Surviving Inside Congress

by Mark Strand, Michael S. Johnson, Jerome F. Climer

Want to work for Congress or just understand it better? Learn the ins-and-outs of how Congress really works. The fifth edition of Surviving Inside Congress includes all you need to know to succeed as a congressional staffer or stay informed as a private citizen. Understanding how Congress really works or doesn t, as the case may be is the difference between being a valuable contributor to the nation s work and being an outsider who never really knows what is going on. Surviving Inside Congress has been revised and expanded to reflect important developments during the 114th and 115th Congresses. Updates
A new chapter on the President s role in the legislative process
New research on social media best practices
How and why Congress is dysfunctional and how it can be reformed
And a floor procedures manual and congressional glossary for the 115th Congress.

464 pages, Paperback

Published August 1, 2017

About the author

Mark Strand was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet, essayist, and translator. He was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1990. He was a professor of English at Columbia University and also taught at numerous other colleges and universities.

Strand also wrote children's books and art criticism, helped edit several poetry anthologies and translated Spanish poet Rafael Alberti.

He is survived by a son, a daughter and a sister.

Reviews

[Kenneth · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an overview book for new staffers in Congress presented by the Congressional Institute. It's extremely helpful for someone, like me, who is coming to Congress with zero hill experience. There are a lot of references to other documents and books which are also helpful. The sections on the actual workings of staff and of the Congressional procedure are extremely useful as are some of the backgrounders on how the processes have arrived where they are. Some of the sections on communications and how voters get their news and interact with Congress are also helpful though the purveyors of CMS systems are generally better informed and their sales and other tools are very instructive as well. When the book moves into the sections on partisanship and potential reforms to Congress it gets more in the wheelhouse of the CI but it becomes somewhat less useful as this ground has been well trod by the academy and by the critics of Congress of which there are a great many. The book itself is highly readable, quite balanced and extremely useful. I would recommend it to anyone in the public realm who is interested in the workings of Congress.

[Julia Anuszewska · Rating 5 out of 5]

Saved me in my internship