Wouldn't It Be Nice If Congress Showed Up For Work?

Watching Congress this year has put me in mind of that classmate we all had in high school who liked to wait until three days before his term paper was due to really dig into it. He usually got it done, but not in a way that made him want his parents to see it.

Our lawmakers in Washington have a lot on their plates this spring and summer. They have to deal with emergency spending bills for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and for rebuilding the Gulf Coast. They have to come up with a budget blueprint, which the House failed to do before taking off for a recess in early April, and try to get a handle on immigration reform, which the Senate likewise had to put off so its members could leave town.

They have lobbying reform, rewriting the nation's telecommunications laws, energy legislation, health-care measures, and revitalizing the nation's emergency management system — ideally, before hurricane season starts on June 1.

So how much time has Congress given itself to accomplish all this? During the first two months of 2006, the House of Representatives spent 47 hours — that's hours, not days — in session. If it sticks to its current plans, House members will spend 97 days in Washington this year. That's down from 141 last year, and is even fewer days than the 108 that led Harry Truman to blast the "do-nothing" Congress of 1948.

Just for comparison, congressional scholar Norman Ornstein points out that during the 1960s and '70s, Congress averaged 323 days in session; even the lower 278-day average in the 1980s and '90s was still three-quarters time. By that standard, this Congress looks like a bunch of temp workers.

I do not want to give the impression that members of Congress don't work hard. They do — but increasingly it has been in activities other than legislating. They spend a lot of time back in the district, visiting constituents and attending to local needs. They put in untold hours on the telephone and at fundraising events, raising money for their own campaigns, for their personal PACs — designed to help them pursue or buttress positions in the leadership — and for their party's treasury. They spend weeks on the road, campaigning for their own re-election or making appearances on behalf of other candidates. And they go out on "fact-finding" missions abroad.

Many of these activities are not irrelevant to the work of a member of Congress. Yet overall our nation is not well served by the current legislative schedule. Sure, people like to joke that the less time legislators spend in Washington, the better off we are, but it's just not so.

The job of Congress is to build a consensus, both within its own halls and in the country at large, behind solutions to public policy dilemmas. This is exceedingly difficult work. It requires time, patience, research, dialogue, and deliberation. It demands that members of Congress sit down with one another, try to understand one another, and grapple with one another's ideas and concerns.

You can't build a consensus without taking the time to do all this. And more important, you can't craft good legislation. As with our high-school classmate, cramming it all in at the end produces shoddy work.

It also reduces not only the effectiveness of Congress, but the legitimacy of our democracy itself. In recent years, ostensibly as a time-saving measure, Congress has become enamored of doing its work through so-called "omnibus" bills. These are huge and ungainly pieces of legislation that just happen to have the effect of stifling free inquiry and debate, and of concentrating power in the hands of a few legislative leaders.

The result is that most of the people we send to Congress have little input into what comes out of it. Moreover, the late Tuesday afternoon-to-Thursday schedule that members of Congress now keep prevents them from discharging one of the most vital duties our Constitution gives them: carrying out robust oversight of the executive branch. It's not too much to think that a Congress that had the time and the inclination to look over the President's shoulder might have led to more judicious decision-making on everything from Abu Ghraib to domestic spying to the Dubai ports deal.

I realize that there are all sorts of forces leading members of Congress to want to spend as little time at the Capitol as possible. Their families are at home in their districts; so is their future in politics. But these are our elected representatives, and we're talking about governing the United States, not writing a term paper. Surely it's not too much to expect them to give the job enough time to get an A.

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Why Does Congress Want to Give Up Power?

Politicians like power. The more they have, the better they can set public agendas, create policy, help their constituents, and affect the direction of government.

Members of Congress are politicians, and most of them like power just as much as you'd expect of someone holding high federal office. That's why they jockey for assignments to powerful committees, seek to gain seniority, and strive to rise in the leadership. If they're in the House, they often have their eye on the Senate. If they're in the Senate, they can't help but glance over at a governorship or the White House. This is the nature of the office.

So, one of the more perplexing and important mysteries of life in Washington right now is this: Why, if they hunger after power, have members of Congress been so willing to hand it off to the executive branch? Why have they been party, over the last three or four decades, to weakening Congress as an institution?

For while many members over the years have sought individual power on Capitol Hill, they have seemed to fall over one another to give power to the President and his Cabinet, or to get out of the way of executive-branch reaches for power.

They have effectively ceded to the President the ability to declare war, a responsibility the Constitution unambiguously lays on Congress' shoulders. They have largely handed to the White House the power to set their legislative agenda. They have weakened their oversight of the executive branch, too often giving the President and administration officials unchecked authority to implement scores of laws without robust scrutiny. They have permitted the President to authorize clandestine surveillance of Americans in the name of national security without any review by judges.

And now, as happens every so often, they are seriously entertaining giving the President even more power of the purse — another responsibility vested in Congress by the Constitution — by granting him an extensive line-item veto.

I can't pretend to understand this development fully. I watched it unfold during my three decades in the U.S. House, and I've watched it accelerate since I left office in 1999, and it still perplexes me. Our nation's founders had good reasons for creating a system that balances an energetic executive branch with an equally forceful and powerful legislative branch. Why undo their work?

