The silver and ebony mace, an emblem of congressional authority, has been placed on its green marble pedestal behind the rostrum in the House of Representatives. Quill pens, symbolic links with a more genteel past, have been sharpened in the Senate, where they are available to any member. At high noon this Thursday, Jan. 19, Speaker Tip O'Neill in the House and Vice President Walter Mondale in the Senate will smartly rap their gavels on the polished desks before them. Thus will begin the second session of the 95th Congress, one of the boldest and balkiest in memory.
The traditions and rituals of opening day have not changed much in 189 years, but in far more substantive ways this is a vastly different Congress from those of the past. More than half of its members—61 Senators and 231 Representatives—were first elected within the past nine years; more than one-third of them have been in office for three years or less. Young, well-educated and aggressively independent—of both their own leaders and the White House—they are continuing the congressional revolution that started as a reaction to the tragic mistakes of Viet Nam and Richard Nixon's imperial presidency. The balance has been restored, and perhaps even swung in the opposite direction: Congress, the branch of Government that most closely reflects the will of the people, is again filling its constitutional role as a check on the presidency, even though both are controlled by the same party. Indeed, this may be the brashest and most self-willed Congress since 1919, when the House and Senate broke Woodrow Wilson and defiantly kept the U.S. from joining the League of Nations.
The transformation has been remarkable. Only five years ago, Congress was the sick man of the Federal Government. For 40 years, power had shifted down Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House; the movement accelerated rapidly under Nixon, who essentially operated on his own in making budgets and war. At regional conferences sponsored by TIME in 1972, scholars, civic leaders and members of Congress concluded that, because of the upset in the balance, the U.S. was facing a grave constitutional crisis that threatened the future of democracy.
But within a year Congress was fighting back. It passed the symbolically important War Powers Act, which placed tight restrictions on a President's powers to dispatch U.S. troops abroad. It set up the Congressional Budget Office, which, together with the newly expert House and Senate budget committees, acts as a sort of economic shadow cabinet. At the same time, members of Congress developed a new self-confidence and a sense that sound policy can—and should—originate on Capitol Hill as well as in the White House.