Committees don’t count in the House and Senate anymore.

Almost all important pieces of legislation passed by the 112th Congress emerged not from the traditional process of committee members debating and marking up bills, but from backroom negotiations among party leaders. The latest examples are the compromises on extending the payroll-tax cut and unemployment benefits hashed out among congressional leaders this week.

The declawing of committees and their chiefs, once seen as the most powerful men and women on Capitol Hill, is a direct result of the deadline-busting approach to lawmaking that has dominated this Congress. Like college students with a term paper due, Democrats and Republicans wait until the last possible moment to reach agreement on major bills, a habit that short-circuits the committee process in favor of direct negotiations between House and Senate leaders.

Such was the case with the August agreement to limit federal spending and raise the debt ceiling. It’s also the case in the appropriations process, where Congress has failed to pass a budget and as a result has relied on a series of stopgap spending measures.

Each time, negotiations ended with bills drafted on the fly and introduced just before voting, leaving lawmakers scant time to read the details before deciding. That’s exactly opposite of “regular order,” which House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, promised to restore once Republicans took control of the House earlier this year.

“We need to stop writing bills in the speaker’s office and let members of Congress be legislators again,” Boehner said late last year, shortly before the midterm elections that swept the GOP to power in the House. “Too often in the House right now we don’t have legislators; we just have voters. Under Speaker [Nancy] Pelosi, 430 out of the 435 members are just here to vote and raise money. That’s it. That’s not right.

“We were each elected to uphold the Constitution and represent 600,000-odd people in our districts,” Boehner added. “We need to open this place up, let some air in. We have nothing to fear from letting the House work its will — nothing to fear from the battle of ideas. That starts with the committees. The result will be more scrutiny and better legislation.”

When the reverse scenario played out again this week — the House introduced a 2,300-page omnibus spending bill late on Wednesday and planned a Friday vote—Democrats pounced.

“I didn’t go to a speed-reading school,” said Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass. “I’m willing to bet most people didn’t read this bill. What I fear is that when all is said and done we’re going to find things we didn’t expect.… This was not the process we were promised.”

House committees dutifully churn out bills — just not anything destined to reach President Obama’s desk. The bills they draft, mark up, and pass typically die in the Senate; the bills’ chief value is to provide House leaders with partisan talking points.

“The leadership is trying to make sure that the conference is staying on message and operating in a cohesive matter,” said Brian Gardner, an analyst with the investment bank Keefe, Bruyette & Woods. “They may push for a specific set of bills but the ones they have done are more symbolic in nature than substantive. The job-related bills coming out of the Financial Services Committee are not high-profile pieces of legislation. These are not game changers.”

House leaders have also intervened to slow committee work on what otherwise would be fast-moving legislation, as evidenced by the sudden interference by Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., with a planned Financial Services Committee vote on the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act.

The bill, a response to charges of congressional insider trading highlighted by 60 Minutes, seemed to be on the fast track in the committee headed by Rep. Spencer Bachus, R-Ala. Then Cantor stepped in and halted the impending vote before it could occur. Sources say that was because Bachus had not kept leadership closely in the loop on the committee’s plans for the legislation, which a majority of House members cosponsored, including at least 78 Republicans.

On the Appropriations Committee, high-ranking members have found themselves unable to wield two traditional forms of power: earmarking federal funds for pet projects (which Republicans banned this Congress) and including policy riders, such as attempts to block new environmental regulations (which are negotiated between House and Senate leaders for final passage).

The shift in power concerns some former lawmakers.

If passing spending bills by continuing resolution is the new normal, said Republican Robert Bennett, a former senator from Utah who served on the Appropriations Committee, “that means the subcommittee has less and less to do. When you have less and less to do, no matter how good you are; the lines go slack.”