As a matter of fact, I don’t have much to add to Bill’s post or Felix’s response—except I will say that as an “elite” voter by the literature’s standards, I rarely find myself consulting the quotidian details of a candidate’s or congressman’s contributors. Maybe this is a flaw in the methodology of my politician assessment process, or maybe I pick up a lot of this stuff “in the water” in the sense that information disseminated by groups like Sunshine makes its way into many of the things I read from week to week about politics and I simply internalize it. All of which is to say: in the grand scheme of the policy mess of our modern and gargantuan administrative state, do we risk missing the forest for the trees? Shouldn’t we simply focus on the quality of proposed legislation and concentrate our ire or bestow our approbation on those politicians who vote either for bad legislation or against good legislation (or vice-versa)?
To open a slightly different thread within this conversation I will now submit the following: we need a lot less transparency about the day-to-day parliamentary proceedings of both houses of Congress. Televised proceedings in both chambers was a bad idea (I know there are many cats we can’t quite put back in their respective bags … but oh, to hope!). God help us if they ever consent to cameras in the Supreme Court! I also think a good case can be made that committee meetings should make their votes secret once again.
Thematically, I’m driving at the tension between accountability and deliberation in the Madisonian sense. The old way in the House, and especially in the Senate, permitted many members from both parties to vote against legislation in committee that they deemed both bad and very popular. (I’m not being original here; I would point everyone to Joseph Bessette’s excellent book, The Mild Voice of Reason.) Members could prevent bad legislation that would be hard to oppose in the “sunlight” of the House or Senate floor simply by killing it in committee, with the public only knowing that said legislation never made it out, not who voted for or against. In other words, a little more closed-door voting encouraged precisely the sorts of checks on popular passions or passing moods that the Federalist envisioned for the institution of Congress as a whole (and especially the Senate).
It seems to me that too much sunshine, especially if focused on all manner of voting in the legislature—especially when it’s coupled with the instant inundation made possible by modern communications technology—drives us closer to a much more volatile plebiscite-like politics rather than the deliberative democracy (or republicanism) envisioned by our wise Founders.
No Comments