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Congress in 1971 will again turn to the renewal and extension of the much-amended and much-contested Sugar Act. Certain changes from the last go-round are worth noting. A new administration is in the White House and Harold Cooley, to whom a journalist once attributed “princely power” in the area, no longer presides over the House Agriculture Committee. But in this area, as in so many others, the changes are not nearly as striking as the continuities. Cooley has been succeeded by the likeminded W. R. Poage, and turnovers in the Department of Agriculture have scarcely reached the Sugar Policy division of the Stabilization and Conservation Service. More importantly, the groups and decision-making bodies in the area have changed little in their interests, their relative power, or their modes of interaction. It is the intention of this essay to tell the story of the 1965 renewal of the Sugar Act in such a way as to illumine the nature of this policy-making situation, with particular attention to the lawmaking roles of the congressional committees that handle sugar legislation, House Agriculture and Senate Finance. A by-product of the analysis should be an understanding of the form in which the Act comes up for renewal in 1971 and of how and why it got that way.
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- Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1971
References
1 This article is a revised version of a case study that I first developed in “Who Makes the Laws? The Legislative Roles of Three Senate Committees” (unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, Yale University, 1969)Google Scholar. What follows will reveal the debt of gratitude I owe to the senators, aides, bureaucrats and lobbyists who gave generously of their time and interest, attempting to acquaint me in a few hours with what to them was everyday working knowledge. No recording devices were used during our conversations; the “quotations” that follow are taken from transcripts, as nearly verbatim as possible, which I drew up from memory after each interview.
2 Cater, Douglass, Power in Washington (New York, 1965), p. 19Google Scholar.
3 See Congress and the Nation (Washington, 1965), pp. 730–735Google Scholar.
4 On the techniques and successes of Cuban interests in maintaining a healthy quota see Cater, , Power in Washington, pp. 199–205Google Scholar.
5 The administration request came in response to a call by the Organization of American States for sanctions against the Dominican government, which had been implicated in an attempt to assassinate President Romulo Betancourt of Venezuela. The resistance of Cooley and Vice-Chairman Poage to the request was widely attributed to their sympathies toward the Trujillo government.
6 Congressional Quarterly Almanac, 1960, p. 214.
7 Ibid., 1963, p. 138.
8 Ibid., 1962, p. 140.
9 Committee on Finance, United States Senate, 89th Congress, Report to accompany H.R. 11135, October 18, 1965, pp. 4–5.
10 Congressional Quarterly Almanac, 1964, pp. 121–122.
11 Committee on Finance, United States Senate, 89th Congress, Hearings on H.R. 11135 and S. 2567, October 14, 1965, pp. 177–179.
12 48 Stat. 676 (1934); 50 Stat. 912 (1937).
13 Congressional Quarterly Almanac, 1962, p. 137.
14 New York Times, August 18, 1965, p. 1.
15 Except for the Philippines, for which a fixed tonnage had been set by a separate treaty.
16 Senate Hearings, October 14, 1965, pp. 58, 65.
17 See Congressional Record (permanent ed.), September 22, 1965, pp. 24692–24695; October 12, 1965, pp. 26739, 26762–26763.
18 See “Sugar Stick-up,” The Nation, CCI (10 4, 1965), p. 206Google Scholar.
19 New York Times, October 15, 1965, p. 44.
20 Senate Hearings, October 14, 1965, pp. 90, 151–155.
21 Ibid., pp. 118–119, 143–145.
22 Data are taken from Congressional Quarterly Almanac, 1965, p. 147.
23 New York Times, October 16, 1965, p. 21.
24 See Senate Hearings, October 14, 1965, pp. 60–61, 178.
25 See Congressional Record, October 20, 1965, p. 27527.
26 Ibid., October 19, 1965, p. 27372.
27 New York Times, October 23, 1965, p. 28.
28 See especially Bauer, Raymond A., de Sola Pool, Ithiel, and Dexter, Lewis A., American Business and Public Policy (New York, 1964)Google Scholar, part V.
29 Theodore Lowi, speaking of the administration of federal programs as well as of lawmaking, describes agriculture generally as “that field of American government where the distinction between public and private has come closest to being completely eliminated. This has been accomplished not by public expropriation of private domain — as would be true of the nationalization that Americans fear — but by private expropriation of public authority.… The regulators are powerless without the consent of the regulated.” See The End of Liberalism (New York, 1969), pp. 102–115Google Scholar. On the “sugar subgovernment” in particular, see Cater, , Power in Washington, pp. 17–20Google Scholar.
30 Lowi, Theodore, “American Business, Public Policy, Case-Studies, and Political Theory,” World Politics, XVI (07, 1964), 690Google Scholar.
31 See ibid., 692–695. The House Agriculture Committee, as Charles Jones points out, is organized “to allow a maximum of constituency-oriented representation,” with members ordinarily appointed to subcommittees dealing with commodities important to their districts. (Sugar, however, is handled at the full committee level.) The subcommittees then often ratify one another's actions in full committee, though party loyalties and programs sometimes cause this system of reciprocity to break down. See Jones', two articles: “Representation in Congress: The Case of the House Agriculture Committee,” American Political Science Review, LV (06, 1961), 358–367CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and “The Role of the Congressional Subcommittee,” Midwest Journal of Political Science, VI (11, 1962), 327–344Google Scholar.
32 See Olson, Mancur Jr, The Logic of Collective Action (New York, 1968)Google Scholar, ch. 1–2.
33 Ibid., pp. 128, 132, 166.
34 See Price, “Who Makes the Laws?” ch. 2.
35 For a fuller discussion of the policy-making role of the Finance Committee see ibid., ch. 4–5