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Notes -
So YouTube recommended me this video "Why You Don't Want to Be in Congress" by Power Politics which I thought actually opened my mind a little about congress and the people elected to it. That's why I decided to re-state the arguments here to see what Mottizens think about it.
Background
I briefly searched up Power Politics, looks like it's a newish channel by Christian Fong, currently a professor at University of Michigan, and his bio states the usual litany of bachelors and PhDs from prestigious institutions, of note is that he did serve as an advisor to Mike Lee, Senator of Utah for a while. He also works with the Center for Effective Lawmaking which he draws many of his stats from. In other videos, he states that he wants to provide a non-partisan view into congress and how it works.
Intro
Fong first points out that the most effective legislators currently: Sam Graves (R-House) and Gary Peters (D-Senate) are both quitting. This is striking because 1) they have powerful positions which is supposed to incentivize their continual stay, 2) they're not that old relatively (62 and 67 respectively), and 3) they are likely to be re-elected. It's concerning to Fong because they are not the only ones quitting, and he's concerned the people who leaves are exactly the kind of legislators you would want to stay (experienced, connected, in their prime).
So what's going on? Fong's thesis: "Being a member of congress is not good of a job as most people think and certainly not as good as it was 60 years ago." Stats-wise, Fong points out that back between 1954 and 1964, for every 3 congressmen who retires, 1 dies. Now it's 21 retires before 1 dies. Members of congress used to want to stay in congress for as long as they could, so something must have changed.
Here are the 4 changes proposed by Fong:
1. Congressional elections are more expensive and contributions does not scale
Between 1952 and 2024, congressional spending on elections increased 41300% ($23M in 1952 vs $9.5B in 2024). Now, because of campaigning financing laws which cap individual contributions to $7000 per cycle, members of congress has to essentially have a second job being a telemarketer at night to go beg for money from rich people (cause how many people would donate $7000 to political campaigns?). Time spent on the phone is time not doing policy making, time not negotiating or making connections with fellow lawmakers, time not spent with family and friends to recharge, time not spent connecting with voters, etc.
Now I don't think this is accounted for inflation, and I do think the numbers are not direct comparisons from a quick glance (reported vs total). But, I do think this is a fair point. Much has been said about Singapore's model for high paying public officials. And though badly argued, but this is essentially the same point Mike Johnson makes when he defends members of congress trading stocks. There is also something to be said where we want people we elect to make laws to, well, focus on law-making and all the things that makes law-making easier and more successful.
On the other hand, congress can solve this. Just as much as congress kept complaining about "call time", seems to me like they stopped doing anything about campaign finance reform since 2002.
2. Congress travel requirements are grueling
It used to be that members of congress lived in Washington full time, now they are expected to fly home every weekend. But not all members of congress live in cities like NYC or LA with their multiple airports.
Fong cited this paper which "find that gaining an airport that provides a round-trip direct flight to Washington, DC, is associated with an approximately 1.6 percentage point increase in the probability that a member runs for reelection." Or in other words if you need to have a layover, you'll less likely to run for re-election. Travel for work sucks in general, and Fong also re-emphasize how this is likely to have a negative effect on family, spouses and children.
My thoughts about this is that it sucks, and I'm not sure how to solve this. Are members of congress from rural areas are just going to have the bad luck of having a higher chance of being burnt out? Can the relationship between the public and their representatives be changed so that a better balance can be found? I'm not sure.
3. Congress increasingly becomes more of a stage than a workplace
It used to be that campaigning and governing were two different seasons in a year, and governing was the longer season, now, it is a permanent campaign. Fong has a separate video about "A Congress of Kardashians", and how the system incentivizes disruptive behaviors that is annoying and completely unconducive to law-making. And well, it's encouraged by leadership of both parties. Just as leftists abhor the shenanigans of Majorie Taylor Greene, rightists decry the outbursts of Jasmine Crockett, but guess what, that's what goes viral, and that's what gets funding.
I don't have much thoughts about this at the moment
4. Members of congress are increasingly not making an impact to worth the sacrifices
Fong argues that the parliamentary processes are controlled so hard by party leaders that members of congress can't even get an amendment in. And if they're just there to put a thumbs up and thumbs down on bills agreed to be put to the floor by leadership, it's just not worth it to slog through point 1, 2, and 3.
