Summary

The framers of the Constitution conceived of Congress as the center of policymaking in America. Although the prominence of Congress has fluctuated over time, in recent years Congress has been the true center of power in Washington. In addition to its central role in policymaking, Congress also performs important roles of representation.

Congressional tasks become more difficult each year. At the same time, critics charge Congress with being responsible for enlarging the scope of government, and public opinion is critical of the institution. Why would individuals want to serve in Congress? And are the critics' claims correct?

Despite public perceptions to the contrary, hard work is perhaps the most prominent characteristic of a member of Congress's job. The typical representative is a member of about six committees and subcommittees; a senator is a member of about ten. There are also attractions to the job. Most important is power: Members of Congress make key decisions about important matters of public policy. They also receive a substantial salary and "perks."

The Constitution specifies only that members of the House must be at least 25 years old, American citizens for seven years, and residents of the states from which they are elected. Senators must be at least 30 years old, American citizens for nine years, and residents of the states from which they are elected.

Members come mostly from occupations with high status and usually have substantial incomes. Law is the dominant prior occupation, with other elite occupations also well represented. Women and other minorities are substantially underrepresented. Although members of Congress obviously cannot claim descriptive representation (representing their constituents by mirroring their personal, politically relevant characteristics), they may engage in substantive representation (representing the interests of groups).

CONGRESSIONAL ELECTIONS

The most important fact about congressional elections is that incumbents usually win. Not only do more than 90 percent of the incumbents seeking reelection to the House of Representatives win, but most of them win with more than 60 percent of the vote. Even when challengers' positions on the issues are closer to the voters' positions, incumbents still tend to win. Voters are not very aware of how their senators and representatives actually vote.

Even though senators have a better-than-equal chance of reelection, senators typically win by narrower margins than House members. One reason for the greater competition in the Senate is that an entire state is almost always more diverse than a congressional district and thus provides more of a base for opposition to an incumbent.

Despite their success at reelection, incumbents have a strong feeling of vulnerability. They have been raising and spending more campaign funds, sending more mail to their constituents, traveling more to their states and districts, and staffing more local offices than ever before.

Members of Congress engage in three primary activities that increase the probability of their reelections: advertising, credit claiming, and position taking. Most congressional advertising takes place between elections and takes the form of contact with constituents. Credit claiming involves personal and district service, notably through casework and the pork barrel. Members of Congress must also engage in position taking on matters of public policy when they vote on issues and when they respond to constituents' questions about where they stand on issues.

When incumbents do face challengers, they are likely to be weak opponents. Seeing the advantages of incumbency, potentially effective opponents often do not want to risk challenging members of the House. However, an incumbent tarnished by scandal or corruption becomes vulnerable. Voters do take out their anger at the polls. Redistricting can also have an impact. Congressional membership is reapportioned after each federal census, and incumbents may be redistricted out of their familiar base of support. When an incumbent is not running for reelection and the seat is open, there is greater likelihood of competition. Most of the turnover of the membership of Congress is the result of vacated seats, particularly in the House.

Candidates spend enormous sums on campaigns for Congress. In the 2001-2002 election cycle, congressional candidates spent nearly a billion dollars to win the election. In the House races in 2002, the typical incumbent outspent the typical challenger by a ratio of 12 to 1. Spending is greatest when there is no incumbent and each party feels it has a chance to win. In open seats, the candidate who spends the most usually wins.

Although most of the money spent in congressional elections comes from individuals, approximately 30 percent of the funds raised by candidates for Congress comes from Political Action Committees (PACs). PACs give most of their money to incumbents who are already heavily favored to win. Critics of PACs are convinced that PACs are not trying to elect but to buy influence.

The high reelection rate of incumbents brings stability and policy expertise to Congress. Those who favor term limits for members of Congress were dealt a severe blow when the Supreme Court declared in 1995 that state-imposed term limits are unconstitutional (U.S. Term Limits, Inc. et al. v. Thornton et al.).

