December 23, 2006
Congressional Morons II Posted by Alexander Burns at 08:00 PM EST Joshua Zeitz and John Steele Gordon’s exchange about Virgil Goode, et al., reminds me of an interesting article I read over the summer. In the inaugural issue of Democracy, a left-of-center quarterly, former Congressman Brad Carson reviewed The House: The History of the House of Representatives, by Robert Remini, of the University of Illinois at Chicago. The review has almost uniformly good things to say about Remini’s work, calling it an elegant and thorough treatment of congressional history. Carson—a conservative Democrat and a graduate of Baylor, Oxford, and the University of Oklahoma Law School—has less positive things to say about the House of Representatives itself. Repeating an anecdote from The House, in which Henry Clay embarrasses himself by fumbling a Hamlet quotation, Carson asks, “The institution now headed by Dennis Hastert may share the same name as that led by Clay, but which member of Congress today reads Shakespeare? Is it possible to imagine a single twenty-first-century politician . . . who is so confidently educated as to recognize a minor quotation from the Bard, much less a misquotation?” Highlighting stories like this, Carson argues that the last century and a half of congressional history “can only be measured along a steep descent,” and that Remini’s book “reads like a chronicle . . . of the decay of American politics, and, perhaps, of American character, too.” Congress has gone from a place where men like Clay felt at home to one in which Virgil Goode and Sam Brownback are less the exception than the norm. Congress will shortly be headed by someone other than the much (and rightly) maligned Dennis Hastert, but I hardly expect Nancy Pelosi to do much to elevate the level of congressional discourse. I agree with Messrs. Zeitz and Gordon about Goode and Brownback, but I can’t help worrying that a “Moron of the Month” award might give the inaccurate impression that there are only a dozen or so individuals in Washington deserving such a distinction. Carson’s review forces the reader to ask whether this kind of political degradation is avoidable, or whether it might just be the inescapable result of two centuries of democratic government. While Clay and his ilk are certainly more appealing public servants than Goode, I think it’s pretty clear that the latter, along with Brownback and Ellison, are actually much better approximations of the public will. I’d like to think that most Americans would find Goode’s words distasteful and Brownback’s conduct appalling. But would at least one in every 435 agree with the representative from Virginia? Would one in a hundred cheer on the senator from Kansas? Regrettably, I think the answer is yes. In fact, I think those proportions might be too small. In the 1970s, during the Supreme Court confirmation hearings of G. Harold Carswell, Sen. Roman Hruska responded to those who maligned Carswell’s intellectual capabilities by asking, “Even if he is mediocre, there are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren’t they?” Carswell’s nomination failed. Hruska’s point, though, remains: “We can’t have all Brandeises, Cardozos, and Frankfurters.” If we want only public servants of that caliber, then our system of government is bound to disappoint us again and again. It really is the worst—except, of course, for all the others.
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