United States House of Representatives

E

The Great Depression and the New Deal

The stock market crash of 1929 presented the country with an unprecedented economic crisis of unemployment, sagging consumer demand, and bank failures—the Great Depression. Republicans controlled the House, and their laissez-faire economic doctrine led them to refrain from intervening in the crisis. Republican president Herbert Hoover and the Republican-dominated Senate also favored letting the market follow its course. The downturn continued, and voters ousted the Republicans from control of the House in 1930 and the Senate in 1932.

Democratic president Franklin D. Roosevelt replaced Hoover in 1933 and embarked on the New Deal, the most ambitious program of governmental expansion ever seen in the United States. The House generally supported Roosevelt’s legislative initiatives to spur job growth through increased government spending on housing, roads, rural electrification, and other public works. Both the House and the Senate opposed Roosevelt’s efforts to increase presidential power. The president proposed legislation in 1937 to increase executive control over federal agencies, but Congress rejected the plan. Undaunted, a few weeks later Roosevelt sought to control the Supreme Court by increasing the number of judges, which would have allowed him to fill the new positions with his allies. Congress also rejected this proposal.

F

World War II to the 1950s

After the United States entered World War II in 1941, the House ceded much of its traditional authority over spending bills, granting Roosevelt wide leeway in financing the war. In 1943 House debates raged over whether to focus the American war effort in Europe or in the Pacific, but there were never floor votes in Congress on the issue. American success in the war helped the House break its narrow focus on domestic political issues that had prevailed in the first few decades of the century. This new global orientation led the House to support the formation of the United Nations after the war.

The Legislative Reorganization Act of 1946 cut the standing House committees from 48 to 19. The consolidation was short-lived, however, as subcommittees replaced many of the standing committees that had been eliminated. The reorganization increased congressional staff and gave more resources to the Legislative Reference Service, a branch of the Library of Congress that provides research assistance to Congress. The improved research support, combined with a sharp increase in the number of House staff members, helped put Congress on par with the White House in policy debates.

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Sam Rayburn, a Democrat from Texas, presided as Speaker of the House for much of the 1940s and 1950s. Despite the reduced power of the office, Rayburn rivaled predecessors Thomas Reed and Joseph Cannon in his influence on the chamber. He guided Roosevelt’s World War II initiatives through the House, and united Republican and Democratic representatives behind America’s foreign policy in the 1950s. Rayburn, in contrast to aggressive Speakers such as Reed and Cannon, won over his rivals through persuasion and compromise.

The anti-Communist fervor of the Cold War dominated the House for much of the first decade after World War II. Fear of subversive activities by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) sparked wide-ranging investigations to identify and jail Communists. The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) held spectacular hearings to root out Communists, including highly publicized questioning of prominent Hollywood actors and directors in 1947. HUAC’s probes climaxed with the 1948 investigation of Alger Hiss, a former State Department official. A court later convicted Hiss of perjury for denying his part in a Soviet spy ring (see Hiss Case). Very few of the committee’s targets were ever charged with crimes, and historians now regard most of HUAC’s charges of Communist subversion as mistaken. Despite the thin evidence, the hearings helped spark a nationwide anti-Communist fervor throughout the 1950s, destroying the careers and reputations of hundreds of actors, ministers, teachers, writers, and trade union leaders. The hearings also vaulted Republican Richard Nixon into public prominence, and put him on the path to become president of the United States.

G

The 1960s and 1970s

Congress approved a flurry of new legislation in the 1960s, but the House saw few organizational changes in this period. Committees remained the focus of legislative activity, and committee appointments continued to follow the seniority rule. Until the 1960s the seniority system permitted a small number of conservative Southern Democrats to scuttle many civil rights and social welfare bills. The hammerlock control of the aging Southerners prompted the Legislative Reorganization Act of 1970. This act marked the beginning of a series of structural changes in the 1970s that weakened the seniority system. In 1975 the parties changed their rules to allow party leaders to nominate committee chairs, with the final choice made by a secret ballot. This reform, which replaced a rule dating to the early 20th century, further undercut the seniority system and curtailed the nearly dictatorial control enjoyed by committee chairs. When they took control of the House in 1995, Republicans imposed a rule limiting individuals to a maximum of six years as chair of any one committee.

In 1974 the House Judiciary Committee conducted an inquiry into the role of President Richard Nixon in the Watergate scandal. The allegations of White House-directed burglary, conspiracy, and obstruction of justice were among the most stunning testimony in the history of the House. The Judiciary Committee passed a resolution calling for Nixon’s impeachment, and the president resigned within weeks to forestall a full vote in the House. Nixon’s resignation brought an end to the House’s impeachment proceedings against him. Although the scandal implicated only White House officials, Watergate heightened public distrust of government institutions, including the House of Representatives.

H

Recent Years

During the 1980s and 1990s the House was rocked by highly publicized scandals reaching its top leaders. In 1989 Speaker Jim Wright resigned in the face of an inquiry by the House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct (ethics committee) into a questionable book deal and other matters. Wright was the first Speaker to be forced from the office.

The 1994 congressional elections gave the Republicans control of the House for the first time since 1954. The party also won control of the Senate, setting the stage for conflict with a White House controlled by Democratic president Bill Clinton. Speaker Newt Gingrich used his party’s control of the House to push for a Republican “Contract With America,” which included tax cuts, welfare reform, term limits for federal legislators, a balanced-budget amendment, and increases in defense spending. Gingrich managed to win House approval of most parts of the program, but resistance from the Senate and the White House killed several key elements.

In 1996 Gingrich, who had pushed for Wright’s resignation, came under fire for failing to inform Congress about his role in a political action committee (PAC). The House voted to censure Gingrich in 1997, the first time in history that the chamber voted to impose such a rebuke on the Speaker. In late 1998, after a personal scandal and disappointing midterm election results, Gingrich resigned from the House. When his likely successor, Robert L. Livingston of Louisiana, also acknowledged a personal scandal, House Republicans turned to a respected but low-key House insider, J. Dennis Hastert of Illinois.

House Republicans also took center stage in the 1998 impeachment of President Clinton. A prolonged investigation of Clinton uncovered evidence that he had conducted an affair with a White House intern and that he had lied about the affair in statements to a court and a grand jury. The House Judiciary Committee’s Republican majority seized upon this evidence and eventually recommended four articles of impeachment to the full House. Although hardly anyone condoned the president’s actions, the impeachment process was marked by noisy partisanship, both inside and outside the House chamber. Clinton’s supporters accused House Republicans of trying to remove a democratically elected president from office and trying to discard his policies. His opponents saw him as a person who had disgraced his office and lied in judicial proceedings. On mostly partisan lines, the House approved two of the four articles of impeachment and sent them to the Senate, which held a brisk trial before voting against conviction of the president. See Impeachment: The Clinton Trial.

By 2001 a series of close elections had whittled the Republican margin in the House to fewer than ten seats. The virtually equal partisan forces made it difficult to pass major legislation. The House manifested intense partisanship over issues such as the environment, trade, education, and social concerns such as abortion and gun control. These partisan divisions often resulted in harsh relations among members and produced a sense of stalemate. Strong showings by Republican candidates in the 2002 and 2004 elections enabled the party to expand its majority in the House. But Democrats regained a majority in the House for the first time in 12 years in the 2006 midterm elections. Polls showed that dissatisfaction with the war in Iraq played a major role in the Democratic victory. When the new Congress convened in January 2007, Nancy Pelosi of California became the first female Speaker of the House.