You are the Rulers and the Ruled.
—FROM A CEILING FRESCO IN THE HALL OF CAPITALS, U.S. CAPITOL BUILDING Perhaps the best place from which to view the alarming erosion of our Winner Take All democracy is from inside the chambers of our most hallowed institution—the U.S. House of Representatives. The People’s House. No single body better symbolizes the animating democratic spirit that swept through the American colonies in the mid- to late-eighteenth century. That Spirit of 1776 fomented a revolution that birthed, not without labor pains, a new nation, where it was held to be “self-evident” that “all men are created equal,” and are endowed with “certain unalienable rights,” as Jefferson and Co. so eloquently declared it before the eyes of a candid world.
The putative American revolutionaries had experience enough with chief executives and monarchs to tire of autocratic license invested in a single office.
Washington, to his credit, had the sagacity and strength of character to resist the temptation thrust upon him by some who offered him the Presidency-for-Life. The constitutional Framers themselves regarded the new national legislature as the “first branch,” enshrining it in the first Article of the Constitution.1 No, it was the creation of a directly elected legislative body, roughly representative by capita and elected by the only known method at the time—Winner Take All, either districts or at-large—that was to become one of young America’s most unique and enduring legacies.
The chamber of the People’s House, when empty, is an impressive room. It’s large and palatial, approximately the size of a high school gymnasium, and it is ringed amphitheater-like by a spectators’ balcony from which the public and the media can watch the show below. The pit where House members sit is bedecked with the alternating regality of marble pilasters and a dark, rich walnut shine, walnut being the choice hardwood at the time of its last reconstruction. The finish work around the perimeter is gilted on the edges by a golden trim, a kind of fancy but not gaudy lace, like that of an elegant evening gown.
Semicircular rows of dark wooden benches for the 435 House members are arranged like church pews inside this cathedral to American democracy. The seals of the states and territories circle the ceiling in the order that they joined this new experiment in popular sovereignty, and over the gallery doors of the House chamber are twenty-three marble relief portraits depicting notable historic and legal figures:
Hammurabi, Moses, Justinian I, Thomas Jefferson, George Mason, Napoleon, and more. A large, full-length portrait of Washington hangs to the right of the Speaker’s chair; plastered on the wall behind the Speaker stretches a large Old Glory framed by two pillarlike bronze representations of ancient fasces, invoking the authority of that republican war machine, the Romans. Thus, the patrilineal imperium of the American political system, and its simulacra of legitimacy, are well evoked inside this cathedral of the American republic.
The House chamber, when empty, echoes with history, tradition, and dissent.
Here, the 35th Congress spent months of 1858 in heated debate over whether Kansas should be admitted as free or slave. “Every man on the floor of both Houses is armed with a revolver,” observed one representative. When a Member accidentally dropped his weapon during a bitter eight-week struggle to elect a Speaker of the House, the uproar threatened to turn into mob violence.2 Such were the centrifugal forces of slavery, argued in this very chamber.
Not far from the current House chamber is located the old Senate chamber, where one can almost hear Daniel Webster’s pleas for Union “now and forever, one and inseparable”; or Calhoun’s passionate retorts for states’ rights; or back in the old House chamber, now called Statuary Hall, an elderly war horse in his final years, Quincy Adams, his snores in the back row still resounding. Some two hundred years later the senior senator from New Hampshire now sits at Webster’s original desk, and the senior senator from South Carolina at Calhoun’s; the senior senator from Mississippi occupies Jefferson Davis’ desk and the senior senator from Kentucky Henry Clay’s. The original desks—first made in 1819, and still showing carved initials of some of their former occupants— were moved to the current Senate chamber in 1859, just before the first cannon fire boomed at Fort Sumter.3
The corridors outside the House chamber, called Westward Expansion Hall, Statuary Hall, and The Great Experiment Hall, show colorful historical frescos and statues projecting hawklike visages of some of the statesmen (precious few women), saints and sinners who have paraded, grandstanded, and bluffed their ways through these halls. Like a never-ending tattoo, a kind of Illustrated Man of the national fable, the throat of hallways shows concatenated scenes: of Washington laying the Capitol building cornerstone; of the First Continental Congress and the Constitutional Convention; of the signing of the Mayflower Compact; of the British burning the Capitol; of the Capitol’s Rotunda during the Civil War, with racks of war-wounded lining the perimeter; of Lewis and Clark standing on a bluff overlooking a native village; and of lustful gold prospectors and fur traders. At the bottom of the west staircase that ascends to the House chamber are two gorgeous ceiling murals of native peoples in their natural milieu, one of them showing the ominous presence of Columbus’ death-ships, lurking offshore.
