Congressional politics 137is the funnel through which all legislation must pass, and it may attempt to
delay consideration of a particular measure, or to block its passage altogether
by refusing to grant a rule.
The vital function of establishing the priorities of the legislative pro-
gramme may be influenced by the Speaker or the elective leadership of the
House, but in the end it is the Rules Committee that makes the decision. The
Rules Committee is not a party committee but one of the standing commit-
tees of the House. It is composed of majority and minority party members,
the former numbering twice the latter. The committee and its chairman play
an essential part in the processes by which the House deals with the presi-
dent’s legislative programme, but there is no guarantee that the Chairman
of the Rules Committee will be sympathetic to the president’s programme;
when the party with a majority in the House is of the opposing party, there is
a built-in conflict between them.
In the years following the Second World War this potential for conflict
was fully realised. Because of the operation of the seniority rule, and because
the method of making committee assignments tended to favour conserva-
tives, the Rules Committee became dominated by the conservative coalition
in Congress. The chairman of the Rules Committee, Judge Howard W. Smith
of Virginia, became, in effect, the leader of the conservative coalition in the
House, and his key position on the Rules Committee gave him a power out
of all proportion to the votes that the Southern Democrats could muster in
the House itself. When President Kennedy was elected in 1960 the Rules
Committee was considered to be the major obstacle to the passage of the
legislation that he intended to propose to Congress, and a change in the
composition of the Committee seemed an essential prerequisite for the pas-
sage of his programme. Speaker Sam Rayburn therefore conducted an opera-
tion in the House to expand the Committee from twelve to fifteen members,
making possible the appointment of some liberal Democrats.
However, although the power of the conservative coalition on the Commit-
tee was moderated, the Rules Committee still failed to grant rules for twenty
pieces of legislation in the years 1961–3, and in 1965 a further diminution
in its power was decreed by the House. Previously the only way around the
power of the Rules Committee to block legislation had been the procedure
of ‘discharging’ the Committee from further consideration of a Bill. But a
discharge petition requires the signatures of a majority of the total mem-
bership of the House, so that it was very difficult to operate the procedure.
In 1965, however, ‘the twenty-one-day rule’ was introduced, which gave to
the Speaker the power to call up a Bill for consideration on the floor if the
Rules Committee had failed to grant a rule after twenty-one days. Then,
by the vote of a majority of those present, the House could adopt its own
rule for the discussion of the bill. Thus the Rules Committee was brought
more closely under the direction of the elective leadership of the House. The
twenty-one-day rule was used to discharge the Rules Committee six times in
1965 and twice in 1966. Perhaps more important was the fact that the very