A Matter of Trust
The House Freedom Caucus, Joe Manchin, and Non-simultaneous Exchange
Item! House Republican leadership is trying to figure out how to prevent some House Freedom Caucus members from torpedoing the Farm Bill later this year.
Item! House Republican leadership is also trying to figure out how to avoid some Freedom Caucus members from forcing one or more government shutdowns (governments shutdown?)
Item! Senator Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) has expressed displeasure with how the Inflation Reduction Act has been implemented pretty much since it was enacted. “Clean hydrogen” tax credits represent the latest potential conflict with the Biden administration.
Congress right now has a series of trust problems. Manchin doesn’t think he can trust the Biden administration to implement the law in a way (he claims) they promised to when they made a deal with him to secure passage. House GOP leaders don’t think they can trust some HFC members to go along with deals worked out by committee leaders. HFC members don’t think they can trust party leaders to do whatever the HFC wants (when they agree on what that is, anyway). You could even extend this back to 2021, when some House Democrats voted against an infrastructure bill because they didn’t trust that Senate Democrats would maintain a bargain struck over social policy spending.
The source of all this distrust isn’t intra-party ideological divides or electoral politics. It’s what academics call “non-simultaneous exchange.” The basic idea is that Congress can’t vote on multiple bills at once. The committee system is designed to allow the institution to address a bunch of different issues at the same time, but when it comes time to debate and vote on the chamber floor something has to go first and something has to go last. If your bill goes first and I say I’ll vote for it if vote for my bill second, I really have no way to make sure you actually do that. Once I vote for your bill, you’re (in theory) free to violate our bargain because you already got what you wanted.
So what do to about this problem? One “fix” comes from Weingast and Marshall’s 1988 article “The Industrial Organization of Congress; or, Why Legislatures, Like Firms Are Not Organized Like Markets.” Weingast and Marshall argue that operating through the committee system is one solution to the non-simultaneous exchange problem. You might get your bill now, but chances are good you’ll want to pass a bill in the future that falls under my committee’s jurisdiction. So you uphold our current bargain to make sure that I uphold any of our future bargains.
(Weingast and Marshall only really talk about legislation, but I’d argue we could extend this line of thinking to the implementation of current/past bargains and oversight of same; if you get the bill you want but I’m in charge of overseeing how agencies interpret that bill, you need me to uphold the bargain not just at the time of the vote but into the future. This is where Manchin’s status as Senate Energy and Natural Resources chairman becomes important for the Biden administration’s implementation plans.)
Why isn’t Weingast and Marshall’s system working now? Because the committees aren’t really working (on legislation) now. (Yes, that’s a plug for my book.) Legislative negotiations increasingly are happening at the party leader level and presidential levels. Party leaders have very little to do with oversight and implementation (as far as we know). They can’t force committee leaders to take up or kill a bill, and even when they have tools at their disposal to do so they rarely use them.
Some HFC members are basically mad at Kevin McCarthy for (in their view) not upholding the “bargain” they struck at the beginning of the year: we’ll support you for Speaker and you let us do what we want. Because the Speaker vote had to come first, they just had to trust that McCarthy would do things their way in the future and now they’re mad that he hasn’t always done that.
The Farm Bill may be a slightly different story but along the same lines. Chris Bosso’s book Framing the Farm Bill shows how House Agriculture Committee has become increasingly isolated as the number of districts with large agriculture industries has decreased. Very few HFC members are on the Agriculture Committee or have agriculture-related priorities, so what do they care if they tank a bipartisan deal that Agriculture Committee leaders have spent years crafting? And so party leaders then need to step in to negotiate among intra-party factions and we’re back in the world of non-simultaneous exchange without committee enforcement.
As Weingast and Marshall point out, using the committee system to enforce bargains involving non-simultaneous exchange is not what we’d (well, economists and political scientists pretending to be economists) call an “explicit market exchange.” The system as W&M describe relies instead on committee jurisdictions as “property rights”: I’ll sit on the education committee, you’ll sit on the environment committee, and well let each other do our own thing; we have “ownership” over our own piece of the issue agenda.
Again, that property rights idea only works as long as legislators see committees as the primary venues for making (legislative) policy, which many don’t anymore. Having the chamber floor (and party caucuses) as the main venues means giving legislators opportunities to try and upend bargains over lots of different issues—overall government spending, reproductive health, nutrition assistance, immigration, gas stoves, you name it. They view the entire agenda as part of their “property,” not just a subset of related issues. By shifting legislative policymaking authority away from committees, Congress has made it harder to deal with the non-simultaneous exchange problem, and easier for legislators to lose trust in each other and in party leadership.
Is the answer, then, to simply shift more legislative authority back to committees? Perhaps. I think a big part of the answer lies not in trying to “fix” distrust, but in having a better understanding of what trust is and where it comes from. In their book Rediscovering Institutions, James March and Johan Olsen put it this way: “The core idea of trust is that it is not based on an expectation on its justification.” March and Olsen argue that there’s no better way to destroy a sense of trust than to expect something in return for it. Instead, they write, trust is/should be given as a matter of course; “trust is extended and honored because that is what is appropriate behavior by appropriate political figures.”
March and Olsen’s discussion of trust flows out of March’s earlier work in organization theory describing a “logic of appropriateness” that often governs actions: people aren’t calculating the most “rationally maximizing” course of action, they’re thinking “what’s considered appropriate for someone in my position to do?” The logic of appropriateness then leads decisionmakers to respond to new situations with routinized responses.
If more policymakers viewed trust, then, as “a confidence that appropriate behavior can be expected most of the time,” the non-simultaneous exchange problem becomes less of a, well, problem. I don’t need to worry about you violating our bargain, and you don’t need to worry about what I’ll do if you violate that bargain, because we’re both operating through sets of routines, and therefore we generally know what to expect of each other. Whether or not they’re in a world of committee property rights and agenda control, policymakers benefit from viewing trust not as something they give with an expected return, but as something they give because that’s just how politics (and life) works.