Republic, Lost_ How Money Corrupts Congress--And a Plan to Stop It - Lawrence Lessig [62]
I had to collect $30,000 a week, each and every week, for six years. I could have raised $3 million in South Carolina. But to get $8.5 million I had to travel to New York, Boston, Chicago, Florida, California, Texas and elsewhere. During every break Congress took, I had to be out hustling money. And when I was in Washington, or back home, my mind was still on money.46
Even twenty years ago, then–Senate majority leader Robert Byrd wanted reform for campaign finance because the Senate had become “full-time fund-raisers instead of full-time legislators.”47 “Members,” as Anthony Corrado of Brookings describes, “are essentially campaigning and raising money all the time.”48 This is an important change. “For most of American history,” Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann write, “campaigns generally were confined to the latter half of election years.”49 Now that the campaign is permanent, the other work that was customarily done during the balance of the term must, in some ways, suffer.
The numbers support what common sense predicts. Between 1983 and 1997 the total number of non-appropriations oversight committee meetings fell from 782 to 287 in the House, and 429 to 175 in the Senate.50 Total committee meetings tanked as well. Averaging for each decade since the 1970s is shown in Figure 9:51
FIGURE 9
There has been a similar decline in the number of days in which Congress has been in session, at least in the House. Again, averaging the decades52
FIGURE 10
Maybe fewer days “in session” is a good thing, if it gives members more time in the district, and hence more time to understand their constituents. But even the idea of “in session” doesn’t fully capture how the place has changed. As historian Gordon Wood describes, in the First Congress, when Congress was “in session,” “nearly all” members sat at their desk in the Hall of Congress, listened to debates for five hours a day, and were “usually attentive to what their colleagues had to say on the floor of the House.”53 The “work” of a congressman was to deliberate—which means to debate, and listen, and argue, and then decide.
The “work” of members even “in session” today has no connection to that picture. Maybe a handful of times in a two-year period a majority of Congress will sit together in a single room listening to the debate about anything. The gathering of a majority of Congress today is almost exclusively ceremonial. It is practically never for the purpose the Framers envisioned: deliberation. Instead, bells, like those from elementary school announcing recess, ring; members race from wherever they are (which is most likely just off the Hill, making fund-raising telephone calls) to the floor; they are instructed by their staff as they enter the Chamber what the vote is and how they are to vote. They vote, and then they leave. As political scientist Steven Smith describes:
On only the rarest of occasions, such as the debate over the 1991 resolution on the Persian Gulf War, do senators engage in extended, thoughtful exchanges before a full chamber. Instead, under pressure to attend committee meetings, raise campaign funds, meet with lobbyists and constituents, and travel home, senators deliberately minimize the time they spend on the floor.54
This change in the culture of Congress is radical when compared with the Framing. It is also radical when compared with Congress just thirty years ago. It has been criticized most by more-senior members. Republican senator Trent Lott (R-Miss.; 1989–2007), for example, describes Congress as having “had a different feel to it—there was a respect for chain of command; there was a respect for the institution.