The Case for 8
tCitizen Legislature' The Senate Majority Leader, a Republican from Tennessee who has chosen to retire next year, otTers his prescription for reforming the U.S. Congress. When I first entered the United States Senate in 1967, I was invariably described as my father's son, as my father-in-law's son-in-law and as a "wealthy young lawyer." Seventeen years later, my familial and political associations with Howard Baker Sr. and Senator Everett McKinley Dirksen remain sources of great pride for me. But I am a "wealthy young lawyer" today only when compared with the truly impecunious, the truly ancient and those who have never been called to the bar. What I have been for most of the last 17 years is a full-time federal employee with no business but government and no real home but Washington. Almost from the beginning of my Senate service, 1 have been waging a one-man crusade to restore the U.S. Congress to its original and intended character as a "citizen legislature" and not an assemblage of elected bureaucrats. To this end, I propose a greatly reduced congressional session, so Congress can stay in closer touch with the people we represent. Lowering our salary accordingly, we should allow outside income. More important, Congress needs to begin to work more closely, less antagonistically, with the President. And so that we might examine the impact of our legislation on Americans, we should limit its life. Not so long ago, members of Congress were real people with real jobs in real communities throughout the country. They were truly representative of the people who elected them because they played an integral and active part in the civic and economic and social affairs of their constituencies. They went to Washington temporarily and they came home. I recall quite clearly when my father first went to Congress in the early 1950s. He went to Washington on the train, an overnight trip from Tennessee. He went in January and had no plans to come home before Easter, when Congress would adjourn. He never thought about moving his family permanently to Washington or giving up his home in Tennessee. He never thought about giving up his profession or his business and civic enterprises and personal interests. He was a Tennessean, temporarily in Washington to speak for his neighbors. For all practical purposes, today's members of Congress consider Washington home, and we're tourists in our own constituencies. We're committed year round to the legislative undertaking. We pass statute after statute forbidding us to do anything but legislate 12 months a year. We're expected to be free of any conflict of interest by abdicating all interests but political power.
As virtual captives of the capital, we think up more and more government programs-whether we need them or notbecause that's all we have to do. We pass thousand-page legislative bills that read more like bureaucratic jargon than public law. We stopped seeing the forest for the trees a long time ago. Now we label the leaves. An $850 thousand million federal budget is only one result of this exclusive concentration on government. It costs nearly a thousand million dollars a year just to run the Congress itself, with a staff almost four times as large as it was in my father's day. Members of Congress now make $72,200 a year as federal employees-several times what most of our constituents make-and still we complain about the high cost of living in Washington and commuting to the state on hurried weekends or overnight excursions. But the problem is not just a matter of government expense, or congressional pay, or nostalgia for a simpler time. Rather, it's a question of function and faithful representation. Congress cannot really be representative, cannot really know or accurately respond to the concerns of the American people while we are strangers in our own country, sequestered from our fellow citizens by public law and the Potomac River. We in Congress are trustees of the ultimate sovereignty in this country-the full expression of the desires and demands of the American people. But in our self-imposed isolation, we grow more and more susceptible to the loudest voice or the largest mailing on any given issue. We surrender the power of independent judgment when we have no personal experience or insight to guide us-when we lose contact with the real world and the practical consequences of our political actions. Our role is to represent the people on major policy decisions, to translate the public will into public law on matters of national and international importance. It is not to manage the federal establishment to the last detail. We have an executive branch-a President, a Vice President, 13 Cabinet departments and dozens of regulatory agencies-to do that, and we. have (Ill the supervisory powers over them we need. The U.S. Constitution defines the roles of the legislative, executive and judicial branches; the powers of the Federal Government, and the essential rights of American citizens in fewer pages than most of the bills-and many of the amendments-we write on the least significant issues, many of which might better be resolved in state legislatures, city councils or even local school boards. But Congress gets into everything because we think ifs our job. For nearly three centuries, for example, public education was virtually the exclusive province of local governments. The Federal Government got into the education business in a big way only after World War II, with the G.!. Bill of Rights, but that involvement was largely at the college level, with few