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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 capitol, 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 each other. 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.
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