In his last press conference as chairman of the Federal Reserve's Board of Governors in 2013, Ben Bernanke was asked what advice he would offer Janet Yellen, the incoming chair, for dealing with Congress. Bernanke kept it simple: “Congress is our boss” (Federal Reserve 2013, 29). The Federal Reserve's (or Fed's) relationship with Congress is hardly that straightforward. Indeed, Bernanke immediately added: “It is important that we maintain our policy independence in order to be able to make decisions without short term political interference.” Bernanke's advice and admonition highlight the inevitable tension for Congress between insulating monetary policy from political pressure and holding the Fed accountable for its policy decisions.

The trade off between independence and democratic accountability is most apparent in the wake of financial and economic crises with interest rates at zero and central banks compelled to break the glass, tapping unconventional tools to ease policy further. Indeed, the recent global financial crisis reveals the limits of central bank independence. In the United States, Europe, and Japan, politicians have renewed their focus on central banks – replacing governors, revamping lending powers, and demanding greater accountability. Heightened oversight of monetary policy contrasts sharply with studies of central bank autonomy: Politicians are said to prefer independent central banks because more independent monetary authorities aim to deliver lower and more stable inflation (Alesina and Summers 1993). Committing in advance to central bank autonomy in theory prevents politicians from interfering with monetary policy to ease conditions for electoral gain.

Why and when do politicians threaten to revise the degree of independence they afford their central banks? And how does the current state of partisan polarization – coincident with the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression – affect how lawmakers react to the Fed's implementation of monetary policy? In this chapter, we focus on Congress's relationship with the Federal Reserve in the postwar period. First, we offer a framework for understanding how lawmakers influence monetary policy given expectations of central bank independence. We argue that Congress and the president largely shape monetary policy indirectly: setting goals for the Fed, reforming Fed governance, and imposing greater transparency. Second, we explore the conditions under which lawmakers threaten to change the Fed's goals, governance, or accountability.

There is one unavoidable fact about legislating in a democratic system. No single person, faction, or interest can get everything it wants. Legislating inevitably means compromising, except in the rare circumstances when consensus is so strong that one dominant view can prevail with ease.

Robert Kaiser 2013, p. 174

Compromise may be the “unavoidable fact” about legislating in a democratic system. Yet, scholars have few systematic answers to this question: How do legislators “get to yes”? To put the question in language more familiar to students of politics: How do politicians with diverse, often-conflicting interests and policy preferences reach agreements on public policy in a legislative body of co-equals? In this chapter, we offer a perspective on deal making in the contemporary Congress, highlighting the impact of political and partisan considerations on lawmakers' abilities to secure policy agreements.

Negotiation in Congress is never solely about policy: politics and policy are always intertwined. Congressional negotiations thus differ from those in the private sector, in which actors seek to maximize benefits and minimize costs and the substantive terms of an offer are paramount. Congressional deal making occurs in a political context that shapes the willingness of party leaders and their “rank and file” to negotiate at all or to accept even favorable offers. Lawmakers must justify votes and policy compromises to their constituencies, whereas party leaders must attend to key groups in the party coalition and to the party's public image. Given the political context of congressional negotiations, we evaluate the tools and institutional arrangements that make deals in Congress more likely – emphasizing that conflicting incentives and interests place a premium on negotiating out of the public eye. We conclude with a broader assessment of the prospects for negotiation in a party-polarized Congress.

DISTRIBUTIVE VERSUS INTEGRATIVE MODELS OF NEGOTIATION IN CONGRESS

Negotiation theorists typically distinguish between distributive and integrative solutions to public problems (see Chapters 4 and 5). Distributive solutions involve zero-sum bargaining over extant benefits.

Compiling a manual of parliamentary practice in 1801, Thomas Jefferson emphatically recognized the importance of procedure in securing the rights of minority party members in the U.S. Congress. In a democratic political institution, majority parties would achieve their favored outcomes by taking advantage of their superior size, and minority parties would resist by availing themselves of protective rules to amend, delay, or obstruct the majority's agenda. Yet, the portrait of congressional rules as stable guarantors of the minority's right to participate meaningfully in the legislative process is deceptive. Far from rigidly securing the rights of the opposition, congressional rules are themselves the object of choice. Just as policy outcomes are contested by coalitions within each chamber, so too are the formal rules of the legislative game.

What leads members of Congress – in theory entitled to full and equal participation as members of a democratic legislature – to alter the procedural rights afforded members of the minority party? I shall articulate and test several competing explanations to account for formal changes in the rules of the House of Representatives that have created or suppressed minority rights from 1789 to 1990.

Although “gridlock” is said to have entered the political lexicon after the 1980 elections, stalemate is not a modern legislative invention. Indeed, in the very first Federalist, Alexander Hamilton complained about the “unequivocal experience of the inefficacy of the subsisting federal government” under the Articles of Confederation. Although stalemate may be endemic to American politics, no definitive account of its proportions or causes yet exists. In this article, I survey recent work, propose a new measure of gridlock, and test several alternative accounts of variation in gridlock over the last half-century.

There is no shortage of scholarship on the politics of gridlock. Most prominent is the work of Mayhew, who rejects the conventional wisdom that divided party control of Congress and the presidency dampens the legislative output of government. Subsequent work takes Mayhew as the point of departure, revisiting the questions he raised and researched. This project returns as well to Mayhew's work, probing in a new fashion the contours of gridlock in American national politics.