A Good Office Can Breed Congressional Success

If you pay attention to the news or watch C-SPAN, you’ve no doubt got a pretty good idea of what members of Congress do. They work as legislators, serve on committees, negotiate policy with the White House, keep tabs on executive-branch agencies, argue for local concerns in Washington, and help constituents caught in the federal bureaucracy.

What you won't have noticed, though, is one of their most important but least visible jobs: running their offices.

This seems too petty to mention, right? Why should it matter whether a politician knows how to sort through software options, budget for stationery, or write a formal staff evaluation?

In truth, though, how a member sets up his or her office says a great deal about what he or she intends to accomplish on Capitol Hill. Moreover, a well-run office can amplify a member's natural abilities, while a poorly run office only hampers his or her ambitions.

This is because the nature of Congress itself has changed in two fundamental ways over the past few decades.

It used to be that a member's staff would be filled with political types — campaign staffers who had helped him get elected, precinct workers, county party chairs; in effect, a job on Capitol Hill or in a district office was a form of patronage. These days, however, the work of a congressman has become so demanding in so many different ways — understanding complex policy dilemmas, using technology, knowing the ins and outs of the federal bureaucracy — that he or she needs knowledgeable and skillful people in staff positions. Without them, it’s impossible to do an effective job.

Just as important, the trend over the past three decades on Capitol Hill has been toward a decentralized power structure that leaves responsibility for individual members' success much more directly in their own hands. As the Congressional Management Foundation wrote recently in its management guide for new members of Congress, "Whereas years ago power bases, or fiefdoms, could be bestowed from above, now they must be won through individual effort and savvy."

No member of Congress truly acts alone, however; he or she needs the support of a competent and well-trained staff to be successful.

This is why, though it doesn't hold a candle to the rest of the federal government, Capitol Hill contains a surprisingly large bureaucracy — with some 15,000 personal and committee staff. Each of the 435 House members' individual offices averages 15 staff members, with a payroll of about $1.3 million;
each of the 100 Senate offices averages 35 staffers, with a payroll ranging from $2.7 million to $4.3 million, depending on the population of the state in question.

The jobs range from receptionist — the first person a constituent, lobbyist or fellow member of Congress typically encounters — to the case workers who handle problems for individual constituents, to the legislative aides responsible for mastering the arcana of federal policy, to specialists in information technology, public relations specialists, speechwriters, correspondents responsible for answering the hundreds or thousands of letters and emails a member gets each week, and, of course, an overall administrator.

In structuring these operations, a member has an astounding number of decisions to make. Massive amounts of information — about federal policy, the state of the world, district events, constituents' lives and concerns, requests for speeches, demands by the party leadership — flow through a congressional office every day; so how does that information get boiled down, written up, and communicated? Who makes the complicated scheduling decisions about who a member should meet with and what meetings the member should attend? What will the information technology system — the member's website, connections to congressional networks, a correspondence management system, PDAs and Blackberrys for staffers — consist of? How will you budget for salaries, technology, stationery, furniture, and so on?

In some ways, though, the most difficult decisions don't have to do with the day-to-day running of the office, but with how to express political priorities in the way the office is set up.

Members of Congress have great freedom to define themselves as politicians and as representatives. Some members, either because their position is politically precarious or because their interests lie in that direction, decide to focus on constituent service and maintaining close ties to the home district; inevitably, they will opt to spend more on case workers and on well-staffed district offices.

Other members want to focus on specific legislative priorities in Washington, so while they will maintain district offices — every House member and Senator has them — they'll use their limited resources to buttress their ability to shape and affect policy.

Of course, being responsive to constituent needs at home and legislating in Washington run parallel; most members of Congress will tell you that their legislative concerns are shaped by what they hear back home from their constituents. Still, looking carefully at how members of Congress choose to run their operations can tell you a lot about their priorities, how they will approach their time in office, and how likely they are to succeed at it.
With all the expertise and specialization required in jobs across the country today, I sometimes think that members of Congress are among the few generalists left. They must be legislators, representatives, advocates, educators, public officials, and politicians. Now you can add to that list, they have to be pretty accomplished office managers, too.

