How to Understand Congress

A paradox comes into sharp relief each election year around this time: Americans in general look down on Congress, but tend to like their own representatives. Most years, in fact, some 98 percent of incumbents running again get re-elected. So why is it that we like the people who inhabit the institution when they're back home in the district, but have little patience for them when they're doing what we elected them to do?

I don't have a complete answer to this conundrum, but I do have a suggestion. Understanding the institution might help explain why it behaves the way it does - and why people you vote for act as they do when they get to Washington.

The first thing to remember about Congress is that it is a highly representative body. This may seem like a cliché, but think for a moment what it means to fulfill the Founders' intention that the people's voices be heard in the halls of government. It means that farmers in Iowa and ranchers in Montana, laborers in Boston, shrimping families in Louisiana, hotel maids in Los Angeles, doctors and lawyers in Minnesota and Georgia - all these and millions of others have someone in Congress who can speak for them. The full diversity of this country's beliefs, concerns, and desires gets funneled to Capitol Hill.

This makes arriving at a political consensus supremely difficult - yet it also guarantees our freedom. It means that, at least in the ideal, Congress acts with the authority that comes from representing the American people.

Congress is also our most accessible branch. You cannot call a Supreme Court justice or secretary of defense to complain about U.S. policy or lodge a grievance. Yet you'll get a response from your congressman or senator. And legislators spend much of each week striving to stay in touch with their districts or states: traveling home for long weekends; hosting call-in shows; meeting both in Washington and at home with their constituents. They know what the people they represent are thinking.

You wouldn't want to change either of these characteristics, but when you combine them with a third - the fact that Congress is designed to be a deliberative body - you can understand why the institution often seems to drag its feet.

We've got a lot of differences in this country - regional, ethnic, and economic - and issues like taxes, health care, or guns don't lend themselves easily to compromise. People often complain about the process, but do we really want a system where laws are pushed through before consensus is reached? Or that lacks legislative speed bumps to ensure that multiple views get heard and Americans' rights are safeguarded? This is why Congress usually deals with issues incrementally rather than resolving them all at once. Its members have to practice the art of deliberation.

This is especially so because Congress is an extraordinarily political body. I mean this in both the unattractive and the appealing aspects of "political."

On the one hand, its members often sway too readily with the currents of public opinion; pay too close attention to the desires of donors; and support or derail legislation for reasons that have little to do with its merits, and much to do with politics. Yet politics as practiced in Congress also entails working hard to understand the concerns of myriad people and interests, bridging differences with an eye toward finding common ground, and building a consensus about how to improve the lives of ordinary Americans.

This is why it's so important that Congress fulfill its constitutional mandate as an independent and coequal branch of government - because it plays a role that the executive doesn't and the courts aren't supposed to. It is the only institution in our federal government charged with listening to the American people, sorting through our needs and interests, and applying both what it hears and its members' own views to the issues of the day.

It is an indispensable check on the power of the presidency, and by virtue of its procedures and legislative hurdles, it is a check on the power of runaway majorities and the passions of the moment. That is exactly what the Founders envisioned.

I don't mean in any way to whitewash the problems that burden Congress at the moment - from the power of moneyed interests to the excessive partisanship. Yet in the end, our Founders understood that the fundamental purpose of the Congress is to help maintain freedom in the land, and to search for a remedy for the challenges confronting the country. That is what Congress is about. If you understand this, then you understand that the messiness we find so frustrating about Congress may be what it has to go through to deliver on its promise.

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What We Owe Our Young People

You cannot step into an American community today without finding a lively conversation about educating our children. How to boost math and science learning, whether our schoolchildren are reading and writing enough, what constitutes a "quality" education - all of this figures in the national schooling debate and its thousands of local echoes.

Yet with all respect, I believe this debate is missing a fundamental piece: a recognition that a well-rounded education includes the civic virtues. We owe our young people not just a solid grounding in math, science, English and a foreign language, but also an education in democratic citizenship, because in all too many places they're not getting it. Too many youth lack a basic understanding of our representative democracy, and we reap the sour fruit of this in many Americans' disengagement and lost opportunities to contribute to our society.

What would a decent civic education look like? It begins, I think, with a robust account of the American story: the full, unvarnished history of our successes and failures, our ideals and the human flaws that jeopardize them, our progress over the centuries and the detours we've taken along the way. That is the best way to learn how crucial the involvement of ordinary citizens has been in setting the course of our history. It is also the best way to gain an appreciation for how deeply experimental our system remains, with basic questions about the use and allocation of power that were present at the beginning still in play.

Indeed, understanding that we continue to evolve as a nation, I'm convinced, is the strongest spur not just to participating in local and national civic life, but to appreciating the skills democracy imposes on us: consensus-building, compromise, civility, and rational discourse. The only way to learn them intimately, of course, is through experience: the hard but rewarding work of face-to-face engagement with political leaders and our fellow citizens. But learning how crucial they are to making our system work, both in the trenches and at every level of government - that is something our schools can teach.

So, too, we need to teach that citizenship carries with it certain responsibilities: staying informed, volunteering, speaking out, asking questions, writing letters, signing petitions, joining organizations, finding common ground on contentious issues, working in ways small and large to improve our neighborhoods and communities and to enrich the quality of life for all citizens.