My Conclusion
In some ways, I find renewed appreciation of US members of congress. It's certainly true that a great number of them are pretty dumb by my count. But quite possibly that for all of them there is a kernel of trying to do public good, or just pure narcissism, or pure naivety, or the promise of insider trading, to make life of a member of congress worth it. But then again, right now, narcissism, or pure naivety, or the promise of insider trading and the public good are not mutually exclusive. The question is still: what can be done about these pathologies of the job of a member of congress so that we get better lawmakers and better lawmaking?
PS: this ranking is pretty good: https://thelawmakers.org/find-representatives
Edit1: Mis-numbered the changes, added slight edit to sentence in intro explaining why Fong wants legislators like Sam Graves and Gary Peters to seek re-election
Edit2: emphasized and bolded Fong's thesis
Doesn't this actually mean the exact opposite - i.e., that there is next to zero correlation between airport accessibility and running for reelection? A 1.6% difference is minuscule and essentially a rounding error.
I also must be honest and admit that I don't really understand this entire segment about Congresspeople returning to their constituency every weekend - as you say, it's "expected" of them, which means in practical terms that it's not mandatory nor enforced in any way. I heavily doubt that an otherwise popular Representative would suffer any kind of status loss or dip in support if he isn't physically present in his constituency every single weekend of the year. This only seems like it would be an "expectation" for retired cranks who spend their days harassing local council members and writing emails to Congress. Do you think AOC or Ilhan Omar would loose their seats if it came out that the spent every other weekend in DC instead of always returning to NYC or Minnesota? I doubt anyone cares.
At the end of the day, a lot of the complaining from Congresspeople about their job should be taken with a grain of salt - this is a pool of people largely self-selected for having huge egos, are in constant need for excuses when they inevitably fail to deliver their campaign promises, and are enmeshed in a mediatic/cultural zeitgeist in which being a snivelling victim is considered a valid defence for failure. They have EVERY incentive to bitch and whine about their job and portray themselves as more martyred by it than they actually are.
I read up on the paper a bit and the authors did anticipate this argument . They wrote that they found the average rate of seeking re-election is 89.8%, so I suppose we can think retirement as 10% chance. A 1.6% increase in retirement rate can be thought of as a 16% increase from baseline. In contrast, having a scandal for example is a 12.66% increase in retirement rate (a 126.6% increase from baseline). (apologies to scientists if I am not using the correct words to describe statistical significance). I didn't do my due diligence regarding math and P-values but it looks to be very small as I skim it (p < 0.001).
Uhhhh, well, as other posters have pointed out, it really does help in a primary. I would like to quote this exhibit on the primary race where AOC had an upset against Democratic mainstay and longstanding leader Joe Crowley:
Anyway, back to your other point.
Point taken, and I agree, yet we are having a pretty dysfunctional congress, so I would like to not dismiss these points out of hand.
We're comparing a Congressman who essentially had zero physical presence in his own district and didn't even possess a home there to the possibility of not returning to your constituency virtually every single weekend over the course of an entire term in Congress. I don't think it's quite the same.
Also, regarding Crowley, I would somewhat question the oft-repeated statement that the guy was some kind of grand figure in Democrat politics - he was a reliable party insider in one of the safest blue seats of the country, not an actual decision-maker or vital asset for the party. The fact that he vanished from politics the microsecond he lost a primary somewhat attests to the fact that he wasn't really a big deal or any kind of political talent, as the DNC would have tried to keep him on their roster or have him run elsewhere. AOC's win was well-earned and she ran a strong campaign, but it was very much a "right place, right time" scenario, as a progressive wave was descending upon the Democrats during Trump I and Crowley barely bothered to campaign since he wrongly assumed it was a done deal.
Fast forward 8 years and AOC is now a global celebrity - which I strongly assume is a much better guarantor of keeping her seat than anything Crowley had to offer.
Returning to the weekend-trip issue, it just feels forced and at best like a minor issue to me: France's Parliament also draws its members from geographic circonscriptions, and French legislative elections are famous for "parachutages" - essentially having candidates stand in regions they have literally zero associations with, but were selected to run in because they have a high national profile and/or the specific race is deemed critical. Everyone knows this and rolls their eyes about it, but in the end it doesn't make a difference - because the vast majority of voters rank it extremely low on their hierarchy of issues. A left-leaning voter is not going to support a conservative or right-wing candidate they hate because the Socialist party candidate has never lived in their region - it simply does not matter enough, and why would it? The vast majority of parliamentary decisions made and voted on do not concern specific regions, but national matters, so whether your candidate has lived in your area his whole life or not is meaningless.
