The rise of the Reagan coalition of economic and social conservatives, with the associated rightward movement of national Republicans across the country, is the proximate cause of partisan polarization among members of Congress and other political elites in the period since the 1970s (Sinclair 2006). The emergence of the Reagan coalition siphoned Southern conservative Democrats from the Democratic coalition that had dominated national politics from the 1930s through the 1970s. In time, the northeastern states lost moderate Republicans who were replaced by Democrats. The net effect was to make congressional Democrats more uniformly liberal and the congressional Republicans more uniformly conservative. This realignment has made control of federal institutions highly contested in most elections and, step by step, has produced the most polarized congressional parties at any time since the Civil War.

This partisan polarization in policy and ideological outlook was accompanied by a radicalization of legislative strategies and tactics, first on the part of the minority-party Republicans and then in the majority-party response. This process affected both houses of Congress and continued when party control of the two houses changed in the 1990s. The character of House policy making changed first, but the character of Senate policy making changed the most.

In the House, the “Gingrich Republicans,” a combination of neoconservative, supply-side, and religious-right conservatives, expanded their ranks in the 1980s. They eventually gained election to top party posts and adopted a variety of parliamentary guerrilla tactics to challenge the majority-party Democrats. The more aggressive minority strategies were met with adjustments in the way Democrats managed committees, structured the floor agenda, and named conference delegations, which further marginalized the role of minorityparty Republicans in policy making and aggravated interparty grievances. In the years since the 1980s, the procedural warfare has intensified, but the House majority party, whether the Democrats or the Republicans, has had the weapons to win most battles.

The Senate is a different story and is the subject of this chapter.