Democrats could bring back a relic: House seniority

WASHINGTON -- The late Senator Warren Magnuson, Democrat of Washington state, was a legend in his day. But by 1980, when he was running for his seventh term, age and diabetes had taken its toll. Still, "Maggie," who had chaired top committees -- first Commerce, then Appropriations -- for 16 years, wasn't prepared to give up power.

So his campaign filmed a commercial of the 75-year-old lawmaker shuffling down the halls of the Senate like a huge, heavy-footed dinosaur.

"I may walk a little slow," Magnuson said. "But the meeting doesn't start until I get there, and it doesn't stop until I bang the gavel."

Unfortunately for Maggie, he ran into the Reagan Revolution and lost his seat in the GOP sweep of 1980. The Republicans took over the Senate that year, so Magnuson would have lost his beloved chairmanship in any case.

Non e theless, the almost theatrical grandeur of elderly committee chairmen, secure in their grips on the gavel thanks to the congressional seniority system, remained for another 14 years.

Then, after the GOP took over the House and Senate in the "Contract With America" year of 1994, a new breed of leaders began dismantling the seniority system. The Republican majorities in both chambers introduced term limits for committee chairmen. And the House went even further, empowering party leaders to choose committee chairmen -- and remove them -- without any consideration of seniority.

The rule changes altered the way the House worked. Power was far more centralized, making the body more efficient, with bills never reaching the floor without the approval of the leadership team. Few committee chairmen ever dared to buck the leadership. Representatives learned that they could achieve their aims only by maintaining strict party loyalty, rather than building bipartisan coalitions.

Similar effects were felt in the Senate, but to a lesser degree; the body's smaller size ensured that each member had a voice in setting policy, and rules requiring 60 out of 100 senators to vote to end debate on a bill meant that the majority didn't always get its way.

Now, with Democrats in striking range of taking over both bodies, the pros and cons of the seniority system are becoming part of the national debate. Unlike Republicans, the Democrats still adhere to the seniority system, with no term limits, though the House leadership retains the power to override seniority in extreme cases.

Republicans, who feel their greater vulnerability is in the House rather than the Senate, are drawing attention to the many elderly liberals who could claim chairmanships after 12 years in the wilderness.

And the roster does, indeed, read like a " Who's Who " of the body's most outspoken Democrats: New York's Charles Rangel (36 years in the House) is in line for the Ways and Means chairmanship; Michigan's John Dingell (51 years) would hold the gavel in Energy and Commerce; Michigan's John Conyers (41 years), author of a controversial report on the Ohio 2004 presidential election, would chair the Judiciary Committee; and California's Henry Waxman (31 years) would head Government Reform.

Republicans, including Vice President Dick Cheney, contend that these chairmen and others, insulated by the seniority system, would pursue quixotic agendas and promote liberal issues -- such as tax hikes and welfare benefits -- that are out of the mainstream of even the Democratic Party.

But history suggests that committee chairmen have the power to block legislation, but not to pass it. For most of the 20th century, key chairmanships were held by long-serving Southern Democrats who blocked such liberal priorities as civil rights legislation and cuts in defense spending.

So Rangel, Dingell, Conyers, Waxman, and the rest would be unlikely to impose a liberal agenda. But as committee chairmen, they would wield one important club: the ability to call hearings and issue subpoenas to compel sworn testimony.

All are intrepid investigators, the Torquemadas of the left. And each has presumably been stuffing his filing cabinets with issues to probe concerning the Bush administration.

But this type of oversight is part of what voters seem to be seeking from a Democratic Congress: Unleashing a pack of dinosaurs on Bush and his own Jurassics, such as Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, could be just what the public wants.

If not -- and if the investigations start to veer into blind alleys -- the Democratic Congress won't last more than one term. And the seniority system, relic that it is, may finally die along with it.

Peter S. Canellos is the Globe's Washington bureau chief. National Perspective is his weekly analysis of events in the capital and beyond.