Don't get me wrong, I think there is definitely an electoral impact when members of Congress make a point of being highly present in their district - like how AOC hosts a local town hall every single month without fail since her election. I just really don't think enough people are keeping constant track of the weekend returns of their Congressperson, nor do I think it matters enough overall to make or break a political career without other factors at play.
The voters that are likely to keep track are exactly the kind of plugged in electorate that shows up for primaries or become volunteers or donate more, etc. It might not be decisive, but it's an effective line of attack that all members of congress has to defend against.
As for the comparison to France, well, it is derogatory isn't it (looks like the US term is carpetbagger)? From what I understand, usually there is a residency requirement for the various political offices in the US, which goes to show how important it is to the local/state residents that they enshrined it into law.
Also, France is smaller than Texas, distance from Paris to the South of France (Google Gemini: "The furthest continental (mainland European) political district from Paris is the commune of Lamanère in the Pyrénées-Orientales department. Located in the Occitanie region along the Spanish border, it sits 721 kilometers (448 miles) south of Paris") is shorter than a flight from DC to Tennessee. We don't compare French politics to Singapore politics for the same reason.
I do agree that the increased nationalization and polarization of politics means residency in your own district doesn't matter as much, but I wouldn't count it out to particular races or elections, even things "on the margin" can be the thing that push it over the line for some.
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Can't they just.... not do those things? Not to derail the discussion too far, but I've had similar thoughts about people who are suicidal due to optional aspects of their life such as their specific job. If you're willing to walk away from it all, why not first break all of the conventions and norms in the hope that it makes it better? What's the worst that can happen, you fail to get re-elected?
Advertise less. If you're a popular and well-established candidate who is likely to win, then you can probably win with a lot less time spend collecting donations and spending them advertising yourself. This reduces your chances of re-election in exchange for more time to either spend on yourself or on your real policy work.
Don't travel on the weekends. I assume this is based on wanting to meet and talk to people in your home district to either gather funds or votes and support. Again, this trades re-electibility for freedom.
Don't do that. In this case, you might lose support from your greater political party (and the endorsements), but if you make good policy that aligns with their goals they'll still likely vote for it.
Not really sure how to solve that, other than if you solve 1-3 then this is less of a big deal.
If you're willing to lose the job anyway, then you might as well do it ethically with lower chance of re-election since, worst case scenario, you don't get re-elected. I suppose if you're taking a more partisan perspective maybe running and losing to a candidate in the opposing party is worse than stepping down and being replaced by a newcomer from your own party. But I would think this would be made up for by actually being a better individual within your party while you have the opportunity.
I think the essence of this is a collective action problem, as hinted about in reason 3 and as pointed out by @MaiqTheTrue and @hydroacetylene, and in my view also a feedback loop problem based on how elections work. Let's assume a person as you said who is a member of congress who don't want to do too much traveling, who doesn't want to spend money on advertising, and want to focus their time and resources on lawmaking. Well, they are surrounded by people who are focused on getting re-elected (the stage), not on good lawmaking (the workplace). Their primary opponents are going to hammer them. The party won't put as much resources into them or just kinda ignore them (how many Rand Paul or Bernie Sanders can a political party really accommodate?). The opposing party can attack them on "being out of touch with the people in the district", "a dinosaur who dines on the public dime".
As @Shakes point out though, the incentives are still there for people to run for Congress. But my question after watching Fong's video would be: Are the crop of people currently running for Congress the kind we want to attract and retain in Congress?
My thesis, for what it’s worth is that this is a function of democracy and especially democratic systems with short terms of office. The way to get and keep office in any democratic system is to become really good at winning elections and doing the work is at best a sideline and at worst a problem. Having short election cycles makes this worse, as the time between elections isn’t long enough that a person can “get away” with doing the work. If you had elections once a generation, you’d have very little of this problem, because you get 20 years between campaigns and this is plenty of time to do a lot of good deep work for the people of your district or state or country without having to worry about whether or not the people are happy about it. If you were appointed, as we used to have governors appoint the senate, you’d never have to court public opinion, and therefore your ability to keep office relies on whether or not you impress the guy who appointed you or maybe those who can fire you. You can thus ignore public opinions and do what you believe is best for the country.
sounds to me like we need different states to experiment with different term durations. Federal politics would change significantly if house terms are 3 years, senate 9 years, and president 6 years.
