On Capitol Hill: The Struggle to Reform Congress and Its Consequences, 1948-2000 (review)

Have partisanship and scandal mania become so intense from Watergate to Whitewater that politics itself has become criminalized? Zelizer thinks so. He argues that the nation's current predicament is the result of well-intended efforts to reform the United States Congress by destroying the committee system. Because that seniority-dominated system allowed conservative and sometimes blatantly racist southern Democrats to wield disproportionate power, liberal reformers coalesced around civil rights from 1948 to the mid-1960s by proposing a series of institutional reforms to attack what they viewed as the decidedly undemocratic nature of congressional decision making. If the reformers were largely unsuccessful and civil rights itself lost its grip as a unifying national issue after the race riots of 1965 (Watts) and 1967 (Newark and Detroit), Vietnam and Watergate emerged to provide a new crusading impetus. The difference is that the movement to restrain the power exercised by southern Democrats through the committee system gave way to a movement to restrain all political power through a wave of institutional changes. Proposals focused on, among other things, the power of committee chairs, campaign financing, ethics, budget processes, legislative war powers, filibuster rules, party caucuses, and open government (for example, authorizing television coverage of Congress).

Given the dynamics of the civil rights movement, urban race rioting, Vietnam, and President Nixon's Plumbers, Zelizer argues that the nation faced a watershed worthy of any pondered by Henry Adams. Those with the reform impulse moved from their assaults on specific problems (centered on the fundamental question of who had the right to vote and who did not) "to alleged pathologies of the entire political process" (10). By 1979 the contemporary era had arrived, with its peculiar mix of centralized and decentralized authority, ubiquitous rules, brutal partisanship, and a scandal politics in which the government's foot soldiers included FBI agents, grand jurors, special prosecutors, and independent counsels. One of the ironies is that those southern Democrats who unintentionally inspired the institutional reformers in the first place went over to the Republicans, and the GOP itself came to rule over the new system, dominating cable TV news, the campaign contribution system, the redistricting process, the procedural minutiae of party caucuses, and the scandal apparat.

Zelizer has written an unusual book in that it is both sweeping and dense. Regardless, the product of those contradictions is impressive enough to border on numbing—in regard to both what Zelizer describes and the intellectual achievement of writing such a fine book. Some readers might object to the relatively episodic effort to hook money in politics to the institutional changes described, but that seems more a topic for another book. Thus, it barely rates as a quibble given what the chapters discuss—the southern revolt against the New Deal; the rise and fall of the civil rights era; the redistricting wars of the 1960s; the birth of scandal politics in Congress during that same decade (with emphasis on lobbyist Bobby Baker and Representative Adam Clayton Powell and Senator Thomas Dodd); the disintegration of the New Deal order (symbolized by Richard Nixon's victory in 1968); Watergate as an largely ineffective impetus for campaign finance reform; Congress under the influence of "Watergate babies"; scandal without reform, especially pertaining to Representative Wayne Hayes, Koreagate, and Abscam and culminating in the defeat of campaign finance reform in 1978; Congress in the age of cable TV; and what might aptly be called the Gingrich era (in honor of Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich).