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"Congressional Decentralization in Design and Evolution" (1996) Burdett A. Loomis

Burdett Loomis traces the evolution of Congress across two centuries of representation. He examines the seeds of fragmentation and individualism on Capitol Hill, established by the Framers of the Constitution, as well as the trend toward decentralization of power produced by the committee system.

Source: Copyright  2/96 by St. Martin's Press, Inc. "Congressional Decentralization in Design and Evolution" (chapter 2) from The Contemporary Congress by Burdett A. Loornis, pp. 13-29. Reprinted with permission of St. Martin's Press, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Prentice-Hall, Inc., Upper Saddle River, N.J. In “Documents and Readings for American Government” Brian Fife, Worth Publishing

The Framers of the Constitution faced a dilemma: how to create a strong national government that would not use Its powers in arbitrary or antidemocratic ways. Within the republican construct of federalism and a separation of powers, the powers of the Congress were spelled out in far more detail than were those of the executive or judicial branches. The contradictory concerns of how to concentrate power and simultaneously limit it led the Framers to design a potentially powerful Congress that is capable of acting quickly and decisively, but is ordinarily slow and cautious in struggling to represent the disparate interests of its widely varied constituencies. The Framers might have a difficult time recognizing the size and scope of the modern presidency or the policy reach of the Supreme Court (for example, the Roe v. Wade abortion decision based on the "right to privacy," which is nowhere detailed in the Constitution), but most would be at home in a contemporary congressional debate such as that on the North American Free Trade Agreement, in which national benefits (increased exports through lower tariffs) were juxtaposed with potential local costs (the loss of jobs to cheaper foreign labor).

The Framers Construct a Congress

Although they recognized the need for a strong, effective central government, the Framers worried greatly over the potential for abuse that comes with any concentration of power. After all, they had fought a revolution to rid themselves of the British monarchy. By providing the Congress with large grants of well-defined authority, most notably the powers to tax and spend, they placed the largest share of national power in legislative hands. At the same time, "the Framers regarded [the Congress as likely to succeed in deceiving and dominating the people." They thus engineered a number of design features into the Constitution to reduce the possibility of systematic abuse by willful congressional majorities. Its three basic elements were:

1.The representation of "a multiplicity of interests within an "extended republic."

2.The separation of powers at the national level into the legislative, judicial, and executive branches.

3.The creation of a bicameral (two-chamber) legislative body.

These provisions defined a decentralized congressional structure in three distinct ways. 'First, the representational nature of the legislature would work against the concentration of power. The Framers knew from first-hand experience how difficult it was to build majority positions from the diverse views harbored by legislators with differing district, state, and regional backgrounds. Even so, vigorous representation of various interests and constituencies was scarcely enough to check a determined congressional majority. Curbing the potential for tyranny required permanent structural barriers to legislative dominance. This was accomplished by constructing both external and internal limitations on the congressional majorities-the separation of powers and bicameralism, respectively.

Second, the separation of powers provides both independence for each of the three branches and the capacity for each branch to retain that independence by checking the actions of the others. This elemental decentralizing feature of American government has produced legendary intragovernmental confrontations raging from the congressional censuring of President Andrew Jackson in 1834 to the Supreme Court's unanimous 1974 decision requiring President Richard Nixon to hand over the Watergate tapes to the Congress. At the same time, interbranch cooperation is crucial, especially between the executive and legislative branches, for the power of the national government to be effectively mustered. Thus, the president must continually act to promote his legislative agenda, while the Congress presses its own oversight of the executive branch and government bureaucracy. In addition, the judicial branch imposes its own constraints on congressional actions, given its powers to rule laws unconstitutional and to interpret their applications. A substantial amount of legislative activity lies in Congress's responses to judicial decisions (for example, abortion policy in the wake of Roe v. Wade and subsequent cases),

Third, not content to rely on external checks on the Congress, the Framers created formidable internal restraints as well. Most of these derive from the adoption of a bicameral structure with distinctive bases of power for each legislative chamber. Given the tendency of legislative authority to dominate in a representative government, James Madison concluded that "the remedy for this inconvenience is, to divide the legislature into different branches; and to render them, by different modes of election, and different principles of action, as little connected with each other, as the nature of their common functions and their common dependence on society, will admit."