I’m not convinced anything less than 5 years is long enough. It’s extremely short when the buildup to the election takes about a year and then you need at least half as long again to raise the funds to run. That makes, at current, the term of the house members of 24 months with 18 months of “reelection related activities” and 6 months of everything else. 6/24 is 1/4 of the term with 3/4 for running for the next election. Make it 36 months, and you’ll only have half of the term for actually doing things. Make it 5 years and it’s 60 months, and thus 7/10 of the term is for doing things and 3/10 is devoted to winning office. At this point it’s long enough that you can’t simply be good at running, you have to get things done. And at 5 years, you have long enough lead times that the results of the changes you make are going to be known and thus affect your ability to win (imagine having the effects of taxes or tax cuts coming known before we voted on whether or not to re-elect the guy who voted for it). It’s also long enough that longer term projects with upfront costs (especially infrastructure projects) become plausible.
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I mean I think especially for #3 a lot of this is baked in. Partly because of the short terms as compared to the time needed to gear up for the next election. The term is 2 years, the campaign season is about 6 months, leaving about one and a half years to actually do things. But that neglects two important aspects of the campaign: funding and name recognition. If nobody knows who you are, it’s hard to convince them to vote for you, obviously. And without a horde of gold to spend on campaigning, you lose. But both of those things take a lot of time. You have to make appearances, you have to get interviewed by the media, you have to have a social media presence, all of that stuff, and you have to get big donors to believe in you enough to fork over the cash. So this probably takes about half of the remaining time, leaving about 9 months to do anything actually productive.
My immediate suggestion is that really, if you want to get congress back to doing legislative work, you need much longer terms. A minimum of 6 years in office would allow the official the ability to stop campaigning and do the work.
I think you completely and utterly missed my main point. As an individual, you can funge re-electibility with productivity by campaigning less. Therefore, if the situation is so bad that you're considering quitting, which gives you an automatic 0% re-election chance, any amount of this tradeoff is superior to resigning.
You can in the sense that a country can simply decide not to have an army. You will end up losing to those who refuse to abide by the restrictions. You won’t campaign for 6 months, okay cool. The guy running against you is, and so he gets his name and message out there, he gets the eyes of the public, and probably wins. It’s an arms race that’s really hard to stop and it’s getting worse because of the media landscape that leads to very short attention spans and memories of what you actually did.
Most congressmen will seek reelection. It’s also part of the system that no, or very few congressmen actually serve only one term.
Okay but this conversation started specifically about people who are retiring because conditions are bad. If things are so bad that it's enough to make you quit, do this first and then you don't have to quit.
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Most Americans Do Not Know who their rep is, so it seems like they could get away with it… except for the primary voters, and in safe seats these are a very small percentage of the population which tends to have extreme views.
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Sitting in Congress is still an elite job because it comes with near-infinite status. It is not just "I worked in Congress". "My father worked in Congress." "My grandfather worked in Congress." Unless you are extremely execrable you permanently graduate in life to a higher class of network and social connection. And even particularly odious congressmen can tap into status networks reserved for them. If you're too much of a pariah to go to Davos there's probably a Billionaire in Montana who loves your brand of fiery stock slop. Lauren Boebert was a welfare baby of a single mom who dropped out of high school, she's probably one of the stupidest and most infamous members of Congress, and presumably her four sons can open basically any doors they want to.
The actual work of being a Congressmen probably sucks, but mostly for tolerable reasons. The average Congressman will not exercise meaningful political power and might feel frustrated by gridlock and commute. This is probably why so many quit early. But you couldn't really solve this with increased pay or benefits. It's their own fault that Congress is so impotent. On a personal level, the average Congressman has many opportunities to help individual Americans. They can pass on military appointments and constituent services, meet with citizen-activist-lobbyists, "draw attention" to anything they choose via social media, etc. etc.
I think the implication is that Congressional turnover is bad because experienced legislators can wield power more effectively. I'm not so sure. I don't think turnover is a problem unless it reaches extremely dysfunctional levels (too much or too little). The problem is more that Congress continues to castrate itself, mostly for political reasons that are theoretically within their control. No one is making them wear the cock cage except themselves, they just prefer that the Executive Branch is responsible for everything important because it insulates themselves from the worst controversies of dealing with the public.
