It has not been uncommon for a meeting to be held without the customary announcements, at midnight or other convenient hour, at which only the friends of the measure could appear. Afterwards the bill might be reported out at any time to an unsuspecting legislature and rushed through before the opposition regained consciousness.

Few states have attempted to introduce system into their committee schedules. To do so involves a surrender in part of each committee's freedom of action and is at variance with the feeling that somehow it is beneath the dignity of a committee to allow itself to have a schedule imposed upon it. A measure of progress has, however, been made. In the 1915 session the Nebraska Legislative Reference Bureau submitted a plan of committee meetings which was followed in the main, and in California a committee is ordinarily appointed for the same purpose. The presiding officers of the South Dakota houses, in consultation with others, work out a schedule for the session, and in New York the various chairmen meet with the clerk and arrange a schedule which is carried out quite successfully. In Minnesota a measure of responsibility for arrangement of committee meetings is placed by the rules upon the rules committee.32 The attitude, however, of most legislators is illustrated by the refusal of the Vermont legislature in 1917 to adopt an elaborate schedule of meetings which aimed to cure much of the old evil.

If committee schedules are to be made a complete success it is best that they be arranged by someone outside the house, who can devote the necessary attention to the details. The smoothness with which the Massachusetts system works is due largely to the effort of the person in charge of the weekly bulletins, whose duty it is to confer with the different committee chairmen and clerks and to arrange a schedule of meetings accordingly.

The value of committee deliberations would be enhanced if they were to proceed according to calendars announced beforehand, but the nearest approach to this innovation occurs in announcement of committee hearings.33 In Massachusetts this latter serves virtually

32 Assembly Rule 19 permits variations from this schedule only on one day's notice or a call of the majority.

33 Committee calendars were Assembly in 1913 but to no avail.

urged by the Progressives in the New York (Journal, p. 19.) A resolution offered recently

as a calendar, since custom secures for each bill a public hearing. Frequently in this state committee action is taken in executive session at the time of the hearing although it may be postponed to a certain day, but inasmuch as regular executive sessions are held at stated intervals members know when certain measures are to come before the committee for final action.34

It is generally accepted that an opportunity for a hearing should be given on each measure and that notice of same should be published in a way that all interested may have an opportunity to attend. Massachusetts publishes twice a week a bulletin of hearings which is copied by the newspapers, and daily, at 2:00 p.m., a printed list is issued of all assignments for the morrow. Notices are also sent to petitioners. In New York, Illinois and Wisconsin notices of hearings are published in weekly bulletins. In whatever manner the notice may be published, it is the general rule, to which Massachusetts is an exception, that hearings are granted at the will of the party leaders and not as a matter of right. An old trick is to fix a date and, if the legislation involved is unwelcome to the bosses, to postpone the hearing when the advocates of the measure have assembled their forces. Thus the latter are worn out by successive postponements.

The importance of committee deliberation is recognized in eleven state constitutions by provisions requiring committee action on bills.35 The constitutions of Alabama and Virginia require that the committee be in session to consider the bill. This is the simple principle that no business should be transacted except in regular session with a quorum present, although the rules of but few legislatures mention the matter of a committee quorum at all.36 Regardless of the constitutional provision in Pennsylvania directing that there shall be a committee report on each bill, committees frequently report without a meeting. The chairman may secure the individual assent of a majority of his committee, or late in the session he may merely rise in the House and ask if any members of in the Illinois House authorizing notice to committee members of bills scheduled for consideration died in committee. H. J. 1915, p. 342.

34 Frothingham, supra, p. 106.

Index-Digest, State Constitutions, p. 839.

36 In Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky, Minnesota, New York, West Virginia, and Wisconsin a majority shall constitute a quorum under the rules. In California the decision is left to the committee although it shall never be less than one-third,

his committee are opposed to his measure, and if strong objection does not appear he reports the bill favorably. Against such procedure a point of order that a bill was not considered in committee will not be sustained as it is not competent for the chair to go back of the committee report.37 Proxy votes are also an evil and where they are admitted it is difficult to maintain committee work on a high plane. New York has recently forbidden their use.

