Members of Congress Should Vote Their Consciences More Often

Around the time Congress convened this year, a Republican member of the House reflected to a newspaper reporter that there was a silver lining to the party's new minority status. "You're freer to vote your conscience," the legislator explained.

It was a revealing comment — not about being a Republican, but because it offered a glimpse into the fact that members of Congress often feel unable to vote the way they'd really like.

Decision-making on Capitol Hill is a perpetual wrestling match, with members' own instincts, analysis and judgment pitted against a daunting array of other claimants to their vote.

This is especially true when they're in the majority, and so feel some responsibility to help their leadership govern, or when they share a party label with the President and want to help him look in control. Sometimes their inclinations run in tandem, but sometimes they don't, which explains why some Republicans are feeling a sudden sense of liberation these days, while some Democrats feel more constrained than they did a year ago.

Republicans and Democrats alike also listen to important campaign contributors; to community leaders whom they rely on for guidance; and, of course, to their constituents, who more than anyone else have a claim to their representatives' attention.

All of these, as worthwhile as their views may be, can stand in the way of voting one's conscience.

There are some people who go to Congress precisely because they want to be loyal party members or support their president or vote as a dyed-in-the-wool liberal or conservative. For them, there's nothing especially complicated about deciding how to cast their votes.

But I would venture that the majority of Senators and House members find voting to be a sometimes agonizing effort at sifting through competing demands, including the demands of their own inner compass.

Imagine, for example, being a Republican House member faced with the non-binding resolution condemning the President's handling of the war in Iraq. Many of them were deeply torn, miserably unhappy with the war but equally unhappy at the prospect of voting against the White House and their party leadership. However they voted, it was not an easy decision.

Legislators often resolve these conflicts by acting as they deem the occasion warrants — sometimes as an agent of their constituents' will, sometimes as party leaders demand, sometimes in consultation with residents of their district but exercising their own judgment, and sometimes according to the dictates of their own conscience.

This last approach is exactly the one that the British statesman Edmund Burke took up in his famous "Speech to the Electors of Bristol" in 1774. An elected representative, he argued, owes his constituents "his unbiased opinion, his mature judgment, his enlightened conscience," and ought not sacrifice them "to any man, or to any set of men living." Indeed, Burke went on, "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."

Most members of Congress, I think, would agree with Burke. Their jobs, after all, consist — or, at least, ought to consist — of studying the issues before them, weighing the alternatives, and thinking through the consequences of each. And I know, from my own experience and that of others, that at the end of a career on Capitol Hill, a member feels proudest of those votes, speeches, and times he or she has acted according to conscience and done the right thing in the face of countervailing pressures.

There is a message in this, one that I think the Founders would endorse: that a representative democracy works best when representatives act according to their best judgment. Anything else constrains the Congress from giving full consideration to the collective wisdom and experience of its members. Shakespeare, I think, said it best in Hamlet:

This above all: to thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.

That's good advice for living, and splendid advice for anyone hoping to do the best job he or she can in Congress. It might even give us better government.

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Why Things Get Complicated In Congress

At this moment, in a small-town café, VFW hall or church basement somewhere, someone is shaking his head and saying, "You know, it's really simple, if Congress would just…." Maybe he and his friends are talking about the Iraq War or tax reform or farm subsidies: Whatever the topic, they pretty much agree that our representatives on Capitol Hill are needlessly muddying the waters.

At least, that's what I take from a recent poll of public attitudes toward Congress. In it, half the people surveyed said they thought Congress has difficulty arriving at decisions because its members just like to argue, not because they represent different points of view or the issues are intrinsically complicated.

So I thought it might be useful to look at an issue Congress is working on right now — the new farm bill — to see why it sometimes takes a while to sort things through on Capitol Hill. It's a perfect example of how, once different regional interests and lobbying groups come into play, matters quickly become very complex.

Farm bills have always been large, but they used to be pretty straightforward. Every few years, members of the agriculture committees would sit down with lobbyists representing corn, wheat, soybean, cotton, rice and dairy interests and deal out billions of dollars in subsidies.

This year, however, things are very different. In part, this is because the range of agricultural interests that want to have an impact on federal farm policy has grown. Farmers who raise vegetables, fruits, nuts or other specialty crops, for instance, want the federal government to spend more on research and marketing programs, and to buy more of their goods for use in school lunch programs.

This will certainly resonate in a country more attuned than ever to the benefits of healthy eating, but it may also run afoul of traditional commodity producers such as corn and soybean farmers, who worry that the more that is spent on fruits and vegetables, the less will be spent on them.

Meanwhile, other interests that you might not think of as "agricultural" also have joined the fray.

The American Cancer Society and the American Heart Association want the government more involved in improving school lunches and promoting healthy foods. The ethanol industry, of course, wants to keep the subsidies it was able to win in previous years; on the other hand, livestock producers and food processors believe that earlier federal programs promoting ethanol have caused corn prices to rise, and they have announced they will fight them this year.

A range of groups interested in farmland conservation, from Ducks Unlimited to the Nature Conservancy, are banding together to have the Agriculture Department enroll more land in conservation programs. The Humane Society and other animal protection groups are lobbying for regulations to improve conditions for livestock.

Now, there's plenty to shake one's head about in this. The sheer amount of money spent lobbying on the farm bill is enormous. And it can get a little disheartening watching farmers, agricultural enterprises, and others who extol free markets scrap for the biggest share possible of federal largesse. Today, agriculture is one of the most subsidized industries in America. When so much money is at stake — more than $20 billion was spent on farm programs last year — you can see why so many different people might want to get involved.

And the truth is, all these different lobbying groups represent a pretty decent slice of America, from farmers in Iowa to ranchers in Montana to vegetable growers in New Jersey to hunters, environmentalists and animal-lovers all over the country. They inform members of Congress about what's important to them and, by extension, to the people — often ordinary Americans — who care about their issues.

The problem with lobbying is not the extent and variety of lobbyists, it's the willingness of members of Congress to let a few well-heeled interests amass more clout than everyone else, sometimes forgetting the interests of taxpayers and consumers.

Yet it's also inescapable that, when a lot of lobbyists and interest groups get involved in a piece of legislation, it will take time to sort it all out. This is not a bad thing in and of itself. It means that members of Congress are listening to the country at large and doing what politicians ought to do — seek common ground among competing interests and make hard decisions about how to share limited resources. The problems come when Congress allows all these interests to tie it in knots that can't be undone.

So the next time you hear someone say that Congress could get more done if its members stopped listening to themselves talk so much, tell them it's not so simple. There are a lot of people who want to get in a word on Capitol Hill, and more than a few dollars out of it. As frustrating as it can be sometimes, that's a lot better than a system in which the only voices members of Congress hear are their own.

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