Most Congressmen when you meet them are somewhat decent people, they're just often much stupider than you'd expect and way in over their heads and totally captured by the DC social world. Maybe you want the Department of Education abolished, that sounds crazy to them so they won't ever even consider it. You don't know how an appropriations committee works, you don't know what a motion is or how one is advanced, you just have crazy political ideas like Medicare for All. If you knew how the sausage was made like they did then you'd surely agree with what they're doing, and sometimes they have to patronizingly protect you from your own crazy ideas because you don't know "how it really works".
I do understand that for almost all jobs and careers and positions, non-regrettable attrition is a thing. But as pointed out in the background context of the video, the point is that for Fong: he believes the loss of Sam Graves and Gary Peters is regrettable attrition. I suppose the bigger underlying questions are:
Anyway, I do completely with what you say about how being a member of congress is definitely a huge step up in status.
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I thought term limits was a more popular idea. What's the idea behind wanting congress critters to stick around forever?
The main criticism of term limits (which I think has been at least partially vindicated by California's experience) is that they transfer institutional power from the elected legislators to the lobbyists and staffers who nobody voted for. Lobbyists and staffers don't have term limits, and already wield a disturbing amount of behind-the-scenes political influence. Term limits also prevent informal blocs and hierachies from forming, which strengthens the position of the formal blocs and hierarchies. This further empowers party leadership at the expense of individual congressmen, and makes Congress as a whole less democratically responsive (i.e. calling your congressman doesn't matter because your congressman doesn't have the ability to influence leadership to actually alter legislation).
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Power Politics has a video on that too: "Should Congress Have Term Limits? The Case of Ted Kennedy" where he presents both sides of the issue (because Ted Kennedy is apparently a great example of both against-term-limits and for-term-limits) and kinda left the question open to the viewer. I will just pick a choice quote on the against-term-limits arguments (bolded mine):
The major bills that Ted Kennedy helped passed that Fong refers to are:
Fong also went more into depth about why Ted Kennedy was a great legislator and it kinda boils down to building connections and knowledge over a long time.
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On having to go to Washington a lot and the travel. I believe it would now be possible to just vote online. If their input doesn’t matter and the average congressmen is a generic red or blue that would solve a lot of issues and give them more time for constituent services.
This will open the congressmen to accusations of being too lazy to go in person: "I will go every week to argue your case in-person to Washington DC and I will not be leaving until I get what's best for you, my opponent wants to phone his vote in, literally phone it in with online voting. This is not what a dogged, hardworker does!"
It's kind of stupid because the reality of campaigning means you have to promise something absurdly draining, unrealistic, and unnecessary.
Yes, thé people should get to vote on how often congresscritters are in DC.
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You know ironically, that’s how lobbyist’s most effectively agitate for their positions? People often think there’s this conspiracy that lobbying and 'special interests' work like some kind of nefarious Jewish cabal, straight out of the Elders of Zion. It isn't like that, at all. I have a relative that's done lobbying work in DC.
First the public perception of lobbying is 100% wrong. People think it’s like something straight out of House of Cards, and that's simply not the case. There is literally no such thing as 'here is a sack of cash, now go pass this legislation for me.' The Abscam Scandals ended like 95% of that in the 80's and what little left there was ended with the Jack Abramoff scandal. I know some people think it's ridiculous when they read this, but it's true. 99.99% of federal and state legislators actually do take ethics seriously.
Lobbying is using money and public support to sway a legislator to see how voting for/against a bill is in the best interest of his/her constituency. I'm not saying you have to agree with this entirely, only that 'that' is what it 'is'. Who are the players? The traditional 'rolodex' lobbyist is a dying beast. This is the lobbyist that people are probably thinking of when you think 'lobbyist', somebody like Trent Lott. This is the guy that can open the doors, and knows the guy that knows the guy. This is 'somewhat' valuable, but not very. One thing that's great about our government is that you can solicit your representative anytime you want. All of us are familiar with this. And of course people do this. Every person that ever worked on the Hill knows about crazy constituents that went into the legislator's office and read them the riot act over something. But the truth is the rolodex lobbyist isn't that valuable. Where they 'are' valuable is describing relationships between important people (e.g., "Sen X won't wipe is ass without Sen Y's approval. If you get Sen Y onboard, Sen X falls right in line").
