BURLINGTON, Vt., Dec. 18 (AScribe Newswire) -- In 1975 University of Vermont political science professor Garrison Nelson, then a member of U.S. Sen. Patrick Leahy's staff, began a research project on the importance of committee assignments to the careers of legislative leaders.
His inquiries took him to the Congressional Research Service, a division of the Library of Congress, where he learned that no history of legislative committee assignments in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives existed.
When Nelson wondered aloud if such a compilation might be created, he got a straightforward answer. "The consensus was, no, this couldn't be done," Nelson says. "The information was buried in obscure resolutions deep in the archives. It would be virtually impossible, people said, to put together a membership history of each committee."
Twenty-seven years and countless research hours later, Nelson, along with co-authors David T. Canon of the University of Wisconsin and Charles Stewart III of MIT, have proven the experts wrong with the publication of "Committees in the U.S. Congress, 1789-1946," a weighty four-volume set that contains over 100,000 committee assignments and more than three million separate pieces of information. The four new volumes join a two-volume set Nelson published in 1993, "Committees of the U.S. Congress, 1947-1992." All six volumes are published by Congressional Quarterly Press.
According to Richard A. Baker, chief historian in the U.S. Senate's Historical Office, the new volumes should prove invaluable, based on his experience with their predecessors.
"Our copies of the earlier volumes are ragged and dog eared," he says, with everyone from historians, to senate staff, to the senators themselves seeking out the reference books, which are among the most read in the Senate.
The new volumes will be especially useful, Baker says, because the Congressional Quarterly began organizing large amounts of data only in 1947, two years after its founding.
"What Garry and his colleagues have done," Baker says, "is to chart a path to the pre-Congressional Quarterly history of Congress, where there really had been no reliable guides." Because of this dearth of historical information, many political scientists have been forced to focus on the post-1947 era.
1.5 million pages of Congressional Record
Nelson's research process was as laborious as it was lengthy. A legion of undergraduate students at the University of Vermont helped with the work, which involved pouring over nearly a million-and-a-half pages of the Congressional Record.
"We would create a grid for the committee at the start of every two-year Congress and then a grid at the end of the Congress." Nelson and his assistants could then chart who came on and went off the committees by sorting through the 15,000-18,000 pages of Congressional Record covering each Congress.
So why is it important to study the joining behavior of senators and representatives over time?
Nelson's research shows that "what you do in Congress is a direct manifestation of your committee assignments." Assignments not only determine a member's influence on legislation but "also on the friendships you make. Many of the strong personal relationships" members form "are built around committee assignments."
Titan influence
Nelson's decision to move forward with the mammoth reference project was propelled by conversations with three Congressional titans.
At separate times during the 1960s and 1970s, John McCormack, speaker of the House; Rules Committee Chair Richard Bolling; and House Ways and Means Committee Chair Wilbur Mills all told Nelson how important committee assignments were to their careers. "Wilbur Mills gave up a shot at running for the Senate because he was on the Ways and Means Committee. Sam Rayburn told him as long as he was on the committee, there was no point in running for the Senate." McCormack, who also served on the Ways and Means committee, told Nelson virtually the same story.
Canon and Stewart played key roles in the publication of the four new volumes, going through the massive amount of primary research Nelson and his students had conducted, which was preserved on computer tapes, and shaping, editing, and formatting it. Canon was also instrumental in obtaining National Science Foundation funding for the project, as Nelson had done earlier in the process.
The reference work is important because of the
"centrality of Congress in creating the landscape of
national politics," Nelson says. In showing how members of
Congress "navigated through the committee system, you're
revealing the nature of ambition."
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