Congress (ch 11)

Reread Article I of the US Constitution

Some preliminaries:

• It is convenient to use the shorthand MC (or MCs) for Member(s) of Congress
• The House and Senate each have their own websites, http://www.house.gov/ and http://www.senate.gov/;  the Library of Congress website, http://thomas.loc.gov/, has information on congressional proceedings and bills

Sen Bernie Sanders (I-VT) at the Strolling of the Heifers parade

Points to ponder:

1.  Legislatures are said to have a variety of functions:

• representation of their constituents
• lawmaking
• conflict resolution which is part and parcel of the lawmaking process
• oversight of the executive in the administration of laws; and
• through debate which is publicly visible, education of citizens

2.   The US Congress is an example of an asymmetric and balanced bicameral legislature—balanced in that the powers of the two chambers are roughly equal (although there are a few differences) but asymmetric in that the bases for election (and terms of office) are different

3.   Large institutions, which the houses of Congress are, require organizational devices to achieve their purposes, and the House and Senate are organized in three different ways

• leadership structures, one in the House and the other in the Senate
• groupings of stakeholders (the political parties, state delegations, and a variety of specialized caucuses like the Rural Caucus, the Arts Caucus, and the Congressional Black Caucus) and
• the committee system

4.   Even given what Coleman et al. say about party discipline (408-409) congressional leaders, of whom the Speaker of the House and the Senate Majority Leader are the most important, are in the end limited in their power because

• the leaders are chosen by their colleagues and so are, ultimately, beholden to the members and
• the leaders do not choose the members but instead constituents do, which means that a member of Congress is more interested in satisfying her constituents than her leaders

5.   Of the various stakeholder types of organizations, the political party is the most evident as can be seen in the fact that the House and Senate chambers, and then committees and subcommittees, are divided along party lines, and note as well that leadership positions are determined by the parties; MCs are drawn together in party blocs for a number of reasons

• while there is a range of opinion in both the Republican and Democratic parties, there are still philosophical tendencies that divide most Republicans from most Democrats,
• the political fortunes of members of the same party rise and fall  to some extent with the fortunes of the party’s presidential candidate (such that the success of Republican MCs in the 2006 and 2008 elections depended to some extent on how well President Bush did, and to the extent that he did poorly (at least as measured by public opinion polls) this was not good for Republicans (on the other hand, one short report from last year suggested that Obama's popular support is not benefitting Democrats as a whole); and
• committee assignments and other benefits are distributed by the parties, often heavily influenced by party leaders

in passing, what Coleman et al. say about polarization and two political parties (415-17) is pretty much besides the point; what accounts for our essentially two party system is the electoral law

6.   While party discipline--in which members of the legislature vote as a bloc on party lines, the majority party holding fast against the opposition of the minority party--is the standard in parliamentary regimes such as Britain where the Prime Minister and his Cabinet can continue in power only so long as they are backed by a majority in the legislature, members of Congress are not obliged to vote along party lines, in part because (whereas British party leaders typically have a large say in determining who gets to run for parliament) congressional candidates win the right to run for office by competing on their own in primary elections; even so, party voting has in recent years been more common, perhaps because most incumbents have been running in safe seats and have been returned to office at rates of 90% or better

7. An important consequence of the lack of party discipline is that on many, perhaps most bills, there is no natural majority in favor of passage, meaning that each bill requires forming a majority coalition of supporters by whatever means necessary; consider Herszenhorn's report ("Reaching well beyond the farm" NYT 20 May 08) of how a farm bill is grown to attract supporters from both parties and various interests, and recall the story of the failed immigration reform effort told by Coleman et al. (425-27)

8.   Woodrow Wilson, a Princeton political scientist before he was president, wrote that “Congress in session is Congress on public exhibition, whilst Congress in its committee rooms is Congress at work,” a point that can be seen in some data from Congress in 2007:  of the many bills and resolutions introduced only a percentage are reported out of committee (which is to say that committees swallow up, and thus kill, most proposals), and even fewer pass the House and Senate, and then not all of those pass both the House and Senate; the point is also made by (admittedly old) data from 1963-1971 which show that 70% of bills passed by the House of Representatives, and 65% of those passed by the Senate, are approved by those bodies without floor amendments, an indication that at least until recently, and maybe even now, a substantial amount of the legislative process takes place in committees and that the two chambers tend to defer to committee work

