I grew up in a culture where politicians rose or fell by their “constituent service” — their skill at getting the potholes filled, the garbage removed, summer jobs for the college students, clerical sincecures for veterans and neighborhood celebrities, pension and disability checks for the old folks. But Fred A. Bernstein, “a journalist and a lawyer in New York”, explains in the NYTimes that this is both unfair and against the Constitution:
OUT of work and stuck with an expensive mortgage, my friend was on the verge of losing her house. Attempts to get the bank to modify her loan led to a situation Kafka would have recognized: scores of letters, hundreds of phone calls — but no modification. Then she called one of her senators. Soon a member of the senator’s staff had contacted the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the federal agency that regulates national banks. Not long after, my friend received the loan modification she had been requesting, unavailingly, for years.
A happy ending? Only for my friend. For the country, what government workers call “constituent services” — really the meddling of representatives in the business of executive agencies — is a sign of federal dysfunction, and one with consequences. Congress, arguably the most powerful branch of government, seems to have given up on the main thing the Constitution authorizes it to do: pass laws.
Instead, it is busy helping Americans one at a time, an impractical and outrageously expensive operation, which is not only a kind of favoritism masquerading as compassion, but a thumb in the eye of the Constitution, with its much admired blueprint for separation of powers….
… [S]olving people’s problems individually takes the pressure off Congress to solve society’s problems generally. By providing constituent services, Congress is like a fire department that doesn’t put out fires, but simply rescues those who scream the loudest. The danger is that “as constituent service becomes such a prominent part of the job, legislative duties suffer,” writes Dennis F. Thompson, a professor of political philosophy at Harvard. He describes such casework, “unmentioned in the Constitution” and “unimagined by the founders,” as a brand of low-level corruption…
Is it just my peasant parochialism, or does this read like a plea for keeping a layer of (adequately compensated) lawyers & professors between us mere voters with our petty concerns, and the legislative nobility of a Congress concerned only with abstract rule-making at a level far above us?
Linda Featheringill
Who is paying the wages of the legislators?
JoyfulA
To me, it isn’t corruption as long as they’re helping all their constituents, not just cronies or donors or those who are registered right.
freelancer
Fuck that guy.
Ruckus
It sounds exactly like that. There are lawyers and there are ambulance chasers. This doofus sounds like he fits into the second category.
TOP123
Actually, I distinctly remember that the concept of meeting with one’s Congressional voice was central to my childhood education about our political system. I even met with my Congressman once in those years. He was very polite, and listened, and took notes. I was about fourteen years old.
Is that not supposed to happen? Perhaps I had a poor civics education after all, and missed the part where we were ruled by philosopher kings…
Edited for a closer chronological approximation..
Roger Moore
I guess I must be getting cynical, because my first thought is that it’s a complaint that ordinary citizens are able to get the attention of government just by complaining and being voters. In the good old days (which didn’t necessarily exist outside the imagination of the author) that kind of thing was restricted to the rich and well connected.
Ash Can
It’s called public service for a reason. Fred Bernstein can go eat shit and bark at the moon.
Suffern ACE
I doubt many problems would be solved by restricting access of citizens to their representatives. We should be thankful for those situations that can be solved with a phone call are. In a lot of places, the average folk need to follow up with a bribe for even basic services. We don’t really need to go that route.
? Martin
Working in government, I agree with this completely. Government workers are hopelessly outnumbered by those they need to serve, and so any one-on-one interaction is incredibly expensive, and it definitely does start to build a culture of constituent naggers (at least at the local level).
Now, there are exceptional circumstances that you need to address individually, but for anything that you might wonder “I bet there are a number of people with this issue” then you really ought to solve it via policy. The effectiveness of government could arguably be reduced the measure of how easy it is to do this. And once done, how well that change of policy can be communicated back out to those who it impacts (which is actually one of the most massive failings of government – aside from the USPS, we have no institutionalized mechanism to communicate with people.)
But Citizens United is really just a demonstration of this problem. Those lawyers aren’t the key layer between citizens and officials, but the opposite – they’re the individuals that are now being serviced in the form of lobbyists, at our expense. The goal here isn’t to eliminate contact between constituents and representatives, but to increase it, and to use that contact to then shape policy.
