Word: macneil
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Especially important for the whole undertaking was the historical perspective provided by Neil MacNeil, our senior Capitol Hill correspondent. MacNeil helped organize the meetings and has been a major participant. He has been a diligent student of Congress since coming to Washington 23 years...
...published Forge of Democracy: The House of Representatives, and seven years later he wrote Dirksen: Portrait of a Public Man. MacNeil also owns what is perhaps the nation's finest private library on Congress, a collection that includes scarce chronicles from the body's earliest years. Among the items: all but two issues of Congressional Debates (1789-91), compiled by Thomas Lloyd, the first legislative reporter, and the original issue of View from the Congress Gallery (1795), by Peter Porcupine (Reporter William Cobbett). "It is never lonely at my house late at night after the kids have gone...
...want to govern," contends Packwood. "We can set policy, we can take back the powers if we want. But we have said 'can't, can't, can't' so long it has become an excuse for 'won't.' " Sums up MacNeil: "I have never seen Capitol Hill so alive to its problems, so anxious to begin the restoration. Yet whether that will can be sustained for an extended time-time enough to accomplish the ends-is debatable. Carrying the hard commitment for the necessary months and years is not easily done...
...into the general causes of the dwindling influence of Congress. Maryland Senator Charles Mathias claims that Congress is so narrowly concerned with each single piece of legislation that it ignores a broader perspective and fails to notice when it is "at a Rubicon, facing a great constitutional watershed." Correspondent MacNeil agrees that the legislators "live, like many people, on the razor edge of right now. They are parochial in time; they lack a sense of the past or a care for the future...
General William Westmoreland, on the other hand, assailed Congressmen for not even using Administration-supplied information at committee hearings. He charged that they do not do their homework and are more interested in "stagemanship, self-aggrandizement and demagogucry" than in analyzing "extremely complex" issues. TIME'S MacNeil contends that legislators are afraid to hire more help because of adverse public reaction, but that if they forthrightly stated their need, the expense would be accepted...