Washington Report: Post-Watergate Reconstruction-II
Sisyphus
repentance. And only in repentance can the unity of Christ be found. Only the repentance of the church can give it the power to act in unity and inspire the affluent to share. Thus, the process...
...Many members of Congress still want to play handsies with Presidents...
...Boiling of Missouri, have made careers out of trying to make these pathways fairer and more open to public view...
...The effect, in terms of procedural reforms, is favorable because newcomers have fewer old-school ties to the past and more ties to the future...
...At that time, one committee chairman returned a draft bill submitted by the Interior Department with the observation that his committee needed no help from the Executive in doing what the Constitution assigned the Congress to do---legislate...
...The history of the Senate reads differently...
...Perhaps, the Congress can get itself together and at least effectively perform supervisory or oversight functions, even if it can't legislate effectively and promptly...
...Philip Burton of California, Thompson of New Jersey and O'Hara of Michigan, who have gained a chairmanship or some other power slot...
...Forty years ago, the House met to discuss its operations...
...More useful to breaking the influence that economic interests have on some legislative committees would be to alter the procedures for referral and management of individual pieces of legislation...
...the Senate, from 26 to 100...
...This would further enable each body to master its committees...
...others turn away from their overall Congressional responsibilities...
...Woodrow Wilson, as a Congressional scholar, phrased it more elegantly when he noted that the Congress consists of ambassadors from different lands coming together to exchange favors...
...In an advanced industrial State, is the elected national legislature finding it too difficult to carry out its primary role assigned it by the Constitution...
...But they are beginning to place a lesser emphasis on these...
...Neither the French National Assembly nor the late President Pompidou is a political guide to follow, France being such a wretched political state, but an observation of his does point to a dilemma of Congress...
...There is greater procedural latitude for discussion simply because it has fewer members...
...Thus, the process by which God can save his people and his world begins with Christians really hearing those cries of anguish...
...In our times, the candidates who defeated Douglas of Illinois, Gruening of Alaska and Morse of Oregon have illustrated no great causes---and show no signs of ever doing so...
...This would enable the full House or Senate to be the master, not as now the servant, of its legislative committees (Congress in session is Congress on display, Wilson wrote, while Congress in committee is Congress at work...
...others, such as Senator McGee of Wyoming, advance the argument that, in the field of foreign affairs for example, the President should be the primary instigator and executor of foreign policy...
...In the 435-member House, the proportion of newcomers is even higher than in the Senate...
...One of four Senators has been elected since 1970 and more than one-half of the 100 Senators within the last 10 years...
...The 1971 Legislative Reorganization Act represented, among other things, a useful effort to provide an effective information-data service for the Congress...
...most feel that, as Congressional reformers, they would be impeded (i.e., punished) in achieving their legislative objectives by party leaders who feel that procedural reforms are directed at them personally...
...Conflicts are arranged beforehand by consensus and sleight-of-hand...
...A measure of campaign-financing reform has recently been enacted...
...OccassionaUy, Congress has responded after prodding...
...In these times, committee chairmen have been publicly quoted as saying their committee couldn't act until they received such-andsuch a draft bill from the White House...
...If these two new committees avoid a staffing hassle now developing, there is a decent chance that the Congressional David can match Goliath, the Executive...
...2--Individual liberties--and their erosion by the demands of government and corporations...
...The Senate and House could only benefit by scheduling such a discussion during the lackadaisical days of the new Congress which will convene next January...
...The I946 LaFollette-Monroney Act, although much praised, did little more than establish a pension system to lure time-servers out of the Congress...
...At times, in the federal system of shared powers, Presidents have grabbed not only the bed-clothes, but also usurped the bed itself...
...House members, such as Rep...
...Until recently, the General Accounting Office (GAO), the investigatory arm of the Congress, confined its activities to reports of such momentous scandals as the ordering of too many paperclips by this agency or that bureau...
...WASHINGTON REPORT POST-WATERGATE RECONSTRUCTION--U From the beginning, the Congress never really has pulled itself together...
...Today, as yesteryear, the Congress, in legislative and administrative ways, behaves as if it consisted of 535 morn-and-pop grocery stores...
...For many years, there's been a huge volume of literature about reform of the Congress...
...The WCC plans to institute educational programs in all the member churches to teach its people to listen, and hear...
...For an assemblage of undeniably bright and, mostly, well-intentioned men (519) and women (16), there is a lack of intellectual curiosity not only about the legislation which they declaim about and vote on, but also an astounding lack of interest in the historical foundations and evolution of the Congress itself, in which the delegates to the Constitutional Convention placed so much faith and hope...
