The Washington Times: Supreme Court’s overturning of Chevron doctrine spurs push for changes to how Congress works

This article, written by Lindsey McPherson, was originally published by The Washington Times and can be read here.

A good government group is pushing the House to adopt rule changes that will improve its capacity to enact new laws and conduct oversight of existing ones as it grapples with a Supreme Court decision that will put greater demands on the legislative branch.

Earlier this summer, the Supreme Court overturned the Chevron doctrine, which allowed executive agencies to make assumptions in writing regulations when laws Congress passed were unclear.

The court’s decision “will place significant strain on Congressional capacity and compel the House to enhance its capabilities to conduct regulatory oversight and craft legislation with clear intent,” the POPVOX Foundation said in its report recommending House rule changes.

The group says it wants to improve congressional operations and help members and staff to rise to the occasion, but it won’t be easy.

“There isn’t one single magic wand issue that can kind of solve what Congress is going to have to do,” Taylor J. Swift, POPVOX’s director of government capacity, told The Washington Times.

The recommendations include standardizing legislative and committee schedules, forming joint committees with the Senate to examine and update legislative branch functionalities and implementing staff and technology changes to aid legislative and constituent work.

A top recommendation is that the House create a chief data officer to help members access historical legislative information that is more readily available in easily searchable databases.

“Congress, as we continue to move through the 21st century, is going to rely heavily on a lot of legislative data to properly analyze what evidence-based policymaking can look like post-Chevron,” Mr. Swift said. “Unfortunately, there really isn’t an office or even a person that is in charge of understanding and knowing and sharing where all the data is in Congress.”

While the House does have a historian and both chambers use the Congressional Research Service for data compilation and analysis, there is no centralized place members and staff can go to for help, he said. A former House staffer, Mr. Swift recalled struggles to find backdated appropriations data and committee reports from previous Congresses, for example.

Another recommendation is to lift a cap on hiring House staff to give lawmakers more flexibility for increased workloads.

A 1979 law prevents members from hiring more than 18 full-time employees for their offices, which can include interns if they work enough hours.

“Lifting that cap would just be a breath of fresh air as far as bandwidth,” Mr. Swift said.

It could help with “brain drain” from high turnover of staff, he said.

POPVOX also has recommendations to help lawmakers better manage their time, including adopting a proposal by Rep. William Timmons, South Carolina Republican, for a more predictable legislative calendar.

How lawmakers split time between Washington and their districts changes currently each year. Even a typical four-day work week in Washington varies, with the House alternating between starting Monday or Tuesday evening and ending Thursday or Friday morning.

Mr. Timmons proposed alternating every two weeks between Washington and district work. That would allow lawmakers to work fuller weeks at the Capitol, minimize travel back and forth to their districts and maintain a better work-life balance.

The proposal comes from Mr. Timmons’ work on the now-disbanded House Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress. The panel met from 2019 through 2023 and approved hundreds of proposals for improving congressional operations, many of which the House previously adopted.

Several suggestions POPVOX included in its report come from the select committee’s recommendations.

Another recommendation is for the creation of two new joint committees to update congressional operations that haven’t been overhauled in years.

The proposed Joint Committee on the Legislative Branch would allow the House and Senate to address institutional issues like budgeting, technology, staffing and facilities that are currently handed on a fragmented basis between both chambers.

While the House modernization panel did some of that work, there has not been a bicameral effort to tackle institutional challenges since the 1970s, Mr. Swift said.

Addressing congressional capacity issues the Chevron decision exacerbates will require buy-in from both chambers, he said, noting, “You’re only as fast as your slowest train car.”

POPVOX also proposed a Joint Committee on Continuity to review and update procedures that address how Congress would continue to function in the event of a crisis.

“God forbid, the morbid conversations around if there are assassination attempts, or if a lot of members get sick … or worse, if there is an attack on some physical infrastructure that wipes out half of the [Congress], there really aren’t rules in the Constitution for the first branch to move forward,” Mr. Swift said.