During the Civil War, the activities of the Joint Civil War Committee became particularly important. For the first time, the highest legislative body created an investigative committee, bringing together both senators and members of the House of Representatives. The speaker appointed four congressmen; the vice president appointed three members of the upper house. The chairman was the head of the Senate Committee on Territories, one of the leaders of the radical Republicans, B. Wade. The Civil War Committee sought not just to control the legality of the actions of federal officials, but also to direct the affairs of state. The radical Republicans who dominated the committee investigated the causes of federal troop defeats, resorted to arresting generals they did not like, and when they went to the battlefields they gave instructions to officers. The Committee acted according to the unwritten laws of revolutionary times, and it is not surprising that it often abandoned the usual routine rules.
Different logical forces were represented in the White House and the Capitol, and this was the basis of the controversy: the constitutionality of both the president’s and the Civil War committee’s actions was questioned. During the difficult years of the bourgeois-democratic revolution, as later on during the debate over the direction of reconstruction, “the rights of Congress, the president, and the states were all fictitious issues. It was only an inherently parliamentary form of expressing the problems of the class struggle in American tradition and American norms. 29 Radical Republicans, who controlled the main committees of the House, disagreed with the cautious centrist position of A. Lincoln and tried to use committee investigations to force the president to change the composition of the cabinet.
Consequently, the viability of parliamentary committees was confirmed during the Civil War. The active activity of specialized congressional bodies had by then become an inherent feature of the American model of separation of powers and the system of “checks and balances”.
By the mid-19th century, the committees of the U.S. federal legislature differed significantly from their counterpart in the English parliament. The core of the congressional committee system was made up of permanent specialized bodies of the chambers that had the right of initial consideration of bills, were not bound by mandatory instructions from the leadership, and exercised both legislative and supervisory powers. While the committees of the British Parliament remained subsidiary bodies operating under the strict control of the Houses, the congressional committee system played an important independent role in shaping the policies of the Senate and House of Representatives.
The evolution of congressional committees during the period of pre-monopoly capitalism was above all related to the development of contradictions within the ruling bourgeois-plantationist bloc. Disagreements between the president and congress, ultimately reflecting these contradictions, usually did not affect the basic functioning of the state apparatus, but had a direct impact on the work of its individual parts, including committees. The use of the specialized bodies of the chambers for reaching agreements and working out political compromises, their role of intermediaries between the Congress and the departments were determining factors in the development of the system of committees of the supreme representative institution. The creation of a stable House structure helped the ruling circles to ensure continuity in the main directions, forms and often methods of work of the Congress, while the revision of the composition of committees repeated at the beginning of each session reflected changes in the political orientation of the houses.
By the mid-19th century, the committees had become the voice of the leading party factions. Legally, they stood apart from the party factions because they were appointed by the official leadership of the houses from representatives of all political groups represented in the congress. In fact, the composition of the committees in those years was already selected by the party factions, and the appointment of the chairman and the determination of the committee majority depended directly on the balance of party forces in the chamber. At the same time, it was to the congressional leadership’s advantage to give the committees’ decisions the character of professional rather than political recommendations. Thus a discrepancy gradually emerged between the legal position and the actual role of the specialized bodies of the supreme legislative institution. Both in the legislative process and in the control of the executive power, the House remained the decisive body, although the prerequisites for gradually replacing the work of the plenary with that of specialized bodies were already in place. The development of Congress during the period of Reconstruction and the transition to imperialism confirmed the tendency to further expand the role and influence of the committee system of the House of Representatives and the Senate.