What Is a Conference Committee and Why Are They So Rare Today? (with Josh Ryan)
What Is a Conference Committee and Why Are They So Rare Today? (with Josh Ryan)  
Podcast: Understanding Congress
Published On: Mon Jun 06 2022
Description: The subject of this episode is, “What is a conference committee and why are they so rare today?”My guest is Josh Ryan. He is an associate professor of political science at Utah State University. Josh studies Congress, the president, state legislatures and executives, as well as electoral institutions. Importantly for the purpose of this episode of Understanding Congress, Josh is the author of the book The Congressional Endgame: Interchamber Bargaining and Compromise (University of Chicago Press, 2018). This book examines conference committees and the other ways the two chambers of Congress come to an agreement—or not—on legislation.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, DC.Josh, welcome to the podcast.Josh Ryan:Thanks so much for having me.Kevin Kosar:Let's start very simply, Schoolhouse Rock! style. What is a conference committee?Josh Ryan:We think of Congress as one branch of government, and Congress is actually two different institutions. The House and the Senate are separated from each other. They have almost no control over what the other chamber does. They have their own legislators, obviously. They have their own procedures, their own norms, their own committees, their own ways of doing things. And when they write a bill, even if the House and the Senate generally agree on the parameters of the bill and what's going to be in the bill, because of all these differences, they usually write two different versions of a bill. So we can think of the House as developing some version of a bill to address some policy problem. Typically the Senate takes up legislation after the House, but not always. Senators are their own people and they like to do their own thing, and they typically change the House bill in some way. So even though the House and the Senate are supposed to kind of be working together, if the bill is anything more interesting or substantive than some trivial piece of legislation, we're going to end up with two different versions of the bill. The Constitution requires that Congress can only send one version of the bill to the president, so the House and the Senate have to have some way of resolving their differences, of agreeing on the exact same language for a given bill. Historically, one of the main ways that they've come to an agreement is by using a conference committee. This is a temporary committee, so it's different than the standing committees in Congress, like the Agriculture Committee or the Armed Services Committee, which exist and are more or less permanent. The conference committee is ad hoc. It's created just to address the differences between the House and the Senate on a particular bill. The House and the Senate will each designate conferees. These are individuals usually who serve on the standing committees which dealt with the bill. And those people will go to a conference where they sit down and they try to hash out the differences between the House and the Senate version. Once they've done that, the conference committee sends the bill back to both chambers, and both the House and the Senate then have to vote on the bill again. But importantly, they can't make changes to the bill at that point, and the House and the Senate have the exact same version of the bill, exactly the same words, etc. At that point, if they both approve the bill, the bill goes to the president.Kevin Kosar:Now, if I could just ask as a brief follow-up: one of the things you note in your book is that if you look to the Constitution to see what a conference committee is, how it's defined, and who's to be on it, you're not going to find it there. There's an element whenever it comes to a conference committee of kind of an adhocracy, where they are reinventing the wheel each time they put one of these together. Is that right?Josh Ryan:That's exactly right. And this is a little bit unusual. Many states use joint committees, that is, committees that are shared between the two chambers, but Congress doesn't work that way, and it really hasn't historically. The House and the Senate have found conference committees to be pretty effective, though. Almost all bills that end up in conference are eventually approved by the chambers and sent to the president. Something like 95 percent of bills that make it to conference end up going to the president's desk. So despite the fact that, as you said, it's ad hoc—every time they do it, it feels like they're reinventing the wheel—it actually works pretty well. And I think the House and the Senate believe it to be an efficient and good way of resolving their differences.Kevin Kosar:Perhaps the lack of constitutional prescription detail just creates the flexibility that you really need, ultimately, to get the right people in the room together and to have the flexibility to work things out. So, conference committee, that's one way to deal with the issue of the House and the Senate both trying to legislate on the same subject, but ending up with two bills that are not identical. What are the other ways for the president to receive one piece of legislation rather than two pieces of paper?Josh Ryan:The most common alternative to conferencing, which the chambers are using more and more frequently nowadays, is what we refer to as amendment trading. Some people call it ping-ponging. You can think of the analogy of a ball bouncing back and forth across the table. The idea here is, rather than creating a committee, when they use amendment trading or ping-ponging, the House and the Senate simply amend the bill in some way and send it back to the other chamber. They amend the bill, hopefully moving it closer to the other chamber's version. The bill gets sent back to the other chamber again. They may amend the bill, moving it again closer to the other chamber's version. And they can do this a number of times, typically no more than three (though there are some exceptions to that). The idea is that they sequentially amend the bill to get it to a place where they can both approve it without changing it. So that's the main alternative to conferencing.One of the things that people forget is [that] there is an alternative to avoid this entire process, which is, simply agree to accept the other chamber's bill without changing it. We actually see this, and I argue in my book that it's becoming more frequent because it offers a way out. If the Senate knows it's going to have difficulty getting to conference or getting agreement in conference or navigating the amendment trading process, they may just take the bill as is from the House. And the same is true with the House. This has happened a couple of times in the last few years, and it's a way of short-circuiting the process. The chamber that does this may not get everything they want, but it's probably going to be easier when they choose to do this. It's going to be easier for them than having to negotiate the bill again after going through the difficulty of passing it the first time.Kevin Kosar:I'm glad you mentioned that, because recently there was an interesting example of that, where the two chambers were grappling with the debt limit and the fact that the country was about to cross it. And if I recall, the way that played out was that the Senate ultimately passed a bill, and then the House voted upon a rule. That rule had a number of provisions, one of which said that the Senate bill on raising the debt limit shall be deemed as approved. The House just basically recognized that they didn't want to have to put their members out there voting on this, but they also didn't want to play amendment ping-pong, apparently. That's the way they got it done, and that's how the bill went to Biden's desk.Josh Ryan:Yeah, that's a really good example of how this works. Usually, in this whole process, it's the Senate that's the problem, at least recently. The Senate has a harder time doing all of these things. The leadership doesn't have as much control over procedures, as much control over the membership. We've had more narrow majorities, arguably, in the Senate than in the House. So typically, when it comes to post-passage bargaining, resolution conferencing, amendment trading, it's the Senate that's the fly in the ointment. Often, just as you said, the House has been put in the position of, we have to take the Senate bill or we're not going to get anything, because it can't go back to that chamber. We'll never get agreement.Kevin Kosar:Right. And just for listeners’ purposes, why is it that the Senate tends to be the fly in the ointment?Josh Ryan:Well, in the Senate it's just harder to get things done. The majority party doesn't have the same power that they do in the House. We're seeing a really good example of this today, which is, in the House today, even with the very narrow majority the Democrats have, they've mostly been able to do what they want. Not entirely, but they've been pretty effective. It hasn't been a situation in which the party is...