Members Of Congress Research Articles

History Lesson

History teaches us that while public health advocates can do much, a country needs well informed and courageous members of Congress to put useful public health measures into law. In the late 20th century, the work of one such individual, Congressman Joseph Moakley (D-MASS), helped to revolutionize the laws on food advertising and labeling and resulted in major gains in information for consumers. Given the recent modernization of nutrition labeling, this article attempts to highlight the initiatives led by the unsung hero of recent past, Congressman Moakley. Specifically, in the practice of nutrition, the behind-the-scenes initiatives that have helped standardize food labels and better educate the consumers to improve public health often go underrecognized. This article presents a brief overview of Moakley's contributions in these domains and identifies gaps for future works in the field of nutrition labeling.

Group of Six Leaders Speak to Members of Congress on Workforce, Access to Health Care

Group of Six Leaders Speak to Members of Congress on Workforce, Access to Health Care

The Congressional Joint Committee on Printing: The Nation’s Guardian of Public Access to Government Publications and Information

The Congressional Joint Committee on Printing has been the Nation’s guardian of public access to government publications for over a hundred years. Depository libraries have a close relationship with the members of Congress in their own state because those members are the ones that designate them as depositories. JCP has taken many steps to improve services to libraries and the public, including hiring the first librarian with the charge of helping Congress improve information services for the public and the libraries that serve them.

What Explains a Representative’s Staffing “Style”? Exploring the Relationship between Congressional Staffing Decisions and Electoral Considerations

Students of legislative politics are divided over the relationship between electoral vulnerability and the type of “home style” members of Congress adopt in terms of their district staffing decisions. The conventional wisdom asserts that an increase in electoral vulnerability corresponds with a legislator increasing the number of district staffers. However, another body of works implies that the inverse relationship should occur. To settle these competing claims, we explore the staffing decisions of legislators serving in the House of Representatives between the 101st and 113th Congress. We find that an increase in electoral vulnerability is associated with a decrease in district staffers. These results cast doubt on the widely held view that a legislator’s electoral vulnerability results in an increase in district attentiveness at least in terms of their district staff. Additionally, our findings provide several insights into the relationship between elections and representation.

It Has Been a Big Year for NASN's Advocacy Efforts!

Annually, the National Association of School Nurses (NASN) sets advocacy goals, including legislative priorities. This past January, the NASN Board of Directors resumed their in-person Hill Day, with over 100 appointments with Members of Congress and Senators. This article highlights NASN's 2022-2023 legislative priorities and advocacy efforts, along with briefly discussing the relationship of Bipartisan Safer Communities Act to Medicaid reimbursement for school nursing services.

Disability Policy in the Contemporary Congress

Abstract The politics of disability policy in the contemporary Congress confirms the observation by James Curry and Frances Lee that lawmaking largely remains a process of bipartisan accommodation. Most major disability legislation since the 1970s has passed with bipartisan sponsorship and support. One reason is that the issue affects so many Americans, including members of Congress. There have been some exceptions to this bipartisan pattern, particularly when disability policy intersects with more contentious issues. And bipartisanship does not guarantee outcomes that are satisfactory to people with disabilities.

How Do US Congress Members Advertise Climate Change: An Analysis of Ads Run on Meta’s Platforms

Ensuring transparency and integrity in political communication on climate change has arguably never been more important than today. Yet we know little about how politicians focus on, talk about, and portray climate change on social media. Here we study it from the perspective of political advertisement. We use Meta’s Ad Library to collect 602,546 ads that have been issued by US Congress members since mid-2018. Out of those only 19,176 (3.2%) are climate-related. Analyzing this data, we find that Democrats focus substantially more on climate change than Republicans, with 99.7% of all climate-related ads stemming from Democratic politicians. In particular, we find this is driven by a small core of Democratic politicians, where 72% of all impressions can be attributed to 10 politicians. Interestingly, we find a significant difference in the average amount of impressions generated per dollar spent between the two parties. Republicans generate on average 188% more impressions with their climate ads for the same money spent as Democrats. We build models to explain the differences and find that demographic factors only partially explain the variance. Our results demonstrate differences of climate-related advertisements of US congress members and reveal differences in advertising characteristics between the two political parties. We anticipate our work to be a starting point for further studies about climate-related ads on Meta’s platforms.

