Consider, for a moment, your response to the following hypothetical job listing: "Large governance organization seeking 535 employees to represent more than 300 million clients' domestic and global interests and manage a budget of over $1 trillion. Position will require candidates to make rapid decisions on economic, diplomatic and legal matters of all types (including those with which the candidate has no prior experience) and with potentially global consequences. Although the position is full-time, employees meet only about half the year."
This seemingly absurd job description is actually a nearly exact reflection of what we demand from United States senators, who we expect to be knowledgeable on every issue and bill that comes up for debate on the floor of Congress. Unfortunately, our country is simply too complex for this expectation to be reasonable. In his most recent column, Josh Kornberg '13 invoked the image of a congressman addressing an empty chamber to make the argument that our legislators are not adequately meeting the requirements of their job ("Senate Stagnation," Feb. 8). However, the expectation that congressmen should somehow be doing more is actually pushing them to do their jobs more poorly.
Let's first consider legislation that almost every congressman wanted to speak his piece about: the controversial healthcare bill signed last year. At the time, I wrote an entire column about how no congressmen seemed able to keep track of the changes being integrated into the healthcare act. This ignorance didn't seem to stop them from making stump speeches about the potential benefits and ills of the bill. It was worrisome to me that congressmen who had little familiarity with the health care industry somehow found the gall to argue so passionately about the bill. If they couldn't even track the concurrent changes in the legislation, on what authority did they speak?
I think it's safe to assume that not everyone in Congress has a background in health care or every other issue that comes before the two houses. However, in an effort to make their voices heard among potential voters as often as possible, congressmen are pressured to speak about unfamiliar topics and play to the expectation that they are all-knowing. The noisy windbags have a terrible tendency to mute the congressmen who actually have experience in public health or whatever issue is being debated. In speaking about topics on which they are ignorant, congressmen are actually doing too much of their jobs, not too little. It's a lose-lose situation for everybody.
No chemist would claim an in-depth understanding of every topic in chemistry, and no political scientist would pretend to be an expert in every category of political science. Why do we expect our legislators to be experts on all legislative matters?
Yet congressmen still encourage and play into this delusion in order to retain votes. When's the last time you heard a legislator reply "I don't know" to a tough question asked by a reporter? What if, when Christine O'Donnell, the Republican Senate candidate from Delaware in 2010, was asked what Supreme Court cases she disagrees with other than Roe v. Wade, she had simply responded with "I don't know" instead of a convoluted, stammering excuse to put something on her website?
Of course, the natural counter to my argument is that even if a congressman is simply a talkbox of slogans and soundbytes, each has an office full of aides, assistants, interns and secretaries of every imaginable kind to perform this level of analysis. There are also many well-reputed think tanks to provide external analysis that legislators can rely on to inform their views and allow them to speak knowledgeably on a subject.
This process still requires us to accept that congressmen will hand off some of their decision-making to their subordinates and do less of their jobs themselves. Letting aides handle some policy analysis might run counter to Americans' idealism of senators debating and changing their minds on the Senate floor. However, relying on aides is also a good way for congressmen with less knowledge to debate on the same level as those with expertise (and no, I don't believe that calling forth the specters of socialism and Nazism is debating on the same level as experts).
I want my congressmen to do less work. Congressmen, if you've got nothing to say, please just don't say anything. Take a vacation, spend some time with your family do anything but talk-show interviews about that bill you haven't really read. The sound of 535 people yelling at the top of their lungs is deafening my political ears.
