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Review
| On Capitol Hill: The Struggle to Reform Congress and its Consequences, 1948–2000, by Julian Zelizer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 376 pages. £30.00, cloth.
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| Julian E. Zelizer's new book offers an impressive analysis of Congressional reform that places it in the forefront of the current resurgence in political history. For the last few decades, political history has taken a back seat to the more popular studies of race, class, gender, and culture. Students and professors have gravitated towards what many believe are more relevant institutions and issues which affect their lives. The trend in classrooms paralleled that in politics as a whole: public participation in elections has declined and increasing numbers of Americans view the Washington elite as, at best, out of touch and, at worst, hopelessly corrupt. Zelizer convincingly demonstrates that we cannot dismiss concerns about political leaders and government if we hope to understand contemporary America. He adeptly links this study of procedural reform in Congress to broader social movements concerning race and labor relations, to media developments, and to political change. This book is essential reading for anyone engaged in the fields of American political science and political history, yet offers insights beyond those fields as well. In a catchy analogy, Zelizer has compared Congress to an automobile. "While drivers of various skills can take the automobile in different directions and along various types of roads, the internal machinery of the vehicle plays a crucial role in determining how smooth the drive will be as well as how far and fast the driver will go." (p, 30) The pages of On Capitol Hill are filled with powerful and colorful leaders in American politics, from Sam Rayburn and Lyndon Johnson to Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton; yet Zelizer studies how Congress has a life of its own. Essentially, the work attempts to reveal how Americans have—or have not—been able to change this most democratic of political institutions. The answer for Zelizer lies in incremental procedural changes, which he demonstrates have had lasting, widespread, and sometimes unexpected consequences. |
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Zelizer breaks Congressional history into two major sections and traces how procedural changes more than policy have most clearly transformed this important political body. The Committee Era defined Congress between the early twentieth century and 1970. During the 1930s and 1940s, powerful Southern Democrats took control of the Congressional committees and entrenched their conservative brand of liberal politics. During the 1950s and 1960s, however, a reform coalition made up of both liberal legislators and interest groups such as Americans for Democratic Action and Common Cause, challenged committee leaders. They did so through the vehicle of procedural reform. The liberal coalition linked reform to important social movements, especially civil rights, and successfully used the media to mobilize public opinion in favor of reforming Congress to make it more efficient and in touch with constituents' needs. The 1970s proved a crucial decade in which the reform coalition took advantage of unique opportunities to enact lasting changes. During this period, the Vietnam War and Watergate galvanized public anger against the status quo in Washington. Congressional reformers wielded public distaste of corruption as a weapon against entrenched committee chairs and their control of legislative procedure. Reformers were able to weaken the power of committee chairs, scale back the Ways and Means committee, create campaign finance restrictions, codify ethics, centralize the budget process, reclaim legislative war power, restrain filibusters, strengthen party caucuses, and allow televised Congressional proceedings. |
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By the end of the decade Congress moved away from Committee dominance into what Zelizer calls the "Contemporary Era" defined less by "an insulated, hierarchical, and stable governing structure" than by an "uncertain, partisan, fragmented, and highly conflictual" one. (p. 263) Changes in this period did not produce all that reformers desired: Even today, Congress is not more powerful that the president or Supreme Court, is not a model of efficiency, is not a center of progressive policies, and is not favored by the public. Why? Zelizer argues that in the contemporary period, committee "chairs...were not replaced with a source of authority that was any more forceful or efficient." (p. 266) When more "subcommittees, caucuses, and mavericks exerted influence...the fragmenting tendencies of the institution made it hard to pull together broad coalitions." (p. 267) Moreover, liberals soon learned that their institutional reforms did not necessarily create a progressive agenda. Instead, conservatives adroitly used the new processes to their own ends. In the 1980s and 1990s, conservatives "exacerbated the antistatist sentiments of the American public" and the media remained adversarial—engendering quite the opposite of what reformers' hoped for Congressional power and prestige. While discussion of reform continues on Capitol Hill and in the media, Zelizer asserts that "individuals and organizations who campaign for institutional reform today are committed to correcting the flaws of the existing system rather than searching for a fundamentally new type of process....Whereas institutional reform in the 1960s and 1970s was tied to mass movements such as civil rights, pacifism, feminism, the New Left, and conservatism, current proponents of institutional reform lack any similar kind of broader connection." (268–269) Although Zelizer sees the 1970s as a golden age for Congressional reform, he concludes that further reforms are always possible. Rather than holding on to their dissatisfaction with political processes, the public should take heart in the possibilities of change even with the knowledge that change can be slow and difficult. |
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Zelizer's work is a masterful account of Congressional history that is essential for those teaching contemporary American political history. It can offer many avenues for discussion in graduate or undergraduate seminars on the subjects of postwar liberalism and conservatism, on the nature of Congressional leadership (both individual and via committee), on the actions of interest groups and coalitions, on the relationship of the media and Congress, on institutional change, and on the overall struggle for power as well as the achievement of specific policy goals. While the detail on Congressional procedure would be lost on students in most general undergraduate courses, it may enlighten faculty teaching such courses and provide important elements for lecture and discussion, while not used as a course text. |
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| California State University, Long Beach |
Donna M. Binkiewicz |
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