The Ten Commandments of Citizenship

This presidential election, if you believe the polls and the rhetoric, is about change in Washington. Both candidates promise it, while voters clamor for it. It is the cause of the moment.

Yet I have news for you: Change in Washington won't happen, and certainly can't be sustained, without change in the country at large. For the point is not to overthrow the system, it's to make it function properly. Government does not fix itself. Only a citizenry that is engaged in our democracy to an extent far greater than in recent decades can help to heal our system. To get change in Washington, in other words, it has to begin with you.

Since being a responsible citizen takes commitment, here are some precepts to follow if you want to be effective — what I call the “Ten Commandments of Citizenship”:

Vote. This is the most basic step democracy asks of us. Don't buy the argument that it doesn't matter. Every election offers real choices about the direction we want our towns, states and country to take. By voting, you not only select the officials who will run the government, you suggest the direction government policy should take and reaffirm your support for a representative democracy.

Be informed. To be a knowledgeable voter, you need to know what candidates actually stand for, not just what their ads or their opponents' ads say. Read about the issues that confront your community and our nation as a whole. Our government simply does not work well if its citizens are ill–informed.

Communicate with your representatives. Representative democracy is a dialogue between elected officials and citizens — that dialogue lies at the heart of our system. Legislators and executives can't do their job well if they don't understand their constituents' concerns, and we can't understand them if we don't know their views and why they hold them.

Participate in groups that share your views and can advance your interests. This one's simple: In a democracy, people tend to be more effective when they work together rather than acting as individuals. You can be sure that almost every issue you care about has one or more organizations devoted to it. By joining and working with the ones you think best reflect your views, you amplify your beliefs and strengthen the dialogue of democracy.

Get involved locally to improve your community. You know more about your community's strengths and weaknesses than anyone living outside it. Identify its problems and work to correct them. Involvement is the best antidote I know to cynicism.

Educate your family, and make sure that local schools are educating students, about their responsibilities as citizens. As a society, we're not as good as we should be at encouraging young people to get involved in political life. Too many young people — and even many adults — do not understand how our government and political system work and why it is important for them to be contributing citizens.

Understand that we must work to build consensus in a huge, diverse country. In pretty much every way you can think of, ours is an astoundingly mixed nation of people, with wildly divergent views on most issues and a constantly growing population. This means we have to work through our differences not by hammering on the other side, but by bringing people together through the arts of dialogue, accommodation, compromise, and consensus–building.

Understand that our representative democracy works slowly. There's a reason for this: it is so that all sides can be heard, and so that we avoid the costly mistakes produced by haste. Our Founders understood this 220 years ago, and it's even more vital now, when issues are vastly more complex and the entire world is closely connected.

Understand that our system is not perfect, but has served the nation well. Democracy is a process designed to give people a voice in how they are governed. It's not perfect — far too many people feel voiceless, and polls in recent years suggest that unsettling numbers believe the system is broken. And our system offers no guarantee that you'll get what you want. Yet it is also true that it provides every individual an opportunity to be heard and to work to achieve his or her objectives, and it has served our nation well for over two centuries.

Understand that our system is not self–perpetuating; it demands our involvement to survive. Just because it has worked in the past does not mean we will have a free and successful country in the future. Lincoln's challenge is still urgent: whether this nation so conceived can long endure. Being a good citizen isn't something one does just for the heck of it; it's critical to the success of our nation.

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Why Ethics Should Matter to Congress

Congress will never regain the faith of ordinary Americans until members of Congress win their trust. This appears to be a long way off.

I see no other way to read the results of a recent poll by the Center on Congress at Indiana University. When it asked 1,000 people whether members of Congress are “honest people of good character,” a rather stunning 42 percent said that most are not. Asked to grade Congress on holding its members to high ethical standards, 75 percent gave it either a D or an F.

This dismal view of members' integrity — and of their interest in upholding the institution's integrity — is especially striking given the importance the general public places on it. Asked which characteristic they consider to be most critical in a member of Congress, respondents to the poll rated honesty as by far the most important, surpassing a member's positions on issues, religious convictions, good judgment, or ability to get things done.

Given the weight the public places on honesty, you'd think that members of Congress would be falling all over themselves to demonstrate they can put their houses in order. Yet the ethics committees of both the House and the Senate have been far too supine in recent years, even as an array of scandals hit their institutions.

Over a dozen members of Congress have come under federal investigation for everything from improper ties with lobbyists to bribery to using their influence for personal benefit. Recently, various members of Congress have been accused of getting special deals on their housing and of abusing the earmark process. Few outside observers would say that congressional ethics enforcement has worked, a sentiment shared by the general public. Too often the standard pursued by congressional leaders has been, “Is it legal?”: They have turned the Criminal Division of the Justice Department into the main ethics enforcer on Capitol Hill.

Passing judgment on one's colleagues is hard, there's no question about that. Not only do members of Congress depend on one another to be effective, and so try not to alienate one another, but they feel an entirely natural reluctance to judge the ethics of their peers in public.

This is a big reason for the one promising step taken by the House — but not the Senate — on this front: the establishment of an outside review board to investigate ethics complaints. This committee, made up of an equal number of Democrats and Republicans who are not sitting House members, will have the authority to look into complaints about misconduct, dismiss frivolous or politically motivated accusations, and recommend sanctions.

