The House should stay at home
It’s time to reduce the risks presented by our concentrated federal government
Newly minted House Speaker Kevin McCarthy issued a no-nonsense tweet this morning. “No more proxy voting,” he commanded. “Effective immediately, Members of Congress have to show up to work if they want their vote to count.”
This is good politics but bad policy. In the modern era of digital communication, there is no reason why members of the House of Representatives need to gather together in the D.C. swamp to vote on the nation’s business. They should be dispersed to their districts rather than concentrated in the Capitol, surrounded by the corrupting influence of powerful lobbyists and bureaucrats.
This is part of a bigger issue of concentration of power in the D.C. area that is long overdue for some fresh thinking. If powerful D.C. lobbyists having “one stop shopping” access to the people’s representatives is not reason enough for a change in venue, then let’s consider for a moment national security.
Perhaps the most chilling words I ever read appear in John McPhee’s book The Curve of Binding Energy (1974), which explores the dangers of nuclear weapons through the eyes of theoretical physicist Theodore Taylor. In it (at page 222 of the 1994 paperback edition), McPhee relates a doomsday scenario envisioned by Taylor.
“A one-kiloton bomb exploded just outside the exclusion area during a State of the Union Message would kill everyone inside the Capitol. ‘It’s hard for me to think of a higher leverage target, at least in the United States,’ Taylor said one day. ‘The bomb would destroy the heads of all branches of the United States government—all Supreme Court justices, the entire Cabinet, all legislators, and, for what it’s worth, the Joint Chiefs of Staff. With the exception of anyone who happened to be sick in bed, it would kill the line of succession to the Presidency—all the way to the bottom of the list. A fizzle-yield, low-efficiency, basically lousy fission bomb could do this.’”
Keep in mind that McPhee recounted this scenario almost 50 years ago, in a pre-9/11 and pre-Covid-19 world where the dangers posed by weapons of mass destruction were less apparent.
It is insane that today we continue to have not only the House and Senate packed together in the same building, but also the White House, Supreme Court, Pentagon, FBI and CIA all located within a radius of a just a few miles. A nuclear or biological attack in this area could be a death blow to the United States, causing future historians to look back and puzzle over why we did not spread out the risk over our broad land. In a country that measures almost 3,000 miles east to west from New York to San Francisco and 1,500 miles north to south from Grand Forks, ND to Corpus Christi, TX, there is no reason why we should have our vital organs concentrated in one tiny region of the nation’s body.
The House of Representatives is a good place to begin the project of dispersal of power because, of all federal elected officials, members of the House are supposed be closest and most accountable to the needs and interests of the people living in their home districts. Senators represent entire states, sometimes numbering in the tens of millions. But representatives must reside in smaller districts, numbering well under a million per representative based on the current U.S. population. And, unlike senators, they must go back to their home district voters every two years to seek re-election, suggesting that the framers wanted the House to be in close contact with the pulse of the people.
In past centuries, when instant digital communication and live teleconferencing were not available, it was necessary to send representatives off to Washington to deliberate and vote upon the nation’s business. This is no longer true. If lobbyists want to exert disproportionate influence over the votes of House members, they should bear the burden of traveling all around the country for that privilege.
Eliminating the need for members of the House of Representatives to reside at least part-time in D.C. should improve the quality of representation. Enabling prospective representatives to maintain normal lives with their families in their home districts would expand the pool of candidates interested in serving in Congress. The present system disproportionately encourages representation by climbers more interested in pursuing national ambition or a degree of fame than in living normal lives in their home districts. A “stay at home order” for the House of Representatives would discourage, for example, carpetbaggers like Liz Cheney, who represented the interests of the D.C. Beltway and the Military-Industrial Complex rather than Wyoming.
Along the same lines, the current Congressional salary of $174,000 per year would go a lot further for representatives if they could maintain a single residence in their home district and didn’t have to commute to Washington to participate in deliberation and voting. In fact, far from complaining about the insufficiency of compensation, as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) did last year, there are many people who would see such a salary as incredibly generous in comparison to prevailing wages in their home districts. Perhaps they would receive it with more gratitude and refrain from engaging in insider trading to make up for the perceived inadequacy of their paychecks.
Nitpickers may protest that a strict reading of the Constitution precludes a shift to virtual attendance. But Article I, Section 4 states merely: “The Congress shall assemble at least once in every Year, and such Meeting shall be on the first Monday in December, unless they shall by Law appoint a different Day.” A virtual assembly should meet this requirement.
A larger project of federal government dispersal should involve a plan to see the White House, Supreme Court and Senate located in different parts of the country. I personally like the idea of putting the Senate in Kansas, the geographical center of the continental United States, but I’m flexible.
The idea of spreading out the federal government may sound unrealistic, especially given the human tendency to wait until a crisis happens to respond with bold action. But it is a no-brainer from the perspective of risk management, with the ancillary benefit of corruption mitigation. Our so-called leaders should at least be having this conversation.