"Congress isn't working." This simple statement reflected an over-
whelming consensus among the American public in the early 1990s.
Apart from a handful of political scientists, established Washington
commentators, and some veteran members of Congress, few Ameri-
cans were prepared to argue that the legislative branch of the American
federal government was doing its job in anything like an adequate
fashion. ¹ Indeed, most members of the House and Senate appeared to
be only too happy to participate in the public denigration of the institu-
tion in which they served. On television news, newspaper columns,
op-ed pages, and talk radio, Congress had few if any defenders, and
this distaste for the branch of government mentioned first in the U.S.
Constitution was reflected in Congress's very poor public approval
ratings (see Figure 1. 1 ). Congress received significant public attention,
it appeared, only when tawdry scandals involving money or sex domi-
nated the political landscape. The institution where Madison, Monroe,
Clay, Webster, Calhoun, Lodge, Russell, Johnson, and Rayburn had
served was now associated with the sordid "money grabbing" of Jim
Wright and Dan Rostenkowski or the "lechery" of Bob Packwood.

This chapter argues that Congress's problems stemmed from a va-
riety of sources, but most of them were ultimately related to the de-
cline in the power and authority of the legislative branch in the U.S.
political system, a decline that became inevitable in an advanced mass
society where the electronic news media serve as the primary vehicle
of political communication and intermediation between citizen and
government and where the norms of legislative government and repre-
sentative democracy as set out in the 1787 Constitution no longer
accord with the prevailing political ethos. Modern postindustrial soci-
ety is ill suited to parliamentary government, a fact that became evi-

-3-