Colombian politicians and Twitter usage: on the path to gender parity

ABSTRACT This article aims to determine whether there are gender-based differences in using Twitter. For this purpose, 518,156 tweets from 280 Colombian Congress members were analysed. The study compares the number of tweets, audience, influence and efficacy of their messages on Twitter. Despite Colombia being below average in terms of political equality, research shows that a gender balance exists between Colombian male and female politicians on this social media channel. Members of the Colombian Congress use Twitter similarly, regardless of their gender: they are comparably influential in terms of volume, amplification, audience and efficacy of their messages. In fact, no significant gender differences exist regarding audience figures or amplification. However, the data show remarkable disparities regarding political party affiliation and ideological beliefs rather than gender.

Does the U.S. Congress Respond to Public Opinion on Trade?

Are U.S. legislators responsive to public opinion on trade? Despite the prevalence of preference-based approaches to international trade, not much work has directly assessed the relationship between constituency opinion and positioning by members of Congress on trade bills. We assess dynamic responsiveness (whether shifting constituency opinion on trade yields corresponding changes among legislators) by exploiting an original dataset on the positions of members of Congress on the North American Free Trade Agreement at various points leading up to the November 1993 roll-call vote. We find no evidence of dynamic re-sponsiveness to shifting constituency opinion on even a highly salient piece of trade legislation. We provide qualitative evidence that interest group influence may instead be the predominant source of shifting legislator positioning on trade.

A Geriatrician’s Perspective on an Aging Joe Biden

A Geriatrician’s Perspective on an Aging Joe Biden

The Current Policy Debate around the Regulation of LDTs: What It Means for Infectious Disease Testing and Where It May Be Headed

The debate over federal regulation of diagnostic tests is not new, but scientific advances, societal developments, and global events over the past decade have accelerated efforts by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and members of Congress to revise the regulatory oversight of these devices, including laboratory-developed tests (LDTs). Despite years of congressional hearings and public meetings, legislation in the House and Senate, draft guidance from the FDA, and debate in the stakeholder community, LDT regulation remains unchanged, and the path forward remains unclear. LDTs play an essential role in infectious disease (ID) management and treatment, and changes in their regulation will have far-reaching implications for diagnostic laboratories. LDTs are widely used by clinical microbiology laboratories for the diagnosis and monitoring of a myriad infectious diseases, and until three years ago, such testing was conducted largely out of the spotlight. The COVID-19 pandemic changed this by bringing ID tests into the forefront. As the 118th Congress gets under way, the regulation and oversight of diagnostic tests, including LDTs, remains at the forefront of health care policy discussions on Capitol Hill and with the FDA. Change is coming, and it is important that clinical microbiologists, ID physicians, and other laboratorians have a seat at the table when such changes are being discussed.

Carbon Intensity Labeling and the 2023 Farm Bill: Five Key Insights for the 188th Congress

As Congress tackles the 2023 Farm Bill reauthorization, one important topic that requires attention is the emerging demand for a federal label to effectively track the carbon intensity of agricultural feedstocks and products throughout the value chain. This need is being driven in large part by biobased industries, brands and financial institutions that have publicly committed to a net-zero carbon transition. This paper presents five important insights for Congressional members and industry to consider.

