of the 104th, and concluded, and I note the last testimony that we provided for you, that this is a very resilient institution. In order to work together effectively, the institution corrected whatever the tendencies were, for whatever cause, probably a role reversal by the second session of the 104th. Those tendencies continued in the 105th. And here I rely on qualitative evidence rather than quantitative evidence, because I think it is far more reliable.

One of the problems of social science is that it has real trouble getting a handle on what didn't happen, but what didn't happen in the 105th I think is more important than what did happen, if one is focused on the question, how civil was the 105th. If one had looked at history in the House, particularly recent history, and predicted when we were going to have extended incivility, a great deal of tension and a lot of impugning of integrity, one would say it would be surrounding ethics charges about a Speaker. So we compared the discussions over Speaker Wright with discussion over Speaker Gingrich and found that the discussions over Speaker Gingrich were handled in a far more tempered and civil fashion. And so what didn't happen is indicative that something was going right in the process.

Secondly, we look at the determination of the victor in California's 46th Congressional District in the first session of the 105th and compared it to the decision surrounding the seating of Democrat Frank McCloskey rather than Republican Richard McIntyre in the Eighth Congressional District of Indiana in 1984. Again, in the 105th, that extended moment was handled in a better fashion in that there was less impugning of integrity, less use of problematic language.

Then we looked at something that was unprecedented in the 105th. That was the resolution banning a former Member from the Chamber after an uncivil outburst occurred, and we noted first that the leadership of the party of that Member supported the resolution banning; that the 289 Members voted to bar the Member from the Capitol sanctuary until his challenge to the outcome of the election was resolved. One hundred eleven of those were members of the offending former Member's party. The session was chaired by the Speaker, also a member of the former Member's party. The process took place without eliciting the sorts of rancorous exchanges that characterized the intense moments during the 104th.

There are three moments in the 105th in which what didn't happen was indicative that something was going right in this institution, that the institution was functioning to maintain a sense of decorum in difficult times.

In the second session, we noted that both Republicans and Democrats mourned the deaths of Officers Chestnut and Gibson. In the process, a number of members commented that they thought that that moment had brought the House together in a way that the House ordinarily was not being brought together. We observed in that language and also in the language that is used to pay tribute to Members when they die or leave that apart from the Hershey retreat, references to comity usually occur when someone dies or when someone leaves. It is a standard line of argument when someone leaves the House to praise that person's civility. If there is a problem, perhaps we should have everyone leave the House for a day, pay tribute to everyone for their civility, and then reconvene the next day.

The problem we found in the 105th was during the three-day debate on impeachment. That was predictable. You are not going to have a debate of this sort without having a grade deal of tension. Among other things, it is not something that the Members do every day, thank goodness. In that environment, however, we note that a number of things appear to be going well. First, I think that Congressman LaHood did an excellent job acting as Speaker pro tem and demonstrated how important a powerful speaker who knows how to use the chair and the gavel well can be, particularly in tense moments, in pacing the debate, and also in using parliamentary recognition judiciously to ensure that the debate is moving forward.

Secondly, if we had to predict what the explosive point was going to be rhetorically in the debate, we would have said that it was going to be the exchange over whether or not the Democrats were going to be able to get a vote on censure. And yet at that moment, the Members who spoke for the Republicans, the Members who spoke for the Democrats moved into a classic legal type of argument of the sort that characterizes statements to the Supreme Court and produced model discourse, the kind that will stand well historically as historians ask whether that in fact was the appropriate parliamentary ruling. By doing that they diffused some of the tensions of the moment but they also brought honor on themselves and the House.

Across the rest of the debate, there were many problematic moments. And I disagree here with Mr. Wolfensberger who thinks this was a model of congressional activity. I realize that many of the times that we find problematic discourse in those three days would not technically have been taken down. The reason that we developed indicators of language use that were not specifically tied to the taking down process was that we made the assumption that some things are considered uncivil although the rules themselves don't specifically say that they ought not to be uttered on the floor, and that of course makes these indices subject to interpretation. But one of the things that we did in the process of looking at all of this was examine the extent to which our indices were picking up comments about Bill Clinton that might under ordinary circumstances be defined as uncivil although might in this circumstance be considered descriptive.

So, for example, the word "reckless" might well be an appropriate characterization; Democrats and Republicans used it. That meant that our aspersion index, which is trying to pick up things that aren't name calling but are in some fashion impugning integrity, might not work as well here as it does elsewhere. We also took the index that maps lying and words that are synonyms for lying off our list for the debate over Resolution 611 because obviously if someone is accused of lying under oath, the word lying is no longer an attack on someone else's integrity in the sense forbidden by the rules. It is a matter appropriately being discussed in the House.

So we recognized the first problem with the indicators that we developed when we began to examine the comments about President Clinton. But that does not mean that the House debate was not problematic in the its other kinds of references and that is what is showing up in the rest of our indicators.

I realize that it is not considered unparliamentary to attack the leadership, for example, or another party in general, but I think as a person listens to a debate and hears the Republican leadership attacked, one has a reasonably good idea who is being attacked. In the debate, for example, the Republican leadership was accused of being angry, obsessed, self-righteous, hijacking the Constitution, ramming this matter through at any cost and of having blood on its hands. The body was "contemplating a constitutional assassination driven by naked partisanship," said one individual. "The GOP is a group of vindictive reactionary Pharisees." GOP was taking a stand to get our President."

The process itself was described in terms that were clearly crafted, and that was part of our concern about it because sometimes on the floor people get upset in the moment. At other times, they have a scripted statement that they have looked at and are now deliberately delivering. People don't ordinarily say such things in casual conversation as "Republican leaders, blind about their own sanctimonious piety and hypocrisy, have chosen to push our Nation to the brink." That is crafted language. When you begin to see such adjectives as "sanctimonious", and attached to strong nouns, "sanctimonious piety and hypocrisy", and then hear descriptions such as the majority is "railroading", as the "Republican coup d'etat", "partisan coup d'etat", "we are in the middle of a parliamentary coup", "all coups are accompanied by the sounds of marching boots and rolling tanks", that by our definition, is not civil.

One of the ways we test to see whether or not something is civil is to ask if someone did not say this was about Democrats in general or Republicans in general but said it was about you, Kathleen Jamieson, would you be offended, would you be less likely to want to continue to work with this person in the future, and the kinds of statements I read I think legitimately fall into the category. They were picked up by our indicators.

We also saw such statements on the other side as the President's defenders are "trivializing felony perjury." The President was called "hypocrite in chief" and the Democrats were accused of "not being interested in the evidence." Whether those would be taken down or not is, I suppose, questionable, but I don't think that when Thomas Jefferson set up the rules he envisioned that those kinds of things would be repeated in the House as often as they were in a three-day period by as many people as said them. One of the reasons we were worried about those three days was not simply we saw indicators suggesting it, but also that it is usual in the House when there are these kinds of problematic exchanges that a few people are involved but in the course of the impeachment debate most of the Members were involved, and they were involved in delivering statements that were very strongly worded and could be interpreted often as hurtful to the people on the other side. So our concern was that those individuals not carry the anger and the hurt of impeachment on into another environment. The good news is I think that yesterday's debate established that they didn't, for whatever reason. Yesterday's debate was partisan, but it was civil. It could very easily have become a debate over the legitimacy of Bill Clinton as President pursuing the actions that he was pursuing in light of these past exchanges that had occurred in three days of impeachment. That it did not is I think a very good indicator for the House and an indicator that those three days were an aberration.

