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Civics Lesson 101
Sep. 25th, 2008 06:16 amMcCain's "I have to get back to Washington to save the economy despite years of policies I supported being what hurt it in the first place" bit reminds me of something that I've been meaning to write about for a while.
The basic thing that people outside of Washington don't realize about how Congress works is that most of what happens is done behind the scenes, by people you never heard of. McCain only needs to be there to push a button to vote "yea" or "nay." His staff will do all the heavy lifting. He gets the photo ops, while they do the work.
The real heavy lifting is done by the professional staff of the various committees. Take, for example, the defense authorization bill which the House passed yesterday. It's several hundred pages long and includes excruciating detail on funding for thousands of line items. The language was drafted by HASC and SASC staffers who spent long hours getting briefed by the services and agencies on the programs. The committee members each have personal staffers who will tell them what might have a controversial effect on their constituency, but any given congresscritter will even bother to read only a small percentage of the bill. (And, when it gets out of committee to the full house or senate, even fewer will read even less.) The conference, which works out the differences between house and senate versions of the bill, won't even discuss more than a couple of dozen sections of a bill that might have well over a thousand. By the time the conference version is being voted on, the issues are down to the handful that the president is threatening to veto it over - and those are things that various agencies have had their staff writing statements about.
I'm not saying that congresscritters (both reps and senators) don't work hard. But nobody has the time and expertise to deal with that volume of paperwork. Being a good manager is the important skill and being a good manager has a lot to do with how you delegate work. If you think you need to do it all yourself, you are not, by definition, doing a good job.
The basic thing that people outside of Washington don't realize about how Congress works is that most of what happens is done behind the scenes, by people you never heard of. McCain only needs to be there to push a button to vote "yea" or "nay." His staff will do all the heavy lifting. He gets the photo ops, while they do the work.
The real heavy lifting is done by the professional staff of the various committees. Take, for example, the defense authorization bill which the House passed yesterday. It's several hundred pages long and includes excruciating detail on funding for thousands of line items. The language was drafted by HASC and SASC staffers who spent long hours getting briefed by the services and agencies on the programs. The committee members each have personal staffers who will tell them what might have a controversial effect on their constituency, but any given congresscritter will even bother to read only a small percentage of the bill. (And, when it gets out of committee to the full house or senate, even fewer will read even less.) The conference, which works out the differences between house and senate versions of the bill, won't even discuss more than a couple of dozen sections of a bill that might have well over a thousand. By the time the conference version is being voted on, the issues are down to the handful that the president is threatening to veto it over - and those are things that various agencies have had their staff writing statements about.
I'm not saying that congresscritters (both reps and senators) don't work hard. But nobody has the time and expertise to deal with that volume of paperwork. Being a good manager is the important skill and being a good manager has a lot to do with how you delegate work. If you think you need to do it all yourself, you are not, by definition, doing a good job.
