Modern Congress Research Articles

President and Congress: Executive Hegemony at the Crossroads of American Government, by Robert J. Spitzer

Preface Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Foundations of the Presidential-Congressional Relationship Antecedents The Founders' Fears Fear of a Strong Executive Fear of a Strong Legislature Fear of Concentrated Power Fear of Governmental Paralysis The Constitutional Framework Conclusion 2. The Evolving Relationship Case I: The First Congress, 1789-1791 Politics as Usual What's in a Name? The Government Seat Debt Funding and Assumption Assessment The Evolving Relationship The Jacksonian Era Case II: The Twenty-Seventh Congress, 1841-1843 Assessment The Road to a Stronger Presidency The Civil War-Reconstruction Era The Ascendancy of the Modern Strong Presidency Conclusion: Explaining the Changing Relationship 3. The Domestic Realm I: The Legislative Presidency Chief Legislator Why a Legislative President? An Administrative Congress? Setting the Agenda Central Clearance Liaison Lobbying from the White House The President's Full-Court Press Party Leadership Patronage Rallying Public Support Controlling the Endgame: The Veto Presidential Success: Measuring the President's Batting Average Conclusion 4. The Domestic Realm II: Explaining Presidential-Congressional Interactions Political Explanation: Presidential Leadership Leadership and Presidential Power Leadership Qualities and Congress Assessment Historical Explanation: Budgeting From Legislative to Executive Budget Congress Awakens Executive Counterpunch Assessment Legal Explanation: The Legislative Veto Congress Gets a Veto Arguments Pro and Con The Court Rules... ...But the Veto Remains Assessment Policy Explanation: Policy Types The Arenas of Power The Four Presidencies Assessment Conclusion 5. Foreign Affairs I: Who Steers the Ship of State? The Executive-Legislative Balance and the Constitution Are There Two Presidencies? Why Presidential Ascendancy? Powers and Military Force The Founders and Imperfect Wars The Evolution of the Power The Powers Resolution The Powers Resolution in Operation... ...or, Oh, What a Lovely War Presidential Making Conclusion: Pacificus Prevails 6. Foreign Affairs II: Ah, Diplomacy! Treaties and Executive Agreements Ending Treaties Treaty-Making Success: The Panama Canal Treaties Treaty-Making Failure: The SALT II Treaty Assessment: Treaties, the President, and Congress Executive Agreements Arms Sales and the Changing Role of the United States in the World The Saudi Arms Deal Foreign Aid Intermestic Issues The President, Congress, and Intelligence Iran-Contra Conclusion 7. Conclusion: Is the Separation of Powers Obsolete? The Presidential-Congressional Relationship: Marginal or Hegemonic? The Ineffectual Congress/Ascendant President Argument Terms and Parties The End of Congressional Lawmaking Is Change Desirable? The Congress/Weak President Argument The Legalism Critique The Imperial Congress Executive Absurdism Were the Founders Wrong? Separation of Powers and Alternatives Retaining and Executive-Hegemonic Separation of Powers The Rules and Outcomes The Presidency and Democracy Appendix A: The Politics of the Modern Presidency Appendix B: The Politics of the Modern Congress Selected Bibliography Index

Institutional change, discretion, and the making of modern Congress: an economic interpretation

Institutional change, discretion, and the making of modern Congress: an economic interpretation

Beyond Administrative Apportionment: Rediscovering the Constitutional Calculus of Representative Government

L. Marvin Overby's Apportionment, Politics, and Political Science aspires to be an impressive effort to survey the literature of contemporary political science. Unfortunately, it does not engage the discussion invited by the historical, legal, and constitutional findings reported in our Why 435?: A Question of Political Arithmetic.1 Why 435? is essentially about the recovery of a legislative process designed to link representation in the House of Representatives to the U.S. Census. The Framers devised this linkage to insure that the of the House and the division of its Members among the states would remain attuned to the growth and changing composition of the American people. The Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, recommits every new decennial reapportionment of the House to the kind of legislative process outlined in Article I, Section 7 of the U.S. Constitution, further assuring decennial discussion over how best to attune representation in the House to the ever-changing constitution of the American polity. Since 1929, however, this legislative process has been repeatedly distorted by an administrative procedure that requires neither debate nor even consent by Congress and the President. This distortion and its constitutional and political implications have been altogether unexamined by constitutional lawyers and political scientists. Why 435? points out this distortion and argues for the necessity of returning to this legislative process. Indeed, Overby tacitly admits this distortion as well as the need for debate about the proper size of the House. Unfortunately, he fixates only on the final aspect of the paper: the proposal that there are several potential benefits of marginal but decennial increases in the House of Representatives. Why 435? examines a set of political experiences and constitutional mechanisms that are prior to the phenomena and propositions explored by the literature on the modern Congress. Overby thus compounds his