The first point I would make is the 105th was about three days that were atypical and do not appear to have poisoned the discourse of the 106th. The other thing that I would say about the impeachment debate is it added a word to our vulgarity index. I had a call from a reporter when the index was originally put out. We have tried not to list the words in the vulgarity index in any public space because they are vulgar. This person said that he didn't actually believe that any of these kinds of words had been spoken on the House floor. We had the documentation of where they were so we know that they have been, but because this is a lagging indicator if we don't anticipate a word it doesn't get into the index, so we can't code it. We didn't imagine that anyone was going to use the phrase "gonad shriveling," but we are now adding it to our vulgarity index. We don't anticipate, however, that it is going to be a repeated phrase in the House.

The indices themselves have all the problems that are associated with doing social science. In our report on the 105th Congress we had already decided that "the House will be in order" was not a reliable indicator. After discussions with Congressman Dreier, we have also decided that it is inappropriate for us to be monitoring requests for a member to suspend. We have now changed the graph so that it has a tombstone on it. It is going to officially rest in peace. We will go back and put that in the other documents we have in this area.

What we are trying to get at with those two measures were those disruptive moments in which the chair is in fact concerned with problematic language but there isn't a taking down process. As we looked at those moments, we found that our word indicators were now picking up most of those moments. And so we don't think there is a need for those indicators, but they probably weren't great indicators to begin with, and we appreciate the input from people who helped guide us away from their use.

The other problems we have in use of the indicators are reliance on data going back to 1935, when the House journals only report words that go to a ruling and don't as a result report those instances in which a taking down process starts but doesn't go to completion. We have not yet gathered the energy to read the eloquent words of the Members from 1935 through 1984 in order to find all of those other instances and, as a result, when a Member of the steering committee asked that we report requests that words be taken town, we had before 1984 to assume that if they went to a ruling, there must have been a request. But what that does mean, as Mr. Bach points out, and he is correct in that, is that our earlier indicators on requests to take down are in fact underreporting what is likely to be there.

Page 37 of our first report shows words that actually went to a ruling, and what that does is push up the numbers in those earlier congresses. We will in future reports make sure that we always include that chart along with the request that words be taken down. The Member of the steering committee who had asked us to report words taken down was concerned with whether there was a difference between the requesting numbers and the voting numbers, and was trying to find out how many times the House managed not to take this process all the way to a vote. I think that although that is a good question, that indicator is always going to be a weak indicator for us until we can go back and actually read all of the congressional discourse.

If, however, Congress would like to put those years on line, we would be able to do this much more readily and the academic community would be extraordinarily grateful. In fact, if you would like to go back to the first Congress and put everything on line, we could push these indicators all the way back to, let's say Jefferson.

The second thing that is important about these indicators is the question that is raised by Mr. Wolfensberger in his statement to the committee for the record. Are we able to pick up enough in the words taken down index to make it an important measure. Are we missing a great deal, in other words by frowning on words ruled out of order. The one measure I trust here absolutely is that measure. That is the measure that gives us the confidence to say the first session of the 104th reached a high point, only slightly exceeded prior to that point in 1946; in other words, to say we don't need to assume that problems started in the 70s and got consecutively worse every year, culminating in the 104th. That is important because if you are looking for solutions, it suggests there isn't really a long-term problem here. There was a one-term aberration probably caused by reversal of majority-minority roles.

Mr. Wolfensberger raised the question, are we able to pick up those things that aren't taken down but could have been taken down. That is a very good question. Let me give you an answer. The process that we were able to observe because we were here talking with you that day was the taking down process that occurred in exactly the sort of environment that Mr. Wolfensberger is concerned about. That is the process in which the language of Mr. Lewis is taken down, but it is taken down in a sequence that had prior to his statement included six earlier allegations that the Speaker had lied. So presumably any of those earlier allegations could have been taken down. We pick up that incivility on our lying measure and we also pick up the two instances during that run up to the taking down process in which pejorative speech was used. So when "hue and cry" is used and when "berate" is used, those are picked up by another of our measures. We picked up the accusation of "cowardice" on our aspersion measure. So by that instance, our other measures are picking up things that are uncivil, were not taken down, in the case of lying could well have been taken down and in the other cases might not have been taken down but fall into our definition of incivility.

In other words, although we believe these imperfect measures we think they are capturing some things that are important but are going to require adjustments when we get into a moment such as the deliberation over impeachment. As a result, we are going to have to look at them in those contexts very cautiously.

I would like to finally address the other new indicators that we offered this year. We stated that legislative productivity and civility go hand in hand. That was very carefully written because, as you know, correlation is not causation. And we tried to signal the fact that we weren't trying to impute causation by using the word "correlate" and also by noting in our explanation, when we say name calling goes up with increased hours in session, we are positing all sorts of alternative explanations and don't know which is accurate.

One possibility with explaining why name calling goes up with increased hours in session is fatigue. People are just tired. Another is that long hours may reflect an inability to find consensus. Another is that less civility may necessitate longer hours to get more work done. Those are basically alternative causes posited for this correlation. So we don't know -- whether name calling is producing the drop in productivity, drop in productivity is producing the name calling, but we do know that they co-vary at a significant statistical level and we think that is interesting.

What you do when you have this kind of a situation is indicate the most plausible explanation. Is there any statistical technique to tease out the direction of causality? We are looking for the statistical technique but meantime we think it is at least plausible that name calling is going up as an indicator that productivity is falling and hence when you see name calling going up, it is a bad thing. So whichever is causing the other, name calling going up appears to be an indicator that something is not going well in the institution unless someone's goal is not to have productivity measured by number of joint resolutions passed and passage of measures. But it is correlation, not causation. We want to make sure we are very clear about that.

In sum, we are trying to develop measures that have all the difficulties that social scientific measures have in an imperfect universe without access to the historical data that we would like to take some of the strongest measures back as far as we would like. However, the measures do suggest a common diagnosis. The common diagnosis suggests that the first session of the 104th was an aberration. Whatever was going on was corrected. The institution did as it has historically done, as it did after 1946, and came back and adjusted. Also the beginnings of the 106th would suggest that the three days of heightened incivility over impeachment were an aberration.

In sum, I don't think there is an institutional problem, which doesn't mean that one ought not to be concerned about comity or that it is not desirable to reenforce it as a norm, which is what I think the Hershey retreats accomplish. Thank you.

