Washington University
Emergence of Legislative Institutions: Standing Committees in the House and Senate, 18101825
Author(s): Gerald Gamm and Kenneth Shepsle
Source: Legislative Studies Quarterly, Vol. 14, No. 1 (Feb., 1989), pp. 39-66
Published by: Washington University
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GERALD GAMM
KENNETH SHEPSLE
Harvard University
Emergence of Legislative Institutions:
Standing Committees in the
House and Senate, 1810-1825
By the 1820s the federal government of the United States had begun to assume
a form we would recognize today. In Washington the experiment in government under the
Constitution was swiftly becoming enshrined in mature institutions, the most important
of which was probably the Congress. Between 1810 and 1825 the two houses of the legislative branch underwent dramatic and lasting transformations in their organizational arrangements. In 1810 the House had a modest system of standing committees; the Senate
had no such system at all. During the next 15 years the House steadily expanded its system, while the Senate produced one in a single fell swoop. By 1825 each chamber had a
fully developed system of standing committees which have dominated its procedures to
the present time. This paper documents these developments and seeks to account for
them by explanations rational choice and organization theory.
By the 1820s the federal government of the United States
had begun to assume a form we would recognize today. Mass political
parties slowly started to coalesce; the selection of the president became a national election; and the vote was extended to virtually all
white males (and, in parts of the North, to free blacks as well). In
Washington the experiment in government under the Constitution
was swiftly becoming enshrined in mature institutions, the most important of which was probably the United States Congress. Between
1810 and 1825-essentially from the War of 1812 and the dissolu-
tion of the first party system to the dawn of the second party
system-the two houses of the legislative branch developed lasting
organizational arrangements and practices. Henry Clay, who sat in
the House for most of that period, made the Speakership an important and powerful office. And, in both the House and the Senate, a
system of standing committees was established.
That system, which has ever since dominated the business of
both chambers, was only employed piecemeal by the House as late as
1810 and was not employed at all at that time by the Senate. Yet by
LEGISLATIVE STUDIES QUARTERLY, XIV, 1, February 1989 39
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40
Gerald Gamm and Kenneth Shepsle
1825, only a decade and a half later, nearly all business in both chambers was channeled through an entrenched network of standing com-
mittees. The effort to account for this important organizational
development, to understand the process by which a standing committee system evolved in these formative years, is the task of this paper.
As political scientists, we are interested in theories of institutional development; as political historians, we are interested in how historical details lend credibility to, or cast doubt upon, theoretically
inspired hypotheses on institutional development. In the first section
of this paper we outline two ideal-type explanations of institutional development, one emphasizing organizational imperatives and the other
emphasizing rational purpose. In the second section we provide some
historical background on the initial development of standing committees as the institutional forms within which Anglo-American legislatures have regularly conducted their business. This is followed, in the
third and fourth sections, by parallel treatments of the development of
standing committees in the House and Senate, respectively. In the succeeding parts of this essay we conduct something of a debate, developing and then critiquing the alternative theories and the degree to which
they fit the known historical facts. Because some crucial details remain
ambiguous, we conclude our essay with some thoughts on future historical study.'
Two Theories of Institutions
We divide theories of the emergence and development of institutions into two contrasting views. The first is a micro-level view emphasizing individual forethought, calculation, and rational purpose.
Institutions, in this view, are intelligent means to preconceived ends.
They are chosen by individuals to accomplish particular purposes.
That the functions such institutions ultimately serve may not have been
those that these individuals intended is no argument against this perspective; forethought and rational purpose need not entail perfect foresight, only "intelligent" foresight.
As a brief illustration of this view, in the 1 st Congress the House
decided that appointment to any committe (standing, select, conference) would be by election. No individual, or committee of individuals,
would be permitted the power to appoint committees. Thus, each time
a bill, petition, or resolution was committed to a committee (usually for
the purpose of putting the matter into an appropriate form for the full
House to consider), the House had to elect the members of the committee. The clear purpose of this institutional arrangement was to mini-
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Standing Committees
41
mize the prospects of tyranny, either by a presiding officer or by a small
group of "committee makers." It took only a few months of experience
with this arrangement, however, for members to come to the conclusion
that, while its nominal purpose had been served, the cost was high. The
House seemed constantly to be electing committees. It altered the practice by permitting the presiding officer to name committees; however,
the House reserved to itself the right to elect committees whenever it
wished (which was rarely). The point here is that nothing mechanical
foreordained either the original choice of means for committee appointment or its subsequent revision. Rather, imperfectly informed,
purposive agents consciously made an organizational choice which,
after some experience, they then revised. In each decision, there was a
practical weighing of costs and benefits.
This, then, is the rational view of institutional origins and
maintenance. Individuals consciously decide to do things in a particular way. They do so with some (possibly vague) ultimate purposes in
mind. After some experience, they may choose to alter those arrangements. Along the way, of course, the arrangements chosen may well have
a host of unforeseen consequences that may, in turn, provide the impetus for further institutional changes.
An alternative view of institutional origins emphasizes macrohistorical forces. Rather than arguing that changes result from the deci-
sions of rational actors, this approach suggests that the individual
actors are only the mechanisms through which larger forces operate. In-
stitutional evolution is viewed as the consequence of accumulated minutiae. "When we examine political institutions, one after the other,
they seem to have been erected, almost like coral reefs, without conscious design," Sait ( 1938, 16) writes. "There has been no pre-arranged
plan, no architect's drawings and blue-prints; man has carried out the
purposes of nature, we might say, acting blindly in response to her obscure commands."
The evolutionary perspective, of course, acknowledges the role
played by human action and decision in effecting institutional change.
No one pretends that institutions change wholly on their own accord;
institutions are, after all, made up of human actors and their "congealed tastes" (Riker 1982). What this approach does stress is the extent
to which institutions evolve in ways unplanned and undirected by the
people composing them. "New social forms originate and old forms
die," Sait (1938, 15) argues, "without any clear perception by contemporaries of what is happening." Through constant tinkering and experimentation, contemporaries unwittingly transform their environments,
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42
Gerald Gamm and Kenneth Shepsle
oblivious to the greater changes they wreak. Institutions develop as they
adapt to new circumstances and new demands placed on them.
Let us return to the illustration we just offered of committee as-
signment practices in the early Congress. As a description of rational
choice behavior, we suggested that congressmen chose first to elect
members to committees but, realizing the impracticality of the procedure, soon decided to place that decision in the hands of the Speaker.
