Tag: Essays

I have a confession to make. I love the United States Congress. I don’t recall hearing that from anyone else lately; although I do know there are others who could say the same thing. If you can trust the latest poll only 6 percent approve of the current Congress and I doubt most in that group would go so far as to profess love for the institution.

My expression of love and respect for this vital American institution is not based on its current state of dilapidation and dysfunction. It is based on its survival and its level of success over 225 years in finding ways to make representative democracy work. It has, in greater and lesser degrees at different times in our history, fulfilled its responsibilities under Article 1 of the United States Constitution.

It was Congress that wrote the Bill of Rights, created the Federal Court System left vague in the Constitution, and created the cabinet offices used by presidents since George Washington. Every good law and every bad law has come from Congress. Every national policy is filtered through Congress. Every dime spent and every tax dollar levied in the past 225 years and every debt incurred and debt paid, has come from the action of Congress. The United States is the product of a remarkable and complex set of  partnerships of Congress with the people, with the presidency, and with American business, tempered from time to time by the Supreme Court.

We have a hard time putting a personal face on Congress in the same way we can the presidency or the Supreme Court. Only 43 individuals have been president and we measure our political history by their administrations. Only 17 individuals have been Chief Justice in the past 225 years, and only 112 individuals have served in the entire history of the court. The court’s history too, is often measured by the name of the Chief Justice.

But in the “people’s branch” more than 11,200 people have served in the House and 1,950 in the Senate (with over 600 serving in both House and Senate). What face do we put on it? Instead Congress gets other labels, like the famous 80^th Congress in 1947-1948, which President Truman called the “Do Nothing” Congress, even though that Congress passed considerable significant, far reaching legislation.

Over the years thousands upon thousands of books have been written about United States history from the perspective of the presidency, we have a system of presidential libraries and museums to the modern presidents since Herbert Hoover which are paid for and maintained with ample private and taxpayer dollars. Yet nothing comparable exists for Congress.

True there is the magnificent Capitol Visitor’s Center, but this is not a research facility.  Across the street from the Capitol is the great Library of Congress, but it is not the depository of the official records of Congress. The voluminous official committee records of Congress, almost as extensive as those of all the presidential libraries, are housed at the National Archives in Washington, D.C., but are owned and controlled by Congress.

Maybe we would appreciate Congress more and understand it better if we knew more about it. But not just from the stuff of daily headlines and tweets, not through the distorted lens of mind-numbing partisanship, but a good hard look at the remarkable achievements, the colossal failures, the great wisdom and the utter stupidity that define this great experiment in government.

The history of Congress after 225 years is the greatest story never told.  We don’t know Congress as well as we should because we have never studied it as systematically as we have the presidency or the federal court system.

The story of Congress is filled with charlatans and frauds and also with noble men and women who have defended the Constitution, understood the importance of the legislative branch as the fulcrum of our government, and devoted themselves to making government work on behalf of the American people. I wish the United States Congress a Happy 225^th Birthday. I hope this marvelous institution is still functioning a hundred years hence, or two hundred years hence, or for as long as the people of the United States value freedom and democratic government.

To raise awareness and to promote the study of Congress from its own records, the Association of Centers for the Study of Congress sponsors Congress Week in the first week of April each year. It was in April 1789 that the House and Senate achieved their first quorums and launched the government of the United States.

Ray Smock is director of the Robert C. Byrd Center for Legislative Studies at Shepherd University in Shepherdstown, WV. He served as Historian of the U. S. House of Representatives from 1983 to 1995 and was a planner of the bicentennial commemoration of Congress in 1989.

For those of us who like to make up our own minds about who, what, and how we are, this is a strange country, where U.S. News and World Report, TIME Magazine and the Gallup Poll profess to know more about our human condition than we do ourselves.

According to those harbingers of happiness and taste, for example, I and my fellow West Virginias  are now served by (and, in my case, teach at) the nation’s eighty-third best law school (up from ninety-ninth in a single year) and reside in its unhappiest, unhealthiest and most obese State.

