The Post-Civil Rights Congress

The influx of Black Members into Congress as a bloc coincides with four major trends in Congressional policymaking

• Explosion in the Congressional agenda (Jones, Theriault, and Whyman 2019)
• Increased reliance on party leadership Cox and McCubbins (2005)
• Higher and higher levels of polarization (McCarty et al. 2019)
• Increased reliance on special interests for generating public support and funding for both issues and members’ re-election bids [ Lee (2016), Hall and Deardorff (2006)]

This indicates that the strategies that worked to secure legislative passage on major substantive topics were being taken away systematically at the very moment of Black political ascendancy within Congress

Race and Anti-Pluralism in the U.S. Congress

Meanwhile, these trends also inaugurated a broader era of Congressional inaction, particularly around the intellectual frameworks of status-quo bias (Enns et al. 2014) and Congressional gridlock (Sinclair 2006). This has often been thought of outside of the field of racial and ethnic politics but as Paul Frymer notes:

“If voter hostility to black political interests is great, then the threat of defections among the party’s current supporters will likely diminish the party’s efforts to appeal to black voters. As long as political party leaders believe that racial appeals to whites are a successful method for gaining votes and attaining office, it will remain in their interests to continue such efforts, and it will remain in the interests of the other party to try to take race issues off the agenda entirely.” (Frymer 1999)

In other words, Black political interests are squeezed from both sides. On one level, the nature of Congressional policymaking promotes less legislative action, not more. On the other, the things that Congress will get done are less and less likely to reflect the needs of the Black community.

Black Members Legislating Under Constraint

This is the environment in which Black members have to work and advance their agendas/re-election interests. How do they do this?

The first step to answering this question is understanding how they came to understand this problem and organized themselves as political voting bloc to advance their individual and collective political agendas, a strategic framework I call advancement through inclusion that takes as its key insight the importance of advancing to ever-higher roles of responsibility within the Democratic Party.

The second is how they make sense of their constraints as Congressional policymaking becomes ever-more hostile to racial justice legislation. My argument here is that all members, but Black members more intensely, use non-legislative means to compensate for legislative constraints, a phenomenon I call representational triage.

How A Constrained Policymaking Environment Makes Representation More Important, Not Less

• This environment has led to some major failures in terms of Black Members not being able to achieve both critical and high-profile legislative initiatives (a key recent example being their inability to construct a legislative coalition strong enough to pass the George Floyd Policing Act).

• However, as a matter of democratic responsiveness, they are still very popular and, beyond that, the importance of descriptive representation is as high as its ever been in terms of being a boon for Black voter turnout. So even a project that is critical of descriptive representation must work through how to think about those criticisms in the context of both the non-legislative priorities they are able to accomplish as well as the ways that it remains a potent tool for the participation of Black people.

References