COMMITTEE RECORDS

The general custom of "the short roll call," by which measures reported favorably pass the house without an actual division, gives to committees the power of life and death over the vast majority of legislative proposals. Yet final action is commonly taken in secret session. The rules of Ohio and Florida require that all committee meetings be public, but these are exceptions and the procedure in New York is typical. Committees have an open session and an executive session.. Different members may appear at the open session and call up bills they have introduced,38 but at the executive session all outsiders are excluded. Here the discussion is strictly secret and no information concerning it is to be divulged except through the official records.3

39

But to open committee deliberations to the public is not sufficient alone to fix responsibility definitely, and the most common device for turning the searchlight upon the dark recesses of committee action has been to require records of their proceedings to be kept. Committee records in one form or another have been adopted by the rules of one or both houses in fifteen states. The record in Wisconsin is most complete. It includes the time and place of hearings and meetings, the attendance of members, the names of persons appearing before the committee with the firms they represent, and the votes of members on all questions. The chairman is charged with the responsibility for its keeping and a copy follows the bill when reported to the house. It is to be accèssible to the

37 Pa. H. J., 1868, pp. 713-714; 1901, p. 303; and elsewhere.

38 Some houses require by rule that the sponsor of a measure be notified when it is to come up in committee; others only if the report of the committee is to be adverse.

39 1916 Clerk's Manual, N. Y., pp. 530-531. Where such courtesy prevails the necessity for an official report of all proceedings is increased.

public and after the session is filed with the secretary of state.40 For the sake of making it easily available in order that its purpose may not be defeated, it would be wise to make the record of votes an integral part of the committee's report. It would then appear in the journal and would be preserved for all time. The Progressives of the New York Assembly of 1913 secured the adoption of a rule that the report of the committee must contain the names of the members present when action was taken and their vote, these to be entered on the journal,41 but as a matter of fact the journal gives only the names of those who favored the report. Ohio and Kentucky accomplish practically the same result by requiring that all in favor of the report sign it, their signatures being spread on the journal. The advantage in recording the votes of committees on the journals is in the wider publicity given them and the greater assurance that they will be preserved, the full minutes being filed in the secretary of state's office.

The experience of the Illinois House demonstrates that merely to pass a rule requiring that committee records be kept may be of no effect. A rule for keeping records similar to the Wisconsin rule was adopted at the 1913 session, but at the end no deliveries were made to the secretary of state as had been provided.42 At the following session complaint was early made that bills were being reported unaccompanied by a report of the roll call,43 and it is doubtful if Illinois has even yet succeeded in her purpose. Had the votes of committees been entered on the journals the members could not have avoided going on record, for it would have been in the power of the minority to have made trouble by protesting.

The publication of full committee records will go far towards introducing regularity in committee proceedings, and to this end they should contain more than a statement of the vote upon the report to the house; they should include the votes on every question put to the committee, as the Wisconsin rules provide. By turning light upon committee proceedings the members would be brought

40 Wisconsin Joint Rule 6.

41 See Assembly Journal, 1913, p. 19, and Rule 21.

42 Bulletin, Legislative Voters' League of Illinois, Nov. 20, 1914.

43 House Resolution No. 53, 1915 H. J., p. 237. This was a resolution to investigate the breaches of the rule but was never reported out of committee. Statement of Mr. Shurtleff of the Rules Committee bears out the above.

to give this phase of their work the attention it deserves. Committees would be unlikely to smother important legislation by failure or refusal to report inasmuch as responsibility could be easily located, but naturally, reform of this nature is steadily opposed by the leaders of the "old guard. For example, when the proposal under consideration was offered at the last session of the New Jersey House it was defeated by the argument of a leader that the power to discharge a committee was sufficient protection against possible iniquities therein.“

Committee work can be much facilitated by the employment of expert clerks to look after the drudgery of details. To this end it would be well to organize all clerical assistance to committees under a head clerk of committees with a permanent tenure of office. The success of the Massachusetts system is in part due to the effort expended by the clerks. Although the custom is to appoint the youngest member of the committee as clerk yet his position in the next legislature is dependent upon the ability with which he handles the affairs of his committee, and if he performs his duties with success the way is opened to coveted places later.

JOINT COMMITTEES

The system of joint committees, highly developed in Massachusetts, Maine and Connecticut, has produced excellent results. In Massachusetts all except judiciary and ways and means are joint; judiciary usually sitting as a joint committee and ways and means sitting separately as a double check on money bills.45 With the exception of the latter committee it will be observed from the lists of committees in the three states where the joint system prevails, that the separate house committees are concerned with the business

44 The Philadelphia Record, Jan. 10, 1917.

NOTE: The argument presented against a proposal, made during the general revision of the rules of Congress in 1880, that the report of a committee shall include the names of the members concurring, in reality sets forth two good reasons for the system of committee records advocated above. It was objected that a member would have to scrutinize every bill before his committee and come to a deliberate conclusion on it, and that the confidential element in committee action would be destroyed. (Congress. Record, 46 Cong., 2 Sess., p. 826.)

45 All money bills must pass through the individual scrutiny of the ways and means committee of each house, although they may have been acted upon earlier by another committee.