Racial tracking made it to the governmental agenda but did not make it to the decision agenda in Congress. More precisely, racial justice advocates repeatedly tried but failed to create a window of opportunity for redress of racial tracking in the criminal process. Their push for enactment of corrective federal legislation continually faltered as a result. The lack of success is not readily attributable to a lack of viable policy options. For a quarter century, proponents of racial justice put forward a legislative agenda composed of a wide and varied range of options from which prospective supporters could choose as a way to commit either tangible or symbolic support to racial reform of criminal justice. Despite this, everything from the weak, narrowly construed, and economical measures to the more aggressive, wide-reaching, and costly proposals met the same fate. It mattered little whether the issue at hand was that of which stage of the criminal process to tackle, which requirements and prohibitions to put in place, or how to enforce the bills.

It would be a mistake also to blame the demise of the Congressional racial justice agenda on the usual institutional and political impediments to policy reform. Besides the substance of policy options, the other factors that typically play a major role in dooming legislative initiatives launched in Congress also did not figure largely in the agenda’s downfall. Informational deficiencies, regional and partisan polarization, inadequate parliamentary skill, intense opposition, and little known sponsors were not determinative. Ultimately, it was the most decisive of the “usual culprits” that sealed the agenda’s fate. Reformers continually fell far short of the votes needed to move the bills through the formal legislative process.