Why Study Congress?
By Ray Smock
The answer should be obvious but often it isn’t. James Madison gave the best answer when he said an informed citizenry was the best guarantee that this nation’s great experiment in representative democracy would work and survive for future generations. The Founders gave us a republican form of government, where the ultimate power and the final check on government was the people themselves. If We the People lost faith in government, if we turned away from it for any number of reasons, if we didn’t understand the Constitution and how the three branches of the federal government work then the system could collapse.
Another Founder, Benjamin Franklin, replied to those who asked what kind of government the Constitution provided, by saying “A republic, if you can keep it.” He didn’t know for sure if the work of the Federal Convention of 1787 had produced a lasting government. Now, 226 years later, the Constitution is still our foundational document, and we still operate with three branches of government pretty much as outlined in the beginning. But not without much strife, uncertainty, a colossal Civil War, and constant debate and controversy about how well government is working and addressing the needs of the nation.
As Congress prepared for its 200 anniversary more than a quarter century ago, the Library of Congress in cooperation with the Senate and House historical
offices conducted a conference on researching Congress that brought together top political scientists, historians, journalists, and current and former members of Congress. One of the main speakers was David McCullough who gave another answer on why we should study Congress. He said “We need to know more about Congress because we need to know more about leadership. We need to know more about Congress because we can never know enough about human nature. Above all, we need to know more about Congress because we are Americans. We believe in governing ourselves.”
Congress is the people’s branch, the part of government designed to be closest to the people and the most likely to reflect the sentiment of the people. Yet it has not been the subject of systematic study and research over the years to the same extent as the Executive Branch or the Supreme Court.
Look at the political section of any book store and you will find scores of books on presidents, biographies, campaign studies, and histories of the United States written from the perspective of presidential administrations. School textbooks favor presidents and the historical view from the perspective of presidential administrations. Congress, if mentioned at all, is in a supporting role of the executive branch and not examined as the branch that for most of American history was the fulcrum of the government and the center of debate in setting the national agenda.
Look at our magnificent presidential library system, where all presidents since Herbert Hoover have special places that are museums for the public and archives for scholarly research on presidents and their administrations. These facilities are administered by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) with regular appropriations from Congress.
NARA also stores and facilitates the use of the official committee records of Congress, which are controlled by the House and Senate but maintained by NARA. These voluminous committee records, which are as vast as the holdings of the presidential libraries, are only part of the records generated by Congress. Each Senator and each House member creates records of their individual service, their voluminous correspondence with constituents, bills they worked on, and causes they championed. Yet these records are not systematically preserved and there are no regular appropriations from Congress to save them and make them available for research by scholars and journalists whose job it is to explain government and monitor its actions.
There is no provision by law to preserve the papers of House and Senate leaders even though these individuals play a large role in shaping the national agenda. Occasionally, in the past, Congress has made small appropriations to help preserve the papers of long-serving committee chairman or House and Senate leaders, usually through earmarks for the purpose. While these earmarks have helped establish small study centers and funds for the processing and archiving of such collections, there is no ongoing funding to guarantee that the papers are preserved and utilized by scholars in the same way that presidential records are maintained. Congress has never found a good way to address the long range study of the legislative branch, even though in 2008 the House and Senate passed a concurrent resolution that declared the private papers of members of Congress are important historical records that should be preserved.
Another reason Congress is not studied as regularly and systematically as the executive branch is that Congress is a greater challenge for writers and researchers. A president is one person who sits astride a large executive branch of many agencies. The president’s personality shapes the way we write about a whole administration. We do the same with the Supreme Court, which often takes on the personality of the Chief Justice. But what is the personality of a Congress with 100 Senators and 435 House members? Only 43 individuals (Cleveland gets counted twice) have served as president in the past 226 years. Only 112 have served on the Supreme Court in the same time, with just 17 chief justices. Yet Congress has been populated by more than 11,000 House members and 1,900 senators.
The members of the Association of Centers for the Study of Congress (ACSC) represent a variety of institutions, often on college and university campuses, that hold the private papers of former members of the Senate and House. Some of these study centers focus on training future leaders, discussing national policy issues, doing research in the history of Congress, encouraging scholarship on Congress with small grants, and showcasing their collections and demonstrating how they can be studied to enrich our understanding of the people’s branch.
The ACSC organizations are proud of the work they do, but they would be the first to say that it is not enough. Congress deserves to be regularly and systematically studied for the benefit of an educated public and for the benefit of Congress itself. Institutional memory, scholarship, journalistic investigations, and public scrutiny of this vast rich body of American history should not be lost. It is too great a historical treasure to allow it to perish from neglect. Our republic will be stronger if we better understand how it works. The three co-equal branches should be studied co-equally.