This same change of rules might have been effected in a less direct or
planned manner without calculated human intervention. Suppose, as in
the earlier illustration, that committee assignments initially were by
election. After some experience the process soon proved cumbersome
and unwieldy. Especially because the early committees were vested
with so little responsibility, floor discussion and debate of committee
membership was increasingly viewed as annoying and generally unnecessary. Congressmen began to rely on leaders in the chamber for guidance on forming committees. While the House continued to exercise its
ostensible power of election, it grew accustomed to deferring to the
Speaker and to other legislative leaders on the subject. Members grew to
trust the relative fairness of the Speaker's "nominations," and ratification of those recommendations became a matter of course. Only after it
had become the accepted method of doing business was this general deference to the Speaker incorporated into the House rules. The change in
rules, rather than representing a conscious decision to remove committee assignments from the floor of the House to the Speaker, constituted
nothing more than a formality, a late acknowledgment that current
practice had long since ceased to conform to official rules.
What distinguishes the two approaches we have briefly described is the differing importance placed on human agency. The ra-
tionalists see the work of human hands, the relevance of human
purpose. Humans respond rationally to their context, arranging their
practices and, if necessary, making adjustments in them. The alternative approach sees a more inexplicit path to the same result, whether
from macrohistorical forces or organizational imperatives. They may
operate through individuals, but are not explicitly controlled by individuals; the shifting agenda, which often gives impetus to these organi-
zational imperatives, is taken as an exogenous shock to which the
system adjusts.
In what follows we hope to assess the historical development of
the system of standing committees in the House and Senate in light of
these two views of institutional development. In its crudest form, the
rationalist approach would expect to find traces of individual purpose
and calculation as the legislative chambers moved from select to stand-
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Standing Committees
43
ing committees. In contrast, the organizational imperatives approach
would be content to identify contextual forces. Before that assessment,
it is advisable to provide some of the facts of the historical context. This
we briefly do in the next section.
Historical Background on the Development
of Committees: Early Decisions
The idea of a standing committee-a subset of the legislature
whose membership is well-defined, its subject-matter jurisdiction relatively fixed, and its life extending for the length of a legislative session
or longer-is quite old. Robinson (1954, 4) fixes the "first germs" of
standing committees at April 6, 1571, when the House of Commons established a single committee "charged not with a single bill or set of bills
but with a general subject which constituted entire divisions of the business of the House of Commons." By the seventeenth century there were
five standing committees of Commons (privileges and elections, religion, grievances, courts of justice, and trade). "They were called stand-
ing committees because they were appointed at the beginning of
Parliament and remained during the session, while other committees
were created for the consideration of specific bills or matters and were
discharged after the business committed to them was reported out"
(Robinson 1954, 4-5).
Ideas of legislative organization crossed the Atlantic to the col-
onies during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.
Jameson ( 1894, 262) notes that "the American system of standing committees, borrowed from England, was developed in the colonial assemblies of the middle and southern colonies, but earliest in Virginia and
Maryland." By the 1700s committees in these and other colonial legislatures were appointed for entire legislative sessions, had fixed memberships, and had well-defined jurisdictions. In Maryland, there is even
evidence of continuity of membership-the same legislators serving on
a committee over several sessions (Jameson 1894, 264-65).
Thus, when the 1st Congress convened in 1790, there is little
doubt that members of the House and Senate were aware of, indeed
many had had experience with, standing committees. Even though
these standing committees were primitive by contemporary standards,
and did not constitute fully elaborated standing committee systems,
they were nevertheless not widely employed in either the House or the
Senate of the national legislature. The House did establish a standing
committee on elections, and the Senate formed "four standing committees which may be characterized as being purely ministerial commit-
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Gerald Gamm and Kenneth Shepsle
44
tees, since they had no legislative function whatsoever to serve"
(Robinson 1954, 19). But neither chamber established any standing legislative committees.
Instead, business was conducted according to a different
model. In each chamber the Committee of the Whole was the institu-
tional setting where an issue wasjoined and debated and general princi-
ples arrived at. Only after such deliberation was a committee
appointed-a select committee. Its task was to take the general principles arrived at in Committee of the Whole and mold them into a bill; in
effect, it was a spot drafting committee. It was required to report back to
the chamber (no veto power), could recommend amendments (modest
proposal power), and was dismissed as soon as it completed its work on
the bill.
Why no standing committees? It is clear that a standing committee was not a radical organizational concept, for such committees
had been in use, both in England and in the colonial and state legislatures, for at least a century. Moreover, as noted above, their primitive,
unelaborated form did not entail a severe concentration of agenda or
decision-making power. Neither their novelty nor their prospective
power can account for their limited use. Rather, it appears to us to have
been the result of a conscious choice to employ a more explicitly deliberative arrangement.
The initial absence of standing committees from the Congress
may be attributed to the political preferences of both the followers of
Jefferson and the followers of Hamilton. As Cooper (1970),
McConachie (1898), Robinson (1954), and Swanstrom (1962) report,
Jeffersonian Republicans abhorred the notion of a small group of legislators disproportionately influential at the prelegislative stage. "The
very principle of standing committees was a positive evil [to Republicans] because they were not specifically authorized by the Constitution" (Robinson 1954, 21). The principles of a bill, in the Jeffersonian
view, should emerge from deliberation and debate in Committee of
the Whole. The main purpose of a committee was to clean up the legis-
lative language after the fact. Indeed, the term "committee" had a
now-antiquated meaning, namely someone "committed" to the principles of a bill. To the Jeffersonians, a committee should consist of a
group committed to some already established principles. Since a
standing committee is a permanently empaneled group of legislators,
it could not possibly have committed to principles that had not yet
been articulated. Thus, the idea of a group charged with permanent
authority over a jurisdiction stood in contradiction to the notion of
prior commitment. This principled opposition to standing commit-
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Standing Committees
45
tees on the part of Jeffersonians undoubtedly incorporated a more
practical-minded nervousness about positive government in general
and a particular fear of the abilities of Federalist executive officials to
control legislative committees.
For the Federalists, Robinson (1954, 20-21 ) suggests that there
was no principled objection to standing committees but rather a feeling
that they were redundant. Agenda-setting power lodged with executive
officials was sufficient to Federalist purposes. In matters of taxes, expenditures, currency, tariffs, and debt, for example, "as far as they were
concerned the Secretary of the Treasury was the only agent needed in
the transaction of [this class of] business." Federalists were content to
let the executive branch take the lead in proposing necessary legislation
and saw no purpose in giving further initiation prerogatives to standing
committees.
Thus, the Committee of the Whole/select committee organizational form prevailed at the outset. In reality, however, an approximate
form of "permanently empaneled body" quickly developed. Swanstrom (1962, 226), for example, notes that in the Senate, while the use of
standing committees was eschewed, "experience soon proved the utility
of referring bills on one general subject to approximately the same
group of Senators, thus taking advantage of their familiarity with that
field of interest. During the First Congress, a large proportion of private
claims bills were referred to Senators Maclay, Wingate, and Elmer, who
apparently comprised an informal committee on claims."2
In the same spirit, Skladony (1985, 169) cautions that committees labeled "select" were not all the same in the House. Ceremonial se-
lect committees dealt with the details of public events (meetings
between president and Congress, presidential inaugurations, funerals
of members). Institutional select committees were housekeeping units
(rules, schedules, facilities). The important legislative work was done by
substantive select committees, which "dealt with petitions, memorials,
executive messages and reports, and were the source of bills and resolutions for House consideration."
