"Congress isn't working." This simple statement reflected an overwhelming 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 Americans 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 institution 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 dominated 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 variety of sources, but most of them were ultimately related to the decline 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 representative democracy as set out in the 1787 Constitution no longer accord with the prevailing political ethos. Modern postindustrial society is ill suited to parliamentary government, a fact that became evi-

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