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The Congress Project of the American Enterprise Institute was initiated in 1979 to conduct sustained studies of the Congress as an institution. The Congress had undergone immense change in the decade of the 1970s — in its formal rules, informal norms, party structure, staff, and internal distribution of power, and in the recruitment and composition of its membership. We are monitoring the effect of these changes because of their implications for the functioning of representative government and the direction of American public policy.
Freshman members of the Congress, confronting the traditions, leaders, and norms of Congress for the first time, gain a unique view of the House as an institution. We sought to participate in their learning experience as they moved from the status of freshmen to established members of the House leadership structure. Seven members of the class of 1978 — that is, representatives elected for the first time in 1978 who began serving their first term in 1979 — were invited to participate in a series of roundtable discussions. There they shared with the AEI Congress Project staff their perspectives on life in the House of Representatives.
The seven freshmen participating in the AEI roundtables comprised four Republicans and three Democrats, who represent a variety of ideological viewpoints and diverse constituencies. Their political backgrounds were also diverse. Several had extensive experience in Washington and national politics; others had served in leadership positions in state legislatures and administrations; and some had held no prior elective office, though they had been active in local politics. No claim is made that these members are necessarily representative of the class of 1978. Indeed, we believe that they are an unusually able and aggressive sample of the class. This judgment was confirmed in 1980 when all members of the roundtable group were easily reelected to the Ninety-seventh Congress (1981-1982) and a number of them gained leadership positions within their parties and on committees.
These were post-Watergate members of Congress. By the time of their election in 1978, the furor over Watergate had subsided and the congressional zeal for reform and confrontations with the president had lapsed. These members were not bent on reforming Congress. Rather, they were eager to take advantage of the changes made earlier in the 1970s so that they could participate fully in the legislative process and have an impact on public policy.
We wanted to track the careers of the seven House members at five roundtable discussions held at AEI. These roundtables were conducted evenings after House sessions, between the spring of 1979, during the initial months of the members’ first term, through the fall of 1982, at the end of their second term, when they were preparing to face the voters as two-term incumbents. At each session, the participants were assured of anonymity, in order to achieve the most free-wheeling and candid discussions possible. The meetings were tape-recorded and later transcribed.
The roundtable discussions have been reviewed, edited, and arranged by topic in the pages that follow. Because of the pledge of anonymity, the comments are not attributed to specific representatives, and identifying information has been deleted from the quotations.
In analyzing the comments of the members of the House class of 1978, it is essential to keep in mind the political context within which these representatives were functioning. They came to Congress in a midterm election as the president’s party suffered the customary electoral setback. Their first term coincided, therefore, with the third and fourth years of the Carter administration — a period when the president’s support from the electorate declined, his ability to influence the Congress seriously weakened, and his administration faced a midterm crisis that culminated in the firing of two cabinet officers. During 1978-1979, the Congress and the nation were marking time until the next presidential election. The Ninety-sixth Congress was, therefore, often preoccupied with the politics of the 1980 elections, as members sought to place their parties in the most favorable position for the 1980 elections.
The roundtable group’s first election as incumbents was fought against the backdrop of the Reagan-Carter presidential contest, in which several group members played significant campaign roles. Roundtable sessions were held in the spring of 1981, when President Reagan’s power and influence with the Congress were at their peak, and in the fall of 1982, just before the midterm elections, when the Democrats sensed a victory and the administration’s influence had waned.
The class of 1978 freshmen had, therefore, served under two presidents — one Democrat and one Republican — during periods of presidential ascendency over Congress and of congressional assertiveness. They had confronted a range of controversial issues — budget cuts, tax cuts and tax increases, expanded use of reconciliation in the budget process, increased defense expenditures, the MX missile, nuclear freeze resolutions, the sale of Airborne Warning and Control Systems (AWACS) and other military hardware to the Arabs, financial bailout of the Chrysler Corporation, energy legislation, hospital cost containment, and social security.
Given this range of issues and political circumstances, we believe that the observations of the members of the class of 1978 provide useful and unique insights into the functioning of the House of Representatives in the 1980s. These are insights that only insiders can provide because, unlike the scholars who study Congress, these freshman members lived within the institution on a daily basis. At the same time, because they were new members of a tradition-bound institution, they brought to their observations something of the quality of the critical outsider.
In these discussions, we see evidence of the active role junior members now play in the decision making of the House. Although deference is still paid to those who have acquired expertise through hard work, specialization, and seniority, junior members do not feel an obligation to serve a quiet period of apprenticeship. This is in sharp contrast to the House of the 1950s and 1960s when restrictive norms of behavior prevented junior members from asserting themselves in a constructive manner. These representatives of the class of 1978 show a strong sense of independence — from their party, interest groups, and presidents. In their ambivalence about serving in the House as a career, they stand in sharp contrast to their peers of recent decades who built lifetime careers in House service. The comments of these perceptive members of the class of 1978 convey an image of an institution in transition and, as such, have special value to students of American political institutions.
“I used to wonder why my predecessor quit after only ten years. He was enormously popular and could have kept his seat as long as he wanted. Now I wonder how he made it ten years.”
“We’d construct alternatives and zap them out there and create party positions and raise hell with the other side, but we weren’t responsible for governing. Now we are.”
“It’s dramatically easier to run as an incumbent. My opponent made a vicious attack on me in his announcement statement, and I answered it the following day by mailing 220,000 newsletters.”
“The Senate is a zoo. I have no interest in the Senate. I like the sealed anonymity of the House. . . . The Senate is all personality dependent. It’s people who shave the face of the next president every morning.”
The candor of these remarks characterizes the outlook of the seven freshmen members of the House of Representatives who took party in a study by the Congress Project of the American Enterprise Institute. Meeting in a series of roundtable discussions from 1979 to 1982, the four Republicans and three Democrats served under two presidents and confronted such issues as the budget reconciliation process, the AWACS sale, and the Chrysler bailout. These post-Watergate members show a strong sense of independence from their party, from interest groups, and from the president and convey how much the House has changed from the tradition-bound institution their predecessors know.
John F. Bibby is professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, an adjunct scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and codirector of AEI’s Congress Project. He is coauthor of “On Capitol Hill” and “Vital Statistics on Congress, 1982.” |
