Waiting for Congress

...Carr and other freshmen would prefer to see head-to-head contests for House leadership posts...

...One freshman who was able to break through this knowledge barrier was Joseph L. Fisher, Virginia Democrat, who got a seat on the Ways and Means Committee and was listened to particularly on energy matters because of his background of many years with the Ford Foundation-financed Resources for the Future...

...By contrast, Franklin D. Roosevelt first reorganized the Bureau of the Budget in the late 1930s to try to deal more rationally with Federal spending...

...Furthermore, the Republicans in the House, to sustain where the showdown votes on overriding vetoes came in 1975, were much more unified in support of their President than were the Democrats in opposition to his vetoes...

...What is to be done with Congress...

...Nobody was willing to share knowledge with us," Mineta told me one day as we talked in his office between his dashes to the House floor for votes...

...Part of the disillusionment with Congress arises from totally unreasonable expectations of its role in today's world...

...The 1974 freshman class will be different, though, won't it...

...why should not the country expect Congress to do the same...

...Of course, case work involving defense or other Government contracts in a member's state or district gets personal attention because such contracts mean profits for industry and jobs for voters...

...The Democrats were unable to get together on such key issues as energy and the country's lagging economy...

...Only in 1975 did Congress really begin to study the massive Federal budget, with all its implications for the economy of the United States and much of the rest of the world...

...It was possible for the freshmen to dethrone three committee chairmen because the seniority system had been eroding for some time...

...It is the business of the Senate and House to lead public opinion, not just to follow it...

...Johnson did not work miracles...

...Despite the firm resolve of Albert, House Democratic Leader Tip O'Neill, and such other leaders as Phillip Burton, the House never was able to pull itself together on major questions...

...Although the Democrats did pull themselves together in support of legislation providing jobs for the unemployed in public agencies—a plan which was successfully vetoed by Ford—they were less successful in reaching agreement on recession-fighting tax-reduction plans...

...Albert has trouble saying no to anybody...

...they do not threaten anyone...

...And the Republicans could always count on the support of most of the dwindling but still potent band of Southern Bourbon Democrats in the House...

...In 1976, the members will be out on the hustings, promising generalities, listening to the voters but not hearing...

...In 1975, it was floundering as usual...

...only the President and the vast Federal bureaucracy under him can do that...

...And in the Senate, good old Mike Mansfield continued to let a hundred egos bloom while his assistant, the ambitious Robert Byrd of West Virginia, ran errands for the Senate potentates and patiently waited for Mansfield's retirement...

...For years the Senate Foreign Relations Committee's hearings have elucidated foreign-policy problems, and the Joint Economic Committee has performed much the same function with respect to major economic issues...

...And Carl Albert fell asleep in living color on television one night while Ford was addressing a joint session of Congress...

...After trying for six months to operate on the momentum of their initial impact on House committee chairmen, the freshmen decided in midsummer—when the energetic Norman Y. Mineta, California Democrat, a former mayor of San Jose, became their chairman—to organize committees of their own and develop knowledge on such key issues as the economy and energy...

...That is why some freshmen like Robert Carr, Michigan Democrat, believe that the new members of the House ought to be concentrating on developing changes in the leadership process rather than spending all of their time on such issues as the economy or energy...

...It is not surprising that the Mike Mansfields and the Carl Alberts are the successes in Congress: The system is made for them...

...Congress desperately needs new leadership, but it is difficult to see where it will come from...

...This is a time when basic questions are being asked about everything from the workings of the nation's economic system to the inability of government to adjust to a rapidly changing social order...

...All of us are products of change, and we were elected to get things done, and to get them done in a different way...

...Significantly, Senate and House leaders have few incentives in their hands, such as Government contracts and appointments, that can be used to influence and change votes, but the President and his White House aides have many such enticements...

...Whatever a Democratic Representative or Senator may have thought of Ford's market-and-price-oriented energy program, it was a specific plan agreed upon by the President and his aides and supported by the Administration team...

...The Senate and House Democratic leadership remained as mushy as ever...

...Perhaps, but as 1975 drew to a close on Capitol Hill there were too many disturbing indications that most of the freshmen, like most of their elders in the Senate and the House, were more concerned with reelection than with the renewal of a flaccid America in its Bicentennial year...

...And pushing everybody were those seventy-five House freshmen, who felt they had been elected to bring about change and had organized themselves into what appeared to be a potent force for good on Capitol Hill...

...In an age when communication over television is vital, the Senate and House leadership has no one who can compete on television with even an unexciting but sincere Ford...

...that had been building up for more than forty years, ever since the days of Franklin D. Roosevelt...