However I do know that within legislative bodies, constituent service is oftentimes just an outlet for legislators to feel that they’re doing their job – particularly when we have the kind of gridlock we now have. If you can’t pass policy, at least you can help that little old lady that wrote you a letter.
Origuy
Seems to me that if a Congressperson’s office is getting a lot of calls about specific agency, they have motivation to look into it as a part of their oversight function.
The Founders had pretty good imaginations. Their example for Congress was the British Parliament, which was made up (ideally) of influential men in the communities they represented. That wasn’t always the case; many MPs had no connections to their constituencies, but they still had motivation to look out for their voters’ interests.
Yutsano
@? Martin: I also work in government, but the nature of my work is that I deal with one case at a time. I won’t bother to mention how vastly understaffed my office is or how difficult it can be to handle these interactions when you have a rule book bigger than three bibles you have to follow to the letter because you’re constrained by law. I actually don’t mind talking with people at all, assuming their goal is to work with me rather than be antagonistic. It’s hard to do though.
Humanities Grad
@? Martin:
In the abstract, that’s fine, but sometimes there’s not time for things to be done that way.
I used to work for a dinky little community organization in a mid-sized Midwestern city. One day I got a panicked call from a woman in the neighborhood we served. One of her relatives was in the country on a temporary visa, and it was due to expire within a few days. If she couldn’t get something done about it, she’d be at risk of deportation.
There was sod-all I could do for her, but I did direct her to the office of the U.S. Representative for our district, and told her to call them. Never found out what happened, but if anybody could help her with that issue, they could.
Now I’m sure that none of us want our elected representatives to spend _all_ of their time doing this sort of thing. But there’s got to be a place for this sort of thing in an elected official’s duties, too.
AA+ Bonds
Right, because legislators respond equally to the concerns of people on food stamps and those bundling tens of thousands of dollars into their campaigns
muddy
I think the legislators can get a notion of things that need fixing if the constituents keep coming in with similar problems. it’s valuable input. I think the data could also be used to improve efficiency if done right, after all if a “huge” problem can be fixed with a phone call, why was it not fixed already?
I had a problem recently and after wrangling bureaucracy for weeks, finally called the Governor’s line (it’s in the ads in my village paper). The person who answered took my info, someone from the proper department (but senior to the level I had been able to reach) called me back within an hour. He rattled someone’s cage, and the next day they came out and dealt with the problem. I couldn’t even get the lower people to return my calls all that time. I hope they all got their hands smacked by the boss, he was amazed and appalled when I told him the whole story.
Gin & Tonic
@? Martin: And it takes precious little of the *legislator’s* time. Lend a sympathetic ear for a couple of minutes, say “I’ll see what I can do for you” and hand it off to a staffer who does nothing but this stuff. In the process you get the constituent’s and his/her extended family’s vote in perpetuity.
Can’t help wondering how Tip O’Neill would react to Fred Bernstein.
Matthew Reid Krell
@? Martin:
That’s the real trick, to my mind. And the idealistic answer is, “well, if everyone with that problem contacted their representative, then Congress would know what needed to be dealt with in policy or oversight, and what could be dealt with individually.” I don’t know what to say about it, though. Seems like everybody’s already hit my points.
Yutsano
@Humanities Grad: My grandfather was adopted. There is no known birth certificate nor adoption record. He was supposedly baptized, but the baptismal record is also long gone. The only record of his childhood anywhere was a census record from 1930 saying he was 8 years old but that won’t work either. He cannot prove his US birth, therefore this WWII vet cannot get a passport. My mom called her Congressman whose office bent over backwards to come up with a solution. Unfortunately none can be had. But they offered many suggestions and even tried to intervene on his behalf. Congressmen can cut through a lot of red tape that oftentimes ordinary citizens can’t.
The prophet Nostradumbass
@Gin & Tonic: I’d guess “laugh in his face”.
Cerberus
Here’s the thing though. As many people already pointed out, yes, if it’s an issue shared by multiple people, then there ought to be legislation, but yeah, issues that affect a lot of people ought to have legislation for them.
And if congress is sticking their thumbs up their asses on solving it because of whatever reason, then the individual people shouldn’t just suffer in the meantime because “sorry, buddy, but my rival senators are riding out that issue because they think it’ll make them look bad at re-election”.