...not that it has much farther to go...
...They still agree that procedure affects substance...
...The two bodies of the Congress have not been without their individual and collective achievements...
...There are no counterparts to the Bollings of the House...
...3--The excesses of technology which uproot man and force him into artificial environments...
...The history of the House may be read in the biographies of its great presiding officers, its Speakers-Clay, who dominated President Monroe...
...Of course, fairer committee procedures and committeeassignment systems are needed...
...Reed, who ran a tight ship in the 1890s...
...Moreover, unlike in the House, few staff members are interested in such reforms...
...Bills as introduced would be referred sequentially to these numbered committees...
...This would occur at the cost of continuing to permit these departments to maintain their legislative initiative, a state-of-affairs that members of Congress would have rejected 50 years ago...
...SISYPHUS 4 October 1974:I0...
...By means of honest elections, a measure of public financing, fair and open voter registration statutes and more issue-oriented campaigns by better-calibre candidates...
...The Watergate scandals show that the Congress could be permanently maimed beyond rehabilitation...
...Not that the House is without members who would be effective Speakers Anderson of Illinois, Boiling of Missouri and Udall of Arizona, among others...
...Yes, contests take place, But reliable spokesmen at the cutting-edge of issues no longer sit in the Senate...
...Viewing the process is like being at an ITT board of director's meeting...
...Congress has recently established Senate and House budget committees, backed by a Congressional budget office, in hopes of matching the budget-makers of the President...
...In truth, it never has achieved the political counterpart of running the mile in under four minutes...
...Congress has demonstrated its willingness to be pistol-whipped by Presidents since FDR...
...Oversight is a function that Congress and its committees have generally neglected...
...Seniority, manifest in its most destructive form in the House, has consequently been somewhat allieviated...
...It falls behind the House in an ability to generate "meat-andpotatoes" legislation...
...The House has increased from its original 65 members to 435 today...
...JOHN KNOBLE (Father John Knoble, an Episcopal priest, writes a regular column for the New Haven Register...
...It would unhinge the tax-writing committees of the House and Senate, which are friendly to corporations, but also the Senate Labor and Public Welfare Committee and the House Education and Labor Committee, which are correspondingly "stacked" with members favoring orthodox liberal-labor points-of-view...
...Such a procedure would raise hob with the "big interests," not only of business but of labor...
...One proposal is to return to a procedure of the early years when major legislation was discussed first by the full House or Senate before referral to a committee...
...If the white-collars begin breathing their hot breath on the collective neck of the Congress as in 4 October 1974:8 the 1930s depression, then the legislators will legislate...
...Presidents and exterior events continue to push it toward the farthest margins of our national political life...
...others simply want to hustle their way into the power structure...
...housing "starts" haven't been lower since World War II...
...It is more "show-than-go," although it receives more press coverage than the House...
...Even more fundamental, but probably unacceptable to members of Congress whatever their political orientation, would be to alter interest-ridden legislative committees...
...The issue of internal reform in the Senate has attracted little interest...
...public financing of Presidential elections may become law this year...
...The pending BoRing reforms are being now opposed by Reps...
...Consensus politics does not address itself to epic problems afflicting us in recent years: economic depression and exclusion of non-whites from American life and military commitments in Southeast Asia...
...these, they say, will do more to improve the Congress than all the internal reforms put together...
...Seldom discussed is an alternative direction--the legislative branch should give more emphasis to "oversight" of Presidential departments...
...The percentage of inflation is running at two digits...
...wholesale prices rose 3.9 percent in August, the largest one-month increase in 25 years...
...On economic problems, the Congress' white male middle-class orientation is even more noticeable...
...Meanwhile, it confines itself to a handout for the lower orders of so-called "public-service" jobs--honorific misnomer for makeshift, featherbedding employment that leaves neither the employing agency satisfied nor the employe with any pride...
...Moreover, in the past, bills, those disapproved as well as approved within committees, were reported to the full House or Senate...
...But, generally, these achievements have come as a result of being pushed and plodded by exterior events and by Presidents who knew what they wanted...
...The first Senate met nine times in the late winter of 1789 before it achieved a quorum...
...Congressional reform may be said to signify three areas: (1) reform of Congressional operations, such as the committee system or seniority...
...Committee No...
...In the populous House, more so than in the Senate, detailed procedures exist that establish pathways for legislation and shape it along the way...
...The first House of Representatives, 25 times...
...Moreover, in recent months, a note of reappraisal has been struck among some veteran Congressional reformers...
...Bland men looking for bland solutions...
