It is as one who has experienced this astounding, rapid and unthinkable transformation in my own world (and resisted much of it along the way) that I look at the tumult in Congress and think I know what is going on. In the same span of time I am talking about they have gone from government by junta to a kind of quasi-democratic system. They have gone from unaccountability to open sessions, sunshine caucuses and unending threats of insurrection against those in authority. When I came to Washington in the early ’60s, the conversation was about whether the Speaker of the House or the committee chairmen should have more power, not whether both should be stripped of their capacity to control. Some of us were passionate would-be reformers of the dreadful, authoritarian rules, but we had to settle for very modest victories. The leadership controlled the member’s campaign funds, committee assignments and general ability to provide for his constituents and get a good reputation. Politics and patronage were the means of getting most everything done-the good as well as the bad.
I would cite the 1963 civil-rights March on Washington as the moment when big-time change began. It is hard for those who were not around to imagine how menacing that benign, peaceful demonstration seemed to the old order, how much fear and disapproval preceded it. A lot of members of Congress fled town. But while that march produced none of the destruction or violence that had been anticipated, it did mark the beginning of the disintegration of the congressional leadership’s lock on power, a heightening of direct popular pressure on the membership which, in turn, became more responsive to that pressure.
Eventual changes in funding, so that every member got his own money, and technological advances that allowed them to communicate constantly and directly with their constituencies made these members ever less dependent on the congressional hierarchs and more dependent on the folks who elected or bankrolled them. And, importantly, over the years reforms were enacted that included adding specialized staffs, professionals in a wide variety of fields so the members wouldn’t be at such a disadvantage in dealing with the administration on difficult issues. Offices of legislators were enlarged too. The old days of a couple of aides per member who did it all and a few top chairmen who said yes or no were past, as dead as the day of the autocrat editor and his handful of generalist-reporters who were willing and able to write 50-inch stories on deadline on any subject at all.
The present plight of the Congress is that it has become this hybrid creature: huge, unwieldy, unmanageable and, in many respects, unwilling to be managed either politically, as it used to be, or professionally as any other institution of its size and complexity would be. For one thing, each of the 435 members of the House and 100 members of the Senate is the unquestioned head of his or her office and organization, the person to whom all deference goes. To govern these people is to govern 535 baronies. For another, there is still enough political trading and patronage in all the workings of the institution to confound anybody’s idea of rational management or orderly leadership. The place is half this/half that, and the members want both. They have hung on to certain perks and privileges and old ways. They also want the advantages and the reputation of a modern, well-managed organization.
The trouble all this was bound to lead to is now apparent everywhere. Tom Foley, who came to one kind of Congress and now is presiding over another, is being blamed, unfairly, I think, for the members’ own embarrassments and derelictions. He is being criticized by some for not protecting them from exposure by the ethics committee and others for not exposing the malpractices more quickly and thoroughly. It is not even a little bit clear what kind of governance (some where between the junta and the town meeting) or what kind of administration (somewhere between what-the-hell, desk-drawer management and the efficient, business-school structure) they want or would submit to. But any rational variation is going to be hard to develop and achieve in this one-of-a-kind, sprawling, power-center-ridden institution.
And meanwhile real problems develop. More interesting by far than the whinings of those legislators who feel their leader should have protected them from themselves in the House banking messlet are the voices of those, especially in the Senate, denouncing the institution for its inability now to conduct its major business. This is news. For these men–Warren Rudman of New Hampshire, John Danforth of Missouri-are not grinding personal axes and they are not relatively powerless members, as has been the case in the past, complaining that the power boys are preventing action. They are the power boys of the 1980s and ’90s themselves, saying: it can’t be done. They do not blame only the institution of Congress, but also, and critically, a public that wants it all, an administration that has no spine and a network of lobbies that serve single interests shortsightedly.
It is these men’s indictment that you should listen to and that should finally get the Congress itself to look honestly at its condition. The complaints of errant members about a leadership that is alternately denounced for being too highhanded and too acquiescent, too tough and too weak should be seen less as a valid critique of those leaders than as a commentary on the strange and unworkable condition into which the institution has let itself develop.
