While those who follow politics closely are busy parsing what the ouster of Kevin McCarthy as House speaker might mean for Congress, those who don’t – meaning the bulk of the American people – could be forgiven for tuning much of the drama of the last few weeks out. Ordinary Americans have little faith in Congress as it stands: as substantively or strategically consequential as they might be, the battles between members of our most reviled class, politicians, seem to most like juvenile squabbles.
Here’s a detail that might incense them further. For generations, members of the US Senate have carved and scrawled their names into their desks. This rite, the stuff of summer camp and grade school, is, to the peculiar mind of a US senator, something more profound – yet another tradition, as though they needed another, signifying their membership in an august and noble fraternity.
The same can be said of the Senate’s dress code, which was unanimously rescued and formalized this past week after Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer relaxed the chamber’s rules, seemingly to accommodate the defiantly casual Pennsylvania senator John Fetterman. Men will be asked to wear full business attire from now on – a requirement that has its practical advantages. As Robert Menendez, the New Jersey senator, may allegedly know, a suit jacket is a fine place to stow wads of cash in a pinch and useful, in the abstract, for another reason – disguising, through costumes of respectability, how grubby, venal and unremarkable many of our politicians are.
A group letter written in the defense of the dress code described the Senate as “a place of honor and tradition”. “The world watches us on that floor,” it reads, “and we must protect the sanctity of that place at all costs.” Of course, the world usually has better things to do than keep up with congressional proceedings on C-SPAN, but there are embarrassing exceptions, the latest dramas among Republicans in the House among them, though the fact that they’re taking place in the opposite chamber shouldn’t flatter the Senate and its defenders – “the world’s greatest deliberative body” is nothing more than the geriatric wing of one of the world’s most unserious legislatures.
And while much due attention is given to the problem of money in politics and more and more conversations are being had about Congress’s structural defects – once the late Dianne Feinstein is replaced and California regains its full complement of senators, each of the state’s voters will still have just over one-sixtieth the representation in the chamber of a voter in Wyoming – we ought to have a conversation, too, about the culture of the place.
The inescapable fact uniting so much that grates about Congress right now – Republican shenanigans in the House, the Democratic party’s sluggishness in handling an obviously corrupt, compromised and distracted Menendez, gerontocracy within both parties – is that we ask very little of our representatives. Being a member of Congress simply isn’t substantively demanding enough.
The irony of all the talk about how elderly our leaders are, and the reality that, in fact, has allowed obviously infirm politicians like Feinstein and Mitch McConnell to retain their positions even as they go catatonic in public view, is that the halls and offices of the Capitol are absolutely teeming with unelected and invisible young staffers – many of whom are in their 20s and 30s, some of whom are constitutionally incapable of occupying the offices they serve – who do much of the actual work Americans believe our elected officials do themselves.
Policy research, drafting and reviewing legislative language, authoring speeches, drawing up the questions senators and congressmen ask at hearings, writing tweets and statements that go out under their bosses’ names, preparing talking points for media appearances, relaying directives from party leaders about how to vote and why – as a practical matter, the average politician in Washington today needn’t be more than a warm body with a pulse ready to cast a given vote.
Of course, the late Senator Feinstein did her level best to test even that. But the fact that she, as one New York Times headline put it, “[Relied] Heavily on Staff to Function” was only partially a function of her age – the same is true of all but a relatively small and wonky contingent of unusually hard-working legislators.
That’s not to say the rest don’t have concrete and vital responsibilities of their own – in 2013, the Huffington Post obtained documents from Democratic congressional campaign committee recommending that freshmen members of the caucus spend at least four hours every day calling donors for campaign contributions, more than the total amount of time recommended for visits with constituents and working in committees or voting on the House floor combined, a figure probably comparable to the number of hours spent dialing for dollars on the other side of the aisle.
“After votes in the House, a stream of congressmen and women can be seen filing out of the Capitol and, rather than returning to their offices, heading to rowhouses nearby on First Street for call time, or directly to the parties’ headquarters,” Ryan Grim and Sabrina Siddiqui wrote. “The rowhouses […] are typically owned by lobbyists, fundraisers or members themselves, and are used for call time because it’s illegal to solicit campaign cash from the official congressional office.”
Once call time is done, we might find our representatives making canned speeches prepared by dutiful staffers before a mostly empty chamber, some of which might find their way into campaign ads and materials later.
It can’t really be a surprise, given this, that Congress attracts so many who have little fundamental interest in doing the work of governing themselves – or that it sustains the careers of even those who do well after they’re personally capable of doing it. In either case, the legislator is little more than a cog in a vast machine influenced variously by donors, interest groups, major leaders and figures in both parties, the media, primary voters, and, yes, somewhere in the mix voters in the general electorate, though it should be said that most legislators don’t have to sweat much for their approval come election time.
In the 2022 midterms, 84% of House seats were either uncontested or decided in races where the victor won by more than 10 points, with the average margin of victory in all races working out to about 28 points. Nearly 95% of incumbents won reelection. On the Senate side, Cook Political Reports rated nine of the 35 races as potentially competitive; ultimately, all incumbents won their seats back.
Congress, all told, isn’t a place most are ultimately forced to leave either by elections or as a matter of their age. Term limits and age limits have been floated as solutions to all this, but another complementary remedy, if we dare to dream, might be party leaders taking it upon themselves to work our representatives harder.
The tasks of legislating are now well beyond the capacities of individual legislators alone, yes, but setting the expectation that they should shoulder more of the burdens now foisted upon their staffers would discourage older legislators and incumbents from sticking around too long – Feinstein might have retired long ago if she’d actually had to do more of her job herself – and help dissuade layabouts and grifters from seeking office.
We’ll never be fully rid of them, of course, and we’d scarcely recognize Congress without them. But making the work of politics feel like work seems worth a try.
Osita Nwanevu is a Guardian US columnist
