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Short-Term Goals and Long-Term Effects: The Mongrel Tariff and the Creation of the Special Rule in the U.S. House

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 March 2016

Scott A. Hendrickson  and
Jason M. Roberts
Scott A. Hendrickson
Affiliation:
Creighton University
Jason M. Roberts
Affiliation:
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
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Journal of Policy History , Volume 28 , Issue 2 , April 2016 , pp. 318 - 341
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Copyright © Donald Critchlow and Cambridge University Press 2016 

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References

NOTES

1. We use the terms “customs duty,” “duty,” and “tariff rates” interchangeably—each referring to the tax assessed by the federal government on goods imported into the United States.

2. See Stanwood, Edward, American Tariff Controversies in the Nineteenth Century, vol. 2 (New York, 1903)Google Scholar. F. W. Taussig, however, argues that the rate reductions were of nominal effect, while many rate increases were of significant and substantive effect. See The Tariff History of the United States, 5th ed., part 1 (New York, 1910).

3. A New York Times editorial written during the congressional debate on the bill noted, “There is not a shadow of public opinion in favor of the retention of the high protective duties. Outside of those immediately profiting by such duties no one approves them” (“Public Opinion and Taxation,” New York Times, 22 February 1883).

4. See Stanwood, American Tariff Controversies, 195–203, and Futrell, William H., The History of American Customs Jurisprudence (New York, 1941)Google Scholar.

5. See Epstein, Lee and Jack, Knight, The Choices Justices Make (Washington, D.C., 1998)Google Scholar; McCubbins, Mathew, Noll, Roger G., and Weingast, Barry, “Structure and Process, Politics and Policy: Administrative Arrangements and the Political Control of Agencies,” Virginia Law Review 75 (1989);CrossRefGoogle Scholar Shepsle, Kenneth, “Institutional Arrangements and Equilibrium in Multidimensional Voting Models,” American Journal of Political Science 23 (February 1979).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6. See Martin, Adam and Thomas, Diana, “Two-Tiered Political Entrepreneurship and the Congressional Committee System,” Public Choice 154 (January 2011);Google Scholar Finocchiaro, Charles J. and Jenkins, Jeffery A., “In Search of Killer Amendments in the Modern U.S. House,” Legislative Studies Quarterly 33 (May 2008);CrossRefGoogle Scholar Knight, Jack and Epstein, Lee, “On the Struggle for Judicial Supremacy,” Law and Society Review 30 (1996).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7. See Roberts, Jason M., “The Development of Special Orders and Special Rules in the U.S. House, 1881–1937,” Legislative Studies Quarterly 35 (August 2010).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8. See Futrell, American Customs Jurisprudence; Taussig, American Tariff Controversies; and John Mark Hansen, “Taxation and the Political Economy of the Tariff” International Organization 44 (Autumn 1990).

9. See Bensel, Richard, The Political Economy of American Industrialization, 1877–1900 (New York, 2000)Google Scholar.

10. See Epstein, David and O’Halloran, Sharyn, “The Partisan Paradox and the U.S. Tariff, 1877–1934,” International Organization 50 (Spring 1996).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11. Bensel, Political Economy, 124–29.

12. Stanwood, American Tariff Controversies.

13. The breakdown of these traditional alliances was part of a larger call by many Republicans to reform the “radical” Republican government of President Grant. See Stanwood, American Tariff Controversies, 175–77.

14. See Futrell, American Customs Jurisprudence, and Taussig, American Tariff Controversies.

15. See McCown, Ada, The Congressional Conference Committe, (New York, 1927).Google Scholar

16. Stanwood, American Tariff Controversies, 206–7.

17. McCown, Congressional Conference Committee.

18. Stanwood, American Tariff Controversies, 209.

19. McCown, Congressional Conference Committee, 109.

20. Stanwood, American Tariff Controversies, 209.

21. The House passed H.R. 5538 on 27 June 1882 by a vote of 130–84. It lowered sales taxes on tobacco and cigars and repealed taxes on matches, medicine, and certain bank deposits. See McCown, Congressional Conference Committee, 107.

22. The decision to so amend the House bill was not without controversy since there was, and would continue to be, considerable debate as to the constitutionality of the Senate amending House-passed revenue bills. Supporters of the Senate action pointed out that since H.R. 5538 had originated in the House, the constitutional provisions had been met, while others pointed out that the comprehensiveness of the Senate amending process had violated the spirit if the not the letter of the Constitution. See Stanwood, American Tariff Controversies, 214–16. The Senate had amended tariff bills in the past, but had never shaped an internal revenue bill into a tariff bill prior to the consideration of H.R. 5538. See McCown, Congressional Conference Committee, 109.

