The Senate Rules Committee

A couple weeks ago, I posted a blog about my class assignment to attend a meeting of a Senate or House committee. I ended up attending the Senate Rules Committee, and here is a summary of the meeting that I wrote for my seminar class:

On February 2^nd, I attended a hearing in the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration entitled “Corporate American vs. the Voter: Examining the Supreme Court’s Decision to Allow Unlimited Corporate Spending in Elections”. One of the goals of the hearing, as stated by committee Chairman Chuck Schumer (D-New York) was to “listen to ideas in order to find a way forward” in the aftermath of the controversial Supreme Court decision Citizen’s United vs. Federal Elections Commission. The committee invited a variety of experts in order to help the Senators examine some of the implications and ramifications of the decision. The committee also wanted to hear from the panel of experts what steps would be legally and practically feasible for Congress to include in their response to the decision.

Aside from committee Chairman Chuck Schumer, the other key players in the hearing included the ranking member Robert Bennett (R-Utah), witnesses Senators John Kerry (D-Massachusetts) and Russ Feingold (D-Wisconsin), and the panel of other witnesses which included the Attorney General of Montana, Constitutional law professors, and representatives of two advocacy groups. A few other Senators from the Committee participated—all from the majority. Senator Bennett, the ranking member of the committee, was the only Republican to participate in the hearing.

From my observation, the hearing seemed to accomplish one of the goals stated by the committee Chairman, but not the other. The first goal of the hearing was to “find a way forward” from the Court’s decision. The hearing provided a forum in which the Committee could put forth possible responses to the decision, and the panel could give the Committee feedback on those proposals. The Committee was interested to find which various legislative proposals would be both legally available to Congress in light of the decision, and effective in limiting the influence of corporations.

The other goal of the hearing was to discover the implications of the decision; how exactly Campaign Finance law was affected by Citizen’s United. This goal was not accomplished as successfully because the members of the Committee (with the exception of the Republican ranking member) came into the hearing already expressing their belief that the decision had catastrophic implications for American democracy. Senator Schumer called the decision “disastrous and corrosive to our democracy”, Senator Durbin asserted that the judges radically overturned precedent in the decision, and Senator Feingold called the decision a “tragic error”. The panel of experts, on the other hand, seemed mixed in their assessment of the situation. An election law expert from George Mason University, for example, suggested that no one could be sure what the result will be, and that there might be little difference in the way that corporations participate in elections in the future. A professor of Law from Ohio State University said that the new precedent set by this decision “might not actually be that big”. Other panelists held the opposing view. In spite of this difference of opinion, the Committee did not seem interested in some of the experts’ view of the situation.

During the hearing, I saw the power that the Committee Chairman’s agenda had in shaping the proceedings. The Chairman spoke first and was able to set the tone of the hearing. He questioned the panel first, which gave him the first chance to pull information from the experts. The Committee came into the hearing with a clear agenda: to test out legislative responses to the Supreme Court decision that they already saw as dangerous for democracy. The hearing was dominated by Democrats—the other Republican members did not even bother to show up. The ranking Republican member, speaking right after the Chairman, put up a very weak defense of the decision and participated very little in the hearing.

The Rules Committee hearing gave me a small insight into how the Committee process of the Senate works. I saw how a Committee’s agenda can play out in the proceedings, how witness testimony can be used to further the member’s policy goals, and how some of the power dynamics of the Senate play out in the Committee setting.