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Shaping Policy is Hard Work

You can interpret the Senate's recent rejection of the immigration reform compromise several ways.

You might see it as a political response to intense anti-immigrant pressure from talk radio and a slice of the heartland. You might consider it "an enormous failure that borders on dereliction of duty," as one Florida newspaper editorialized.

Or you might, as I do, count it an especially convincing example of just how difficult it can be to create sound public policy.

As the subject comes up at the courthouse-square café or over cards at the VFW hall or in conversation at church, many Americans no doubt are shaking their heads over the fact that, once again, Congress failed to act when it needed to do so.

Yet those exchanges themselves illustrate the problem. For some, illegal immigration is a scourge that must be dealt with harshly; for others, it's a fact of life that requires us to integrate millions of people into our society; for still others, immigration presents an opportunity to build an economy for the 21st century.

All these points of view were present in the Senate debate. And you can find equally diverse, passionately held beliefs whenever Congress takes up the most pressing issues facing us today: Iraq, health care, energy policy, global warming. It is Congress' job to find a way past those differences, to forge legislation that serves the national interest, meets the desires of the American people, and allows Americans whose views diverge sharply to find common ground. It’s frustrating when it fails. But let's not pretend that it's easy.

The issues Congress is being asked to confront are extraordinarily difficult and they come at its members with such great rapidity that the time to consider them carefully seems an unaffordable luxury. Sometimes, as with global warming, there's a consensus as to the nature of the problem but no agreement at all — either on Capitol Hill or in the country at large — on how to proceed.

Sometimes, as with health care or immigration, there's not even agreement on what the problem is, only that there is a problem.

For our political leaders, sorting through all this is immensely complicated. Some issues are highly technical and demand detailed study; others have so many moving parts that it's hard to master them in their entirety. And while Washington is filled with entrenched interest groups that may contribute to understanding the fine points of any given issue, they will inevitably fight hard when their interests are at stake.

If discerning where the national interest lies is difficult, so is trying to figure out where the American people stand on any given issue.

The truth is, our opinions are often fuzzy — more a gut sense than a finely nuanced argument — and changeable. Crafting legislation that will be accepted by 300 million people, or even a majority of them, is a gargantuan challenge. This is one reason many members of Congress would rather put off dealing with tough issues, and it is why it takes extraordinary political leadership to come up with a solution that can command a majority in Congress and support from most Americans.

It gets even harder when you take into account the process that legislation must pass through. Our system was designed by its framers to move slowly — to cool passions, to prevent a rash response, to keep the majority from trampling the interests of the minority. Letting it work can be immensely frustrating, especially when movement bogs down over the specific wording of a measure or a seemingly trivial point.

But the measured pace of change is also a gift, allowing legislators to examine an issue from all sides, understand its intricacies, look for unforeseen and unintended consequences, build consensus on Capitol Hill, create support in the country at large, and educate the American people as to what they're doing and why.

When they can't, our tendency is either to blame the politicians, assigning them all sorts of malign motives, or to blame the system itself. What we forget is that there are genuine, deeply held political differences that have to be resolved. It's hard work, and it demands strong leadership, patience, and an abundance of good will.

The road to producing good results can be fraught and difficult, yet I'm reminded of Gerald Ford's comment when he became President after Richard Nixon's resignation: "The Constitution works," he said. It does. We might not always enjoy the troubles that assail us along its path, but in the end we move past the difficulty of the moment, achieve at least a few victories, and, refreshed, square our shoulders to face the next challenge.

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Our Future Depends on Improving the Public Dialogue

Wherever I go these days, people want to talk about how much trouble we have talking reasonably to one another about current public policy challenges. The quality of the public dialogue, they say — our ability to reason with one another and to sort through issues — is lamentable.

Al Gore’s new book, The Assault on Reason, decries the decline of public discourse. In my view, he’s hit a nerve.