23. Stanwood, American Tariff Controversies, 209.

24. McCown, Congressional Conference Committee, 109.

25. This bill also proposed a reduction in tariff rates, but not as large as those proposed by the Tariff Commission. Stanwood, American Tariff Controversies, 209.

26. McCown, Congressional Conference Committee, 111.

27. “The Tariff in the House,” New York Times, 24 February 1883. Summarizing the situation, an editorial published the same day lamented, “There seems to be no hope of securing a vote of non-concurrence and reference to a conference committee under the rules as they stand.” (“Position of the Tariff Bill,” New York Times, 24 February 1883).

28. Ibid.

29. Roberts, “Development of Special Orders.”

30. Ibid.

31. There was also some concern, even among reform-minded Republicans, that passage of the Senate bill would hurt the party’s electoral chances in 1884. It would appear that these concerns helped to make the reform-minded Republicans “amenable to party discipline” with respect to the vote on the resolution. See McCown, Congressional Conference Committee, 111, 119.

32. The disappearing quorum was a clever dilatory tool of the minority party whereby they would refuse to answer the roll call on votes, even when they were in the chamber, in an effort to stall all action due to the lack of a quorum. This practice finally came to an end in the late 1880s, through another procedural innovation by Thomas Reed. For more detail, see Binder, Sarah A., Minority Rights, Majority Rule: Partisanship and the Development of Congress (New York, 1997)Google Scholar and Dion, Douglas, Turning the Legislative Thumbscrew: Minority Rights and Procedural Change in Legislative Politics (Ann Arbor, 1997)Google Scholar.

33. See McCown, Congressional Conference Committee, and Stanwood, American Tariff Controversies.

34. Not surprisingly, the conference committee was strongly protectionist (Taussig 1919, 143–44 n. 208). The controversy revolved around the assertion by one of the House conferees that the Senate had overstepped its bounds in radically amending the House bill and the resignation by the Senate’s Democratic conferees from the conference committee. See Taussig, Tariff History of the United States, 143–44, and McCown, Congressional Conference Committee, 120–25.

35. Taussig, Tariff History of the United States, 143.

36. Stanwood, American Tariff Controversies, 218–19.

37. Frances E. Lee and Bruce I. Oppenheimer, Sizing Up the Senate: The Unequal Consequences of Equal Representation (Chicago, 1999).

38. Shepsle, Kenneth and Weingast, Barry, “The Institutional Foundations of Committee Power” American Political Science Review 81 (March 1987): 94–97.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

39. Cox, Gary and McCubbins, Mathew, Setting the Agenda: Responsible Party Government in the U.S. House of Representatives (New York, 2005).Google Scholar

40. Aldrich, John H., Why Parties? The Origin and Transformation of Party Politics in America (Chicago, 1995), 35.Google Scholar

41. For a discussion of special rules in the modern era, see Bach, Stanley and Smith, Steven S., Managing Uncertainty in the House of Representatives: Adaption and Innovation in Special Rules (Washington, D.C., 1988).Google Scholar

42. Jenkins, Jeffery and Nokken, Timothy, “Partisanship, the Electoral Connection, and Lame-Duck Sessions of Congress, 1877–2006.” Journal of Politics 70 (April 2008).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

43. Ibid.

44. See Doenecke, Justus D., The Presidencies of James A. Garfield and Chester A. Arthur (Lawrence, Kans., 1981)Google Scholar.

45. “Taxes and the Tariff,” New York Times, 21 January 1883 (emphasis added).

46. See Engstom, Erik J. and Kernell, Sam, “Manufactured Responsiveness: The Impact of State Electoral Laws on Unified Party Control of the President and House of Representatives” American Journal of Political Science 49 (July 2005)Google Scholar, and Brady, David W., Congressional Voting in a Partisan Era: A Study of the McKinley Houses and a Comparison to the Modern House of Representatives (Lawrence, Kans., 1973)Google Scholar.

