Running in Place: Inside the Senate

Miller, a former aide to thenSenate Majority Leader Howard Baker (and now a CBS News producer), here offers a highly revealing diary of a week in the life of the U.S. Senate. Based on a journal kept during his two years at the Senate, the book focuses on three major issues before that body in late April 1983Central America, the federal budget and immigration reformto show how lawmakers and staffers actually function in the ""bloated, overburdened, and increasingly polarized'' Senate that has emerged in the past decade. Against instructive accounts of the daily rounds of ``emblematic'' senators (Baker, a Republican from Tennessee; Alan K. Simpson, Republican from Wyoming; and Connecticut Democrat Christopher Dodd) and of aides from other Senate staffs, Miller argues that the Senate is now a ``conglomerate'' in which younger, bolder members place personal ambitions above party discipline, hindering government and threatening a ``legislative crisis.'' (April)