The Constitutional Convention's fundamental compromise was to create a two-chamber structure in which only members of the lower body, the House of Representatives, would be elected directly by the people. Senators would be selected by state legislatures, and each state would be represented by two senators, regardless of its population. Senate terms would stretch for six years, as opposed to the two years given Representatives. The Senate would be accorded the power to ratify treaties and confirm executive-branch appointments, and the House would be granted the sole authority to originate revenue bulls.

Among their myriad accomplishments, the Framers of the Constitution succeeded in laying the groundwork for a strong national government. This potential for centralized power-realized in fits and starts over the past 200yearswas simultaneously checked by representation of diverse interests, the separation of powers, and a bicameralism that roughly balanced the strengths of the two chambers. Even before the first Congress met or before George Washington assumed the presidency, the stage had been set for the tensions between centrifugal and centripetal forces that have characterized American legislative politics since 1789.

What follows is in no way a complete history, even in outline form, of the United States Congress. Rather, the emphasis on a succession of congressional eras offers a series of sketches on how the legislature has developed since its inception and how the initial tensions over representation and structural experiments, such as bicameralism, have shaped the nature of the institution. Indeed, even as Republicans won control of both houses of Congress in 1994 for the first time in forty years, Speaker Gingrich and his unified band of 230 GOP Representatives were forced to contend with a Senate that has been less eager to enact sweeping legislation and a Democratic president who can exercise his constitutional veto powers. Despite defining congressional powers more clearly, and at much greater length, than the other national branches of government, the Constitution did little to dictate how the two houses would be organized. No mention is ever made of committees or political parties; only the offices of Speaker, President of the Senate (the vice-president), and the Senate's President Pro Tempore are noted, although without any demarcation of their duties. The larger size of the House (65 members in 1789 and 181 by 1813, in contrast to 26 and 36 senators for the same years, respectively) led to the development of a more complex structure to conduct its business. To take advantage of its numbers, the House soon developed the decentralized standing committee system that remains an organizational hallmark of the body. Concurrently, however, the House's size also fostered the growth of political parties that served to pull together the diverse interests of their members, who had soon begun to feel the centrifugal pull of their committees as well as that of their constituencies.

For the first ten Congresses, most committees operated as ad hoc bodies to "perfect" the work done by the Committee of the Whole House, but gradually-especially after 1825-standing committees, which continued from one Congress to the next, took on the major tasks of writing and revising legislation. Reliance on growing numbers of committees illustrates the increased decentralization of the House. This organizational style benefitted the average Representative by allowing each committee to become expert in its own policy area and share that knowledge with the rest of the members. Moreover, by facilitating a division of labor, the House could take advantage of the very condition-its large number of members-that rendered it most unwieldy.

As committees were beginning to develop the specialized expertise essential to address particular issues, the House also needed some way to build consistent majorities. As with committees, congressional leaders turned to a structural answer. American politicians of the 1790s-1830s gradually invented a new organization designed for a republican form of government-the political party. Although scholars disagree about the extent of partisanship and party organization in the first two decades of constitutional government, there were distinct factions that opposed each other in elections and within the legislature. As early as the Second Congress (1791), even though parties had not become formalized, "common ideas and concerns were fast binding men together, and when Congress met, many individuals in both houses became more or less firmly aligned into two voting groups-Federalists on one side and republican-minded [a Madison-Jefferson faction] on the other."

The central figure in establishing strong parties and leadership in the House was Representative Henry Clay of Kentucky, who energized the Speakership during his three periods of service in that chamber. By 1814, Clay and his colleagues "had succeeded in erecting a new system, based on the party caucus, in which legislative leadership was now the prerogative of a group of prominent men in the House of Representatives."

Party divisions and organizational strength would vary over the next four decades, but by 1825 the beginnings of a stable party system with regular leaders and consistent voting patterns had taken firm hold as a centralizing force within the House. Indeed, by this time, both committees and parties were established to the point that a scholar could write in 1917, "so far as its organization was concerned, the House of Representatives had assumed its present form." This is a significant observation for contemporary legislative politics because the House of both the 1825 and 1917 eras contained both strong committee systems and forceful, coherent party leaderships, much like that of the Democratic House of Speaker Jim Wright (1987-1989) and the Republican chamber under Speaker Gingrich (1995- ).
Through the early 1820s the House, with its emerging structure and growing numbers, was accorded more weight than the Senate largely because of the direct election of its members. The Senate, however, was also changing, if more through evolution than through the impatient leadership of a Clay. By 1830, the Senate had moved from being an elitist imitation of the English House of Lords to a strongly American institution-" close to the people, as proactive as the House, and independent of the executive."