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Flashing forward to 1913: President Woodrow Wilson visited the House chamber, becoming the first president since John Adams to address a Joint Session of Congress, initiating a ritual that subsequent presidents would follow. Four years later, Wilson addressed another Joint Session, announcing the severance of diplomatic relations with Germany—World War I was just around the corner.
Winston Churchill addressed a Joint Session of Congress here after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, predicting with his classic signature understatement a “long and hard war.” Impeachment hearings have been held here for two presidents, one recently burned into the nation’s memory cells; one other president, reading the handwriting on the wall, chose to resign. Sitting high up in the spectators’ gallery ringing the House chamber, one would have to be a recrudescent syndicalist, a moderern-day Guy Fawkes4 holding a match to the gun powder, not to be moved by the drama, the moment, the intersection of the past—the multiple pasts—that reside in this, our People’s House.
Today, leaning over the House gallery’s balcony, a spectator can watch as the chamber’s current inhabitants—our elected representatives—trickle in and mill about, like so many molecules composing the whole. When the chamber is finally filled, say, just before an important vote, the first thing one might notice, gazing down from the gallery, is that this People’s House doesn’t look very much like “the people.” There are a lot of white faces down there—86 percent in fact—and a lot of guys—about 87 percent.5 There are also a lot of gray hairs and shiny pink pates down there—nobody that looks like, say, a regular at a local Midwest diner, or the waitress who serves her or him, or a Los Angeles bus-riding commuter, or a Bronx convenience store owner. Also, we know there’s a lot of lawyers down there, and a lot of real estate, insurance, or finance specialists—taken together, over 60 percent of the House membership.6 And there is a plurality of millionaires down there, in fact during the debate in April 2001 on the repeal of the estate tax, which sought to benefit a small affluent minority holding at least a half million dollars in wealth, it was estimated that 60–70 percent of the Congress would benefit by its repeal.
Indeed, it is rather shocking how little the face of this House of Representatives has changed since 1789, despite two hundred years of litigation, activism, protest, sacrifice, marches, sweat, blood, lynchings, and tears. No, the People’s House still doesn’t look like the people, hardly at all, and the U.S. Senate is even worse in that regard—there are no blacks or Latinos, even fewer women than in the House, and even greater income disparities between the Senators and their voters. A famous nineteenth-century aphorism said, “It is harder for a poor man to enter the United States Senate than for a rich man to enter Heaven,” and things hardly seem different today. No, two hundred years into our history the United States Congress is still a fairly patrician body, more resembling the Roman Senate than a New England town meeting.
But this is what political scientists call “descriptive” or “mirror” representation.
Descriptive representation is academic jargon for what some would label a kind of
“political correctness,” an apparently radical and disquieting notion that The People’s representatives should mirror the demographics of the people they purport to
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represent, at least within some reasonable parameters. Like other matters PC, descriptive representation is not very popular today, either in the academy or in the mass media, ridiculed as government by bean-counters or affirmative action zealots.