Mr. Linder. Thank you very much. I thought your study was fascinating. I was curious to know in addition to dealing with the taking down process, if you analyze how many times points of order were raised against someone's speech.

Ms. Jamieson. We looked at points of order in our process of finding "House will be in order." Part of the problem is the computer search structure picks up too many things that are not actually germane. So we dropped it as an unreliable measure. It is a measure we plan to go back to when we have the time to check everything in context. What we are doing now with all of the language measures is going back into context to find out how often, for example, the word "lie" occurs in a sentence that says this is not a lie. In the context surrounding the taking down of Mr. Lewis' words, there is one Republican who stands up and says, what Mr. Gingrich did is not a lie. And so that word "lie" would get counted in the context of her saying, it was not. I would argue in the interim until we have checked all the contexts, however, that people don't ordinarily say it isn't a lie unless someone has accused it of being a lie, so that indicator suggests something uncivil is happening here. But we will try, once we are able to go back to context to check that as a measure. It wasn't reliable enough to trust the computer to do it.

Mr. Linder. Mr. Dreier.

Mr. Dreier. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. Thank you, Kathleen Jamieson. Nice to be with you again. Nice to have you here in the committee and sitting under the portrait of your former employer Claude Pepper. I wanted to follow on the discussion that we had on one issue. Did you actually look at the question of the chair admonishing Members in such a way that they said that they were getting close to the edge? When we discussed this before, I said simply saying the gentleman will suspend is not appropriate because maybe the place is just so packed and a Member would in fact be encouraged to stop talking because people had just come back from a recess and are in fact talking loudly. But when the chair proceeds with a statement that they would actually admonish Members, they were getting close to the edge, I wonder if that was included at all.

Ms. Jamieson. We had looked at it again as a computer based measure and had found it to be too inexact because when you simply search "admonish" you don't have enough other predictable words around it to always pull up those contexts. We had written in the first report, however, that analyses of the strong Speaker, a Speaker who is comfortable trying to dampen down tensions, and in that context had found a number of instances in which what ordinarily would have escalated it deescalated because the Speaker made that kind of move. We identified it as something that Speakers ought to be encouraged to do in appropriate moments, but we have not been able to trace it through the computer at this point.

Mr. Dreier. I just think that B you might think B you used the word "admonish." Thinking about some of the language that is used for those of us who have been presiding officers, you know, just debate is becoming personal. It is becoming close to violating the rules of the House. Those are the sorts of things that those of us who have presided have said in those instances and you might -- I mean, what I would think -- you might look at some examples beyond those I have just used and see if something comes up there.

Ms. Jamieson. If we could have the same few people chairing for long periods of time using the same language, this would be much easier. So that could be our second recommendation from an academic standpoint; we would like to have those people who are going to be Speakers pro tem either do it for life or develop a limited repertoire of those kinds of cautions.

Mr. Dreier. We have retired Mr. Walker, who did very well on that. I have pretty much retired since I have taken over the gavel on this committee. I don't think I have presided at all over in this Congress. Maybe once in a while when they couldn't find anybody else, they throw me up there. And Ray LaHood, as you pointed out, spends most of his time presiding over Congress. So we have gotten pretty close as we can with that.

Ms. Jamieson. And with your retirement the number of times someone says "the Member will suspend" has gone down.

Mr. Dreier. Thank you very much.

Mr. Linder. Mr. Sessions.

Mr. Sessions. Dr. Jamieson, I may be the only one on this committee that may -- I don't espouse the views of management, okay. Your page 10, where you talk about productivity and civility go hand in hand, I am skeptical or concerned that we equate productivity with numbers of bills that we pass. I am a Texan and we think that passing numbers of bills is bad and I would like to see you tell me or try and convince me why productivity and related passing bills, why passing numbers of bills would be considered productive?

Mr. Dreier. Would the gentleman yield before the question. I don't remember if you recall when we were discussing this, this whole issue came up.

Ms. Jamieson. I think it is a very good question. The way I would rephrase it is, is this fundamentally a liberal Democratic measure which assumes that passage of legislation is a positive indicator and if you didn't think you want more government, you probably wouldn't want more legislation passed unless you are passing it to put things back into the States, and so the question that I would ask of someone who makes that assumption is, Isn't in fact in the congresses that we have looked at, the dominating assumption of the Republicans that it is good to pass legislation because what the legislation is doing is taking Federal responsibilities and moving them back to the States, and so my assumption is that that is productivity by your definition. If your concern is to undo things that are done, you are going to have to pass legislation to accomplish this goal. So long term, once the Republicans have moved everything that they want to move to someplace else, this would be a much less reliable indicator. I think during the time that the Democrats are in charge, the Democrats would ordinarily define it as more likely an indicator overall than most Republicans would in most circumstances.

Mr. Dreier. Would the gentleman yield. I recall the Almanac of American Politics describing me when I first came to the Congress and said David Dreier didn't come to the Congress to pass bills. He came to repeal them. Well, it takes passage of legislation to repeal them and I think that is, you know, a very important point that needs to be made on this. So I think you are right, we need to get everything back to the States out of Washington as well as we can. I think this is a gauge that really is not appropriate.

Ms. Jamieson. The question I would ask the gentleman is what would a good gauge be for you?

Mr. Sessions. Well, I am not the PhD. I am simply suggesting to you that I am not sure productivity is an indicator and I politely disagree never with my chairman very often but --

Mr. Dreier. Never very often.

Mr. Sessions. Never very often, but I would suggest to you that for us to put that down is something that I very much disagree with and that I believe that even if you did say, well, the Republicans want to have productivity, it is still numbers oriented and it is a numbers game and I believe that our bill is going to be one for every 10 of a ratio. I just picked that out of the air or two out of a 10 and I just -- I would hope, doctor, that you would go back and perhaps offer some reevaluation because it tends to feed this productivity and I will tell you that in my opinion, numbers, people like to go home and quote numbers of bills they passed and all these kinds of things and I am trying to hold those numbers down. So I would -- I don't think it is a reasonable indicator.

Ms. Jamieson. I appreciate the concern. In fact, I wrote in a book called "Eloquence in the Electronic Age" that one of the pernicious things about the reliance on speech writers and the increase in speaking by legislators and Presidents is the assumption that a good speech has legislative proposals in it and as a result, that a lot of legislation was being proposed simply because we needed to have something to cap a speech with.

So I share your concern. We will make sure as we describe this as an indicator that we are clear about its limitations. We are searching for is an answer to this question: Why don't you want incivility in the institution? And one assumption has been that it is harder for people to get done what they want to get done in the institution and that legislation is one of the things they want to get done. The problem with this from my perspective, apart from a concern this is simply number driven and assumes that legislating is good, is that it is possible to pass a lot of trivial legislation and not pass the important legislation that concerns the country. And this measure won't pick anything of that up. In fact, it will reward you for passing a lot rather than passing what is right.