And beyond that, there’s all sorts of problems that aren’t really a “need a legislative fix” and these are the most common of constituent service. It’s someone who’s needing one specific action because they slipped through the gears a little or maybe because the intent of the laws in place didn’t forsee their circumstances.
In some cases, this can actually highlight a minority issue with current legislation that needs a quick patch-up.
But none of these problems are solved by our political leaders becoming even more insular and self-obsessed.
arguingwithsignposts
Am I missing something in here about a first amendment right to petition for a redress of grievances?
Ronzoni Rigatoni
By gawd, when I was running a Gummint Union back in the day, and wanted something done by the upper-level lackeys in the agency, the congerscritters were the easiest way to get things done. I got to know all 3 in the Miami area (when they were all Demoncrats. We got nuttin’ when the seats all went Repugnican). After awhile you got to know the congressional aides and worked thru them. Same at the Senate level. It’s really a good system, especially for breaking up bureaucratic logjams. Don’t knock it. More people ought to use it.
? Martin
@Humanities Grad:
No, I agree, there are always exceptions, but they should be kept to exceptions.
I don’t see a call in the quoted piece that citizens shouldn’t contact their representatives and that the representatives shouldn’t encourage it. What I see is a call that representatives shouldn’t opt to solve these policy problems on a case by case basis – rather that they should take these contacts as evidence that policy changes are needed and then change the policy and solve the problems that way – not just for those that contact, but also for those that don’t. Not only do you have an efficiency problem here, but you have an equity problem as well – do we really want a government where only those people with the time, means, and good fortune to have a letter read by their representative gets served? Isn’t that sure to devolve into government for the Koch’s and lobbyists as they have the time and means and access to crowd all the rest of us out?
DCLaw1
@? Martin: Bingo.
@VividBlueDotty
When I was a senior in high school, I interned in Congressman Martin Frost’s office as part of an internship class. The first phone call I took was from a veteran who wanted Congressman Frost to look into why he hadn’t received his check this month. I thought the guy was crazy. I listened and was empathetic, took his name and said I would see what the Congressman could do. When I told the staffer in charge of the office about the call, I said, “some crazy guy didn’t get his check and wants the Congressman to look into it.” She gave me an important lesson on constituent services. Honestly, as interested as I was in civics and governmental processes, I had no idea such a thing existed.
I think it’s wonderful that elected officials intervene when a situation cannot be resolved through normal processes. But I think many people are like I was at 16 and have NO idea that they can do this.
It does seem an expensive and inefficient way to solve larger issues, and I agree that Congress doesn’t seem to be able to do what it was meant to do: pass laws.
I think part of the solution is publicly funded elections. Without the constant need to be fundraising, our elected officials could spend time on the larger issues as WELL as one-on-one cases that slip through the cracks.
Villago Delenda Est
ZOMG, the proles are getting the sort of access that only trained professionals like Fred Bernstein should get after they’ve buttered up the right hands.
Next, these people will want guys like Bernstein to be held accountable for their actions? Will this madness never end?
brashieel
I cannot think of anything less shocking than NYTimes publishing an op-ed explaining that the problem with the US legislature is that they’re too responsive to their constituents’ problems.
Constituent service is the most basic level of public service. It’s also incredibly basic politics. For most voters, it’s one of the primary ways they can tell if the congressman they will probably never meet in person gives the least damn about their lives.
I second the notion that Bernstein should eat shit. Opposing constituent service isn’t clever or high minded. It’s stripping away one of the few direct connections between voters and the people that are supposed to represent them in the halls of power.
? Martin
@brashieel:
But the reality is that they aren’t responsive to their constituents. Sure, they helped those few individuals that called or wrote, but how many people with unemployment benefits running out didn’t get served because the legislator or their staff invested their time on some other problem? How many in their district or state trying to get citizenship are stuck in a paperwork black hole because immigration doesn’t have enough staff?
Your constituents aren’t just those that write but also those that don’t, and they too deserve to be served. And there truly is a limited amount of staff time to go around, particularly at 650,000 citizens per district.
pseudonymous in nc
Right to petition, fuckwit. They could imagine Magna fucking Carta.
flounder
When I was in Arizona my wife worked in the VA system and I came to describing John McCain’s support for veterans as one of “constituent service”, in that he would work to slash the VA budget at any given opportunity, then make a big display of berating some poor VA office assistant whenever a vet complained that it took a month to get an appointment.