Senate Individualism and House Fragmentation: 1830-1860

By the beginning of the Jackson Administration in 1829, the Senate had begun to attract the most formidable leaders of the day, such as Kentucky's Henry Clay. Clay, who had instituted vigorous party leadership in the House before serving as secretary of state, continued his illustrious, meandering career by returning to Congress in 1831 as a Whig senator. There he would join such notables as Daniel Webster (Whig-Mass.), John Calhoun (D-S.C.), and Thomas Hart Benton (D-Mo.) in a chamber composed of the most notable men of the era. The French observer Alexis de Tocqueville contrasted the "vulgarity" he found in the House with the Senate, which he described as being filled with "eloquent advocates, distinguished generals, wise magistrates, and statesmen of note."

Although many senators operated skillfully behind the scenes, this was a time of great individual oratory and sweeping attempts to hold the Union together. Setting the stage for the era's politics was the legendary Webster Hayne debate of 1829, which defined the slavery issue in terms of the survival of the Union as a whole. Several other sub themes also ran through the Senate of the I 830s, most of them revolving around the roles of the states and the national government, slavery, the populistic aims of Jackson and the Democratic Party, and the sectional split within the Democrats' ranks between New York's Martin Van Buren and John Calhoun. The freedom of individual action within the still-small Senate (forty-eight members in 1831) meant that coalitions could form and reform as these able legislators jockeyed for advantage over a wide range of issues. All the while, they understood that their fundamental division over slavery might destroy the very system of government that allowed them to flourish.

In contrast, the House found it difficult to organize itself coherently in the 1830-1860 period. With a larger, less stable membership than the Senate, the House could not as easily rely on the leadership of strong individual legislators. Nor could it count on its party factions and sectional interests to provide the organizational coherence demanded by the fractious body. Extended, bitter contests for the Speakership became commonplace. In 1849, for example, five major groupings vied for control, and a Speaker was finally elected on the sixty-third ballot after the members agreed that the office could be awarded to the candidate who won a plurality, not a majority, of the votes. In 1855, a mix of Whigs, Republicans (a newly formed party), Democrats, and various minor parties went 133 ballots before selecting (again by plurality) anti slavery Representative Nathaniel Banks (Mass.) of the nativist American (Know-Nothing) Party.

Finally, in the 36th Congress (1859-1861), which again harbored no clear party majority, forty-four ballots over three months were required to elect the most unlikely of Speakers: William Pennington (R-N.J.), who was serving his first (and last!) term in the House. His election to this post matched Henry Clay's 1811 victory as a first-term representative, but Clay had won the Speakership because of his strong personality and forceful leadership qualities; conversely, Pennington was the lowest common denominator in a highly fragmented chamber of a nation that was about to burst apart.

The Rise of the Modern Congress: 1860-1920

Between the Civil War years and the end of World War 1, the United States Congress underwent a series of organizational restructurings that culminated in what can be called its modern form by about 1920. The combination of a growing national industrial base and an increasing U.S. role in world affairs required the legislative branch to adapt to a very different environment than that of the pre1860 United States, in which an agrarian nation had wrestled with the fundamental, highly divisive slavery issue.

Over the 1860-1920 period, the Congress experimented with strong party leadership in both chambers, created and then limited a separate committee for appropriations, first dominated a series of weak presidents and later looked to the president for coherent leadership initiatives, and eventually moved toward the mixture of standing committee decentralization and oligarchy that would characterize the institution until the mid-1960s. Why such a flurry of activity? As a representative body, the Congress adapts to its environment; new members enter the body, new issues come before it, and new party alignments arise. In the course of adapting to broad societal changes (such as industrialization in the late 1800s and early 1900s) the Congress has often restructured itself internally to consolidate power and regularize procedure.