Which is ironic, because certainly the Founding Fathers understood that a monarchical and distant overseas British government didn’t reflect their demographics, and they fought a war of independence to establish a principle that it should. John Adams, no Jefferson radical, wrote that “this representative assembly…
should be in miniature an exact portrait of the people at large.”7 So let’s just take note of the fact that, when we look in the mirror of the People’s House, of this Winner Take All legislative body, the mirror doesn’t reflect back, and then let that drop. For now.
The flip side of descriptive representation is what is called “substantive”
representation. This is the more accepted notion that what is most important is not what our elected officeholders look like, but rather that they represent the best interests of their constituents and the nation. The corollary to this is that, while the inhabitants of the People’s House may not look like the people, they at least think like the people; they share their opinions, or at least act as their constituents would have them do, and as a collective body duly represent the people’s best interests. But is that really true? Do the current inhabitants of the People’s House really think like the people or act as the people wish? Let’s explore that notion a bit.
Once the great chambers of the House are full, and debate starts, other observations spring to mind. There are two sides in this chamber, a left and a right—
Democrats on one side, Republicans on the other—with an aisle, a dividing line, down the middle. The People’s House is divided into two partisan sections, like the line where the ocean meets the rocky shore, forever battering against each other. But surely the American people, with its vast array of ethnicities, religions, languages, geographic regions, political philosophies, Web sites, jazzy urban centers, and climate zones, are not so easily categorized. In fact, it’s one of the great modern ironies that as consumers we can purchase at least fifteen different types of toothpastes, twenty-one different breakfast cereals, thirty-one flavors of ice cream, fifty-seven channels of cable, a dozen airlines, and a cornucopia of magazines, newspapers, TV shows, and Web sites—consumer choice being a mantra of the times—but in the political sphere we effectively have two choices (and as we will see in the next chapter, in nine out of ten legislative races we really only have one choice).
The free marketplace has spread everywhere except to our politics. The American nation is a bright and splendid peacock, of dizzying colors and shimmering array, but the People’s House is a rather drab, two-toned bird.
No, the People’s House is the bastion of phantom representation, where T-rex right-wingers like Tom DeLay and Dick Armey supposedly represent everyone in their districts, including the Democrats and liberals; and where fiery liberals Patrick Kennedy and Jesse Jackson Jr. represent even the Republicans and conservatives in their districts. This is the House of artificial majorities, where representatives who received less than a majority of popular votes nation-wide nevertheless ended up with a majority of seats.8 These are the 435 “chosen ones,” those who currently
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reign over the semifeudal Winner Take All districts, the representatives of the two- choice tango. These proxies are supposed to represent “we the people,” but they were the choices of surprising few numbers of voters—only a third of eligible voters actually cast votes for winning candidates. There is little inspiring about this leadership body, as evidenced by the numbers of voters who bothered to show up on Election Day, less than a majority (and in 1998 barely a third), the lowest in the world among established democracies.9
Needing an explanation for AWOL voters that can reinforce the legitimacy of our flaccid elections, the cavalry in the form of Official Rationalization has already arrived. One respected sociologist has proposed the radical notion that citizens participate in our modern society in a myriad of ways, and that voting and elections is just one of them, and not even necessarily the most important—so let’s not get too worked up, presumably, over single-digit voter turnouts, disengaged young voters, or our spiraling national political depression.10 George Will, ever the mischievous neo-con trying to burst liberal balloons, periodically tosses off the opinion that maybe people don’t vote because they’re satisfied—there are better things to do in a prosperous democracy, after all, than muddle through campaign sound bites and thirty-second TV ads.11 But the Willian thesis conveniently ignores reams of hard evidence about who does and who does not vote: the voting electorate is overwhelmingly whiter, wealthier, older, and more educated than those who don’t vote.12 In other words, those who have least reason to be satisfied are those who have been no-shows on Election Day (in fact, it was a large and sudden influx of black voters to the Florida polls, many for the first time, that overwhelmed the unprepared poll workers. Knowing that many of their votes never were counted, it remains to be seen if these voters will lapse back into their previous standby mode).
