Restoration

George F. Will

• Publisher: Free Press
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780029347133
• eBook ISBN: 9781439119044
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: American Government
• Index: History

From Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist George Will, whose "thinking is stimulating, erudite, and makes for great reading" ( The Boston Globe ) comes a "biting, humorous, and perceptive" ( The New York Times Book Review ) argument for the necessity of term limits in Congress. The world's oldest democracy—ours—has an old tradition of skepticism about government. However, the degree of dismay about government today is perhaps unprecedented in our history. Americans are particularly convinced that Congress has become irresponsible, either unwilling or incapable of addressing the nation's problems—while it spends its time and our money on extending its members' careers. Many Americans have come to believe fundamental reform is needed, specifically limits on the number of terms legislators can serve.In Restoration, George Will makes a compelling case, drawn from our history and his close observance of Congress, that term limits are now necessary to revive the traditional values of classical republican government, to achieve the Founders' goal of deliberative democracy, and to restore Congress to competence and its rightful dignity as the First Branch of government. At stake, Will says, is the vitality of America's great promise self-government under representative institutions. At issue is the meaning of representation. The morality of representative government, Will argues, does not merely permit, it requires representatives to exercise independent judgment rather than merely execute instructions given by constituents. However, careerism, which is a consequence of the professionalization of politics, has made legislators servile and has made the national legislature incapable of rational, responsible behavior. Term limits would restore the constitutional space intended by the Founders, the healthy distance between the electors and the elected that is necessary for genuine deliberation about the public interest.Blending the political philosophy of the Founders with alarming facts about the behavior of legislative careerists, Restoration demonstrates how term limits, by altering the motives of legislators, can narrow the gap between the theory and the practice of American democracy.

From Bristol to Cobb County: The Decline of Representation and the Rise of Careerism

When the young Senator Henry Clay arrived in Washington in December, 1806, the nation’s capital was a village lacking virtually every element of commodious living. “Pennsylvania Avenue, the city’s main thoroughfare, was frequently so muddy as to be impassable.”¹ When Clay’s disciple, Abraham Lincoln, arrived fifty-five years later for his Inauguration, Washington was even worse than it was when the young Clay came to town, and worse than when Representative Lincoln had come in 1847. “Washington was a dirtier, ranker city than Lincoln remembered, with a plethora of livery stables and rancid saloons. Pigs rooted in the dirt streets slanting off from Pennsylvania Avenue, and sewage marshes lay at the foot of the President’s park south of the old mansion. At the northern edge of the garbage-strewn Mall ran an open drainage ditch, ‘floating with dead cats and all kinds of putridity,’ said an observer, ‘and reeking with pestilential odors.’ Even now, in the early morning, a stench hung over the city worse than any Lincoln could recall.”² In the nineteenth century accepting a job in Washington involved, for many people, accepting the discomfort of living in the cramped quarters of a boarding house. In February, 1869, while President-elect Grant was cobbling together a cabinet, “One lady, asked why she wished to speak to the general, told an aide (or perhaps a reporter) that she was calling to learn whom he had chosen, as she had rooms to rent.”³ Few people were drawn to the capital by any glitter, and few who came as congressmen could even bring comfort with them, or could afford to buy it in Washington.

That is one of several reasons why relatively few members of Congress—far fewer than today—made running for reelection the great constant of their lives. Perpetual incumbency was not the normal career aspiration for members of Congress. For a long time Washington was not a place where many people who had a choice chose to linger. People came to Congress for a while, then departed, either because they had other things they wanted to do—perhaps other political offices to seek—or because they were defeated. This mitigated the tendency—a timeless tendency in any political branch of any government—of Congress to become an insular ruling class, resented by a suspicious public.