The House

For more than a quarter-century after the Civil War, Congress dominated national politics and policy making, but battles raged over the control of both chambers. Standing committees dominated the legislative process, especially after the House stripped the upstart Appropriations Committee (established in 1865) of much of its authority. At the same time, a number of strong Speakers increased the power of their office; in particular the Speaker could appoint all committee members and could aggressively employ his power to recognize members who wished to speak. Still, Davidson and Oleszek conclude that in the I 880s, "despite growth in the Speaker's prerogatives, centrifugal forces in the House remained strong, even dominant." Although committees contributed to this dominance, even more significant was the almost total inability of House majorities to work their will, largely because of delaying tactics that allowed any member to slow actions of the chamber to a crawl.

Enter Speaker Thomas Brackett Reed (R-Maine), elected to lead the House in 1889. In his first three months as Speaker he rewrote the House rules from his position as chair of the Rules Committee and-on the House floor revised the rules for recognition of a quorum (a majority of all members). Since the 1830s the House had operated under the odd, but powerful, precedent of not recognizing the presence of those who sat mute in the chamber, refusing to answer a quorum call. As Representative Benjamin Butterworth (R-Ohio) put it.... It is the weapon of anarchy." A unanimous, if slender, Republican majority upheld Reed's decision that all members physically present would be counted as present in constituting a quorum. This ruling was reconfirmed by the Democrats when they took control of the House in the early 1890s.

Reed's quorum ruling and other rules that consolidated organizational power opened the way for twenty years of great centralization in the House. Speakers Reed, Charles Crisp (D-Ga.), and, most notably, Joseph Cannon (R-111.) increasingly employed the formidable weapons that the position had accumulated. From 1903 to 1909,

"Uncle Joe" Cannon steadily became more dictatorial (the word is not too strong) in his command of the House. Finally, a coalition of minority Democrats and insurgent Republican reformers (many from the Midwest) broke the Speaker's hold over the combination of power levers that permitted him to dominate the process and outcomes of House decision making. As we shall see later in more detail, Cannon had lost the majority that allowed him to function as an autocrat. The support of his fellow Republicans, which was crucial to his dominance, had crumbled. Cannon remained as Speaker for the rest of the term, but both his personal power and that of the office were greatly diminished.

For a few years, the Democratic party caucus and the presidential leadership of Woodrow Wilson combined to retain some relatively strong centripetal momentum in the House, but this dissipated with increasing disagreement over international policies surrounding World War 1. By 1920, strong party leadership had given way to a decentralized committee system as the principal means of organizing the House-a condition not to change for more than half a century.

The Senate

In his classic account of the nineteenth-century Senate, historian David Rothman concludes that

the Senate of 1869 was very much like its predecessors; by 1901 it had come to resemble its successors.... Senators in the 1870s . . . were free to go about their business more or less as they pleased. By 1900 all this had changed. The party caucus and its chieftains determined who would sit on which committees and looked after the business calendar in detail. Members were forced to seek their favors or remain without influence in the chamber. At the same time, both organizations imposed unprecedented discipline on roll calls.

Occupying the central positions within the Republican caucus of the 1890s were the chair, Iowa's William Allison, and New York's Nelson Aldrich, perhaps the most talented and influential member of the chamber. They dominated Senate policy making through a combination of formal and informal linkages. The Allison-Aldrich faction gained control of overlapping party committees and standing committee positions to dominate the chamber's agenda and its policy outcomes. For example, controlling the Republican Steering Committee "confirmed the power of the Allison Aldrich faction over the Senate business. Arranging the legislative schedule in detail, week by week, the committee extended the party leaders' authority unimpaired from the caucus to the chamber. Senators knew they had to consult the committee before attempting to raise even minor matters."

Remnants of the traditional Senate individualism remained, but those Republicans who refused to cooperate with the Allison-Aldrich group found themselves without influence. As Rothman notes, "Anyone could use the chamber as a forum and address the nation. Senators willing to abandon the opportunity to increase their own authority could act freely, following their own inclinations. ... But barring a take-over of the party offices, they could hardly affect the exercise of power. The country might honor their names but the Senate barely felt their presence."