HOW CONGRESS IS ORGANIZED TO MAKE POLICY

Making policy is the toughest of all the legislative roles. Congress is a collection of generalists trying to make policy on specialized topics. The complexity of today's issues requires more specialization. Congress tries to cope with these demands through its elaborate committee system.

A bicameral legislature is a legislature divided into two houses. The U.S. Congress is bicameral, as is every American state legislature except Nebraska's, which has one house (unicameral). By creating a bicameral Congress, the Constitution set up yet another check and balance. No bill can be passed unless both House and Senate agree on it; each body can thus veto the policies of the other.

The House and Senate each set their own agenda. Both use committees to narrow down the thousands of bills introduced. The House is much larger and more institutionalized than the Senate. Party loyalty to leadership and party-line voting are more common than in the Senate. One institution unique to the House is the House Rules Committee, which reviews most bills coming from a House committee before they go to the full House. Each bill is given a "rule," which schedules the bill on the calendar, allots time for debate, and sometimes even specifies what kind of amendments may be offered. The Senate is less disciplined and less centralized than the House. Today's senators are more equal in power than representatives are. Party leaders do for Senate scheduling what the Rules Committee does in the House.

Much of the leadership in Congress is really party leadership. Those who have the real power in the congressional hierarchy are those whose party put them there. Power is no longer in the hands of a few key members of Congress who are insulated from the public. Instead, power is widely dispersed, requiring leaders to appeal broadly for support.

Leadership in the House, however, is not a one-person show. The Speaker's principal partisan ally is the majority leader, a job that has been the main stepping stone to the Speaker's role. The Constitution makes the vice president of the United States the president of the Senate; this is the vice president's only constitutionally defined job.

The structure of Congress is so complex that it seems remarkable that legislation gets passed at all. Its bicameral division means that bills have two sets of committee hurdles to clear. Recent reforms have decentralized power, and so the job of leading Congress is more difficult than ever. Congressional leaders are not in the strong positions they occupied in the past. Leaders are elected by their fellow party members and must remain responsive to them.

Most of the real work of Congress goes on in committees and subcommittees. Committees dominate congressional policymaking at all stages. They regularly hold hearings to investigate problems and possible wrongdoing, and to investigate the executive branch. Committees can be grouped into four types: standing committees (by far the most important), joint committees, conference committees, and select committees.

More than 11,000 bills are submitted by members every two years, which must be sifted through and narrowed down by the committee process. Every bill goes to a standing committee; usually only bills receiving a favorable committee report are considered by the whole House or Senate. New bills sent to a committee typically go directly to subcommittee, which can hold hearings on the bill. The most important output of committees and subcommittees is the "marked-up" (revised and rewritten) bill, submitted to the full House or Senate for consideration. Members of the committee will usually serve as "floor managers" of the bill when the bill leaves committee, helping party leaders secure votes for the legislation. They will also be cue-givers to whom other members turn for advice. When the two chambers pass different versions of the same bill, some committee members will be appointed to the conference committee.

Legislative oversight-the process of monitoring the bureaucracy and its administration of policy-is one of the checks Congress can exercise on the executive branch. Oversight is handled primarily through hearings. Members of committees constantly monitor how a bill is implemented.

Although every committee includes members from both parties, a majority of each committee's members-as well as its chair-come from the majority party. Committee chairs are the most important influence on the committee agenda. They play dominant-though no longer monopolistic-roles in scheduling hearings, hiring staff, appointing subcommittees, and managing committee bills when they are brought before the full House. Until the 1970s, committee chairs were always selected through the seniority system; under this system, the member of the majority party with the longest tenure on the committee would automatically be selected. In the 1970s, Congress faced a revolt of its younger members, and both parties in each house permitted members to vote on committee chairs. Today, seniority remains the general rule for selecting chairs, but there have been notable exceptions.

The explosion of informal groups in Congress has made the representation of interests in Congress a more direct process (cutting out the middleman, the lobbyist). In recent years, a growing number of caucuses have dominated these informal groups. Also increasing in recent years is the size of, and reliance of members of Congress on, their personal and committee staffs, along with staff agencies such as the Congressional Research Service, the General Accounting Office and the Congressional Budget Office.

