Committee seats cost as much as $800,000 per year to sit on. Congressmen don't even make that much.
Not clear where and how you came up with this number. Nor does your video insert make clear who gets this money and how.
FYI;
Committee assignment procedure
The appointment of Senate committee members is formally made by the whole Senate, and the whole House formally appoints House committee members, but the choice of members is actually made by the political parties. Generally, each party honors the preferences of individual members, giving priority on the basis of seniority.
In the Senate, each party is allocated seats on committees generally in proportion to its overall strength in the Senate as a whole. Membership on most House committees are also in rough proportion to the party's strength in the House as a whole, with two major exceptions: on the
House Rules Committee, the majority party fills nine of the thirteen seats;
[14] and on the
House Ethics Committee, each party has an equal number of seats.
[15]
In each committee, a member of the majority party serves as its
chairperson, while a member of the minority party serves as its
ranking member. Four Senate committees instead refer to the ranking minority member as vice chairperson: the
Senate Committee on Appropriations, the
Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, the
Senate Select Committee on Ethics, and the
Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. The chairpersons and ranking members in each committee are also elected by the political parties.
An analysis of U.S. House of Representative committee request letters from the 92nd, 93rd, 97th, 98th, 100th, and 101st Congresses showed that the most common justifications raised by members seeking a committee assignment were prior
professional experience, geography, and electoral considerations, in that order. About 80 percent of justifications in the letters fell into one of these three categories.
[16] Members who request an assignment to the
House Armed Services Committee tend to have a greater military presence in their district, while members requesting assignment to the
House Interior Committee generally tend to come from sparsely populated areas with more land held in
public trust.
[17]
....
A
congressional committee is a legislative sub-organization in the
United States Congress that handles a specific duty (rather than the general duties of Congress). Committee membership enables members to develop specialized knowledge of the matters under their jurisdiction. As "little legislatures", the committees monitor ongoing governmental operations, identify issues suitable for legislative review, gather and evaluate information, and recommend courses of action to their parent body.
Woodrow Wilson once wrote, "it is not far from the truth to say that Congress in session is Congress on public exhibition, whilst Congress in its committee rooms is Congress at work."
[1] It is not expected that a member of Congress be an expert on all matters and subject areas that come before Congress.
[2] Congressional committees provide valuable informational services to Congress by investigating and reporting about specialized subjects.
Congress divides its legislative, oversight, and internal administrative tasks among approximately 200 committees and
subcommittees. Within assigned areas, these functional subunits gather information; compare and evaluate legislative alternatives; identify policy problems and propose solutions; select, determine, and report measures for full chamber consideration; monitor executive branch performance (oversight); and investigate allegations of wrongdoing.
[3] The investigatory functions have always been a key role. In the tabling and wording of new law, procedures such as the House
discharge petition process (the process of bringing a bill onto the floor without a committee report or mandatory consent from its leadership) are so laborious and technical that committees, today, dominate the draftsmanship and honing of the detail of many bills laid before Congress. Of the 73 discharge petitions submitted to the full House from 1995 through 2007, only one was successful in securing a definitive yea-or-nay vote for a bill.
[4]
The growth in autonomy and overlap of committees has fragmented the power of the Senate and of the House. This dispersion of power may, at times, weaken the legislative branch relative to the other two branches of the federal government, the executive and the judiciary. In his often cited article
History of the House of Representatives, written in 1961, American scholar George B. Galloway (1898–1967) wrote: "In practice, Congress functions not as a unified institution, but as a collection of semi-autonomous committees that seldom act in unison." Galloway went on to cite committee autonomy as a factor interfering with the adoption of a coherent legislative program.
[5] Such autonomy remains a characteristic feature of the committee system in Congress today.
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en.wikipedia.org