ABSTRACT
Ever since Woodrow Wilson first wrote about congressional government (1885), students of Congress have agreed that committees are where the action is. What they have done with this fact is something else. Wilson’s identification of committees as the effective power centers of Congress began a complicated relationship between scholars and the institution they study. The purpose of this chapter is to put the long sweep of this scholarship into perspective, to assess the current role of congressional committees in the American political system. The conclusion of this assessment is that congressional committees have fully emerged from the post-war congressional system that obscured party differences, highlighted the particular goals of legislators, and was studied through a series of theoretical lenses that treated committees as autonomous actors on the legislative stage. In the new era, which is still in its infancy, party differences are sharp, party goals dominate, and committees are no longer as autonomous as they once were.
