Washington at Work: Back Rooms and Clean Air, Richard E. Cohen, (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1992), 180pp.
Politics; consensus building; applicability to air quality issues; written for the first party participant.
Washington at Work: Back Rooms and Clean Air is an examination of the political dimension of environmental problems; specifically air quality. The work specifically addresses the years of the Reagan and Bush presidencies.
Washington at Work: Back Rooms and Clean Air has been required reading in multiple political science courses at CU Boulder. This work will be of interest to those who seek an understanding of the political dimension on environmental problems such as air quality. The first chapter is devoted to the difficulty with which anything is accomplished in the congressional body of the United States. The second chapter examines early clean-air politics. The next two chapters address focus on the Reagan and Bush presidencies. The author asserts that the Reagan administration was instrumental in defining the problem while the Bush administration took definitive action toward cleaner air. One need not search far to find many sources who would disagree with the author's assessment of these administrations.
Cohen next addresses the change in the power of committee chairmen as a result of 1974 congressional reforms. He asserts that these reforms significantly reduced the power of the chairmen and allowed more grass-root party opinion to carry additional weight in the administration of influential committees. The author discusses the role of the Senate majority leader's in championing a new clean-air act. This discussion praises George Mitchell as a tireless advocate of a massive clean-air bill.
Chapter seven addresses special interests and influence and asserts that the effect of these twin pressures on the content of legislation is minimal. In the next chapter the author states: "Knowledge and skill are not the sole determinants of legislative success." This statement is prefatory to an examination of the sort and amount of work that is accomplished behind closed doors, as it were. This topic bleeds over into the next chapter which is concerned with the making of alternative deals. The penultimate chapter is concerned with the ways in which the Senate and House reach common ground on a final version of a clean-air act. The final chapter is applause for the system of government of the United States. The author takes the passage of a clean-air act by the Bush administration as evidence that the United States government does work. His powers of inference are evidently greater than critics of the snail-like pace of the United States government.
While Washington at Work: Back Rooms and Clean Air gives a blow-by-blow account of the passage of a clean-air act during Bush's administration it gives one the impression of mere panegyric.
T. A. O'Lonergan
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