An Introduction to the U.S. Congress

Charles B. Cushman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317476689
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

What does Congress do? How does it do it? Why is it such a complicated institution? This concise primer offers students and general readers a brief and systematic introduction to Congress and the role it plays in the US political system. Drawing on his experience as a former Congressional staff member, the author explores the different political natures of the House and Senate, examines Congress's interaction with other branches of the Federal government, and looks ahead to the domestic and foreign challenges that are likely to drive the Congressional agenda for decades to come. The book provides revealing insights into the sometimes-contradictory Congressional responsibilities of representation and lawmaking; oversight and appropriation; and managing and organizing the government. It includes a case study (on the formation of the Department of Homeland Security) that sheds light on Congress's often-complicated procedures. The book also includes boxed features on Congressional action - highlighting such topics as file sharing and student loans - that show students how Congress's work affects their lives. Chapter-ending lists of web resources add to the book's usefulness.

1 • Introduction

In republican government, the legislative authority necessarily predominates. The remedy for this inconveniency 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 the society will admit.

—Federalist No. 51¹

Why is Congress such a complicated institution? What does Congress do, and how does it do it? Will it be able to meet the policy challenges of the next few decades?

Ever since beginning my study of Congress in 1992 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, I have been trying to figure out good answers to those three questions. After my graduate studies, during which I examined the role of congressional leaders in setting defense policy, I went to work in professional politics for several years, a sort of practical postdoctoral fellowship in real-world congressional politics. I worked on a congressional campaign during the 1996 election and spent two years working for Rep. David Price (D-NC) as a legislative assistant, working on a variety of issues in the fast-paced environment of a Capitol Hill office—still seeking answers to those three questions. The campaign and the staff work made the central importance of serving constituents come alive for me and helped me to see the powers and limitations of political science as a means of explaining our complicated political system in the United States. Following my time on the Hill, I worked as a lobbyist and as a consultant in Washington for several years and saw firsthand how Congress sits at the center of the decision-making network. Congress is the mechanism that connects politics and policy in Washington, DC, and Congress provides the forum for discussing all the important issues in the national government. Since 2001 I have been working on understanding how Congress brings policy and politics together at The George Washington University’s Graduate School of Political Management, teaching about Congress and continuing my research on the legislature’s role in national politics.

This short text on Congress is what I have learned so far. This book is an overview of the House and Senate, their history, organization, and powers. But I have a strong bias toward practicality. This text gains insight from the leading theoretical debates in political science today, but it does not stop there. This book also assesses the real-world successes and failures of Congress in doing its job and considers whether Congress might do better.

But do not expect this book to explain the entire national policymaking system or to discuss state or local policymaking. In this introductory chapter, we will review the national policymaking system, and we will meet the many players who work with Congress to make important policy choices, but we will not explore the rest of the system, or the other players, in detail: those are the subjects of libraries full of interesting and excellent books. This one is about Congress. Any survey of politics in the United States quickly makes it clear that a great deal of American politics does not happen on Capitol Hill or in Washington. But that is not the focus of this story: Congress is.

Congress and Public Policymaking

Here is my story about Congress. The Framers built a flexible, adaptable system of government that was designed so that each part limited the power of the other parts: the states limit the national government, and vice versa; and in Washington, Congress, the president, and the courts share power. In the next section I will offer an overview of how this system makes public policy, but the star of this story—and of the Framers’ system of government—is Congress.

Congress is the centerpiece of the whole constitutional design. Congress makes the major decisions in the national government designed by the Founders. In the Framers’ system, Congress has two roles (representation and lawmaking) that frequently conflict, and two chambers that are designed to react differently to political challenges. The Framers wanted the two chambers to check each other, as well as the other branches. So the House and the Senate take two completely different approaches to balancing their twin roles of lawmaking and representation. The two bodies combine their constituent members, committees, and parties in two different patterns that reflect the Framers’ different designs for House and Senate. In the House, the balance tips toward representation, giving us a majoritarian body, controlled by its majority party, that works hard to stay close to the political views of its constituents. The Senate manages to represent the states and make national policy reasonably well in a more egalitarian style that gives individual senators a great deal of power to shape legislation in the Senate. But Congress has a severe limitation: it cannot implement its own policies.

The executive branch and the courts execute the policy decisions made by Congress. So how does Congress enforce its decisions? There was no large executive branch planned in the Constitution, so the Framers did not give Congress an extensive toolbox to use in managing the actions of the other branches. While Congress does wrestle with how to shape the activities of the federal court system, its main energies have usually gone to influencing the executive branch, so that is what we will concentrate on in this story. Congress has derived three main powers from the Constitution to influence the executive branch—the powers of oversight, appropriations, and organization. These are good but fairly blunt instruments, which do not always work well to force agencies to comply with Congress’s desires. Congress has evolved since the founding to reflect the desires of the Framers fairly well, and Congress uses the three powers reasonably well to enforce its decisions. But the way Congress has organized itself to use the powers is complicated, and that fragmentation, along with partisanship and parochialism, does limit the effectiveness of the Framers’ system.

