All Roads Lead to Congress: The $300 Billion Fight Over Highway Funding - Softcover

Costas Panagopoulous; Joshua Schank

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0872894614 ISBN 13: 9780872894617

Publisher: CQ Press, 2007

Synopsis

While learning procedures like the markup or cloture, the legislative process can seem mechanical and dry. What students hunger for, and greatly benefit from, is seeing lawmaking from the inside—the backroom politics that makes the process so fascinating, so real, so compelling. All Roads Lead to Congress drives students through one piece of legislation—the surface transportation bill—showing them the maneuvering and negotiating that go on among members of Congress and their staffers as they haggle over a huge pot of money. The bill provides an example of both sides of the domestic legislative coin, as members of Congress formulating the bill fight over both policy issues (mostly along party lines) and money (mostly along regional lines).

While working on the Hill, Costas Panagopoulos and Joshua Schank were able to follow the path of this legislation from inception to law, observing firsthand the twists and turns of its journey. While filled with details and dialogue reminiscent of a good novel, All Roads is sure to explain the various rules that structure legislation, the leadership styles and strategies at play, the tensions among levels of government, and the impact of the executive. Students are not only likely to read this intriguing case study of Hill life cover to cover, but they also might seriously consider an internship or future career on the Hill. More important, they will have absorbed conceptual ideas about Congress effortlessly.

About this title

About the Author:

Costas Panagopoulos is assistant professor of political science and director of the Center for Electoral Politics and the Master's Program in Elections and Campaign Management at Fordham University. He is also research fellow at the Institution for Social and Policy Studies at Yale University. He served as an American Political Science Association Congressional Fellow in the office of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY) from 2004 to 2005. His academic research, focusing on American politics with an emphasis on campaigns and elections, voting behavior, public opinion and Congress, has appeared in the American Journal of Political Science, Public Opinion Quarterly, Presidential Studies Quarterly, Electoral Studies, and PS: Political Science and Politics. Panagopoulos was part of the Decision Desk team at NBC News in 2006 and has provided extensive political analysis and commentary for various print and broadcast media outlets including the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Newsday, CNN, NBC Nightly News, Fox News, and BBC Television. Panagopoulos holds an undergraduate degree in government from Harvard University and a PhD in politics from New York University.
Joshua Schank is President and CEO of the Eno Transportation Foundation, a transportation policy think-tank.  Previously he was the Director of Transportation Research at the Bipartisan Policy Center, where he directed a national transportation policy study. He has been a consultant with Parsons Brinckerhoff and ICF International. Schank advised Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton on federal highway and transit legislation from 2002 to 2005.  He has also been an analyst for the U.S. DOT Inspector General, and a transportation planner for the Permanent Citizens Advisory Committee to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority in New York City.  In addition to a PhD in urban planning from Columbia University, Schank has a master's degree in city planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

About this edition

• Publisher: CQ Press
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0872894614
• ISBN 13: 9780872894617
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 197