Even among the substantive select committees, however,
there were differences. Most were on-the-spot drafting committees,
and thus were not subject to the Jeffersonian principled objection to
standing committees. Nevertheless, some were "appointed to con-
sider a subject and 'report their opinion thereon'." The latter units differed from the standard Jeffersonian notion of a committee, since the
will of the majority had not been determined before the committee
was formed. Many of "these select committees were not dissolved
after making an initial report. From the days of the First Congress,
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46
Gerald Gamm and Kenneth Shepsle
then, some select committees had lifespans up to the date of adjournment, and received multiple referrals of business." After the 1st Congress it was quite common in the House to partition the president's
annual message into parts and assign them to select committees that
stayed in existence for the entire session. They "often handled more
business, and more important matters, than any of the official stand-
ing committees" (Skladony 1985, 170).
In sum, against the backdrop of a century's use of standing
committees in legislatures, the members of the 1 st Congress chose not
to entrust matters to permanent panels. Whether for principled
(Jeffersonian) or more practical (Federalist) reasons, each chamber em-
ployed select committees instead. Among these select committees,
however, a rudimentary division and specialization of labor emerged. A
harbinger of things to come, in some cases "a select committee first
gained such regularity of appointment and such general jurisdiction
that it became a standing committee in everything but name and only
subsequently was recognized as a standing committee in the rules"
(Cooper 1970, 42).
Unanswered, in our view, is the matter of why committees,
which were in everything but name standing, remained select. To take a
prominent example, a select committee on Ways and Means was appointed in the 1 st Congress, and reappointed for each of the six congresses thereafter. During the first two congresses, it was a select
committee in classical Jeffersonian fashion; it was appointed after debate in the Committee of the Whole on a financial bill and was dis-
missed upon reporting back. In 1794, however, the growth of the
Jeffersonian coalition in the House coincided with a more pervasive
suspicion of Treasury Secretary Hamilton; in that Congress (the 3d) a
select Committee on Ways and Means was established which was required "to submit a report on appropriations and revenue measures be-
fore consideration in the Committee of the Whole House... [T]his
Ways and Means Committee was put on a more or less standing basis
since such a committee appeared at some point in every Congress until
it was made a permanent committee" (Ways and Means Committee
1978, 22, emphasis added). Why did it take until January 1802 for
Ways and Means to be established as a standing committee? Neither we
nor any historians of the period with whom we are familiar have much
to say on this. Some standing committees in the House had already
been established by this year (Elections, Revisal and Unfinished Business, Commerce and Manufactures), so the answer cannot be attributed
to the novelty of such a change. This development, however, appears to
have been more than accidental.
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Standing Committees
47
To speculate, we believe that, opinions to the contrary notwithstanding, select committees were not "standing committees in everything but name." Because they were always provisional and contingent,
neither their membership nor their jurisdiction was very secure. Calling such recurring select committees "semi-standing," Skladony illustrates this insecurity with an incident concerning the Post Office and
Postal Roads Committee, a select committee that had been appointed
nearly every session until it became standing in 1809.
The fact that a semi-standing committee was in existence did not mean that the House
could not use other methods when quick results were needed. Near the close of the first
session of the Tenth Congress, William Bibb of Georgia made a motion to appoint a select
committee to alter certain post roads in his own state. Over the objections of several members ... a three man committee was appointed. Within a day its bill had passed the House;
a Senate-amended version was signed by the President two days after that (Skladony
1985, 172).
Even so regularly and routinely appointed a select committee as one
dealing with post offices and roads could be end-run under some circumstances. We do not know what those circumstances were in this
particular case; nor do we have a general sense of how often it occurred. We suspect, however, that a decision by a legislative chamber
to make a committee standing is a choice to devolve political power
upon a subset of legislators. The failure to do so is also a choice (even
though some select committees might appear to approximate the status of "standing").
Thus, during the first decade of the nineteenth century, there
were a variety of organizational forms in the House: select committees
of the Jeffersonian kind, select committees with slightly more agenda
power, repeatedly reappointed select committees (which we call
semistanding and, perhaps, were "standing committees in everything
but name"), and standing committees. In the last Congress of this decade (the 10th, 1807-09), 44% of all legislation in the House was referred
to select committees, 9% to semistanding committees, and 47% to
standing committees. The Senate, as we will see below, still channeled
virtually all of its business through pure select committees and the committee of the whole.
The second decade of the nineteenth century would witness a
veritable revolution in organizational arrangements in both the House
and the Senate. By 1825, 89% of all legislation in the House and fully
96% of all legislation in the Senate would be referred to standing com-
mittees. It is to these events that we now turn.
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48
Gerald Gamm and Kenneth Shepsle
Historical Background: The Creation and Utilization
of Standing Committees in the House, 1811-25
When the 12th Congress opened on November 4, 1811, the issue
that animated editorialists and enlivened political debate throughout the
country was the matter of hostilities with England. In the elections of
1810 a number of new legislators from the South and West came to Congress single-minded in their pursuit of a declaration of war.
Southern and western constituents had suffered, physically
and economically, at the hands of the British. Owing to Orders in Council, and a navy that could enforce them, the British had cut off continental markets for the agricultural crops and crafts that were the mainstay
of the frontier economy. A second basis of animosity toward the British
from frontier settlers was their physical insecurity resulting from the
presence of hostile Indians. It was believed that arms and other materiel
were being provided by British agents. Impressment, too, pushed
Americans toward war. Although the latter did not directly affect south-
ern and western constituencies, it provided another (demagogic) hook
on which to rally public opinion against Britain. As easterners sought
negotiation with the British to prevent interruption of the transAtlantic trade, southern and western war hawks decried "British monopoly, British pressgangs, British tomahawks." Legislators from the
South and West, driven by these perceived provocations and by an eagerness to grab a new territory, sought an open confrontation with the
enemy overseas.
One of the new legislators to arrive from the West was Henry
Clay of Kentucky. He had distinguished himself during the previous
Congress while serving out the final six months of a vacancy as a senator from Kentucky. In the closing days of that Congress, Clay had come
to national attention with his strident war speeches and his chastising of
more conciliatory Jeffersonians and Federalists. Together with other
similarly activist congressmen (Calhoun, Cheves, and Lowndes of
South Carolina, Grundy of Tennessee, Bibb of Georgia), Clay took up
lodgings in a Georgetown boarding house in November of 1811. "With
good reason they were soon dubbed 'The War Mess"' (Mayo 1937, 402).