Public Policymaking in Washington

Before we see what the Framers were thinking when they wrote the Constitution, let us examine the American public policymaking system and get a sense of what makes up the system: What does it take to make public policy? Who decides what to work on? What sort of issues does the system address? Who plays a role, and what does each actor do?

The public policy literature is extensive and detailed—and there are several competing theories of how the system works. Each theory focuses on a specific question, and none of them effectively covers the full range and complexity of public policymaking in the United States. Researchers use models to simplify the complex world they study—otherwise it would be nearly impossible to make sense of what goes on in Washington. All of us use models to make it through our own lives—simplifying assumptions that allow us to concentrate on the important things happening around us and make good decisions about our own actions. Public policy in the United States is the product of an amazingly complex set of actions, taken by an enormous number of players, much of which occurs nearly simultaneously—some simplification is mandatory! The American Political Science Association has endorsed the study of politics from many angles, using many complementary approaches; the same advice applies when we look at public policy.² In the spirit of gaining understanding by casting our net broadly, here are a few of the main approaches and their answers to the questions asked above.

The oldest and simplest approach to understanding American public policy is to break the process into its several steps, from identification of a policy problem through specification of criteria for evaluation, generation of alternative solutions, and selection of the alternative to implementation and evaluation. While most policy debates do flow through these steps, they do not always occur in sequence, some steps may disappear in certain cases, and a set group of participants does not usually take part throughout the life of a policy debate.³ But three steps seem to generate great interest, and they all involve Congress: setting the agenda (deciding which issues demand attention); selecting the policy option to pursue, which is Congress’s main responsibility in public policy; and evaluating the policy once implemented, which takes up much of Congress’s time (as we will see in part II of this book).

Several key public policy studies have expanded the “policy stages” model by exploring specific steps in more depth; the most important and most interesting of these studies deal with agenda-setting. Agenda-setting seeks to explain how an issue rises in importance to the level at which the White House and Congress agree to spend some of their limited time and political capital to solve the perceived problem. One of the most intriguing efforts to understand agenda-setting is the “multiple streams” theory advanced most forcefully by John Kingdon.⁴ In this conception of how Washington’s policy agenda is set, three streams flow through the Washington policy community simultaneously: a problems stream, which consists of the many potential issues Congress could spend time trying to resolve; a policies stream, which contains possible solutions advanced by one of the players in the system; and a politics stream, which consists of political events and efforts to focus the attention of the system on one problem or another. When the three streams come together—when politics allows Congress the chance to connect a policy solution to a problem—a window of opportunity opens, allowing the players to craft a solution. Three key features drive Kingdon’s complex, chaotic view of policymaking. First, many of the policy actors hold “problematic preferences,” which means that they either do not fully understand what they want to accomplish or they have not clearly expressed their policy goals. Second, policymaking occurs with “fluid participation,” with players entering and leaving the discussions as they proceed, and with many players performing unspecified, changing roles in the process; this instability makes it difficult to track who is doing what—especially since the pattern changes for every issue, as well! Third, policymakers choose among “uncertain technologies,” which means that they are not sure that their proposed solutions will actually solve the problems they are trying to resolve. With such a complicated and uncertain environment, Kingdon argues, there is not a clearly defined, easy to follow “process” that addresses public policy; rather, the various actors in Washington struggle somewhat blindly to connect reasonable solutions to some problems, with limited success.

Other researchers have concentrated on understanding how policy actors can successfully navigate the complexity Kingdon describes. One framework explains how advocates for a policy work together in a coalition to raise awareness of their issue and build enough support to get their proposals through Congress. Recognizing that many policy issues are complex, and that they can take as long as a decade or more to reach the stage where Congress can vote on a bill, Paul Sabatier has focused his research efforts on understanding how all of the actors in a policy domain might come together to solve a problem. Rather than relying on a narrow focus on government actors, his “advocacy coalitions” model seeks to identify all the players inside and outside government who can take part in a policy debate. Given that many issues require substantial technical expertise, outside groups like think tanks, university researchers, advocacy organizations, and industry technicians and researchers all have a role to play in formulating both the problem and the possible solutions to that problem. Finally, Sabatier also recognizes that policy debates are not purely scientific or rational discussions of how best to solve a problem; instead, many issues generate emotional responses, which play into how the actors think about policy solutions.⁵

Other researchers have extended the idea of policy domains, noting that policymaking in the United States is not exclusively the job of Washington or of government. Some decisions fall to Congress or to state legislatures, with their particular style of politics that favors compromise and collegiality. Other players make other decisions in our system, too. Presidents, governors, and city managers or mayors make chief executive decisions, which follow a more hierarchical pattern than legislative politics. Courts make many decisions, with their particular style dependent upon the a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Tables and Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Original Half Title page
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Origins and Evolution of the Congressional System
• I Competing Roles Lawmaker and Representative
• II Enforcing Policy Decisions
• III Congress and Emerging Challenges
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author