Noting that Matt Lauer could be fired but Al Franken and John Conyers could not, he writes,
There’s an irony here. The government, which imposes regulations and other restrictions in a top-down way across the whole economy, has a strange degree of autonomy. The constraints on government tend to come from the bottom up, with limited effectiveness. The control is spread out over time and the process of competition among political parties is more like a cartel than a competitive market. The constraints on the private sector actors are top-down. The board of directors fires the CEO at will. There is much more command-and-control at NBC than there is in the oversight of Congress.
Read the whole essay. Russ does not offer any definitive answers on this topic du jour. I try very hard to resist du jour topics, but I may end up writing on this one.
It’s not accurate to conflate “Government Employees” with elected officials. Ordinary, non-elected, and non-politically appointed employees – and even quite senior leaders on occasion – are disciplined for sexual misconduct all the time, to include termination (eventually) in the more egregious instances.
Legislators, on the other hand, are construed as agents on a temporary, renewable contract from the people of their district. They are not ’employees’ of some organization called ‘Congress’, are instead are class representatives that merely congregate in a particular place to negotiate on behalf of the interests of their constituents, as if they have a ‘power of attorney’ to handle certain matters.
And as such, the rules regarding that power of attorney, and when it can be revoked, and when and in what manner they can be recalled and replaced, etc., at least in our constitutional order, are determined mostly by the law of the states in which their district lies.
A good analogy could be drawn to, for example, a lawyer representing a family in an attempt to arrive at a settlement in multi-party litigation. If someone tells the family, “You need to know, your lawyer, while excellent at his job, was nevertheless once accused, but never tried or convicted, of some bad misconduct,” then it is up to the family and the terms of the agency contract to decide whether to retain counsel or switch to someone else. All the other parties and their lawyers don’t have any say in that matter, and they ought not to have any say. Now, they could collectively decide to bring informal social pressures to bear, and ostracize or shun that lawyer so as to render him ineffective, effectively forcing the family’s hands. But they can’t just fire the guy against the family’s wishes.
Now for lawyers there could also be sub-criminal conduct or accusations that are still so egregious that their state could disbar them according to occupational licensure standards and the need of the profession to maintain reputational capital, and/or judges or courts could decide that the attorney is so contemptuous that he is barred from arguing before them, and so forth.
But again, this is very different from “Congress” having the ability to purge a member like a private company can terminate an employee.
Handle gets it. Essentially everyone in government except for legislators and maybe Cabinet level appointees are easy to fire. They have been fired for sexual misconduct in the past. Congress is unique. It is not responsible to anyone but the voters. It makes it’s own rules and polices itself. Any wonder it has problems?
Steve
I don’t know about “easy to fire”. I’ve been reading for years about how hard it is to fire anyone from the civil service…
It is hard, but not really any harder than it was for GM to fire a unionized worker with a lot of seniority and contractual protections. While there is a lot of job security, tales of effective impunity of civil servants are myths.
In particular, discriminatory, harassing, and offensive conduct against protected groups will very quickly get one some negative consequences, and when appropriate, into the extensive process that eventually leads to removal and termination.
> In particular, discriminatory, harassing, and offensive conduct against protected groups will very quickly get one some negative consequences
From what I’ve seen and heard, that’s pretty much the only way to fire a civil servant. Failure to perform job duties is not generally a firing offense.
Your decision to avoid du jour topics mostly contributes to the admirable qualities of this blog, IMHO.
I wonder what the ideal “cooling off” period is for a topic. Is three days long enough to wait? Three weeks? It depends on (1) how insightful your comments will be, (2) the level of your expertise or analysis, and (3) your ability to maintain some distance from the fervor du jour.
Walter Laqueur said that much of the writing on terrorism after 9/11 was of low quality because it provided experts (real and self-proclaimed) with a new opportunity “to parade hobbyhorses.” All we heard was what people were already going to say, based on pet theories already developed before hand.
It’s a tough judgment call. If we can predict what you will write before you write it, you don’t have to blog it. If it’s new and unpredictable perhaps it’s a more valuable signal, but the problem with new and exciting ideas is that often they aren’t correct, they are simply incorrect (but interesting to intellectuals since new and exciting).
I can’t manage to get italics to turn on and off. My apologies for having italicized the whole post. Better next time for sure.
Which points out [again] how clever were our founding fathers, as well as a perhaps unforeseen consequence of the 17th Amendment.
As we all know, the Constitution originally provided for direct election of U.S. House representatives every two years — allowing for near-contemporaneous oversight and accountability for constituents’ satisfaction or dis-satisfaction with the quality of the representation provided.
The post-17th Amendment direct election every SIX years of senators chronologically distances accountability for any senator’s actions from his constituents’ disapproval (besides diluting any electoral backlash among a far more numerous voting pool.) I don’t know whether it’s ever been done, but absent a showing of historical fact to the contrary, I presume that a pre-17th A. a state legislature could contemporaneously recall and replace a senator with sufficient votes?
