Suchergebnisse

"To achieve legitimate self-government in America's extended Republic, the U.S. Constitution depends on Congress harmonizing the country's factions through a process of conflict and accommodation. Why Congress demonstrates the value of this activity by showing the legislature's distinctive contributions in two crucial moments in the mid-twentieth century: during World War II, when congressional deliberation contributed to national cohesion by balancing interests and ensuring fairness, and during the push to end racial segregation, when a prolonged debate in Congress focused the nation's attention and delivered a decisive victory for the broad coalition united around civil rights. The second part of the book traces the evolution of Congress, which first experimented with radical decentralization in the 1970s and then, beginning in the 1980s, embraced powerful leadership and ideological caucuses that prioritized partisan unity and electoral confrontation. This transformed institution has been unable to work through the country's deep divisions on contemporary issues like immigration or the COVID-19 pandemic. Contemporary policymaking often circumvents Congress entirely. In other instances, Congress is engaged, but it proceeds without any bipartisan cooperation or through leader-broken compromises generated by crises. Each of these patterns creates serious difficulties for legitimating American policy. The book concludes with three scenarios for Congress's future. Without significant change, the institution will sink into decrepitude. But it could still be transformed, either by progressive constitutional reform empowering the president at the legislature's expense, or by a revival of meaningful deliberation and debate facilitated by the renewal of the committee system"--

A growing body of scholarship explores processes of gradual but transformative institutional change, classifying patterns of change into several categories. I argue that policymakers themselves actively contest the appropriate institutional frames for understanding changes as they seek to guide institutional change, and show that judicial determinations of statutory meaning are sensitive to judgments about which institutional perspective is most compelling. A process-tracing examination of institutional changes in the Glass–Steagall Act over the law's whole life span, from 1933 to 1999, provides a concrete example of how the dynamics of contestation can play out. Those who conceived of Glass–Steagall as the institutional embodiment of the separation between commercial and investment banking argued that expansion of commercial bank powers represented institutional drift. Alternatively, those who came to see Glass–Steagall as just one set of statutory imperatives to be handled within the larger institutional context of American banking law, including banking regulators, interpreted regulatory changes as constructive acts of conversion adapting to novel economic challenges. I document the slow process through which courts came to accept the second framing while noting how the fixity of statutory text nevertheless continued to limit available adaptations.