In Congress, Courtesy Matters

When Congress convened in January, those who were watching got treated to a small but revealing moment: As John Boehner, the new minority leader of the House, was handing the House gavel over to incoming Speaker Nancy Pelosi, he looked out at the assembled members and told them, "Be nice."

It might have sounded like a jocular and insignificant point, but if Congress follows any single admonition this year, I hope it's that one.

In truth, it shouldn't even need saying. For an individual legislator, cultivating congenial relationships with other legislators ought to be a matter of habit. In order to get anything done, especially if it involves legislation, you have to work constantly to line up support, convince others that what you want to accomplish matters, and make it clear that you're worth listening to. Even if others don't agree with your goals, they'll still respect your efforts and at least listen to your arguments.

But being nice — and especially, treating others fairly — is at the moment as much a group imperative as it is wise personal custom. Congress has just emerged from an extended period in which fairness and decent treatment of others were too often banished, and it created a toxic environment on Capitol Hill.

The new Democratic majority has an opportunity to freshen the atmosphere, and every American has a stake in whether or not they make good on that chance.

For if there's any single lesson to be gleaned from the Republican takeover after the 1994 elections or the Democrats' this year, it is that the manner in which a majority wields power has enormous consequences.

If members of the minority party lose on issues of policy but believe that the process was a fair one, they might be frustrated, but they'll abide by the results.

If, on the other hand, they feel constantly slighted, ignored, shut out of the legislative process and treated overall as if they have nothing to contribute to the national dialogue, they will seethe with resentment. They will do everything in their power to frustrate the majority. And, the vicissitudes of politics being what they are, they will eventually be put back in a position of power.

Which is why I was somewhat disconcerted to see that the new Democratic majority in the House, which certainly understands the sting of unfair treatment, has on occasion yielded to the temptation of its newfound power to shut down Republican participation. It did so during the vaunted "first one hundred hours," barring Republican amendments to the package of bills it had prepared in order to make good on Democrats' campaign promises.

This was neither a good precedent nor, as it happens, all that necessary: Having passed its bills in a hurry, the House now has to sit around and wait for the Senate to act. It also cost it the benefits of legislative vetting that a robust debate offers — as Democrats discovered when it became clear that the wording of a proposed ethics law forbidding members from flying in private planes meant that those who were pilots could not fly their own aircraft.

Then House Democrats did it again, preparing a budget to keep the government running for the rest of the fiscal year that allowed no GOP amendments. Again, there were arguments to be made defending their actions: Time was short, and leading Democrats pointed out that the entire exercise would have been unnecessary had the GOP-dominated Congress acted on such a measure last year.

But let's be honest: The majority can always come up with reasons for taking shortcuts that allow it to act. That's not the point. The point is that in our democracy, the process is every bit as important as the legislation it produces. Fairness and trust should be the coin of the realm.

Congress represents everyone, not just those who voted for members who happen to form the majority. Allowing the regular order of hearings, amendments and debate to flourish — with fair restrictions to keep it wieldy, if necessary — would go a very long way to healing the scars of the last few years and make it less likely that Capitol Hill will return soon to the ugly bitterness that cost it so much public good will and led to legislative stalemate.

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To Reform Congress, Shine A Light On It

Watching Congress tackle reform has been interesting and even uplifting, but in the end I find myself oddly disappointed. Our representatives on Capitol Hill may be missing an important opportunity to bring real and lasting change to an institution that sorely needs it.

Reducing the influence of lobbyists on legislation and banning most (but not all) privately funded travel for members of Congress may help end the abuses that so repelled American voters last year. But the more I look at the problems of recent years — the lackadaisical attitude toward ethics enforcement, the legislative shortcuts, the outsized influence of special interests, the secret earmarks, the poisonous partisanship, the pernicious influence of mountains of cash on the system, the playing field tilted in favor of incumbents — the more I am persuaded that one fundamental reform addresses many of them: sunshine.

My thinking is simple. The more exposed members of Congress feel, the less likely it is we will see the misconduct and institutional shortcomings that led to this year's reform effort. Congress belongs, in the end, to the American people, and behavior that can't stand the light of day has no place there.

Michael Klein and Ellen Miller, who run an organization devoted to increasing the "transparency" of government, put it this way in a recent commentary: "Why focus on transparency? Because a major cause of voter mistrust is a feeling special interests are served by those who do their bidding in the belief they will not be detected. The best cure for this is increasing transparency and thus the risk of detection."

I am not quite as devoted as they are to the belief that everything a member of Congress does should be public. Politics, after all, depends on the willingness of its practitioners to compromise for the common good in ways they might be reluctant to do if a camera were focused on them all the time. And certainly some national security matters need to be handled in private.

Still, there is much that could be made public that has either been hidden or is so inaccessible that it might as well be. Campaign donations and lobbying expenses, for instance, should promptly be published online and made easily searchable, so that we know right away who is financing whom and to what end. Similarly, there is no legitimate reason for keeping the sponsors of earmarks or their intended beneficiaries under wraps.

And this is an era when pretty much anything that can be caught by a camera makes it quickly onto YouTube. Shouldn't House and Senate meetings — especially floor action and committee and subcommittee hearings — be viewable online as well? I see no reason why the public shouldn't be able to look over its representatives' shoulders as they go about their legislative work. It is, after all, the public's business.

You'll notice a theme here. New technology — especially the Web, high bandwidth, and the search revolution sparked by Google — makes possible a degree of scrutiny that would have been inconceivable even 15 years ago.

Without making a special trip to Washington or scouring some obscure federal office for a buried report, we could know immediately which special interests fund the campaigns of specific members or devote millions of dollars to buying access (if not more) to members of Congress.

We could know right away when a member attaches an innocuous-seeming amendment to a bill that happens to benefit a prime campaign contributor. We could watch markup and oversight sessions as they take place. We could see when legislative shortcuts are taken, and when amendments and debate on bills are curbed. We could quickly learn which members are serious and competent in looking into every nook and cranny of the federal government, and which members are merely engaged in "show time."

We could, in other words, make it far easier to hold Congress and its members accountable for actions that affect us all. Democracy, after all, is a process, not a result; Americans need to see that process.

This change will not be easy. Members of Congress resist making their doings more public, not because they have any nefarious purposes in mind, but because it's more comfortable and easier for them out of the public eye. So if there is to be greater transparency, it will come about largely because the American people have demanded it.

Powerful interests certainly let members of Congress know they're watching. The American people should be able to, too. So, next time you run into your representative, put the question to him or her bluntly, "Do you, or do you not, want to let the sunshine in?"

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