Call your legislators

“We the people are the rightful masters of both Congress and the courts, not to overthrow the Constitution but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution.”

— Abraham Lincoln

For today’s post, I am choosing to venture into a topic that might spark some controversy — trust in the Federal Government. As a former runner, I appreciate how training for a marathon is very different from training for a sprint. For this marathon, I believe we need to lean into creating and supporting lasting systems, rather than quick fixes. The specific step I want to lean into is holding our legislators more accountable to fixing the system itself, and I am suggesting that we all place calls to them to make fixing the system a priority.

What’s the problem?

No matter where anyone is at in the political spectrum, one common thread in the US is that public trust in the Federal Government is at an all-time low. This has been true in the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations, so I hope that I am not making any statement here that will offend anyone.

Source: Pew Research Center

There are many reasons for the low trust that the government will do the right thing, and the specific underlying reasons for the lack of trust do vary across the political spectrum. At one end are concerns including excessive spending, perceived inefficiency, size of the government, and encroachment on individual freedoms and economic liberties. At another end are concerns including economic inequality, social justice, the environment, and corporate influence. And the list of other issues can seem endless. However, I believe that behind all of the concern that these problems can’t be fixed stem from the partisanship and the inability for members of the two major parties to work together.

The design of the American system

Of course, ever since more than one person was involved in making decisions of any type, there has been disagreement. I believe the American system was well-designed for governance when presented with a diversity of opinion. For a quick review, there were specific roles for each branch of government. While we often talk about three equal branches of government, they don’t split all responsibilities in thirds. Instead, there are specific functions as outlined by the Constitution.

1. Legislative Branch: Congress creates laws and is designed to be more responsive to the people.

2. Executive Branch: The Executive branch enforces and implements laws passed by Congress. As the leader of the Executive Branch, the President serves as the Commander in Chief of the armed forces, making treaties (with Senate approval), and appointing federal officers and judges (also with Senate approval). The President has the authority to recommend measures to Congress, as well as to highlight legislative priorities and suggest policy directions. The President also has the power to veto legislation.

3. Judicial Branch: The Judicial branch Interprets the laws and actions and ensures they are consistent with the Constitution. Led by the Supreme Court, the Judicial branch resolves disputes and ensures justice under the law.

Congress is the linchpin. It is Congress that passes the laws. The president and administration are supposed to simply implement and enforce. The Judicial branch ensures Constitutionality.

Our current political environment has this flipped, with the President on a spree of signing Executive Orders. It’s important to recognize that Executive Orders written by the Executive Branch are not specifically mentioned in the Constitution, but have been generally accepted when required to “take care that Laws be faithfully executed.” Justice Hugo Black in Youngstown Sheet and Tube Co. v Sawyer wrote “The President’s power, if any, to issue the order must stem from either an act of Congress or from the Constitution itself.”

We are clearly in a situation now where many orders in the current plethora of Executive Orders issued by the current administration do not meet these criteria. The system is not operating in the way it was designed. Even if some individuals may agree with the result of some of these orders, the process to get to those results is operating outside the system’s design, which contributes to the erosion of trust in the system itself.

How did we get here?

I believe that many of the underlying issues stem from the failures by Congress to adjust to changing circumstances. Here are just some that hit my radar screen, and I know this is an incomplete list. Feel free to leave others in the comments.

Legislative gridlock forced delegation to the Executive Branch. Executive Orders became practice because the Legislative Branch has experienced ongoing failures to pass laws because of legislative gridlock caused by partisan divisions. This partisanship has resulted in Congress effectively delegating its legislative powers to the Executive Branch. Admittedly, this inadvertent delegation feels like a very hard problem to solve in general, but we could start with issues visible to both sides and their voters.

Lack of codifying the Chevron deference (the roles of Congress versus federal agencies). There has been some backlash around the Federal government agencies getting too big and wielding too much power. As such, the Trump administration has filed its own executive order establishing governance for federal agencies, where Congress could have stepped in to do so earlier, with a priority around fulfilling legislative intent, increasing Congressional oversight, and establishing review mechanisms rather than simply conforming to the individual wishes of the President. An NYU Law Review article covered this topic all the way back in 2015. The problem here, of course, is that the agencies aren’t necessarily too big. I think very few airline passengers today would blame Boeing’s current safety problems on any excessive size of the FAA, and I think voters on all sides would like to see the US regain its image of safety in the international aerospace market.

