Rules Committee

This session I will be serving as Chair of the House Rules Committee. The Rules Committee helps control the flow of legislation, deciding (subject, of course, to the ratification of the entire body) which bills should get out to committees and to which committees they should go. Later in the session, all bills will be referred back to Rules, and the Rules Committee will determine which bills go to the floor for consideration and in what order.

The Rules Committee is running a bit of an experiment this year. My excellent intern, Scott Riding (BYU), has set up a shared workspace online (a wiki). Rather than me compiling the list of bills and sharing it with members when they get to committee, each of the eight members of Rules logs onto the workspace and submits a proportional number of bills to go out to the committees.

Our deal is that, once we get to the actual Rules Committee meeting, we won't add bills to the list that previously was collaboratively compiled, but any bill can be pulled off that list. This gives each member a lot of power to work with legislators and compile his/her additions to the master list. And it also gives each member a lot of responsibility to own those decisions and to make sure the bills they nominate have the support of a majority of Rules Committee members to stay on the list.

Such collaboration (and distributed authority/responsibility) is only now made possible by recent advances in technology. Last week, before Scott set up the wiki, I had each member submit suggestions by email. Even in the pre-session calm, it was too big a pain, and I wouldn't have done it again without the collaboration made possible by the wiki.

Most things are beautiful in theory. We'll see how the experiment holds up when we hit crunch time in a few weeks.