...Both at the beginning and end of 1975 Ford proposed tax-reduction programs which left the Democrats floundering in disagreement over the course they should take...

...at other times, as in the case of so many foreign policy and economic investigations on Capitol Hill, the President pays no attention to what Congress is putting on the public record...

...Phil Burton, who certainly would like to be leader, is a much stronger and more aggressive man, but just because he has those qualities he is feared by many of his colleagues...

...The other part of the oversight function involves committee investigations of major governmental problems or significant issues of public policy...

...In the Senate, Robert Byrd, while more conservative than Burton, is also regarded warily because of his ambition and willingness to trample on anything or anybody in his way...

...witness the Senate Watergate hearings of 1973 and the House Judiciary Committee's work in 1974...

...At the same time, however, there still is all too much of the quill-pen and snuff-box atmosphere on Capitol Hill...

...Everyone around this place seems to be looking for tenure," Carr commented as we talked about the shortcomings of the House...

...But a President, as Ford has demonstrated, can come up with an energy program without a national consensus...

...much of his arm-twisting and posturing was for effect only...

...But it's just a lot of motion...

...But what the country would seem to need on Capitol Hill are men and women who will threaten the status quo of politics, economics, and the entire social system...

...In the White House sat Gerald Ford, a former House member with many friends on Capitol Hill but nevertheless the nation's first appointed President...

...The energy issue was the best example in 1975...

...Congress is changing, but not fast enough...

...On Capitol Hill, the Democrats had almost a two-thirds majority in both the Senate and the House...

...Speaker Carl Albert had taken the pledge and actually come up with a legislative program concentrating on the nation's difficult economic problems...

...Carr has, in fact, gone so far as to call for Speaker Albert's resignation...

...In fact there still is a snuff box just inside one of the entrances to the Senate floor...

...The Senate was alive with Presidential candidates trying to polish up their records with new and exciting programs...

...A Senate with 100 members and a House with 435 members —and with lopsided Democratic majorities but with all members marching to different constituencies— cannot even lead on some key issues, as has been demonstrated during the last year...

...There are two aspects to the oversight role of Congress...

...Slowly, inexorably, Albert rose to the top, becoming first Democratic Leader and then Speaker...

...In talking about the shortcomings of the House leadership, Carr' is particularly critical of the ladder system through which House Speakers are, in effect, selected...

...At long last, too, the Congressional Budget Office and the Congressional Research Service in the Library of Congress are putting easily retrievable information into computers...

...And those meteoric freshmen were melting slowly into the musty leather-couch and cigarsmoke background of the Speaker's Lobby...

...The 1975 session began amid the euphoria still radiating from the case for impeachment of Richard Nixon built by the painstaking work of the House Judiciary Committee during 1974, and the cohesiveness of a freshman class of seventy-five Democratic Representatives who astonished the town by leading the successful effort to topple three ancient committee chairmen...

...The last time Congress tried to run the country was during the Civil War and Reconstruction, and the Congressional efforts were disastrous...

...So far there has been some evidence of the impact of this work, but not enough...

...But when the cherry blossoms started blooming everything began to fall apart...

...More record votes must be taken on the House floor now, too...

...Gradually, more and more committee sessions have been opened to public view, and now even the Senate-House conference committees where some of the worst deals are consummated are open to press and public...

...One casts Senators and Representatives as ombudsmen trying to help constituents in their dealings with the bureaucracy...

...In the case of taxes and other economic issues as well as energy, the Democrats unquestionably would have done better if they had had stronger leadership in the Senate and the House...

...Congress had muffed its big chance...

...Ford demonstrated that even a weak President who had never been elected to national office could outmaneuver a Congress inherently divided between Senate and House and Democrats and Republicans, where the real power remains in the satrapies of the committees and their chairmen...

...The process through which leaders are selected screens out people with strong views, the boat-rockers...

...But one wonders how the strong-minded and independent House freshmen would react to a strong leader like a Lyndon Johnson or even to a strong but gentle leader of the Rayburn stripe...

...The House freshmen also discovered that a Representative (or, for that matter, a Senator) can seldom influence policy unless he is a member of the committees considering a piece of legislation...

...Sometimes, as in the case of the Senate and House Watergate investigations, the committee oversight process works...

...The one major exception in 1975 involved the House vote on the oil-depletion allowance, but on other energy and economic issues the freshmen soon learned that they had little input into the legislation presented to them and other members for a vote on the House floor...

...The Budget Committees were putting some brakes on Pentagon spending and were beginning to reorient budgetary priorities...

...These Congress can do well...

