Good Government

Yesterday, Sunday, I watched C-SPAN from four in the afternoon until midnight. I told my wife not to be mad, because a lot of husbands do that all Sunday long—during the football playoffs.

But not me. I was looking at a live video feed of the U.S. House of Representatives in session. It wasn’t anything I hadn’t seen before. I’ve watched Congress in session from the House gallery before. I worked on the floor of a state House of Representatives as a political science student in college. But I had never seen this.

My parents’ generation got to see this. They got to see Congress do big things. They saw Congress pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964. They watched Medicare and Medicaid created on the floor of the House just a year later. And their parents watched Social Security take form in the same place in 1935.

But us—my generations of X, or Y, or whatever we called ourselves who were born to the baby boomers, we never saw anything like this before. Maybe that’s why we got so cynical. Maybe that’s why we think Congress is more corrupt that the Sicilian mob. Whatever we thought, that went out the door yesterday.

Yesterday, I watched Congress—our government, elected officials, politicians—do something I had never seen before. It was the first time in my 34 years that I watched government do something for us.

Usually, Congressional resolutions go something like this: AN ACT to provide for the privatization of certain military functions. Or AN ACT to increase foreign investment in renewable coal power plant technology. Or AN ACT to bypass certain trade restrictions on Idaho potatoes. Or, in other words, AN ACT to do nothing but something for some well-heeled self-interested power group.

This was different. I read sections of the House Resolution passed last night, waded through the legal mumbo jumbo and section headers and references to other laws and strike-outs and underlines, and read something that actually does something for no other reason than that it is good.

I read provisions etched in law that go against every notion of Darwinian capitalism—just to protect the vulnerable. I read parts of law that fly in the face of moneyed corporations who have everything to lose and nothing to gain. There are paragraphs that tell health insurers, who have long been acting like the monopoly in a company town, what they can and can’t do—who cares how much money you have.

And I saw politicians—yes, slimy, dirty, rotten politicians—put their careers at stake to do something good. No matter what you think about the 219 House members who voted for the legislation yesterday, you can’t say they lacked fortitude.

And for the first time in my life, I got inspired by government. I felt good about what it did yesterday. It made me think, in all my cynicism, that the government can do what’s right.

I hope we see more of that.