What Do Congressional Committees Do? (with Maya Kornberg)
What Do Congressional Committees Do? (with Maya Kornberg)  
Podcast: Understanding Congress
Published On: Mon Feb 06 2023
Description: The topic of this episode is, “What do congressional committees do?”My guest is Dr. Maya Kornberg. She is a political scientist in the Elections and Government Program at the Brennan Center. Dr. Kornberg leads the center’s work related to information and disinformation in politics, Congress, and money in politics. Maya also is the author of Inside Congressional Committees: Function and Dysfunction in the Legislative Process (Columbia University Press, 2023.) All of that makes her the perfect person to answer the question, “What do congressional committees do?”Kevin Kosar:Welcome to Understanding Congress, a podcast about the first branch of government. Congress is a notoriously complex institution and few Americans think well of it, but Congress is essential to our republic. It’s a place where our pluralistic society is supposed to work out its differences and come to agreement about what our laws should be, and that is why we are here to discuss our national legislature and to think about ways to upgrade it so it can better serve our nation. I’m your host, Kevin Kosar, and I’m a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank in Washington, D.C.Dr. Kornberg, welcome to the podcast.Maya Kornberg:Thank you so much for having me. I’m excited to be here.Kevin Kosar:Since its earliest days—more than two centuries ago—each chamber of Congress has had committees and used them for lawmaking, oversight, etc. Why committees? Maya Kornberg:As you noted, committees have been essential institutions in Congress since its inception. One of the reasons for this is that Congress is a big organization with an enormous number of issues to handle. So committees act as sub-organizations that can help Congress perform specific duties. Congress delegates work through its committees, so they also serve as indicators of how Congress is apportioning responsibility and resources. And in terms of power within the chambers, committees help to decentralize power, and encourage and give space to more legislators from both parties to be active participants in the policymaking process. Kevin Kosar:You note in the book that committees have four core functions: deliberation, education, theater, and personal connection. What do you mean by these terms?Maya Kornberg:These are the core functions that legislative scholars have identified as key roles of committees in legislatures, generally.First and foremost, scholars identify committees as a deliberative forum within Congress. Woodrow Wilson once wrote that “The House both deliberates and legislates in small sections. It delegates its legislative and deliberative functions to stand in committees.” And what does deliberation mean? As you and your co-authors touch on in Congress Overwhelmed, deliberation is really about weighing the different aspects of a question and reasoning through the different causes and consequences. This is a crucial part of any policy formulation, and something that committees handle in Congress.Traditionally, committees are where research is brought in and technical learning takes place, and that’s what I mean by education. Congress is a body in which many lawmakers have to legislate on specialized topics that they don’t have any training in. Committees give them the space to learn—they are a place where lawmakers gather information and educate themselves about specific policy areas.  Committees are also one of the major bipartisan institutions in an increasingly partisan Congress, so they form a space for members of Congress to cultivate personal relationships with each other and with the witnesses. Members from both parties come together on a regular basis in committees for hearings and other regular work. And this forms a space then for potential personal connection between members.  In my book, I tell the story of a particularly notable friendship that came from a committee, and that is the friendship between longtime senator, Dick Lugar, whom I interviewed before he passed away in 2019, and then-senator, Barack Obama. Republican Senator Lugar told me that Barack Obama was frequently one of the only members left in the committee when Senator Lugar was chairing, and would sit there and ask questions and be engaged. Also as a result of their joint membership in the committee, they went on several trips together—what’s known as CODELs, or congressional delegations—and were really able to maintain a friendship and fruitful working relationship across party lines for many years after, that originated in their joint membership in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. So that’s what I mean by personal connection.Finally, committees can act as what Woodrow Wilson terms “the theater of debate upon legislation.” One of the staffers that I interviewed in the book explains that sometimes the purpose of a hearing is to give a public forum to discussions that largely happen behind closed doors. This public function of committees allows members to publicize issues. It’s really a public-facing function and it can help them to mobilize support for different policy issues that they might be working on.So these four functions—deliberation, education, personal connection, and theater—are core universal functions of committees. And my book then explores under what conditions each of these functions might be most likely in Congress today.  Kevin Kosar:Since you’ve teed up the question nicely, are the committees of today still doing all four of these things: deliberating, education, theater, personal connection? Does it vary? Does the mix—the kind of cocktail of these four functions—change from committee to committee?Maya Kornberg:As I note in the book, there’re certain parameters that lead a hearing or a committee to be more likely to fulfill different functions. Today, after a series of developments over the past several decades, committees are—by and large—less autonomous, less specialized, and less deliberative than they once were as a result of decades of having staff cut and having their power taken away and usurped by party leadership.Still, committees can serve these functions. I note in the book that, in particular, the educational platform of committees can be most likely—and this might seem counterintuitive—the further away you are from a vote or from talking about a specific piece of legislation. I spoke to members who explained that the closer you are to a vote, the more likely you are to descend into partisan tribal warfare.But in terms of what I call agenda-setting and general education about topics—this is really important because these members of Congress still need to be legislating about all of these very specialized topics—committees can still serve this general education function. I tell the story in the book, for example, of the genetic engineering hearing in 2015, which was at the very beginning of genetic engineering science and development of that science in the United States. Members talked about this hearing as one in which—at the very beginning—this policy issue becoming something that they would need to regulate, fund, and legislate about. They were able to learn about this because it had not yet been colored by partisanship in the way that many issues are. I also note in the book that personal connection can still occur, but under specific circumstances. As we know, Congress is becoming increasingly partisan. Frequently, the only time that members have to connect with each other is within the rancorous halls of Congress because many of them don’t live in Washington; whereas before the mid-90s, they did and they had plenty of opportunities to form personal connections. One of the things I talk about in the book are opportunities like field hearings, like congressional delegation trips that committees facilitate that allow members to socialize with each other and form personal connections outside of Congress.So again, these kinds of hearings and committee work might allow for more personal connection than we see in traditional scripted and partisan hearings within the halls of Congress. Similarly, the committee hearings that we see in Congress with all the cameras all teed up might actually be the place for more theater. But when they’re out on the road—with for example, the Agriculture Committee’s Farm Bill Listening Tour, listening to farmers—there might be more space for actual interaction and less theater.So, again, in the book, I explore when each of these is most likely, arguing that they all take place in Congress, but we can learn from when they take place in order to think through what reforms can help facilitate more of these different functions in Congress...