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Exploration of how nationally prominent House Majority Leader Eric Cantor lost the battle for Republican primary for Virginia's 7th Congressional District to college professor David Brat, an unknown political rookie.

Legislators have long recognized that delaying tactics are powerful tools for preventing the passage of laws they deem unsatisfactory. Because the U.S. Congress has several deadlines built into its session, when committee chairmen or individual members delay the scheduling of hearings, markups, or executive business meetings, it can have a devastating effect on pending legislation. The tactic of delay is now being used by the Senate Judiciary Committee and individual senators to stall confirmation of the President's judicial nominations. Since 1996, the average length of time between an individual's nomination to serve as a federal judge and the time that he or she is confirmed has increased dramatically. At the same time, some nominations still proceed very quickly through the confirmation process. This article explores the question of why some nominees are subjected to lengthy delays, while others move through the Senate confirmation process in a matter of days. Specifically, it explores the impact of divided government, institutional strength of the President, and the majority party in the Senate, the position to which an individual has been nominated, and a number of nominee-specific variables to assess the impact that these have on the length of time a nominee will wait for confirmation.

Missing from most studies of congressional staff is the insight gained from the representative bureaucracy literature that descriptive characteristics may affect the behavior of unelected bureaucrats. In considering congressional representation as an activity mediated by staff, we ask: Does descriptive representation of congressional committee staff lead to substantive representation? We explore this question, using gender as our descriptive characteristic of interest. We produce a typology of staff roles developed through in‐depth interviews about two cases that illustrate how institutional factors affect and constrain women staffers' contributions as substantive representatives for issues concerning women. We posit that passive representation translates into the active representation only when: 1) interest groups hold expectations for passive representation on an issue and then in turn demand some level of active representation; 2) a staff member possesses the necessary resources of interest, expertise, and status, and 3) the opportunity structure of member‐staff relations, staff autonomy, and political salience coincide. When these conditions are less than optimal, active representation will not occur.

Bell reviews The Foreign Policy Disconnect: What Americans Want from Our Leaders but Don't Get by Benjamin I. Page and Marshall M. Bouton.