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| | | | | The Democratic Debate, Second Edition
Bruce Miroff, Raymond Seidelman, Todd Swanstrom
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| | | | Chapter Overview
Chapter Eleven: Congress: A Vehicle for Popular Democracy
Of the three branches of the national government, Congress would appear to be the natural home of popular democracy. Yet many of the developments discussed in Part II have worked to undercut its democratic potential. Our national legislature is a volatile mixture of elite and popular democracy. The founding debate over the democratic character of Congress echoes to this day; both the Federalists and Anti-federalists have seen some of their hopes and fears realized in the contemporary Congress.
To many Americans in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Congress was awash in elitist corruptions. The Republican revolution launched through the 1994 elections promised to carry out a populist cleansing of Congress. The chapter examines Congress through the prism of the Republican upheaval, looking at how the institution has worked before, during, and after the revolution and considering whether the Republican majority has lived up to its popular democratic rhetoric.
Congress Before the Revolution
Although Congress has some permanent features, rooted in the Constitution, and some near-permanent features such as the committee system, its landscape has often been altered, especially by partisan forces. Before the Republican revolution of 1995, Democratic control was a decisive, formative influence. In descending order of importance, four factors were at work in Congress under Democratic majorities: (1) individual members and their districts; (2) committees; (3) parties; and (4) leadership. The Republicans, when they came to power, would attempt to reverse this order.
Scholars explaining pre-1995 congressional behavior usually highlighted individual members' roles as reelection seekers and entrepreneurs. As the parties declined, candidates for Congress were often "self-selected": ambitious, experienced political pros adept at raising the kind of money needed to finance highly expensive, modern congressional campaigns. The deck was heavily stacked in favor of those already in office. Getting elected the first time was the hardest; the reelection rate for House incumbents was normally over 90 percent. (Senate incumbents were almost as successful.) Several factors favored sitting members. The first was money: incumbents had an enormous head start in fundraising and were usually supported by special interest PACs. They also benefited from the privileges of incumbency: greater name recognition, travel allowances, the franking privilege, and casework.
With so many built-in advantages, many incumbents tried (and often succeeded in) scaring off prominent and experienced opponents. Incumbency was less important in Senate races.
A major finding of congressional scholars was that the pursuit of reelection continually shaped the relationship between representatives and their constituents. These scholars showed that members of Congress worked hard to make themselves familiar "brand names" in their districts, gained credit with voters by intervening on their behalf in the proceedings of the bureaucracies they themselves had created, and developed attractive images designed to win the admiration and trust of constituents. Yet if this relationship between representatives and constituents resembled popular democracy on a superficial level, it did not involve an invitation to voters to participate meaningfully in politics or use their intelligence to deliberate about the common good.
As independent power holders, these skilled reelection seekers did not have to answer to party leaders in Congress or presidents. They first considered their district's interests when deciding how to vote, and acted as individualistic policy entrepreneurs rather than supporters of a common party program.
Second in importance in Congress before the revolution was the committee system, which makes it possible for Congress to handle an otherwise overwhelming flood of bills, requests, and nominations. The most important kind of committees are standing committees, the permanent bodies that draft legislation and act in effect as legislative gatekeepers. The others include select, joint, and conference committees. Obtaining good committee assignments is important, especially in the House, where legislators vie for seats on the prestigious Rules, Appropriations, Ways and Means, and Budget Committees. Before the revolution of 1995, advancement in a committee normally proceeded under the seniority system. This system was automatically followed until the 1970s, when reforms were instituted by the Democratic majority to loosen the virtually autocratic power of the committee chairs.
The committee system has undergone considerable changes in recent decades. With the explosion in Congress's workload came a parallel increase in the size of committee staff. Congressional aides often assumed many of the functions that we associate with legislative leaders. Another trend was the rise of subcommittees.
Long-standing committee members often gained tremendous substantive expertise, which gave them great influence over legislation in their particular policy area. Committee experts not only brought greater knowledge to the art of governance, as elite democrats would claim, but made Congress as a whole a much stronger player in its bargaining with the executive branch.
Nevertheless, the committee system had some distinct drawbacks. One problem with legislative expertise is that it can become self-serving. In some cases, legislators formed mutually beneficial alliances with the interest groups and executive agencies with which they interacted. These alliances, called iron triangles (or the looser issue networks), often favored the narrow interests of the groups involved rather than the public interest. At the same time, Congress had few mechanisms to relate or coordinate the bills produced by its committees. Policy inconsistency, or incoherence, could be the result. By the early 1990s, committees in Congress were not as powerful as they had been decades earlier, but they were still pivotal players in almost all policy decisions.
Third in importance in shaping congressional behavior before the Republican revolution was party. Legislative parties are the most important means by which Congress coordinates its members and their work. Seats on committees and leadership positions are determined on the basis of party. However, compared to the parties found in parliamentary democracies, congressional parties before 1995 were weak. This was due mainly to the electoral independence of members and the diversity of the major parties. However, party unity began to grow in the 1980s even as party in the electorate had declined. This could be attributed to (1) the growing ideological homogeneity of both parties and (2) the sharp partisan conflict that characterized the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton years.
