unchallenged. As designed by the Democrats, the modern presidency was conceived as an ally of
programmatic rights. When this view was seemingly violated by Vietnam and its aftermath,
reformers set out to protect liberal programs from unfriendly executives. By the time Lyndon
Johnson left the White House, support for unilateral executive action had begun to erode,
occasioned by the controversial use of presidential power in Vietnam; it virtually disappeared
under the strain of divided government. The result was a “reformation” of New Deal
administrative politics, which brought Congress and the courts into the details of administration.
The institutional reforms in the Congress during the 1970s that devolved policy responsibility to
subcommittees and increased the number of congressional staff support members were
compatible with the attention being paid by legislators to policy specialization, which
strengthened congressional oversight of the administrative state while making Congress more
administrative in its structure and activities. Similarly, the Judiciary’s decreasing reliance on
constitutional decisions in its rulings affecting the political economy and its emphasis on
interpreting statutes to determine the responsibilities of executive agencies were symptomatic of
its post-New Deal role as “managing partner of the administrative state.” Consequently, the
efforts of Republicans to compensate for their inability to control Congress by seeking to
circumvent legislative restrictions on presidential conduct were matched by Democratic
initiatives to burden the executive with smothering legislative and judicial oversight (Ginsberg
and Shefter 1990; Melnick 1994). The opposition to liberal reform, then, did not end in a
challenge to national administrative power but in a raw and disruptive battle to control its
services.
A major, if not main forum for partisan conflict during the Reagan and Bush years was a
sequence of investigations in which Democrats and Republicans sought to discredit one another.
The legal scrutiny of public officials was in part a logical response to the Watergate scandal. To
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Convention