Mr. Sessions. That is more or less my point of a ratio. I am just suggesting to you that it appears as though we are interested in productivity that is based on the number of bills that you pass. And I don't have a better answer for you. I mean, I would have a tough time doing what you have done, and I have spent a good time in quantitative analysis during my years of looking at numbers and I think you have -- I mean, your job does not solve the problem. It quantifies the problem.

Ms. Jamieson. It was to find out whether by some indicator there was a problem. When we started this process there were press reports that said this problem had begun in the 70s and escalated dramatically every year culminating in the 104th and was getting worse in the second session of the 104^th. So we started out with one hypothesis which was it was just going to continue to escalate. Another hypothesis, was that this was aberrational. We did not know. What we tried to do was develop as many independent measures as we could while recognizing that one was the most highly reliable and that would be taken down and going to a ruling against the individual. But this is essentially a very early process from the scholarly community and as a result has all of the problems of social science and all of the problems of people trying to grapple for the first time with an issue.

We were very surprised to search the scholarly literature and find that none of this had been done. When I was asked to do this I thought I will go and find it. It is out there somewhere. We would find someone else's measures and perfect them. We have basically started from scratch and as a result are making false steps. I appreciate feedback because it helps us.

Mr. Sessions. The only place I may be able to help you, and once again people might disagree, is if you looked at numbers of votes that changed after the gavel went down, numbers of times a majority was not reached by the time the time expired but the gavel had not gone down. That is when the horse race starts. That is when a lot of contentious issues take place. That is when civility or arm twisting or some of these things -- and you might look at that and then go back and find something interesting about those votes. When it is 338 to 5, you know, that is not exactly a huge indicator but when there is not a consensus, that tells you where there is tension. But the productivity thing causes me huge unrest in my mind that that would be an indicator that we would accept as something that was something to look at.

Ms. Jamieson. Could I ask the Congressman a question? Does the joint resolution indicator cause you similar concerns?

Mr. Sessions. You know, I think you would have to -- I don't think so. But maybe Chairman Dreier has some bit of deference. If I think back how contentious those are, whether that is a good indicator, I can't really -- Mr. Chairman?

Mr. Dreier. I think that you should use as a gauge the turnaround time people have for answering the mail in their office. This issue of productivity is so far reaching and there is so many other aspects than actually time on the floor. I use that facetiously, but participation in committees. One of the things that we did on our forms was that we had attendance taking in committees so that could in fact be another gauge of productivity or participation was put out there.

Mr. Linder. Stopped proxy voting.

Mr. Dreier. And ended proxy voting. I will tell you it is no secret that the longer that we are the majority, the greater pressure that I have received from committee chairmen who have come to me pleading with me to put proxy voting back in place. And it has been tough. It is an ongoing battle but I think -- we have never had it in this committee, obviously, but I think this has been a good thing. I am just saying on the issue of productivity, it is so tough to gauge.

Mr. Sessions. If you are going to put productivity, one thing in the private sector that would be looked at is expense, expense ratio. So that may be something that you could go back and look at. It costs a lot of money to run this House. When this body is here at 1:00 in the morning I go down and file a bill and there are 25 people down there, that is an indication that we are spending overtime. I don't know the amount of -- the amount of money that it takes to run the place.

Mr. Dreier. It is important to note that our overall committee budgets are 10 percent below where they were in 1993, so that is while we have had some increases, they still are significantly low.

Mr. Sessions. I don't think there is a person in here that would disagree we are far more effective and efficient than we have ever been.

Mr. Dreier. One of the things we have always talked about in congressional reform is that efficiency is not something we are seeking as far as the process of law making because the founders wanted us to be deliberately inefficient as we proceed with this, but that Texas view reminds me of the line that we often use and that is if you are speaking to an audience and you are not in Washington, you say your life, liberty and property are safe when the United States Congress is not in session.

Mr. Sessions. There is truth to that. I live by two actually. One, my wife cut a deal with me, and that is unless you compromise, you bend my way, and then the old axiom we live by in our office is that beatings will continue until morale improves. Somewhere between the two of those.

Mr. Linder. Dr. Jamieson, will you be willing to accept questions in writing?

Ms. Jamieson. Yes, of course. Thank you for your help.

Mr. Linder. Thank you.

Mr. Dreier. Thank you very much.

Mr. Linder. I would also like to submit the testimony of Don Wolfensberger and Ms. Pryce for the record.

Mr. Linder. The next panel is Bob Walker, Stan Bach, Barbara Sinclair. Please come forward.

STATEMENT OF HON. BOB WALKER, FORMER CONGRESSMAN FROM THE STATE OF PENNSYLVANIA AND President OF THE WEXLER GROUP; DR. BARBARA SINCLAIR, HOFFENBERG PROFESSOR, DEPARTMENT OF POLITICAL SCIENCE, UCLA; AND DR. STANLEY BACH, SENIOR SPECIALIST, LEGISLATIVE PROCESS GOVERNMENT DIVISION, CRS

Mr. Linder. Our first witness is Dr. Stanley Bach. He is a Senior Specialist in the Legislative Process, Government and Finance Division of the Library of Congress' Congressional Research Service. He has been with the CRS since 1976, concentrating on the legislative process in the House and Senate, and has written extensively on the House Rules Committee. Dr. Bach, your prepared remarks will appear in the record. You are welcome to summarize or do whatever you would like.

STATEMENT OF STANLEY BACH

Mr. Bach. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and Members of the committee. It is, as always, a pleasure as well as an honor to appear before my very favorite congressional committee.

The committee staff asked me to take on a fairly technical task today; that was to look at the data presented in the three Annenberg Center reports.

Mr. Linder. May I interrupt for a second. I want to make a point for the record that while the four cosponsors of the retreat didn't wish to speak to the recommendations, we specifically asked some members of this panel to come and talk about some of the recommendations because the proposals had appeared in the press.

Mr. Bach. Because I am at CRS and we are barred by law from making recommendations to Members or even expressing opinions about recommendations, one of the things that the committee staff thought I might be able to contribute to the hearing is some observations on the data that are presented in the reports, how they were compiled, how they are presented, and what they may tell us about the state of civility in the House today or how that has changed over time.

So that is what I attempted to do in my prepared statement which I submitted to the committee a few days ago. And for one of the few times in my professional life I find myself virtually speechless because the questions that I raised in my statement, the specific methodological questions, Professor Jamieson has already spoken to, and I don't see any point in belaboring issues she has already addressed. But I said almost speechless. I do have several observations to make.

First, a couple of things occurred to me as I was listening. Although there may have been an addition to the vocabulary of aspersions, I also noticed, and was delighted to see, that the term "fatso" had not been used on the floor in more than a decade, which I suppose is progress of some kind, though I am not quite sure just exactly what kind.

Second, a random comment on the question of productivity. One of the things that we have all noticed, and, as a matter of fact, something that Barbara Sinclair has written about extensively, is the growth of omnibus legislation. So when you look at the numbers of measures passed, that is very deceptive because reconciliation bills and omnibus this, that, or other bills could very easily be broken down into enormous numbers of separate measures. Productivity, even if it captured what you want it to capture, is a very difficult thing to track over time because of changing congressional practices.

