Good Legislation Has Nothing to Do With It
Shapiro, Walter
Good Legislation Has Nothing To Do With It by Walter Shapiro Most books about Congress tend to do little more than reinforce stereotypes about life on Capitol Hill. That’s why a...
...Bella Abzug is now running for the Senate largely on the basis of her four-year record as an outspoken congressional advocate of women’s and peace issues...
...Outside of such pork-barrel bills, a legslator knows that even if he is defeated on a piece of major legislation, he will get credit for having been brave enough to “fight the good fight...
...If we want a responsible Congress we-both the press and the public-must,remind our legislators that we’re following the advice of John Mitchell: watching what thev do...
...Going Through the Motions Mayhew’s 180-page essay builds a theoretical frame work which can explain events that seem baffling when viewed from other perspectives...
...But it is difficult to picture liberals opposing an incumbent with a perfect ADA rating, no matter how incompetent...
...The problem is that much of the basic work of Congress is ignored by the voters...
...This is the traditional-and often neglected- oversight function of Congress, which, if performed diligently, can have an important impact on the performance of the executive branch...
...Although the new congressional freshmen have been widely praised for their intelligence and their seriousmindedness, there are some disturbing hints that, for all their admirable qualities, they may not place legislative craftsmanship high on their list of personal priorities...
...Mayhew’s model reminds us, however, that such investigations will also help Moffett’s reelection campaign...
...To buttress his point, Mayhew cites several examples where congressmen “display only a modest interest in what goes into bills or what their passage accomplishes...
...Mayhew contends that few congressional inWalter Shapiro is an editor of The Washington Monthly...
...Part of the problem for the liberals, of course, is that the congressional “inner club” which has taken responsibility for keeping the institution functioning has always had a rightwing ideological cast...
...Smith Goes to Washington, which featured Jimmy Stewart filibustering against evil legislation...
...Similarly, the armed services committees in both houses tend to pay close attention to the Pen tagon’s budget only when military construction legislation can provide specific projects for their own districts...
...I tried to bury a few myths in my campaign,” he said after a month in office, “including the one that says the most important thing a congressman does is to legislate...
...Even the most secure congressmen can’t ignore the voters back home...
...As Mayhew notes, “Congressional processes are so complicated that it is very difficult for outsiders to tell what’s going on...
...David R. Mayhew...
...Rather than letting them testify individually, Jackson insisted on questioning them as a group...
...Up to now, outside efforts to evaluate congressional performance have only tended to make matters worse...
...The problem of legislative sloppiness and congressional irresponsibility is difficult for liberals to face...
...making policy...
...Cynical exercises like Jackson’s hearings are an all-too-frequent by-product of presidential ambitions . What is far more destructive to the internal fabric of Congress is that well-intentioned legislators like Toby Moffett believe that making speeches is important work...
...In fact, there are a few indications that the problems may grow worse...
...Wayne Morse and Ernest Gruening were revered for having voted against the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, but no one wondered why they couldn’t attract any supporters...
...It remains to be seen how many freshmen will become obsessed with currying the favor of groups outside Congress and how many will dedicate themselves to mastering the legislative process...
...An illustration of the flexibility of the congressional workday is the ease with which senators can conduct presidential campaigns without taking a leave of absence from their legislative duties...
...Yale University Press, $7.95...
...Each WIN graduate who was actually placed in a job cost the federal government more than $8,800...
...It would be as if General Electric only paid its employees for making speeches about free enterprise, but hoped that they would build appliances in their spare time for the fun of it...
...Mayhew believes that if a congressman went before an audience and said, “I’m responsible for the highway program, judge me on the success or failure of that,” no one would believe him...
...they have become background noise like public service announcements on late night television...
...There is no reason why you can’t have a chairman of the Ways and Means Committee who gives as meticulous attenton to tax reform as Wilbur Mills gave to maintaining tax privileges...
...There is, for example, the mystery of why the large numbers of antiwar senators were so ineffectual in their efforts to end our military involvement in Vietnam...
...Similarly, the ADA is unlikely to give a legislator credit for voting against a poverty bill, even if he knew that the legislation was badly drafted and the money would be wasted...
...Many of the results of legislative sloth are hidden within the recesses of the federal budget, but there are times when we get clues as to the precision with which our laws are drafted...
