In the 1994 general election, Republicans won a majority of seats in the House for the first time since the 83 rd Congress (1953-1955). By practice, the majority party organizes the House. It elects its Speaker, chairs its committees, holds majorities on its committees, selects its officers, and manages its legislative agenda. One of the majority's prerogatives is writing the House's rules and using its majority status to effect the chamber's rules on the day the new House convenes. It is a feature of the House, but not of the Senate, that it must adopt rules at the convening of each Congress. It is also a feature of the House that it relies heavily on its formal rules, and formal means of temporarily changing them, rather than on the informal, ad hoc procedures so often used in the Senate. Although each new House largely adopts the chamber rules that existed in the previous Congress, each new House also adopts changes to those rules. Among the many subjects that the rules may cover, these changes can strengthen the ability of the majority to control the legislative process and the legislative agenda, and they can bestow rights on the minority party, minority interests, and individual Members. The changes made by the Republican majority in the 104 th Congress rules resolution and in subsequent rules resolutions adopted by Republican majorities through the 109 th Congress addressed nearly every aspect of the legislative process, budget process, committee organization, administrative operations, and ethical standards. The changes the Republican majority made were not conceived solely in the days following the 1994 elections, but drew on many experiences and sources. This report has two principal parts reflecting its two principal purposes. The first part analyzes the sources of Republican rules changes. Republicans built their critique of Democratic management of the House over many years. In drafting rules for the 104 th and subsequent Congresses and in other exercises of the House's rulemaking authority, Republicans could draw on their experience and on a variety of partisan and bipartisan plans and proposals. The first purpose of the report is to identify the sources of the broad rewriting of House rules in the 104 th Congress and additional changes in subsequent Congresses. The second part of the report organizes rules changes affecting committees and the House floor topically and changes affecting budgetary legislation, House administration, and ethics by Congress, and briefly explains the changes in layman's terms. These changes were included in the rules resolutions adopted at the beginning of the 104 th through 109 th Congresses, special orders adopted in conjunction with the rules resolutions, and Speakers' policy announcements made at the convening of each of these Congresses. The major topical headings for this part of the report are as follows: " Rules Changes Affecting Committees " " Rules Changes Affecting the Chamber and Floor " " Rules Changes Affecting Budgetary Legislation " " Rules Changes Affecting Administrationof the House " " Rules Changes Affecting Ethics Standards " Each of these major headings is further subdivided by topic or by Congress. The second purpose of the report is to catalogue and briefly explain by topic—regardless of the location of a topic in one or more rules—specific changes to rules over the course of Republican majority control of the House. This report supplements the official source of rules changes, the House Rules and Manual . This volume, printed in each Congress to reflect adoption of a rules resolution, contains the current provisions of House rules. For each rule, it also contains the House parliamentarian's notes describing changes to the rule (or its specific clauses) and decisions of presiding officers and the House based upon the rule. Rules in the House Rules and Manual are arranged by rule number. This report does not describe all of the actions taken during each Congress that effected permanent and temporary organizational, procedural, administrative, and other changes in the operation of the House. In addition to changes made through rules resolutions, such changes were made through freestanding legislation and as provisions of bills or resolutions, and in report language on legislation and in joint explanatory statements accompanying conference reports. Legislative branch appropriations bills and budgetary legislation contained organizational, procedural, and other changes that were temporary or permanent. So-called fast-track or expedited House procedures were included in legislation that otherwise addressed a policy matter. Democratic Caucus and Republican Conference rules and decisions also had an impact on how specific House rules (such as rules on suspension of the rules and on committee assignment limits) were implemented. In a few instances, changes made by means other than the House rules resolution are described, where necessary to understand changes made in rules resolutions. Selected references to relevant freestanding bills and resolutions, however, are provided in footnotes in the report. Between the 104 th and 109 th Congresses, some committees were created and others were abolished, and some committees' names were changed. In this report, the names of committees