Ripon Forum


Vol. 57, No. 3

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In this edition

With each new week seeming to bring a new advancement in artificial intelligence, the latest edition of The Ripon Forum examines the role of Congress in regulating AI and how our lives and our world may be reshaped and impacted in the years ahead.

The Role of Congress in Regulating Artificial Intelligence

As policymakers begin to tackle the issue of AI, it is vital that we maintain the agility of our technology and strike a careful balance between protecting consumers and protecting innovation.

How AI is Reshaping the Battlefield

Data, advanced algorithms, computing power – these are the weapons that will determine the fight for information.

AI and the Future of Schooling

Advances in artificial technology create new opportunities to tackle persistent challenges in schooling. But we must be clear-eyed about the technology and how it is used.

How AI is Reshaping Transportation

AI has emerged as a transformative force in transportation, one that will affect both how we use transportation – the demand side – and how we supply transportation facilities and services.

How AI can Reshape Lawmaking in the U.S. Congress

The integration of AI into the lawmaking process has the potential to significantly reshape the way laws are created and implemented — just ask ChatGPT.

Memo to Washington: AI Needs Your Full Attention … Now!

The development and deployment of this one specific type of AI technology — large generative models such as GPT4 — is outpacing our ability to understand their strengths and limitations.

Bring Back Conference Committees

Like so many aspects of the legislative process, the Conference Committee has fallen victim to the dramatic shift of congressional power to party leadership.

Should America Continue to Accept Asylum Seekers? Yes.

America has always been a land of refuge and will continue to be so. That is the easy part of any debate about refugee and asylum issues.

Should America Continue to Accept Asylum Seekers? No.

Today, the U.S. has needlessly made the administration of providing refugee protection confusing by creating two separate paths and processes: An alien overseas applies for refugee protection, while an alien at our border or inside the U.S. applies for asylum.

Ripon Profile of María Elvira Salazar

The Representative of Florida’s 27th Congressional District discusses her time in Congress and her legislative priorities.

Bring Back Conference Committees

Not that many years ago, one of the grandest spectacles in the legislative process was the Conference Committee. House and Senate Committee chairs would battle over significant points to reach a consensus. Unfortunately, like so many aspects of the legislative process, the Conference Committee has fallen victim to the dramatic shift of congressional power to party leadership. If Congress wants to restore its powers, restarting this traditional way of hammering out compromises would be wise.

Conference Committees are ad hoc committees formed to resolve differences between the House and Senate. The chairs of these temporary committees are usually the chairs of the committees that produced the legislation in question. The remaining members are then appointed by the party leaders in both chambers and ratified by the entire membership.

Once the committees met, a dynamic process would occur, usually behind closed doors. Our book, Surviving Inside Congress, described it as being like the knife fight in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (“Rules! There are no rules in a knife fight). Staff would resolve slight differences, and the two chairs would determine how to resolve the significant differences.

Like so many aspects of the legislative process, the Conference Committee has fallen victim to the dramatic shift of congressional power to party leadership.

It worked well because the people resolving the differences were the experts in the subject matter of the legislation. Committees are the fundamental way Congress creates a division of labor so that Members can become specialists on specific issues and act as agents for their chamber and party. Conference Committees also allowed chairs to keep the promises they made to Members to gain initial passage. It also allowed them to remove items from the bill as punishment should a Member renege on a commitment to vote for the bill. The net effect was to help build strong and somewhat bipartisan and diverse majorities for legislation. It also had the effect of building relationships based on trust between Members and Committee chairs.

Much of this has changed over the last few decades as party leaders – the Speaker mostly – gathered power and control over the process. Unfortunately, that power shift has come at the expense of Committees. In political science, this is called conditional party government, where Members of Congress agree to back the Speaker, regardless of their own views, in exchange for being protected from tough votes and increased assistance from the party’s campaign apparatus. Both parties have engaged in this practice since the turn of the century.

It turns out that strict party control is barely efficient and rarely effective. Party leadership weakened committees. For instance, after the 1994 Republican takeover of the Congress, Speaker Gingrich cut committee budgets by one-third and imposed term limits on Committee Chairs. As hyper-partisanship increased in the 1990s, bipartisan legislative efforts became more difficult. The narrow majorities of the early 2000s led party leadership to avoid tough votes on authorization and appropriations bills to protect their Members. This led to an abandonment of normal appropriations in favor of unamendable omnibus and “minibus” spending bills that avoided tough floor fights while neutering the authorization committee process that allows for effective Congressional oversight. Today, two-thirds of the non-defense budget is unauthorized, and the appropriations process is combined into one massive trillion-dollar bill that no one reads, and no one can change.

Today’s party leaders have further weakened committees by rarely appointing Conference Committees to resolve House and Senate differences. Instead, the leaders send messages back and forth, offering compromises and solutions to their legislative differences. This process nicknamed “ping-ponging,” sends messages back and forth between chambers, with the Capitol Rotunda being a metaphorical net.

Instead of having the Committee members, the actual subject matter experts, iron out an agreement, the leaders make a deal based on political imperatives. As a result, the Speaker, the Senate Majority Leader, and the President become the only legislators in the process, with the other 533 members of the House and Senate merely being observers who ratify their leader’s agreement.

If Congress wants to restore its powers, restarting this traditional way of hammering out compromises would be wise.

That is different from how Congress is supposed to work. The purpose of a congress is to bring together diverse representatives of the nation to reach compromises everyone can live with.

This is not to say that one party’s political interests never align with the nation’s values, but in the current contest between developing good policy and good politics, politics seems to be winning hands down.

Congress should restore the traditional Conference Committee system. It forces the Administration to deal with policy experts in the committees instead of just the Speaker’s or Senate Leader’s office. It brings more regional and diverse political representation into negotiating policy solutions. It also allows both chambers to build bipartisan majorities as deals are cut to win votes.

Is the Conference Committee always a pretty process? Unfortunately, no. That’s why the Prussian Otto von Bismarck remarked that legislation and sausage closely resembled each other. You did not want to watch either of them being made, but you liked the result once the work was completed.

The key is restoring strength to Committees, ensuring that multiple members of both parties participate in the legislative process. In addition, strong committees increase the power of Congress since the Executive Branch must deal with multiple points of power rather than one or two people in the House and the Senate. Finally, restoring Conference Committees would, most importantly, restore policy expertise on complex legislation.

It makes no sense to ask a committee to spend months developing legislation only to have the party leaders shape the final package. The solution to Congress’ loss of power vis-à-vis the Executive Branch is to open up and restore a robust legislative process where Committees once again act as agents of their chambers rather than merely being the opening act for the actual show between the President, the Speaker, and the Senate Majority Leader.

Mark Strand served as President of the Congressional Institute from 2007 until his retirement earlier this year. He previously spent 24 years as a senior congressional staff member on Capitol Hill.