View this post on the web at [link removed]

It’s been 10 years since I worked as a Senate staffer, but Rob Tracinski’s September 9 piece, “The Era of the Do-Nothing Congress [ [link removed] ],” had me reflecting on my 18 months on Capitol Hill. Rob’s essay poses a question I often found myself asking during my time working on the Hill: Why do legislators no longer want to legislate? (Of course, as I look at the legislative output of the current Congress, it makes the 113th Congress in which I worked seem positively prolific.) 
I came to a very similar conclusion as Rob, that too much time is spent on the appearance of legislating rather than actually making laws. At the time, I believed that a good way of solving this problem would be to do away with Senate press staffers like me. After all, very little of my role aided in the legislative process, and most of it actively distracted from that process. During the 2013 government shutdown, for example, members of Congress quickly prioritized being photographed helping veterans access the “closed” WWII Memorial over working out a deal to reopen all of the government. 
But in the years since leaving the Hill, I’ve settled on a new culprit: The American people have become extreme helicopter parents.
There certainly are members of Congress who use their taxpayer-funded staff to amplify their showboating rhetoric. Legislators make statements offering simple solutions to thorny policy issues, while neglecting to note the various constitutional, procedural or political reasons that made their “solutions” unworkable. And this rhetoric attracts attention: Most of what comms staffers on the Hill do is respond, both directly and indirectly, to a constant barrage of constituent questions.
Just as we can’t expect college students to grow into independent adults with parents constantly hovering, we cannot expect our senators to meaningfully legislate if their offices are getting flooded with calls and emails demanding an explanation about procedural minutiae like cloture votes [ [link removed] ].
A cloture vote is just one small part of legislating, but it’s symbolic of much of the process. It’s one of many decisions senators face as they craft, pass and block legislation. And most of us likely believe that we’re helping by offering continuous feedback and critique, the same way overbearing parents believe they’re helping when they call their 19-year-old college students at 7 a.m. to wake them up for class.
Instead, we’ve trained our elected officials to seek constant affirmation. So instead of doing the necessary but boring work of hammering out legislative language in nine-hour committee meetings, they’re giving speeches to television cameras in otherwise empty chambers.
As constituents, our job in the legislative process is to share information about our concerns and preferences with our representatives and then to take the time to make informed choices when voting. Then, until it’s time to vote again, there’s nothing meaningful that we can do with what Rob refers to as “political infotainment.” In a less connected age, it might have made sense to have staffers pushing information back to the states, so that a member’s policy positions and voting record would be available for constituents to review ahead of the next election. But today, the House and Senate websites make it easy to peruse every vote at any time.
Constantly refreshing the app that tracks their kid’s phone doesn’t give parents any more control over their child’s safety. The same is true of your senator’s social media feed. Constituents can’t recall an elected member of Congress. Instead of stressing about the actions of people you cannot control, I’d recommend picking one day, once per election cycle, to do a deep dive on the candidates on your ballot. For incumbents, that will include looking at the bills they sponsored and the votes they took. Use that information to make your selection, cast your vote and then give yourself the freedom to spend the next two, four or six years doing your job, rather than your congressman’s. 
Meanwhile ...
What I’m Reading: I’m currently revisiting “Shane [ [link removed] ]” by Jack Schaefer, and it’s my first time reading it since it was assigned back in junior high. The book came up in a conversation with co-workers at happy hour last week, and I was surprised to learn that most of them hadn’t read it. Someone asked me for a synopsis, and I found myself unable to articulate much beyond, “A mysterious man name Shane arrives ... and eventually he has to leave.”
To rectify my pitiful recollection of a book I claimed to enjoy, I pulled my old copy off the shelf and was immediately sucked in. At my initial reading, I was around the same age as Bob, the 11-year-old narrator. As an adult, I appreciate the way Schaefer uses an adult reader’s life experience—their understanding of that period in history and their own recollections about what they did and did not understand about the world at the age of 11—to provide an additional layer of insight into the story Bob is telling. His narration at times includes snippets of conversation between Shane and his parents, and I’m now picking up on inferences I missed in my initial read.
I’ve still got over half the book to go, so I’m not yet able to offer a more complete recap. But it’s been a delight to reread a book that I remember fondly and discover that I hadn’t just applied the rosy haze of nostalgia to the story.
Latest Stories
Martin Gurri, “Mistaking Leviathan for God [ [link removed] ]”
Michael J. Ard, “The Gunman on the Sixth Green [ [link removed] ]”
Jennifer Tiedemann, “For Your Reference [ [link removed] ]”
Jacob Bruggeman, “Disinformation or Shared Search for Meaning? [ [link removed] ]”
Patrick Horan, “The Fed Needs to Modernize Its Tactics [ [link removed] ]”
Nathan Goetting, “The Federal Bureau of Entrapment [ [link removed] ]”
David Taylor, “How Organized Crime Has Turned Environmental Crime Into Big Business [ [link removed] ]”
From the Archives
David Masci, “Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss [ [link removed] ]”
Robert Tracinski, “What Replaces the Biblical Cinematic Universe? [ [link removed] ]”
Andrey Mir, “‘Malinformation’ and the Wrong Truth [ [link removed] ]”

Unsubscribe [link removed]?