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By WES ALLISON, Times Staff WriterThanks to Thomas Jefferson's rules, the U.S. House and Senate can't criticize each other. Some House Republicans want to change that.
WASHINGTON - Thomas Jefferson was looking for a way to promote civility between the U.S. House and the U.S. Senate while maintaining each chamber's independence. So he figured each body should all but ignore the other.
Now, more than 200 years after Jefferson crafted a parliamentary rule barring legislators from disparaging their esteemed colleagues in the "other chamber," House conservatives are seeking to overturn it.
The change would be largely symbolic. But in the context of today's contretemps at the Capitol, where the Senate often tempers or ignores bills passed by the more conservative House, it would give frustrated House members an outlet and, some hope, hold the offending senators more accountable.
The rule change, proposed by Florida Rep. Tom Feeney, R-Oviedo, is one of 10 sought by a growing cadre of House conservatives, called the Republican Study Committee, that's pressing for more clout in the upcoming session of Congress.
Most of the proposed changes would make it more difficult, procedurally, to increase spending. None would alter history like Feeney's proposal.
He said the Jefferson-era prohibition stifles debate. "We ought to discuss current events, including what is happening or is not happening in the Senate. And, in regards to individual senators, we should be able to cite voting records, and quotes. ...
"Our rules would suggest that there is no United States Senate at all."
The prohibition dates to President John Adams' first term, 1797 to 1801, when Vice President Jefferson presided over the Senate. Jefferson crafted rules by which Congress would govern itself, known as Jefferson's Manual, based on British and colonial parliaments as well as his own intuition.
Rule 17 forbids members of one chamber from discussing the actions or inaction of the other, save for basic details about what bills have passed. Floor debate on the merits of those actions is forbidden, as is discussion of individual members. "In a sense, Jefferson understood that people's tempers would flare ... that they would feel outraged at times, and they would want to express that outrage," said Donald A. Ritchie, the associate Senate historian. "But he also realized that it was important sometimes to cool those tempers so some kind of political compromise could be reached."
(The most famous case of cross-Capitol rage came in 1856, when Rep. Preston Brooks of South Carolina charged onto the Senate floor and clobbered Massachusetts Sen. Charles Sumner with his cane. Sumner had castigated several Southern senators, including Brooks' uncle.)
In his manual, Jefferson noted the House and Senate were designed to work independently and were given different jobs, as a check against the other's powers. Only the Senate confirms presidential nominees to the Cabinet and the federal courts. Only the House - considered the people's body by the founders - may initiate the raising of taxes.
"It is a breach of order in debate to notice what has been said on the same subject in the other House," Jefferson's Manual says, "because opinion of each House should be left to its own independency, not to be influenced by the proceedings of the other."
Kenneth Kato, chief of the House office of history and preservation, said the rule highlights the sovereignty of the House and the Senate. "To characterize another body was almost to disparage your own - "Who cares how the Senate does it, we do it our way,"' he said.
Generally, rules of the House favor the majority party and its leaders - with 435 members, that's the only way to get things done. The rules of the Senate, with just 100 members, give individual senators and the minority significant power, allowing for filibusters and other procedural tricks that temper the majority's ability to run roughshod.
This often leads to more ideologically driven legislation from the House and more moderate measures from the Senate. The two sides appoint members to work out their differences before sending a bill to the president.
Jefferson's Manual is still printed each year and remains a part of the House rules. The Senate phased it out in the 1900s, but there wouldn't be much chance to invoke Rule 17 anyway. Rarely does a Senator deign to blast the House.
In the House, the opposite is true. Hardly a week goes by without the presiding officer warning a member to "refrain from making improper references to the Senate or its members."
As often as not, the House member is admonished either for thanking a senator for sponsoring friendly legislation or complaining about Senate inaction. The Republican Study Committee keeps a list of House-passed bills that the Senate has ignored, from allowing oil drilling in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge to permanently ending the inheritance tax.
In recent years, the Republican-dominated House has been especially frustrated by the Senate's refusal to confirm several conservative judicial nominees.
"If the Senate isn't even voting on federal judges nominated by the president," Feeney said, "I think it's ridiculous that I can't go down to the House floor and say the Senate is holding judicial nominations - and, in my view, the Constitution - hostage."
The Republican Study Committee submitted its proposed rule changes this month, and House Republicans are expected to consider them before the 109th Congress convenes on Jan. 4.
Several senators declined to comment on the proposals last week on grounds the rules of the House are none of their business. But Florida's retiring Sen. Bob Graham said he dislikes the idea; he doesn't think it will improve how Congress works.
"I think there's been enough decline in civility in the country," he said.
Senators aren't the only ones protected by the House rules. The president is sacred, too, and over the years the rule has been annotated to include specific, colorful insults that members used about the commander-in-chief and that won't be tolerated. They include accusing him of "raping the truth," of being "cowardly" and a "draft-dodger," and "referring to him as "a little bugger."'
Many of those additions date to the presidency of Bill Clinton, a Democrat whose relationship with House Republicans was, at best, uneven. But with Republican President Bush back in the White House for another four years, the Republican-led House isn't likely to change that rule soon.
-- Times staff writer Curtis Krueger contributed to this report.