"Many academic studies of the last twenty years use large-N quantitative studies of roll-call voting and partisanship to make a case for why Congress is broken as a rule-making and functioning institution of governance. In Inside Congressional Committees: Function and Dysfunction in the Legislative Process, political scientist Maya L. Kornberg explores Congress beyond voting, concentrating on congressional committee hearings as the legislative concourse...

Have you no sense of decency, sir? asked attorney Robert Welch in a climactic moment in the 1954 Senate hearings that pitted Joseph R. McCarthy against the United States Army, President Dwight Eisenhower, and the rest of the political establishment. What made the confrontation unprecedented and magnified its impact was its gavel-to-gavel coverage by television. Thirty-six days of hearings transfixed the nation. With a journalist's eye for revealing...