The third general observation I would like to make is that I think that the Annenberg Center reports demonstrate two things: first, how social science analysis can be brought to bear on issues of importance for policymakers, in this case to Members of Congress; but second, and something that Professor Jamieson mentioned and that I think every thoughtful social scientist recognizes, that sometimes the most interesting and the most important questions are the most difficult ones to try to get a handle on in an empirical way, especially in trying to develop data that give you any kind of quantitative way of assessing either the state of things at one point in time or how they have changed over a period of years.

So I have a great deal of admiration for what Professor Jamieson and her colleagues have been able to do and a great deal of sympathy with the difficulty of doing it. As I was just listening to some of the most recent exchanges, I also have an appreciation for why it might be fine to try to do some of the other things that have been suggested, but just how difficult it is as an empirical task to try to locate some of the events that you were talking about, and to try to develop those time series data in a reliable way.

Let me comment a little bit on what the data may tell us, because I was particularly struck by the one page from the latest report that I think has been redistributed to you today. As Professor Jamieson said, one of the questions is how things change and how serious a problem House may have. If you just look at the most solid data, which are the instances in which the chair has held that Members' words violated the norms of decorum in debate, one of the things that strikes me is that the 1940s and the 1950s were clearly much more contentious periods in the history of the House, at least by this measure. But then for the next 40 years when this House was debating issues such as civil rights legislation and the Vietnam War and other issues that divided politicians as well as the country so seriously, we saw very few instances in which it was necessary to carry the enforcement procedures of House rules on this issue, decorum in debate, to an ultimate ruling of the chair.

What we did see was the spike in the data in 1995. The obvious question, and one that I think provoked some of the discussions that led to the first Hershey conference, was whether we have a long-term problem here, and what the data are showing us so far is that apparently we do not. We have reverted very close to the status quo ante by all of the measures that the Annenberg reports document, both the strong measures and some of the weaker measures.

Interestingly, the only time when we saw a comparable spike was in 1946-- not after the year of a change in party control, but the year leading up to a change in party control. It is very difficult to avoid the most obvious inference, which is that essentially the same kind of thing was going on. If that is the case, then as the House and as this committee asks if there a problem and what if anything the House should do about it, I think there are two questions you might consider.

The first report from 1997 lays out, I think in a very useful way, the variety of factors that have given rise to concerns about the state of civility not only in the House but in the society more broadly. So while one line of argument is that the problem, to the extent there has been a problem has been an internal affair, the other line of argument is that it has been a reflection of broader societal trends.

I don't know how you separate out those two things. But as you ask if we need to make formal changes in the House's rules, I think you do need to look more carefully at whether you are trying to address a problem that is susceptible to a fix by any changes in formal rules or the practices of the chair. As for the more informal approaches that have been discussed here and at Hershey, I don't think anyone would argue that those are not ultimately good.

Finally, let me just say that, in a sense, the data, whatever they show, however strong or weak they are, may not ultimately be very important. If the Members of the House perceive there to be a problem, then it seems to me that there is a problem, regardless of whether even the most thoughtful and imaginative attempts to capture it empirically aren't able to do so. I think the attempt to devise a catalogue of words which, when used in debate, might not justify an adverse ruling from the chair but still increase the level of animosity among Members, that is very difficult to capture but I think it reflects what you see going on on the floor so very often: when Members are questioning the intentions and the motives of their colleagues instead of focusing on the philosophical and policy differences which, as all the Members who have spoken today have emphasized, is the appropriate role of these intense debates on the floor.

With that I will stop. Thank you.

Mr. Linder. Thank you.

Mr. Bach. May I add just one thing. One of the issues that has been mentioned from time to time is the difficulty that Members have in getting to know each other. In this regard, I would just like to call to the attention of the committee a program that CRS has been involved in for some years now, which is an orientation program for new Members that we have conducted in Williamsburg. I think Congresswoman Pryce attended it. I mention it because it is a bipartisan program. It is also a program that includes spouses and children, and one of the side benefits that we think comes out of it is an opportunity for the new Members to get to know each other.

As a matter of fact, one of the most useful sessions that have been held at that program was a session conducted by your former colleague, Tony Beilenson, and Dolores Beilenson, who would come down and meet privately, no staff in attendance, with the new Members and their wives to talk about what it is like to be a Member of the House, what kinds of pressures congressional service puts on marriages and families, and how to try to cope with it. I know we owe a debt to Tony Beilenson for doing that, and I think that kind of program can be useful to get new Members to recognize that they may be dealing with opponents but not with enemies during debate on the floor. We look forward to having the continued support of the House Administration Committee and the leadership of both parties if we are to be able to continue doing these programs in the future. So much for the commercial.

Thank you.

Mr. Linder. Thank you. Dr. Barbara Sinclair is the Hoffenberg Professor of American Politics at University of California, Los Angeles. She received her PhD from the University of Rochester, has published numerous articles and books on the Congress and has won the Richard Fenno prize for the outstanding book published on legislative studies and the D.B. Hardeman Prize for the outstanding book on the United States Congress. Thank you for coming and welcome.

STATEMENT OF BARBARA SINCLAIR

Ms. Sinclair. Thank you for inviting me. Professor Jamieson's report tempers the prevalent view that recent years have seen a steep and unrelieved decline in civility. Her data show it is not that bad. Still, the evidence really is incontrovertible, that the House in the 90s is a less civil place than the House in, say, the 50s. Comity, civility, mutual respect and even friendliness used to be more common in the House.

If the House is a less civil place, is that a problem? I think in several respects it is. Public confidence in Congress, seldom very high, is certainly going to be undermined further by name calling and other displays of incivility. The problem in part is the House's worst moments often make the best TV news stories, so notable instances of incivility on the floor tend to powerfully reinforce the public's negative views. To the extent that incivility and even hostility making serving in the House less attractive I think that is a problem as well. If the House becomes a place where only the most belligerent are willing to make a career, the consequences for public support and policy are likely to be problematical. So the question, isn=t B is civility valuable and should it be fostered? Of course it should. Rather, the question is how should it be encouraged and what trade-offs should one and should one not be willing to make to further civility.

I agree with Professor Jamieson that civility and strong partisanship are not mutually exclusive. Still, when the parties are strongly polarized and the divergent policy views are intensely held, as is the case now, civility is harder to maintain.

A very brief look at the history of the House in the post World War II era I think sheds some light on the likely trade-offs. The evidence suggests the House was at its high point in terms of comity in the 50s and early 60's. This was a period in which partisan differences were blurred. Although nominally controlled by Democrats, the House was really often dominated by a conservative coalition of Republicans and southern Democrats. Committee chairs chosen solely on the basis of seniority were strong and largely independent of their party. Rules, norms, and a lack of resources such as staff constrained the participation of rank and file Members. Much of the legislative process took place behind closed doors.

