Stumbling to a Showdown

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Congress has fallen into other bad habits. Knowing how hazardous and time consuming it is to push a controversial bill through the multilayered committee system, legislators increasingly tack their pet proposals onto major bills as riders. Right-wing advocates of so-called social issues have placed anti-school busing and pro-prayer riders onto a number of Justice Department funding bills. There is even an antiabortion rider attached to this year's appropriations bill for the Postal Service. These irrelevant amendments rarely survive both houses, but legislators waste valuable time in the process of shedding them.

One new fact of congressional life that has made the institution less effective, though it was designed to do the opposite, is the immense growth in the size and cost of the staffs maintained by committees, subcommittees and individual members. Congress now has 23,000 such aides, in contrast to 3,300 for Canada's Parliament, which has the second largest staff among Western democratic governments. It now costs $1 billion a year to operate Congress, against $150 million only 20 years ago. Some Washington experts fear that these hardworking, generally bright technocrats are devoted primarily to the re-election of their congressional bosses and too inclined to justify their jobs by producing needless legislation. Others contend that these staffs provide Congress with the research and vital expertise it needs to assess the torrent of information churned out by the Administration's massive bureaucracy.

The upshot is that Congress today is much more of a brake on an Administration's initiatives — and perhaps on the nation's progress — than it is an inspiring source of fresh ideas and solutions to problems. Whether that reactive tendency, to block what a President proposes, is perceived as good or bad depends, of course, on the observer's political point of view. In any case, Congress this year will not produce many dramatic new legislative achievements. Reagan, in fact, has asked it to undo much of what its predecessors have done.

Historians and political scientists with long memories contend that Congress has often been ponderous, frustratingly slow and unharnessable. Shortly after Franklin Roosevelt's sensational, Depression-generated 100 days, a Democratic-controlled Congress soon reverted to its traditional friction with the White House, leading F.D.R. to com plain about its mulishness.

Following John Kennedy's assassination, President Lyndon Johnson en joyed a burst of support from the Congress he knew so well, but that romance lasted only 18 months. Says Political Scientist Ornstein: "We have never had sustained congressional-presidential unity for even one full term."

Some thoughtful members of Congress take comfort in the unruliness of their branch. "The system was not meant to be any different," contends Massachusetts Democratic Senator Paul Tsongas. "It was meant to avoid hasty activity." At best, he argues, Congress can block and can force a President in a direction, "but positive leadership has to come from the President." Democratic Congressman Richard Gephardt of Missouri agrees that the shapers of the Constitution meant Congress to be a check on Executive excess. "It's the price you pay for diffusing power," he says.