12 Guidelines to Help Congress Do a Better Job

The following was written and posted on a blog by one of my favorite bloggers. Beth happens to be a Presbyterian minister, formerly an attorney. She writes with a foot in each camp, and is always on target in my book. She gave permission to share this portion of her blog post October 1st. I urge you to go to her blog site and read more. The address is at the end of this piece.

“..with suitable humility, do I offer a short list of rules (more guidelines, really) that might help Congress get past gridlock and actually have a budget every year as they’re required to do (except when they don’t):

1. Remember nothing is forever: if you will simply remember this obvious fact, maybe it’ll be easier for you to vote on a budget that contains provisions with which you disagree.  You can always vote to eliminate the program next time.  But so long as a program is a program, please stop voting not to fund it simply because you wish the vote had gone the other way.  Which leads to rule #2:

2. Live with it.  Things will not always go your way.  This is how things work when we work in groups.  And maybe, just maybe, ‘it’, whatever ‘it’ is, is not as bad as you fear.

3. Resist the temptation to play hide and seek: this is not the playground, this world you inhabit.  Obscuring what you’re doing by calling it something else or using thousands of words you pray no one will ever read is dishonest.  We deserve better of you and so do you.

4. Act as if we matter: Even if we the people do not matter to you, act as if we do.  Who knows, maybe over time, we’ll actually come to matter to you – and that will be a good thing.

5. “They” love America as much as you do: if you believe, really believe, this, you’ll be surprised at how agreeable you can be with your political enemies.

6. Just because something is hard doesn’t mean it can’t be done: yours is a hard job.  Anyone who says or thinks otherwise is foolish.  Pay them no mind.  That said, never forget that the job being hard is no excuse not to do the job.

7. No one did this to you: nobody made you be a Senator or Congressperson.  This was something you chose.  So please stop resenting the job you worked so hard to get and simply do the job.

8. Remember what your job is: your job is not to get re-elected.  Your job is not to poll all of us to see what we think.  It’s your job to do the heavy lifting of thinking and listening to others among your colleagues and being informed and making rational, thoughtful, and if you are so inclined, prayerful, decisions.  Stop pawning your job off on the American people, hiding behind our opinions as if they’re determinative of what you should do at any given moment.  We hired you to represent us, not reflect us.  We want you to be better than us, not mirror images of us.  And if you need further reminder, go back and reread the Constitution and remind yourselves that we are not a democracy: we’re a representative republic.

9. You are not indispensable.  Nobody is.  Thus you are not.  The Republic will continue without you.  A little humility goes a long way in doing a job, any job, and especially your job, well.

10. This too shall pass.  When the Civil Rights Act was passed in the 1960's, certain Senators predicted the end of the world.  It was the end of a world, but not the end of the world.  And that’s (according to many of us) as it should have been.

11. Compromise.  Said another way, Idealogues are ill-suited to representative republics.  If we the people those many years ago had wanted to always have things go a certain way, we would have kept to kings and queens.  Only when one person is in charge does everything always go the way that person wants.  When all of us are ‘in charge’, it’s messy and complicated and hard work and it requires compromise.  Compromise is not the nasty cost of doing business in the United States; it’s actually the bedrock of our governmental institutions, this idea that the other guy or gal may actually have something of benefit to offer to our common good and our common understanding of ourselves and that our best understandings, not our worst,  come out of the wrestling.

12. When you’re beaten, shake hands.  Every child on every sports field across America understands the ritual of shaking hands, declaring the contest at an end with an acknowledged victor.  When you lose, simply admit you lost and move on.  Don’t keep refighting the fight.  It’s exhausting of resources and wastes time.  You can keep protesting when you’re outside the decision-making circle.  But when you’re inside that circle, you actually serve the working of the institution at least as much as you serve your own particular agenda.  To lead, one cannot act as an outside agitator.  That’s actually the job of folks like me."

- See more at: http://ifbethhadablog.blogspot.com/2013/10/october-is-for-budgets-12-guidelines-to.html#sthash.UXipdYug.dpuf

Now maybe I will forward this to my Congressmen..

Peace and Love,

Marilyn