Experience of Redman in the Congress
The present book concerns the personal experience of Eric Redman as an official in Congress. As a member of the most powerful legislative body in the USA possessing the unique authority to adopt laws, Redman was able to view the process from the inside. More than that, Redman was personally involved in passing the National Health Service Bill S.4106 and could experience the hardships, plots, and maneuvers that were a part of daily activities in Capitol Hill. Summarizing his experiences in the book The Dance of Legislation, Redman (1973) shows how intricate and unstable the position of every Congress member is in the legislation process, how many tricks and maneuvers one has to take to keep his or her stable ground and to come at least a bit closer to the stipulated goal.
The purpose for producing such a detailed description of the inside world of the Congress and the main value of the book recognized by readers is that Redman opened the mystery of the Capitol Hill events, processes, and procedures. People knew only the pieces of information that were chosen for PR campaigns and official news releases. In all other fields, they could not understand the unofficial side of Congress affairs and the mysterious triggers being pushed to produce the outcomes known to the common public. Redman was a young, immature man who was fascinated by the picture that he saw in the Congress during his Bill-related activities, so he decided to share the opinion that he acquired for two years of work in the most sacred place in the US that was able to influence the destiny of the whole state.
Important Points Made by Redman
The first important point Redman emphasizes in his book is the way the health reform was treated – how much debate was over the philosophy and the content of the reform. In these considerations, one can see the ever-lasting debate over the content of healthcare reforms that is still the burning issue of modern reality. From Redman’s thoughts, one can see what importance was attributed to healthcare in the 1970s, from which the modern public can understand how pressing the problem was and is on the nationwide scale. In the process of designing a special kind of program that could have been passed by Magnuson and describing it to the reader, Redman attributes the following elements to it:
“Confronted with a National Health Service Corps scheme that purported to strengthen the system of private practice…We hardly pursued it with the zeal one would expect of conspirators…We agreed…that the NHSC should be not as grand in scale…So we settled for what we hoped would be a small but imaginative experiment: an NHSC in which several dozen Public Health Service Doctors would run a handful of healthcare projects in a few selected communities scattered throughout the United States” (Redman, 1973, p. 39).
Another point that is important in the discussion of the Congress affairs offered by Redman is the precise description of inner legislative processes so unintelligible for the common public. It is enough to recollect the speculations of Redman in the chapter “The War of Nerves” dedicated to the bill they were working at. On considering an opportunity for Nixon to veto the bill and to prevent it from passing on further through the Congress, Redman also considered one more opportunity that a President could use besides some formal reactions – the pocket veto: “The strategy itself was easy: Nixon had to be decided to filibuster and block action on the conference report until his demands were met” (Redman, 1973, p. 237). Providing this example in line with many others, Redman assumes that all ways of achieving goals were welcome in the Congress, no matter how decent and allowed they were.
Finally, among other significant points offered by Redman (1973) for consideration one should pay attention to the chapter dedicated to the initial proposal of the Bill Magnuson and his team, together with the author, designed. On seeing no proposal that was entrusted to Congressman Rogers, the author tried to find out the true reason for such negligence. The answer he got was too sincere and too cruel to be a lie: “BILL SEEKS CARE OF POOR BY GOVERNMENT DOCTORS” (Redman, 1973, p. 99). This passage is very expressive in two dimensions. First of all, it reveals the never-ending problem of health financing and dealing with vulnerable groups of the US population (the situation seems to have not changed a bit for more than 30 years). Secondly, Redman shows how dependent the success of their undertaking was on many other influential Congressmen such a Rogers, Nelson, and Kennedy. Power was a privilege of the few, and only with their help, it was possible to initiate any change.
It is hard to find any counterevidence in the work of Redman because it mostly pursues one goal – to describe the role plays, plotting, and negotiations that members of the Congress had every day in their pursuit of power and aim achievement. Surely, he includes some good, positive characters that do not suit the profile of politicians that Redman has created, but they are too few to fall out of the common picture drawn by him. The book fails to be highly persuasive because the author shows the world of Congress as an inside observer, which is not always objective. Being a member of a Congressman’s team he still had access to materials, information, and acquaintances that a usual writer even conducting thorough, in-depth research would have never obtained, but his opinion cannot be called mature.
Conclusion
Summing up everything that has been said about the book, it is hard to say that the book genuinely produces the breakthrough that is ascribed to it. The fact that it gave procedural knowledge to readers is highly doubtable because the overall procedure is hard to grasp and makes itself evident in contemporary reality. Everyone knows about the manipulations and power-relations that exist in any power structure, so the way Redman depicts the whole legislative mechanism appears too positive. Though it is surely Redman’s personal opinion and he was not sponsored by any party or political power in the process of writing the book, it is essential that he was an immature politician fascinated about everything taking place in Congress. He liked his work and was enthusiastic, so he could have evaluated many facts in a much more positive light than he would have in case he were older and more experienced in legislation. In addition, Redman’s investigation is too limited (examining only the process of passing Bill S.4106) to afford generalizations on the overall work of Congress.
References
Redman, E. (1973). The Dance of Legislation. University of Washington Press.