Reconcilable differences?: Congress, the budget process, and the deficit

Gilmour traces the development of the congressional budget process from its origin through the emergence of reconcilliation and Gramm-Rudman-Hollings. He shows how changes in process have brought about far-reaching shifts in congressional power, and explains why they have failed to control the explosion of budget deficits. Throughout the last decade budgetary issues have dominated the national political agenda as the deficit has skyrocketed to previously unimaginable levels. In this important book, John Gilmour traces the continuing quest of Congress over the last fifteen years to reform its budgeting system in the hope of producing better policy. He shows that the enactment of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974 and the introduction of the reconciliation procedure in 1980 have produced a budgetary system in which congressional majorities can get what they want, provided only that they can agree on a comprehensive budget policy. From his thorough analysis, Gilmour concludes that, while the reforms have not produced balanced budgets, they have eliminated procedural obstructions to the adoption of a coherent budget. New budget procedures have transformed the way Congress works. Before the reforms of 1974 and 1980, Congress had an extremely fragmented, disintegrated budgetary system in which the budget emerged almost haphazardly from the independent actions of numerous committees. Gilmour shows that reconciliation procedures in the budget process makes total revenue, total expenditures, and the size of the deficit matters of deliberate choice, consolidating decisionmaking to an extent unprecedented in the history of the modern Congress. Yet, despite the striking structural and procedural changes, and despite its highly majoritarian features, the budget process has failed to reduce dissatisfaction with congressional handling of money. Deficits have been larger, not smaller, and overall spending has gone up. Gilmour deftly shows that the massive budget deficits of the Reagan years were due primarily to the failure of the House, the Senate, and the President to agree on how to reduce spending or increase taxes enough to eliminate the deficit. Responsibility for budgetary failure, he argues, must rest with Congress and its inability to reach consensus, not on the new budget process, which, given what we can expect from procedural change, has been quite successful.

Leadership and Coordination in Legislatures: The "President" of the First American Congress: 1774-1789

We analyze the viability of the office of President of Congress as a source of in the Continental and Confederation Congresses.1 Our primary interest is in institutionally grounded, as opposed to and separate from charismatic or personal, bases for leadership. We show that virtually every institutional support for power recognized to be at work in the modern Congress was absent in the Continental Congresses. We trace the origins of these limitations on power and potential to a series of decisions taken during 1774 and 1775 and substantially maintained and even elaborated over the fifteen-year history of the Congress. The result was that even though the institution was awash in leaders, men like Virginia's Peyton Randolph, Massachusetts' John Hancock, and New York's John Jay, stable and effective leadership from the office of President of Congress proved to be impossible.

The Advent of the Modern Congress: The Legislative Reorganization Act of 1946

The Advent of the Modern Congress: The Legislative Reorganization Act of 1946

The Advent of the Modern Congress: The Legislative Reorganization Act of 1970

The Advent of the Modern Congress: The Legislative Reorganization Act of 1970

The Power of Subcommittees

Since the reforms of the 1970s, congressional scholars and critics have widely acknowledged the political importance of subcommittees, suggesting that the modern Congress has been transformed to a state of government. In this essay, we investigate the phenomenon of subcommittee power in four parts. We argue first that the empirical evidence so often cited on this subject is inappropriate to the task of measuring subcommittee power. We then present an alternative approach based on staff interviews and previously unexamined markup data. In the second and third sections, we employ this approach to test the subcommittee government hypothesis for a sample of 56 bills from three House committees. In general, our analysis supports the hypothesis, but it also reveals theoretically important differences across committees and, more importantly, across bills. The final section examines the implications of our findings for theoretical work on committee power. In particular, we argue that institutional ...

Doing the Politically Right Thing: Results, Behavior, and Vote Trading

The current understanding of vote trading assumes legislators' payoffs vary only with results--the motions enacted or defeated by their votes. This characterization is not supported by evidence from the modern Congress. This paper specifies a model of vote trading in which legislators' payoffs are a function of results and voting behavior. Analysis of this game amends the standard wisdom about voting and vote trading in two areas: the existence of a nonempty core, and the conditions under which sophisticated voting produces an outcome in the core.

