The New House Committee System of Consolidated Power: A Death Blow to Real Wind Turbine Reform?
By reorganizing most of the House committees under the auspices of just a few super committees, the new House Speaker has, in effect, built a new firewall.
And in the example case cited above, he’s made it highly unlikely that any meaningful attempt by the grassroots legislators to bring the absolute insanity of the latest manifestations of the green, climate change religion, the government-subsidized invasion of the fiberglass-shedding, forever-chemical dropping, eagle-killing, sunset-destroying, headache-inducing, light-polluting, unable-to-be-disposed-of, likely-non-economically-viable-sans-subsidization, massive wind turbine invasions that have destroyed much of Oklahoma’s rural landscape for the entirety of our lifetimes, to an end, has been much diminished.
Three weeks ago, I described a sense of déjà vu: As I watched the coronation of a new Oklahoma Speaker of the House, specifically a highly touted "youngest House Speaker in the nation," I noted the similarities between this year's incoming Speaker and the 2007 Speaker of the House, who was also, at that time, the youngest in the nation.
I told of the 2007 Speaker's tenure and stated,
"Eighteen years ago, as a freshman representative, I saw almost identical coverage given to another incoming Speaker: the youngest in the nation. That type of attention, not to mention the endowment of absolute power, isn’t something your average politician is equipped to handle. It’s especially challenging for those who are young and have yet to acquire the requisite gravitas or enough years of experience to thoughtfully observe the human condition, govern wisely, understand the fleeting nature of human praise, and use power justly."
In my view, the pressure on those who are prematurely thrust into absolute power at a young age is significantly greater, as even older, more experienced individuals often suffer from the toxic exposure to absolute power. How much more daunting, and mistake-inducing, then, must it be for their less seasoned, youthful peers?
Additionally, the lack of experience makes it doubly important for the youthful power master to surround himself with those who are wise and who know of a time past, who have a sense and an understanding of history, and who are prepared to council the new power master on how to avoid the mistakes made by others.
My unsettling sense of déjà vu reached new heights on Monday when the House of Representatives' new leadership unveiled a new, greatly revised committee structure.
While not all details are yet known, the House committee structure was dramatically overhauled, and not for the better.
In essence, there are now two types of committees: super committees, where the Speaker's power over the life and death of legislation has now been concentrated into the hands of just a few powerful chairmen, and sub-committees, now making up the majority of House committees. These are set to become mostly powerless, feel-good committees that will provide a pretense of deliberative process, but in fact, will have little power.
Here’s why this is important.
Last week, I described the game that under the current regime of concentrated power, a powerful Speaker must play. He has all power, in some form or fashion, delegated to him, but because he has this power, and because there are savvy legislators, lobbyists, a few members of the public, and for him, most-importantly big-money contributors who know he wields this power, he must find clever ways to pretend, trick, and deceive the interested parties into believing that the buck stopped somewhere else, that there was another dastardly party who somehow managed to thwart the will of the interested party, not The Speaker.
Because of this, he’s trapped in a soul-corrupting, and thus also self-paranoia-inducing game of pretending to distribute power amongst his lieutenants, while behind the scenes, he still has the authority to make every meaningful decision.
This game depends on his creating the perception that the roadblocks to an unwanted piece of legislation’s passage are spread out at numerous decision points.
For example, consider the case of a Speaker who, due to his connections to powerful special interests, who are funding his campaigns and causes—such as the federally subsidized Wind Energy industry—dislikes a certain bill. This bill, not sponsored by the special interests but instead arising organically from grassroots outrage, seeks to increase the setbacks on massive industrial wind turbines.
Perhaps the Speaker knows that legislation on this issue is needed, so as to quell the outrage, especially the outrage in his own district, but he wants to control that legislation himself, to be in charge of working with his donors, the special interests, to write token legislation with the appearance of reform, but not so onerous to his donors as to make them regret their support of his campaigns and causes, both past, and most importantly, future.
So, when other members of the legislature attempt to sponsor their own versions of this legislation—legislation that the Wind Energy donors don’t like—as they decide how to assign the bill to committee, leadership can assign this legislation based not on the bill’s subject matter or the committee that has subject area provenance, but based on how they profile the members of the committee, and particularly the chairman, all of whom the Speaker appointed.
But even then, with all of this planning and power notwithstanding, committee chairmen and their members routinely make, what are in the Speaker’s view, bad decisions, become weak, or give in to public pressure, maybe with, and maybe without, the Speaker’s permission. And sometimes, the whole system starts to break and the unwanted legislation slips between the cracks and gets approved in committee before leadership realizes what is going on. After all, there are hundreds of bills coming at them every session. What if some crafty reformer sneaks in an amendment to a bill in committee and catches the chairman, wind energy lobbyists, and committee members off guard?
But so long as these types of mistakes are rare, it’s not a big deal. Leadership can always either refuse to hear the bill on the House floor—another draconian power they shouldn’t have—or if they feel compelled to hear the bill, they can strike the bill’s title or enacting clause, a step that renders the legislation unable to go into law and allows the Senate, weeks later, to put the bill out of its misery, and as a double bonus, misdirect the ire of the reformers who won’t blame the Speaker, but will blame the Senate.
But here’s their problem: If they exercise this last strategy too often, eventually angst builds and the membership of the House may start to get restless. And, make no mistake, the Speaker of the House is like every other authoritarian—whether rationally or not—always fearing the whispering and rumblings of the commoners on the House floor who one day might mobilize and rush the confines of the imperial corner office—complete with its own washroom, so as to keep the kingly Speaker from having to mix with the commoners when needing to make use of the facilities—to demand new leadership.