9.   Following the principles of division of labor and specialization of function which follows from it, the use of a committee system is

• functional for Congress as an institution because committees (1) make large bodies more efficient by breaking them down into smaller units, (2) allow the chambers to deal with the large number of policy areas and issues requiring attention by assigning particular topics to individual units, and (3) improve the quality of policymaking by giving responsibility for the intricate complexities to units detailed to become expert in particular areas; and
• functional for MCs because committees (1) give each member more chances to participate in meaningful legislative activity than if all the work was done in the large chambers, (2) reduce each MC’s workload because he or she is now responsible for only selected legislative issues rather than the entire agenda facing Congress as a whole, and (3) provide avenues for MCs to do things which will improve their reelection chances (especially since MCs tend to seek committee assignments that will be of special significance to their constituents and supporters)
• If a system of committees is functional for MCs and Congress as an institution, then a system of subcommittees is even better, and that’s what one will find (in the House there are 84 subcommittees attached to the 20 standing committees, and in the Senate the 16 standing committees are supported by 67 subcommittees)
• all of this goes to show how the system of committees helps Congress deal with the intelligence (information) challenge, the collective action problem, and the dangers of cycling, (Coleman et al.: 408-409)

10.   MCs are free to choose what roles they wish to assume, subject to validation by their constituents at the next election (Coleman et al.: 403-404); old research by Roger Davidson on members of the 88th Congress found that 23% said they considered themselves as delegates, 28% adopted the trustee role, and 46% were classified as “politicos” because they said their role varied by circumstances; on a related point, 42% of the MCs said that they took a district orientation and another 28% said they made decisions based on the nation as a whole (23% said they took a combined district/national view).

11. Some picky things:

• to clarify, what Coleman et al. say about the respective jobs of the House and Senate in impeaching presidents (400) applies to other officers, in particular judges, who can be removed from office by Congress
• for a variety of reasons, Senators have slightly lower rates of reelection success than do members of the House
• if the Senate "was intended to be more deliberative" (400) that may be linked to the fact that the Founders originally designed senators to be chosen indirectly by state legislatures, something changed by the 17th Amendment; how direct election impacted senatorial behavior is a question worth considering
• Coleman et al. don't provide any data to support their claims about House members' behavior as compared with senators (400) and so I would regard all this as speculative

• The tale of how a bill comes a law doesn't make clear enough that many bills are sent to committee and die from inaction (to use the old phrase, they're pigeonholed, stuffed in a slot and forgotten); this helps explain the the data in Figure 11-6 which shows that in most years less than 10% of bills introduced pass the House (and an even smaller percentage become law), but it is important to understand that most bills don't fail to pass the House because they're defeated on the floor--instead they never make it to the floor because they never get past the committee, and indeed they're never even taken up for consideration by the committee.
• In another case where the Coleman et al. description of the legislative process is not really adequate (420-23) , it is important to recognize that party leaders largely have a chokehold on bills getting to the House and Senate chambers for consideration by all members; only extraordinary action by members of either body can force a floor vote if the House Rules Committee (heavily influenced by the Speaker of the House) or the Senate Majority Leader don't want the bill debated and put to a vote
• The president's power to veto legislation will be discussed in the next section of the course, but for now you may want to look over some historical data on the use of the veto and congressional success in overriding vetoes

Questions to consider:

1. How does the asymmetric but balanced character of the bicameral Congress affect the legislative process?
2. How can one justify the practice of the filibuster?  If the filibuster is such a good thing, why doesn’t the House of Representatives have it?
3. Why might members of the House of Representatives have a better reputation for being expert in the work of their committees than do Senators?
4. Does a member of Congress adopting the "trustee" role conflict with democratic norms?
5. Why did the 2008 farm bill, noted above, pass over President Bush's veto, but immigration reform (Coleman et al., 425-27) was stymied?

A little something extra:

You might find interesting the discussion and Q&A at Harvard with Jack Abramoff whose notorious lobbying activiites earned him a prison sentence.