The Early Institutionalization of Congress

This study applies Nelson Polsby's conceptualization of an institutionalized organization to the first U.S. Congress. Polsby argued that the modern Congress is relatively well bounded; internally complex, with a clear division of labor; having well defined and universalistically applied rules of action. In a substantial way these characteristics also were present at the creation of Congress. Most importantly, it began with legislatively socialized members. Congress quickly developed a complex division of labor to produce sound legislation. Fair rules and even-handed presiding officers allowed minority views and majority rule. While substantial changes in its institutionalization have occurred in the two centuries since its founding, Congress assumed the characteristics of an institutionalized organization from the outset of its history.

Woodrow Wilson's Congressional Government and the Modern Congress: The "Universal Principle" of Change

In Congressional Government Woodrow Wilson analyzes change in Congress during its first century of development. This essay argues that Wilson's analysis of the 19th century Congress, which explains congressional behavior as an outgrowth of both institutional and societal forces, provides a more useful interpretation of change than the institutionalist perspective dominant in the specialized studies of the modern Congress. The essay illustrates the value of Wilson's analysis to contemporary scholars by tracing its impact on the evolution of the author's interpretation of the congressional reforms and changes of the 1970s. The essay attributes the continuing value of Congressional Government to its broad and unified portrait of Congress as a whole.

Voluntary Retirement, Incumbency, and the Modern House

In the last decade, students of the Congress have placed great emphasis on the analysis of membership change. Most of the work has centered on the House of Representatives, and the two primary topics have been the development of service into a profession or and the advantages of incumbency. Aspects of one or both of these themes have been studied by a variety of political scientists, and career and have been treated as critical elements in explaining the character and performance of the modern Congress as well as the behavior of its individual members. ' In large part the results of this research have been compatible and reinforcing. Admittedly, there have been important differences in findings for the House and Senate and disagreement about causes. Nevertheless, notions of the development and impact of the incumbency effect have, in general, fit neatly with notions of the development and impact of service in the Congress as a career. It is thus ironic that within a short time after students of the Congress have discovered and incumbency and have begun to treat them as key,

Party Realignment and the Transformation of the Political Agenda: The House of Representatives, 1925—1938

According to Walter Dean Burnham, party realignments “result in significant transformation in the general shape of policy.” Through the analysis of House roll-call data, the New Deal realignment is examined to determine whether, in fact, a significant transformation took place and, if so, what its characteristics were. It was hypothesized that if a new political agenda emerged at that time, at least some of the stable policy dimensions which Aage Clausen finds as characterizing the modern Congress should have developed during the New Deal period. In terms of content and level of partisan voting evoked, the government management and the agricultural policy dimensions do take their modern form during the New Deal. A social welfare dimension developed but had not, by the late 1930s, taken its modern shape. It is argued that a major transformation of policy did take place and that, in the process, the ideological distance between the parties increased. This realignment, however, did not immediately change regional voting patterns within each party.

Party Realignment and the Transformation of the Political Agenda: The House of Representatives, 1925—1938

According to Walter Dean Burnham, party realignments “result in significant transformation in the general shape of policy.” Through the analysis of House roll-call data, the New Deal realignment is examined to determine whether, in fact, a significant transformation took place and, if so, what its characteristics were. It was hypothesized that if a new political agenda emerged at that time, at least some of the stable policy dimensions which Aage Clausen finds as characterizing the modern Congress should have developed during the New Deal period. In terms of content and level of partisan voting evoked, the government management and the agricultural policy dimensions do take their modern form during the New Deal. A social welfare dimension developed but had not, by the late 1930s, taken its modern shape. It is argued that a major transformation of policy did take place and that, in the process, the ideological distance between the parties increased. This realignment, however, did not immediately change regional voting patterns within each party.

Home Thoughts from Abroad

THE modern international congress has developed into a remarkable phenomenon. It seems that it is only necessary to announce that such a congress will be held and an ever increasing number of participants (and their followers) will signify their intention to make the journey from ever increasingly distant parts of the world. Furthermore, the facilities for rapid transport have produced a situation in which the traveling time is often inversely related to the distance traveled. Thus, the delegate from Tokyo or San Francisco who avails himself of the services of one of the world's jet airliners may well arrive in . . .