Members of Congress, get out of town and gain perspective
Well, that’s a bit harsh, but only a wee bit. Yet that excerpt from Oliver Cromwell’s 1653 speech, in which he described lawmakers as having “contempt of all virtue” and in which he dissolved the famous Rump Parliament, is not totally inappropriate for our time, three and three-quarter centuries later.
Because of all the wretched ideas that have come out of Washington this year, one of the worst is the notion — first proposed by a president frustrated with Capitol Hill’s paralysis on health care and the Democrats’ success in blocking his appointments — that Congress should stay in Washington rather than disperse for its summer holiday.
There is some poetic justice in making the members of the House and Senate swelter in the capital’s relentless August heat and labor under the remorseless blanket of humidity that descends on the city.
I admit, it is an appealing thought. But Cromwell’s indictment, and his verdict that “you were deputed here by the people to get grievances redressed (and) are yourselves become the greatest grievance,” are the very reason members of Congress should go on vacation.
The Founders worried that members of Congress might drift far from the public, its sentiments and interests, a concern that political figures on the left and on the right have cited across the generations. More recently, Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, a devout conservative, has written that the Founders believed that “(f)reedom itself depended on an elected legislature of citizen lawmakers.”
A study released early this year by the international market-research firm GfK showed that the city where people took the fewest days off was Washington, D.C., which gives the lie to the notion that the capital is full of slackers.
The point is that the nation’s lawmakers would be better served by spending some time in mountainside contemplation or lakeside leisure than by spending an additional fortnight hearing mind-numbing legislative mumbo-jumbo, fighting over rules of order, fulminating at cable hosts, obsessing over presidential tweets and preparing statements seeking to explain the inexplicable to the incredulous.
Nor would it hurt members of Congress to walk the streets of their hometowns and encounter the members of the public who sent them to Washington, only to see them bicker among themselves and belittle each other. Yes, they just recently had a recess. But truly they cannot be amid the people too often.
The work will always be there, and in most cases — perhaps not on health care, where additional hearings might be of value — the work can be accomplished in a fraction of the time Congress usually consumes. Here’s advice from the pages of the Harvard Business Review: “If you plan ahead, create social connections on the trip, go far from your work and feel safe, 94 percent of vacations have a good (return on investment) in terms of your energy and outlook upon returning to work.”
So, members of Congress: Take a swim. Take a hike. Awaken to the sunrise and gaze at the sunset. Hold a town meeting or two and keep your ears, and your mind, open. Listen, too, to Cromwell: “Go, get you out! Make haste! Ye venal slaves be gone! So! Take away that shining bauble there, and lock up the doors. In the name of God, go!”