How Congress works ... in Colombia-with-an-“o”

In comments, Tzintzuntzan asks about the procedural rules in the Colombian congress. What are the rules by which the legislature makes the rules? Who controls them?

This is something often overlooked when Americans examine foreign countries. It’s an odd oversight, since procedural rules define American politics more than most places. In the Senate, the need to get 60% to pass anything is a procedural rule. In the House, the Speaker’s near dictatorial control over what bills get to the floor is a procedural rule. And don’t get me started on the baroque rules governing the conference committees that reconcile bills passed by both houses. In short, American politics is entirely incomprehensible if you don’t understand the procedural rules.

The same applies (albeit generally to a lesser extent) to other countries. If you don’t understand the rules by which the legislature makes the rules, then you can’t understand their politics.

Fortunately, Royce Carroll (Rice) and Mónica Pachón (Uniandes) have studied the issue for Colombia. Who controls the legislative agenda? Where are the vetoes?

The U.S. president, as Barack Obama knows all too well, cannot introduce legislation directly. Now, it is usually easy for a President to get a sympathetic legislator to introduce a bill, but he or she cannot force Congress to vote on it. Speaker Boehner or a coalition of forty Senators can kill anything before it even comes up for a vote.

Not so in Colombia! Here, the President can directly introduce legislation. Article 200 of the constitution (English here, Spanish here, and note that in context “gobierno” is used in the British sense and ought to be translated in American English as “administration”) lays out the authority:

1. Help draft the laws, present bills through ministers, exercise the right of objecting to them, and approve them in accordance with the Constitution.
2. Convoke the Congress to special sessions.
3. Present the national development and public investment plan, in accordance with the provisions in Article 150.
4. Send the budget bill of revenues and expenditures to the Chamber of Representatives.

This article has been interpreted very broadly.

In addition, the President can force votes on his or her bills within 30 days. In fact, they can force a vote within 15 days by invoking a joint session of Congress. Better yet, they can skip committees and insure that the House and Senate debate the same initial version of the bill.

But there is a snag. Bills can be amended on the floor. So the President needs to pay close attention to the legislative process in both chambers. If the House and Senate amend bills differently, then a conference committee will determine its final shape ... and the President of the Republic has no direct authority over the committee.

So who does? The answer: each chamber’s three-person Board of Directors. They are elected to one-year terms, by secret ballot. Each Board consists of one president and two vice-presidents, with (by tradition) the president coming from the majority coalition and the veeps from the largest minority parties. These guys serve pick the conference committee, and these are the guys that the President needs on board to get his or her bills through the Congress. In fact, they pick all committees, so getting any bills through Congress requires their assent.

The board presidents are, to get back to Tzin’s question, the equivalent of the U.S. Speaker. The one-year limit, however, insures that the Colombian congress produces no Willie Browns. Me, I think that is a bad thing, but mileage may vary.

What is the upshot? First, presidents in Colombia have a good-but-not-perfect legislative track record. (See page 17.) President Pastrana got 85% of his major bills passed. President Uribe got 79% passed in his first term, and 57% in his second. Presidential bills generally, however, take a lot longer than 30 days to pass: the average is actually 224.

Congress, however, maintains a lot of influence over the process. Carroll and Pachón calculated the proportion of characters that changed between the first version of a bill and the last. For presidential initiatives, 54% of the bill (among passed laws) changed throughout the process. For legislative initiatives, however, the proportion was only 26%. (See page 20.)

The unanswered question, however, is why presidential bills change more than Congressional ones. There are three hypotheses.

Hypothesis 1: The conference committees run the show. They change presidential bills more than ones introduced by their fellow congresspeople.

Hypothesis 1 is probably wrong, or at least incomplete. If it were correct, the changes to presidential bills should mostly happen in the conference committee. Conference committees, however, change only 14% of presidential bills. Most changes occur on the floor.

Hypothesis 2: The only kinds of congressional bills that can pass are uncontroversial motherhood issues.

Hypothesis 2 is also probably wrong. It is true that congressional bills usually fail: none passed under Pastrana and only 36% in Uribe’s first term. But congresspeople introduced such significant (and successful) pieces of legislation as the Violence Against Women Act, the Congressional Ethics Act, and a law allowing the confiscation of property from convicted criminals.

Hypothesis 3: The Board of Directors exercise control early on over congressional bills, but though means other than the conference committee. (Of course, the threat of an unfriendly conference committee might lead the executive to roll over on amendments earlier in the process.)

This one seems to fit the facts. The Board of Directors (in Spanish, the “mesa directiva”) are very powerful. Their power is limited, however, by the fact that they serve only one-year terms.

The upshot is that the President of Colombia can work even with the kinds of fragmented Congresses produced by Colombian electoral law as long as he can get a friendly Board of Directors. He can even work with the Senate. Barack Obama should be so lucky.

Tzin, does this answer your question?

But this is not to say that all is well with Colombian politics. More on that if there is interest.

Comments

[Tzintzuntzan]

I'm blushing; I never expected to spark a whole new post! Thank you! And this does answer my question, except for one thing: are the Congressional Boards of Directors not allowed to serve in those posts consecutively? That affects everything about the secret ballot.

The link you gave to the Constitution doesn't seem to mention the Boards of Directors at all (either that or I don't know how to use the find function on my computer). But I assume this is a matter of procedural tradition rather than the Constitution (is that right?)

I'm definitely interested in all that is not well. If I understand right, the main problem is that only "uncontroversial motherhood issues" can usually pass?

[Noel Maurer]

You are right about the Board of Directors. Like the filibuster or the Speaker in the U.S., they are part of Congress's internal procedural rules and not the constitution.

The Board of Directors cannot be re-elected during the same four-year congressional term. (The Senate describes the Boards here: http://www.senado.gov.co/el-senado/mesa-directiva .)

It's not entirely clear to me that there is a problem with Congress ... but it is true that it is really hard to pass bills that are introduced by congresspeople rather than the president. In a sense, the Colombian congress operates more like a parliament than a U.S.-style congress, at least in terms of legislative procedure. The amazing thing is that the country's institutions have produced this result despite a weak and divided party structure.

[Tzintzuntzan]

A lot of talk of the problems with the American system is the gridlock it produces. If the goal in Colombia is to make it easy to pass legislation...

...then why didn't they start with a British-style system where the PM is an "elected dictator"? Unless that wasn't the goal, of course.

[Noel Maurer]

History, mostly. Colombia (like all Latin American countries) has been under presidential constitutions since independence. A parliamentary system is a strange and not-quite-legitimate animal in this hemisphere.

There is a second reason, but it isn't the real reason. For a divided parliamentary system to work, you need politicians who know how to form coalitions and electorates who are prepared to vote in snap elections. These skills are not natural and one can imagine a parliamentary system going spectacularly wrong.