Week 10 -  Congress and elected representatives.

Here are some terms from your book:

casework
oversight
Speaker of The House
President pro tempore
Senate Majority leader
House Majority leader
minority leader (House and Senate )
House Democratic whip and Republican whip  
standing committee
select (special) committee
seniority system

The Congress is kind of like real life...
There's much that we can learn about ourselves and the way we live our lives by studying the Congress and the process of legislation.  After all, elected representatives are people.  They share our culture, even if they are generally from the upper classes.

First off: School House Rock lied to you - just flat out lied to you. Bills don't walk themselves anywhere . A Bill doesn't move from Sub-committee to committee to sub-committee and on and on by itself. Bills have life because some body (or more likely, a group of people) cares enough, pushes enough… complains enough….

The legislator's job is to get things done. As I've said, everything involves working with people, groups of people and elected representative really can't lead in the traditional sense. They are Consensus builders - that's a very difficult, general job.

Most bills die

Not because some one killed them, but because no body kept them alive. Kind of like many things in our lives. It's generally much easier to kill something than to keep it alive. And it's even easier to let something die than to kill it. Most bills die for the same reasons our pets, plant, cars, love-lives and a host of other things in our life die. Things die because of last of interest, support and energy.

There's no such thing as "a bill."

Like I said in week 6, a bill doesn't really become a law. Thousands of bills are conceived, hundreds are proposed and a few lucky ones , mutate, combine with others or somehow live long enough to live through this meat-grinder of a process - the process of legislation. Most bills die.

This is a SLOW process by design, on purpose, it's set up to be slow frustrating arduous and all that. Remember, limited government is more important that democracy. Our greatest security lies in our government's inefficiency.

You are an elected official...

So you are Senator, Congressman, Assemblyman or some other elected representative (the poli. sci. word is "parliamentarian") and your staff brings you a proposed bill. What's the first question you ask? Is it a good idea? (Your staff is working on that) How much will it cost (They're working on that, too, but what do you care, it's not like you'll be using your own money to pay for it. What's in it for me? Will it effect my re-election (Great questions, but not the first question.) Who's for it and who's against it? (closer…)

Will it pass?

You ask: Will it pass? If it's definitely going to pass, you might want to support it no matter what. Or if you know it'll lose, but you like it, you can "fight the noble fight" and "try your hardest" and it loses but you've won. Maybe you support it and it might pass, so you have to declare your support early to get others to join in. Maybe you hate the idea and it might pass, so you have to come out early to kill it. Or maybe it might pass and you want to hold out to see who's support you can get for your unrelated bill….

Anyway you look at it - "Will it Pass?" means do I have to do something about it or can I ignore it.

"Workaholics"

Elected officials and their staff all work more than forty hours - they are not only very busy, but many more people and groups want to meet with them, talk at them, demand from them, and all the rest, than there is time for in a day.  It's called lobbying and lobbyists outnumber staffers by about 10 to 1.

2 Choices?

Here's another thing we can learn for and about our lives. In many situations people will believe and act as if they have two options (right or wrong, stay or go, etc). There are always an invite number of options. For elected officials this means an infinite number of stands to take on all the issues.

We can see these choices as a spectrum and identify option areas:
 

Strongly Support Something

Support Something

TAKE NO STAND

Not Support Something

Fight Against Something

We all know the difference between not doing something and fighting against it, just as we know the difference between doing something and REALLY DOING IT WELL.

But it's that middle range that's interesting. Have you heard: "Not to decide is to decide"? If you haven't, maybe you should read more, take more classes. Can you really "do nothing"? Even that's a choice to do something.

So why don't all elected officials always simply "take no stand"? Again, look at it from the perspective of a congressman or senator - if there was a colleague that never took a stand, would you need him or her to help you, are his or her "stands" ever worth anything?

The preconsensus process.

Thus all the work that is done before a bill is passed and sent to the President is called the "preconsensus process." Before the consensus is when the work to build a consensus is done (makes sense?) This preconsensus process involves all the research for bills, the drafts, the sub-committee and committee hearings and all the other work you could imagine.

The "Your Man (Boss) Question."

A large part of the preconsensus process is asking the so-called "you man question" (some in Congress a re not men, but the question's still the same. A staff member would ask a fellow staff member: "Where does your man stand on this?" "Is your boss gonna fight us on this?" "Just have your guy stay out of it and take a stand later"… This informal exchange of information among congressional staff is done in a very open environment. There really are no secrets on Capitol Hill, everyone finds out everything, sooner or later. The staff don't lie to each other, their bosses nor their boss's competitors' staff. Why lie? You can't keep secrets and eventually your credibility suffers.

    Maybe you should review the "iron triangle" segment of the lecture from Chapter 4 (Week 6).

The role of the staff on all sides of the iron triangles.

Many competing and cooperating interest groups, political groups, corporations and the like (and as we'll see later, government bureaucracies and departments as well) - all competing for access and attention to their cause. This creates a dynamic, (rapidly changing) swirling cloud of proposals and counter-proposals and eventually enough compromise building to consensus to keep a bill alive and get it to the president.

