One Simple Way to Tackle Corruption in Congress
Let me ask you a question.
What if members of Congress weren’t publicly held accountable for their voting record?
What if all Congressmen were voting in secret instead of having their votes officially tallied and observed by the voting public?
The intuitive answer seems obvious- chaos and mayhem. Without the watchful eye of public scrutiny our elected leaders might run wild, voting huge pay-outs for themselves and selling-out our fragile republic in the naked self-interest that an elimination of governmental transparency might grant them.
This might be true. But let me posit for you an uncomfortable hypothetical idea: what if it’s our current level of transparency that is actually causing- not curtailing- unpopular governmental outcomes and a dysfunctional Congress?
What if too much sunlight is actually killing our Republic?
This idea of transparency versus seclusion on behalf of our lawmakers in decision-making first became apparent to me while reading an (admittedly brief) book chronicling the contentious debates over our founding document- the Constitution.
It was a pretty amazing time. In 1787, reeling from a costly war of independence and struggling with a diffuse and fractured population spread over differing geography, occupation and class, the 13 colonies sent delegates to a national convention to try and form a more binding and effective political union which might protect the fledgling states from the challenges of autonomy both domestic and foreign. The convention, dutifully documented by James Madison, lasted many sweltering months in Pennsylvania and embodied a range of debates that spanned almost every topic that one can reasonably conceive. Slavery. Taxation. Representational allocation. Civil rights. Wealth consumption. Nearly everything was on the table — and the frequent revisiting of previously resolved issues was a constant frustration for the congress as a whole.
It might be important to remember, however, that this kind of open and frank discussion among well-meaning peers with strong differences of opinion was largely protected under a shared agreement understood at the outset of the convention: that the entirety of this deliberation be conducted strictly in private.
With no press, no punditry and no citizen input whatsoever. Philadelphia was to be a kind of nation-building black box — delegates go in and a constitution comes out. Nobody save for the delegates themselves were to be in the kitchen while the future America was being cooked-up.
This had some interesting results.
In some sense, the U.S. Constitution was hardly a crowd-pleaser. It was awfully vague in key respects and famously hemmed and hawed on some crucial sticking points in American society at the time. Slave-holders and abolitionists alike were unenthusiastic at the 3/5ths compromise concerning how black enslaved people ought to be counted or the kick-the-can-down-the-road mentality of preserving the Atlantic slave trade, only to open it up to future debate in 10 years’ time. The question of citizenship for Native Americans remained unanswered in the text. And the bicameral legislature of our modern Congress was a compromise that hardly settled the worries of the small states or the larger states, who each felt that they had a pretty good grounding for their concerns.
And yet this kind of private hand-wringing and headache led to a gigantic compromise document — presented somewhat falsely under a unanimous vote — which has underpinned the United States’ structural integrity for 200 years; and which remains an accomplishment largely unrivaled by any contemporary nation that exists today.
So my question might be this: did the secrecy and clandestine nature help facilitate compromise and institutional consistency needed to formulate policy in a time of great national need but amid a political landscape of hyper-polarized voting blocs?
I’m very much starting to think yes.
And I suspect that this principle is still very much applicable to the modern-day political structure in America.
But I’m not the first one to hatch this notion.
Around 2015 a number of videos appeared on YouTube that began to outline a number of disturbing trends in our political and economic climate that all seem to originate from the 1970’s. This was how I was first introduced to James D’Angelo, a former NASA scientist and founder of the think-tank Congressional Research Institute which seeks to study and bring to light the unintended consequences of our modern obsession on governmental transparency.
Without oversimplifying the extensive research of D’Angelo and others, the CRI posits a pretty simple idea: that in 1970 Congress passed the Legislative Reorganization Act and struck a major blow to the secretive, closed-door legislative process of haggling over details of the bill-writing process. This had the obvious, on-the-face-of-it benefit of allowing citizens to finally get to peek into the messy horse-trading and sausage-making that had previously been closed-off to observation by the parliamentary process known as the Committee as a Whole — where much of this deal-making took place in secret.
But, as D’Angelo points out, when citizens were given an invitation into the room so were lobbyists and powerful interest groups. And since lobbyists can go to Washington in person and bring huge sums of campaign donations with them, their voices hold much more weight in those deliberative sessions than an average voter’s letter-writing or internet posting ever could.
In this way, transparency- often touted as a way to empower the little people over their elected officials — really just exposed the fragile process of legislating to the influence of the powerful. We had increased politician’s accountability, but it was largely lobbyists and the powerful that were now disproportionately getting to hold Congress accountable for their votes.
In the United States today our individual voting is done in secret: you submit your vote in national and state-wide elections behind a curtain or cardboard box and you never receive a proof or receipt for how you voted. You get an optional sticker which is a lot of fun but only attests to the fact that you voted- not any information about whoever it was you actually pulled the lever for.
And there’s a very good reason for this secrecy. D’Angelo identifies two main problems with recorded, in-public voting. One being the fear of intimidation, or that more powerful forces in your life like community leaders or employers can leverage your vote against you if they wanted you to vote against a set of policies that might benefit you but go contrary to their financial interests. And the second being naked vote-buying; it’s unlikely bribery schemes of the past could work very well in a world where the funders can never verify that they got what they bribed voters for.
It’s on the whole good policy for clean elections and is rarely questioned today.
So then why did we take this safety mechanism away from the legislators who also cast votes in Congress? Is it possible that without secret ballots they themselves might be subjected to intimidation and vote-buying from powerful forces?
That’s a rhetorical joke. The answer is an obvious and unequivocal yes.
A basic assumption is politicians, left to their own devices, would naturally make more destructive and self-interested legislative policy under the cloak of secrecy. But what if the opposite were true — that leaders, now under the microscope of campaign donors, lobbyists and hyper-partisan television pundits are actually pressured to perform more empty grandstanding, less able to act independently from party bosses and less likely to agree to compromise on crucial legislation?
It’s worth noting that since the 1970's when the Legislative Reorganization Act was passed that the political parties have become more extreme in their ideologies with less and less aisle-crossing. Voting on strict party lines has increased. Filibusters have become more common. And votes on relatively routine procedures like adjusting the debt ceiling have become epic life-and-death political battles which have resulted in the US actually losing is credit rating among financial institutions.
And it seems like the elites are getting what they’ve paid for. Since the 1970's workplace regulations have been rolled back, middle class wages have become stagnant and income inequality is on a sharp rise. It’s weird to observe since many of these problems are both fixable and relatively popular complaints among voters. But if you understand who has really benefited from this expanded access to Congress then it starts to become demystified.
Transparency has not always helped average voters or the issues they care about.
People are pretty acutely aware that our legislative branch doesn’t work as well as it probably should. This usually translates into a popular sentiment to just “throw the bums out,” but throwing new blood into Congress seems to do little in fixing the problem. It’s becoming more clear to me that we’re probably not electing bum after bum, but rather something in the structure of Congress itself is turning representatives into those bums.
We’re not picking bad leaders necessarily. They’re just set up for failure at the beginning.
It’s kind of quaint to remember that the term “lobbyist” comes from the pre-1970's time when the lobby of Congress was about as far as corporate and private interest representatives could physically get. And by being locked out of the meeting room they were hardly the political force that they are in our modern era.
Perhaps it’s time to send them back out into the hallway and let legislators craft policy without people peeking over their shoulder. For as much as we want to protect good citizens from bad government, what if we started emphasizing the other side of that governmental coin? What if we started protecting good governance from bad citizens?
This is an idea that the Founding Father’s knew when they were first taking pains to build this country 200 years ago. And it might be a lesson worth relearning today.