The War Mess agreed to support Clay for Speaker, as did "the Young Re-
publicans who met in Caucus on Sunday evening, November 3, and
brought Clay forward as their candidate for Speaker.... The Caucus
was held presumably to prevent the election of Macon, who, it was
feared, might appoint his friend Randolph [a vitriolic opponent of war]
as chairman of the Ways and Means Committee" (Mayo 1937, 403).
The next day Clay was elected overwhelmingly as Speaker.
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Standing Committees
49
During the next eight months, Clay and his allies in the House
pushed President Madison and more traditional Republicans for a war
declaration. By manipulating select committees and stacking them
with his war hawk friends, Clay produced a raft of war legislation. A de-
tailed roll-call analysis of major war votes (Hatzenbuehler 1976) provides strong quantitative evidence of Clay's supporting coalition. Clay
could count on 70 to 80 votes on most of the war measures. Approximately 20 congressmen consistently voted for war, and what disagree-
ment existed revolved primarily around the timing of war measures-on details, not first principles. Thus, for most of the 12th
Congress, Clay stood at the head of a relatively homogeneous coalition
of southern and western Republicans.3 The final declaration of war produced a 79-49 vote, with all 37 Federalists and 12 Republicans aligned
against 79 Republicans. Forty of the 48 legislators from south and west
of Virginia voted for war; 41 of 80 north of Virginia voted against
(Mayo 1937,520).
In terms of the manner in which congressional business was
conducted during the War Congress, several conclusions may be offered. Perhaps the most important is that Clay, like none of his prede-
cessors, was an activist Speaker with both a policy agenda and a
political mission. As his biographer put it, when he was elected to the
Speakership "he gave no hint that he considered his duty other than that
of preserving order. But he was to be far more than a presiding officer in
the British tradition of his predecessors" (Mayo 1937, 409). The Committee of the Whole/select committee method of procedure was ideally
suited to his needs: he could stack semistanding committees with war
hawk allies, while, because the Speaker did not preside over the Committee of the Whole, he was free to participate actively in debate on the
war measures which took place there. He did both with abandon. Politically, his mission was no less than to wrest control of the Republican
party from the Virginia group.
No new standing committees were created by Clay in the 12th
Congress (see Table 1) and, even more than in the previous Congress,
Clay sent most bills to select and semistanding committees (see Table
2).4 As is clear from the latter table, the use of select committees had
begun its steady decline; the employment of semistanding committees-the ones Clay stacked with war hawk majorities-rose in fre-
quency, and especially in significance. Most of the important war
measures came out of these bodies.
The war dragged through the first session of the 13th Congress,
and Clay continued to manage it through semistanding and select com-
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50
Gerald Gamm and Kenneth Shepsle
TABLE 1
Growth of Standing Committees in the U.S. Congress
New Committees Established
Congress and Years House Senate
1 st-9th (1789-1807) 8 1
10th
(1807-09)
2
1
11th (1809-11)
12th (1811-13)
13th(1813-15) 3
14th(1815-17) 7 12
15th (1817-19)
16th
(1819-21)
2
4
17th (1821-23) 4
18th (1823-25) 1
Source: Stubbs, 1985.
mittees. During this period three new standing committees were created. Two of them, Judiciary and Revolutionary War Claims, were created in the first session while Clay was still in the Speaker's chair; the
third, Public Expenditures, was created after he had resigned from the
House to become a commissioner to the peace conference at Ghent.
Clay returned to the country, the Congress, and the
Speakership at the beginning of the 14th Congress ( 1815-17). In the pre-
vious two Congresses, the war itself had helped hold Clay's coalition together. Yet even then there were signs of splits among the Republicans.
Traditional Jeffersonians disliked standing armies. The western war
hawks were opposed to a large navy. Various Republicans were uneasy
about using state militias as expeditionary forces to take new land.
The tensions within the coalition were most apparent when it
came to the taxes that would be required to finance the war. President
Madison and his Treasury Secretary, Gallatin, who were not eager to
engage in war, used the tax issue to buy time. Gallatin presented an odious set of direct taxes, especially one on whiskey, for consideration in
the House as necessary to prosecute a war. Federalist newspapers had a
field day with it, underscoring two dimensions of cleavage in Clay's coalition. First, northern and middle Atlantic Republicans were prepared
for war only as a last resort; they hoped for a negotiated settlement and
were disposed to give Madison and Gallatin time. Second, these traditional Jeffersonians were not oblivious to the political inroads being attempted by the new breed from the West and were not eager to make
room for these "newer" Republicans. A third dimension of cleavage is
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Standing Committees
51
TABLE 2
Bill Referrals to Each Type of Committee in the House
(for the first session of each congress)
Committee Type
Congress and Year Standing Semistanding Select
10th
(1807)
47
9
44
(73) (13) (67)
11th
(1809)
59
6
35
(39) (4) (23)
12th(1811)
53
14
33
(78) (21) (49)
13th(1813)
47
35
18
(34) (25) (13)
14th
(1815)
62
19
19
(156) (47) (48)
15th(1817)
68
16
16
(195) (47) (45)
16th(1819)
74
15
11
(239) (47) (36)
17th (1821) 72 18 10
(231) (57) (31)
18th
(1823)
89
4
7
(406) (19) (29)
Source: Annals of Congress, various volumes.
Note: Each column gives the percentage distribution across types of committee (with the
number of bills in parentheses).
as common today as it was then-good old-fashioned distributive politics. Many who supported Clay in principle, happily position-taking on
the war, stopped short at imposing direct costs on their constituents.
Gallatin's tax bill had become, for the war hawks, "a decisive Rubicon"
(Mayo 1937, 453). In the end Clay won, getting all of the Gallatin direct
taxes approved. But it had not been easy. His coalition was homogeneous only up to a point.
One explanation for the rise of the standing committee system,
an explanation grounded in the rational-actor perspective, emphasizes
the disintegration of that homogenous coalition. According to this approach, Clay had been able to unite a majority of the House behind his
leadership before and during the prosecution of the war. Once war
ended, however, the basis of that coalition collapsed; the homogenizing
issue disappeared. Clay, consequently, was forced to search for new issues and to construct new methods to maintain control of the House.
Among Clay's initiatives was an increased utilization of standing com-
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52
Gerald Gamm and Kenneth Shepsle
mittees. An expanded standing committee system, Clay might have reasoned, would have provided a new coalitional foundation and would
have solidified Clay's congressional base in his struggle for power with
Madison and Monroe.
Of course, more than the conclusion of the war led to the fracturing of Clay's coalition. Factionalism is the unavoidable fate of any
hegemonic coalition. The War of 1812 and the Hartford Convention
led to the discrediting and rapid collapse of the Federalists as a significant political opposition. Consequently, under any circumstances one
would expect the Republicans to have been wracked by internal dissension once its common foe had disappeared.5
As the data in Table 2 reveal, the 14th Congress conducted con-
siderably more business than had any preceding Congress-and the
bulk of it was now done by standing committee. The rational-choice
conjecture for this outcome has Clay intentionally managing the business of the House in a different way, depending far more on standing
committees and on formal decentralization (Shepsle and Humes 1984;
Rohde and Shepsle 1987). Clay bolstered his flagging troops by giving
them a permanent stake in the business of the House.