Civic education can help young people feel a part of something larger than themselves by connecting them to the splendid traditions of American democratic involvement, and by showing them how to make the most of their talents to leave their communities better places than they found them.

Withholding civic education, on the other hand, means denying the people who will build our future the means to help them do so. The 21st century is bringing with it some very tough challenges: terrorism; nuclear proliferation; declining energy resources; global warming; a rapidly changing economy; competition from China, India, and nations still emerging as global players; immigration; new diseases; fundamental questions of governance. Our young people cannot hope to be successful in confronting those challenges if they have no idea how to get along together in an open and democratic society.

In the end, then, a good civic education has to include not just history and the skills demanded by democracy, but the qualities that undergird collaboration and engagement:
* mutual respect, so that results of lasting consequence can be achieved;
* tolerance, so that our citizens know how to navigate a diverse world and to value differences rather than fear them;
* deliberation and consultation, so that open debate can lead us to consensus rather than conflict;
* empathy, so that we can understand the worries and motivations of others;
* civility, so that we can disagree and still find common ground;
* humility, so that we keep in mind that we might be wrong and are open to learning from others;
* honesty, so that our common deliberations are open and straightforward;
* and resolve, so that we can overcome setbacks and surmount challenges.

These are not matters for classroom education alone, of course. For the most important quality a democracy must possess is the ability to transmit its needs and values through the experience of participating in it. Our families, our communities, our political system as a whole - all serve as teachers.

We adults have been given the great opportunity of political freedom, and we have a heavy obligation to pass on the knowledge of where it came from and how to sustain it. But teaching our civic virtues has to start somewhere, and I would argue that a key place is in our schools.

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You Need to Understand Lobbying

When news stories about questionable doings on Capitol Hill appear these days, more often than not they involve lobbyists. Think of the Jack Abramoff affair and its many spinoffs, or the ruckus over the New York Times story about John McCain and his dealings with one particular lobbyist. Small wonder that many Americans continue to think of lobbyists as little more than back-room influence peddlers.

The truth, though, is rather different. Most lobbyists are hard-working professionals who understand how to navigate the political process, gain access to lawmakers and key executive-branch officials, and build a strategy to achieve their legislative goals. Whether or not you like the prominent place they occupy in our system, lobbyists have become such an integral part of how our government operates that you can't really understand Washington unless you also understand the role they play in it.

Let's start with the basics. Lobbying is a huge business. There are roughly 30,000 registered lobbyists, but that does not include the marketers, public relations experts, pollsters, support personnel and others who back up their work. One lobbying expert, American University government professor James Thurber, puts the total number of people involved in lobbying at 261,000.

This army of people - whose activities, remember, are aimed at influencing just 535 members of Congress and a relative handful of federal officials - cost and spend several billion dollars each year. At least one company spent more than $1 billion in lobbying activities last year, at the federal and state levels.

A good lobbyist can make four or five times what a legislator or high-ranking official earns, and there's a reason for this. Groups with interests in Washington pay big money for the lobbyists they hire because if they're successful, the payoffs can be huge: subsidies for business; tax breaks for corporations and industries; immunity from lawsuits or even from laws their competitors must obey.

Regardless of which party controls the White House or Capitol Hill, it has become clear to pretty much every interest imaginable in recent years that Washington can stack the deck in its favor or tilt the field against it, and the lobbying workload has soared as a result. In a very real sense, lobbyists have become intermediaries between Washington and the organizations that represent the vast diversity of people, beliefs, and interests in our society.

Even without the occasional scandal, Americans tend to be skeptical about this development. They see lobbyists as agents of special interests who get privileged access to decision-makers, in part by buying it through campaign contributions. There's truth to this. Many Washington lobbyists are active in raising money and support for candidates who back their positions; they make hard-headed judgments about who will most strongly support their industries or causes and hence get their cash. And lobbyists undoubtedly get the chance to press their cases on Capitol Hill with access that your average farmer or teacher can only envy.

Yet the reality is more complicated than "special interests" overwhelming "the public interest." Lobbyists deal in facts - the best of them know that what lawmakers want is straightforward, understandable, and accurate information on a given issue. So on any tough policy matter, which will inevitably find Americans coming down on every side of the issue, all the various interests will be armed with good arguments that make the strongest possible case for their position. While it's too simplistic to say that they cancel one another out, this does mean that they serve an invaluable purpose in helping members of Congress understand an issue and, perhaps even more important, to understand how various constituencies view it.

This suggests a responsibility on the part of public officials who are being lobbied. It is their job not simply to be passive recipients of arguments and information, but to sort through it, and in particular to understand that it comes with a point of view - to listen carefully, in other words, but also remember that a lobbyist presents only one side of a complex issue. The skillful lobbyist, of course, will identify his or her position with the broader public good, but an equally skillful politician understands how to separate the wheat from the rhetorical chaff.

At the same time, ordinary voters should remember that they have one attribute that a member of Congress prizes highly: a vote. For all the campaign contributions they hand out and access they enjoy, lobbyists don't actually have the final say on whether a member of Congress gets re-elected; that's up to the folks back home. Which is why transparency - strict reporting laws on campaign contributions and lobbying expenditures, with easy access to that information for reporters and ordinary Americans - is so important.

For in the end, the voters have to judge whether a member of Congress has allowed lobbyists' arguments and contributions to outweigh the interests of his or her constituents and of the public at large. If so, that's what the voting booth is for.

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