Corruption

(Ick, this is too prosaic, even for me. This is hardly a complete discussion, or even rant, but it won't get any better with out getting even more tedious. I'm posting it anyway...)

It's a popular topic this election year, and I'm sure many have brought up what will be shown as my view of it. Corruption is not equal to illegal. There are illegal activities that have brought corruption to the forefront of politics, but there is no way congress is going to fix the broken machine because the legal corruption is rampant.

Let's suppose you are elected to congress (either the House or Senate). Let's suppose you are a "good" congressman/woman and do everything you should. You sit on your committees, you vote on every bill, and you are present every day congress is in session (barring illness/death in the family/other emergency). You will work, in the Capitol, about 100 days in a year. There are 260 weekdays in a year. There are 10 federal holidays; a new employee typically gets 10 days paid vacation; I'll add another 10 days miscelanious time off. So there are 230 work days in a year. Your congressional work is less than half that. The remaining time is supposedly meant for spending in your district/state finding out what your constituents need and want. But that job is now done by polling, which is done and analyzed by various staff members.

Further, due to volume, most of the reading of congressional documents is done by staff who then summarize it for the congressperson. Speaches are written by speachwriters. Email and letters are read by aids first. Some may get passed on to the congressperson, but there are form responses for many hot button issues. What does congress spend its spare time doing? Mostly fundraising. This is work, of a sort. For big name politicians it often involves pricy dinners and speaches. For freshmen (and freswomen, grumble) it may be a more personal experience.

Now these are generalities, and the smaller you go, the more representative your representative will be. At the national level, however, there is not enough time to be that personal. Of course there is too much time to not be, so there should be a balance struck, and there is sometimes, but more often, the result is too much power, too much free time and too many people courting that power that are not constituents.