Given the underlying differences among senators, based on region, party, interests, and ideology, the Senate's centralization could not hold for long, and the Republican caucus' domination eroded over the 1901-1912 period. The individualistic, centrifugal forces of the chamber came to the fore in caucus challenges to Aldrich, the growing strength of Progressive senators (often supported by President Theodore Roosevelt), and the election of a Democratic Senate to complement the presidential victory of Democrat Woodrow Wilson in the 1912 election. In addition to the partisan turnover of 1912 came the 1913 adoption of the Seventeenth Amendment to the Constitution, which provided for the direct election of senators. No longer would state legislatures and state party machines formally dominate the selection process, although by the time of the amendment's ratification, most states already selected Senate candidates through the primary election process.

Finally, the Senate did change one further fundamental element of its procedure. From its inception, the Senate had allowed unlimited debate on any subject; the filibuster-or its threat-had proved a powerful tool for many Senate giants of the past. This was one of the strongest decentralizing elements within the entire legislative process. An individual senator (or, more likely, a band of legislators with similar, intense feelings) could indefinitely delay consideration of a crucial bill. This occurred in 1917, when, in President Wilson's words, "a little group of willful men" blocked his armed neutrality bill, which had the public support of seventy-five of ninety-six senators.

In the aftermath of this inability to act, the Senate adopted cloture, the first measure that provided a mechanism to shut off debate; cloture could be imposed by a two-thirds vote of those present and voting. Although this procedure was employed in 1919 to end a filibuster on ratification of the Versailles Treaty, until the late 1970s the Senate rarely approved cloture, save in extraordinary cases such as the 1964 Civil Rights Bill. The filibuster remained a potent weapon, both in its occasional implementation and in its frequent use as threat.

The Drift toward Decentralization

Allied with the Republican presidency of William McKinley (1897-1901), the House's strong Speakership, and the Senate's dominant Allison-Aldrich faction, legislative power was highly concentrated in the congressional parties at the turn of the century. The ability of legislative party leaders to set the nation's policy agenda became increasingly important, in that the industrializing U.S. society was placing rising numbers of demands upon government. In the 40th Congress (1867-1869), lawmakers introduced a total of 3,003 bills; by the 52nd Congress (1891-1893) that number had grown to 14,518, and the 60th Congress (1907-1909) witnessed the introduction of almost 38,000 bills, more than a twelve-fold increase in forty years. This volume of legislation eventually benefitted those restive representatives and senators who desired to reduce the power of their party leaders.

Absent dominant leaders, some mechanism was needed to handle this immense flow of prospective legislation. The committee system offered the most obvious alternative. In fact, the number of standing committees had proliferated in both chambers, to the point that in 1918 the House had sixty such units and the Senate a staggering seventy-four. The very number of committees might imply the development of a highly decentralized Congress, but through 1910 party leaders combined their leadership roles with those of key committees to produce strongly centralized operations in both chambers. With Speaker Cannon's defeat, the subsequent waning of Democratic caucus unity in the House after 1914, and the Senate's growing fragmentation in the period from 1901 to 1919, congressional party organizations could no longer move bills through the legislative process in a predictable, timely manner. Relying on committees would be essential for the sake of coherence and dictated that both chambers reform their committee systems, which they did in 1919 and again, more meaningfully, in 1946.

The Development and Decline of the Textbook Congress: 1920-1970

Although Woodrow Wilson could celebrate the work of congressional committees in the 1880s, their great ascendancy did not come until fifty years later and lasted well into the 1960s. Gradually, over the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, committee strength grew, and members almost universally advanced on the basis of their seniority-the length of their consecutive tenure on a given committee. The 1946 Legislative Reorganization Act sharply reduced the number of committees in both chambers and thus sharply increased the value of the remaining standing committee chairmanships-nineteen in the House, fifteen in the Senate.

The committee-dominated Congress of the 1950s coincided with the first systematic analysis of the Congress by political scientists trained in behavioral methods. Scholars and students received a much fuller picture of the Congress of the period from the late 1950s to 1970 than of any previous era. The Congress of this time was relatively stable, which allowed for well-documented, detailed analyses to capture the essence of an increasingly complex institution. There is no question that this generation of congressional scholars "got it right." The strength of their analyses was so great that the cumulative picture, circa 1970, was so clear and detailed that it dominated conventional views of the Congress long after the institution changed profoundly in the 1970s and 1980s. In fact, as these scholars put the finishing touches on their work in the late I 960s, the Congress began to restructure itself in ways that would demonstrate the time-bound limitations of their insights.

