Robert G. Kaiser's "Act of Congress" Luke Sharrett for The New York Times The House chamber is largely empty while the votes of the electoral college are counted, January 2013. Congress has long been one of the country's most establishmentarian institutions. Unlike the presidency, which periodically comes under the control of outsiders, Congress rewards sheer longevity, mastery of obscure rules and inoffensiveness to colleagues. Unlike Supreme Court justices, who live in what passes for monklike isolation by Washington standards, most congressmen circulate among a permanent klatch of pundits and lobbyists. Few who serve more than four or six years can hold out against the sheer brain-deadening blandness this ­encourages. It's no surprise this institution would attract Robert G. Kaiser, who grew up in the capital and has spent half a century at The Washington Post. Kaiser's new book, "Act of Congress," chronicles the making of the enormous financial reform bill that became law in 2010. Although Kaiser constantly bemoans the lack of civility and rise of petty politicking in Congress, it's clear that at its most functional, the body reminds him of the Washington of his youth, when serious-minded men of good will toiled in the national interest. Financial reform is proof that even in its current, degraded form, Congress can still occasionally serve this higher purpose. This is what Kaiser intends to show, in any event. What he actually shows is the limits of establishment thinking, of the sort that pervades both Congress and his book. Kaiser tells the story of financial reform through the two figures who guided it to passage: Barney Frank, who chaired the House committee overseeing the financial services industry, and Christopher Dodd, his Senate counterpart. Both Frank and Dodd granted Kaiser frequent interviews while they worked on the bill and encouraged their staffs to do the same. These interactions only marginally advance our understanding of how reform came about, but they do reveal what its architects were thinking. And it's striking to see how self-satisfied they were. At times Dodd and Frank, along with their colleagues, come across as downright blinkered. Frank complained to Kaiser about a front-page article in The New York Times describing the banks" secret plan to fend off regulation of derivatives, the lucrative financial instrument at the center of the recent meltdown. Frank hated the implication that the banks were setting the terms of financial reform and harrumphed that Gretchen Morgenson, the article's co-author, "is so determined to be negative, she just gets it wrong." But the thrust of her piece closely matched other reporting at the time (including my own). Or consider Frank's staff director, Jeanne Roslanowick, who was skeptical of a new agency to crack down on predatory lending. Roslanowick told Kaiser, presumably with a straight face, that moderate House Democrats were cool to the idea because their constituents weren't interested in it. "If what they were feeling back home . . . suggested the public was crying for an independent consumer protection agency, they would be responding to that," she explained. A neutral observer might suggest that Roslanowick spend less time around bank-funded Democrats. Polls consistently showed the consumer agency to be enormously popular. Throughout Kaiser's book, the policy makers and aides he interviewed adopted a kind of "everybody knows" posture - everybody knows that Morgenson gets her facts wrong, or that the consumer agency would be a flop. Naturally, this mind-set infects the substance of reform. Apparently, no one around Frank or Dodd questioned the utility of extending bank regulation to other large financial firms, a cornerstone of the Obama administration proposal. No one wondered why, if bank-style regulation was the panacea Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke made it out to be, it didn't prevent a megabank like Citigroup from flaming out almost as spectacularly as the lightly regulated A.I.G. One of the last issues Congress had to deal with before approving the Dodd-Frank bill was Senator Blanche Lincoln's insistence on banishing the banks" derivatives desks to separate subsidiaries. All the key players in reform - Dodd, Frank, Geithner, Bernanke, even Paul Volcker, the legendary former Fed chairman - opposed the idea, which survived only because Lincoln chaired a key Senate committee. The power brokers claimed the proposal was sloppily written and politically motivated (Lincoln, who was from Arkansas, was fending off a primary challenge from the left when she cooked it up). To the extent anyone offered a substantive objection, they said her idea would drive derivatives into the shadows of the financial system, outside the view of regulators. Noam Scheiber is a senior editor at The New Republic and the author of "The Escape Artists."