...He notes that Albert was, in fact, chosen as Speaker twenty years ago when the then Speaker, the late Sam Rayburn, put Albert on the lowest rung of the leadership ladder by appointing him House Democratic Whip, or assistant leader...

...The Senator or Representative seldom gets involved in this work, but when a case has been resolved to a constituent's satisfaction he signs with a flourish the letter conveying the good news back home...

...The dawn of a new era was immediately heralded by the pack journalists of Washington who streamed into the Speaker's Lobby and the House galleries and corridors—once someone pointed out to them where the long-neglected and seldom-covered House of Representatives was located...

...On Capitol Hill they call it case work, and a good portion of the thousands of Senate and House aides spend their days as if they were insurance adjusters, sifting the mail, calling up the Veterans Administration or the Social Security Administration, trying to expedite claims or straighten out tangled skeins of red-tape...

...So we decided that we would have to get together to develop our own knowledge and share it among ourselves...

...so, in fact, do 90 per cent of the liberals around here...

...When the 1975 session of Congress prepared to adjourn late in the year, the Democrats were still squabbling over an enejgy policy, smarting over the way Ford beat them to the political hustings with a tax-deduction proposal for 1976, and arguing over what to do about a bankrupt New York City...

...In 1975, Senate and House committees spread out for public view at long last the transgressions of the Central Intelligence Agency and other governmental intelligence activities...

...Ford successfully vetoed such major Democratic reform measures as legislation controlling strip-mining and a bill providing jobs for the unemployed...

...The irony of the freshmen's frustrations is that Congress has changed enormously over the last few years...

...Poking around the dusty nooks and crannies of the Senate and the House, one found but a single ray of genuine hope at the end of the year: To the astonishment of old Washington hands, the new Congressional budget process with Senate and House Budget Committees and a large, professional Congressional Budget Office designed to offset the power of the President's Office of Management and Budget seemed to be working surprisingly well as it huffed and puffed its way through a labyrinth of goals, ceilings, and allocations...

...All you see are these eager young aides—every single one of them with a moustache—rushing around trying to attach themselves to a fashionable cause or a Presidential candidate...

...By contrast, the Democrats on Capitol Hill have been all over the energy field, with views ranging all the way from stringent rationing of supplies to an absolute do-nothing attitude...

...Even with knowledge, however, it will be difficult to pull the freshmen together, let alone all of the House Democrats...

...Congress cannot govern the country...

...And where is Congress...

...Nobody does anything up there except talk...

...The Congressional role today is primarily that of oversight, and, once one drains the humdrum day-today politics from the work of the enormous staffs built up on Capitol Hill in recent years, that is what most of the ambitious young men with moustaches are spending their time doing in their overcrowded, rabbit-warren quarters in the Senate and House Office Buildings...

...Johnson was able to lord it over the Senate for a few years in the 1950s because he and a majority of the Senate were sympathetic to the extraordinarily popular Eisenhower Presidency...

...Elsewhere in the House, standing in line behind Albert, are men like Tip O'Neill, who is cast in much the same live-and-let-live mold...

...There are unquestionably some potential leaders among the freshmen, but it is not realistic to expect them to emerge quickly...

...In Congress, as elsewhere in Washington, knowledge is an important component of power, and the freshmen found to their chagrin that however much they might disagree with committee chairmen and other senior members of important committees, these potentates had an intimate knowledge of issues, and it was respected by the majority of their colleagues...

...The basic trouble with Congress is that the members who stay with it and amass seniority and power learn, for the most part, that compromise is the easiest way to electoral and legislative success...

...Nixon, sulking and ailing in exile in San Clemente, had taken with him the shattered aura of the all-powerful and all-knowing Presidency Julius Duscha is director of the Washington Journalism Center and formerly covered national politics for The Washington Post...

...For a few weeks last winter, the renaissance of Congress did seem to be at hand...

...Elsewhere on Capitol Hill, however, there was little to cheer...

...The unity achieved by the freshmen Democrats when they sought to dethrone committee chairmen disappeared as each freshman attempted to divine the wishes of his constituency when tough decisions had to be made on the House floor...

...The Congressional leadership is weak and seldom can pull itself together in agreement on a major issue...

...And as Ford has shown during the last year, he is ready to put on the pressure to get the votes to sustain his vetoes...

...But in addition to exercising the vital oversight functions, Congress ought to be able to develop and affect national policies, and it is in this area, in particular, that the House Democratic freshmen have become so bitterly disillusioned...

...There is, of course, no consensus in the country on energy, and the Congressional fumbling of the issue reflects this lack of agreement...