All these traits probably contributed to civility in the House but some certainly at considerable cost. The opportunity for rank and file Members to participate meaningfully in the legislative process either in committee or on the floor was tightly constrained. Accountability was meager. Committee chairs, although nominally chosen by the majority party, could not be held accountable by their fellow party Members. And with the blurring of party lines, and the weakness of party leaders, the public could not easily hold anybody accountable for the functioning of the House.

The 70s and 80s saw the House undergo a series of reforms and adaptations that resulted in more opportunities for rank and file participation, more openness, and more accountability. Committees and committee leaders became less independent and more responsive to their party caucuses. Majority party leaders were granted the powers and resources to enable them to truly lead the House so long as they had the support of a relatively homogenous party membership.

I have undertaken this brief review to lay the groundwork for my argument about what should and should not be done to promote civility. Most particularly, I want to argue against making changes that would undermine the majority rule character of the House and thus potentially make the body unworkable. Proposal one under action steps, which the Members were careful not to discuss B and it is not by any means clear in what they are proposing, but if that were to give the minority new rights in House rules, it could very well produce undesirable side effects. How do you give the minority new rights in the realm of legislative scheduling and floor procedure choices without giving them new ways of obstructing the majority?

The House is a large body that depends on the rules. It can't really rely on informal accommodation and if it tries, it could easily become incapable of making decisions. The majority is responsible for what happens on its watch and it needs the institutional powers to allow it to prevail when it commands a majority of the entire House.

Now, the majority party would be very well advised to be flexible and accommodating to the minority party and in all those things that were talked about, scheduling, floor procedure, resources such as committee staff and committee ratios. After all we are in a period of close party balances in the House. It seems to me very likely that control will shift back and forth, probably with neither party having very large majorities. So it would be in the self-interest of the current minority to set precedents of generosity. And I think in addition the informal action steps, especially those to promote greater communication between the two leaderships and also among Members across party lines are certainly to be encouraged. I also recommend again considering the three weeks in Washington, one week at home scheduling option. Members don't now have the time to get to know each other the way that they used to be able to and certainly not across party lines, and fewer harried and jet lagged Members might contribute to civility as well.

In conclusion, I would urge you to be careful about making changes in House rules. It took the House until almost the beginning of this century to establish in rules the rights of the majority to work its will. Other barriers to a reasonably cohesive majority working its will that had grown up during the committee government era was swept away by the reforms of the 70s and adaptations of the 80s. Don't sacrifice the House's majority rule character in an attempt to foster civility. The House is large in Membership and confronts a big and complex workload. Undermining the power of the majority to work its will undermines the capacity of the House to legislate.

Mr. Linder. Thank you, Dr. Sinclair. Bob Walker served here for 20 years and had the reputation of being one of the most respected and decent Members to have served. Dr. Jamieson, I would like you to know that in 20 years of fierce rhetorical combat, he never had his words taken down one time.

STATEMENT OF HON. BOB WALKER

Mr. Walker. Thank you. I am delighted to be here. Since I live only 20 miles from Hershey, I feel like I am here supporting the local economy as well. I do.

I also do reflect that there were moments a decade, a decade and a half ago when I was out doing my thing on the floor when people would not have envisioned me appearing as a civility expert here. But I have had somewhat of a chance to reflect on some of those days in the House and where the House is going now. It seems to me that the uniqueness of the institution does mean that we have to treat some of these issues in ways different than you would typically do it in other kinds of circumstances.

I start with the belief that legislative civility is in large part something which requires an understanding of the roles that the two parties play within the legislative process. Ultimately, the role of the majority is to govern. The role of the minority is to become the majority. And if in fact what you do is structure the House around some understanding of those relative roles, then you have enhanced the chances for civility.

What breaks down civility is when, for example, the majority begins to use its power in a way to shut down the minority's ability to make their legitimate points and if you have closed rules towards the minority and the minority can't offer what they think is in their best interest to put on the floor during a debate, that is going to break down civility.

If in fact you use proxy votes, and I know the pressures that the committee is under at times but the proxy voting that took place in committees meant that the minority even though they made their points legitimately in the committee, often had their votes taken away from them at the last minute when proxy votes were brought into play when the people who were voting had no role in the deliberations. It seems to me B when you use rules and procedures that stifle the debate you break down the civility of the majority against the minority.

On the other hand, the minority also has some responsibilities. And when the minority attempts to circumvent the rules to prevent legitimate legislative action, the result there is typically bad as well. For instance, challenging the ruling of the chair to make a policy point. You know, everybody knows that the rules, that the one way you can usually get a vote is to challenge the ruling of the chair. But I remember when we were in the minority, there were many times when we had policy matters come up where we just wanted to get a vote, get any vote that would show where we stood on the policy issue, and we would go to Bob Michel, who was the leader, and we would say to him we want to challenge the ruling of the chair. Invariably Bob Michel asked one question. He said when the chair makes his ruling, is the chair going to be correct. Oh, yeah, we would say, the chair is going to be correct, but that is not the point, we are going to get a vote on this. He said, not with my vote you are not. Because, he said, if you have a legitimate place where the chair is not correct, fine. If you found some new precedent that needs to be set, that is fine. But if what you are doing is basically challenging the chair on something where the chair is correct, I am not going to vote with you. Guess what? Most of the time we never had the vote because if the leader wasn't going to be with us on the vote, it would be futile. So there was a sense of legislative responsibility there that the minority took that I think is important as well.

My point is that really strong views can be presented opposite to one another within a process where there is some respect for the rules and where the role of each party in a debate is understood. And I even think that that kind of thing encourages more bipartisanship. If in fact you have to work within a rules process and you know what is expected of you, the chances of reaching across the aisle, particularly in circumstances where the margin between the parties are pretty close, I think it is enhanced. When you reach across the aisle, the chances of improving the civility are increased. If you try to put together artificial mechanisms that call for bipartisanship and are bipartisan committees, the result of that is often gridlock which serves neither party very well.

And let me speak on the example of 1994, which has been cited as one of the years where civility kind of broke down in the House, but a piece of that was the fact that early in the Congress, the Republicans came with this political agenda, our Contract with America, and we attempted in those early days to have open rules. Some of you served in all of that. The problem was the minority decided to use the open rules against the schedule and, you know, use the process for untold amendments and to draw it out and to prevent it. Well, the result in the majority was that the leadership came under tremendous pressure to shut down the open rules. In my view everybody lost. The fact was we didn't have the good kind of debate on some very important policy issues that were being debated at the beginning of that Congress. And the fact is that it opened the door for majority committee Members to begin to say, I think we ought to shut down these rules and force the process through.

I think everybody loses in that kind of circumstances. The bipartisanship tends to break down. The other end of bipartisan deliberations over tough issues is there is often at the end of that kind of bipartisan deliberation an attempt to end run the legitimate rules in order to get this bipartisan committee thing accomplished. And in my view, that often works against not the majority but the minority. If you do an end run around the legitimate procedures, then in the end it is going to be the minority that will suffer the most from it.

