The leaders in both houses of the U.S. Congress have announced that, starting in January, they will be in session five days a week, instead of the Tuesday-through-Thursday schedule followed during the past decade or so by the Republicans.
The three-day workweek was “family friendly,” according to Rep. Jack Kingston, a Georgia Republican who generally flew home on Thursday and returned to Washington on Tuesday when Congress was in session.
“Marriages suffer” when one partner is off in Washington instead of home with the family, he said. “The Democrats could care less about families – that’s what this says.”
And the way he says it, Kingston couldn’t care less about speaking sensibly. Further, I suspect that most congressmen aren’t spending their four-day weekends with their children anyway – not when there are campaign contributors to placate, speeches to make and parades to march in.
While the short Washington week may make them look lazy, earning $160,000 while convening only 103 days in the second session, they’re not slothful people. P.J. O’Rourke followed a Congressman around for a day and wrote about it in his 1991 book “Parliament of Whores,” and observed that he was exhausted by early afternoon, while the congressman was still going strong well into the night.
The argument in favor of the short week, aside from whatever “family values” it provides to those who do not move their families to Washington, is that by flying home for a few days frequently – as well as during the week-long Memorial Day recess, the fortnight-long April recess, the month-long August recess, etc. – they stay in touch with us ordinary folks who can’t afford lobbyists in the Capitol.
But when was the last time you saw a congressman in the checkout line with you at Wal-Mart, soliciting the opinions of ordinary folk?
Besides, spending so much time back home, listening to what locals want, might explain why there’s so much pork – bridges to nowhere, artificial rain forests in Iowa, etc. – in the federal budget. Instead of focusing on truly national issues as they might if they stayed in the nation’s capital, their attention is constantly turned to parochial matters.
If they stayed in Washington for the duration, as happened before jet travel arrived in 1958, they’d socialize more with one another. They would still, as they should, differ in political views, but some of the partisan rancor might dissipate. You might disagree with Rep. Claghorne, but you would be more likely to find a way to work with him if you two had been golfing together on some recent weekend.
Further, these short-week Congresses tend to pass major bills – the Patriot Act is a good example – without even reading them, let alone holding hearings, deliberating and debating. And how much oversight of the full-time round-the-clock executive branch can Congress provide when it meets only three days a week?
Granted, there is a converse argument here. As the saying goes, “No man’s life, liberty or property is safe when the legislature is in session,” and as Thomas Jefferson put it, “the government that governs best, governs least.” That is, if Congress is not in session, at least our representatives cannot be enabling torture, subsidizing oil companies, reducing taxes for billionaires and borrowing trillions of dollars from our grandchildren.
Perhaps, though, if they stayed in Washington and focused their jobs, they would do better work. And that’s a chance worth taking, since it’s hard to imagine how any future Congress could do much worse than the three-day-workweek bunch that just adjourned.
Ed Quillen of Salida (ed@cozine.com) is a former newspaper editor whose column appears Tuesday and Sunday.
