Regular Disorder: How Congress broke itself, caused chaos and misery, and why it may not be possible to go back ever again.

• Over the past three decades, party leadership in congress has accumulated more and more power to cut big deals.
• This came at the expense of members serving on House committees and subcommittees.

The past year has been a fiasco in the House of Representatives. The Speaker of the House took weeks to secure the votes needed to take office and survived a few months before being unceremoniously ejected from his position, which led to a month of legislative time being squandered as a series of would-be Speakers failed to win over enough Republicans to bag the job.

At the same time, the body has seen a wave of early retirements, with young backbenchers becoming increasingly frustrated by the contours of the job, the constant need to fundraise, and the utter inability of everyday members to influence policy.

These situations are not coincidences.

Indeed, they're the reverberations of a deliberate strategy that congressional leaders have implemented over the past several decades to fundamentally change the way Congress operates, moving away from the so-called "regular order" that "Schoolhouse Rock" aficionados might be familiar with. The strategy has gradually shifted power that was once distributed throughout the membership to party leaders.

It has shattered the illusion that serving in Congress empowers individual politicians to change things for the better. It has changed how the body works, and permanently. It has turned potential rising stars into disaffected, young retirees. For a while, it probably made things a little easier to negotiate. But if the past year is any indication, absent competent leadership with a broad latitude to get deals done, it has set the federal legislature on a path toward fecklessness and irrelevancy from which it might not be possible to escape.

What's changed?

Regular order refers to the process of legislative committees holding hearings and marking up bills before referring them to the legislature as a whole. Ostensibly, this gives committee members and leaders significant sway over what goes into these bills, and is a way for members to accumulate expertise and horse-trade even if they're rather new to serving in the legislature.

Today, this is much rarer for the big bills than it was historically.

Since 1996, Congress has failed to complete each step in the appropriations process on time, and as a result since that year Congress has overwhelmingly preferred omnibus-style bills. Contrast that with the period from 1989 through 1995, when all 13 of the appropriations bills made their way through Congress the way (I'm Just a) Bill said they would, from subcommittees to committees and then Congress as a whole.

But now, party leaders negotiate large spending packages in top-level meetings, potentially dealing in committee leaders and party bigwigs, while closing the doors to the rank and file while they hash out agreements.

What got us here?

"Essentially, there were a series of reforms, at least on the Republican side, that began following the Republican takeover of the House and the 104th Congress, with the rise of then-Speaker Newt Gingrich," said Alan Wiseman, the co-director of the Center for Effective Lawmaking. "And one of the major institutional changes that were put into place on the Republican side was term limits for committee chairs and subcommittee chairs."

Gingrich was deliberately trying to hollow out the power of committee chairs, rein in their fiefdoms, and accumulate power for himself and other party leaders to oversee dealmaking on major spending packages. According to Wiseman's research, a committee leader that is running the show for their fifth, sixth or seventh term is drastically more effective at getting what they want than one in their first, second or third term.

By booting committee chairs before they could accrue that power, Gingrich and subsequent party leaders eliminated potential roadblocks to the will of the Speaker. The coup worked.

"What's happened more recently is that it's tilted more toward leadership, and toward the whole idea that you're campaigning constantly to hang on to power or to gain power," said Donald Wolfensberger, a congressional scholar at the Wilson Center. "And that has sort of thrown out the window the whole idea of regular order."

A Party of One

As a result, party leaders have vast influence over what happens in their chamber — powers that once were in the hands of rank-and-file membership.

"The power has broadly centralized in Congress over the past few decades," said James M. Curry, a professor at the University of Utah who previously worked as an Appropriations Committee aide. "That means not just a centralization of power specifically in party leaders, but a broader centralization away from processes and ways of doing business that gave rank and file members a lot more opportunity to influence decisions."

This isn't entirely bad. Curry in fact argues that it can actually be more efficient to negotiate spending deals this way.

"These were changes that were largely adaptations to dealing with a political environment that made legislative action more difficult, the political environment that settled in since the 1980s, or 1990s," said Curry."

The move away from regular order was natural selection, this argument goes. The institution had to evolve to survive in new harsh environmental conditions caused by the media, partisanship, and financing in American politics.

The current iteration of Congress requires party leaders that want to actually come to deals, and who have the backing of their party to make the necessary trades needed to come to an amicable conclusion. By centralizing power in the Speaker office, one might argue, you have a better chance of achieving a meaningful compromise.

That assumes, however, that party leaders and the members that put them there would want to have a functioning government.

This past year illustrated that what Congress has evolved into may not be able to function under unique pressures, like a slim majority with an intransigent right wing.

We probably can't go back.

The very incentives that pushed Congress away from regular order are stronger than ever.

Partisan media, which can punish rank-and-file members and subcommittee chairs for cutting deals with the other party, is more entrenched every day. Over the same period, lobbying and special interest groups have continued to grow in influence, and the breakdown in social interaction between members has accelerated, particularly as more and more legislator time must be spent dialing for dollars.

The electorate itself has grown more polarized, and that penalizes the kind of horse-trading that had been the hallmark of regular-order-style negotiation.

"If you are seen even talking to somebody the other party, even if it's just socializing and talking about your family to something that," said Wolfensberger, "Oh, he's conspiring with the enemy."

The country doesn't want it, the media doesn't want it, the leadership doesn't want to concede it, and by now much of the membership doesn't know how to get it. It is not entirely obvious how a dedicated group of legislators could even go about wrestling back that power from a Speaker or a party leader. Even if they did, it's not entirely clear that regular order would even work given the intense media scrutiny on anyone who deviates from party orthodoxy.

It's causing some members to realize they have a better chance of advancing their policy agendas outside of the institution. There has been a wave of retirements.

"People are talking about it — more openly than they ever talked about it," Rep. Bill Huizenga told POLITICO. "Like wondering, 'Is this really worth my time and effort?'"

Over the past three decades, the rise of hyper-partisanship, a 24/7 media ecosystem, and declining relationships within Congress have forced the body to retool itself and put the chamber's vast powers in the hands of just a few people. It worked often enough that the transition wasn't questioned. But this year, the flaws of the current style of managing the House could not be more evident. When the people with power aren't up to the task, it can cause the entire government to break down or grind to a halt.

It's not clear that it's even possible to fix this thing, anymore.