Not everything is political, but increasingly, everyone is.
In a democratic country with a growing population, everything’s a resource, an allocation, a public good or ill. There was a time when some things just were, and I am barely old enough to remember that time. We now seem to live in a country that is wrestling between issues of scarcity and nimiety—in which we feel compelled to voice our concerns, complaints, and opinions. Not so long ago, there were simple things that weren’t political, such as school lunches, urban trees, and fish in the oceans. Now, even the most mundane elements of our world have causes, campaigns, and advocacy platforms (e.g., there has been an international movement, spearheaded by cooking guru Jamie Oliver, to make children’s lunches healthier and more sustainable).
Enabled by technology, our concerned voices are piling onto the democratic process in record numbers. But the underpinnings of the legislative process are weakening; accessible legislative information and healthy dialogues between citizens and legislators are difficult to come by. And while we view the bureaucratic process of building legislation as arcane, we rarely glimpse how anachronistic the technology within the process is—from minutes stored in microfiche to bills released online to the public days after they were available in person. The tools of our modern legislative process are old and ill-fitting. If we listened well enough, I think we’d hear the sound of our democratic process cracking under the weight of our new demands.
That sound, for me, was the voice of a U.S. Capitol security guard saying to me, “Oh, there’s nothing left to see here, now. We’re closed.” Closed? Who was the Capitol closed to, and why did this guard assume I was a tourist?
It was 4:25 p.m. on a hot, humid, summer afternoon in the nation’s capital in early July 2008. I was dressed in heels, skirt, and blouse, and had just tromped through three government buildings to get my two gallery passes to watch Senate and House proceedings. Outside the Capitol dome where I’d served as a House intern, I stood at the mouth of the velvet rope as the door to the dome closed. Proceedings in the House and Senate were still underway—but I didn’t have access that day.
I wasn’t a tourist. I hadn’t come to “see” government like a specimen under glass. I was here to observe the U.S. legislative process, but Congress views most constituents who make the pilgrimage to D.C. as tourists, not participants. Congress built a $621 million tourist center at the Capitol, investing relatively little in making its process and information as accessible.
Standing outside the Capitol in the heat of a D.C. summer, I was just another tourist shut out of Congress in person and online.
If I had chosen to visit Congress via Thomas.gov that afternoon, I would’ve found bill information lagging about 48 hours behind what was actually happening in Congress. I would never know that members of Congress and their staff have a more modern, organized, thorough congressional website accessible only to them (on the House and Senate intranet). If I was passionate about an issue, I would’ve cranked out an email or forwarded a form letter to my congressperson. And it would’ve gone into a stack of several thousand emails my representative received that day, one of millions collected in Congress each week; my voice would add to the electronic cacophony of voices of other Americans, a barely manageable, never-ending stream of advocacy that requires our nation’s elected officials to spend more time in document management than in dialogue with constituents. My efforts would be largely ineffective; frustrated, I might choose to believe that my voice didn’t matter at all. Like the 57% of Americans who believe that they don’t have a say in government, I would feel marginalized, when more likely I’d just be caught up in a poor document management system.[159]
I’m not suggesting that we build a new and improved legislative process, one robustly equipped to handle our every whim. I’m suggesting that we need delicate, distributive tools for placing political pressure on our democratic process. If we’re all going to be actively involved in government, we should gain techniques and tools to tread lightly on a system that has served us so well.
[159] 2009 National Conference on Citizenship (NCOC) report, finding that 43% of Americans feel like they have a say in government.