Congressional politics 121the Senate is given the function of ratifying treaties on behalf of the United
States, and of confirming the appointments to senior federal executive and
judicial posts. The Constitution also provides that all bills for raising revenue
must originate in the House of Representatives, but the Senate retains the
right to amend or reject such proposals. Just as important for congressional
autonomy, however, is the fact that the decentralised party system provides
no basis for the effective disciplining of Senators or Congressmen. No single
person or group of leaders at the national level can endanger the political ca-
reer of a legislator simply because he has refused to follow their leadership.
From time to time Congressmen are disciplined by their congressional party.
Representative John B. Williams, a Democrat from Mississippi, supported
the Republican candidate for the presidency in 1964, and as a consequence
the caucus of the Democratic Party in the House stripped him of his seniority
in the party. But no one in Congress or in the administration could prevent,
or even consider attempting to prevent, his re-election to Congress in 1966.
The method of selecting candidates, in particular the system of primary elec-
tions, places the effective power of discipline in the hands of the local party,
or of the Congressman’s constituents, and not in the hands of national lead-
ers. The diversity of the local political systems that we have surveyed and the
truly local basis of power in those systems are the fundamental guarantee of
congressional autonomy.
The most important consequences of this constitutional and political con-
text are, first, that there is no single united source of leadership in Congress
comparable to that exercised by the government in a parliamentary system.
Second, Congress has organised itself to allow full play to the sectional and
local interests that dominate the fates of its members, and to the group pres-
sures that fill the vacuum left by the absence of strongly party-oriented pro-
grammes. Third, the changing patterns of voting in Congress on the issues
that come before it are determined by a very complex interaction between
local, sectional and pluralistic influences, by the individual characters of
Congressmen, and by the influence of the president and the administration.
Thus the individual Senators and Congressmen stand at the centre of a great
web of relationships, constitutional and political. Some of these relationships
greatly strengthen their ability to exercise judgement independently of the
overriding authority of any person or group, but of course the exercise of
this judgement is a matter of the highest political sensitivity. Members of
Congress can exercise their judgement only in a political context, which has
a number of dimensions. Members of the same party as the president will
feel the pull of allegiance to the national leader of the party; but they will
also have a loyalty to the congressional leadership of the party in the House
or the Senate. The extent of the loyalty owed to these two types of party
leader will depend upon a number of factors, and they will not always coin-
cide. The Senators and Representatives will be particularly concerned with
their perception of constituents’ attitudes, and also with the views of interest
groups that may put those views to them with varying degrees of importunity.