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In the Wake of Watergate: Congressional Reform?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Leroy N. Rieselbach
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Extract

When the Watergate dam broke, the ensuing flood of revelations about White House activities swept away a fundamental and cherished tenet of the contemporary liberal credo: the faith in the beneficence of the American presidency. Already suspect after John Kennedy's Bay of Pigs fiasco and Lyndon Johnson's Indochina policy, the dogma that “the cure for democracy is leadership,” strong, forceful presidential leadership, sank beneath the waves of Watergate. The lesson seems clear that it is naive to assume that an innate goodness characterizes the presidency. Rather it seems safer to accept the proposition that executive power, unchecked or only loosely restrained, can be used for whatever purposes a particular president seeks to promote.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 36 , Issue 3 , July 1974 , pp. 371 - 393
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1974

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References

1 The phrase is that of Burns, James McGregor, long a leading proponent of executive power, in The Deadlock of Democracy (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1963), p. 340Google Scholar. See the same author's Congress on Trial (New York, 1949)Google Scholar and Presidential Government (Boston, 1960)Google Scholar and the Committee on Political Parties of the American Political Science Association, Toward a More Responsible Two-Party System. (New York, 1950)Google Scholar for additional statements embodying this liberal assumption.

2 My Congressional Politics (New York, 1973)Google Scholar attempts to present a full description and analysis of current congressional organization and practice.

3 The discussion of reformist perspectives must, of necessity, be oversimplified. The effort here is to identify major points of view, but it must be recognized that there exist multiple variations on each theme which because of space limitations cannot be clearly differentiated here.

4 The specific targets of these reformers are well known: the seniority system and the powers that committee chairmen possess, lengthening the congressional term to increase party loyalty, more powerful party caucuses and institutions, reform of the Rules Committee in the House and filibuster rule in the Senate, and the executive's exercise of the item veto.

5 There is, most certainly, some doubt about whether the electorate as presently constituted could perform an accountability role that demanded a central concern with the substance of political issues. We will return to this problem below.

6 Burnham, James, Congress and the American Tradition (Chicago, 1959)Google Scholar presents the classic exposition of this view. See also de Grazia, Alfred, Republic in Crisis: Congress Against the Executive Branch (Washington, D.C., 1965)Google Scholar.

7 As this is written (in March 1974) both houses have passed a reform bill and the prospects seem bright that the differences will be reconciled in conference.

8 This change might not offer a gain in responsiveness. On one hand, such reforms might enable the congressional point of view to prevail against the president's; legislative budget decisions, as responsive choices, might well reflect sentiments other than the executive's. On the other hand, a reformed process might cut into committee power. The substantive panels would remain open and responsive since they would continue to authorize funds through a negotiation process, but they would be constrained by the spending ceilings that the new budget committee's resolution would impose on them; they would, that is, have to bargain about a limited sum and could not freely “logroll” to accommodate multiple interests by increasing the total funds allocated. Thus, the new budgetary system might well strengthen Congress vis-à-vis the executive,, but might also lead to internal centralization of authority in the hands of the new budget committees.

9 For a cogent discussion of Congress' information problems and some proposed remedies, see Saloma, John S. III, Congress and the New Politics (Boston, 1969)Google Scholar.

10 On data systems for Congress, see Janda, Kenneth, “Information Systems for Congress,” in Alfred de Grazia (coord.), Congress: The First Branch of Government (American Enterprise Institute, 1966), pp. 415–456Google Scholar and Information Retrieval: Applications in Political Science (Indianapolis, Ind., 1968)Google Scholar.

11 My colleague Jeff Fishel has suggested that this may be an overly pessimistic conclusion. He argues that certain politically alert groups (e.g., the National Committee for an Effective Congress) have been successful in intervening selectively to alter citizen preferences about candidates—incumbents and challengers. For data which indicate that collectively, across all 435 House seats and from one election to the next, Congress' ideological character changes very little, see Sullivan, John L. and O'Connor, Robert E., “Electoral Choice and Popular Control of Public Policy: The Case of the 1966 House Elections,” American Political Science Review LXVI (1972), 1256–1268CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Fishel, , Party and Opposition (New York, 1973)Google Scholar.

12 It should be emphasized that what follows is in no way intended to minimize the importance of legislative accountability. Accountability is highly desirable and the steps noted above to make it more effective should be pursued.

13 For a description and discussion, by one of its congressional authors, of a mixed public-private program of election finance that seeks to control abuses without destroying challenger's opportunities to unseat incumbents, see Anderson, John B., Money, Interest Groups, and Politics: Realistic Reform and the Crisis of Confidence (Bloomington, Indiana, 1974)Google Scholar.

14 Other minor changes aimed at eliminating the use of dilatory tactics would make marginal improvements in the House's ability, already superior to that of the Senate, to deal decisively with pending bills.

15 These majorities would, of course, be similar to those found at present—shifting from issue to issue and created in consequence of a negotiating process.

16 For instance, the New York City Bar Association has proposed (Congress and the Public Trust, 1970) a blanket prohibition, effective six years after election, of the practice of law by sitting legislators and on the practice of members' law firms representing clients that the members cannot serve. Others seek a postemployment ban, like that imposed on former executive employees, on ex-legislators dealing with the federal government. For a summary of many of these issues of ethics, see Getz, Robert S., Congressional Ethics (New York, 1966)Google Scholar.