A press with no ink, a congress with no bills

I spent the better part of my working life setting type. A print shop that runs no jobs does not stay a print shop long — it becomes, very quickly, a warehouse for idle men and aging equipment. National Review's piece, 'The Rotting Branch,' puts the same observation to Congress: without a regular menu of legislation, individual lawmakers have fewer occasions to distinguish themselves, and — I would add — fewer occasions to be caught when they fail to do so.

This is not a trivial complaint about parliamentary procedure. It is a complaint about accountability, which is the load-bearing wall of any republican structure. A citizen cannot reward good representation or punish bad representation if representation produces nothing visible to examine. The representative who never votes cannot be held to his vote. He floats free of consequence, which is precisely the condition that invites mischief.

I have always held that industry is a virtue with public consequences. What is true of the tradesman is equally true of the legislator. The cobbler who takes no orders still draws his wages from the guild; the congressman who passes no bills still collects his salary from the Treasury. In both cases the public is the poorer, and in the congressman's case the public has no shoes and no recourse.

The National Review lead notes that without legislative activity, individual members have 'fewer opportunities to distinguish themselves.' I would push that further: they also have fewer opportunities to be distinguished from one another by the voters. Uniformity of inaction is a perfect camouflage. It is very hard to fire a man for doing nothing when everyone around him is doing the same nothing with equal industry.

The remedy, as I understand it — and I speak here by inference, not recollection of modern affairs I could not have witnessed — is the restoration of the ordinary rhythms of legislative work: budget resolutions debated in public, bills marked up in committee, amendments offered and voted on in the open. These are not procedural niceties. They are the mechanism by which a self-governing people actually govern. Strip them away and you have not a republic; you have a building with a flag on it.

My counsel to the working citizen is this: watch not only how your representative votes, but whether she votes at all. A long absence from the record is itself a record. Empty ledgers are still ledgers, and they tell you everything you need to know about who is minding the shop.