The biggest players in the post-Abramoff world are trade associations and advocacy groups. 'These' are the people that fuck, and there's 'literally', tens of thousands of them. A great example is the NRF. To put it simply, every little retailer that wants to belong, from Mom and Pop's all the way up to Wal-Mart contributes money, and that combined money is used to advocate for the industry. The NRF sends people to conferences, to Capitol Hill, to state legislatures, everywhere, to support pro-industry legislation and to shoot down anti-industry legislation.
A tertiary player (but growing in influence) is the Government Affairs groups for large companies. Here's AT&T's head guy. They are basically single-company trade associations. But a big company like AT&T belongs to a lot of associations in addition to having their own GA team.
Now as far as the money goes, this is actually the least important aspect of lobbying. That name of the game is campaign contributions. Campaigns at all levels are extremely expensive, and you need help paying for them. But, direct contributions are limited and public, so they aren't too valuable. The contributions come in from PACs and advocacy groups or organizing groups (NCSL is an example).
Mechanically speaking, the NCSL will have a conference and a shit ton of legislators (state-level in this case, but there are tons of federal conferences) will attend. They have to attend because if they do NCSL will contribute $X to their campaign fund. Also a massive huge number of lobbyist from trade associations and company GA teams will also attend. Incidentally, those lobbyists paid anywhere from $10k to $100k to attend the event. This is the money that goes into the legislators' campaign funds. At these events, all the lobbyists elbow-jockey for the attention of the legislators. The goal is to get a 'sit down' or a call set up at some later date. Why does the money not matter? Because the legislator gets his campaign contribution irrespective of what happens at the meeting. He's under zero obligation to even 'listen' to the lobbyists. At the sit down, the lobbyist is going to try to explain why issue X is important. Or even better, the lobbyist will set a meeting and bring some constituents.
Another thing too is the fact that for just about every issue in America, there are two extremely well funded but diametrically opposed parties. Take net neutrality. If I'm a legislator, I can be in the ISP camp or in the content/Google camp. But it doesn't matter, one of the two sides will fund my campaign. I don't care who does it. And this is what's so funny about it. There is 'literally' so much money in politics now that there is a PAC/group that will fund almost every possible position. This is very true on the federal level, sort of true at the state level.
So if money doesn't matter, how do lobbyists pressure legislators? They call it 'social advocacy'. It's a 'huge' business. Say for example, Congress is pushing a bill that would be bad for retailers. The NRF is going to be tasked with killing it. This is a campaign. The first thing the NRF is going to do is call, not Capitol Hill, but local retailers. The NRF will broker phone calls between Mom and Pop retailers and their representatives to put 'extreme' pressure on the congressman to vote a certain way (e.g., "I have been in business in your district for 20 years. I'm hanging up a sign in my window 'tomorrow' about how you are killing the local community by voting for bill X. I'm also going to the local Rotary Club and we are going to discuss how you have turned your back on your constituents!"). Believe me, congressmen listen to these calls, and they will have no idea is was set up by the NRF. This is extremely common. Also common are email campaigns (less effective) and 'fly-ins' where an association will get, say, 10 local store owners to fly to DC and complain to their representative for an hour. As you might imagine, this is also extremely effective. At your local level, you should try this if you want something in your city changed, it will very likely work.
A very common thing a legislator will ask a lobbyist for is 'cover'. Asking for cover is asking a lobbyist to sway public opinion on an issue. This is also fairly common. Believe it or not, there are 'media advocacy' companies that will set out to sawy social media in favor or against an issue. I don't know how they work exactly, but they have their hands in everything, including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, 'definitely' Reddit, all of them. A trade association will hire an agency to 'paper' an issue. So the agency will scan, say, Reddit and whenever issue X comes up, the agency will start commenting with "Well this article is total bullshit because X" and upvote himself with other zombie accounts. Same with Twitter, same with Facebook. I didn't believe it until it was shown to me by my relative awhile ago. Its extremely expensive, but extremely effective.
This whole industry grew out of SOPA/PIPA legislation some years ago. It was a watershed moment, when lobbyists and legislatures simultaneously realized the power of organized social media. Media advocacy is 'expensive' and the people that work there get paid big time. If you can do this, I highly recommend you explore the field.