Perhaps repeal of the 17th Amendment is worth consideration as a remedy for what may now be perceived as a “termination” problem in the Senate?
Recall of Senators? Not according to Wikipedia:
“…During the American Revolution the Articles of Confederation stipulated that state legislatures might recall delegates from the Continental Congress.[5] According to New York Delegate John Lansing, the power was never exercised by any state. The Virginia Plan, issued at the outset of the Philadelphia Convention of 1787, proposed to pair recall with rotation in office and to apply these dual principles to the lower house of the national legislature. The recall was rejected by the Constitutional Convention. However, the anti-Federalists used the lack of recall provision as a weapon in the ratification debates.
Several states proposed adopting a recall for US senators in the years immediately following the adoption of the Constitution. However, it did not pass.”
Thanks for finding that. Interesting that it was considered at all (although I’m not clear from the excerpt whether it was intended to apply to both or just one chamber?)
Non-inclusion of any recall provision in the existing Constitution would sort of leave the question unanswered in the case of a return to state appointment of senators, though. Doesn’t it?
Given that the limits of constitutionality have been continuously tested in the courts & have been found quite flexible (my favorite target for overturning is Wickard v Filburn, but there are many more recent cases), it would be an interesting case to argue.
Or, it could be specifically included as part of the repeal amendment, which would appear to be a better path.
…just trying to think outside the box. 🙂
There is little difference between CEOs with the board in their pocket (and far too many are also chairman), heads of private companies, individual entrepreneurs with sole or majority control, self employed practitioners, or elected officials, answerable only to courts or the court of public opinion and above the rules for the most part.
A related question – the behavoirs in question have been going on for a very long time. Some of the parties in question got away with it for very long time.
Then, suddenly it seems to me, high placed executives are fired or forced out, and several politicians, some thought nearly untouchable, are forced to withdraw from elections (Murray from the Seattle mayor’s election) or even resign from office (so far Al Fraken.)
What caused this “phase change”? Why didn’t this volume of accusations, some in patterns that seem very credible albeit not yet proven by trial, flow after the Cosby accusations? Or after Bill Clinton’s well documented behavoirs? What changed? And will it stay changed? And will it mature into something fair and lasting, or remain a kind of trial by accusation?
(Not to say that at least some of the parties recently unseated were not in reality guilty….)
If one looks closely at the accused there is a general pattern.
1) Few are physically attractive. If they once were age has taken its toll.
2) Many are past their “prime” in various ways. Even if they still have a good deal of status, its often less then when the actions they were accused of took place.
3) The women doing the accusing can no longer hope to get anything out of the men in question. Whether that be favors or a romantic relationship.
Take Bill Clinton. He’s past his prime, not very attractive anymore, and after Hillary lost its clear the Clinton time has past. So its open season.
If people were serious about “draining the swamp” on this issue we wouldn’t have seen such a backlash against Mike Pence saying how he took precautions against being alone socially with attractive capital hill girls because its just a recipe for trouble. He got eviscerated for being a “puritanical” by the same people part of #MeToo.
Women want to keep their options open. Being chased, often inappropriately, is a popular female fantasy (50 Shades, Twilight, all those Harlequin books). The Mike Pence strategy was a kind of mutually agreed upon disarmament strategy. Women gave up trying to sleep to the top, men gave up being horndogs. Both went against their natural urges so we could have some order and peace.
I think what we are seeing something more like an attempt to play both ends. Women still want to play the game, but want it more slanted in their favor. Men that don’t pay up (don’t leave their wife and marry them, don’t give that promotion) in exchange for play get accused. The government/public opinion becomes like a pimp making sure that John pays up or else.
If I’m wrong we’ll start seeing women accuse true alphas at the top of their game at the time the event occurs. Or returning ill gotten gains from male affections. I don’t anticipate either of these.
Till then its all Twitter, Fury, and kangaroo courts.
Louis C.K. has never looked more attractive than he does now.
Go back ten, twenty, thirty years and he looked ridiculous. Now he’s making movies with David O. Russell and Woody Allen and he’s a handsome bear. He looks great.
But Bill Clinton? A lot of women very bravely spoke out against him when he was Governor and President, and they did this knowing that the DNC and NBC and the NYT would punish them.
Hell, Gloria Steinem was defending him against his victims.
This seems like a lot of recent history cherry picking. Roger Ailes and Harvey Weinstein both ran their organizations for over a decade with a lots of sexual harassment and the boards pretended not to know. And both Conyers and Franken are on the way out. (And along with what Handle wrote.)
I would say that the elected officials are analogous to the board of directors, and the shareholders analogous to the voters, although where different classes of shares each elect one board member and maybe they all vote together to elect a director of the board.
It would be interesting to see a structure where the legislature appoints a “CEO type” manager to run a country. Many localities where there is an appointed city or county manager seem to run decently in this configuration.