‘The tactics of assemblies ought to reference the greatest happiness of society’

Three students of parliamentary procedure - Cleon would have judged these scholars to be ‘gifted fellows’ - had a great deal to say about the evolution of parliamentary procedure in the study interval 1774-1801.

Legislators were, Bentham remarked, ‘in the situation of a manufacturer, who besides the work that was the object of his manufacture, should find himself under the necessity of making the very tools he was to work with’.¹⁴ The writings of these three scholars exhibited a common motivation to elaborate the range of logical choices available to a legislative assembly in advance of a procedural difficulty.

Chapter 1

Upon declaring independence from Britain on 4 July 1776, the United States Congress urgently needed to establish its credentials as a legitimate gov­ernment that could credibly challenge the claims of the British Crown to political supremacy in North America. Americans adopted parliamentary procedures that, to any casual observer, seemed to borrow heavily from pro­cedures evidenced by the practice of the House of Commons at Westminster. However, both nations built parliamentary procedures based on an idealised understanding of best practices. This approach enabled law-makers at West­minster to deal at arm’s length with its extensive and well-documented par­liamentary history while American law-makers at Philadelphia were enabled to write modest inventories of procedural rules without explicit connection to British parliamentary experience.

In the interval 1774 through 1781 circumstances required the Continen­tal Congress to address serious procedural challenges.

Chapter 2

John Hatsell (1733-1820) served the House of Commons at Clerk’s Table as its Clerk in active service from 1768 to 1797. He published his mag­num opus under the series title Precedents of Proceedings in the House of Commons. Hatsell laboured at this study from 1776 to 1796. Hatsell’s first thesis suggested a minimal standard for new procedures: they need not be tethered to history. A proposed ‘rule to go by’ might be taken, arbitrarily, as rationally or irrationally grounded. Hatsell’s second thesis imagined an encounter with the blank page. This thesis set benchmarks by which legisla­tors might measure their progress along the pathway to acquisition of par­liamentary competence. Hatsell’s second thesis, unlike the first, elevates the importance of code-writing as an essential skill. This became increasingly important as the fiscal-service state matured delivery of goods and services in the last decades of the eighteenth century.

Chapter 3

Through the decade of the 1780s the national appetite for reform in par­liamentary and governance arrangements demanded substantial realign­ment of responsibilities among actors and bodies in Great Britain and the United States.

Chapter 4

Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) drew on his service as a provincial legislator and later in the Continental Congress along with experience gained as the presiding officer of the United States Senate (1797-1801) to compose his Manual of Parliamentary Practice for the Use of the Senate of the United States (published 1801, rev. ed. 1812). The Manual’s framework relied on the Rules for Conducting Business in the United States Senate. Jefferson supported his presentation and analysis of the Senate's best practices with 658 citations, the vast majority of which were of British origin. The per­formance standards he proclaimed were ‘accuracy in business, economy of time, order, uniformity and impartiality’.

Chapter 5

The chapter presents two case studies. The Bank of England suffered a crisis of confidence in the convertibility of its banknotes (February 1799). The House of Commons was unable to craft the procedures required to manage financial business in the run-up to these events. The House of Commons was obliged to catch up on several years of overdue financial analysis and reporting. The United States Senate, on the other hand, made careful and considered progress in maturing new procedural rules governing Senate rati­fication of treaties; these were duly wrapped into an expanded code of pro­cedural rules in 1801. Each study illustrates the challenges facing members of the House of Commons and the United States Senate when circumstances required a second look at procedures and practices.

Chapter 6

Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) pioneered the use of virtual experiments that tested existing and proposed parliamentary procedures. These investigations appeared in his Essay on Political Tactics, a fragment of which he published in 1791. His experiments imagined procedures based on best practices. These delivered hoped-for benefits and avoided imposing inconveniences on political society or, further afield, in civil society. ‘The tactics of deliberative assemblies, as well as every other branch of the science of government, ought to have ref­erence to the greatest happiness of society: this is the general end’.¹⁶ Bentham thereby made the connection from the willingness of legislators to engage each other in a ‘good discussion’ to the ambition of the body to model ‘better rules’.¹⁷ Bentham and Benthamite reasoning significantly contributed to our understanding of the connection between the technical and the aspirational.

Chapter 7

Legislative assemblies saw themselves as collaborative risk-taking machines. Members generated the energy required to get their product out the door and onto the statute books. Risk was exposed through the members’ ‘ani­mated performance’, that is, members doing things with words, numbers and other data. The equation of skills and logics provided the intellectual framing for choreography in the assembly chamber. Mini-codes of rules guided and governed this choreography. First employed in the extremity of rebellion and a long-running recognition war, the American talent for code­writing reached a youthful stage of maturity at the end of the century, com­parable to the level of performance exhibited in the House of Commons. Jefferson summed up the utility of an inventory of prescriptions - whether dressed up as a constitution or a mini-code of procedural rules - as a ‘text of civic instruction’ in his Inaugural Address (4 March 1801).¹⁸

These inventories of prescriptions supplied the format of choice for delivery of the goodness and fairness that national legislative assemblies promised a nation’s inhabitants.

Political society, Jefferson argued, would identify and proclaim for politi­cal society enduring values or ‘transcendent objects’.²⁰ This revolutionary claim - equal in stature to Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence - was grounded in functionalism.