The Hidden Governments

excerpted from the book

The Democratic Facade

by Daniel Hellinger and Dennis R. Judd Brooks

Cole Publishing Company, 1991, paper

Protecting Governement from Democracy

p183

The Hidden Governments

Nineteenth-century Congresses largely consisted of individuals who temporarily suspended private careers to attend a few brief legislative I sessions. Today members consider service in Congress to be a career in its own right. ~ ~ The average member of Congress has served for a decade. Whereas each member represented less than 50,000 people in the 1830s, each will represent nearly 600,000 in the 1990s. Constituency demands and workloads have increased exponentially. By 1987, the House and Senate received over 100 million pieces of mail annually. The number of public bills enacted has increased fourfold since the 1850s; the 99th Congress (1985-86) approved over 7,198 pages of statute law.

Partly in response to the increased workload pressures, Congress has been transformed into a bureaucracy in its own right. In 1987, Congress employed a total of about 32,000 individuals, including employees in agencies such as the Congressional Budget Office, Library of Congress, the Congressional Research Service, and the General Accounting Office. Over 11,000 of these employees served as personal staff to the 535 elected representatives and senators, a figure that had increased tenfold since 1930. For fiscal year 1990, the budget for Congress alone amounted to nearly $2 billion.

The bureaucratization of Congress has gone hand in hand with the specialization and fragmentation of legislative power. Whereas few standing committees existed in the nineteenth century, such committees multiplied and became the focal point of congressional power early in the twentieth century. Between the 1950s and the 1970s, legislative responsibilities became even more decentralized when committee work was delegated further to subcommittees. By 1989, there were 182 committees and subcommittees in the House of Representatives, and 137 in the Senate. These committees and subcommittees employ about 3,000 staff experts.

These developments usually were justified as necessary for keeping Congress abreast of expanding executive agency activities. The bureaucratization of Congress, however, yielded an unintended dividend for individual legislators: Members of Congress are able to use the formidable resources at their command to help them win reelection campaigns. Incumbent members of Congress, especially representatives, have been able to protect themselves more and more successfully from electoral defeat. Since 1950, more than 90 percent of incumbent U.S. representatives who sought reelection have won. In 1986 and 1988,98 percent who sought reelection won. Even more striking, members are insulated from defeat even when national electoral trends run against their party. In 1988, for example, voters split their tickets in 148 (of 435) congressional districts, giving a majority to a presidential candidate of one party while electing (that is, nearly always reelecting) a representative from the other party.

Incumbents and their staff have a variety of tools that allow members to publicize their names and maintain favorable images. Members can mail letters, surveys, and other publicity to constituents without paying for postage. Many of these mailings are posted just before an election. In the two months before the November 1988 congressional elections, for example, members sent 60 million newsletters to constituents. Computers in each member's office store extensive specialized lists of constituents who can be sent special mailings tailored to their interests. "Robot" pens personalize a legislator's letters by reproducing "authentic" signatures by the thousands. Congressional recording studios permit members to send live or taped audiovisual messages to their constituents via local television and radio stations. 16

These resources make it possible for individual representatives to claim credit and take personal responsibility for government actions desired by constituents. Congressional staffers do "casework," that is, intercede with federal agencies on constituents' behalf. Their job is to cut through the bureaucratic maze that regularly frustrates citizens. When a congressional staffer secures a government check for a constituent or cuts through regulatory red tape, the constituent feels grateful. More than one-third of congressional staff are based in members' home districts, where they can most easily respond to constituents' inquiries. On a larger scale, government agencies routinely allow individual members of Congress to announce and therefore claim some of the credit for the construction of major projects, such as locks and dams, interstate highways, and major defense contracts.

Political scientist R. Douglas Arnold argues that working through the bureaucracy makes more sense for individual members' careers than would the direct congressional delivery of benefits.

Congressmen can claim some of the credit for whatever benefits flow into their districts, but at the same time they have insulated themselves from their constituents' anger when certain benefits cannot be secured. If Congress itself allocated benefits, constituents might well blame their congressmen for failing to acquire benefits, but as long as bureaucrats have the final say, congressmen are partially protected from their wrath.

