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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 September 2013
Although I have enjoyed five productive and stimulating years in the House of Representatives, my satisfaction is tempered by the conviction that our collective response has often been inadequate to our country's needs. In the near term we are faced with a stubborn recession, the need to ease its pain and to promote economic recovery. But the long-term challenges are even more daunting: laying the groundwork for improved economic performance and an enhanced quality of life by investing in research, education, and training; rebuilding and extending our infrastructure; broadening access to adequate health care; stimulating savings and investment; and achieving budgetary accountability and control.
The 102nd Congress has made some progress on these issues, most notably by approving a major high-way-transit program and an ambitious rewrite of the Higher Education Act. But on many other fronts Congress has found it difficult to act, and the president has offered little in the way of a domestic program save occasional vetoes of Democratic initiatives.
The most obvious immediate barrier to effective governmental action is the federal budget deficit. The failure to correct the problem in the 1980s, when the economy was healthier and could have more easily withstood austerity measures, has left Congress and the president with equally unpromising alternatives: either rely on symbolic, hortatory, and largely ineffectual actions to counter economic adversity, or fund more serious recovery measures at the expense of a dangerous deepening of the deficit.
This essay is drawn from remarks given upon the author's receipt of the Pi Sigma Alpha Award at the spring conference of the National Capital Area Political Science Association, February 29, 1992. It also comprises part of the final chapter of The Congressional Experience: A View from the Hill, recently published by Westview Press.
1. I expressed some of this in an otherwise appreciative review of Fenno's, Richard Congressmen in Committees: American Political Science Review, 71 (June 1977), pp. 701–04Google Scholar.
2. Bendiner's, Robert Obstacle Course on Capitol Hill (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964)Google Scholar was an account of frustrated efforts to pass aid-to-education legislation; Boiling's, Richard House Out of Order (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1965)Google Scholar was a brief for reform by a prominent House member. See also Udall's, Morris K. newsletters from the 1960s, reprinted in Education of a Congressman, ed. Peabody, Robert L. (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1972), especially chaps. 19-22Google Scholar.
3. The study that I directed, The Commerce Committees (New York: Grossman Publishers, 1975)Google Scholar, although completed within a few months, was published almost three years later as one of a set of six volumes.
4. Green, Mark J., Fallows, James M., and Zwick, David R., Who Runs Congress? The President, Big Business, or You? (New York: Bantam Books, 1972)Google Scholar.
5. Ibid., p. 94.
6. See Fenno, Richard F. Jr., “Adjusting to the U.S. Senate,” in Wright, Gerald C. Jr. et al. , eds., Congress and Policy Change (New York: Agathon Press, 1986)Google Scholar, and David Price, The Congressional Experience, chap. 3.
7. Dionne, E. J. Jr., Why Americans Hate Politics (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991), pp. 16–17 Google Scholar. Dionne borrows the concept of democratic politics at its best as “the search for remedy” from Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
8. Tussman, Joseph, Obligation and the Body Politic (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960), pp. 118, 108 Google Scholar.