The Remarkable Success of our 535 Representatives and Senators

No sarcasm intended, but perhaps a touch of irony.

When anyone becomes a professional politician, their primary career goal must be to attain and hold on to political power. In order to fulfil that goal, they must win elections. And in both the House and the Senate, re-election rates for incumbents have averaged about 90% for the last ten cycles, with the House a bit higher and the Senate a bit lower.

At the same time, national approval of Congress keeps dropping and now stands below 20%, approaching the inverse of re-election results!

In the wake of that strange trend comes a flood of articles complaining about and diagnosing what’s wrong with Congress. As far as I can tell, the most popular flavors of complaint are gerrymandering, the filibuster, and primaries favoring ideologues. There’s also the increasing propensity of the Executive and Judicial branches to expand their powers to effectively legislate, thereby giving Congress a pass. If those are the Vanilla, Chocolate, Strawberry, and Rocky Road flavors of complaint, I’m sure there are at least 27 others.¹

I find all this complaining wearisome and perhaps even ridiculous. After all, the American people who disdain Congress are the same people who elect essentially the same Congresses, election after election.

Whatever your politics may be, I suggest we step back and realize that the men and women who choose to run for Congress have made a very grueling career choice given their other options. With some notable exceptions, our 535 reps have impressive resumes and skill sets. By any metric of executive functioning, as a group they are well above average. I’d like to call them “elite,” assuming I could use the meaning of that word before it became freighted and tarnished with all sorts of negative aspects. (In fact, running as a self-described “elite” might be a surefire way to lose any election for any position, national or local, in the country.)

The job description of the 535, as far as I can tell, is as follows:

To constantly be asking people for money;

To commute between Washington and wherever you’re from (which is probably where your family lives);

To be reviled nationally by  “the other side,” as well as being hated, perhaps even more so, by whichever “wing” of your side you’re not part of;

To live in a justifiably heightened state of fear as a target (think of January 6th, Gabby Giffords shot, Steve Scalise shot at a charity softball game);

To be paid not a lot of money given the job and your likely alternatives : $175,000, or about $25,000 less than first year associates are paid at the top New York law firms;  

Finally, the cherry on top, to be part of a group that more than 80% of the country disapproves of.

I say “god bless” to those who run for Congress. They work hard and they’re underpaid. Moreover, if they’re deadlocked on many issues, who’s to say that this deadlock is not what most of us actually want?  

The fact is that when any of us, including me, thinks about a Congress “un-deadlocked,” we always imagine that this Congress will enact legislation that we will cheer for rather than curse.

I’m going to bring my late mother, who passed away a few years ago, into this “conversation.” She was a huge fan of deadlock, because she believed that a very active Congress would do far more harm than good. She was active in medicine and fond of the dictum “primum non nocere,” or “First do no harm.”

She also was a huge believer in the Stoics. My brother reminded me recently that one of her favorite Stoic “takes” was about complaining. In a word, don’t!

In a few words, “Not what you endure, but how you endure it, is important.”  

So, let’s stop complaining about the people we elect to Congress. Maybe you’re like me and admire them as a group, or maybe you think they’re an awful group and believe 535 random citizens picked out of a hat or a phonebook would do better.

The bottom line is if any of us are really upset about Congress, we should vote more often, especially in primaries. We all know that we as a country are incredibly lazy about voting, and I include myself in that description!

Complaining about complaining is the point of this post. I had hoped that the German language might yield up an apt combination word in the vein of schadenfreude, but I came up empty. So I created my own word, Kvetch-um-beschweren. Feel free to use it (free of charge) in your next casual conversation.

1. Burt Baskin once met a man who told him, "Whoever thinks of all these flavors must be plumb nuts!" "Congratulations," said Mr. Baskin. "You just invented a new flavor: Plum Nuts."