Presidents are partners with Congress in the legislative process, but all presidents are also Congress' adversaries in the struggle to control legislative outcomes. Presidents have their own legislative agenda, based in part on their party's platform and their electoral coalition. The president's task is to persuade Congress that his agenda should also be Congress's agenda.

Presidential success rates for influencing congressional votes vary widely among presidents and within a president's tenure in office. Presidents are usually most successful early in their tenures and when their party has a majority in one or both houses of Congress. Regardless, in almost any year, the president will lose on many issues.

Parties are most cohesive when Congress is electing its official leaders. For example, a vote for the Speaker of the House is a straight party-line vote. On other issues, the party coalition may not stick together. Votes on issues like civil rights have shown deep divisions within each party. Differences between the parties are sharpest on questions of social welfare and economic policy.

In democracies with parliamentary systems such as Great Britain, almost all votes are party-line votes. Parties are considerably weaker in the United States. Party affiliation does influence votes of U.S. legislators, but in a typical year, a majority of Democrats and Republicans oppose each other less than half the time. Party leaders in Congress are limited in their powers to obtain support from party members. They cannot remove a recalcitrant member from the party, although they do have some influence (such as committee assignments). Recently the parties-especially the Republicans-have been a growing source of money for congressional campaigns.

There are a variety of views concerning how members of Congress should fulfill their function of representation. The eighteenth-century English legislator Sir Edmund Burke favored the concept of legislators as trustees, using their best judgment to make policy in the interests of the people. The concept of representatives as instructed delegates calls for representatives to mirror the preferences of their constituents. Members of Congress are actually politicos, combining the trustee and instructed delegate roles as they attempt to be both representatives and policymakers.

The most effective way for constituents to influence congressional voting is to elect candidates who match their policy positions, since winners of congressional elections tend to vote on roll calls pretty much as they said they would. On some controversial issues, it is perilous for a legislator to ignore constituent opinion. Representatives and senators have recently been concerned about the many new "single-issue groups" that will vote exclusively on a candidate's position on a single issue rather than on the member's total record.

Lobbyists-some of them former members of Congress- represent the interests of their organizations. They also can provide legislators with crucial information and often can give assurances of financial aid in the next campaign. There are more than 14,000 individuals in Washington representing nearly 12,000 organizations. Lobbyists spent nearly $2 billion on lobbying Congress-plus millions more in campaign contributions and attempts to try to persuade member's constituents to send messages to Washington. The bigger the issue, the more lobbyists are involved in it. Lobbyists are regulated primarily by the Federal Regulation of Lobbying Act (1946). Paid lobbyists whose principal purpose is to influence or defeat legislation must register and file reports with the secretary of the Senate and the clerk of the House.

In 1995, Congress passed a law requiring anyone hired to lobby members of Congress, congressional staff members, White House officials, and federal agencies to report what issues they were seeking to influence, how much they were spending on the effort, and the identities of their clients. This law was designed to close loopholes in a 1946 law that allowed most lobbyists to avoid registering and permitted those who did to disclose only limited information about their activities.

UNDERSTANDING CONGRESS

The central legislative dilemma for Congress is combining the faithful representation of constituents with the making of effective public policy. Supporters see Congress as a forum in which many interests compete for a spot on the policy agenda and over the form of a particular policy. Critics wonder if Congress is so responsive to so many interests that policy is too uncoordinated, fragmented, and decentralized. Some observers feel that Congress is so representative that it is incapable of taking decisive action to deal with difficult problems.

In a large democracy, the success of democratic government depends on the quality of representation. Congress clearly has some undemocratic and unrepresentative features: Its members are an American elite; its leadership is chosen by its own members; voters have little direct influence over the people who chair key committees or lead congressional parties. There is also evidence to support the view that Congress is representative: Congress does try to listen to the American people; the election does make a difference in how votes turn out; which party is in power affects policies; linkage institutions do link voters to policymakers. The authors of the textbook conclude that members of Congress are responsive to the people if the people make clear what they want.

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