134 Congressional politics
strength in the House, the practical result of their operations is to provide
another focus of loyalty that cuts across party lines.
The chairman of a standing committee has considerable influence over
the fate of legislation. Over the years he or she will have built up a net-
work of influence and will know how the system works and exercises control
over the calling of the committee and over its agenda. It used to be the case
that committee chairmen were chosen on the basis of the seniority system,
which meant that they were almost inevitably from safe seats, and, when the
Democrats were in control, a disproportionately high number came from the
Southern states. In 1966 the chairmen of more than half of the Senate com-
mittees came from former Confederacy states, while six came from Western
states and one from West Virginia. There were no committee chairmen from
New England or New York, none from great Eastern states like Pennsylvania,
or from industrial states like Michigan or Illinois. In the House eleven of the
twenty chairmen were from the South. Inevitably, the Southern committee
chairman, who had been in Congress representing a safe constituency for
many years, tended to be somewhat out of touch with, and unresponsive to,
the interests of the great cities of the North. Yet it is these cities that are so
significant in the election of the president and where so many of the pressing
problems of America today are to be found. However, since 1970 there has
been a steady decline in the hold of the South over committee chairmanships.
Nevertheless, in 2006, with the Republicans in the majority, five of the six-
teen Senate committee chairmen came from the Deep South; in the House,
however, with its stricter control over the selection of committee chairmen,
only three of the twenty committee chairmen came from Southern states.
The influence of the committee chairman is by no means finished when
the committee has reported out a Bill. The committee appoints a floor man-
ager for each Bill, often the chairman, whose role is to see the Bill through
to the final vote. In the House of Representatives the Rules Committee will
have allotted a certain amount of time for the Bill, which will be divided
equally between its supporters and its opponents, and the floor manager and
a senior member of the committee in opposition to the Bill will allocate this
time among those who wish to speak. Usually the members of the committee
will dominate debate on the floor and will greatly influence the extent to
which the measure is amended.
Conference committees
The two Houses of Congress consider legislation independently of each oth-
er, so that a Bill passed by one House may fail to pass the other. Usually on
important matters identical Bills are introduced into both Houses, but by
the time they have been through the legislative process it is unlikely that
they will still be identical, and it will be necessary to iron out the differences
between the Senate and House versions of the legislation. Sometimes these
differences may be reconciled by the supporters of the legislation securing