The problem with trying to take scheduling and ratios and rules out of the hands of the majority is also that you create a lot of unrealistic expectations. Mr. Dreier and I know from serving on the reform committees to some extent there were unrealistic expectations. We were in the minority at that time and we believed that what we were going to get out of it was a way to get a better chance to win the daily battles. The fact is you have an unrealistic expectation that grows out of that. You also end up with the majority believing that it is a way to co-op the minority, that if you can simply get them into the room and get them to agree to a bunch of stuff, you can co-op them on a daily basis and that is totally unrealistic as well. I don't think it necessarily works. It takes both parties out of their real roles and thereby the unrealized expectations can lead not to less but rather more incivility and I think that is bad for the institution.

The real challenge it seems to me that faces the House is to adapt to the realities of the modern era and the modern House. We have heard the discussion before, that the Members have very little chance to get to know each other very well. I think that is a piece of all of this. The fact that you live on airplanes creates all kinds of pressures within the system. Having sat in the leadership room for some time watching the scheduling problems that we faced and knowing that that creates probably more anger among Members than nearly any other thing you do, I know that living on airplanes is a very tough thing to deal with. What we would end up with every week, we would have Members who came to us, both majority and minority, whose daughter had a recital on Friday morning and they were trying to get home for it and if you let the session go late into the night on Thursday, they weren't going to be able to catch their plane to get home for the Friday recital. It is a very personal, very important thing and the fact is when you had to have that late session on Thursday, that Member ended up being very, very angry and you had all kinds of circumstances of that type rise all the time.

The people on the West Coast have one kind of schedule. The people on the East Coast have another kind of schedule, both of which the leadership tries to accommodate and never gets it quite right and you end up with angry people.

I also think that the modern information age where we are all capable of getting information from all kinds of sources. Just the nature of the flood of information, has made little fiefdoms that we run on Capitol Hill. We built the walls even higher around these little fiefdoms, in other words, your staff and the things that you personally control, and as a result those walls mean that the staff is more powerful in terms of the Member. It means that there is less relationship among the Members. Then you put together with that the massive schedule demands and everybody on the Hill has their own personal universe that keeps them from seeing other things in a broader context and I think that is a problem. In the end I think you have to create more interaction because that is crucial to civility. I will also tell you that staff often gets in the way of creating that kind of interaction because staff says, well, no, you have got important things to do back home. You can't stay in town this weekend to do Hershey or whatever it is, that you have more important items on your agenda. You have a campaign to run. You have all these kinds of things and it is a problem.

So I was asked finally to give some acceptable areas of bipartisan cooperation that I think could be done. Let me give you a few that come to mind. I think that you have to have open rules even at the expense of committee deals. Having been a committee chairman, I know how important it is to get legislation through a committee by cutting deals within the committee and then trying to hold those deals together through the process. Those committees come to you all the time and say to you that you have got to give us a closed rule in order to hold together this bill. Well, I have got to say to you I think in the end that the open rules and the debate and the House working its will is vastly more important than any given set of deals that happen within the committee.

This one is a favorite of mine, and I know it goes against the grain of a number of people, including maybe some of you, but I think that leadership PACs have been a detriment to civility for several reasons. I think that they have increased the partisanship. They have increased the internalizing of how you do work. They have created kind of cults of personality within the parties, thereby dividing the parties themselves. It is hard for leaders to work across the aisle when they can't even deliver their own party. So the more you create the cults of personalities of people who are beholden to other people because of contributions to leadership PACs the more of what you do is create an atmosphere in which you can't get work done and where Members are at each other's throats both internally within the parties as well as externally. I think that has been a bad thing.

I would say that one of the things you guys ought to do is figure out a way to have more travel with Members and particularly international travel, where you all go on a similar mission because the thing that international travel does is it means that you are all Americans going on a similar mission and the camaraderie that develops in doing that is absolutely beneficial. The best friends I had across the aisle tended to be the people I traveled with and the problem has become that Members are so afraid that the press reports will be negative on the travel that they don't do it. Well, you know, you may have to figure out ways that assure that if you have consultants that are using travel in campaigns against other Members, that those consultants don't work for the party anymore. You may have to decide that you are -- that the parties and the individuals within the parties are not going to attack each other for travel and you may even want to make the trips open to the press to travel with you so that there are people who are legitimately reporting on what is actually happening on those trips. But the most important thing is to get Members traveling together so that they know each other better.

I would argue that there ought to be more formality in your processes and less informality. I think it has been a bad thing on the floor to have people addressing each other by their first names in the debate, that there were reasons for referring to people as the gentleman from California and the gentleman from Georgia. It meant that you were acting on the floor in your roles as a representative. And when you begin to personalize a lot of these things within the debate, what you do is detract from the ability to then separate out the personalities when it gets mean. And so I think the chair ought to enforce some of the rules that contribute to formality within the process.

Finally, I think that civility absolutely requires a respect for minority rights and a respect for majority prerogatives; if throughout the process you have respect for the rights of the minority but also so that the minority has respect for the majority prerogatives that you end up with a more civil process.

Mr. Linder. Thank you very much. One of the first good lessons I learned when I first came here, I don't remember who told it but he said get control of your schedule because he said your scheduler will get you scheduled and their job is done. You still have to show up. They will schedule you and you need to get control of it. Dr. Bach, you were here as a staffer during Watergate. You were here right after Watergate.

Mr. Bach. During Watergate too.

Mr. Dreier. Barbara was a fellow during Jim Wright's.

Mr. Linder. I wonder about the relative tensions that you felt during the Watergate hearings and the impeachment hearings.

Mr. Walker. I have a hard time reflecting on the impeachment thing because not being internal. I do know there was a lot of tension on the Hill during the Watergate period. There is no doubt that you had a lot of tension. It did not seem that it spilled over into the deliberative process within the Congress. Now, were Members angry with each other? Were there highly partisan feelings during that time? Yes. But it was not something where you saw a lot of spillover into the deliberations within the committees and within the House. I am sure there were incidents that I don't recall specifically, but the main thing that affected the Congress at that time was it was a very, very tense period. Tensions were so thick you could cut them.

Mr. Bach. I wasn't at CRS at the time, but I was on the Hill during Watergate and actually sat in on some of the Judiciary Committee meetings on impeachment. There were some very strong partisans on the committee and some fairly intemperate exchanges, as I recall. What did strike me as I was watching the debate last year compared to the debate in the Judiciary Committee in 1974 is what a difference there was in the tenor of the debate. I found the debate last year to be much more combative than I remember the debate having been when the Judiciary Committee in 1974 also was debating articles of impeachment.

What do you attribute the difference to? I really don't know. The television cameras were there in both cases. Perhaps Members were responding to the cameras in different ways. Perhaps it was a different political circumstance. You recall by the time the Judiciary Committee in 1974 began to actually deliberate on articles, it was not a straight party line issue. So that may have had something to do with the difference.

Ms. Sinclair. I wasn't here during the Watergate period.

