Common Ground: Committee Politics in the U.S. House of Representatives

Extract

Common Ground: Committee Politics in the U.S. House of Representatives. By John Baughman. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006. 272p. $50.00.

A handful of scholars have devoted attention in recent years to the dynamics of standing committee jurisdictions in the U.S. Congress. This is an important focus because congressional rules and procedures give committees a central role in the legislative process and because the increasingly complex policy environment of recent decades has made clear demarcations of subject matter jurisdiction more difficult. How Congress resolves overlapping committee jurisdictions can affect both the deliberative quality and the substantive outcomes of policymaking. This is an important point of departure for reading John Baughman's new book.