Was Cincinnatus a Commuter?

__"Capitol Flight" by Jennifer Bradley, in The New Republic (Apr. 7, 1997), 1220 19th St. N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036.__

Running as antigovernment outsiders in 1994, Republican candidates for the House of Representatives, intent upon becoming not mere lawmakers but citizen-legislators, promised in their "Contract with America" to enact term limits. Term limits may have failed, writes Bradley, a staff writer for Roll Call, but so many new members seem to think of themselves as Cincinnatus, ever eager to return to the plow and home, that the House is now a lot emptier most of the time.

"Every week, on Thursday evening or Friday morning, more than half the members of the House abandon Washington, and its pernicious climate of government professionalism, and head home," she says. "They spend four cleansing, clarifying days with ‘real Americans’ in their districts and return, reluctantly, to Washington as late as Monday night or Tuesday morning."

The work of governing—attending committee hearings and dealing with proposed legislation and fellow legislators—thus gets squeezed into three "harried, tense, 12-hour days": Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. This truncated schedule was invented not in the last few years by Republicans but in the 1960s by Democrats who wanted to encourage members to be responsive to their constituents (and thus more secure in their seats). But the Republicans have made the weekly rush to the home district a virtual congressional commandment.

As a consequence, hundreds of lawmakers don’t know their colleagues very well and don’t understand much about legislative work. One recently retired congressman estimates that fewer than 100 out of the 435 members today are "serious legislators." The result is not a more virtuous deliberative body, Bradley argues, but only "a new kind of do-nothing Congress."