Grumet opens with Justice Louis Brandeis’s idea that states serve as democratic laboratories, then shifts the metaphor to Congress. States still test policies, but Grumet argues that legislative committees can better resemble true laboratories because small groups allow expertise, trust, and sustained collaboration to develop. He presents committees as places where diverse interests can refine policy before national decisions are made.

The chapter traces the historical balance of power between party leaders and committee chairs. Early twentieth-century Speakers such as Thomas Reed and Joseph Cannon dominated the House, prompting reforms that empowered committees. The Legislative Reorganization Act of 1946, shaped by Robert La Follette Jr. and Mike Monroney, reduced and clarified committees, helping usher in decades when committees became productive, autonomous engines of legislation.

Grumet then explains how committee power also became abusive. Entrenched southern Democratic chairs, the “Old Bulls,” used their authority to block civil rights legislation, leading reformers in the 1960s and the Watergate-era “Watergate Babies” to weaken chairmen and shift power outward. But because large chambers cannot easily govern collectively, power flowed not to rank-and-file members but to party leaders, especially from Jim Wright through Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay.

As leadership consolidated control, committees also became fragmented and unfocused. Subcommittees multiplied, jurisdictions overlapped, and major issues such as cybersecurity, derivatives regulation, homeland security, energy, and climate policy became trapped among competing panels. Grumet calls this the “spork effect”: committees tried to cover too many functions and therefore performed none well. The result was inefficient oversight, weak expertise, and missed legislative opportunities.

Grumet uses personal and policy examples to show both the problem and the remaining promise of committees. Paul Kanjorski and Scott Garrett asked the Bipartisan Policy Center to host off-the-record financial crisis dinners, where members learned, mixed across party lines, and developed some bipartisan work, though Dodd-Frank still passed on a party-line vote. Energy and climate examples show how leadership and jurisdictional conflicts killed viable bipartisan committee products, while informal Senate “gangs” reveal legislators’ desire to collaborate outside broken formal structures.

The chapter closes with reforms meant to restore committees as working laboratories. Grumet proposes temporary ad hoc committees for cross-jurisdictional priorities, more incentives for attendance and substantive work, and mechanisms such as Calendar Wednesday to move strongly supported committee bills to the floor. He points to the 2013 Senate immigration markup as proof that, when committees have real responsibility, senators and staff still know how to legislate; the broader lesson is that polarization is worsened by institutional design, not only by individual character.