At The Dispatch, Rep. Patrick McHenry talks to John McCormack:
“We’ve had, for most years since the turn of the century, crisis politics dominating and large legislative packages becoming the full crux of the Congress,” he noted. While those big omnibus spending packages concentrate power among House and Senate leaders, McHenry believes “we should have hundreds of bills that get enacted in the law, because they are bipartisan reforms and changes that are evolutionary, not revolutionary.”
Asked to identify other major institutional challenges facing the House, one of the first things McHenry mentioned was the upper limit on staff pay. “We have to build out the committee power structure in a more significant way, which means expertise,” he said. “You need to have quality staff members that can be appropriately compensated, and we’ve made steps there, but I think we’ve got more work to do.”
“You especially need staff to be able to go toe-to-toe with the people they’re regulating or overseeing in the executive branch, which means you need to get the highest quality folks,” he added. “You can’t have the executive branch and the judicial branch on a higher pay scale than Congress. That is absurd, and really stupid for Congress to disadvantage ourselves in this game of checks and balances.”