That was then. This is now:

On autumn mornings in 1991, commuters driving into San Francisco on Interstate 80 had their eyes opened wide by billboards advertising a local morning TV news show. The billboard featured an image of the U.S. Capitol dome and these words: “Find out what they did to you last night.”⁴ The pronoun and the preposition were signs of the time. The sinister cabal denoted by the pronoun “they” were the representatives of the sovereign people who put “them” beneath the dome. The sovereign people, including the commuters, were being incited by anxiety about what was being done “to” them, not for them. The people were not feeling particularly sovereign and were not happy with the way American popular sovereignty was working. They were seething with resentment of a ruling class that was, infuriatingly and frustratingly, of their making. That class, the “they” beneath the Capitol dome, was resented both in spite of and because of its relentless attempts to ingratiate itself with the resentful public.

It was apparent at the dawn of this decade that Americans were entering a season of special discontent with the tone and substance of the nation’s political life. Two disturbances—a movie and a man—were particularly vivid signs that 1992 was the year of the “outsider.” Both Oliver Stone’s movie “JFK” and the Ross Perot phenomenon were evidence of the pathologies to which a society is prey when it becomes extremely cynical about “insiders,” meaning people operating within the constitutional institutions.

“JFK” was a pastiche of tendentious history, infantile paranoia and ideological fantasies, all purporting to prove that in 1963 Washington—all of it: the Vice President, the Chief Justice, the CIA, the FBI, the armed services, congressional leaders and everyone and everything else important—was completely controlled by a criminal, indeed treasonous, conspiracy. Furthermore, Stone implied, the fact that this conspiracy has not been unmasked (other than by his movie) proves that nothing much has changed in 29 years.

Ross Perot’s promise to “buy” the presidency for “the people” was received rapturously by millions of people who knew next to nothing about his political ideas. They even seemed to like the fact that he had few ideas and that the few he had proved that he knew next to nothing about America’s Constitution, budget or recent political history. That seemed to recommend him as the outside-most outsider, someone outside the mundane realm of information.

“JFK” was not jeered into instant oblivion. It was respectfully reviewed and treated as a serious contribution to understanding modern American history. And it made pots of money. Perot, a political buccaneer, had his sails filled by just the sort of gusts of popular passion that the Framers of the Constitution feared. But, then, his boast was that he had a relationship of special immediacy with “the people.” And he claimed he was the kind of “can do” fellow who can do without the constitutional forms and mores that are supposed to shape the national will and the relations between the people and the holders of power. Or so the Framers thought. But what did they know, that pack of eighteenth century “insiders”?

“JFK” and Perot were prominent among the 1992 symptoms of the severe distemper to which a republic is susceptible when people distrust their representatives. The movie and the man were both fevers erupting in the context of collapsing confidence in a political class composed primarily of careerists.

Of course, complaining about the caliber and conduct of politics is not only every American’s birthright, it is also a favorite recreation. And it is a reflection of national character, for historical and philosophic reasons.

Our nation had a distinct founding moment featuring notably reflective and eloquent statesmen. Hence ours is a nation permanently poised for disillusionment. It is natural, if not inevitable, for subsequent generations to measure their situation against the standards of a receding Golden Age that becomes more golden as it recedes. So it is natural for Americans to decide that things are going to hell in a handcart. However, the fact that a tilt toward pessimism about politics is built into American history does not mean that pessimism is not sometimes reasonable. It is today.

Furthermore, the broad outline of America’s public philosophy inclines Americans toward disrespect regarding political people. That philosophy, in the form in which most Americans have internalized it, holds that government is a necessary evil. Or, to put the point more amiably, government is a useful nuisance. American history, from the Boston Tea Party (perhaps the earliest historical episode vivid to most Americans) through whatever contemporary tax or other government act is most annoying at the moment, teaches Americans that government needs watching. Furthermore, today, as always, Americans have a lively thirst for scandal, as well as a journalism eager to slake that thirst. So there never has been a time when there were not heard discouraging words about politicians and their works. But differences of degree become differences of kind, and historians may one day conclude that in the autumn of 1991 American discontent became qualitatively different.

In that autumn interest in term limits reached the political equivalent of what nuclear physicists call “critical mass.” As is often the case in the untidy politics of this large democracy, the large issue of term limits rose on the public’s agenda because of an unplanned concatenation of small events, many of them manifestly trivial. Historians may one day conclude that Congress’s slide into disrepute became especially steep on September 18, 1991, when the General Accounting Office released a report on the administration—or lack of administration—of the bank run for members of the House of Representatives. It was the first sputtering of the fuse that would lead, four months later, to the Big Bang of the check-bouncing debacle.