The two legislative parties represent different coalitions of ideology and interests. The majority Democrats held to the liberal ideology of government activism. Accepting the "privileged position of business" and receiving large campaign contributions from special interests, the Democrats were not much of a threat to economic elites. Yet as the party of minority groups, women's groups, unions, environmentalists, and senior citizens, they also spoke for popular democratic concerns. With such a divided coalition, the Democratic majority was better at opposing Republican presidents than at supporting Democratic ones. The failures of the Democratic majority provided an opening for the Republican takeover of Congress in the 1994 elections.
The Speaker of the House is the most visible and prestigious congressional leader. Selected by the majority party, the Speaker exercises a combination of procedural, policy, and partisan leadership. Other important leadership figures are the majority leader, minority leader, and whips. The Senate has no leader equivalent to the Speaker, but does have other leadership figures with the same titles (and similar functions) as House leaders.
Congressional leaders before 1995 were relatively weak. They could not command the allegiance of their rank and file; thus, to be successful they had to be skilled in the arts of political persuasion, conciliation, and compromise. But starting as early as the 1970s there was a trend toward strengthening congressional leadership. For example, the Speaker was able to name a majority of the Rules Committee, which decides how much time is allotted to floor debate on a bill and what kinds of amendments to a bill will be considered. Senate leaders were more hamstrung in advancing party priorities. Individual senators could attach unrelated riders to any bill on the floor, while the minority party could block legislation it opposed through a filibuster. Cloture could be invoked to terminate debate; however, it requires a three-fifths majority, which is usually hard to obtain.
Congress During the Revolution
The public grew increasingly irate about congressional failures and scandals during the half-decade before the 1994 elections. In those elections, the Republicans shrewdly capitalized on the public's anger and turned it entirely against Democrats. Having won majority control, Newt Gingrich and his troops set out to conduct a revolutionary transformation of the House and a conservative transformation of American life. By the end of 1995, the year of the revolution, the House (but not the Senate) was a very different place than it had been under the Democrats. The Republicans had attempted to reverse the factors shaping congressional behavior, with leadership now first in importance and the individual member last.
The central figure in the revolution was House Speaker Newt Gingrich. Outsized in his ambitions, skills, and ego, Gingrich became the most powerful speaker in the twentieth century. At the beginning of the 104th Congress, Gingrich consolidated power: He chose the committee chairs (sometimes bypassing seniority), controlled committee assignments, and oversaw rules changes that weakened committee and subcommittee independence.
With the aid of the Speaker's Advisory Group, Gingrich focused the Republican program in Congress as the Democrats had never been able to do when in the majority. His "Contract with America" provided a unifying agenda for Republicans, with Gingrich pushing it rapidly through the House and applying his political muscle to bring dilatory supporters behind his timetable. Even after a balanced budget replaced the Contract as the centerpiece of the GOP agenda, Gingrich held together his forces with impressive negotiating and consensus-building skills. He approached his party followers in a therapeutic New Age guise, while treating his Democratic opponents as foes in a political war.
Gingrich aspired to replace the president as a public agenda setter, and the Contract with America received enormous media play. But in this area Gingrich revealed his greatest weakness as a leader: His unpopularity rose with his rhetoric, and he became the nation's least-liked political leader.
In the Senate, Majority Leader Robert Dole faced the same kinds of limitations as his predecessors. The Republican majority was too small to overcome Democratic filibusters. And Senate individualism undercut partisan unity, especially as the handful of Republican moderates balked at the highly conservative bills passed by the House. The most successful Senate leader during the revolution was Minority Leader Thomas Daschle, who forged a united Democratic opposition that posed a major obstacle to the Gingrich agenda.
Gingrich's success as a revolutionary depended on an experiment in party government: Under the new Republican regime in the House, party was to take precedence over committee autonomy and individual interest. House Republicans did in fact reach unusual levels of party unity in their voting patterns during 1995. And the House Republican Conference gained in importance, both as a supportive following for the leadership and as an occasional check on Gingrich's power. Republican success at party government was facilitated by the party's ideological cohesion. With moderates in decline, the party was a vehicle for militant conservatism, eager to dismantle the welfare state and turn authority back to the states and to the market. The fervor and energy that drove the revolution were supplied by a huge class (73 members) of conservative Republican freshmen.
The core constituencies of the party, the religious right and economic elites, came to the fore once the less controversial elements of the Contract with America had been passed. Lobbyists for business interest became highly visible as they drafted antiregulatory bills to trim environmental protections and rewrote tort law to favor corporations over consumers. Republican spokespeople claimed that the resulting legislation was promoting freedom, but to many Americans the ties of the House Republicans to elite interests contradicted the popular democratic rhetoric of the revolution. As its elite democratic elements became more apparent, public support for the revolution declined (and public support for President Clinton rose).