These voting demographics are one of the undeniable outlines, the shape of this place, wobbling toward post-democracy. And no amount of Willian sophistry can change that.
But back to the debate on the floor of the People’s House. The deliberations are heated this particular day, uncustomarily so. Usually the debates are flaccid, quotidian even, as each representative stands and delivers with a rather perfunctory wind up, without much ceremony or fanfare. The Members usually don’t listen to each other much, having heard each other’s cant and rant a hundred times before.
Rather, if they are present on the floor at all, they converse with their seat mates, or a page, or stroll around the chambers, smiling and waving at visiting constituents in the gallery like a major league baseball star hanging around the dugout.
But today the Members are rapt and riveted; Speaker of the House Hastert is having to bang his gavel and enforce decorum and civility more than usual. Rep.
DeLay from Texas is a snarling Republican pit bull, rising on the House floor to deliver a series of elemental attacks, invoking God and nation and lancing his opponents with partisan barbs and opprobrium. Rep. Hyde is relentless, attacking his pet straw man, the entertainment industry, and tossing in sermons decrying
“moral decay” for good measure. Democrats respond in kind; Speaker of the House–
hopeful Gephardt accuses the Republicans of being beholden to certain special
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interests, of being out of touch with the American people, of leading a “do-nothing”
Congress. Rep. Dingell from Michigan is appealing to his Democratic colleagues for crossover votes. Each side tries to score points in a governing process that in recent years has degenerated, sadly, into one long scorched-earth campaign filled with partisan rancor and legislative rope-a-dope.
And there are many points to score, because today the issue is—gun control. It’s a particularly hot and muggy June 1999 in the nation’s capital, and similarly the temperature in the House chamber this day is torrid. The level of vituperation and acrimony is palpable, the ripostes and sparring resound with the searing passion displayed previously in these chambers by abolitionists and states rightists, or Vietnam war hawks and doves, and manifest destiny mouthpieces who have plowed the way, come hell or high water. Not more than three weeks ago, two high school students in Littleton, Colorado, waltzed into their high school, each bearing more individual firepower than a GI storming the beaches of Normandy, and blasted away thirteen of their classmates and teachers and then committed suicide. This massacre is the latest tragedy in a string of suburban schoolyard shooting sprees, and before that a rash of drive-by shootings at urban schools, that has left the nation stymied about how to protect its children. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, ten children and adolescents in the United States are killed each and every day by gunfire—nearly 4,000 per year, 86 percent of the firearm deaths for children in the entire world13—a level of horror usually expected in death-squad dictatorships like El Salvador or Pinochet’s Chile, or in the Taliban’s Afghanistan.
Indeed, on this very June day, as the U.S. House of Representatives debates a change in gun-control policy, yet another armed student went berserk at a high school in Georgia, upping the ante as a restless nation looks toward their elected representatives for national leadership. National opinion polls clearly show an overwhelming majority of people favoring stricter gun controls.14 This People’s House, which doesn’t look like the nation nor probably reflect the diversity of opinion encapsulated within it, is being asked to stand and deliver, in essence to show that, at the very least, they think like the people they purport to represent, or at least can lead the nation out of its current gun-slinging morass.
We all know how this one turned out. Congress punted the ball. If we wanted to look for a more fitting example of the trivialization of public opinion and national policy by what Winner Take All politics has become, we can hang a “Look No Further” sign here. Congress, asked by an anxious nation to do something about school safety and gun control, responded by passing a recommendation that the Ten Commandments be posted in the nation’s public schools. Held hostage by certain Members elected from safe, one-party, Winner Take All districts and more interested in political posturing than effective policy, the gun debate degenerated into partisan screed blaming modern culture, including birth control, the theory of evolution, and daycare.15 It was one of the most stunning congressional failures of policy formation in recent history. Washington, DC, once again revealed itself as a kind of noir movie without end, a horror flick that one cannot exit, where the hockey-masked assailant keeps rising again and again.
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