Undergraduates striving to learn what Congress does and how and why they do it may memorize a blizzard of terms—like the famous “hopper” into which House members submit their bills—and a complex flow chart of “How a Bill Becomes a Law,” but too often they have difficulty grasping the concrete, day-by-day realities that actually produce legislation. This well-written, engaging case study provides a useful corrective. Costas Panagopoulos and Joshua Schank undertake to illuminate the politics of the legislative process using a very simple framework, more of a checklist really, that consists of power, process, policy, and price. The list constitutes system elements to be discussed, but relative weights and dynamics are not assessed beyond the descriptions of this particular situation.
The authors draw knowledgeably on David Mayhew's work when discussing specifics such as member motivation, and they demonstrate a firsthand familiarity with congressional practices acquired from their experience as full-time fellows in the office of then-Senator Hillary Clinton. The book's great strength lies precisely in their ability to discuss both the substance of transportation policy—including such related issues as air pollution and traffic congestion—and the concrete realities of congressional politics in a lively, even entertaining, prose. Their descriptions of particular steps in the process, such as how a bill is actually written and submitted—usually with the aid of an automatic pen machine—are informative.
This well-paced narrative brings forth the key elements of the bill, emphasizing distributive issues by applying concepts such as donor and donee states and explaining terms such as “minimum guaranteed return.” The attentive reader will gain considerable understanding of why certain states and groups of states undertook the strategies they did and how these strategies shaped the final outcome of the process.
The authors also illuminate the important details of procedures, including the markup and the floor vote. I learned, for example, that amendments are only proposed in the committee markup and must be voted up or down on the floor. They also do an excellent job on the power of conference committees, noting that they often fail to adhere to the limits implied or directly stated in textbook treatments of their role. All of these characteristics make the book especially attractive for undergraduate courses, but a graduate student's understanding would also be enhanced by the specificity and concreteness of the exposition.
If the book has one overriding theme it is the importance of staff. The first chapter introduces Dawn Levy, chief transportation staff person to Max Baucus, the ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee and a key player on the Environment and Public Works Committee. Described as “smart, confident, and ambitious” (p. 1), Levy becomes the central figure in a subsequent chapter on the convoluted workings of the Senate committees as they wrestle with a bill that eventually dies. Interesting details are illuminated. The authors note, for example, that she gained power and confounded the opposition by never committing to paper her most important financing proposal, a practice that echoes an ancient Washington maxim, “Never give them anything they can Xerox.” She also controlled a key power resource—rooms large enough for all the rebellious staff to meet at one time.
All of this suggests that a fifth “p” should be added to Panagopoulos and Schank's checklist, to stand for “personality”—the impact of personality and personal relationships on political dynamics. As the authors note, for instance, even more senior staffers shivered upon hearing Dawn Levy's name (p. 1), while other staffers of meeker disposition inspired no such anticipatory deference.
Perhaps reflecting the authors' experience in the Senate, the Senate side of the story dominates their rendition (something they concede); the details of the House of Representatives' proceedings are often vague or skimpy. Surprising in a book that is, for the most part, surefooted on procedure, the normally crucial distinction between authorization and appropriation is not discussed until quite late in the narrative, and most of it deals, therefore, with the authorization process. No explanation for this pattern is offered. If authorization was paramount in this case, the readers should know why.
More generally, questions can be raised about the book's focus on staff. Most scholars would acknowledge that staffers carry out most of the day-to-day business of the Congress; indeed, most would argue this is inevitable given the growth of American government and the competing demands, especially fund-raising, on elected officials' time and energy. The sticking point is the issue of power. Panagopoulos and Schank do show that a staff trying to protect its own power may affect the legislative process, especially in terms of timing and sometimes in terms of the success or failure of negotiations, but they never show staff exercising independent power on fundamental policy issues. Moreover, what they cannot show within the structural limits of a case study on a single piece of legislation is how frequent or important such procedural staff exercises of power are in a more general sense.
Another way of putting this point is to say that the authors eschew the central issue in the recent literature on Congress—the question of who wields power over the legislative process. They do say that with regard to the transportation bill, regionalism overcame party, but they do not link this conclusion to the debate over whether committees (the view associated with David Mayhew and others) or parties (the view associated with John Aldrich, David Rohde, and others) should be considered the main power centers in the Congress, nor do they link it with recent attempts by Rohde and others to go beyond this debate to create a more powerful analytical synthesis. The potentially intriguing suggestion that regionalism merits consideration as a third variable in the discussion of congressional power is not followed up, even at the level of a hypothesis. The book thus remains resolutely descriptive. In this way, its value to scholarship remains largely illustrative and suggestive. It is, nonetheless, of considerable value to students of Congress because of its compelling, detailed description.