For congressional members successfully to engage in the machine-style politics that keep individual constituents happy, they must stay on good terms with executive branch agencies. As a consequence, they are not simply advocates for their constituents with these agencies. Rather, they generally try to work out arrangements where everyone in power looks good.

p189
The Covert Presidency

The growth of a complicated bureaucratic maze and the frequent spectacle of congressional deadlock have led inevitably to the concentration of more authority in the executive branch. But presidents find that the size, complexity, personnel protections, and political support of the bureaucracy limit their ability to exercise policy control. Admiration for a strong presidency has increased each time a president demonstrated that he could align the fragmented national government to bring about far-reaching policy changes, as did Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin

Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, and Ronald Reagan. Advocates of an even stronger presidency believe that the office elevates the incumbent and encourages him to exert leadership toward positive goals such as international security, economic planning, and social justice. Motivated by similar aspirations, presidents have searched for new ways to exert more political power. Almost invisibly, each recent presidential administration has added new tools for exerting presidential influence. There now exists a recognizable pattern of hidden powers, a covert presidency, that rests on centralizing presidential direction of personnel, budgets, and information; on the manipulation of the media; and on the expanding use of "national security" to control the political agenda.

p195
The President and "National Security"

It is obvious that presidents are tempted to define issues as "national security" problems, because in the area of national security the public, Congress, and the courts give the president wide latitude. The Reagan administration was determined to go farther than its predecessors to restrict access to all kinds of information. In 1982, the president issued an executive order that vastly increased the number of government documents classified as secret and made access to these documents more difficult. Federal employees with access to information defined as sensitive were asked to agree in writing that, for the rest of their lives, they would submit for government approval all writings and speeches that might touch on intelligence matters. Over 250,000 federal employees signed the agreements. The administration even attempted to stop university professors from lecturing or writing about advanced technology. Admiral Bobby Inman, deputy director of the CIA, warned that if academics and scientists did not voluntarily limit their dissemination of scientific research on such topics, public opinion "could well cause the federal government to overreact" against the scientists, possibly with criminal sanctions.

The potential for the abuse of presidential power is greater in foreign policy matters than in any other policy arena because presidential discretion goes almost unchecked. Deception in military and foreign policy making is a constant across administrations. The "Pentagon papers," first published by newspapers in 1971, revealed that the Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson administrations had misinformed the press and the public about the nature of the war in Vietnam and the purposes of American intervention. Without congressional approval, President Nixon ordered the secret bombing of Cambodia on Christmas Day, 1970. Although the War Powers Act of 1973 aimed to prevent such unilateral actions in the future, the CIA secretly mined harbors in Nicaragua in 1984.

The National Security Council (NSC) has become partisan and more central to policy making in each succeeding presidential administration. Presidents Kennedy and Johnson elevated the NSC role by relying heavily on the advice of such national security advisors as McGeorge Bundy and Walt Rostow. Henry Kissinger, the most influential foreign policy expert in the Nixon administration, built the largest staff in NSC history and used it to wrest policy control from the State and Defense departments. Although Jimmy Carter expressed an intention to return foreign policy to cabinet responsibility, he came to rely increasingly on his national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski. Secretary of State Alexander Haig attempted to reinvigorate cabinet influence in the early years of the Reagan administration, but Haig was soon eased out of his post and such NSC advisors as William Clark, Robert McFarlane, and John Poindexter became more prominent in many foreign decisions than Haig's successor, George Schultz.

The Iran-contra scandal demonstrated that the temptation to abuse national security is endemic to the modern presidency. The White House national security staff established a secret foreign policy network dubbed "the Enterprise" that bargained with numerous foreign governments, sold arms to Iran, and channeled profits to the Nicaraguan contras despite a congressional ban on U.S. government assistance to them. A full accounting of this shadowy organization's budget is impossible, but between June 1984 and 1986 the Enterprise apparently received $10 million from private contributors and $34 million from other countries, including $3.8 million from the sale of arms to Iran. With this money the Enterprise purchased airplanes, built an airstrip, bought weapons in Europe, and delivered them to the contras. Deceiving outsiders, including the Congress, was considered critical to the success of this operation. As Oliver North told contra leader Adolfo Calero, "We need to make sure that this new financing does not become known. The Congress must believe that there continues to be an urgent need for funding."

Such operations as the Enterprise are predictable responses to circumstances in which all presidents find themselves. Although Congress and the courts might act to prevent a recurrence of the specific abuses involved in a given scandal, the circumstances that prompt these abuses have not changed, nor has the inventiveness of presidential staff. Opportunities to enhance their autonomy and power lead presidents to invent national security reasons for bypassing other government institutions in carrying out their policies.

The consequences of military and foreign policy decisions increasingly spill over into domestic politics as the American economy becomes more integrated into international markets. The United States has a long tradition of defining its domestic problems in relation to foreign threats. In the 1950s, federal aid to education (the National Defense Education Act) and interstate highways (the National Defense Transportation Act) were promoted as necessary for the "national defense." In 1988, both parties' presidential candidates endorsed the definition of drugs as a national security problem, and accordingly they favored using the military to combat drugs. A federal antidrug law enacted in 1988 established an Office of National Drug Control Policy in the White House whose director-later referred to as a "czar"-was explicitly authorized to attend National Security Council meetings. As more domestic, as well as foreign policy problems become linked to national security justifications, both presidential power and the abuse of that power will continue to blossom.

The Democratic Facade

Index of Website

Home Page