Throughout the remaining years Clay was in the Speaker's
chair, the trend continued. The seven standing committees newly created in the 14th Congress were supplemented by seven additional committees during Clay's last years. Congressional business flowed increasingly, if gradually, to the standing committees, so that when Clay left the
Speakership only 7% of all bills were assigned to select committees. By
1825, the practice of legislation by standing committee that Woodrow
Wilson (1885) so deplored 60 years later was an established fact.
What we have not been able to establish directly is Clay's hand
in any of this. It is not likely that so crafty, politically attuned, and ambi-
tious a man as Clay would have been oblivious to, or even without an
opinion on or a role in, these important organizational developments.
Yet we have found no "smoking gun." There is no mention of organizational matters in Clay's papers (Hopkins 1959). We have found no explicit role for Clay reported in the Annals. None of the Washington
newspapers of the time (The Intelligencer, Niles Register) make much
mention of these changes.6 And none of the literature with which we are
familiar on Clay, the War of 1812 and its aftermath, or organizational
developments in the 14th through 18th Congresses makes any mention
of Clay's responsibility in these organizational changes.7
Clay may be regarded by some students of the period as the fa-
ther of standing committees. While theoretical reasons have been provided, no clear evidence for his role in their creation has been found.
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Standing Committees
53
More persuasive evidence exists for his use of committees generally
(stacking and manipulating semistanding committees before and during the war), and standing committees in particular (the gradual but
persistent increase in the amount of business handled by standing committees), but we have been unable to document these as intentional acts
on Clay's part. We are left with a coherent theory of leadership ambition (Shepsle and Humes 1984; Rohde and Shepsle 1987) that, at the
least, is not contradicted by known facts. But ambiguities and doubts
concerning Clay's role remain. Next we look at contemporaneous developments in the Senate.
Development of Standing Committees
in the Senate, 1811-25
In 1811 when Clay came to the chamber, the House already had
9 or 10 standing committees (accounts differ) processing about half the
chamber's business. By any measure, the Senate utterly lacked such a
system. In the 12th Congress, the Senate boasted but a single standing
committee, a joint committee with the House overseeing the Library of
Congress. In our actual count of bills in the first session, none of the 227
bills considered by the Senate was referred to a standing committee (see
Table 3 below for a complete tabulation). Even semistanding committees were of no real importance. There was just one committee that
could be so classified, dealing with foreign affairs. As of 1811, more
than 96% of the Senate's legislative business was still channeled through
more or less pure select committees.8
From this inconsequential base the development of a system of
standing committees in the Senate was swift and dramatic (Robinson
1954, chap. 3). When the second session of the 14th Congress opened,
the traditional motion to create 13 select committees to receive various
parts of President Madison's message was postponed. On December 5,
1816, Senator Barbour of Virginia submitted a resolution to amend the
Senate standing rules by creating 11 standing committees (Foreign Affairs, Ways and Means, Commerce and Manufactures, Military Affairs,
Militia, Naval Affairs, Public Lands, Claims, Judiciary, Post Offices
and Post Roads, and Pensions). A day later he amended his own motion
by adding a committee on roads and canals. The amendment provoked
four days of debate and, in the end, was defeated, signifying that the
Senate was unprepared to create permanent panels on subjects that
were not regularly considered by Congress.9 The original motion, however, passed with only a minor change (the name of Ways and Means
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54
Gerald Gamm and Kenneth Shepsle
was changed to Finance). Ten days later the rule was further amended in
order to create a Committee on the District of Columbia.
Thus, in a two week period in December 1816, a standing committee system was born. (Four more standing committees were added
in the 16th Congress-see Table 1.) There is no record of discussion of
Barbour's motion on the Senate floor, though it is hard to imagine that
such an event was unworthy of remark.10 Almost immediately, prior
practices were altered as standing committees in the Senate came to be
utilized. Table 3 vividly documents the changes. The pattern of bill re-
ferrals in the 13th and 14th Congresses indicates that the Senate
achieved in just four years what it ultimately took the House over 35
years to create-an extensively utilized system of standing committees.
By the first session of the 16th Congress, standing committees had already assumed so much power and influence that their important role
in the legislative process appears to have met with general acceptance.
Speaking on the floor of the Senate in January 1820 on the Missouri
question, Senator Barbour alluded to the place that the body now accorded standing committees in policy making:
Pray, sir, what is the object of referring a bill to a committee-merely to dot the i's and
cross the t's? I had supposed they had a more important duty to perform. Not only their
right, but that it was their bounden duty to modify or amend any and every part in relation to the particular subject embraced by the bill, and to extend its provisions so as to em-
brace every corresponding subject. This is not only a rational rule, but one which is
prescribed by every well organized deliberative body (Annals 16Congl:102).
McConachie (1898, 133) writes of a logical, gradual, careful development of House standing committees: "Generally standing committees
have grown out of select committees.... A longer or shorter time of
probation has often preceded the admission of a committee into the
standing sisterhood." In the Senate, by contrast, all was telescoped into
a few short years. As late as the first session of the 12th Congress, all but
4% of the bills were handled by select committee. During the next two
Congresses, the Senate witnessed, as did the House, the decline in the
use of select committees and the growth of semistanding committees.
But, in contrast to the House, the decline of select committees in the
Senate was not associated with a gradual rise of standing committees.
By the first session of the 14th Congress, only 1 of 379 Senate bills went
to a standing committee. By dramatic contrast, in the second session of
that same Congress, 247 bills-fully 87% of the total-went to standing
committees. By the 18th Congress 96% of all bills were referred to
standing committees and another 3% to semistanding committees. In
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55
Standing Committees
TABLE 3
Bill Referrals to Each Type of Committee in the Senate
Committee Type
Congress and Year Standing Semistanding Select
12th, 1st Session (1811) - 4 96
(8) (219)
13th
Ist
2d
3d
Session
Session
Session
(1813)
(1814)
25 75
(17) (52)
49 51
(94) (96)
(1814) 1 47 52
(2) (91) (99)
14th
1st
Session
(1815) 0 69 30
(1) (263) (115)
2d Session (1816) 87 2 11
(247) (6) (30)
15th, 1st Session (1817) 91 - 9
(373)
(37)
16th, Ist Session (1819) (96) - 4
(483)
(22)
17th, lst Session(1821) 97 2 1
(401) (9) (4)
18th, Ist Session (1823) 96 3 2
(559) (15) (11)
Source: Annals of Congress, various volumes.