With his term "the textbook Congress," political scientist Kenneth Shepsle has captured the extent to which the studies made up a received wisdom that still shapes our view of legislative politics. In representing their constituencies and making national policy, legislators confront tensions that "derive from three competing imperatives-geographical, jurisdictional, and partisan. . . . Congress is Ithus] an arena for constituencies, committees, and [partybased] coalitions. The textbook Congress of the 1950s represented an equilibrium among these imperatives involving an institutional bargain that gave prominence to committees." Although legendary party leaders such as Speaker Sam Rayburn (D-Tex.) and Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson (D-Tex.) wielded substantial personal power in the 1950s, the Congress of these years emphasized the work of autonomous committees as directed by a set of senior chairmen. The textbook Congress was both decentralized and oligarchic: decentralized in that committee chairs dominated their own policy domains; oligarchic in that top party leaders, committee chairs (and chairs of the thirteen Appropriations Committee subcommittees) all benefitted from their joint control of the domestic policy agenda. Although the House relied more heavily on committee work than did the Senate, the same general committee-based equilibrium existed in both chambers.

The organizationally stable Congress of the 1950s did not bend easily to the winds of change. Popular pressure for more educational spending fell victim to procedural wrangling. In the face of filibusters and a hostile bloc of Southern senators, civil rights legislation proceeded slowly in the aftermath of the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education school desegregation ruling. Nor was medical care for the elderly allowed to wend its way through the legislative process. The committee-dominated system proved superb at slowing the pace of policy change in a narrowly Democratic Congress that faced the moderate-to-conservative Republican presidency of Dwight Eisenhower. Indeed, the title of Robert Bendiner's study of educational policy making, Obstacle Course on Capitol Hill, would have been equally apt in describing the limited progress of many other policy initiatives.

The congressional equilibrium began to change with the Democratic landslide in the 1958 congressional elections, which greatly increased the size of the party's majorities in both chambers. More important, many of the newly elected legislators were relatively liberal and committed to policy changes. Six years later another surge of Democratic legislators ascended Capitol Hill, brought there in part by Lyndon Johnson's sweeping presidential victory over Senator Barry Goldwater (R-Ariz.). Despite coming in disproportionate numbers from Republican districts, these rank and-file Democratic legislators proved crucial to the passage of several of Johnson's ambitious domestic programs. Liberal voting records denied many first-termers a chance for reelection; those who survived, however, felt entitled to a real voice within the legislative process. The major outlet for this voice came in positions taken by the Democratic Study Group, a body of progressive Democrat House members formed after the 1958 elections. This unofficial, but well-organized, group consistently pressed for a reform agenda, which included reducing the power of committee chairmen.

The standing committee oligarchy was thus ripe for challenge by the late 1960s. Party leaders had begun to chip away at the chairs' powers, while reformist junior members hungered for responsibility within the committee structure. Both leaders and backbenchers stood to gain from reining in the chairs; change was inevitable, but with it came great disruption that lasted for a decade.

Reforming the Congress: The 1970s

It is the members who run Congress. And we will get pretty much the kind of Congress they want. We shall get a different kind of Congress when we elect different kinds of  congressmen.                          Richard F. Fenno, Jr.

In general, the newly elected legislators were impatient, eager to use their expertise, and unconcerned if they ruffled some senior members' feathers. In the House, subcommittees gained a measure of independent authority; members sought and received many more resources for their offices; most votes on the floor were recorded and thus open to public scrutiny; and the Democratic Caucus provided enhanced powers for the Speaker and the top party leaders. Shepsle summarizes: "The revolt of the 1970s thus strengthened four power centers. It liberated members and subcommittees, restored to the Speakership an authority it had not known since the days of Joe Cannon, and invigorated the party caucus. Some of the reforms had a decentralizing effect, some a recentralizing effect. Standing committees and their chairs were caught in the middle. Geography and party benefitted; the division of-labor jurisdictions were its victims." The relatively brief reform era of the 1970s produced a highly unstable political environment on Capitol Hill, especially in the House. Even though they held the presidency under Jimmy Carter and enjoyed comfortable numerical advantages over the Republicans in both chambers, Democrats in Congress could not generate consistent majorities to pass major policy initiatives. Leaders and backbenchers alike struggled to understand what their reforms had wrought.

