The Committee

For three years while serving as a senior adviser to Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-CA), chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerceone of the most powerful committees in CongressBruce C. Wolpe kept a diary, a senior staffers look at how committees develop and promote legislation. With its insiders view of the rough-and-tumble politics of cap-and-trade, healthcare reform, tobacco, oversight, and the debt ceiling agreement, The Committee uniquely melds the art of politics and policymaking with the theory and literature of political science. The authors engage with the important questions that political science asks about committee power, partisanship, and the strategies used to build winning policy coalitions both in the Committee and on the floor of the House. In this new edition, the authors revisit the relationship between the executive and Congress in the wake of the sweeping changes wrought by the Trump administration, as well as thoughts about how that relationship will change again as President Biden faces a 117th Congress that is strikingly similar to Obamas 111th. The insider politics and strategies about moving legislation in Congress, from internal and external coalition building to a chairmans role in framing policy narratives, will captivate both novice and die-hard readers of politics.