Roger Moore
@? Martin:
That isn’t necessarily easy. My impression is that the big thing that Congressional staff winds up doing is helping constituents deal with the big bureaucratic beast that is the US government. The size of the government isn’t something you can really reduce, so there are sharp limits on how much you can shrink the complexity and intimidation factor of the bureaucracy people have to deal with. It may be that the best solution is to have a set of trained guides who help ordinary people to negotiate the maze, and having Congressional staff do it is a working method to do just that.
opie jeanne
@Yutsano: The minister’s wife at our church (many years ago) had a similar problem. Her parents were missionaries in China when she was born so there was no record of her birth, none of any sort.
The way it was resolved in the late ’80s was that affidavits of people who had known her during her childhood in the US were accepted as proof of who she was, proof of who her parents were. The people who wrote these affidavits were in their 80s and 90s at the time.
uila
My parents had a lien put on their house by the state of California for failure to pay taxes. This was upsetting, mostly because they have lived in NY all their lives. I can’t remember what all they went through to get it resolved, but in the end it was chuck schumer’s office that finally fixed it. This guy’s an idiot.
pseudonymous in nc
And the problem with the US House is that when your districts represent 750,000 people or so, you can’t do the same kind of constituent service as you can with 75,000 people in a district. Instead, you receive emissaries (all the while spending more time fundraising for re-election).
Now, I don’t think you should have 4,350 members, but you could double the size of the House and it’d cut into the power of lobbyists.
uila
Also too: “a thumb in the eye of the Constitution…”? I know they call it a living document, but Jesus fucking christ that’s bad writing. I blame schoolhouse rock.
Jay Noble
Representative Democracy. That’s what I was taught was our form of government. You are elected to REPRESENT your constituents.
Mnemosyne
@? Martin:
And I’m sure that by removing constituent services from the list of things a Congressman or Senator is supposed to do, they’ll totally get right on writing the legislation needed to fix the problem for everyone. Yep. They haven’t gotten around to it because they’re wasting time on constituent services, not because Congress has abdicated their jobs to the executive branch.
C’mon, you’re not this naive.
hamletta
Y’all, I am so glad this came up.
I got my driver’s license confiscated last week, because state records showed it had been suspended since 2010. But I jumped through hoops at that time to remove a suspension for unpaid tickets, and the license was issued AFTER that suspension.
The cop said it was plain, but he had to go by the records.
I will appeal to my state rep, who is an awesome fightin’ librul. This course of action had not occurred to me until I saw this.
The auspicious timing of Mr. Fred Bernstein’s butthurt is proof that the Lord works in mysterious ways.
Mnemosyne
Also, too, since this guy is a lawyer and his close friend was on the verge of losing her house, did he ever consider maybe doing some pro bono work on behalf of his friend to try and help her? Or does he just want to whine because she got something he didn’t know he could get because he’d never asked for it, and that’s not faaaaiiiiiirrrrr.
d0n camillo
So is this guy saying it would have been better for his close friend to lose her house? He can’t have very many close friends with an attitude like that.
Citizen_X
@arguingwithsignposts:
Seriously. End of fucking story.
Slightly off-topic, is the the Teabagger disease spreading, the one where everything not explicitly mentioned in the Constitution (or missed, as in this clown’s case) is viewd as “UNCONSTITUSHUNAL!”? Maybe Lennon’s “Revolution” needs updating. “You say it’s not in the Constitution, well, you know…“
brashieel
@? Martin:
I’m not aware of any serious case being made that the reason Congress didn’t extend unemployment benefits or properly fund most of the USG was that they ran out of time. This congress took a massive amount of time off and mostly didn’t engage on the serious economic issues. That was the result of ideology and political tactics, not schedule difficulties.
I’ve got plenty of problems with this congress. But I can’t imagine how adding a lordly indifference to the personal appeals of people they (at least in theory) work for could possibly help.
Marshall
The New York Times prints concern trolls.
Who knew?