Lack of enforceable laws to control partisanship on the Supreme Court. Of course, the current partisanship on the Supreme Court brings up another set of issues, which are not likely to be easily resolved. However, proposals do exist for a code of ethics or term limits for Supreme Court justices, which may (unfortunately) require a constitutional amendment. Still, it is surprising how strong a case for judicial reform can be built on Clarence Thomas alone. Even those that like Clarence Thomas’ judicial opinions can see that there should not be such a publicly visible conflict-of-interest. (I remain both humored and appalled by a John Oliver piece on the topic of Clarence Thomas.)

Money in politics. I don’t want to understate the impact of money in politics through lobbyists, but I believe that both sides know the problems here and could also work together to pass legislation to address these issues to regulate lobbying and reduce the influence of special interest groups on Congress.

Why don’t we focus on this?

The Legislative Branch was designed to be responsive to us as voters, and I believe the power of the people has been underutilized or misdirected.

Because politicians need to get re-elected, many seem more incentivized to spend time on getting quoted by the social media influencers followed by their primary voters than to spend time in the committees actually working on legislation. For many reasons, we as voters need to reduce our consumption and reliance on social media. We also need to change our priorities to value legislation.

In contrast to some very personal issues, including healthcare, poverty, inflation, gun violence, immigration, climate change, and social security, the changes required to fix the structural issues in the government system itself have just been lower priorities in voters’ minds. The anti-Trump messaging of “preserving democracy” didn’t fly well in focus groups, and the messaging was likely too vague to even understand how to measure the success of. However, if we really want to “build to last” and create a better system for future generations, we need to invest in making the system itself better.

What are my next steps?

My next plan is to use the system to try to improve the system and encourage others to do so, too. We as citizens can let our legislators know what’s important to us, and I want to ensure that they know I care about many of these systemic issues, including better oversight of money in politics, federal agencies, and Supreme Court ethics. With respect to gridlock, I think there need to be some more creative solutions, but I believe we need to start with some wins to fix the system itself.

To get the attention of our legislators, the basic recommendation from Washington insiders is to make six calls per day: two each (the DC office AND the local office) to our two senators and one representative. The basic guidance is that online contact basically gets immediately ignored and letters pretty much get thrown in the trash. It is these calls that the legislators pay attention to, as the senior staff and the legislators get a report about the three most called-about topics every day at each of their offices sorted by ZIP code.

As such, I’ve started daily calls to my House representative (Suzanne Bonamici) and my two senators (Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley). Per recommendations, I have put the numbers for their Washington, DC and Portland metro area offices in my contacts with the first name “Politician” for easy access.

Screenshot of the entries in my iPhone Contacts app

Some notes:

• With my House representative, I have typically reached a staff person live in both the local Portland and the Washington, DC offices.

• With my senators, I have typically left voice messages.

• I pick a single issue to focus on

• I generally get asked for my ZIP code, but provide it even if they don’t ask.

• Some voice messages require that I leave my address

• The Washington office for one of my senators seems to have my email address on file!

Regardless of whether people’s opinions differ from mine, I personally believe that everyone who wants to improve their trust in government should take advantage of this opportunity.

Some other interesting data.

“Republican callers tend to outnumber Democrat callers 4-1, and when it's a particular issue single-issue voters pay attention to (like gun control, or planned parenthood funding, etc...), it's often closer to 11-1, and that's in part why Republican congresspeople who may otherwise be on the fence continue to vote the way that they do.”

— @annepmitchellesq via Threads

Also, for any Democrats who are in Republican districts, this interesting video from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is relevant.

This is Easy

You can do this too! If you’re at all hesitant, I’ve recorded my calls that I placed today. You can hear that these only took a few minutes.

• Call to Rep. Bonamici (Washington, DC)

• Call to Rep. Bonamici (Portland)

• Call to Sen. Merkley (Washington, DC)

• Call to Sen. Merkley (Portland)

• Call to Sen. Wyden (Washington, DC)

• Call to Sen. Wyden (Portland)

If you need some guidance or additional tips, you can also try the site 5calls.org for more information!

Will you join me? If so, what issues are you interested in calling about?