...But it is.now becoming clear that, even if Bolling's reforms of long standing are put into effect, there are few bold, competent leaders available to make the most of any reorganization...
...Now that they've a piece of the action, they're not about to let go any more than did the Southern reactionaries who dominated the House committees into the 1960s...
...The executive sector of public government is more agile, although not necessarily wiser, at directing the public's business...
...Actually, "Congressional reform" is a portmanteau word, meaning it lacks definition...
...They are taking a second-look at their own proposals...
...Further, many Senators are busy running for President...
...But the courageous, plain-speaking men of the Senate, be they Tories or Populists, become fewer and fewer...
...One is reminded, as one or another biU is put together in the Senate cloakrooms, of the definition of a camel as a horse assembled by a committee...
...Each tries to beg, borrow and barter the best for itself...
...And, in recent months it has become apparent that some House Democrats, hitherto regarded as "reformers," were, in fact, only in the battle until they were admitted to the precincts of power...
...Congress should halt its slide...
...It never will...
...The disgruntled civil servant, columnist Jack Anderson and the Washington Post are the customary sources of news of transgressions by Presidential departments...
...But it may not need the detailed overhaul that some reformers hitherto have suggested...
...There are three sectors that need attention: 1--The drive of Presidents to increase their powers at the expense of Congress...
...To a degree, flagrant abuses of entrenched Congressional power have been mitigated simply by electoral defeats and enforced retirements...
...This could be done by identifying the legislative committees of the Senate by number (1, 2, 3, etc...
...The Senate has had fewer titans than the House, particularly in recent years when its personal and committee staffs play such a vital role...
...In practical terms, it's easier in the Senate to by-pass the tight grip of a committee chairman and bring a neglected issue to attention in the Senate chamber...
...Conceivably, the two appropriations committees could be exempted from such a procedure...
...But it has done its institutional duty from time-to-time...
...One does not have to be a Jeremiah to be alarmed about the decline of Congress...
...Yet there seems to be no general awareness of this in either body of Congress...
...Others, particularly House members, believe they're elected to get what they can for themselves and their constituents, but that, overall, the reignCommonweal: 9 ing President is, and should be the "Big Daddy" of us all...
...Private sectors are more powerful and more knowledgeable, though not necessarily wiser...
...Procedural reform, that Congressional dose-of-salts, is not primarily the remedy, they are now suggesting tentatively to each other...
...They have attempted to convert the issue of House reform into something along the lines of a Brooklyn clubhouse brawl over patronage...
...and (3) campaign-financing reform of Congressional primary and general elections--limitations on contributions an dexpenditures, for example...
...One long-standing hope has been that Congressional reform would materially alter this unresponsiveness...
...Yet as long as white unemployment remains at about 3 percent or less for male white-collars, the Congress isn't going to respond effectively and energetically to a jobless rate of 6 percent nationally~and double that, or worse, for non-whites...
...The Congress, on some issues, is almost the last institution to respond~even the last to understand what this issue is about, as in the ease of civil rights and the Vietnam war...
...and, occasionally, Raybum...
...Of course, the Congressional machinery does need alteration...
...However, the great issues, domestic or foreignmsuecessfuUy or unsuceessfuUy resolvedmhave also been refracted through the prism of great personalities, among them, Webster, Calhoun, La FoUette and Borah...
...An alert Congress would have exposed the Nixon Administration's efforts to alter the federal system...
...Nor, as many reformers realize in reevaluating their earlier efforts, does the Congess need to match in numbers both the staffing and computers marshaled so formidably by the Defense, Health-Education-and-Welfare and other departments of the Executive Branch...
...Congress does damn little investigating on its own--at least, of substantive matters...
...1 would perhaps in the course of a Congressional session be assigned an environmental bill, a trade bill, a foreign-affairs bill and a healthservices bill...
...2) reform of the Congressional political parties, such as the operation of their respective caucuses...
...for example, instead of by name (Agriculture, Finance, Foreign Relations, Interior, etc...
...Seldom has the Congress evidenced a sense of self as an institution, unlike the Presidency...
...Cannon, albeit with a negatively charged vision...
...Were it institutionally fit, the Congress, as overseer, could insist to President Ford, following his act of pardon to Nixon, that it is one thing to temper justice with mercy, but it is quite another to tamper with justice---and force Ford to back-off...
...The discussion lasted nearly one week...
...Larger staffing and more computers won't do the chore, however, without the will on the part of members of Congress both to monitor more effectively Presidential departments and regain the loss of appropriation power...
...But since Rayburn returned to his native Texas to die in 1961, there's been no effective Speaker...
Vol. 101 • October 1974 • No. 1