Funny thing about that: I, along with most of my friends, neighbors and colleagues here in West Virginia, am relatively happy with life here. Happier, for example, than I was in sophisticated and ectomorphic Boston, Washington or New York, where I grew up, or somewhat more mesomorphic and less cheerful Clarksville, Tn. and well, as for my health, whatever lacks I am currently experiencing in that domain have more to do with my own negligence than any shortcomings on the part of this wild and wonderful state.  

Most of my friends and neighbors, in addition, seem in reasonably good physical shape, though I would be last to deny that West Virginia, along with the other eight American states I have resided in, has more than its share of people who are overweight, and more than its fair share of bad teeth.

I’ve lived in West Virginia only a scant five years, but I’ve already grown more than a bit tired of having the place I’ve chosen to live, and maybe even die in, constantly maligned and belittled by our superior-feeling fellow citizens and journalists in New York, Massachusetts, Washington and California, to name but a few. To my mind, at least, the people depicted in the condescending documentary The Wild, Wonderful Whites of West Virginia are no more representative of our State than is Bernie Madoff of New York, or the Boston Marathon bombers Dzhokhar and TamerlanTsarnaev are of Massachusetts.

The wonderful law school I teach at, insofar as I can tell, is equally good as the far snobbier, higher rated, and far less cheerful one I myself attended; our environmental laws may leave something to be desired, but, then again, it may be the breathtaking beauty of our state that draws our attention to them.

Nor is a West Virginia farmer is any more likely to call his sheep “darling,” or marry his cousin, than is a native New Yorker to take a chain saw to a parking meter, or cheat on his taxes.    

Yes, students at WVU seem to have themselves a good time, and probably do a helluva lot more drinking than teetotalers like myself, but whoever it is that’s counting up the party hours, or the drinks, at U.S. News & World Report might be better off finding a worthier subject for his or her skills than making lists no right-thinking person could care less about.

The moral of the story, methinks, is not only that those who can’t do sometimes teach, or that those who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones, but that those who judge the rest of us according to polls might do better taking a long, hard look at themselves: What they find there–who knows? Might take them down a few notches on their polling data where they will have us happy and healthy West Virginians to keep them company.

Michael Blumenthal is a writer who lives in Morgantown, W.Va., and is a visiting professor at the West Virginia University College of Law.

It’s spring and along with bunches of daffodils, robins, and ramp festivals, there is a feeling in the air of fresh starts and new beginnings.

After the winter we have had all I can say is “hallelujah!”

Ironically, though, it was a hint of autumn that made me think of new life this week.

As I drove by our elementary school, I noticed the sign in front heralding that the next day was “Kindergarten Registration Day.”

We are just about a year away from “High School Orientation”  but, boy, do I remember that earlier rite of passage.

It’s been several years, but it seems like yesterday that we walked through the doors of that very school with our son to get him signed up for kindergarten.

Registering your child for – kindergarten!

Do we have all the right paperwork?

Our son has a July birthday, so he is one of the youngest in his class. Should we have him start kindergarten this year or wait a year?

When school starts in the fall, will he like his teacher? Will WE like his teacher?

That day of “Kindergarten Registration” had “this-is-a-big-milestone-in-our-son’s-life-and-ours” written ALL over it.

And, truth be told, it WAS a milestone.

We reached it.

We passed it by.

And we have kept on traveling, through all the years of elementary school and into middle school, past more milestones.

Each milestone brought its own questions and anxieties and excitement and opportunities.

We reached them together and with plenty of supportive family and friends to cheer us along the way.

Life’s like that.

Each new opportunity holds its own questions and its own excitement and anticipation.

But, like the fresh, crisp blank sheets of paper in your backpack on that first day of school, each opportunity holds out the promise of a fresh start and unknown adventures, all just around the next bend.

So, I welcome spring and its traditional signs of “new” – forsythia and red bud and baseball.

But I’m saving some good thoughts for those parents and kids turning their cars into the grade school parking lots over the next few weeks, walking hand in hand into the building and signing up for great adventures.

The world awaits.

Go get ‘em!

Sarah Lowther Hensley is a former West Virginia Public Radio reporter and higher education administrator who lives in Fairmont, W.Va. Her writing appears on her blog Home Among the Hills.