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When the House voted down the bailout on Monday I was very surprised by the result, but I was not particularly surprised to hear that of the Representatives facing close re-elections, only two voted in favor of the bailout. This looks like a blatant reminder that the primary concern of elected officials tends to be keeping their jobs rather than showing leadership. I say that while acknowledging that I feel strongly that rejecting the bailout was the right choice. The urgency with which the bailout was pushed makes me immediately wary. Government should never work that fast on anything of importance – except in cases of our nation being attacked. In other words, the members of the house did the right thing, but it appears that they did it, in most cases, for the wrong reason.
Today the Senate is set to vote on the bailout bill – despite the fact that they have no Constitutional authority to appropriate money except in concurrence with the House. Unlike the House, where every member is facing re-election, 2/3 of our Senators are insulated from an immediate election. Because of this I expect that the bailout bill will pass in the Senate as Senators feel more free to lead with re-election not being an immediate issue for most of them. I have not been able to read a draft of the Senate version of the bailout, but assuming that they have not written a new bill from scratch I fully expect that they will do the wrong thing for the right reasons.
I’m really not sure which is worse, but our options in Congress (when we have options) seem to be that our elected officials do the right thing for the wrong reasons, or the wrong thing for the right reasons.
UPDATE 11:00am: There is no way that any Senator will have read the full text of this bill – it is 451 pages long. I have no idea why it is so long because as of the parts I have read nothing of significance has changed. In fact, the page numbers for the entire first section of the bill (which contains the bulk of the substance) appear to be unchanged. None of the issues I raised with the House bill have been addressed in any way.
4 replies on “Government Gray Area”
Our Founders expected that elections would force politicians to hew more closely to the will of the people. However, they designed a republic to counteract the tyranny of the majority that necessarily exists in democratic systems.
The Founders expected senators to be more deliberative and more separated from the will of the masses. Having them more beholden to the will of their state legislatures, however, didn’t work out as well as hoped.
These various forces were intended to create a balance. The Founders did not expect that politicians would magically forgo personal interest in favor of pleasing their constituents or acting in the nation’s best interests. In other words, they did not expect our politicians to do the right thing because it’s the right thing to do. Rather, they expected them to (collectively, at least) do the right thing because other options seemed less pleasant.
I realized as I wrote that this balance of doing the right thing for the wrong reason and the wrong thing for the right reason – even the differences between the two chambers of Congress is proof of the genius of our founders. Of course their genius can only carry us for a limited time when our elected officials blatantly ignore their Constitutional limitations of office.
Too true. Unfortunately, it is WE THE PEOPLE that are asleep at the switch, allowing them — nay, encouraging them (and voting them out of office if they don’t) — to “blatantly ignore their Constitutional limitations of office.”
I could not agree more about the fact that the electorate is asleep at the wheel which is why I want to form a group to encourage civil dialog and to help people abandon their place among the “silent majority.”
Care to join me?