The claim that contemporary historical scholarship has ignored the twentieth-century U.S. Congress is a great understatement. During the past two decades, most social and cultural historians minimized the study of government institutions, policy makers, and policies. They characterized these aspects of American history as elitist, irrelevant, and even illegitimate (Leff 1995; Leuchtenburg 1986).The ultimate villain in this scholarly narrative was Congress, considered to be an insulated haven for white male elites who sub-vert the democratic process in favor of vested interest groups.When Congress appeared in a few academic books, it was treated as an archaic institution that functions as either a road block or a rubber stamp to proposals that emanate from the executive branch or from mass social movements.Those interested in the modern history of Congress can turn only to the work of journalists such as John Jacobs (1995) and Richard Cohen (1999) who rely on political biography in attempts to understand the institution’s past.

Once upon a time, historians and political scientists expended a great deal of effort in tracing the complex development of the United States Congress in the twentieth century—a time, especially from the 1930s onward, during which Congress faced a remarkable expansion in government activity as a surge of new concerns, foreign and domestic, and, as a result, an unprecedented load of business, all but overwhelmed the institution. During this same time, Congress’s role within the American political system has been Social Science transformed in the face of the rise of the imperial presidency, the Supreme Court’s insistence on changing rules of representation, and the consequent shift in the institution’s makeup and internal power structure. Finally, public perceptions of Congress, increasingly negative as they have become, have had some significant impact on the transformation of Congress within the American political system as well (Sundquist 1981; Harris 1993; Rieselbach 1994).

The growth of administrative government in the United States since the turn of this century has meant the gradual rise of statutory enactments as a (if not the) primary source of law. Despite the burgeoning importance of the work of legislatures, legal scholars were relatively slow to devote deserved attention to statutes and the bodies that enacted them.The familiar rhythm of the common law continued to draw the bulk of theoretical analysis.

Any lingering concern about the relative neglect of statutes and legislative bodies may now be put aside. The last two decades have seen a remarkable collaboration among scholars in the disciplines of law, economics, and political science concerning how we can better understand what motivates legislatures and how we should interpret their work product.1 This attention to statutes and the legislative process has caused scholars to engage in a great amount of congressional historiography, as they test their theories against legislative and political practice. Historians are noticeably absent from this interdisciplinary collaboration, a state of affairs this roundtable is designed to address. Everyone, it seems, is doing congressional historiography—everyone, that is, except the historians.

The study of the institutional development of the U.S. House of Representatives, long a mainstay of traditional scholarship, has recently undergone a revival with the rise of rational choice approaches of interpretation. In earlier years, most research was highly formal and descriptive; the emphasis was on legislative offices and parliamentary rules. While scholars noted changes in the formal structure of the House of Representatives, their descriptions of these changes consisted mostly of anecdotal accounts in which theoretical explanations played little part. More recently, many scholars have defined institutions primarily or even solely in terms of procedural rules and, from that perspective, have focused on organizational form as an important factor in the empowerment of legislative coalitions and the expression of member preferences. However, because rules are frequently viewed as a rigid structural setting for legislative behavior, institutional change has often been downplayed as outside the scope of most research.

Thanks in part to the impeachment of President Bill Clinton, the popular reputation of Congress has recently plum meted to perhaps an all-time low.As the Senate deliberated in late January 1999, Jay Leno captured what seemed to be widespread disgust with Capitol Hill. He cracked, “We’ve reached a point where Congress does not affect anyone’s life, so we look at it as entertainment. It’s like the Jerry Springer show, except everyone has a law degree. They can’t fix health care, they can’t fix Social Security, so we look at them to provide a few laughs on a daily basis” (Providence Journal 1999).

Leno’s wisecrack adds to a long history of jokes and laments about Congress, which throughout this century has taken far more hits from the public than has the executive branch. To listen only briefly to such criticism is to hear that Congress is inefficient, unresponsive, obstructionist, irresponsible, and undemocratic in its operations. Most often we are told that Congress suffers from two related weaknesses: it rolls over to please powerful interest groups, and it cravenly dreads reprisal from constituents.

Congressional scholars have a unique opportunity to reconnect the histories of American state and society, a task central to the new generation of political historians. As MarkLeff (1995:852) recently argued, social and political historians have come to realize that they “ignored the other at their peril” and that “interaction was the only way to interrogate power—how it was structured and changed, where it was contested, how it was exerted, what its impact was, and what assumptions shaped the discourse that framed it” (see also Gillon 1997).To accomplish the challenge of integrating social and political history, congressional historians will have to examine how the institution’s development related to external forces. Much of what has been written about Congress thus far remains insular.

A handful of books published in the past two decades suggest how integration can be accomplished. In Sectionalism and American Political Development 1880–1980, Richard Bensel (1984) situates the internal development of Congress within the larger context of sectional tensions between the “industrial northern core” and the “underdeveloped southern and western periphery.” He pays close attention to key policy decisions and the ongoing struggle between decentralized committee and centralized partisan power to show the influence of sectionalism.