Another Founder, Benjamin Franklin, replied to those who asked what kind of government the Constitution provided, by saying “A republic, if you can keep it.” He didn’t know for sure if the work of the Federal Convention of 1787 had produced a lasting government. Now, 226 years later, the Constitution is still our foundational document, and we still operate with three branches of government pretty much as outlined in the beginning. But not without much strife, uncertainty, a colossal Civil War, and constant debate and controversy about how well government is working and addressing the needs of the nation.
As Congress prepared for its 200 anniversary more than a quarter century ago, the Library of Congress in cooperation with the Senate and House historical
offices conducted a conference on researching Congress that brought together top political scientists, historians, journalists, and current and former members of Congress. One of the main speakers was David McCullough who gave another answer on why we should study Congress. He said “We need to know more about Congress because we need to know more about leadership. We need to know more about Congress because we can never know enough about human nature. Above all, we need to know more about Congress because we are Americans. We believe in governing ourselves.”
Congress is the people’s branch, the part of government designed to be closest to the people and the most likely to reflect the sentiment of the people. Yet it has not been the subject of systematic study and research over the years to the same extent as the Executive Branch or the Supreme Court.
Look at the political section of any book store and you will find scores of books on presidents, biographies, campaign studies, and histories of the United States written from the perspective of presidential administrations. School textbooks favor presidents and the historical view from the perspective of presidential administrations. Congress, if mentioned at all, is in a supporting role of the executive branch and not examined as the branch that for most of American history was the fulcrum of the government and the center of debate in setting the national agenda.
Look at our magnificent presidential library system, where all presidents since Herbert Hoover have special places that are museums for the public and archives for scholarly research on presidents and their administrations. These facilities are administered by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) with regular appropriations from Congress.
NARA also stores and facilitates the use of the official committee records of Congress, which are controlled by the House and Senate but maintained by NARA. These voluminous committee records, which are as vast as the holdings of the presidential libraries, are only part of the records generated by Congress. Each Senator and each House member creates records of their individual service, their voluminous correspondence with constituents, bills they worked on, and causes they championed. Yet these records are not systematically preserved and there are no regular appropriations from Congress to save them and make them available for research by scholars and journalists whose job it is to explain government and monitor its actions.
There is no provision by law to preserve the papers of House and Senate leaders even though these individuals play a large role in shaping the national agenda. Occasionally, in the past, Congress has made small appropriations to help preserve the papers of long-serving committee chairman or House and Senate leaders, usually through earmarks for the purpose. While these earmarks have helped establish small study centers and funds for the processing and archiving of such collections, there is no ongoing funding to guarantee that the papers are preserved and utilized by scholars in the same way that presidential records are maintained. Congress has never found a good way to address the long range study of the legislative branch, even though in 2008 the House and Senate passed a concurrent resolution that declared the private papers of members of Congress are important historical records that should be preserved.
Another reason Congress is not studied as regularly and systematically as the executive branch is that Congress is a greater challenge for writers and researchers. A president is one person who sits astride a large executive branch of many agencies. The president’s personality shapes the way we write about a whole administration. We do the same with the Supreme Court, which often takes on the personality of the Chief Justice. But what is the personality of a Congress with 100 Senators and 435 House members? Only 43 individuals (Cleveland gets counted twice) have served as president in the past 226 years. Only 112 have served on the Supreme Court in the same time, with just 17 chief justices. Yet Congress has been populated by more than 11,000 House members and 1,900 senators.
The members of the Association of Centers for the Study of Congress (ACSC) represent a variety of institutions, often on college and university campuses, that hold the private papers of former members of the Senate and House. Some of these study centers focus on training future leaders, discussing national policy issues, doing research in the history of Congress, encouraging scholarship on Congress with small grants, and showcasing their collections and demonstrating how they can be studied to enrich our understanding of the people’s branch.
The ACSC organizations are proud of the work they do, but they would be the first to say that it is not enough. Congress deserves to be regularly and systematically studied for the benefit of an educated public and for the benefit of Congress itself. Institutional memory, scholarship, journalistic investigations, and public scrutiny of this vast rich body of American history should not be lost. It is too great a historical treasure to allow it to perish from neglect. Our republic will be stronger if we better understand how it works. The three co-equal branches should be studied co-equally.
The author is a former Historian of the U.S. House of Representatives and is currently Director of the Robert C. Byrd Center for Congressional History and Education, located at Shepherd University.
