Select Or Special Committee (United States Congress)
A select or special committee of the United States Congress is a congressional committee appointed to perform a special function that is beyond the authority or capacity of a standing committee. A select committee is usually created by a resolution that outlines its duties and powers and the procedures for appointing members. Select and special committees are often investigative in nature, rather than legislative, though some select and special committees have the authority to draft and report legislation.
A select committee generally expires on completion of its assigned the duties, though they can be renewed. Several select committees are treated as standing committees by House and Senate rules, and are permanent fixtures in both bodies continuing from one congress to the next. Examples of this are the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence in the House and the Select Committee on Intelligence in the Senate. The Senate Indian Affairs Committee is also a select committee, though the name Senate is no longer a part of its title.
Some 20th-century select committees are called special committees, such as the Senate Special Committee on Aging. However, they do not differ in any substantive way from the others.
Prior to the advent of permanent standing committees in the early 19th century, the House of Representatives relied almost exclusively on select committees to carry out much of its legislative work. The committee system has grown and evolved over the years. During the earliest Congresses, select committees, created to perform a specific function and terminated when the task was completed, performed the overwhelming majority of the committee work. The first committee to be established by Congress was on April 2, 1789, during the First Congress. It was a select committee assigned to prepare and report standing rules and orders for House proceedings, and it lasted just five days, dissolving after submitting its report to the full House. Since that time, Congress has always relied on committees as the best means to accomplish its work in an orderly, efficient, and expeditious manner.
Read more about Select Or Special Committee (United States Congress): Early Select Committees, Notable Select Committees, Select Committees in The 21st Century
Famous quotes containing the words select, special, committee and/or states:
“The director is simply the audience. So the terrible burden of the director is to take the place of that yawning vacuum, to be the audience and to select from what happens during the day which movement shall be a disaster and which a gala night. His job is to preside over accidents.”
—Orson Welles (1915–1984)
“When, in some obscure country town, the farmers come together to a special town meeting, to express their opinion on some subject which is vexing to the land, that, I think, is the true Congress, and the most respectable one that is ever assembled in the United States.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Like other cities created overnight in the Outlet, Woodward acquired between noon and sunset of September 16, 1893, a population of five thousand; and that night a voluntary committee on law and order sent around the warning, “if you must shoot, shoot straight up!””
—State of Oklahoma, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“If I be false, or swerve a hair from truth,
When time is old and hath forgot itself,
When waterdrops have worn the stones of Troy,
And blind oblivion swallowed cities up,
And mighty states characterless are grated
To dusty nothing, yet let memory
From false to false among false maids in love
Upbraid my falsehood.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)