appear as they existed in the specific Congress referenced. Following the next section, " The 103 rd Congress: Prelude to Change ," there is a section titled " Recodification of House Rules, 106 th Congress ." During the 105 th Congress (1997-1999), a Rules Committee task force completed the first recodification of House rules since the 1880s. Citations appearing in this report are only to the recodified rules. The parliamentarian's notes in the House Rules and Manual, attached to specific rules, clauses, or paragraphs, trace the recodification of specific provisions of House rules, in addition to changes to the text of the rules. This report is the first in a series on House rules changes. A second report currently covers changes for the 110 th through 112 th Congresses: CRS Report R42395, A Retrospective of House Rules Changes Since the 110 th Congress , by [author name scrubbed] and [author name scrubbed]. It is also divided into two parts, with the first part covering the partisan critique of the majority party's management of the House—a source of rules changes when the majority changed—and the second part organizing rules changes topically. The topic headings in reports in the series are the same, to the extent that the same procedural and other topics were addressed in each time frame. The House rules changes made in the 104 th Congress reflected a Republican frame of reference that was built over many years as the minority party, including more democratic floor processes, minority party rights, a subordinate role for seniority, accountability in House operations, and streamlining of the House's organization and staffing. The rules changes in the succeeding five Republican-organized Congresses continued to draw on this frame of reference, but also drew on current experiences in managing the House. While Republican Members as members of the minority party for 40 years had less invested in the status quo of the House than Democratic Members, they nonetheless had some investment, such as the opportunity awaiting those Republican Members who might assume the chairmanship of a committee on which they had long served as ranking minority Member. These interests also influenced the final 104 th Congress rules package. Republican criticisms relevant to the changes made in the 104 th Congress began with the decisions on rules made at the direction of the Democratic Caucus beginning after the 1974 election. The Committee Reform Amendments, agreed to just a month before the 1974 elections, had abolished proxy voting in committees and allocated to the minority one-third of statutory committee staff and one-third of investigative committee staff. The rules for the House in 94 th Congress (1975-1977) restored proxy voting, although requiring proxies to be given in writing, and abrogated the committee staff allocation formula, with minority committee staffing in the 94 th Congress anticipated to be about 20% of total committee staffing. As the Democratic majority began innovating in the 1970s and 1980s with special rules—such as modified closed rules and "king of the Hill" rules—to give a procedural advantage to its preferred policy outcome, Republican House Members formed groups, such as the Conservative Opportunity Society and the Republican '92 Group, to contest Democrats' legislative management of the House by employing House procedures to attract attention, to critique Democratic proposals, and to develop and publicize substantive Republican alternatives. The Conservative Opportunity Society, founded by then-Representative Newt Gingrich in 1983, promoted conservative proposals as an alternative to the so-called welfare state. The '92 Group, named for the goal of electing a Republican majority in the House in 1992, was founded by Republican moderates such as then-Representatives Olympia Snowe and Tom Tauke. It also advanced proposals for governing as an alternative to Democratic legislation. Then, in the 102 nd and 103 rd Congresses, scandals cast a pall over public perceptions of Congress, exposing Members' special treatment and self-dealing, and contributing to the public's sense of disconnection between Members of Congress and their constituents. The disclosure of damaging information began in 1991 with an investigation of the House post office stamp clerks for embezzlement and drug dealing. A reported allegation by a post office supervisor that he had helped Members of Congress "get thousands of dollars in cash through phony transactions disguised as stamp purchases" led to subpoenas for the records of three Members, one of whom was the chair of the Ways and Means Committee, Representative Dan Rostenkowski. On May 31, 1994, Representative Rostenkowski was indicted on 17 criminal charges involving embezzlement, fraud, and coverup. In September 1991, a General Accounting Office audit revealed that Members had written 8,331 bad checks (non-sufficient fund checks) in the 12 months ending June 30, 1990, at the House bank, a check-cashing service in the Capitol for Members and staff. Later that month, House Administration Committee members revealed that more than 250 Members were in arrears for bills at House restaurants for more than $255,000. In March 1992, the House voted to release the bad check audit data, including Members' names.