And for good reason. Our political system is riddled with problems: cynicism and low voter turnout; intense partisanship; the outsized influence of money. But if Americans feel that we can’t even set about fixing them because we’re incapable of holding a discussion that isn’t distorted by spin, misleading studies, media manipulation, 10-second sound bites, and accusations of suspect motives, then we’ve got a really serious problem.

It doesn’t just affect efforts to reform the political system, of course. Woodrow Wilson once said, “I not only use all the brains I have, but all I can borrow.” What was true in the early decades of the 20th century is even more true today. The complexity of the problems we confront, from how to handle our role in the world to how to fix our health care system to what to do about public education, demands that Americans of different beliefs and perspectives think together about what to do. No one individual or small group can know all there is to know.

Yet we suffer from a poor and superficial imitation of debate, often the equivalent of playground name-calling, rather than the deep exploration of challenges and their potential solutions that the times call for.

Our electronic media, in particular, is drawn by the quick-and-easy. You are far likelier to learn about a candidate’s debate style, mannerisms, attire or expensive haircut than you are his or her ideas about fixing our health care system.

Yet in the end, I believe we have no one to blame but ourselves. Living in a democracy takes work, and if we want to enjoy its fruits, we have to labor a bit to prepare them.

I’m sometimes disappointed by how ready we Americans are to believe polls and studies and the assertions of those in authority, rather than to gather information, think for ourselves, and make discriminating judgments. If we want the quality of public dialogue to improve, then it’s up to us to improve it and let our political leaders know we will no longer let them get away with offering inadequate solutions to difficult problems.

We can do this in several ways:

— First, pay attention to reason and fact, not propaganda and half-truths. Don’t accept an assertion of fact on its face. Obtain your information from a variety of sources.

— Don’t let yourself be diverted by fluff. We love the clutter of celebrity lives, gossip and the extraneous details of politics, but letting them dominate our attention has a real cost. This country has made serious mistakes over the last decade in no small part because we were distracted by the diversions we wanted to pay attention to, rather than focused on the issues we needed to pay attention to.

— Listen to the experts, but make up your own mind. As the psalm says, “Put not your trust in princes.”

— Do not attack the motivations of adversaries. Give them the respect of speaking to the merits of their arguments.

— Try to take a step back from ideology. Listen carefully to different sides in a debate, be prepared to see the logic in what people of different viewpoints have to say, and above all look for pragmatic approaches that work, not ideologically rigid approaches that don’t comport with the real world.

Many Americans have simply checked out of the debate, and many others who do participate ignore these precepts. Among the great gifts of living in this country is the right to speak out, but that right carries with it a responsibility. All of us have the responsibility to work to increase the quality of the public dialogue. The future of our country is on the line.

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There’s Still Much Room For Improvement In Congress

In the run-up to last year's elections, critics of the House of Representatives and its leadership articulated three broad concerns.

First, they believed Congress had abandoned its constitutionally mandated role overseeing the conduct of the Executive Branch.

Second, they contended the GOP leadership had allowed lobbyists and their money to become too powerful.

Third, they condemned the majority for trampling on the right of the Democratic minority to offer meaningful alternatives in legislation and debate.

Now, as we approach the mid-point of the Democrats' first year back in control, it seems an apt moment to gauge how well the new majority is performing on all three fronts.

The short answer is: some improvement, but still only fair.

While the House has once again become a force on oversight and made some progress on lobbying and ethics reform, it's still got a long way to go in restoring balance to its internal procedures.

Oversight: If you've been keeping up with the news, you know that Congress has already significantly expanded its oversight of the Executive Branch — on everything from the Iraq War to its hearings on the U.S. attorney firings. It is holding the White House and Cabinet officials accountable for their actions and decisions, and as a result enhancing Americans' ability to judge their government's actions.

This is a vital improvement to our democracy, which does not function well if those in power go unquestioned.

Lobbying: The House has also moved productively — though not as thoroughly as it ought to have done — on lobbying reform. The Abramoff scandals and corruption charges against several former members of Congress not only brought the institution itself into disrepute, they also sapped Americans' trust that the system could function fairly on behalf of ordinary citizens. Democrats' promises of full-scale ethics reform were key to their win last fall.