As power shifted to the leadership and the party conference during the revolution, committees and their chairs declined in influence. With the seniority system bypassed, term limits for chairpeople put in place, and staffs cut in size, committees were no longer such major players. Democratic Speaker Tom Foley had referred the 1993 health care reform issue to ten different committees; in 1995, Republican Speaker Gingrich kept control of the Medicare reform issue himself. To circumvent committees on key pieces of legislation, Gingrich set up task forces whose members he himself handpicked. Committee independence was also under attack in the Senate. While moderate committee chairs were not deposed, the Senate followed the House's lead and adopted a six-year term limit for chairing a committee.
The importance of the individual members was also downgraded during the revolution. Supporters of party government were expected to vote their party and ideology more than their districts' interests. Many of the new breed of Republicans were different from their Democratic counterparts: More of them were political amateurs, recruited to run by Gingrich and his GOPAC and partly funded by party sources. These Republican freshmen scorned congressional careerism and avidly backed a constitutional amendment to impose term limits on Congress, but they were thwarted by senior members of their own party as well as by Democrats. The House during the revolution did see less individual policy entrepreneurship, as Republican members were socialized to put party unity ahead of individual enterprise.
Congress After the Revolution
With the defeat of the congressional Republicans in the budget showdown at the end of 1995, the revolution was stymied. The politics of 1996 and 1997 revealed a Congress that had been significantly changed, yet also one in which leadership and party unity were losing steam while committee influence and individual reelection concerns were reasserting themselves. Gingrich and his supporters had made two basic mistakes during the revolution: They overestimated their electoral mandate and they underestimated the checks on the power of the House to reshape the agenda.
The biggest loser in the decline of the revolution was Speaker Gingrich. After his failures in the budget showdown and his punishment by the House for ethics violations, Gingrich's power was far from its revolutionary peak. Many Republicans in the House also lost some of their brashness, turning more pragmatic as the 1996 elections approached. As the elections of 1996 pushed the House in a more moderate direction, the Senate became more conservative, both in leadership (Trent Lott) and composition.
Congress after the 1995 revolution remains more centralized and partisan than the prerevolutionary version, although the forces of decentralization and individualism are reemerging. Even the Democrats have learned from the Republicans the necessity of greater party discipline. But the experiment in full-scale party government is not likely to be repeated in the House, where the Republican majority of 1997 1998 is too small and divided to reenact the revolution.
Congress and the Executive
In the twentieth century the balance of political power has shifted from Capitol Hill to the White House. However, the rise of presidential government was stalled by the Vietnam War, Watergate, and the backlash against the sweeping assertions of power by Richard Nixon. Since that time, battles between the branches over budgetary politics, foreign policy, and congressional oversight often have been deep and bitter.
During the 1970s, Congress was impelled to recapture some of the budgetary power it had lost to a more coherent and unified executive branch. It did so through the Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974, which established new budget committees, created a Congressional Budget Office (CBO), and set up a new budget resolution process. This change increased both congressional power and conflict between the legislative and executive branches. During the 1980s, battles over the deficit became so intractable that Congress resorted to an automatic deficit reduction gimmick by passing the 1985 Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Bill (which proved a failure). President Clinton's 1993 budget proposal finally began to bring the deficit down. Republicans failed to get a constitutional amendment requiring a balanced budget through the Senate in 1995 and 1997, but they did get Clinton to agree to balancing the budget by the year 2002.
Supporters of presidential initiative have at times claimed foreign policy to be the exclusive realm of the executive, but the Constitution gives Congress significant powers in this area (such as the responsibility for raising military forces and the Senate's authority to ratify treaties). Congress has reasserted its authority in this area in recent decades; after Watergate and Vietnam, Congress stepped up its role in covert actions, war making, and trade policy. Critics contend that Congress acts too slowly, indecisively, and politically to be an effective force in foreign policy. These inadequacies have been exaggerated. Congress is usually less inclined than the executive to send American forces into combat. Congressional involvement in global affairs increases the range of policy options, gives the public a say about how the nation conducts foreign policy, and corrects for the tendency toward an imperial presidency.
Oversight is the review by congressional committees of the operations of executive branch agencies. It is also a highly political contest'between Congress and the president'for control of the vast federal bureaucracy. There has been a sharp jump in oversight activities during the past two decades. Again, critics have complained that congressional oversight has evolved into a harmful form of micromanagement of the executive branch. To popular democrats, however, oversight is the chief tool with which Congress can hold the president and bureaucracy accountable.
Conclusion: The Revolution in Congress and the Democratic Debate
The fate of the Republican revolution holds clues to the ability of Congress to serve as a vehicle for popular democracy. The revolution contained some genuine popular democratic elements, such as the attack on insiders' privileges and the call to party responsibility. Yet it fell far short of popular democratic reform: It was based on only a fifth of the eligible electorate, tried to steamroll the opposition rather than engage in real debate, and used populist anger to further the interests of economic elites. A telling sign of the role of elite democracy in the Republican revolution was the lack of interest in campaign finance reform. The biases of the Republican revolution should not deter us from considering what is still needed for the democratic revitalization of Congress. As the most open and representative branch, Congress remains crucial to the future of popular democracy in the United States.
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