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Reviews in American History 33.1 (2005) 111-118



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The Citadel and the Home Place Under Siege

Julian E. Zelizer. On Capitol Hill: The Struggle to Reform Congress and Its Consequences, 1948-2000. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Photographs, notes, and index. xvi + 359 pp. $30.00.

Citadel, published in 1957, was a best-selling exploration of the contemporary U.S. Senate. Journalist William S. White sought to provide his readers with insights into the workings of the institution, a strikingly hierarchical, isolated, and secretive body. This was not an attack but a celebration of the Senate's club-like atmosphere, which White praised for its encouragement of bipartisan cooperation. Southern Democrats, whose seniority earned them special influence through control of committees, won notable praise in White's account for their promotion of stability and compromise.1 But what White perceived as the Senate's strengths were antidemocratic weaknesses in the eyes of some politicians and activists who were then coalescing in pursuit of congressional reform. Julian Zelizer's On Capitol Hill is a very successful analysis of this coalition's origins, its long quest for reform that reshaped the House of Representatives as well as the Senate, and the unanticipated consequences of its legislative and procedural achievements. By the end of the twentieth century, the House and the Senate constituted a more open and less hierarchical legislature, but the partisan conflict that increasingly characterized Congress fueled new frustrations, including deeper public dissatisfaction with the political process.

This was an elite-led impetus to deepen Congress's democratic responsiveness, one that changed the institution dramatically without necessarily strengthening its connections with the people. On Capitol Hill underscores the obstacles to political reform and in particular the strength of an institution's resistance to disruptive change. "In the most basic of terms," Zelizer writes, "this book posits that reforming government is much harder work than most politicians or pundits admit" (p. 3). With its analysis of a successful effort to transform the procedures and structures of Congress, the book compellingly describes the subtle complexities involved in achieving this change and the paradoxical nature of its consequences. [End Page 111]

The Congress described by White was at the height of what Zelizer terms the committee era, characterized not only by strong committees and influential chairs whom seniority elevated to positions of leadership. Cozy relationships existed between the committees and the handful of relevant interest groups and between politicians and respectfully deferential journalists. Further characterizing the era were "secrecy in deliberations, a particular type of campaign process, the structure of districts, . . . [and] norms and rules that guided behavior among legislators" (p. 4). The nature of Congress changed fundamentally when the procedures and regulations that underpinned this committee era underwent wholesale reform, a process that was concentrated during the 1970s. These reforms attacked the role of committee chairs, weakened the importance of seniority, encouraged the development of subcommittees, reduced the power of filibusters, strengthened restrictions on campaign finance, created ethics codes, instituted an independent budget-development body, and boosted the significance of party caucuses.

The creation of a fragile coalition in support of reform is a central concern of the book. Race informed the initial quest for reform. A group of Democrats elected to Congress in the late 1940s found that the committee system threatened the achievement of an urban liberal agenda, even though, as Zelizer notes, during the New Deal this process had "facilitated a significant expansion of the state, with southern Democrats at the helm" (p. 24). Among a wide-ranging set of policy concerns, civil rights was especially significant in encouraging the coalition's coherence and its commitment to reform. This coalition enjoyed a notable and significant triumph in gradually defining the committee system as problematic despite its political strength and despite the general public's indifference to the reform cause.

Significant allies of reform included scholars whose work on Congress concluded that its structures posed an obstacle to effective government. Reform was necessary, they argued, for Congress to fulfill a positive role in policy-making during an era...

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