The lobby reform bill passed recently by the House is certainly an improvement, but it hardly knocks the ball out of the park. The House failed to create an independent office to investigate allegations of ethical improprieties; it also watered down a proposal that was in the initial version of the bill requiring that two years pass before a retiring House member be allowed to lobby his or her former colleagues.

And though it did require disclosure of lobbyists' "bundling" of campaign contributions, that measure will undoubtedly face a stiff headwind in the House-Senate conference on the bill.

So while the House may be moving in the right direction on ethics issues, it has not yet lived up to Americans' expectations of a complete turnaround from what came before.

Fair procedures: The Democratic majority, which controls the terms of debate and sets the parameters for considering legislation on the floor, often seems to forget how damaging mistreatment of the minority can be. It has sent far too many bills to the floor without allowing amendments, it has toyed with some of the most egregious of the previous Republican majority's violation of House norms — such as holding open floor votes beyond the normal time limit so that the leadership can twist arms — and most recently it considered changing the rules to disallow the so-called "motion to recommit," one of the few tools the House minority can use to get its point across.

Internal procedures can seem like unbearably arcane issues, of little import to most Americans. Nothing could be further from the truth. The goal in the House — the most representative institution our nation possesses — is to create a process that is fair and that allows the nation's business to be done, while also letting the minority present an alternative policy, have it debated fully, and then see it voted up or down. The way the majority uses the rules is a basic test of that fairness; if it quashes the minority's ability ever to have its alternatives heard, it flunks.

Now, the House minority bears a share of responsibility, too. If its members are constantly playing little games to score political points, rather than developing serious policy alternatives, then it, too, shares the blame for undercutting the civility and fairness necessary for the House to work.

As congressional scholar Norman Ornstein put it not long ago, "If the minority uses the opportunity to offer amendments to exploit cynically the opening for political purposes...it soon will lose its moral high ground for objecting to majority restrictions on debate and amendments." So far, neither Democrats nor Republicans have covered themselves with glory on this front.

The House ought to be a beacon of open, deliberative and thoroughgoing debate, an institution that truly represents the diversity and fair-minded decency of ordinary Americans. Let us encourage our representatives to make Congress an institution we can all point to with pride.

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Citizenship is Hard Work

I've heard a great deal from citizens over the years about what they expect from their elected representatives. Now I'd like to tell you what one former politician, at least, expects of citizens.

With each passing year, I become more impressed with the obligations and responsibilities that our form of democracy places upon ordinary people. To put it plainly, our nation depends for its health on the active engagement of its citizens. As Adlai Stevenson once said in a speech at Princeton, "Our government demands, it depends upon, the care and the devotion of the people."

This is a remarkably concise summation of a truth that many people who hold public office come to appreciate — that while the burdens placed on elected officials in a representative democracy may often seem heavy, they are merely a distillation of those we ask our citizens to shoulder.

For in order to select their representatives carefully and wisely, and then to hold them to account for their behavior in office, voters must be able to judge difficult issues and their solutions, weigh complex arguments, and identify problems that need addressing.

They must have some understanding of the intricacies of the problems confronting the nation and be able to respond to the rapidity with which the biggest evolve — problems such as war, a changing economy, global warming, the health care crisis.

And citizens must have a dose of critical attitude toward their leaders — the skeptical frame of mind that will help them fairly evaluate those in office without forfeiting their belief in the system as a whole.

This is asking a lot. It means studying the issues, seeking out all sorts of points of view, talking to friends and acquaintances about the crises of the day. It means being open to having one's mind changed as new information comes in, having a fundamental respect for facts, and being able to weigh what's reasoned and unreasonable in the arguments one hears.

Above all, the engaged citizen must be open to compromise, to appreciate that conflicting interests are just part of our society and that resolving conflicts allows our nation to function and move forward.

We live in a diverse and complex society, and it's inevitable that your fellow citizens are going to see things differently from you. A lot is at stake in how this gets dealt with. In the end, for citizens no less than for politicians, finding healthy and constructive ways to resolve our differences is crucial for a functioning democracy.