That's basically how it all works.
Of course there are, that's why democracy is a scam.
'Never argue with a man who buys ink by the barrel.' The printed press, the tv networks, and now social media companies will claim to be 'pro-democracy' until comes time for the people to vote, buy video games or movie tickets, or make healthcare decisions 'wrong'.
The powerful will swing their power, they will bury the news, they will censor or bot the internet, leverage their intelligence connections, propagate hysteria and incite race riots, make up WMD or pandemics out of whole cloth... And then they'll you you voted for this, this is what you wanted.
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A while ago I might have been more prone to agree with you on this, but with high profile bribery including Eric Adams, Tom Homan, and well, the practically endless examples on display in the Trump admin now from pardoning big criminals for their support of companies related to him (or relatives who gave him a million dollars) to a ton of foreign policy shenanigans to well, tons of other examples it sure does seem like the stereotypical bribery of giving money for politics is alive and well.
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Could this also have to do with life expectancy? I feel like the average/upper end of congressional age has increased since then... so presumably, someone retiring at 80 when they would have previously died at 75 would, for instance, be shown as part of this change, but not support the thesis at all.
I feel like it'd be a combination of life expectancies and particularly the ability to extend the final runway by a couple years if you're reasonably well-funded. You're probably not winning your last election if you're undergoing serious chemotherapy and clearly on death's door, and when modern medicine is pretty good at making that a 2-3 year step instead of a 3 month step that's going to impact a lot.
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it's a good point, the average age of members of congress also went up so the change in life expectancy won't totally explain the rise in retirements but it's a good point. I would have preferred Fong cites some kind of study that has more controls. but anyway, AI did point out 2 more possible explanations that Fong didn't mention:
Probably also helps turnover since it means that there's more of an active effort to target people in warm seats than historical norms.
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The larger trend is that representative bodies tend to divest themselves of power and turn to gridlock over time. This is part of the long term political cycle, seen over and over again throughout history. "Democracy" is what Oligarchy is called when it is in political power. "Tyranny" is when the populists, angry at gridlock and elite failure, get the best strongman they can to try to improve things. "Monarchy" is when one of the Oligarchs wins and breaks the "democratic" stasis.
Is this cycle a matter of fact/reality/unavoidable fate (AI tells me it's from an Ancient Greek named Polybius)? There has been moments before in American history where some would think the US is on the path of becoming a monarchy (I'm assuming FDR got a lot of this criticism).
Just the nature of politics given a long enough timeline. The chinese say "the empire long divided must unite, the empire long united must divide". No form of government is stable long term. There is no "end of history" highest form, there is only the waves of politics abstracted through society and available technology.
In the US we can see this trend strongly, and it has to do with the same thing that sunk the Athenian oligarchy and the Roman one. It succeeded. The US went from being a regional power to superpower/international trade guarantor/hegemon in a generation. Since that time, congress has steadily ceded power to the bureaucracy, the courts and the executive. A century and change ago real politicians didn't run for president, because the power was in congress. Now, congress is for people who aren't interested in governing. The power of the presidency grows, until one day someone notices that hey, isn't he basically an emperor? Let's remember Augustus made every effort to make it seem like the Senate still had influence, while stripping the last vestiges of it.
I mean civilization itself runs in cycles and greater cycles. Not just the concentration of power eventually leading to a Uniate system, then dividing, but the cycle of rising and falling empires, civilizational collapses. Honestly, history is very cyclical and it’s really pretty clear to anyone who read it. I think the cycles are much faster now than in the bronze and Iron Age because technology makes things move fast enough that the breaking down happens in decades instead of generations because things change that fast.
To my mind the big change is ease of transport. The Movement of the Peoples is faster by plane. What once would have taken centuries now takes months. What would have taken months now takes hours. Politicians can ethnically cleanse their constituencies much faster with these mighty robot powers.
See, I think it’s computers and communication. In 1726, an event happening in New York might not be known in Los Angeles for months. In 2026, an event happens in New York and the news reaches Japan within 10 seconds. As such, the amount of information is much much higher, and the time you have to react to it is much smaller. Waiting a week in 1726 isn’t slow because the time between you doing a thing, putting it in motion, and seeing a result is longer. In 2026, waiting a week is waiting an eternity. Your ability to do things quickly is much bigger, and the news cycle is so much shorter that everyone is like “it’s been three days, we must be losing the war, because we haven’t won yet.” Wars in the past lasted for decades, yes in part because of transport, but also because the computer age allows you to do things faster. I can order a strike in the time it takes me to answer a text. The order reaches the front instantly. The order will be executed in seconds.
