Leadership Tries to Restrain Fiefs in New Congress

From The New York Times:

Less than 24 hours after taking over as speaker, Representative Nancy Pelosi summoned the new chairmen of five committees with responsibility for various aspects of Iraq policy to her office to review and coordinate plans for hearings and inquiries.

The gathering on Friday would have been unthinkable when Democrats last controlled the House. In the days before the 1994 Republican takeover, all-powerful Democratic chairmen ruled their committees with impunity, doing what they wanted, when they wanted, with little regard to the views of the speaker or others in the upper ranks.

Now the new Democratic leaders of the House and Senate want to avoid a return to that era by forging a working relationship with the men and women who will actually write the bills and lead the Congressional investigations. Top lawmakers acknowledge that finding a way to keep the overarching goals of the party from clashing with the objectives of the independent chairmen will be crucial to keeping Democratic control from spiraling out of control.

[T]he delegation of such power to the chairmen came with a price. Republicans derided Democrats as arrogant and pushed the image of out-of-touch Democrats as a campaign slogan, riding it and Democratic gaffes to majority status in 1994.

Once installed, the new Republican leadership moved quickly to centralize power in the offices of speaker, majority leader and whip. They stripped chairmen of the power to control their own legislation, enacted term limits and forced prospective chairmen to plead their case with the leadership and bolster it with a record of campaign contributions.

Incoming Democrats said Republicans went too far in diminishing the authority of chairmen and fostered arrogance at the leadership level.

Now Democrats say they hope to strike a more productive balance, giving chairmen some leeway as long as they operate in concert with their fellow committee leaders and with the leadership’s approval.