Congress: two decades of analysis

Two questions might reasonably be asked of my contribution to this book. Why were these essays written in the first place? And more to the point, why should they be reprinted now? Generations are so short nowadays that it's hard to recapture the climate of twenty years ago. Hard-but helpful in this case.
Literature on the legislature then was less profuse than now, generally of good quality, but concerned for the most part with formal aspects and the prospects for reform. Legislative scholars were confident that they knew what a really good legislature would be like and they thought it useful to measure the real

article against the models they constructed. Then came Stephen K. Bailey's case study of the enactment of the Employment Act of 1946, Congress Makes a Law. His concern was what went on in the two houses where an intellectual's dream of a national commitment to full employment was converted into a bill that could pass. The idea of paying attention to what legislators do was revolutionary, and legislative scholarship was never quite the same after that.