AA+ Bonds
OH GOD BLESS EM, THE GREAT AN WUNNERFUL M.P.S, THAT CAN DO WHAT WE CANNA
AA+ Bonds
It’s pretty gross that these folks fuck you sideways and clean up on it and then you have to beg them to help you out because policy has failed you, that’s sort of my point of view on the whole thing ;)
Herbal Infusion Bagger
No, it strikes me that he’s saying that if there’s fucked up shit, that Congress should be passing laws to un-fuck up that shit. Individual un-fuck for individual constituents are inefficient (like trying to mow the lawn with tweezers) as well as giving uneven treatment.
Tim I
It is my observation that it takes a number of years in graduate school to get this fucking stupid.
Ruckus
@Tim I:
Are you saying that the more stuff you cram into someones head the more dense they become? Or is it the stuff inside is more densely jammed in, distorting the response effort?
Batocchio
Policy to fix broad problems is better than putting out individual fires, but individual fires still need to be put out, and a good official’s office does just that. Take the mentality that opposes individual services to an extreme, and you get the essence of modern conservatism: Gummint interferes with the magic of the free market. Human suffering is a small price to pay for that. Hell, it’s a feature, not a bug.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
He might wish for it, but it will never happen. One reason Republicans were growing stronger in NC during the ’80s and ’90s was Jesse Helms, and a big part of his popularity was constituent services. He probably would have kept getting elected anyway by the racist elements here, but a lot of his margins were made up of people his office had moved heaven and earth for after they had first contacted their Dem representatives and senator and been blown off.
Nancy Irving
The guy’s point is that constituent service is *displacing* the obligation to legislate for the benefit of all, that Congress is using solving one person’s problem as an excuse for not solving everyone’s problems.
As far as it goes, I agree, but I don’t think the answer is just to end constituent services. Clearly they should do both.
Jim Pharo
I think the writer is right — constituent service is inherently unfair to those who don’t fancy themselves special people deserving of special treatment — which is most people. I’ve done some of this work as an aide to a state rep, and the people who get results are just the crankiest. Rather than defer to the judgment of the traffic engineers at the DOT who have studied where and when a stop sign, red-flashing light of traffic signal is needed, and have made detached recommendations based on using the available dollars (collected from all, not just the load and special) for the best possible effect, “constituent service” provides extra value to a select handful of residents.
“Bringing home the bacon” is nothing to be proud of. Making sure the special and unique views of your district are heard in the larger debate is something to strive for, of course. But if I can use legislative gimmicks or just plain power politics to deprive some other district of something they would otherwise be entitled to just so I can bring it to my district? Count me out….
Original Lee
Constituent services are still necessary, and they shouldn’t be just for Call 9-1-1 type emergencies, either. It’s all well and good to talk about policy changes and lawmaking, but how many legislators can get a law through both houses of Congress and onto the President’s desk in, say, a week? Almost un-possible. Most people don’t think their problems are important enough to call their representative, and some people think that because they donated to the campaign, they hired themselves valet service for the government. That’s human nature. Most constituent services are handled by staff, who are paid for out of a budget each legislator gets. Maybe Bernstein thinks we can balance the federal budget if the Congresscritters only draw a salary for themselves and a receptionist or something.
Once upon a time, I interned at the Library of Congress. I usually took lunch later than the others in my office, so I was alone one day about two weeks into my hitch, when the phone rang. It was a Senator. I had never talked to anyone at that high a level in my life, and I was so flabbergasted that it took a while to sink in that he was reaming me out over something over which nobody in my office had any control. I had been on the job long enough to know who actually had responsibility for whatever it was, and was able to stammer out something on the order of, “I’m sorry, Senator, I’m just an intern and have only been here two weeks, but you really should call X at this number.” Needless to say, I was kinda shaky by the time the others returned from lunch and got lots of sympathy from my supervisor, who walked over to the Senator’s office and had a quiet word with a staffer about it.
OTOH, my (retiring) state rep is AWESOME in constituent services. When I called the county about a problem with rats in an empty lot nearby, I was told that a lot of Animal Control officers had been RIFfed due to budget cuts and they couldn’t do anything for months. So I called my state rep, talked to one of his staffers, had a very nice discussion about options, and within a week, the state rep had managed to pull together enough money from a number of different sources for the state public health department to hire several regional ratcatchers. This never would have happened if I hadn’t called.
John.Ty
So aside from the service that will deliver congressional news to everybody’s door six days a week for free, we have no institutionalized mechanism to communicate with people.