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As much as it may be fashionable to blame congress for many of our problems I think it is fair to take an unbiased look at how congress functions. As I began to do so I realized that no matter how numerous my complaints about the legislation we hear about and the legislative process itself I am pleased to realize that Congress is working as designed by the founders.
I’m reminded of an old joke:
If "pro" is the opposite of "con" then Congress must be the opposite of progress.
It turns out that the major thing that Congress does as designed is to slow down the process of law-making. Obviously we have seen recent exceptions such as the ever-popular bailouts and the patriot act where Congress acted faster than it was meant to act, but the fact that such legislation is so shoddy is proof of why the House and Senate are intended to be deliberative bodies.
What I was very happy to realize was that while I may complain when Congress takes a decent proposal from the executive branch and strips it down (or gums it up) to a barely palatable law, it also takes poor proposals from the executive branch and dilutes them up until they are marginally less toxic. So while we may complain that nothing can come through Congress clean, we should also recognize the flip-side of that truth – that bad legislation is never as potent as it would be without congressional intervention.
I know that the founders envisioned a Congress that would, through their deliberation, pass good proposals with little alteration while preventing or significantly improving poor proposals. That is the ideal for which we should continuie to strive, but at least we can approciate the fact that even a poor congress has some beneficial value to the people.
2 replies on “Con-Gress”
Americans love to complain that Congress gets nothing done. But they also gripe when Congress does something. Whatever Congress does or doesn’t do, it’s derided and condemned.
LaVarr Webb likes to say that Congress has gotten so bad that it is capable of only two courses of action: doing nothing or overreacting.
Congressional sluggishness is designed into the system on purpose. As you note, it is meant to be a virtue (perhaps by simply slowing down or diluting vice).
But we live in a *now* society where we are used to immediacy. Our 24×7 news cycle feeds into a need for legislators to appear to be doing something. We also live in a time when the federal leviathan’s tentacles invade more recesses of our lives than at anytime outside of the Civil War and WWII. Is it any surprise that people clamor for immediate action by Washington politicians?
Perhaps that 24-7 news cycle is why Congress can only do nothing or overreach. If they act at the speed that Congress was designed to operate they ar accused of doing nothing and if they act at the overclocked speed of 24-7 news they end up overreaching.