And you wonder why Congress might be dysfunctional? “Do the Right Thing” – that was ingrained in me when I was a Sr Consultant at DEC working with our customers, their customers, and all the internal departments within DEC. Is that the problem with our Federal Government – that their definition of “Do the Right Thing” is dysfunctional? This from Betsy’s Page caught my eye that started on a run by Senator Mary Landrieu’s (D-LA) absence at committee (emphasis mine):
Defenders will say that legislators typically miss committee hearings. Perhaps that is evidence that Congress is doing too much missable stuff. I do an activity with my students when we cover the Congress unit and give them an excerpt that David Price, a Democratic representative from our area of North Carolina wrote. He includes a schedule from a typical day in his life as a congressman. The students soon notice that he has overlapping meetings all day long. He meets with constituents and interest groups, pops in at several committee meetings and then goes to several fundraisers in the evening. He’s busy from early in the morning until late in the evening. Then I ask the class what he does not have on his schedule. Someone will finally notice that there is no time on his daily schedule for him to read bills, do research, or have a briefing on a policy. If this is what they’re doing all day long, how do they have time to understand the policies they’re voting on? They have to just vote the way their party leadership or interest groups or aides advise them to.
And then she asks the most important question:
Is this what the Founders had in mind when they set up a system of representative democracy?
“He’s busy from early in the morning until late in the evening” – but is it on what we think it important? Without going all wonky, it comes down to two basic things in my mind:
- Congress mistakes the urgent for the important – and everything is urgently important
- Congress has EVERYTHING on its plate – they have no real priorities because they have no sense of limit.
For instance, WHY IN GOD’S GREEN EARTH do they concern themselves with a name of the professional football team – and ignore the $18 Trillion national debt they have ALL built up in our names? I don’t think that most of them know WHAT their real purpose is other than do be seen to “be doing something” (which is not their real responsibility). She continues:
I start off the unit on Congress by giving them Edmund Burke’s famous speech on what it means to be a representative.
Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.
We discuss the trust model of a representative as Burke enunciates it and the delegate model in which a representative just votes how his or her constituents want. Some students prefer one model or the other. But what we seem to have now is something else in which representatives vote how their party or interest groups indicate they should. They are neither delegates of their constituents’ choices or representatives whose judgment we can trust.
There’s that word again – Trust. When I elect someone to office, I want someone that will not betray me based on their campaign promises. I want them to not betray the Principles in the Constitution as originally laid down. And I don’t want to have to worry about their future votes – I wish to be secure that I can predict (with a high degree of confidence, with a few misses here and there) how they will vote based on Principles common to us both. Not much to ask for, eh?
But I do believe that they have entangled themselves with so much because too many are wedded to having their seats in our seats. Becoming involved in the trivia of our lives, they have unhooked themselves from the hard decision that are required. And thus, they stumble from one “urgent” emergency to another – and always to our detriment.