Part of the reason, I believe, is quite simply that times have changed. As complex as the affairs of state must have seemed in 1789, they are exponentially more complicated now. On issues from national security to, say, the safety of our food, there is only so much that can be accomplished by passing legislation. Much of the hard work of carrying out public policy is in the implementation of policy, which is the task of the President and the executive branch, not the Congress. So to some extent, members of Congress have had no choice but to allow a vigorous executive branch to stretch its wings.

Yet that does not entirely explain the timidity of Congress over the past few decades. There is more at play here than simply a change in the substantive nature of the federal workload. It is, in a word, politics.

It is not easy to make Congress work well. It can be difficult and time-consuming to develop a legislative consensus among 535 representatives and senators who have many competing interests and agendas. This means that Congress works in shades of gray and in long increments of time. Many members, as a result, wonder whether Congress can be effective or efficient in dealing with the complex issues of the day. They have come to believe, perhaps because of the difficulty of legislating, that the President can do things better.

Add to this the media's natural propensity to focus on the President — and, in this sound-bite era, to shy away from reporting on the complexities of congressional policy-making — and you get a gradual loss of confidence in Congress.

At the same time, letting the President take the lead makes life much easier on members of Congress. When the same party controls both branches, as has been the case recently, there is a natural tendency within the congressional majority to defer to the President's wishes.

But even without that, taking a position on a difficult issue leaves a member of Congress politically exposed and complicates his or her next election. The far easier route is to delegate the tough decisions to the President; if he handles them well, you applaud him, and if he does not, you condemn him. Either way, you don't have to take political responsibility.

There is a severe cost to this, however, and it is measured in the erosion of the checks and balances and the constitutional structure envisioned by our founders. For our system to work, Congress needs to balance the President: If it hands him power with one hand, it needs to exert greater oversight with the other. That has not been happening. As a result, the people's body, the Congress, is a weakened institution, and is no longer playing the role of a separate and co-equal branch of government that our founders envisioned.

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What It Means When You Take That Oath of Office

There is a small tempest whirling about Washington at the moment that may have escaped your attention. Earlier this year, Congress passed a new federal budget by very narrow margins — in the Senate, in fact, it required a tie-breaking vote by the Vice President. There's just one small problem:

The versions passed by the House and Senate are different. The bill was signed by the President, but if you remember your 7th-grade civics class, it's not clear that this was constitutional. The Constitution requires the House and Senate to pass identical bills before sending them on to the White House.

Should this worry a member of Congress who has sworn to uphold the Constitution? What about a measure that shifts power sharply away from Congress and to the President? Can anyone reasonably expect a lawmaker to hold each action he or she takes up to the light of the Constitution for examination?

I think one can — and should. After all, every member of Congress swears an oath at the beginning of each term to "support and defend" the Constitution.

And while every member has to decide for himself or herself what this entails, I can't help but think that at least a few of the excesses we've seen in recent years on Capitol Hill might have been avoided if every member set aside a little time every so often to reflect on the meaning of that oath, and on why the framers saw fit to have members swear allegiance to the Constitution.

To begin with, the Constitution asserts a profoundly democratic vision of this nation, a bedrock belief in the sovereignty of the people and a vision of how our structures of government are meant to secure freedom. The Preamble, with its sweeping talk of justice, promoting the general welfare, and securing "the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity," is especially relevant here.

Counterpoise this inspiring view of the hope underlying our system against the sordid details of the relationship between members and lobbyists laid bare by the Abramoff affair, and it's not hard to see that more attention to the ideals of the founders might have stood Congress in good stead.

But defending the Constitution is not just about giving life to the vision it lays out. That venerable document is also an operating manual for our government, with a strong emphasis on the separation of powers. When you take the oath of office as a member of Congress, it means that you are swearing to defend the Congress as a strong, independent, and co-equal branch of government.

Indeed, the longer one serves in Congress, the more loyalty one often develops to that body when it comes to sorting through the competing claims on its attention. The member's loyalty must go, not to the president or one's political party, but to the Constitution itself.

In fact, I would argue that the congressional oath of office requires members of Congress to protect the powers of Congress especially from encroachment by the executive branch.

The Constitution certainly provides for a strong executive. "Energy in the executive," Alexander Hamilton once said, "is a leading character in the definition of good government," and he was right. This does not mean, though, that Congress is free to ignore the careful balancing act embedded in the Constitution and allow its own prerogatives to be eroded, or countenance attacks on the independence of the judiciary.

Vigor in the Congress is also, we might remember, a leading character in the definition of good government. Better public policy emerges, believed the founders, if both the president and the Congress are robust.

The administration of the oath of office is such a fleeting thing, a few quick words on the hectic opening day of each new Congress before members of Congress dive into the hurly-burly of legislating, fighting partisan battles, and positioning themselves for the next election. It is easily overlooked.

But we live in an era when the White House insists on strengthening its hand at the expense of Congress; when well-organized interests and even members of Congress, no less, feel free to launch attacks on the independence of judges; when a timid Congress gives more power to the president but less oversight; and when the strength and resources of the Washington lobbying corps often outweigh those of the ordinary American people whose rights and privileges were the concern of the drafters of the Constitution.

At such a time, it seems to me, members of Congress need to take their oath of office seriously, and pay close attention to the Constitution they've sworn to protect and defend.

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