Saving Congress from Itself by James L Buckley

Author:James L Buckley [Buckley, James L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781594037757
Publisher: Encounter Books

THE COST TO CONGRESS

Once upon a time, the United States Senate was known as both the world’s greatest deliberative body and its most exclusive club. The first suggests that senators went about their legislative duties with great care, that they attended the floor debates of pending legislation, studied the proposed laws’ merits, and cast their votes based on an informed understanding of their purposes and likely effects. The second description suggests that senators had sufficient leisure to develop friendships across party lines, which made it easier for them to bridge partisan differences. However accurate those characterizations may have been in years long past, they bear little relationship to today’s Senate, and they cannot because of the extraordinary pressures under which its members are now forced to live.

Shortly after my election to the Senate in 1970, I was handed a recently completed study of Congress that had concluded that the workload of the average congressional office had doubled every five years since 1935. Given the fact that, in simpler times, Congress worked at a leisurely pace and was in session for five or six months a year, its members could take the initial increases in stride simply by devoting more hours per day and more months per year to their work. Over time, however, the available hours and months were exhausted, and the doubling could only be accommodated by squeezing deliberation out of the legislative process. I can certify that during my own six years in office, I witnessed both a sharp increase in the already frenetic pace of the Senate and an equally sharp decline in its ability to get very much done that could honestly be labeled “thoughtful.”

This pressure cooker existence is the result of Congress’s assumption of ever-wider responsibilities, as evidenced by the explosion of federal laws and regulations that began with the New Deal. In 1934, the United States Code consisted of a single volume containing 2,275 pages of statutes, the work product of our Congress’s first 137 years. In 1970, when I was elected to the Senate, the Code had grown to eleven volumes, and the 2006 edition contains thirty. But those statutes are just the tip of the iceberg, because they are supplemented by an ever-expanding number of small print regulations that have the force of law and currently fill 235 volumes that occupy more than 24 feet of shelf space. Those laws and regulations touch virtually every corner of American life, with the result that individuals and communities increasingly encounter problems that require them to deal with Washington, and so they turn to their congressional representatives for help.

This combination of legislative and constituent work has converted Congress from an institution that could once think problems through to responsible conclusions into a treadmill that is turning at an accelerating pace. That treadmill is now spinning out of control. I recall a Washington Post article a few years ago by a reporter who had acted as a congressman’s shadow over the course of a week. He reported that the poor man had no more than fifteen minutes a day for consecutive thought.

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