The freedom caucus is (sort of) right.

• Author: Drutman, Lee

The House leadership's top-down management style isn't working. Is it time to try more democracy?

Legislating in the Dark: Information and Power in the House of Representatives

by James M. Curry

University of Chicago Press, 264 pp.

When members of the ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus revolted last October against then Speaker John Boehner and threw the House of Representatives into chaos, their central complaint was that they had systematically been cut out of the legislative process. "[Boehner] operated a top-down system," complained Representative Justin Amash, of the speaker's regime. "Which means that he figures out what outcome he wants, and he goes to the individual members and attempts to compel and coerce us to vote for that outcome."

Among the caucus's many demands was that the House return to "regular order." Rather than a small cadre of leaders running the show from on high, House committees and subcommittees should actually write bills, with space and time to deliberate. Bills should not be foisted on members at the last minute.

While widely acknowledging that regular order was a nice idea, many in the Washington commentariat worry that any move away from the kind of centralized power structures that House leaders have been building up for decades would be an invitation to even more chaos. Imagine what would happen, many argued, if these right-wing extremists had more opportunities to participate. If you think things are bad now, the thinking goes, you ain't seen nothin' yet.

The standoff ended when Paul Ryan reluctantly agreed to serve as speaker, told House Freedom Caucus members he felt their pain, promised he would do what he could to involve them more in the process, and then somewhat reorganized the powerful Steering Committee as a symbolic first step. Washington collectively breathed a sigh of relief.

While many of the caucus's demands are ridiculous, the idea that the House should become a more deliberative place isn't. It harkens back to James Madison's original vision of Congress, which, in his timeless words, would "refine and enlarge the public views, by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens" so that "the public voice, pronounced by the representatives of the people, will be more consonant to the public good than if pronounced by the people themselves." Perhaps the House came closest to these ideals in the 1970s, a time of considerable subcommittee activity and bipartisan compromise. The drift away began in the late 1980s, when Democrat Jim Wright began to consolidate power in the speakership. In 1995, when Newt Gingrich was elected speaker, he affirmatively changed the model, eliminating subcommittees, weakening committees, and centralizing power in ways that had not been seen since the early twentieth century, when Republican Speakers Thomas Reed and Joseph Cannon operated effectively as czars.

And yet, opening up the deliberative process to allow the House Freedom Caucus to participate more still feels like an invitation to legislative nihilism. And yet, the kinds of strong-arm leadership tactics that Boehner used (and Ryan will eventually have to rely on as well) do...