Note: Each column gives the percentage distribution across types of committee (with the
number of bills in parentheses).
general, the pattern is one of swift decline in select committee use, accompanied by a growth in semistanding committee use (enabled by the
1806 change in Senate rules-see note 8), which in turn is brought to a
sudden halt by the creation of standing committees. It appears that
much of the business that had accreted to semistanding committees
suddenly was performed by standing committee (since the status of the
former was precipitously changed to the latter). A procedural and institutional change of breath-taking proportions had occurred nearly overnight in the Senate.
In deciding to construct a full system of standing committees,
senators affirmed their satisfaction with the tentative experiment they
had conducted with semistanding committees. Four sessions of channeling the chamber's business through semistanding committees was,
by the second session of the 14th Congress, apparently sufficient to
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56
Gerald Gamm and Kenneth Shepsle
prompt the Senate to grant such bodies a more permanent status.
Whether by conscious human foresight or by organizational pressures
related to the war, the Senate abandoned its pure select committees,
first for a cluster of semistanding committees and then for a full stand-
ing committee system. In all likelihood, the House influenced the decisions of the Senate. In turning to semistanding and then to full standing
committees, the Senate was imitating the lower chamber, accomplishing in one stroke what the House had been moving toward through
much of its first 30 years.
Kravitz (1974, 29) makes a passing reference to what may
have been a significant reason why the Senate copied the arrangements in the House and why this move took place in 1816 rather than
earlier. The Senate, through most of its first 30 years, was a reactive
chamber. Legislatively, it responded to House initiatives; in other constitutional respects (confirming federal officers and judges, ratifying
treaties), it responded to executive initiatives. In short, the Senate was
a legislative body that had surrendered much control over its agenda
to external agents. The House, because it did have some agenda power
of its own, began the process of creating agenda units at an early stage
of its institutional development; the Senate did not. Whether the Senate was content to remain second-mover, either after the House or
after the president, we cannot say. But by 1816, so it is reported, the
Congress had become estranged from the Madison administration. 1
"Congress lost its traditional agenda-maker-so the theory goesbecause of deep and bitter estrangement between Madison and his
Congresses and turned to standing committees to fill the vacuum"
(Kravitz 1974, 29-30).
So it appears the Senate borrowed from the House the notion of
standing committees but then extended its new system to the almost
immediate and total exclusion of earlier forms of organization. Perhaps
such dramatic change came more easily to the smaller body, accustomed as it was to more collegial decision making.
We conclude this discussion by relating it to our concerns in the
House. We have briefly articulated one argument about leadership in
the House: that Clay moved to decentralize that institution as part of a
strategy for holding a coalition together whose raison d'etre had been
eliminated by the Treaty of Ghent. A competing hypothesis suggests
that organizational imperatives-growing size of the chamber, in-
creases in business owing to the war, etc.-rather than leadership maneuvers were behind the growth of standing committees in the House.
We conceded that we had been able to turn up no direct evidence of
Clay's role. With no "smoking gun," evidence of essentially the same
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Standing Committees
57
sort of thing going on in the Senate would have suggested an alternative
explanation-one placing substantial weight on the political context
shared by both House and Senate-rather than on instrumental leadership behavior. From what we have been able to learn, it would appear,
first, that in establishing its standing committees the Senate followed
(though in essentially one fell swoop) the role model established by the
House; second, that there is no evidence of the leadership maneuvering
there that we have hypothesized for the House; but, third, that the con-
text in the Senate was different from that in the House (due to its size
and its political relationship to both the House and the president).
Thus, while there are grounds for skepticism, we cannot, on the
basis of Senate experience, reject the leadership conjecture for the
House. Such a theory might still be relevant in the House, and Clay's
role there might well have been consequential in the evolution of standing committees. But it appears that no such leadership motivations operated in the Senate where, once adopted, standing committees came to
dominate legislative business earlier than they did in the House.
Enough of the historical detail has been presented. It is time
now to be a bit more explicit about theories of institutional development and the bearing of the evidence upon them.
Standing Committees and a Rational Theory of Leadership
We have broadly hinted at the idea behind a rational theory of
institutions, in which individuals make conscious choices among organizational forms. We have indicated that the idea of standing committees was not novel in the late eighteenth century, though it had
evolved only slowly inside the House (and not at all in the Senate) by the
second decade of the nineteenth century. In short, standing committees
were relatively well-known commodities, though they had not been em-
ployed systematically in the Congress.
Our rational theory focuses on the role of leaders and, in particular, Henry Clay. We suggest that leaders have an interest in manipulat-
ing and utilizing institutional resources as a means to their own
personal objectives. Clay came to the Speakership in 1811 as an agent
for his war hawk followers.12 Whether or not his ambitions for national
prominence and leadership were already in place by this time, we cannot say. But surely, as his very actions gave him increasing visibility, he
must rapidly have acquired such ambitions. So it is important to factor
these personal objectives into any explanation of Clay's behavior.
As we earlier noted, Clay's coalition, while divided at times on
various tactical aspects of getting to war with Great Britain, was rela-
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58
Gerald Gamm and Kenneth Shepsle
tively homogeneous on first principles. Clay's ambition to lead this coalition was simplified, both by the homogeneity of opinion within it and
by the means available to him as Speaker. The Committee of the Whole/
select committee system suited his requirements, which were, in effect,
to "grease the skids" for the war hawk agenda.'3
The homogeneity of his coalition during the 12th and 13th
Congresses disappeared in the 14th. While engaging in "search behavior," seeking out alternative issues upon which to reconstitute his coa-
lition, and attempting to "coopt" potential competitors, Clay also
fiddled with organizational parameters. Both the creation of new
standing committees and the increased utilization of existing standing committees were means by which Clay could commit himself in
advance to a now disparate group of legislators. Lacking a program of
issues (because of opinion heterogeneity) with which the Speaker's
precommitment would cement the coalition together, Clay precommitted to an organizational arrangement that assured various powerful allies a piece of the action. During his remaining decade in the
Speakership, we conjecture along these lines, Clay continued to search
and to coopt (with limited success; see Young 1966, 131-35). But in the
end he had to rely on increasing the number, and the utilization, of
standing committees.
A few caveats are in order. First, Clay certainly did not invent
standing committees, despite the paternity attributed to him in some
casual argument. Jameson (1894), Harlow (1917), Robinson (1954),
and Cooper (1970) all document the knowledge, but conscious eschewing, of standing committees 20 years before Clay arrived on the scene.
Second, Clay need not have comprehended the rational theory we have
described in order to have acted in accord with it (though he must undoubtedly have had an intuitive grasp of things). Third, the experience
in the Senate was entirely different and offers no support for the rational theory; but, owing to the entirely different context, especially the
relative influence of individual senators even with the standing com-
mittees, that experience does not count against the theory either.