...Since, as Mayhew demonstrates, these non-legislative activities also bring rewards at the polls, it may be difficult for Congress to devise internal incentives that will keep their noses to the legislative grindstone...
...There is little to prevent a congressman from leaving the constituent work to his staff and spending most of the day working out in the Hause gym...
...not what they say...
...But there is no structural reason why things have to be this way...
...In a recent profile of Scoop Jackson, Robert Sherrill recalled how the Washington Democrat summoned seven oil company presidents before his Senate Interior Committee at the height of the gasoline crisis...
...History is filled with examples of legislators .who were defeated because they took an unpopular stand, but Mayhew asks rhetorically, “Who can think of one where a member got into trouble for being on the losing side...
...Not only were there only token efforts to block war appropriations, but, until the very end, Congress couldn’t even pass innocuous resolutions setting withdrawal dates...
...One of Moffett’s major priorities is to investigate the federal regulatory agencies...
...Many of the new House freshmen have brought variants of this “outsider” mentality with them to Washington...
...One example is the notorious WIN (Work Incentive) program that was created by the House Ways and Means Committee in 1967 as a way of getting the able-bodied off the welfare rolls through job retraining...
...What is important is that they tend to romanticize the non-legislative side of Congress...
...Liberals have always been especially willing to reward politicians for grand but futile gestures...
...The fault is not his, because this is the kind of representation that issue-conscious liberals have come to demand from their legislators...
...So many legislators have falsely claimed to be the authors of bills they have merely co-sponsored that voters have grown skeptical of such boasts of individual accomplishment...
...Mayhew is a political scientist at Yale and his book is an example of a largely abandoned academic genre-a tightly written theoretical essay, designed to be suggestive, rather than conclusive, .and presented to the reader without the methodological crutches of modern political science...
...Mayhew argues that performing the day-teday legislative chores can be regarded as a form of altruism-almost as selfless as ladling out broth at a Salvation Army soup *Congress: The Electoral Connection...
...kitchen, As any organizational theorist can testify, altruism is a slender reed on which to build the framework of an institution...
...Good Legislation Has Nothing To Do With It by Walter Shapiro Most books about Congress tend to do little more than reinforce stereotypes about life on Capitol Hill...
...But that kind of congressional dedication is unlikely without being encouraged by the voters...
...Mayhew identifies the activities that can help a congressman win reelection...
...Congress is a place where almost no one works harder than he wants to...
...The problem is that Moffett would get equal electoral rewards by merely generating press releases...
...There is just one major exception to this rule-the roll-call votes on measures that provide tangible benefits for specific congressional districts, such as a new post office or grants to local programs...
...But Mayhew contends that it was not in their direct interest to devote much time to organizing against it...
...Yet little criticism of the program was directed at the Congress which had approved the program and funded it...
...That’s why a little-noticed essay by David R. Mayhew, Congress: The Electoral Connection,* is such a joy...
...Too often their nurturing of the congressional machinery included accommodation with special interests and a general legislative conservatism...
...cumbents are truly free from reelection fears...
...Many others never found jobs...
...Answers to February puzzle...
...The pillars of the congressional process have always been men like Richard Russell, Sam Raybum, Lyndon Johnson, Robert Kerr, Wilbur Mills, and the like...
...Because Congress has 535 members, voters do not generally hold their individual representatives responsible for the failures of the institution...
...Even when congressmen want to be held responsible for their legislative actions, it is difficult for them to get their constituents to take them seriously...
...For example, Les Aspin gets favorable press coverage whether he has unearthed a major Pentagon scandal or merely discovered that General Haig used a NATO plane to transport his pet dog around Europe...
...It made great television as the fearless Senator confronted the oil barons, but it also ruined any chance for sustained questioning...
...A 1972 investigation revealed that two thirds of the welfare recipients who enrolled in the program never finished their training...
...Take the’case of Kansas Republican Chester Mize, who was elected to the House in 1968 with almost 68 per cent of the vote...
...Because the political rewards of congressional investigations have more to do with drama than content, it is easy for House and Senate hearings to degenerate into publicity circuses...
...What mattered was not what Moffett said in his speech but that he considered such predictable rhetoric important...
...The Detroit area legislators who led the anti-integration efforts were acclaimed back home, but they were under no obligation “to worry about what was passed or was implemented...
