What do these aspects of the legislative branch mean for policy making? Any discussion
of the legislative process will inevitably reflect difficulty in actually passing laws
and policies. When a decentralized Congress and its members are more concerned
with its relationships with interest groups, key bureaucracies, and citizen-clients,
it is difficult to make “big” policies that require substantial legislative action, particularly
since members’ “clients” are often as likely to resist change as they are to
support it. This feature of the system became most evident during the health care
reform debate in 2009, in which opposition to reforms arose based simply on the
distaste some have for any change. And, indeed, the founders purposefully created
a system in which change was difficult to achieve, but they realized that change
would be possible when a coalition of elected officials and citizens formed to promote
change. But Congress’s focus on politically safe casework and distributive
(pork-barrel) projects may make lawmaking less politically safe and more unpopular,
and therefore may lead to greater tendencies to maintain the status quo—a situation
in which less powerful, still striving interests find it difficult to press their case for
sweeping policy change.