Mr. Linder. One more question I have. That is, one of the things when I was first elected in Georgia in 1974, I took it upon myself to learn the rules. I was always struck by how few people knew the rules and how much of an advantage you have on the floor if you know the rules. If we could find some way for people to get convinced that that was a good idea to study the rules and learn them, it would be helpful in terms of discourse. Any comments?

Mr. Walker. The one observation I would make is I think a lot of things that take place on the floor often happen because the people operating are scared. For many Members it is very difficult to go down to the floor and make a speech and engage in debate and if you come up against somebody who is particularly good and is coming after you, people don't like to admit it but they are scared and they don't know exactly how this is going to play and they are in unknown territory and then if they don't know the rules besides and are relying upon somebody else to continue to brief them, they are in real trouble. I have seen committee chairmen really almost panic at times because they are in uncharted territory and the staff can't give them the information quickly enough to keep them out of trouble, and that then leads to all kinds of floor related problems.

The answer is, yeah, I always thought it served me well. One of the things that always served me well in the debate was the fact if I knew some little gimmick that was perfectly legit within the rules that I could use to my advantage, it helped me tremendously.

Mr. Bach. Or the fear that Mr. Walker had something in his pocket.

Mr. Walker. Precisely. I used to show up every once in a while with the rule book and you know I didn't have anything at all in mind, but I just kind of flopped it down on the table and they thought I had something in mind.

Ms. Sinclair. Probably just a smile would have done it.

Mr. Dreier. We have done this to help Members and it has been -- in fact, we circulated this at the Hershey retreat and there were a number of people who talked about it. Actually I guess it was in not Hershey. It was at our Williamsburg retreat that we had and I think it has been helpful.

Mr. Bach. Can I comment on this question for just a minute, Mr. Dreier? I feel a little bit like Mr. Houghton when he was talking about throwing stones at people who live in glass houses. If everybody and all their staff knew the rules very well, I would be out of a job.

Mr. Goss. You have no fear.

Mr. Bach. I would like to call attention not only to the book that Mr. Dreier is holding up, but also to the parliamentary outreach program that this committee developed under Mr. Solomon's chairmanship, to try to make staff more well informed. We at CRS also try to do something similar. The difficulty is in trying to do something like that not for staff but for Members.

Mr. Dreier. Before we complete the hearing, I wanted to get to some of the specifics that I tried to at the very beginning which are in this Roll Call article and to get your comments on. First, and I am quoting from the news conference, it says, the principal recommendation which grew out of the discussion groups at the retreat is that Republican and Democratic leaders establish a bipartisan committee that would review institutional matters of the House such as schedules and the ratios on committees. It goes on to have a recommendation. You sort of alluded to this, Mr. Walker. Increase coordination between Democratic and GOP leadership, including bipartisan leadership meetings and consultation on scheduling for Congress. Establishment of a code of honor for Members that will include ground rules for communication between lawmakers. And then bipartisan service activities intended to establish Congress as a participant in the local community, establishment of a bipartisan policy forum, improved orientation for freshmen, including mentorship for incoming Members. Tony Hall mentioned this.

These are the proposals that came forward and I assume that some or all of them are going to be discussed by the leaders of the retreat, but specifically you mentioned again the scheduling, but on committee ratios and then on this code of honor question, do you all have any comments on those?

Mr. Walker. Well, with regard to schedule, the fact is it would be nice if you could have some cooperation between the leaderships on scheduling questions but in the end, they are so difficult and they involve all 435 Members, someone has to take responsibility for them. And you know, one of the responsibilities that falls to the majority is they are going to have to make the call on it. So consultation is a good thing. I think some bipartisan leadership meetings are good things to do simply to maintain some communication, but in the end there is no group -- bipartisan group that can get together that can decide on things like committee ratios. I mean, if I were a part of a minority coming in, one of the first things I would do is decide the committee ratio and the Rules Committee ought to be 5-4 or something like that, to put the chairman in a position of having to make virtually every decision. You obviously can't do that. You have to have a committee that allows you to govern here. The same thing with other committees that have responsibilities. I just don't think that determining ratios lends itself very well to an equal bipartisan committee. Can there be discussions about it in advance of the majority doing it? Sure, but in the end it is the majority responsibility.

Mr. Dreier. This code of honor thing?

Mr. Walker. The code of honor thing, I think that part of the problems that you sometimes get into on the House floor are by people just not knowing what it is that is expected of them. So if there was some way of making Members more aware of what is expected of them as Members, that is probably a good thing. Whether or not you need a code of honor or whether or not you just need better instruction of the expectations that are already written in the rules and procedures, I am not certain. I think a lot of people get themselves in trouble on the floor simply because they don't know what is expected.

Mr. Dreier. It is a very important point that we do have some rules that are in effect and as you observed are not enforced. Just one little one that sort of irks me today, we all are charging towards the 21st century but I bet at this moment I have several colleagues sitting engaged in telephone conversations right in the middle of the House floor on cellular telephones. That is something that we just very rarely enforce. I feel it should be and needs to be. A lot of people say I didn't know you weren't supposed to do this. You all have any comments on some of the specific proposals?

Ms. Sinclair. I talked a bit about some of the notions about scheduling and the like. But I think B and it is very unclear as to what is envisioned B but I do think as you mentioned before the notion that you could end up raising expectations in a way that cannot be fulfilled and therefore leading, if anything, to more hard feelings is a problem, because there is no way in which you can run the House as a total participatory democracy. Doesn't work too well on the Senate side. The House is a lot bigger.

Mr. Bach. Let me just make one observation about scheduling. There are really two dimensions to that problem. One dimension is when will the House meet, and the second is what business the House will transact while it is meeting and how long it will meet. I think we have seen the difficulty of trying to deal with the question of when the House should meet with all the discussions that have taken place about how to make the House more family friendly. The problem is that what would be a very friendly schedule for a Member from California would not be a particularly friendly schedule for a Member from nearby Pennsylvania.

Mr. Dreier. It is impossible to have any kind of schedule that is friendly with California.

Mr. Bach. Professor Sinclair spoke about the notion of having a three weeks on, one week off schedule which might be good for Members who have a long, difficult commute. But for Members whose districts are nearby, there is a real appeal to the Tuesday-Thursday schedule. So you have conflicting interests that don=t break down along party lines. This breaks down along regional lines.

Mr. Dreier. Thank you very much.

Mr. Linder. Mr. Goss, any comments.

Mr. Goss. No, thank you. Being fair, I will yield to Mr. Reynolds.

Mr. Linder. Mr. Reynolds.

Mr. Reynolds. I thank the panel and I also want to let you know because our chairman wrote the introduction to this, I carry it 24 hours a day with me.

Mr. Dreier. Very smart man. Very smart man.

Mr. Walker. I might say I thought his comments today in the course of earlier today were right on target with regard to where some of the problems lie. Thank you.

Mr. Linder. Thank you all very much.

[Whereupon, at 12:15 p.m., the subcommittee was adjourned.]

House Committee on Rules
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