Policy Consequences of Revolving-Door Lobbying

This article presents the first direct analysis of the influence of revolving-door lobbyists over the content of adopted public laws. We use earmarks to evaluate both the effects of lobbying and the possible additional effects of lobbying by individuals who formerly worked as congressional members and staff. Employing a fixed-effects panel approach, we evaluate original data describing the lobbying efforts of the more than 5000 accredited U.S. colleges and universities over a 12-year timeframe. Our analysis indicates that schools that lobby in a given year can expect to receive 54% more earmarks and 24% more earmarked funds relative to other schools and other years. Further, there is an additional significant effect of revolving-door lobbying that is greatest at lower levels of lobbying expenditures. Our results contribute to the emerging literature on comparative lobbying and speak to concerns about the possible corrupting influence of revolving-door lobbying over public policy.

Either with Us or Against Us: Business Power and Campaign Contributions in an Age of Hyper-Partisanship

Political scientists have repeatedly failed to establish a relationship between the money companies funnel into political campaigns and how members of Congress vote. Notably, studies have mainly examined how campaign contributions affect the voting of their direct recipients. However, considering the partisan divide and intense power struggle between the two major American parties, this paper proposes that the influence of campaign contributions operates at the party level. That means a member of Congress is more likely to side with a firm whose donations favor her party, even if the firm has not given to the member’s own campaign. Correspondingly, legislators should be less likely to vote in line with the policy preferences of firms whose donations predominately go to the other party. A quantitative analysis of campaign contributions, corporate policy positions, and roll-call votes in Congress bears out these propositions. While the paper also uncovers a recipient effect, the party effect is more substantial.

Experimental Evidence of the Benefits and Risks of Credit Claiming and Pork Busting

As appropriations earmarks return to Congress, every legislator faces a decision: pursue or refuse congressionally mandated federal spending projects. This decision is likely influenced by public messaging concerns. We theorize that both credit claiming for federal projects and position taking against spending projects (“pork busting”) can benefit legislators as they look to improve future electoral returns. We field a nationally representative survey experiment to estimate the effect of credit‐claiming and pork‐busting messages on the perceived effectiveness, fiscal responsibility, and overall approval of an unnamed member of Congress. We find that respondents are likely to penalize the representative's approval assessment when presented with an out‐party message strategy. Conversely, respondents are likely to increase the representative's personal trait assessments when presented with an in‐party message strategy. We expand on these results in an additional analysis and find that these trends persist when controlling for other partisan and demographic factors. We discuss our results in light of traditional expectations, potential mechanisms, and future directions for related research.

The Papers of Andrew Jackson. Vol 11: 1833 ed. by Daniel Feller, Laura Eve-Moss and Thomas Coens