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"House leaders subsequently have built more hoe time into the congressional calendar."
That was pretty funny.
"But in late 1994, when Republicans took control of the House for the first time in 40 years, incoming Speaker Newt Gingrich encouraged his party's members to leave their families in their districts, to emphasize their independence from Washington and their roots among constituents."
I sort of wonder if this was a simple case of pure cynicism or an inability to picture the long-term adverse consequences of this decision, which should not characterize a self-proclaimed conservative. Chesterton's fence and all that.
As @Thoroughlygruntled already pointed out, there is an ideological belief that drives these decisions. In a sense, it is good that elected officials are more connected to their constituents instead of being charmed or adapted into the elites. But yes lots are lost too. I can't help but be reminded of this question on /r/AskHistorians about "I'm a Victorian-era housewife whose husband is, say, a doctor. What's my usual day like?" and here is an answer, bolded mine:
It hasn't been mentioned elsewhere but I'm sure the loss of this parallel network of spouses and acquaintances also reduces the random chances of lawmakers becoming acquainted and find common grounds in which they can then trade favors or collaborate on.
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Of course it was Gingrich.
The more I learn about 90s politics, the more I feel like the 2010s were overdetermined.
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It was an attempt to weaken the power of the DC cocktail party circuit to influence Republican Congressmen into betraying the small town/rural values of their constituents. No more socializing with urban socialists.
I see. I'm also guessing that Gingrich was concerned about the DC cocktail party circuit influencing the Congressmen's children and wives. Then again, maybe he wasn't thinking that ahead.
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Where's point #3?
Re point #1, what does all this campaign spending even do? I thought the US was full of safe constituencies.
And re point #2, why do congressmen still commute every weekend?
The witch is deadThe newt has been out of the House for 27 years, why should anyone follow his rules? Why should Democrats follow his rules at all?Ooops, bad late night formatting. Fixed
Aside from the other points people made, it is definitely still politics. Nancy Pelosi got to call the shots, I'm sure, is anchored by how she's one of the Democrat's rockstar fundraiser.
Because it's a really effective argument: "[incumbent] is an out of touch elite, last time he had a town hall was 6 months ago". It probably lands even better on Democrats because it's already primed that Dems are "coastal elites". It's pretty hard for normal people to gauge the effectiveness of their own legislator. The public is already under the impression that congress doesn't do anything already so any push to "making things easier for members of congress" will get used by the other side as "they're just cashing in instead of helping you".
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Safe seats tend to have expensive primaries- thé US has two rounds of election.
Surely the primaries can be regulated easier than elections. Local party leadership can directly limit the spending on its own primaries.
Due to civil-rights era precedents, not while using state elections infrastructure to run them. (In the Jim Crow south, some Dixiecrat state parties used to end-run the 15th amendment with all-white primaries). The 1st amendment applies to government-supported primaries in the same way the 15th does.
Parties which run their own internal elections at their own expense (which, for example, all UK political parties do) can impose whatever rules they like.
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Congressmen have quotas to kick up to the DNCC/RNCC/DSCC/NSRC, with the quota increasing depending on how many desirable committee slots you have. The committees use the money to blitz the small number of close races.
Press coverage of the system tends to say that it isn't really about fundraising, and more about creating busywork to stop backbench Congressmen participating in the legislative process.
So campaign donations get spent on other campaigns?
Yes, but I suspect everyone (particularly including the kind of donor who gives $7,000 to their Rep) understands that the campaign donation is actually being used to buy better committee slots.
If I was a political donor and my Congressman (who I liked and had donated to in the past) said "can you contribute another $7,000 towards getting me off Indian Affairs and onto Banking?" then I would consider that a worthy cause.
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Yeah, the cast majority of house seats are relatively to vary safe. So much of the fundraising is for the handful of unpredictable seats where massive sums are spent.
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You can still get primaried in a constituency that is "safe" from the opposing party, though, no?
Fighting for the seat that your party is going to win is more appealing than fighting for one you’re likely to lose, even.
See the relative weakness of California Republicans and Texas Democrats.
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