47. Epstein and O’Halloran, “Partisan Paradox and the U.S. Tariff.”

48. Brady, David W., Goldstein, Judith, and Kessler, Daniel, “Does Party Matter? An Historical Test Using Senate Tariff Votes in Three Institutional Settings,” Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization 18 (April 2002).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

49. See Carson, Jamie L., Engstrom, Erik J., and Roberts, Jason M., “Candidate Quality, the Personal Vote, and the Incumbency Advantage in Congress,” American Political Science Review 101 (May 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Carson, Jamie L. and Roberts, Jason M., Ambition, Competition, and Electoral Reform: The Politics of Congressional Elections Across Time (Ann Arbor, 2013).Google Scholar

50. Bensel, Political Economy, chap. 7.

51. As we noted above, the Senate took approximately two hundred roll-call votes on this bill during the 47th Congress. Most of these were amendment votes that dealt with particular tariff schedules or tariffs on individual goods. (We do not analyze these votes because of space constraints and our focus on House procedure.) All amendments in the House were considered in the Committee of the Whole, which did not have recorded votes on amendments until 1971. See Roberts, Jason M. and Smith, Steven S., “Procedural Contexts, Party Strategy, and Conditional Party Voting in the U.S. House, 1971–2000,” American Journal of Political Science 47 (April 2003).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

52. Data for each of these models are taken from Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal’s website, voteview.com, accessed May 12, 2015. Because party almost perfectly predicts the results of the Senate vote on the conference report, we do not present statistical analysis of this vote.

53. Because of the large values of both manufacturing interests and agricultural real estate associated with some districts/states, we use logged values of this data in our multivariate analysis. For urban areas with multiple congressional districts for which Parsons, Dubin, and Parsons provide only the urban area data but not the district level data, we estimate the district-level data in proportion to the population of the district vis-à-vis the population of the urban area. Data taken from Parsons, Stanley B., Dubin, Michael J., and Parsons, Karen Toombs, United States Congressional Districts, 1883–1913 (New York, 1990).Google Scholar

54. Michael Tomz, Jason Wittenberg, and Gary King, “CLARIFY: Software for Interpreting and Presenting Statistical Results,” Version 2.1. Cambridge, Mass.: Stanford University, University of Wisconsin, and Harvard University, 5 January 2003, http://gking.harvard.edu.

55. Only one Republican voted against final passage (Mitchell of Pennsylvania). The New York Times’ account of the vote suggests that Senator Mitchell voted “nay” because he thought the tariff reforms reflected in the bill went too far in the direction of reform (“Congress and the Tariff,” New York Times, 22 February 1883). Although a model including all Republicans in the analysis and party as an additional independent variable converges (with results similar to those shown in Table 3), outlier analysis of that model indicates that the lone Republican “nay” vote is a strong and influential outlier in the analysis and must be removed. Because party as an independent variable then becomes a perfect predictor of the Republican vote, we are limited to analyzing only Democratic votes. The model we report also excludes two additional (Democratic senator) observations that outlier analysis shows to strongly influence the model results.

56. It may be the case, however, that constituency interests may reinforce this seemingly strong effect for party—with each interest leading to a vote in favor of final passage. For instance, it is likely that western-state Republicans voted in favor of final passage due to their success in significantly lowering tariff rates, while other (high duty) Republican senators voted in favor of final passage knowing the bill would be altered in conference committee.

57. Reestimating Model 1 with non-lame-duck Democratic senators only produces results statistically (and substantively) similar to those presented and discussed.

58. Given that our model includes only Democrats, this may very well be the case. Democrats from agriculturally minded states would be those most likely to support a free trade approach to tariff legislation and therefore adopt the view that the Senate bill did not go far enough in reducing tariff rates.

59. While we would prefer to use a trichotomous dependent variable and model the “abstain” “nay” and “yea” votes separately, the limited number of Democratic “yea” votes and Republican “nay” votes makes such an approach difficult. Both ordered logit and multinomial logit models produce what appear to be statistically significant results, but with large parameter and standard error values on the party variable—indicating instability in the model. Moreover, postestimation analysis suggests that the ordered logit model violates the parallel regression assumption of that model. Attempts to relax this assumption with appropriate statistical techniques prevent estimation of the model. Therefore, we do not present the results of this model. A Heckman selection model fails to converge because the same variables predict both the decision to vote and the direction of the vote.

60. Because of this fact, the remainder of our discussion focuses on predicted probabilities calculated as if the representative was not a lame duck. The lame-duck variable has no statistically significant effect on the voting behavior of Republicans. It has a statistically significant effect on the voting behavior of Democrats, but only over a very narrow range (centering around the median values of both manufacturing interests and agricultural real estate).

61. McCown, Congressional Conference Committee, 119.

62. Ibid.

63. See Binder, Minority Rights, and Dion, Legislative Thumbscrew.

64. Schickler, Eric, Disjointed Pluralism: Institutional Innovation and the Development of the U.S. Congress (Princeton, 2001).Google Scholar