While President Cleveland was successfully asserting his executive authority, the House of Representatives, too, was trying to assert its authority; but its choice of means was such that it was badly beaten and was reduced to a state of humble subordination from which it has never emerged.Its traditional procedure was arranged on the theory that Congress ought to propose as well as to enact legislation, and to receive recommendations from all quarters without preference or discrimination.Although the Constitution makes it the right and duty of the President to "recommend to their consideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient," measures proposed by the Administration stand on the same footing under the rules as those proposed by the humblest citizen of the United States.In both cases, they are allowed to reach Congress only in the form of a bill or resolution introduced by a member of Congress, and they go on the files without any distinction as to rank and position except such as pertains to them from the time and order in which they are introduced.Under the rules, all measures are distributed among numerous committees, each having charge of a particular class, with power to report favorably or adversely.Each committee is constituted as a section of the whole House, with a distribution of party representation corresponding to that which exists in the House.
Viewed as an ideal polity, the scheme has attractive features.In practice, however, it is attended with great disadvantages.
Although the system was originally introduced with the idea that it would give the House of Representatives control over legislative business, the actual result has been to reduce this body to an impotence unparalleled among national representative assemblies in countries having constitutional government.In a speech delivered on December 10, 1885, William M.Springer of Illinois complained: "We find ourselves bound hand and foot, the majority delivering themselves over to the power of the minority that might oppose any particular measures, so that nothing could be done in the way of legislation except by unanimous consent or by a two-thirds vote." As an instance of legislative paralysis, he related that "during the last Congress a very important bill, that providing for the presidential succession...was reported from a committee of which I had the honor to be a member, and was placed on the calendar of the House on the 21st day of April, 1884; and that bill, which was favored by nearly the entire House, was permitted to die on the calendar because there never was a moment, when under the rules as they then existed, the bill could be reached and passed by the House." During the whole of that session of Congress, the regular calendar was never reached.
"Owing to the fact that we could not transact business under the rules, all business was done under unanimous consent or under propositions to suspend the rules upon the two Mondays in each month on which suspensions were allowed." As a two-thirds majority was necessary to suspend the rules, any considerable minority had a veto power.
The standing committees, whose ostensible purpose was to prepare business for consideration, were characterized as legislative cemeteries.Charles B.Lore of Delaware, referring to the situation during the previous session, said: "The committees were formed, they met in their respective committee rooms day after day, week after week, working up the business which was committed to them by this House, and they reported to this House 8290bills.They came from the respective committees, and they were consigned to the calendars of this House, which became for them the tomb of the Capulets; most of them were never heard of afterward.From the Senate there were 2700 bills....Nine tenths of the time of the committees of the Forty-eighth Congress was wasted.We met week after week, month after month, and labored over the cases prepared, and reported bills to the House.They were put upon the calendars and there were buried, to be brought in again and again in succeeding Congresses."William D.Kelley of Pennsylvania bluntly declared: "No legislation can be effectually originated outside the Committee on Appropriations, unless it be a bill which will command unanimous consent or a stray bill that may get a two-thirds vote, or a pension bill." He explained that he excepted pension bills "because we have for several years by special order remitted the whole subject of pensions to a committee who bring in their bills at sessions held one night in each week, when ten or fifteen gentlemen decide what soldiers may have pensions and what soldiers may not."The Democratic party found this situation extremely irritating when it came into power in the House.It was unable to do anything of importance or even to define its own party policy, and in the session of Congress beginning in December, 1885, it sought to correct the situation by amending the rules.In this undertaking it had sympathy and support on the Republican side.
