If Boehner wants to give more power to Paul Ryan I say kudos to that. As chair of the Budget Committee I’m sure he can do a lot of good there. I’m not sure who is more powerful, the Appropriations Chair or the Budget Chair, but having Paul Ryan overseeing the Budget can’t be a bad thing.

but the key principal is to have both leaders as well as party reps. that view their constituents as their constituents and behave as such. This includes having a fair amount of integrity, regardless of party. We’ve drifted so far from having a real representative democracy that all this rearranging of the deck chairs fails to get at the core of the problem.

You show me a party that aligns a good, solid, core of ethical and disciplined people and you’ll be showing me a the leaders of a party that are setting themselves up to be in party for a long time.

HF

Just imagine how much more power Democratic committee chairs could derive in the future from “reforms” authored by recovering porkaholics.

IMHO, the first budget reform that the GOP should take up is repealing various Democrat Congressional rules that make it harder to balance the budget.

Get rid of the Budget Act of1974 which requires the President to spend all the money that Congress appropriates. Put the President back on notice that balancing the budget is part of his job. Presidents of both parties were much better at balancing the budget before this bill was passed. Make it take effect in 2012. Make the (Dem) pols who’ve never run a company and/or balanced a budget run against someone who has.

Get rid of PayGo. It’s the typical Democrat farce with a loop hole so big you could drive Jupiter through it. When the Dem’s need to buy votes with money they don’t have, they just declare in an emergency….

Yes, fussing with the committee rules might help a bit. But this isn’t thinking out of the box, it’s just changing the interior decorations. It doesn’t make any significant statement about what the GOP stand for versus the failures of the Democrats. Besides, the Dems will just change committee rules again when they get in power — end result => NOTHING. THINK BIGGER YOU IDIOTS!

The power structure in congress, I believe, is at least partially responsible for governmental departments hanging around after they’ve out lived their usefullness and morphing into monsters, like hammers looking for a nail.

Using the EPA as an example, like many, I can agree that given the international issues raised concerning acid rain, there was some need for a national regulatory structure in order to clean up our collective act. But somewhere along the line, and somewhere after ‘mission accomplished’, there was no plan to wind it down and keep a limit on the power necessary to sustain the task at hand. Instead, it grew into a tool to smash ordinary Americans with over everything that could be considered ‘dirty’ or a hazard to public health (subject to various interpretations), regardless of whether it meets the interstate or international threshold in scope. So, here we are, having gone through the chicken littles harlding the coming of the next ice age in the 70s, to global warming in this decade and facing more corruption and usurpation of personal liberty with cap and trade. Why? It is simply because of a refusal to relinquish the political power that comes with the committee.

I agree wholeheartedly that committees do not need more power, they need less, much less. I do not know what a practical solution to this problem is, but I can suggest that some way to make the committees themselves more fluid and responsive to real needs of the nation is long over due.

Boehner is dead wrong on this. Having power, other than what is necessary to ensure the effective administration of the Congress, vested in Committee chairman has two effects, neither desirable:

The first is that it creates petty dictatorships that are to be grasped for by politicians with career ambitions, the second is to frustrate equality of representation, by making some legislators subordinate to others.

This goes on at all levels. In my state, committee chairman have nasty powers of retaliation, including cutting staff size of non-compliant individuals and determining office location.

You are dead right. Hence the need for term limits, first and foremost!

If I need other men to determine my future, I do not need nor want it.

It is true that most committee chaimen are long-timers, and come to their chairmanship loaded with baggage, the answer is, da da–
TERM LIMITS,
TERM LIMITS,
TERM LIMITS!