So, the Speaker depends on an array of committee chairmen to refuse to hear certain legislation and to spot and defeat problematic amendments so as to keep the angst dispersed and spread out, and not concentrated on the Speaker and his chief lieutenant, the floor leader who has oversight of the floor calendar. If the chairmen fail to take some of the flack, the Speaker, at least in the confines of his ever-increasingly paranoid mind, becomes endangered.
However, depending on a large group of chairmen is a heavy ask. Invariably, some of them are going to be weak and give in to pressure and send up the bill that the Speaker needed crushed. Sometimes, they will first get the permission of the Speaker, behind the scenes, before they cave in public, and at other times, they will just betray the Speaker and send up the bill, forcing the Speaker and his floor leader to figure it out on their own.
When this happens, the buck stops a little too close to the paranoid, fearful, authoritarian Speaker—a little too close for his comfort.
So, a conniving Speaker will find new cork ports, i.e., new ways to put a cork in the process, to retain control, while also keeping the angst distributed.
The new concept of a super committee provides this perfect control point.
By reorganizing most of the House committees under the auspices of just a few super committees, the new House Speaker has, in effect, built a new firewall. A small handful of just a few, likely trusted loyalists, have been given control over most legislation.
These super committee chairs will likely have the ability to assign, and when needed, reassign legislation to the sub-committees that sit under them, and if a subcommittee gets weak or goes rogue, then the super committee chairman can take some of the flack, before that flack goes upstream, to The Speaker.
Good legislation will now face a whole new gauntlet of possible opposition. That grassroots-sponsored wind turbine setback legislation must now navigate two committee chairmen and two committees, all of which will become choke points for the special interests to squash the legislation before it ever gets to the floor. Those special interests have likely invested heavily in both the sub-committee chairman and his super committee counterpart.
Of course, those pieces of legislation that are preferred by the Speaker, leadership, the financiers, and the bureaucrats don’t need to go through a two-step process. They can likely be put directly on the super committee’s agenda without first being heard in the meaningless subcommittee, or the Speaker can continue a trend from recent years, by which the Speaker’s legislation can be directly assigned to the rules committee, which didn’t lose its authority in the latest reorganization, and which normally consists of the most sycophantic of leadership sycophants, and will gladly and rapidly approve the Speaker’s bills even if the Speaker doesn’t show up at the committee room for the hearing.
Thus, the Speaker and or his designee, in the example scenario of the wind turbine setback bill, can both easily squash any attempt by the grassroots to advance a meaningful reform, while also keeping control over the actual legislation designed to give the appearance of reform, while in reality, ensuring any new updates to the law are expressly approved by the special interests that poured in so much financing for the Speaker and his causes.
This new Speaker has thus taken an awful, authoritarian system and made it significantly worse, with tighter and more concentrated power.
And in the example case cited above, he’s made it highly unlikely that any meaningful attempt by the grassroots legislators to bring the absolute insanity of the latest manifestations of the green, climate change religion, the government-subsidized invasion of the fiberglass-shedding, forever-chemical dropping, eagle-killing, sunset-destroying, headache-inducing, light-polluting, unable-to-be-disposed-of, likely-non-economically-viable-sans-subsidization, massive wind turbine invasions that have destroyed much of Oklahoma’s rural landscape for the entirety of our lifetimes, to an end, has been much diminished.
A meaningful reform proposal now has to hurdle two barriers before acceptance.
I suspect it’s likely that the Speaker has astutely observed that, for the first time since the great purge of conservative members in 2018, the culture of the House has significantly right-sized. That the voice of the people has, in the last election cycle, finally overwhelmed the dark money spending of the special interests. And, to manage this liability, a new system of even more control must go into place.
But he has made a serious miscalculation.
Back to my sense of déjà vu: In 2007, the last youngest Speaker in the nation put into place a very similar system of super committees sitting over sub-committees.
It lasted exactly two years before it was abandoned.
Here’s the reason this doesn’t work: Though the House is an autocratic system, it still depends on the Speaker maintaining a core coalition of supporters who at least have the perception that they have some power and can operate under the self-deluding pretense of being important.
So, there are usually about 30 to 35 members or so who can point to their committee chairmanships as a way of feeling good about their standing, and this gives them the cognitive dissonance necessary to motivate their reasoning. They can cast any values-betraying vote or convince themselves to take any actions if it’s done in the name of the greater good: keeping them in their perceived power position, that of being a chairman.
The chairmanship of a meaningless subcommittee is a position so weak that it becomes hard for even the most sycophantic of members to delude himself into believing he has enough real power to both raise money from the special interests, who also likely realize that the subcommittee chairman is now greatly weakened, and the motivation to take on the risk of compromising the values of the electorate back home, even if The Speaker personally requests him to do so.
In short, the Speaker, by concentrating the power in the hands of some of his most ardent loyalists, has taken power from a second tier of supporters who are likely to become dissatisfied with leadership at a much more rapid rate than before. If the Speaker’s popularity is a radium half-life, the pace of half-life decay has just been significantly accelerated because the 2nd tier level of support, is now less likely to stay on the bandwagon when times gets tough.
Then there are the logistical issues. The practice of double-hearing bills means members whose bills aren’t privileged with the special treatment of single assignment must double present; the agenda of the super committee goes very long, which ironically may tend to make committee members much less deliberative as they seek to quickly dispense with a long agenda. And, very notably, in 2007, the Speaker sought to consolidate the appropriations and policy sub-committees together so as to allow the membership to specialize in subject matter, a policy not duplicated in the new 2025 iteration and thus an extra logistical hurdle.
Had this new Speaker surrounded himself with enough wise, experienced advisors who knew this history, who had lived through the 2007 to 2008 session, or who at least know the folly of concentrated power, he could have avoided this mistake.
He did not. And that’s a subject matter for our next article.