House Rules

...But even more important to the rise of the Republicans in the South, Polsby argues, were the changing demographics of the region, resulting, most significantly, from the migration of substantial numbers of northerners following the introduction of air conditioning in the 1950s...

...Polsby's How Congress Evolves is crisply written and argued, moving logically toward an explanation of how Congress changes over time...

...His focus is the transformation of the House Democratic caucus from a highly divided and inert body during the leadership of Sam Rayburn (1940 to 1961), who had to use all his considerable political skill to hold it together, into the chief instrument of congressional reform in the late 1960s and early 1970s...

...This decline was the result of the message the new rules conveyed to committee chairmen, namely, that they owed their allegiance not to fellow committee members but rather to the party machinery responsible for installing them in their positions...

...Today, the centers of power in Congress have shifted to party leaders and caucuses, the seniority system has been significantly modified, and congressional business is conducted largely in the open...

...A full decade before the passage of the Voting Rights Act, Republicans could already claim a safe seat in St...

...When put together with Zelizer's On Capitol Hill, however, it suggests an interesting picture of congressional reform...

...When Majority Leader Bill Frist proposed last fall reforming the rule to allow debate on judicial nominees to be ended by a simple majority (as opposed to the sixty votes required to invoke cloture), his proposal was denounced by many Democrats as a cheap political trick...

...Why isn't that a surprise...

...Having wrenched the committee and subcommittee chairmanships away from the old guard, they weren't about to give up the positions of power they had just gained...

...Still, as Zelizer points out, House Republicans were able to turn the party-oriented environment they inherited from the Democrats to their advantage following their return to power in 1994: "After more than a decade of attacking Democrats for using special rules to mishandle the minority, Republicans turned to the same provisions as a way to bury legislation or stifle looming threats to the party agenda from Democrats or uncontrollable Republicans...

...But the diminished autonomy of committees has not meant the return to centralized party control, since the number of decentralizing influences in Congress (including the media's focus on the politics of scandal to help bring down influential legislators) have increased over time...

...Polsby, a veteran observer of America's political institutions, explains how the House of Representatives evolved from the late 1930s, when the coalition of Republicans and conservative Democrats first appeared, to today's institution of sharply drawn lines of demarcation between two solidified party caucuses...

...In the end, political reform has always been fundamentally about politics...

...Like Zelizer, Polsby acknowledges the importance of the dramatic increase in voter registration following the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which strengthened the liberal factions of the Democratic party and led to the movement out of the party of conservatives and newly registered white voters...

...This group was joined by a "reform coalition" of good-government activists representing the interests of the suburban middle class that came together in the late 1960s under the banner of Common Cause and a number of allied groups...

...Unlimited debate has been a favorite target of congressional reformers for much of the twentieth century...

...These included deposing three sitting committee chairmen, pressuring a fourth to resign, weakening the once-powerful House Ways and Means Committee, and making a number of key changes in Senate procedures as well, including opening up most hearings to the public (achieved several years earlier in the House) and lowering the number of votes needed to invoke cloture and terminate debate...

...By taking on the mantle of reform—and claiming the proposed changes will advance some democratic value like reducing the influence of money in politics or making government officials more accountable—reformers seek the moral high ground that will strengthen what is often a purely partisan agenda...

...The Budget Act of 1974, for example, which allowed the House and Senate to gain some measure of control over tax and spending policy...

...This transformation was achieved through the decline in the impact of southern conservatives, a decline brought on by the rise of the Republican party in the South...

...The growing assertiveness of the Democratic caucus would bring about a corresponding decline not only in the power of committee chairmen but also in the spirit of committee bipartisanship that characterized the work of most of the key committees, including Appropriations and Ways and Means...

...As it happens, some congressional reforms do strengthen Congress...

...Fifty years ago, Congress was an institution largely insulated from public scrutiny, its power held by committees dominated by southern Democrats unresponsive to party leaders, its meetings generally held in closed session, its key votes often unrecorded, and its operations rarely reported by the press...

...One can see similar patterns in proposed reforms of the Senate...

...The Democrats wanted to eliminate the filibuster when it was a tool favored by southern conservatives to thwart civil-rights legislation...

...This trend would continue from the 1960s on, when "north-to-south migration accelerated the transformation of the South into a region showing greater similarities to other parts of the country with its suburban Republicans and retirees voting according to habits they had picked up in their places of origin...

...The reform coalition worked to chip away at the power of committees and their chairmen, helping to set the stage for the dramatic changes that would follow in the wake of the post-Watergate congressional elections of 1974...

...According to Julian Zelizer in his new volume On Capitol Hill: The Struggle to Reform Congress and Its Consequences, 1948-2000, these changes were the culmination of several waves of institutional reform, begun in the 1950s and driven originally by a group of liberal House Democrats and their allies who favored civil-rights legislation...

...But during the same Congress, an initiative in the House to rationalize outdated committee jurisdictions was torpedoed— because, to a much greater extent than the budget reforms, it infringed on the power of too many members...

...Petersburg, Florida, previously a resort area during the winter months...

...What we tend to forget is that the committee system itself was a reform from the early part of the century, born in rebellion against the autocratic rule of Speaker "Uncle Joe" Cannon...

...But for both sides—whenever they are out of power, and sometimes even when they are in power but with internal divisions—the reform of congress has been a hardy perennial of American politics...

...In the name of transcending politics—under the banner of institutional improvement—the reform of Congress has been largely about power: who has it, and how the reformers can get that power to achieve their political objectives...

...But the reform of political institutions is often more about changing who has power than actually making the institutions perform better...

...It should be read by anyone serious about the subject of how political institutions evolve...

...In recent years, however, they've discovered a fondness for the rule of unlimited debate and have taken advantage of it with unprecedented regularity to frustrate the will of the majority...

...At the same time, "all but ignored by observers, the Republicans were running a far more ideologically compact and hierarchical operation," with committee assignments dominated by a coalition of senior members from the large state delegations...

...These include the "growing strength of the president and the courts, and an adversarial news media...

...Actually, most changes in Congress over time have less to do with specific initiatives from the inside than with changes in the larger political context...

...But because he fails to distinguish among the various types of reforms, he omits the most obvious explanation, which is that many if not most of them were never aimed at strengthening Congress as an institution in the first place...

...These developments, Polsby contends, helped set the stage for the intensely partisan battles that have dominated the House for the past twenty years...

...Zelizer's study is best when it demonstrates how reforms were made possible by such developments as the Supreme Court's reapportionment decisions of the 1960s and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, both of which weakened the hold of the deep South over the Democratic caucuses in both the House and Senate...

...In How Congress Evolves: Social Bases of Institutional Change, Nelson Polsby argues that the reforms of the 1960s and 1970s can best be understood as the result of a complex series of social and demographic changes that brought the politics of the South into alignment with the rest of the country...

...And many of the members of Congress who David Lowe is vice president for government and external relations at the National Endowment for Democracy...

...Reform of the judicial system has long been a rallying cry of Republicans, and reform of the campaign finance laws is a banner under which many Democrats have marched...

...Zelizer offers a number of reasons for the fact that, despite several generations of reform, "Congress has not emerged as the dominant branch of government...

...led the charge against this proposed reform were the same members who had fought earlier that year to weaken the southern-dominated committee system...