Reviewed by: The Papers of Andrew Jackson. Vol 11: 1833 ed. by Daniel Feller, Laura Eve-Moss and Thomas Coens James Humphreys The Papers of Andrew Jackson. Volume 11: 1833. Edited by Daniel Feller, Laura Eve-Moss, and Thomas Coens. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2020. Pp. xxxiv, 1007. $110.00, ISBN 978-1-62190-538-7.) The eleventh volume of The Papers of Andrew Jackson—edited by Daniel Feller, Laura-Eve Moss, and Thomas Coens—provides historians with a source of inestimable value. The editors arrange the papers chronologically from January to December 1833. The documents compiled in this volume include Andrew Jackson’s correspondence with family members, friends, and political associates, as well as drafts of his 1833 inaugural address, his last will and testament, and his collected statements on major public issues. The documents alone span more than eight hundred pages. This volume focuses on an especially important year of Jackson’s two-term presidency. Voters reelected Old Hickory in November 1832, and in the next year Jackson confronted the nullification crisis and a titanic struggle over the future of the Bank of the United States. Letters dealing with the nullification crisis, which erupted when South Carolina politicians refused to comply with federal law due to disagreements concerning tariff policy, dominate the book’s early section. Joel Roberts Poinsett, a South Carolinian opposed to nullification, wrote often to Jackson, keeping the president abreast of the controversy in his home state and urging him to oppose the movement firmly but calmly. Poinsett beseeched Jackson to let public opinion, which Poinsett thought recoiled from nullification, sink the cause of the agitators in South Carolina. Jackson himself considered nullification an illegal act that threatened to destroy the Union. Letters of support arrived in Jackson’s office from every region of the United States, with writers sometimes detailing the number of men that could be raised in their states to fight if the conflict grew more serious. The letters and documents related to the nullification crisis demonstrate just how close the country came to a violent standoff in 1833. Members of Congress defused the crisis by agreeing to lower tariff rates. President Jackson (ironically, as later events showed) declared the death of the secession idea. In July 1832, Jackson had vetoed a bill to extend the charter of the Bank of the United States, which was set to expire in 1836. This volume details his plan to weaken the national bank by placing its deposits in state banks. Jackson asked his cabinet members for opinions on this strategy. Both Louis McClane, who served as Jackson’s treasury secretary from 1831 to 1833, and William John Duane, who replaced him, opposed the scheme. In his correspondence with Jackson, Duane explained that only Congress could approve such a plan and that unilateral action by the executive branch smacked of unjustified, arbitrary power. Attorney General Roger Brooke Taney disagreed, informing Jackson that the president possessed the right to undermine the Bank on the grounds that it was unconstitutional and had abused its power. Jackson appointed Taney to the Treasury post, and in October 1833 Taney began authorizing the [End Page 352] removal of funds. The Bank of the United States never recovered from Jackson’s onslaught. This volume also includes documents that reveal aspects of Andrew Jackson’s personal life. Jackson complained of bad health in many letters, informing his adopted son that “a copious bleeding” had helped relieve one of his ailments (p. 63). Jackson’s correspondence mentions the loneliness that dogged him; his wife, Rachel, had succumbed to heart trouble in 1828. He also inquired about the health of his slaves and about the state of farming operations on his Nashville plantation, the Hermitage. The effort and thought the editors have invested in this volume is stunning. They include a calendar that lists documents chronologically and have annotated, sometimes extensively, the papers in order to provide scholars with relevant background information. A fifty-six-page index concludes the volume, offering historians a quick method for finding specific documents. Volume 11 of The Papers of Andrew Jackson is an extremely impressive, highly useful collection of primary sources. James Humphreys Murray State University Copyright...

We Are Not One People: Secession and Separatism in American Politics since 1776, by Michael J. Lee and R. Jarrod Atchison

The United States has become more polarized over the past decade, with no realistic prospects of reversing the trend. The degree of polarization and its historical significance can be debated, but the acceptance of it as fact by voters, media, and politicians animates many of the behaviors, conversations, and concerns about U.S. politics. A 2021 poll by the Center for American Politics at the University of Virginia found that nearly 50 percent of Trump voters and 40 percent of Biden voters agreed that the nation should split up. This is reinforced by a prominent member of Congress who called for a national divorce. Federalism scholars are well-positioned to provide analysis and perspective on secession and separation. We Are Not One People: Secession and Separatism in American Politics since 1776, by Michael J. Lee and R. Jarrod Atchison, is a timely contribution that can help us situate the current challenges in a broader political and social context.

On First Reading Thomas Dixon Jr. in 2021: What Racist Fiction from Reconstruction Can Teach Us About Building Multiracial Democracy Today

On First Reading Thomas Dixon Jr. in 2021: What Racist Fiction from Reconstruction Can Teach Us About Building Multiracial Democracy Today

Chasing Automation: The Politics of Technology and Jobs from the Roaring Twenties to the Great Society by Jerry Prout