...Problems More Basic Than Seniority One reason Mayhew’s essay is likely to be of lasting value is that he is concerned with structural problems which are so basic that they will not be alleviated by the arrival of a large and restive freshman class in Congress...
...Other than voting records and public statements, it is hard for outsiders to judge the legislative performance of individual congressmen...
...It doesn’t matter whether this is a product of the antiwar movement or the result of watching film classics like Mr...
...For too long too high a premium has been placed on congressional rhetoric and symbolic gestures...
...Without trying to romanticize the ancien regime in the House there are grounds for legitimate concern over the long-range effects of the “freshman revolt...
...By rating legislators solely on their voting records, groups like Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) have accentuated the symbolic element already inherent in congressional roll-calls...
...It is significant that the author can find only two ways in which work in Congress can be translated into votes at home: creditclaimingdoing some thing that can be cited as a personal accomplishment in office -and position- ta king-articulating popular views on public issues...
...No one expected them to author legislation...
...Two years later he was unemployed, after polling only 45 per cent of the vote in a bid for reelection...
...Denunciations by Republican Presidents of the profligate spending habits of Democratic Congresses have become so predictable that most liberals no longer even hear them...
...The result is a distorted incentive system that encourages legislators to labor over the fine print of a bill to place an Army installation in their district and to gloss over the details of a more general $1 0-billion federal spending program...
...Similarly, The Almanac of American Politics tells far more about the demography and political history of each congressional district than it does about the legislative record of the incumbent...
...Although never explicitly stated, Mayhew’s major concern is accountability, the problem of assigning responsi6ility for the actions of Congress...
...When I spoke with Moffett in early February, the highlight of his legislative day had been appearing before the Armed Services Committee to read a statement expressing his outrage at military aid to Cambodia...
...Obviously, it is possible to exaggerate Mayhew’s argument to the point of parody...
...The erratic quality of the profiles which Ralph Nader’s Congress Project produced in 1972 illustrates this problem...
...They received so much credit for their antiwar speeches that they had little to gain by actually stopping the war...
...Many antiwar senators were quite sincere in their desire to see the war ended...
...It is, obviously, ridiculous to evaluate a congressman’s legislative performance solely on the basis of his voting record...
...Although attendance is excellent at Senate Foreign Relations Commit tee hearings when the television cameras are present, William Fulbright, its former chairman, has complained, “This is the kind of committee that senators like to be on, because they don’t have to do anything...
...Voters are swayed, however, when the same congressman takes credit for the new local post office, because they can’t believe that anyone else would care...
...The Right-toLife movement is grateful to James Buckley for introducing a constitutional amendment outlawing abortion , but they don’t blame him when it isn’t ratified...
...The quick objection is that Mayhew ignores the hundreds of legislators who represent “safe” districts with loyal constituencies...
...A similar example is the recent spate of anti-busing legislation...
...and then speculate about how congressmen so motivated are likely to go about...
...His method of analysis is deceptively simple: “I shall conjure up a vision of United States congressmen as single-minded seekers of reelection...
...Mayhew argues that the dove senators lacked a political incentive to do more than just talk...
...Take Toby Moffett of Connecticut, considered by many to be one of the brightest lights in the freshman class...
...The failure of the doves is related to Mayhew’s contention that members of Congress are not overly concerned with whether they support the winning position on roll-call votes, so there is little incentive for a minority to do the persuading and the armtwisting necessary to become a majority...
...Back in 1971, when it seemed that American fighting in Vietnam would go on forever, it was symbolically important to those in the antiwar movement to have people like Bella Abzug and Ron Dellums in Congress...
...If legislators are denied personal credit for writing effective legislation and are largely spared the blame for fiascos like the WIN program, it would take a Congress of almost selfless dedication to the public weal to behave in an entirely responsible fashion...
...their role was to provide primal therapy for antiwar militants...
...This kind of liberal mind-set encourages speechmakers and ideologues but provides congressmen with absolutely no incentive to do substantive legislative work...
...Such activity would have meant neglecting other matters that had a greater bearing on reelection-“making speeches, meeting cons ti tuen ts, looking in to casework...
...Yet this may be one accusation by Richard Nixon that is not entirely without foundation...
Vol. 7 • March 1975 • No. 1