Social theory provides two opposing views about the role played by mass communications in modernizing America. Mass society theorists, including José Ortega y Gasset (1932), George Seldes (1938), and Joseph Bensman and Bernard Rosenberg (1963), and also critical theorists, especially Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno (1991 [1944]) and Jürgen Habermas (1989), maintained that the mass press weakens authentic forms of community, whereas, in contrast, Chicago School sociologists, especially Robert Park(1971 [1922]), contended that the newspaper, notably the ethnic press, buffers the individual against the brutalizing effects of the city’s impersonality and disorganization.

Instead of encouraging reflective and rational thought, the commercial press, according to Habermas (1989: 195), is both emblem and harbinger of the decay of civil society as it reinforces the totalizing processes of modernity and offers the public crass and stultifying banalities.

Colorblind Injustice largely derives from my workas an expert witness in federal voting rights cases. A vignette from one particularly important case, Garza v.Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors(1990), and a relatively brief summary may give those who have not yet read the book both a feel for its scope and a sense of how the issues it deals with impact real people.

At an international historical conference in the mid-1980s, I met a young Russian historian, Sergei Stankevich, who specialized in America and who had read and liked some of my work. In the last few years of the Soviet Union, Sergei’s political career took off, and his fluent English and keen insights into both countries won him the attention of U.S. and Soviet media. In late 1989, when Sergei was brought to Los Angeles for the first showing of an American television documentary that prominently featured him, he called me from a Beverly Hills hotel and invited me for a drinkth e next day. But because I was working on the Garza case and had scheduled an all-day appointment to give a deposition before a lawyer in Century City (which is where people work who can afford to live in Beverly Hills), I regretfully declined, saying, ‘‘I’m sorry, Sergei, but I’m being deposed tomorrow.” There was a long pause on the other end of the line.

Colorblind Injustice is an angry, ambitious, and very valuable book. In it,Kousser argues that the Second Reconstruction—that is, the post-1965 edifice of law and institutions securing essential African American and Latino civil rights and effective political voice—has been disastrously undermined, possibly mortally so, by the distorted, ignorant, or malicious (and, ultimately, to Kousser, dangerous) misinterpretations of the history of American race relations and of the meaning of the nation’s voting rights laws and Reconstruction-era constitutional amendments.The culprits in this tale include, among other members of the Rehnquist Supreme Court, Justices Sandra Day O’Connor and ClarenceThomas; political scientist AbigailThernstrom,who believes that past discrimination against racial minorities never justifies raceconscious remedies; overzealous Republican (and Democratic, though more of the former than the latter) party partisans; and a lot of additional white politicians, officials, and judges ranging in localities from Los Angeles to North Carolina.

Critical reviews of social science research such as that presented in Colorblind Injustice typically take one of two approaches. The most popular approach evaluates the merits of the research and includes an appraisal of the logical coherence of the guiding theory or questions, the validity of the inferences made from the empirical observations, and the like.The second approach evaluates the policy implications of the research conclusions. Here I take the second rather than the first approach because I find Kousser’s research to be a masterful demonstration that racial motivations produced the electoral laws and redistricting efforts in Los Angeles,Memphis, Georgia, North Carolina, and Texas between the 1950s and 1990. Furthermore, Kousser shows how the development of Supreme Court doctrine concerning the use of racial criteria in redrawing electoral districts is logically flawed and a departure from legal precedents set in the 1950s and 1960s.The current trend toward a standard of colorblindness ignores the history of discrimination against blacks and Latinos and perpetuates racial injustice. Hence, the title of the book.

It is no small task to provide an account of voting rights in both the First and Second Reconstructions. It is hard to think of many with the combined expertise in both fields who could have pulled it off as well as J. Morgan Kousser has in Colorblind Injustice (1999).

Kousser has long been a historian and a social scientist. In his earlier work , such as The Shaping of Southern Politics (1974), Kousser was clearly one of the leading proponents and artful innovators in the use of quantitative methods in historical analysis: he did not merely import old ideas from quantitative social scientists. Now, in Colorblind Injustice, we see Kousser again combining his thorough and deft historian’s touch with insights from social scientific approaches.

The key explanatory theme in Colorblind Injustice, I believe, is captured in two terse sentences: “Culture is fragile. Institutions are tough” (366). From these premises come Kousser’s central ideas about how to explain the progress and retrogression of minority voting rights and why we should care so much about the set of Supreme Court rulings beginning with Shaw v.Reno in 1993.

The often kind and always interesting comments of Larry Griffin, David James, and Bradley Palmquist touch different aspects of Colorblind Injustice. Let me respond to them, in effect, in chronological order, according to which periods of history illuminate the comments the most. Palmquist points out that institutions like the Supreme Court may suddenly reverse their decisions, as the Court did in the !“switch in time that saved nine” after FDR had proposed to pack the body in 1937, or as it over-turned Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) in Brown v. Board of Education (1954). But as the Brown example suggests, it often takes a long time to overturn precedents, and that is the case with minority voting rights, as well. It was 25 years after Richard Nixon’s “southern strategy,” 24 years after Earl Warren ceased to be Chief Justice, and 23 years after Nixon proposed to water down the Voting Rights Act before the overwhelmingly Republican Supreme Court dared to seriously undermine African American and Latino political rights. Even then, they hesitated to attack the Voting Rights Act itself directly. Major institutions are tough in two senses: their policies often have large impacts, and the institutions, including those as tiny as the nine-member Supreme Court, are difficult to change.