If what I've just described sounds like the set of qualities you should expect in an elected representative, rather than in your fellow citizens, there's good reason. Despite what the more cynical political commentators would have you believe, there are no walls that separate Capitol Hill from the rest of the nation. The success of a representative democracy rests in citizens' ability to make discriminating judgments, both about whom they wish to represent them and about how they want to be represented. The conclusions they come to then feed into the political system, whether at election time or through the day-to-day exchange of ideas and concerns between politicians and citizens.

So, at heart, our system relies on citizens making the effort to do the work we also expect of political leaders: to develop a "civic temperament" that allows them to grapple constructively with people of differing opinions, and above all to educate themselves on the issues of the day.

"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be," Thomas Jefferson once wrote to a friend. Our first duties may be to our families and our immediate communities, but our freedom depends on the willingness of ordinary citizens to devote time, attention, and effort to the public interest as well.

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What Politics Should Be About

Over the years, I've met with a lot of high-school and college students, and there's one question they come up with time after time: What, they want to know, is politics really about?

Having spent a good part of my life in the trenches, I long ago arrived at an answer that I thought reflected reality and was sufficiently cynical to make me believable. Politics, I would tell them, is about power: getting it, keeping it, and using it to advance one's agenda.

At least, that's what I said until I ran across a comment by the eminent historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who died recently. He had a different, and far more useful, answer. Politics is about "the search for remedy," he said.

We live at a time when such a belief seems outdated and hopelessly earnest. Americans have watched their politicians over the years with increasing skepticism, and come to the belief that politics is about anything but an honest effort to resolve the issues that confront us. It's about personal egos. It's about enriching oneself. It's about winning elections or wielding power for its own sake.

What's disheartening is that politicians themselves have contributed to this abandonment of sincerity. Often they — and especially their consultants — talk about politics as a highly technical and fascinating game whose largest purpose is to experience the thrill of victory. In one of this year's gubernatorial primaries, there's a leading candidate whose advertising ends in the tagline, "The only Republican who can win in November." Don't get me wrong; electability is hardly irrelevant to a primary voter. But should it be the chief thing we look for in a political leader?

What Schlesinger invited us to do was to search beneath the definitions we've given politics over the years, and to find an underlying purpose. All those "abouts" you hear now — it's about ego, it's about money, it's about power — are partly true, or at least, true in certain cases. But they're inadequate when it comes to describing what politics in a democracy is truly about: It's how we wrestle with and try to resolve the challenges that confront us.

To see why this is so important, think for a moment about some of the tremendously difficult issues we face. There is a constant barrage in Washington right now of finger-pointing and ex post facto analysis of what went wrong in Iraq. These have their place, if only because we should learn from our mistakes, but seen through the lens of Schlesinger's formulation they are political sideshows. The real challenge is to devise a remedy to the situation at hand that can be embraced and implemented by a divided government. That is what true politicians are spending their time on.

So, too, with our health care system. There hasn't been an all-out effort to tackle the many issues that assail it since the failure of the Clinton plan more than a decade ago. The result is that the system has grown more expensive, more wasteful, and less helpful to growing numbers of Americans. It is a situation that calls for politics at its best, an honest and concerted effort to find a remedy that is not only fair and lasting, but also can win the support of a diverse nation.

You'll notice that in both these examples I've added something to Schlesinger's phrase: that solutions have to be pragmatic and broadly acceptable. If politics at heart is a means to an end — the end being an actual fix to a problem — then it is not just about the search for an answer, but about making that answer work.

This means that the best politicians don't just dream up policy solutions regardless of context: They also think about how those solutions would work in the real world; they think about the forces that can help them and those that can block them; and perhaps above all, they think about how to build the broadest consensus possible behind their solutions, so that they have a realistic chance of taking root and flourishing.

Our next national election is a year and a half away. But as politicians start competing for your attention, I'd ask you to keep Schlesinger in mind. Are the people in front of you interested in constructive problem-solving? Can they engage wholeheartedly in "the search for remedy"? If so, they deserve our praise. If not, perhaps they — and we — would be better off if they spent some time out of office, contemplating what politics should really be about.

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