The Postreform Congress: The 1980s and Beyond

Many analyses of the Congress of the late 1970s emphasized, with good reason, the proliferation of subcommittees, the growth of individual members' resources, and the apparent weakness of both the Carter presidency and the Democratic legislative leadership. In 1980 Republicans ran a pointed national campaign advertisement that depicted Democratic Speaker Tip O'Neill as unresponsive and woefully out of touch on 'important, pressing issues. Building on substantial public dissatisfaction, Republican candidates ran strongly in 1980, capturing the Senate and narrowing the Democrats' majority in the House to the point that President Reagan's initial tax and budget proposals won speedy congressional approval as conservative Democrats joined with Republicans to provide majority support.

Speaker O'Neill and his fellow House Democrats were not quite dead, however. Their rejuvenation over the next few years derived in part from the Speaker's winning personality; by the time he retired from the House in 1986, he could claim that his popularity levels had surpassed those of Ronald Reagan. O'Neill, a great listener, could find grounds to bring together the different strands of the legislative party. Equally important, however, were the aggressive use of party -strengthening reforms adopted in the 1970s and the consistent reduction of ideological disagreements among House Democrats. Thus, the personally popular O'Neill could lead an increasingly homogeneous group of partisans with a combination of carrots, such as including many members within the leadership, and sticks, such as controlling the process of appointing members to committee seats.

If the reforms of the House produced large-scale changes in the I 970s and 1980s, with fragmentation giving way to Speaker Jim Wright's consolidation of leadership powers in 1987-1988, the Senate of the same period underwent a less striking, more evolutionary transformation. By 4989 both Senate parties had strong, partisan floor leaders in place (Senators Bob Dole [R-Kans.] and George Mitchell [D-Maine]), but the chamber continued to respect the almost sacred status of the individual member. A lone senator could often tie the institution in knots, as the whole deferred to the "rights" of a single willful legislator. Senators like Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) and Howard Metzenbaum (D-Ohio) gained notoriety and power as they proved willing, time and again, to bring the business of the Senate to a halt if their desires were not accommodated. Senators chose not to limit their colleagues' excesses, and the chamber has become steadily less collegial since the 1960s. Indeed, when compared with the sharp partisanship of the House in the 1980s and 1990s, complete with competing visions of the role of government, the contemporary Senate has often seemed less focused and less sure of its step. This may be an "identity crisis" of a highly individualistic body, but it may also reflect the traditional Senate role of addressing issues in a leisurely and frustratingly repetitive manner.

Finally, the development of the Postreform Congress coincided with an era of divided government. From 1969 to 1993, the same party controlled both houses of Congress and the presidency for only four years (1977-1981). Until the onset of the Clinton Administration, the Democrat-dominated Postreform legislature had functioned only with Republican presidents. Despite the constitutional need to cooperate, the interbranch relationship was often adversarial. In 1993-1994, despite the eagerness of many Democratic legislators to serve with a Democratic president, single-party control of the national government scarcely eliminated interbranch wrangling.

With the election of 1994, all bets were off. Divided government returned with the Republican victories in the House and Senate. Given the evolutionary nature of change in the Senate, and Republican control of that body between 1981 and 1987, Senator Bob Dole moved easily into his majority leadership role. The Gingrich-led House has proven to be a different story, as Republicans embarked on systematically addressing the most ambitious policy agenda since Franklin Roosevelt's first 100 days as president in 1933. Speaker Gingrich has exercised an extraordinary amount of power in a House where power has been steadily, if unevenly, centralized since the late 1960s by the ruling Democrats. Speakers O'Neill and Wright demonstrated the great opportunities offered leaders who could command the allegiance of their fellow partisans; more than any Speaker since Joseph Cannon, Gingrich has done exactly that. We need to go back to Speakers like Clay, Reed, and Cannon to adequately place Gingrich and the House Republicans in context.

More generally, the Postreform Congress has evolved from the constitutional and organizational elements that have shaped the institution in previous eras. It remains highly responsive to constituency interests, even as it addresses national issues such as health care and welfare reform. The separation of powers continues to affect its operations. Committees and party leaders are still central to congressional organization. Henry Clay and John C. Calhoun would recognize the ins and outs of politics on Capitol Hill 150 years after their salad days.