Debacle more than scandal. There probably was little peculation of any sort involved, little conscious moneymaking from the calculated kiting of checks. Clearly, some members cynically exploited the chaotic conditions at the bank and used it as a source of interest-free loans. But many members simply had no idea that they were writing overdrafts, so badly was the bank administered. But for much of the public, shaky on the details but sound on intuitive judgment, maladministration was the symbolic truth, and that was enough: Those people in Congress did not know what they were doing. They couldn’t run a little in-house check-cashing service called a bank without making a mess of things. Small wonder they can’t run the country worth a damn. In time, and remarkably little time it was, a prairie fire of public disgust was raging. It was fueled by talk-radio, television newscasts and other media. The media at last had a subject small enough to wrap their comprehension around and simple enough to communicate with the concision of an uppercut.

Someday historians, pondering all this heat with the cool detachment conferred by distance in time, may marvel at the disproportion of American passions in the 1990s. Failures of government were manifold and manifest, but bouncing checks aroused more wrath than anything else. Why?

People became enraged by legislators’ small abuses of a minor privilege because government is not using its power intelligently and competently regarding big problems. The small abuses are more comprehensible and more easily rectified than the big failures. What Stalin said about mass murder (one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic) is true, too, about politics in this democracy. A $400 billion deficit is a meaningless number. A few dozen checks bounced by a congressman at a bank that had no business being in business is an understandable focus for disgust. The bank debacle became a lightning rod, drawing down a lot of the gathered energy of anger that had been intensifying for years and was bound to be released, sooner or later, with an ear-splitting crack of thunder.

The basic question is why the public was so combustible. If you seek reasons, look around. They are everywhere. They are in the government’s big policy failures—cities, schools, budgets, infrastructure—and also in its routine, mundane operations.

Speaking of the mundane, one day in November, 1991, Washington’s scandal du jour posed a conceptual puzzle. Should something properly called a scandal be at least a little bit secret? Can a scandal be something done in plain view, with due process, by people who put out press releases boasting about what they have done?

Brooke Masters of the Washington Post revealed that beginning December 1, 1991, a one-plane commercial airline would get a substantial federal subsidy—more than half a million dollars a year—to fly mostly affluent business travelers to expense-account meetings at the posh Homestead resort in Hot Springs, Virginia.⁵ Taxpayers from Harlem and Watts and everywhere else would pay more than $150 per passenger to reduce the price wealthy travelers would pay to get to their playground. This is part of a national program costing approximately $39 million a year. It is exquisitely titled Essential Air Service.

“Essential.” To whom? “It’s about jobs for the community,” says an official of the airline. The congressman in whose district the Homestead sits says, “I consider [the subsidy] essential to keeping the hotel open.”⁶ Oh? The wealthy travelers (few from Harlem or Watts) taking tax-deductible trips (another subsidy) to a tony watering spot (three golf courses, stocked trout stream, skeet range, spa) will stay home and sulk unless taxpayers foot part of their travel bill? Most guests make the final leg of their trip by rented cars or limousines. The hotel has six hundred rooms. The plane has nineteen seats. In peak season it will make two round trips a day; the rest of the year, just one. It will average just six passengers per trip (although the subsidy will be paid even if the plane is empty). The hotel depends on this?

The Essential Air Service program is just another entitlement. Congress says many small communities are entitled to air service even if market realities make it unprofitable for commercial carriers to provide it. This is foolishness; it also is routine. It is a tiny part of an enormous pattern of federal activity. The Post’s Brooke Masters deserves accolades for excavating this story from the budget’s fine print. But this subsidy, and thousands of other follies, are hardly hatched in...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• From Bristol to Cobb County The Decline of Representation and the Rise of Careerism
• The Recovery of Deliberative Democracy
• The Revival of Classical Republicanism
• “Like A Strong Wind” Love of Country and Respect for Congress
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index