Fourth, the organizational strategy we have suggested is not an end in itself; rather, it is a means to some ends. Thus, this theory does not assert
that Clay intended to create what became the system of standing committees. Clay's maneuvers were, in his judgment, the best shot he had at
riding herd over a diverse set of allies, maintaining his hold on the
Speakership, and positioning himself to succeed to the presidency.
Fifth, the institutional maneuver was not Clay's only move: he continued to float a variety of issues in the hope of finding one to reunite his
former coalition; he continued to watch over his shoulder for potential
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Standing Committees
59
challenges to his leadership, coopting rivals whenever the opportunity
was available.
This, then, is a rational theory of institutional development,
one that has the evolution and maturation of institutional arrangements as much a by-product of efforts by a leader to secure personal ob-
jectives as anything else. Is it true? As a theory, it is coherent and
logically compelling. But, alas, the evidence in support of it is elusive.
Standing Committees and the Theory
of Organizational Imperatives
An alternate interpretation of the historical details would attribute the institutional developments in Congress to contextual forces.
In such an accounting, Henry Clay does not figure as an important
player in these developments. By the time he arrived in Washington, a
limited but fairly energetic set of standing committees already flourished in the House. They matured and came to dominate the legislative
process before the termination of Clay's tenure as Speaker. Still, the
process in the House appears to have been orderly and gradual, a calm
continuation of developments that antedated Clay's arrival. In the Senate, by contrast, a committee system arose dramatically and swiftly
during Clay's tenure in the lower chamber. It was much less developed
than the system in the House in 1811, but much more comprehensive a
few years later.
Most probably, the coinciding developments in the House and
Senate reflected similar institutional solutions to similar organizational problems. The timing of the rise of the standing committee system suggests that the War of 1812 may have been a catalyst. What
McConachie (1898, 40-41) states to be true of individual committees
was probably true for the system of standing committees as a whole:
"The creation of a standing committee has generally been linked with
some important historical occurrence. Louisiana was purchased in
1803; the Committee on Public Lands came in 1805. In response to the
guns of the Leopard firing upon the Chesapeake sprang into existence
the Committee on Foreign Affairs."'4 Committee development in both
the House and the Senate occurred during and in the immediate aftermath of the war. Presumably, the pressures of organizing for and fight-
ing a war made imperative a more coherent organization of congres-
sional decision making. Especially as congressional leaders acted to
provide the wartime leadership and direction that many believed were
absent in the president, it seems reasonable to conjecture that similar
forces, operating in both houses, produced similar institutional devel-
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60
Gerald Gamm and Kenneth Shepsle
opments. Thus the most important semistanding committees established by Clay in the House were all related to the war (Shepsle and
Humes 1984, 14). The first semistanding committee observed in the
Senate was Foreign Affairs, operating throughout the first session of the
12th Congress, on the eve of the war. And by the second session of the
13th Congress, during the war, fully half of all the Senate's business was
suddenly being channeled through semistanding committees, of which
there were only three-Foreign Affairs, Military Affairs, Naval Affairs.
In short, while the rational-leader hypothesis has the conclusion of war
fracturing a previously homogeneous coalition and providing the
grounds for seeking an institutional solution to leadership survival, this
alternate argument suggests that the opposite is nearer to the truth: that
it was the war itself, and the legislature's seizing of war decision making,
that made inevitable the development and institutionalization of a
standing committee system.
Increased workloads, increased responsibilities, and an increased longing for independence from the executive branch de-
manded a more efficient and orderly system of processing legislation
and reaching decisions. Once created by the conditions of the war,
semistanding committees apparently demonstrated their superiority
to the older institution of select committees; at least their creation
gave rise to powerful legislators with stakes in their survival. Their
transformation at that stage into full standing committees represented a small, natural, next step.
Undoubtedly, the two houses, in groping for solutions, looked
to each other. The Senate, in creating a system of standing committees
in the 14th Congress, was simply realizing the potential of a system already substantially developed in the House. Similarly, the House, as its
committee system reached maturity, must have reflected on the meteoric formation of such a system in the Senate and its apparent success
there as a working organizational form. Together, acting symbiotically,
the two houses of Congress created the modern committee system. According to this argument, no individual actor greatly impeded or accelerated a development whose time had so obviously come.
Discussion and Conclusions
Reconciling these two versions of a major institutional development is no simple task. Not only do the two scenarios rest on different theoretical grounds, but they are products of different approaches
to the study of political history.
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Standing Committees
61
Proponents of rational choice approaches, like theorists of any
stripe, necessarily confront their evidence from an explicit point of
view. They presume the relevance of rational human action for the
comprehension and explanation of particular events. Theory precedes
evidence: history is approached with a theory in hand and the records
of the past are rummaged through for facts to support or refute the implications of the theory.
In this vein we have described in this paper a rational theory
of leadership, and suggested a central role in institutional develop-
ments for ambitious leaders. An ambitious leader like Clay-the
man who revolutionized the Speakership, the man who mobilized
congressional forces behind a war with England, the man who was
constantly positioning himself politically to become president, and
the man who as Speaker presided over the full-blown development of
a standing committee system in the House-had to have been more
than an innocent bystander. He must have had an active hand in the
unfolding of these events.
The claim of this theory, then, is that these major developments
did not just happen. Despite our lack of success in rummaging through
the record of the past-we uncovered no diary confession, no clinching
newspaper account, nor any evidence from congressional records-we
find it implausible that Clay did not figure prominently in the transfor-
mation of the organization of the House. Unfortunately, the records of
the past are inevitably incomplete: we have not only been unable to uncover evidence of Clay's role, but have also found little fine-grained detail at all about the individual events that culminated in an organizational transformation. It is a bit like having a few summary statistics
(none sufficient to allow interesting inferences) and little of the raw
data. Here is clearly a task of major proportions awaiting the historians
of Congress.
Pitted against this rational-choice approach is a more strictly
historical narrative. In this second approach theory is implicit at best.
Rather than looking to history for evidence on theoretical implications,
it offers description instead. In the case at hand, in its close reading of
evidence and its attempt at faithful rendering of known events, this sec-
ond approach ties committee development less to rational actors and
more to evolutionary and contextual factors. In the available evidence
no role for Clay is found. Instead, emphasis is given to seemingly selfdriven institutional growth.
Certainly much happened in these years which could plausibly
explain even so important a development as the rise of a system of standing committees. The amount of business before Congress was, of course,
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62
Gerald Gamm and Kenneth Shepsle
swiftly increasing. Especially as war approached and as Congress assumed a major role in organizing for it, the pressures of the moment
forced a devolution of authority onto small groups of men expert on a
given subject and capable of efficiently preparing legislation. This development was particularly evident in the Senate, where three semistanding
committees-Foreign Affairs, Military Affairs, and Naval Affairsdealt with half of the chamber's business by the second session of the
13th Congress. The remainder of the Senate's legislation was still channeled through select committees; there were no semistanding or standing
committees beyond those three. But this ad hoc practice that evolved
during the war must have proved popular; with only the precedents of the
war-related semistanding committees before them, the Senate created
instantaneously a full standing committee system.
