THE CONGRESS: The Crack in the Constitution

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TIME'S regional meetings produced some intriguing insights into the general causes of the dwindling influence of Congress. Maryland Senator Charles Mathias claims that Congress is so narrowly concerned with each single piece of legislation that it ignores a broader perspective and fails to notice when it is "at a Rubicon, facing a great constitutional watershed." Correspondent MacNeil agrees that the legislators "live, like many people, on the razor edge of right now. They are parochial in time; they lack a sense of the past or a care for the future."

One reason for this, as Ohio's Republican Senator William Saxbe sees it, is that "Congress has declined into a battle for individual survival" in which few members think about the welfare of Congress as a whole. Each reasons that "if you don't stick your neck out, you won't get it chopped off." Thus when a decision is tough, argues Oregon's Packwood, Congress may be more than willing to pass the buck to the President.

"We can delegate powers to the President, then sit back and carp or applaud, depending on whether what he does is popular or unpopular. If it's unpopular, we can say, 'What a terrible thing. We wouldn't have done that.' " Berkeley Political Scientist Nelson Polsby; author of Congressional Behavior, finds legislators hampered simply by their need to get reelected. While the public expects Congressmen to be generalists, competence in a complex age requires specialization—a dilemma Polsby would resolve by urging constituents to expect less "omnicompetence" in their representatives so they can concentrate on their specialized committee work. Polsby considers committee competence the key to a strong Congress.

Another dilemma working to the disadvantage of Congress is described by University of Rochester Political Scientist Richard Fenno, who wrote The Power of the Purse: Appropriations Politics in Congress. Fenno claims that most people "love their Congressmen, but not Congress." It is easy to like a legislator for his personal style and policy views, Fenno notes, but difficult to admire a Congress because it is expected to solve national problems—and it rarely can. Moreover, many Congressmen "portray themselves as the gallant fighters against the manifest evils of Congress; they run for Congress by running against Congress." As Congress thus loses prestige, its effectiveness can decline in a self-perpetuating spiral of criticism.

Among the specific areas of congressional decline:

BUDGET. Despite political charges that Congress has been spending the Government into heavy debt, it has actually altered the Administration's budget in recent years by less than 5%. Saxbe illustrated congressional inadequacy in analyzing just one part of the budget: that of the Defense Department, which spends more money on the staff to prepare its budget alone than the whole Congress spends for all of its operations. Against the Pentagon, the Senate Armed Services Committee has only 15 staff members, who, says Saxbe, also "spend a lot of their time campaigning for the committee members, running their offices and hauling their wives around."