Reviewed by: Chasing Automation: The Politics of Technology and Jobs from the Roaring Twenties to the Great Society by Jerry Prout G. Pascal Zachary (bio) Chasing Automation: The Politics of Technology and Jobs from the Roaring Twenties to the Great Society By Jerry Prout. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2022. Pp. 275. Jerry Prout provides a valuable account of the policy debates and political tensions over technological unemployment from the 1920s to the 1960s. His subject is automation, and his detailed and nuanced study fills a gap in the literature about the politics and policy of labor, the workplace, and technological change in the twentieth century. Prout's aim is clear: people struggle with the "sheer unpredictability of technological progress," which turns "anticipating the next wave of job-eliminating machines" into a "formidable challenge" (p. 3). Although the forces Prout examines are global, his study makes only a single reference to important scholarship by the late David Noble and Amy Bix, whose Inventing Ourselves Out of Jobs? has widely been viewed as the standard work since its publication in 2000. Prout's narrow focus on U.S. politics and policy, chiefly at the federal level, limits the ability of Chasing Automation to present a nuanced sense of social and economic factors, especially with regard to the documented motives of large employers who embraced automation as much for control as productivity. Prout also studies only the U.S. experience of the global automation movement and maintains a sharp focus on the fitful efforts by successive presidential administrations—from Hoover to Johnson—and members of Congress to face the perils to workers of rapid innovation. These perils were keenly felt during the Depression of the 1930s and surfaced again in the 1950s and 1960s during a wave of automation that included the first spread of computers and digital networks. In Chasing Automation, Prout aims to explain the shifting politics arising from "worries about unemployment" and "the role that machines were playing in causing it" (p. 5). Prout presents two contending perspectives in the debates over the effects of automation on labor: those who argue that innovation will harm workers through eliminating entire classes of jobs (from those operating elevators to telephone switches), and those who insist optimistically that over time technological change will yield a net gain in employment. One side, "the most alarmed technophobes," predicted "a dystopian future with increasing joblessness," while their opponents, whom Prout describes as "ebullient technophiles," envisioned a future "where workers were not only fully employed but freed from drudgery." Prout ends his narrative in the 1960s, but the debates he thoroughly documents remain alive for Americans to this day, and he admits that there might be an "inability to ever entirely resolve" them (p. 10). Much of Chasing Automation recounts attempts in the 1930s and the 1960s to assist workers in coping with automation. Sharp divisions over the extent of the problem existed in both periods. In the 1930s, concerns [End Page 640] ran so high that one member of Congress advocated "taxing machines" to "slow the pace" of technological unemployment (pp. 52–53). Advocates for labor-saving devices, meanwhile, "either deny the existence of technological unemployment or regard it as of minor importance" (p. 54). In the mid-1960s, a major study of automation was undertaken by the federal government. The so-called Automation Commission, now long forgotten, receives extensive treatment, with Prout recounting internal debates among the best and the brightest who were chosen as members and well documenting how tensions between the promise and peril of innovation limited policy initiatives. Liberal "visionaries" driven by a certain fatalism, Prout reports, proposed a "guaranteed income" to ease the pain of too few jobs and to break the link between jobs and income (p. 149). In early 1965, Prout writes, "the commission seemed to represent the last best hope of realizing the liberal-labor vision of a more planned response to the growing onslaught of computerized operations." Although he expresses admiration for the commission, Prout concedes that its final report "received very limited press, and what few accounts there were ranged from indifferently informative to actively critical" (p. 203). In closing, Prout cautions against the "expectation...

Historical Records Fail to Support Agent Orange Exposure of Veterans Stationed in Thailand

In the case of Thailand and its many airbases, the Compensation Service of the United States Department of Veterans Affairs has not conducted a comprehensive search of the historical records that were retrieved from Vietnam and are now a continuing source of research. Thailand veterans were previously eligible for health care for any injuries they incurred during their service in Thailand. However, they were not eligible for health care for diseases and compensation as provided to Vietnam veterans under the Agent Orange Act of 1991. Recently, the “Promise to Address Comprehensive Toxics Act” (PACT Act) was passed by the United States Congress that permits veterans who served in Thailand and Guam during the Vietnam War to be eligible for health care and compensation for their exposure to Agent Orange, despite the absence of any evidence from historical records. Too often the pressure from members of Congress, as in the case of Thailand and Guam, the enactment of the PACT Act dictated a course of action. This action and others involving Agent Orange are examples where “political” forces make a mockery of the science and historical records.