PS: Political Science & Politics

Table of Contents - April 2010 - Volume 43, Issue 02  

Symposium

What Might Bring Regular Order Back to the House?

Matthew Greena1 and Daniel Burnsa1

a1 The Catholic University of America

It is not hard to find critics of how the U.S. Congress operates today. Two of the most prominent, Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein, have bemoaned in particular Congress's failure to follow “regular order,” which in their 2006 book The Broken Branch they describe as a legislative process that incorporates “discussion, debate, negotiation, and compromise” (Mann and Ornstein 2006, 170).

Matthew Green is an assistant professor of politics at the Catholic University of America. He is the author of a forthcoming book on the Speakership, The Speaker of the House: A Study of Leadership (Yale University Press), and a number of articles on congressional politics and leadership in Congress. He can be reached at greenm@cua.edu.

Daniel Burns is an undergraduate politics major at the Catholic University of America. He can be reached at burnsd@cua.edu.

Footnotes

Our thanks to two congressional staff members for providing interviews and materials used for this paper.

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