Path: bloom-picayune.mit.edu!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!americast.com!americast.com!americast-post
Newsgroups: americast.wpost
From: americast-post@AmeriCast.Com
Organization: American Cybercasting
Approved: americast-post@AmeriCast.com
Subject: Plan to Reform Congress Called Act of 'Tough Love'<By Guy Gugliotta<Washington
Date: Fri, 20 Nov 92 04:42:00 EST
Message-ID: <37.1992Nov20.044200@AmeriCast.com>

Plan to Reform Congress Called Act of 'Tough Love'<By Guy
Gugliotta<Washington Post Staff Writer=

Many Americans think congressional reform is easy: Freeze pay,
cut staff, close the bank, close the gym, close the barber shop,
get rid of the limos and limit the number of terms each lawmaker
can serve. The hacks and public trough feeders will disappear,
leaving behind a dedicated army of citizen-legislator worker
bees.

Wrong, say a pair of Washington-based scholars. Reforming
Congress is difficult, contentious and far more complicated than
messing with what the Brookings Institution's Thomas Mann calls
"cosmetic and symbolic" matters such as perks and term limits.
Fix Congress properly, Mann said, and "over time pressure for
term limits will dissipate."

Mann and Norman J. Ornstein, of the American Enterprise Insti-
tute, yesterday released the first of a series of reports on
"Renewing Congress," a foundation-funded effort to examine close-
ly and make recommendations for an institution that many Ameri-
cans love to hate.

Fresh from an election that will put a Democrat in the White
House for the first time in 12 years and put 110 new members in
the House, Mann saw "a unique opportunity to make Congress more
effective, but also to reestablish its credibility."

The Mann-Ornstein effort was spun from a slowly developing reform
movement within Congress itself. Both Mann and Ornstein have fre-
quently provided expert testimony during Capitol Hill hearings on
proposed reforms, and some of their work is expected to be used
by Congress in the future.

The Renewing Congress Project seeks to confront Congress's major
structural failings: a diffuse power structure, proliferation of
subcommittees, excessive staff, multiple obligations for members,
wasted time and a lack of deliberation and real debate.

Yesterday's Mann-Ornstein report focuses on the House, suffering,
all sides agree, from rampant federalism - so many poles of power
that decision-making moves at a snail's pace, if it moves at all.
To attack the problem, the report focused on two types of system-
ic change: one that would tinker with power relationships within
the House, and another that would cut and paste House structures
in hopes of streamlining the whole.

The basic tenet, Ornstein said, is that "the power of party
leaders must be strengthened" in order to enhance the House's
ability to formulate an agenda and carry it through. The report
proposes several changes that would consolidate more power in the
hands of the House speaker or his designates and, in many cases,
move it away from committee chairmen.

The report suggests setting up a 16-member Majority Agenda Com-
mittee chaired by the House majority leader and dominated by the
speaker's appointees. The committee would set up a schedule for
each session, establishing priorities and setting timetables.

The report also proposes that the speaker be allowed to proclaim
vacant any committee chair at any time during the Congress, set-
ting the stage for a vote by the majority caucus. This, the re-
port said, would be "an important tool to force chairs to pay
close attention to the leadership and to the caucus."

On structural matters, the report took the line that the House
could get along better with less: fewer subcommittees, smaller
conference committees, fewer committee and subcommittee assign-
ments. The report recommended cutting personal staff from 18 to
15, eliminating individual members' staff from all committees and
phasing out four select committees: Aging; Hunger; Children,
Youth and Families; Narcotics Abuse and Control.  The report also
sought to limit the role of proxy voting in committee and to re-
quire that attendance be taken at committee meetings. It also
suggested that there be full-scale "Oxford-style" debate once or
twice a week on what Mann described as "the larger issues of the
day."

Ornstein said he had "no illusions" that the substance of the re-
port "will be universally embraced," but he added, "We expect it
to have weight and momentum.

"It's clearly done with some respect for the institution," Orn-
stein said. "I call this report 02:29 11-20C9999-----

Copyright 1992, The Washington Post.  This story is from the
Washington Post's Capitol Edition On-Line and is not to be ar-
chived or redistributed.

For more information, send-email to American Cybercasting Cor-
poration (usa@AmeriCast.COM)