Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, December 7, 1994                   TAG: 9412070100
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-8   EDITION: METRO  
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

GOP REFORM

But the Republicans and Speaker-to-be Newt Gingrich are right not to consider restructuring inconsequential. The GOP package of changes announced last week for the new Congress represents a worthwhile updating and streamlining of House committees - as well as another step toward concentrating power, thus accountability, in the new speaker's hands.

Nearly a half-century has elapsed since the last standing committee of the House was eliminated. That the Democrats, who controlled the House for the past 40 years, let committees proliferate wasn't the result of mere inattention to detail. The committees, and their similarly proliferating staffs, served a purpose. They were the means by which party barons, who could act more or less independently of official party leadership, carved out their pieces of power.

Under the GOP plan, staff committees will be cut. Three committees - Post Office and Civil Service, District of Columbia, and Merchant Marine and Fisheries - will be eliminated, their responsibilities folded into other, existing committees. But the diminution of the powers of the Commerce and Energy Committee (its new name is to be the Commerce Committee) is as important a change as any.

Under the Democrats in recent years, there has been no more telling example of the entrenched baronialism noted above than William Dingell of Michigan, chairman of Energy and Commerce. The committee's name may have sounded narrowly technical; in fact, it had jurisdiction over more than 40 percent of all legislation. Spreading some of that jurisdiction to other committees, as the GOP plan calls for, would be both a symbolic statement and a redistribution of substantive power.

The plan also calls for allowing TV coverage of committee meetings, not just committee hearings as is now the case. That's fine, since committees are where most of the real work gets done. Of course, public viewership isn't apt to be very high; the likeliest effect will be for members to play to the cameras, as they now do when committee hearings are televised.

But GOP leaders deserve credit in general for their efforts to open up Congress, to loosen its rules, and to break up committee fiefdoms that have tended to enjoy more power than scrutiny.

Memo: ***CORRECTION***