Bills are often combined , sometimes totally unrelated things will show up on the same bill - so-called " riders " because they ride on other more popular bills.

A lame little analogy:

Take a Ping-Pong table, put 50 people on both sides, give them all paddles, drop 1000 Ping-Pong balls on the table and tell them to keep as many in play as possible and eventually, you might have six or eight balls still in play. But everyone will want to get their hits in and it'll be a very confusing game.

Eventually, a few bills survive until they are passed.

Most bills, by the time they get to the final floor vote, pass overwhelmingly. Of course, if I knew a bill of mine was going to lose, would I like it voted on? No, votes take place at the end of the process, after consensus has been reached.

Decentralized Power.

Our Congress is yet another example of " Decentralized Power " in our system of government.

Decentralized power means power is spread out…spread out among the fifty states, among the three branches of government and even in the one congress we have two houses. They do the exact same thing: make laws by building consensus.

Committees and Sub-committees.

Both houses have standing committee , these always exist and usually involve oversight. For instance, there are standing committees which oversee (check up on) every cabinet level department.

But it is at the subcommittee level where most of the real work is done. In the house a committee may have 45 people. How much can you get done with 45 people, but subcommittees are smaller (maybe 10 or 20) so things can be accomplished.

The number of subcommittees in both houses has risen greatly in the last 30 years. Because of the proliferation of interest groups and lobbyists, but also because of the need for congressmen and senators to be the chair of a committee or sub committee (used to be called chairman or chair person - now just called chair).

Credit Claim.

Remember " credit claim "? Setting up a situation where, if it works, you can claim credit and if it fails some one else can be blamed. The Congress is really good at credit claim. They pass welfare reform, reduce the money and make states come up with their own plans for welfare reform - that's the policy. If it works, the congress did a great thing by giving states back their power, if it fails, it's those damn governors and those silly states that just can't get it together.

Claiming credit is cheaper than buying advertising to get re-elected and even cheaper than taking stands. Whenever a politician takes a stand, it may help bring more support, but it will definitely make some one (or group) angry.

Every stand we take costs us.

This is another life lesson from studying Congress.

To the founders, the House of Representative was supposed to be the rowdy loud bunch inflamed by the "passions of the people" and the senate was to be more sane and sober. They may have been somewhat correct in their view. Thus the House is governed by more strict rules of debate and the senate has the filibuster.

The "power of the purse."

Much is made of the " power of the purse ." The House gets to start all bills involving money. But where a bill starts is only important in it's death.

The Speaker of the House has the authority to send bills to start in whatever committee he wants (in general) and thus he can doom a bill to death by sending it to a committee which will never act on it.

In the Senate, a committee from the majority party assigns bills to committees. Every successful bill has to make it out of it's first committee but most don't have such a linear path. They get bounced around from committee to sub committee and back and forth (if they are lucky because this means they are still alive).

The President of the Senate?

The vice President has the title of President of the Senate, but he does very little there. There is another title " president pro tem " and that person chairs the senate in full session, but also has no real power. The senate Majority leader is the ranking senator from the republican party (in this session) because the Republican party is the majority party. Both house have "whips" from both parties. Their job is to whip up party support for votes - given de-alignment and other factors we've already discussed this is a tough job.

Finally, another thing Congress can teach us about our own lives:

The Four Things Congress Can Do
And Does (and us, too).

When we look at what Congress can do and what it actually does, we can identify four things. We can even put them in order of (1) the easiest thing to do, thus the thing that mostly gets done to (4) the hardest thing to do, thus that which gets done rarely if ever.

And it's the exact same four things for most people in most of their lives.

The thing Congress does the most, does the best, is the thing most of us do more than any other act - (1) Act symbolically . Most of our action isn't really about anything but our own symbolic universe. We say "I love you" much more than we do the work of loving some one. We are very used to symbolic action and often think it's enough. The congress can't fix racism but they can create M.L.K. Day. Symbolic action may be an important first step, must most of the time it's the only step people take.

(2) Delay action . Congress is really good at passing a law and then stopping the bureaucracy from enforcing it (that way they can credit claim). Congress can delay it's own or other's actions. Just like us, we can decide to quit smoking (the symbolic act) but we'll "start tomorrow".

(3) Service a particular group . Congress often does this, but the group has to be powerful and the issue has to be important to a great number of people. Or maybe one that few people care about, but one an organized group REALLY cares about. For us, we solve part of the problem or the surface or symptom of the problem.

(4) Actually solve a problem . That's the hardest thing to do and the thing we and the congress do the least.

Parliamentarians are a lot like you and I - they just have busier lives and more secure jobs.

90 - 95 % re-election rate in U.S.

Most congressmen, senators and the like get re-elected. They have to constantly run for office. They have to constantly raise money.

They don't really compete against each other. Through out this long frustrating bloody process of legislation where most bills die, elected officials don't die. If they get things done (anything at all) they win. There are no playoffs, no superbowls, no dramatic falling on swords or anything like that. There are thousands of bills and even if you are my opponent on one bill today, I will need you tomorrow and you'll need me.

And that's the best lesson we can learn from congress - it's like life, it goes on and on and on. The process never stops, because people won't let it.