DC Confidential. David Schoenbrod

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      Voters on the left and the right agree that Congress has become ineffective, self-serving, and more beholden to special interests than to the American people. Yet, voters on the left see conservatives as the problem, and voters on the right see liberals as the problem. What neither side sees is that a Congress that lets its members fool the people (and lets the people fool themselves) is the even-more-fundamental problem. Policy analysts on the left and the right agree on substantive policy to a surprising extent, and the electorate is less polarized than those who are active in politics.³¹ Nonetheless, Congress fails to enact such policy because the tricky legislature is stacked against doing what makes sense for us.

      So, while the Left and the Right fight over legislative priorities, the real battle remains unfought. That battle is the struggle between honesty and trickery in Washington. DC Confidential will start the fight by stripping away the veils through which members of Congress and the presidents misrepresent their legislative actions and show how we can win the battle by making them once again shoulder the responsibility that comes with their job and thereby actually work for us.

      Placing responsibility on them for the consequences of their decisions will change how they legislate. I will not attempt to forecast those changes, let alone show that they are good. Voters will decide. That is how things should be with a government that derives its “just Powers from the Consent of the Governed.” What I will show is that were voters no longer fooled by the Five Tricks, they would act more wisely.

       • Chapter 2 explains how Congress is supposed to and did work for a century and half.

       • Chapter 3 describes the beginnings of the trickery in the 1960s and ’70s.

       • Chapter 4 explains the four tricks that Congress uses in making domestic policy (the Money Trick, the Debt Guarantee Trick, the Federal Mandate Trick, and the Regulation Trick) and how Congress came to get away with using them.

       • Chapter 5 shows how these tricks harm us now.

       • Chapter 6 shows that these tricks cannot continue indefinitely, because, unless stopped, they will eventually bring ruin.

       • Chapter 7 explains the War Trick.

       • Chapter 8 proposes a statute that would stop the Five Tricks: the “Honest Deal Act.”

       • Chapter 9 shows how voters could get Congress to pass the Honest Deal Act.

       CHAPTER 2

       How Congress Is Supposed to Work—and Long Did

      The people who met in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787 to draft a constitution for the United States faced a formidable challenge. They knew that most new democracies ended in tyranny or anarchy.¹ Yet, they designed a system of government that pleased most Americans until 1964. That year, as described in the introduction, an overwhelming majority still trusted our government to do “the right thing.” Yet, today most Americans distrust the federal government.

      The drafters of the Constitution pinned their hopes for the new government upon representatives in Congress taking personal responsibility for critical policy choices. This would make them accountable at the polls for the consequences. The legislators’ accountability would force them to engage in open debate about those consequences.

      Insight into the value of open debate can be gained by considering—strange as it may seem—how honeybees choose a new home. If a bee colony in the wild is thriving in the late spring or early summer, the queen bee and about ten thousand companions will depart from the hive in a swarm, leaving their original hive to the bees (and a new queen) that stay behind. That is how bee colonies multiply. The swarm will alight on a nearby tree branch and then choose a site for their new hive.

      William Shakespeare suggested in Henry V that the queen bee rules her colony in the same way as a human monarch rules a country; the bard notwithstanding, monarchy is not how the bees pick a home.² The queen bee plays no part. If she were to be injured house hunting, the colony would perish. So, like American revolutionaries who rejected rule by a king, in locating their new hives honeybees must have a workable alternative to monarchy because making a smart choice is critical to survival.³

      The bee colony leaves picking a new hive to several hundred worker bees. They spread out for miles in every direction to scout for potential sites. Each scout inspects a site, returns to the swarm, and performs a dance that communicates the location of the potential site and the bee’s degree of enthusiasm for it. Yet, the colony cannot simply opt for the site that draws the highest praise from an individual scout. The scouts vary in how much enthusiasm they show for the same site. That is understandable. The suitability of a site depends on many considerations, some of which are difficult to assess. For example, the hive’s interior must be big enough to store sufficient honey to keep the colony from starving over the winter but not so big that the bees can’t fight off the cold by huddling together. The hive’s entrance must also be small enough to bar raccoons and other honey thieves from entering. The small entrance means the scouts must estimate the honey-storing capacity of the interior in the dark.

      While the colony cannot leave the choice up to a single scout, it cannot have every scout visit every potential site, either. The colony would starve before that could happen.

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