As with many things on Capitol Hill, the proof will be in the implementation. The new review board does not have subpoena power, and at least one of its Democrats and one of its Republicans have to agree that an investigation has merit before it can move forward — a recipe that could lead to partisan stalemate. Moreover, once an investigation starts, the board needs to have credible power to conduct its inquiries, a professional and impartial staff, and the political and financial resources to give it heft. We haven't yet seen whether it will.

The fact that Congress has to look for help from an outside panel is disappointing, indicating that by itself it is unable to police its own members. But it is also a recognition of the political reality that the congressional ethics process has in recent decades become highly politicized.

Too often, complaints of impropriety were made not to strengthen the institution or uphold its integrity, but to weaken a political opponent and drive a member from office with ethics attacks when substantive attacks on his or her record didn't work. When I was in the House, some of the “ethics and corruption” charges made against the leaders of both parties were accurate, some were greatly exaggerated, and some were simply false. The politicization of the ethics process was getting out of control.

One of the core goals of this outside commission is to reduce the political misuse of the ethics process, and that is certainly needed. Not punishing ethical misconduct has weakened the institution, but so has the misuse of the ethics process by members of both parties for purely political purposes. Both bring discredit on the institution and both contribute to the low opinion people have of members' integrity.

Americans want members of Congress to avoid actual and apparent wrongdoing; they want them to act always to reflect credit on the institution. That basic standard of good conduct needs to be vigorously and fairly enforced. Anything less will continue to undercut Congress's already imperiled legitimacy.

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Why Holding the Majority Matters

This is where some members of the minority party in the House can get relegated when they want to host a gathering for constituents or visitors. Members of the majority might instead get the meeting rooms that showcase the grandeur of Congress — the elegant ones just off the House floor in the Capitol, with high ceilings, plush carpets, and rich wood paneling.When you see news stories over the next few months about which party is likely to emerge from the November elections with a majority in Congress, keep one thing in mind: the basement. You might think that congressional leaders care most about the ability that majority status gives them to set the agenda, and you're probably right; but rest assured that they're also thinking about the gloomy corridors underneath the various House office buildings on Capitol Hill.

I tell you this because it helps to explain why members of Congress behave as they do when control of their chamber is at stake. Sure, being in the minority means losing the House or Senate leadership, committee chairmanships, and the opportunity to set and to advance a party's agenda. But that's just the start of it. The difference between being the majority party and the minority party is so great that in many ways you're talking about two very different experiences of Congress for their respective members. This is one reason the intense partisanship we've seen on Capitol Hill for well over a decade now has such a sharp edge to it.

Party status affects pretty much everything. The majority not only gets nicer spaces and meeting rooms, it also gets to determine which members and staff will go on overseas fact-finding trips, and enjoys all sorts of little perks that make life on Capitol Hill more pleasant. And on congressional committees, the majority often takes two-thirds to three-fourths of the budget and will have three times the number of staff as the minority, so a shift in party control can be traumatic for those suddenly in the minority.

Then, of course, there are the substantive differences. In the House, for instance, the leadership of the majority party controls the legislative agenda entirely. It decides not only which issues will be taken up, but also how they can be debated, whether amendments will be allowed, and how the matter will be handled on the House floor. If it wished, it could — and on occasion does — prevent the minority party from offering even a single amendment to important bills brought up on the floor during the session.

The rules are somewhat less lopsided in the Senate, though the minority there often gets less of a chance to shape legislation — or even attach its members' names to legislation — than it does simply to block a bill entirely.

The result of all this is two-fold: In a closely divided Congress, the stakes in each election are enormous, not simply in terms of which policies and philosophies will prevail, but what legislative life will be like afterward for members of each party; and this in turn feeds an atmosphere of partisanship and mistrust, and makes it harder to cooperate across the aisle, simply because neither party wants to give the other even the remotest advantage.

Americans may be tired of the partisanship they've seen on Capitol Hill, but it's worth knowing that there are some basic institutional forces at work that make it difficult to overcome.

None of this is to say that lessening partisanship is impossible — just that it won't happen without a concerted effort by the majority and minority in both houses of Congress to behave in ways that make the vast gulf in potential power and perquisites somewhat narrower.

How the majority treats the minority, and vice versa, is hugely important in terms of setting the atmosphere and tone on Capitol Hill. As things stand at the moment, each side tries to manipulate the process to set up votes with an eye toward gaining a partisan advantage to enable them to win another seat or two, rather than producing good legislation. This can only be changed by a wholesale shift in attitude on the part of both parties.

For the majority's part, this means being aware that it sets the tone, and that consulting with members of the minority party — treating them fairly, as colleagues and not as enemies — should be a normal part of doing business. Equally important, the minority has a responsibility not to gum up the works by taking advantage of arcane rules of procedure or trying to turn every iota of legislative business to its political advantage.

The tone overall ought to be one of mutual respect and fairness, ruled by a constant awareness that Congress is there to serve the American people and to make the country work, not to offer an arena for conferring on one party or the other a political advantage. Only then can the people who serve in Congress free themselves from the institutional forces that, of late, have made it such an unpleasant place for many of them to serve.

Audio Version