At the Niskanen Center, Soren Dayton, Josiah Watney offer a history of the House Rules Committee. The conclusion:
From the 1930s to the 1960s, there were a series of fights over economics and Civil Rights. To accomplish their policy and political goals, legislators sometimes turned these into fights over the organization of the House. Those are the moments where there was institutional innovation like the 21-Day Rule and the change in composition of the Rules Committee.
In this understanding, congressional procedure is a sort of engineering problem — a search for the right vehicle to run the House and use power. And so congressional rules are downstream of political and cultural transformations.14 If that is the story, the hardest part isn’t the procedure. It’s finding and motivating the legislators who wish to act and are willing to engage in forthright factional conflict to accomplish their goals.15
Perhaps the biggest question that we face today is, who wants to engage in conflict to ensure governance? History provides models and tools. But history cannot provide the political will today. That takes leadership.