미국의회의 한국관련 안건 심의 구조

Abstract

The purpose of this research is to trace structural characteristics of the Congressional bill examination process from the vantage point of American foreign policy making to Korea. Considering the intimate relationship between Korea and the States and the magnitude played by the Congress in the American foreign policy making process, such a research is very demanding and inevitable in some sense not only for the practical interests of the Korean government officials wrestling with its foreign policy to America but also for the Korean academia experiencing serious paucity of literature of this field. To meet the purpose of this research, all of the bills dealing with Korean issues even partially from 1974 to 1994 were retrieved from the House and Senate computerized information systems and the contents of them were analyzed systematically.

Research found that Korean bills were dealt more frequently by the House than by the Senate. Most of them were proposed in the forms of House bills and Senate bills among other various forms of bill introduction. Major proponants of them were liberal Democrats with about 10 years of hill experience and from less safe districts. Generally speaking security issues were more frequently dealt by Korean bills. Most of them were pending in the Congress for about one month. And about half of Korean bills were either discarded or stopped any further examination at either sub committee or full committee level of bill flow of the Congress.

When we count the Korean bills passed and became eithe law or Congressional resolutions only, however, it is very interesting to find that whether they were dealt either by the House or by the Senate and introduced by Democrats or by Republicans does not make much difference to the outcomes of the bill examination. The bills introduced by mid-career conservative Congressmen who worked for the Congress for about from 10 to 30 years and from rather safe districts were passed rather easily. The bills pending about one year in the Congress had higher possibility of passing through the Congress. Most of the bills in the bill examination process were killed at full committee level.

Contrasting such structural characteristics of the Korean bill introduction and that of passage in the Congress, it is found that major proponents of the bills are not conformative to active sponsors of them. It really implies that there is a high possibility that Korean bills are introduced not for real passage but for political and symbolic usage only. Therefore it becomes very important to know and respond to such political needs of the Conressmen when we develop foreign policy to the States.