The Congressional Record is the official record of the proceedings and debates of the United States Congress. It is published daily when Congress is in session. The Congressional Record began publication in 1873. Debates for sessions prior to 1873 are recorded in The Debates and Proceedings in the Congress of the United States (1789-1824), the Register of Debates in Congress (1824-1837), and the Congressional Globe (1833-1873)

This book explores why some members of Congress are more effective than others at navigating the legislative process and what this means for how Congress is organized and what policies it produces. Craig Volden and Alan E. Wiseman develop a new metric of individual legislator effectiveness (the Legislative Effectiveness Score) that will be of interest to scholars, voters, and politicians alike. They use these scores to study party influence in Congress, the successes or failures of women and African Americans in Congress, policy gridlock, and the specific strategies that lawmakers employ to advance their agendas.

'Promised Land, Crusader State' is a reinterpretation of the traditions that have shaped U.S. foreign policy from 1776 to the present. Looking back over two centuries, Walter McDougall draws a striking contrast between America as Promised Land and a contrary vision of America as Crusader State.

"The National Environmental Policy Act has grown more, not less, important in the decades since its enactment. No one knows more about NEPA than Lynton Caldwell. And no one has a clearer vision of its relevance to our future. Highly recommended." —David W. Orr, Oberlin College What has been achieved since the National Environmental Policy Act was passed in 1969? This book points out where and how NEPA has affected national environmental policy and where and why its intent has been frustrated. The roles of Congress, the President, and the courts in the implementation of NEPA are analyzed. Professor Caldwell also looks at the conflicted state of public opinion regarding the environment and conjectures as to what must be done in order to develop a coherent and sustained policy.

An essential responsibility of the U.S. Congress is holding the president accountable for the conduct of foreign policy. In this in-depth look at formal oversight hearings by the Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations committees, Linda Fowler evaluates how the legislature's most visible and important watchdogs performed from the mid-twentieth century to the present. She finds a noticeable reduction in public and secret hearings since the mid-1990s and establishes that American foreign policy frequently violated basic conditions for democratic accountability. Committee scrutiny of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, she notes, fell below levels of oversight in prior major conflicts. Fowler attributes the drop in watchdog activity to growing disinterest among senators in committee work, biases among members who join the Armed Services and Foreign Relations committees, and motives that shield presidents, particularly Republicans, from public inquiry. Her detailed case studies of the Truman Doctrine, Vietnam War, Panama Canal Treaty, humanitarian mission in Somalia, and Iraq War illustrate the importance of oversight in generating the information citizens need to judge the president’s national security policies. She argues for a reassessment of congressional war powers and proposes reforms to encourage Senate watchdogs to improve public deliberation about decisions of war and peace. Watchdogs on the Hill investigates America’s national security oversight and its critical place in the review of congressional and presidential powers in foreign policy.