-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [apfn-1] Do Nothing Congress
Date: Fri, 24 Mar 2006 12:59:35 -0500
From: Milo shining@direcway.com
Reply-To: apfn-1@yahoogroups.com
To: George gaemerson@direcway.com
Is Congress Slacking Off?
Better that our politicians work a little less hard
Brian Doherty
http://www.reason.com/links/links032206.shtml
Congress this year, some complain, is set to be in session even less than the late 1940s Congress condemned by President Truman as the "do-nothing Congress." This year's crop might end up putting in as few as 97 days of work.
They've been keeping lazy college student schedules, with roll call votes generally kept away from Mondays and Fridays, to ensure long weekends. Members of Congress—especially in an election year—argue that the short work week is a necessary evil so they can spend more time back home, communing with their constituents.
That sort of citizen contact seems desperately needed by our unrepresentative representatives—the vast majority lawyers, with nearly 100 percent incumbency re-election rates of late giving them tenures as rock-solid and eternal as the faces on Mt. Rushmore. A far cry from the citizen legislature our Founding Fathers envisioned. A Gallup Poll last October showed only 29 percent approval of Congress, the lowest level in over a decade. And a big reason why a member of Congress might want to head home is to be out of D.C. whenever future indictments come down from the fallout of the Abramoff lobbying scandals.
But are laziness and slacking off really what's wrong with Congress?
To say that we'd be better off the less time Congress spends working can sound like the weak punchline to a Leno joke—always a sure laugh in a country with enough self-respect to view government with a smidgen of healthy disdain. But it is painfully true. Given the legacy of debt, corruption, and war Congress has saddled America with, it serves us best by acting not at all.
Even the things that Congress should spend more time on—reforming or bringing to a smooth end such oncoming train wrecks as Medicare and Social Security—bedevil us now because Congress tried to do too much in the past, with too little heed for the future.
It might seem they need to work much harder in at least one respect—hard enough for them to have read and understood all the laws they vote on. But given the complexity and size of federal legislation nowadays, given the enormously huge reach and meticulously picayune grasp of modern government, they can't achieve that simply by buckling down. For any group of even 435 people, detailed understanding of what the federal government is up to is just plain impossible.
The founding fathers thought we could, and should, have an essentially amateur citizen legislature because their vision of what the federal government should do was reasonable and small. Having lost sight of that vision, we have a Congress that, no matter how few days it has worked, has managed, along with its slightly harder-working Senate colleagues, to do quite a bit when it comes to taking American's money and deciding what to do with it—in just one day last week, for example, the House spent an extra (extra!) $92 billion over last year's budget mostly on the Iraq war, an unpopular war Congress provides little useful oversight on, but plenty of (our) cash for.
Congress crows about what a great job they are doing by pointing at low unemployment rates ( 4.8 percent) and respectable job growth (243,000 new nonfarm jobs in February). But such achievements are the result of citizens' ideas, work, saving, and spending, not the creation of legislative genius.
Unless and until Congress can learn to abide by some political version of the Hippocratic Oath—to first, do no harm--better Congress should take even more time off. We've seen on the state level, though, that part-time legislatures are no panacea—although many states have them, it doesn't stop them from generally continuing to raise spending higher than GDP rises.
Our dissatisfaction with Congress, then, should reflect back at least somewhat on the constituents who, however professedly unhappy with Congress as a whole, keep sending their own rascal back. We all need to learn that asking our representatives to do more for us is no guarantee of eventual satisfaction with government. With deficits and debt as far as the eye can see, it is more likely a guarantee of greater future disappointment.
Brian Doherty is a senior editor of Reason and author of This Is Burning Man (Little, Brown).
"RADIO YOUR WAY" APFN POGO NETWORK (( WOW!! ))
"All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of
good conscience to remain silent" -- Thomas Jefferson
http://www.apfn.net/POGO.HTM
Subject: [apfn-1] Do Nothing Congress
Date: Fri, 24 Mar 2006 12:59:35 -0500
From: Milo shining@direcway.com
Reply-To: apfn-1@yahoogroups.com
To: George gaemerson@direcway.com
Is Congress Slacking Off?
Better that our politicians work a little less hard
Brian Doherty
http://www.reason.com/links/links032206.shtml
Congress this year, some complain, is set to be in session even less than the late 1940s Congress condemned by President Truman as the "do-nothing Congress." This year's crop might end up putting in as few as 97 days of work.
They've been keeping lazy college student schedules, with roll call votes generally kept away from Mondays and Fridays, to ensure long weekends. Members of Congress—especially in an election year—argue that the short work week is a necessary evil so they can spend more time back home, communing with their constituents.
That sort of citizen contact seems desperately needed by our unrepresentative representatives—the vast majority lawyers, with nearly 100 percent incumbency re-election rates of late giving them tenures as rock-solid and eternal as the faces on Mt. Rushmore. A far cry from the citizen legislature our Founding Fathers envisioned. A Gallup Poll last October showed only 29 percent approval of Congress, the lowest level in over a decade. And a big reason why a member of Congress might want to head home is to be out of D.C. whenever future indictments come down from the fallout of the Abramoff lobbying scandals.
But are laziness and slacking off really what's wrong with Congress?
To say that we'd be better off the less time Congress spends working can sound like the weak punchline to a Leno joke—always a sure laugh in a country with enough self-respect to view government with a smidgen of healthy disdain. But it is painfully true. Given the legacy of debt, corruption, and war Congress has saddled America with, it serves us best by acting not at all.
Even the things that Congress should spend more time on—reforming or bringing to a smooth end such oncoming train wrecks as Medicare and Social Security—bedevil us now because Congress tried to do too much in the past, with too little heed for the future.
It might seem they need to work much harder in at least one respect—hard enough for them to have read and understood all the laws they vote on. But given the complexity and size of federal legislation nowadays, given the enormously huge reach and meticulously picayune grasp of modern government, they can't achieve that simply by buckling down. For any group of even 435 people, detailed understanding of what the federal government is up to is just plain impossible.
The founding fathers thought we could, and should, have an essentially amateur citizen legislature because their vision of what the federal government should do was reasonable and small. Having lost sight of that vision, we have a Congress that, no matter how few days it has worked, has managed, along with its slightly harder-working Senate colleagues, to do quite a bit when it comes to taking American's money and deciding what to do with it—in just one day last week, for example, the House spent an extra (extra!) $92 billion over last year's budget mostly on the Iraq war, an unpopular war Congress provides little useful oversight on, but plenty of (our) cash for.
Congress crows about what a great job they are doing by pointing at low unemployment rates ( 4.8 percent) and respectable job growth (243,000 new nonfarm jobs in February). But such achievements are the result of citizens' ideas, work, saving, and spending, not the creation of legislative genius.
Unless and until Congress can learn to abide by some political version of the Hippocratic Oath—to first, do no harm--better Congress should take even more time off. We've seen on the state level, though, that part-time legislatures are no panacea—although many states have them, it doesn't stop them from generally continuing to raise spending higher than GDP rises.
Our dissatisfaction with Congress, then, should reflect back at least somewhat on the constituents who, however professedly unhappy with Congress as a whole, keep sending their own rascal back. We all need to learn that asking our representatives to do more for us is no guarantee of eventual satisfaction with government. With deficits and debt as far as the eye can see, it is more likely a guarantee of greater future disappointment.
Brian Doherty is a senior editor of Reason and author of This Is Burning Man (Little, Brown).
"RADIO YOUR WAY" APFN POGO NETWORK (( WOW!! ))
"All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of
good conscience to remain silent" -- Thomas Jefferson
http://www.apfn.net/POGO.HTM
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