It is important, too, to remember that war was not the only ho-
mogenizing issue in the 181 0s. Cementing Clay's coalition as solidly as
war was partisanship. The need for Republicans to unite in Congress
behind Clay was reinforced by a strong Federalist opposition. What Republican leaders in the House and the Senate, including Clay, lost with
the Treaty of Ghent was much more than the homogenizing issue of
war; they lost the Federalists as viable opponents. Hence, from the disintegration of the party system came the necessity to organize a group of
Republicans who were becoming unglued. The collapse of the first
party system provided incentives to maintain the standing committee
system that the War of 1812 had spawned. Republicans needed to be
kept in line; the committee system was an available device to do so, an
apparatus that was right at hand in the wake of war.
Although this latter approach more truly records what evidence there is, it cannot presume to tell a very rich or informative story.
On the one hand, only shards of evidence necessary to a proper telling
of the story have been excavated to date. On the other, we are given lim-
ited guidance on explaining things. Even if all the pieces were available,
in the end one must embed them in some sort of theoretical framework
that is lacking.
Despite their different bases of argument, and the different emphases they place on the guidance of theory and the importance of description, these two seemingly incompatible approaches are, in our
view, more appropriately portrayed as two sides of the same coin, as
complements rather than substitutes. Rational man in an institutional
and historical setting is not an entirely free agent, but rather is encumbered and constrained by this context. By the same token, institutional
context and historical setting by themselves are insufficient as independent, exogenous causes of things; rather they must be seized upon and
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Standing Committees
63
exploited by institutional agents, or at the very least must have some
impact upon them.
That is, there is both a demand side and a supply side to institu-
tional change. The former includes precisely those demands placed on
existing institutional arrangements-growth in the size of the legislature, increase in responsibilities owing to war decision making, etc. But
unless institutional agents are motivated to respond to these demandside pressures, there is no reason to believe they need count for much.
Life will often continue under the ancien regime unless some form of
entrepreneurial response is supplied. In principle, when contextual demands and entrepreneurial supply are in rough balance, the institution
may be said to be in equilibrium. The rational choice theorist must be
reminded that rational agents are embedded in a context and their
choices and opportunities are thereby constrained. The organization
theorist likewise must be discouraged from taking context as a determining cause; demand-side pressures are filtered through the purposes
and goals of supply-side agents.
And so, as always, we suspect that the theoretical optimum is
not a "corner solution," but rather lies somewhere in the middle. Two
approaches to political history have generated two different views on
the evolution in Congress of standing committees. Still, we have
learned the reasonable bounds within which politics must have operated. It seems clear that in the 1 st Congress members consciously chose
to reject a standing committee form of organization and to use, instead,
select committees and the Committee of the Whole. Through succeeding Congresses, the House slowly began employing semistanding committees and standing committees. Evolutionary forces (that is, the
development of informal habits and routines that were eventually formalized into institutional rules) must have combined with perceptible
human decisions to cause this gradual development. In the end a system
of standing committees emerged as a new basis for governance in the
House and the Senate, perhaps the greatest legacy of the 1810-25 period
for the institutional development of Congress.
Gerald Gamm is a graduate student in History and Government, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138. Kenneth
Shepsle is Professor of Government, Harvard University, Cambridge,
Massachusetts 02138.
NOTES
Shepsle acknowledges a grant from the Everett Dirksen Center and research
support from the National Science Foundation (SES 86-16372).
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64 Gerald Gamm and Kenneth Shepsle
1. It should be noted that the authors themselves are not in complete agreement on these issues. In effect, this paper replays the debates and discussions between the
authors during the conduct of the research.
2. This illustration is similar to our second view of committee assignment
practices, in which practice precedes rules change and habit precedes formal justification
for the practice.
3. This is not to say that all Republicans were frothing at the mouth for war.
Many of the traditional Republicans continued to hope war could be averted through diplomatic means. Even some of the more militaristic Republicans demurred on the creation
of a large navy (Clay messmates Bibb of Georgia and Grundy of Tennessee voted against,
along with most other western war hawks) and bridled at the levying of taxes before a declaration of war (Peter Porter of New York, Clay's choice for chairman of the select committee on foreign relations, opposed).
4. The data for the House in Tables 1 and 2 were first reported in Shepsle and
Humes (1984).
5. On the general problems of hegemonic, or oversized, coalitions, see
Riker 1962.
6. For example, early in the 14th Congress, after a number of new standing
committees had been created, Niles Register matter-of-factly reported, "The standing
committees were appointed as usual."
7. Bernard Mayo's very complete biography of Clay (1937) had been projected as a three-volume study; unfortunately, Mayo's death permitted only the first of
these volumes to be completed, which covered Clay only through the War of 1812. Van
Deusen's less detailed biography (1937), covenng a broader time frame, makes no mention of Clay as an institutional engineer. Most of the literature on the early congresses
make considerable mention of Clay in reference to his revolutionizing of the Speakership
but give little attention to his relationship to the standing committees. Harlow (1917) is a
partial exception, noting that Clay used the standing committees in a novel manner.
8. It should be noted that the Senate changed its standing rules in 1806 so that
"when a subject had been referred to a select committee, any other subject or matter of a
similar nature might, on motion, be referred to that same committee" (Robinson 1954,
27). This change allowed the Senate to economize on the number of select committees it
established. However, this arrangement falls short even of the semistanding committees
in the House (much less "standing committees in all but name"), since a floor majority
had to vote to send a related matter to this committee. Nor did these committees have the
power to propose, since they could only report on what was submitted to them. Nevertheless, this change in rules was a first step in recognizing the awkwardness of government by
select committee.
9. At that time, the Cumberland Road was the only national bit of infrastructure. With no other national roads or canals, the Senate was unwilling to create such juris-
diction. Many senators may also have entertained constitutional doubts about the
propriety of federal intervention in the creation of infrastructure, an issue that remained
salient throughout the 1820s and culminated in President Jackson's veto of the Maysville
Road Bill in 1830.
10. Robinson (1954, 53) does refer the reader to Annals 14 Cong 2:21 for a discussion of Barbour's amendment, but not of the original motion.
11. Kravitz cites Binkley 1962, 72; McConachie 1898,218-221; and Robinson
1954; 20, 32.
12. For a good, nontechnical review of the theory of principals and agents,
written primarily for political scientists, see Moe 1984.
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Standing Committees
65
13. A formal model of leaders as coalition agents is presented in Shepsle and
Humes 1984 and described in Rohde and Shepsle 1987. It is based on a model of legislative agents first articulated by Fiorina (1972).
14. Alexander (1916, 231-233) provides a similar accounting.
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