Pelosi Aims to Take Sept. 11 Commission's Advice on Committee Structure

Tuesday, November 21, 2006

By Patrick Yoest and Tim Starks, Congressional Quarterly Today

November 10, 2006

House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi has made it clear she intends to enact recommendations from the independent Sept. 11 commission that the Republicans declined to pursue when they controlled Congress.

Her efforts could begin close to home, with a reorganization of the House.

According to a Pelosi aide, the presumed incoming Speaker is considering changing the structure of congressional committees.

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and Sen. Richard J. Durbin, D-Ill., have said that the Democrat-controlled Senate next year would consider measures to enact commission recommendations, but have not explicitly said they would make changes to the Senate's committee structure.

The Sept. 11 commission suggested that Congress strengthen its homeland security and intelligence committees, but turf-conscious lawmakers largely stymied such efforts.

Specifically, the commission recommended either establishing a bicameral intelligence committee, or a combined authorization and appropriations committee in each house. For homeland security, it prescribed a "single, principal point of oversight and review."

"Congress had addressed to some extent or another most of, or many of, our recommendations," said Richard Ben-Veniste, a Sept. 11 commission member. "With respect to reorganizing its own committee structure so as to provide a rational and robust mechanism for oversight, we have seen very, very little done."

Different Approaches

The House and Senate leadership would more likely address any changes to committee organization through rules changes, rather than legislation. But both approaches have proved problematic.

In 2004 a resolution negotiated by Reid and Senate Majority Whip Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., allowed a broad array of committees to perform oversight of the Homeland Security Department, rather than centralizing oversight at the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

Language that would have brought Coast Guard and the Transportation Security Administration oversight under the jurisdiction of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs panel ran into "a firewall of bipartisan opposition," according to committee chairwoman, Susan Collins, R-Maine.

FEMA Dispute

The House Homeland Security Committee has repeatedly sparred with other committees on oversight of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and chemical security legislation. Minnesota Rep. James L. Oberstar, the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee's top Democrat, has already said that he plans to make FEMA oversight and port security part of his 2007 agenda.

Although a House bill (HR 5017) suggested as a template for Pelosi's Sept. 11 recommendations bill would give the House and Senate Homeland Security committees more jurisdiction over the Homeland Security Department, a similar Senate bill (S 3875) sponsored by Reid and Durbin would not.

Likewise, the Senate voted down an amendment to the 2004 resolution that would have made the key change advocated by the Sept. 11 commission to the structure of the Intelligence Committee: giving it both appropriations and authorization powers. The commissioners argued that without appropriations authority, the authorizing committee risked being ignored by the intelligence community.

Appropriators, including incoming Senate committee chairman Robert C. Byrd, D-W.Va., resisted it on the grounds that they believed there should be separate committees for authorizing and appropriating -- two different functions that they said adds layers of oversight.

Neither the House nor Senate legislative language that leadership aides point to as a potential template for implementing the commission recommendations includes a joint authorizing and appropriating panel.

Rather, the Senate language would create an oversight subcommittee on the Intelligence Committee, another commission recommendation that the House already enacted.

Both the House and Senate language would create an intelligence subcommittee on the Appropriations Committee, as favored by Sept. 11 commission members when they realized their original proposal for joint authorizing-appropriating intelligence panels would go nowhere.

The House language would implement another commission suggestion, previously adopted in the Senate, that four Intelligence Committee members also serve on the Armed Services, Judiciary, International Relations and Defense Appropriations subcommittees. That could require some reshuffling of committee membership, because some Republicans that hold the joint assignments will inevitably leave the committee, and among committee Democrats, only the Armed Services panel is represented.

Aides said additional details were still being fleshed out, however.

"No doubt it's hard, but with Congress bordering on dysfunction over the last few years, it's absolutely essential to rebuild the foundation of institutional oversight," according to Tim Roemer, a Sept. 11 commission member and former Democratic congressman from Indiana (1991-2003).

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