I’m a huge fan of telecommutes. It’s not that I don’t like being around people. I do, and my colleagues in particular are wonderful. But I can blog from my laptop from anywhere with an Internet connection, my line on the DC metro is a sardine can, and staying on my couch saves over an hour of total travel. In the aggregate, telecommuting is good for conserving office space, good for family time, good for the environment, good for overall travel times (if there are fewer people going to work, the roads are less congested).
But would telecommuting be good for our government? Conor Friedersdorf thinks so.
His argument isn’t so much about the environment, or the commute times, or family. It’s about K Street:
As professional lobbyists grow ever more powerful, it is increasingly
consequential that members of Congress spend significant stretches of
time hundreds or thousands of miles from their constituents, but mere
minutes away from every K Street firm. An e-Congress wouldn’t merely
result in legislators more attuned to their constituents by virtue of
spending their working lives among them — it would make influence
peddling far more difficult on lobbying firms, who’d find it more
expensive and time-consuming to get face-time with multiple senators
and Congressional representatives, or to simultaneously court a
senator, six members of the federal bureaucracy, a few political
journalists, and a dozen House underlings …And although lost social lubricant would be one cost of an e-Congress,
it would be mitigated by an important benefit: fewer folks would get
jobs as congressional staffers, put in a few years at a mediocre wage,
and cash out by using their contacts as leverage when they negotiate
their starting salary at a lobbying firm. Ask yourself whether social
cohesion among D.C. insiders results in good governance — or the
opposite.
There are a few double-edged swords here. It might be more difficult for a Whip to unite an opposition for partisan reasons, but it would also be more difficult for committees to produce bills as anybody who has every dozed on in a teleconference meeting knows. You might mitigate obstructionism that way, but you’d also mitigate constructive conferences in Congress (if that isn’t oxymoronical, anyway).
Similarly, a more hyperlocally-focused Congress would be a good thing for individual districts, but it could also (a) increase the pressure for more pork; (b) allow local interests to eclipse national legislation, which would result in (c) even more money being used to pay off local interests to bring that national legislation to the floor. Just look at the health care bill. So this is an unperfect idea, but still it is a very interesting piece by Conor.
