What Are the Job Descriptions of Representatives and Senators? (with Casey Burgat)

Understanding Congress

The topic of this episode is: “What are the job descriptions of representatives and Senators?”

To answer that question, we have Dr. Casey Burgat. He's the director of the Legislative Affairs program at the Graduate School of Political Management at George Washington University. Dr. Burgat also has had stints at the Congressional Research Service, and he worked with me back when I was at the R Street Institute. Recently, he and Professor Charlie Hunt authored the book, Congress Explained: Representation and Lawmaking in the First Branch. Casey has been studying Congress and how it operates for years, which makes him a great person to ask the question, what are the job descriptions of representatives and Senators?

Kevin Kosar:

Welcome to Understanding Congress, a podcast about the first branch of government. Congress is a notoriously complex institution, and few Americans think well of it, but Congress is essential to our republic. It’s a place where our pluralistic society is supposed to work out its differences and come to agreement about what our laws should be, and that is why we are here to discuss our national legislature and to think about ways to upgrade it so it can better serve our nation. I’m your host, Kevin Kosar, and I’m a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank in Washington, DC.

Dr. Casey Burgat, welcome to the program.

Casey Burgat:

Thanks for having me.

Kevin Kosar:

It's not unusual for Americans to grumble about Congress and to complain that these elected officials are not doing their jobs. But last I checked, there're no official job descriptions for the positions of representative and Senator. So in thinking about what these guys are supposed to be doing, I think we should probably start with the US Constitution. It certainly has some clues.

Casey Burgat:

Yes. Always, always start with the Constitution. It takes us back to the Founding. It sets the framework for how we're supposed to think about a lot of these institutional questions. This is one of them.

The Constitution does provide at least some clues, but definitely not as many as we assume are in there—especially in regards to the actual duties of Senators and representatives. It does give eligibility requirements of who can serve: you have to be 25 years old to be in the House, 30 in the Senate, seven years a citizen, etc. But after that, it gets surprisingly and oftentimes frustratingly sparse in terms of what individuals are supposed to do once they're elected. We have to look more broadly and deduce our expectations of job descriptions.

We can take some hints about what the individual members are supposed to do based on what the Constitution says that Congress as an institution—and the individual chambers—are tasked with. So Congress-wide, all legislative powers are granted to Congress. It's right there at the top—Article I, Section 1—no debate about it: Congress is the legislative branch. Then, they itemized what other powers Congress is supposed to have: to declare war, coin money, and—Kevin, I know this is for you—establish post offices, etc. We know that they're supposed to do that. Then each of the chambers has its separate roles: the House deals with revenue legislation, impeachment, etc. The Senate has advice and consent on treaties and nominations, and exclusively conducts the impeachment trials that the House sends them. Because Congress and the individual chambers are constitutionally tasked with these types of duties, if they don't do them, no one else will—at least in theory; in practice, we know it's not always that simple.

So given that the Constitution gives them these duties—both as an institution and as individual chambers—we can at least somewhat deduce that they are part of their constitutional job descriptions. But that's about where the Constitution runs out of the details on exactly what these 535 powerful members are supposed to do every single day. In fact, the vagueness of the Constitution is intentional. The Framers explicitly punt on a lot of these specifics that we often assume they've detailed for the individual members and Congress as an institution.

For example, the Constitution says things like “each House may determine the rules of its proceedings,” so it's left up to the members to decide how to operate and organize. This means they have to decide things like what—if any—committees to have, how to elect leaders (if they will have leaders), and how to process its business through procedures, especially in regards to legislation. Despite us thinking that it's an unbending, unmovable, and slow-operating institution, Congress has changed these things over time to suit the wants and needs of its membership.

But getting back to your original question about the frustration, this ambiguity and letting Congress figure out the details of the job on its own and changing things as they see fit has absolutely contributed to the public’s frustration with Congress. It's not like throwing a job posting up on Indeed of “Senator” and “representative.” It's up to all of us to decide exactly what these powerful people should be doing with their powers and their hours. And when we don't agree, we inevitably get frustration because you can't be everything to everyone at the same time. This is nothing new and has been a constant challenge for members since the beginning.

Kevin Kosar:

Americans also tend to have conflicting feelings about representatives and Senators. On the one hand, they'll say, "You guys just need to get things done." On the other hand they'll say, "Why aren't you deliberating more? Why aren't you bargaining?" And then on another hand, they'll say, "You need to stick to your principles and quit doing all that compromising and horse-trading." The very nature of the body of Congress itself—that it pulls these people from all over the place with different interests, and throws them into a big soup bowl together—seems to create its own theoretical problems with the expectations we should have for members.

Casey Burgat:

Absolutely. We are full of contradictions and it really helps to admit it. Then we can get past the lazy answer of what they're supposed to do—the bumper sticker version of all this stuff—and have conversations about what Congress is supposed to do and what's possible given all those contradictions baked right into the system.

Every few months we'll see a survey of Americans saying the vast majority of us—90% of us—say we want Congress to get something done, find common ground, compromise on things, etc. That's the lazy version. When we get down to the individual incentives of who these people represent, the thing you might want to compromise on is the thing that I deem as a principle that is uncompromisable. And in fact, the minute that my representative compromises on an issue like that, I'm looking for someone else to take the job.

We see this baked into campaign platforms where candidates will say this explicitly. "Send me there to stop them. Send me there to stop President Trump or President Biden.” Then this message is spun as standing up for principles. This just gets to the conflict that we've had since the beginning. We take all of these constituencies—all of these collective action problems—elect some people to be our voice, and say “Good luck.” Then we blame them when we don't feel represented on the one thing that really matters to us. It is just an incredibly hard job that leads to unrealistic expectations, which—in turn—lead to frustration that is easy to capitalize on. It's an impossible job, and I'm sympathetic to the members who have to navigate this every single day.

Kevin Kosar:

You just mentioned something that's important, which is that we have Senators whose job it is to represent whole states, whereas you have representatives who are supposed to represent districts. At the same time, they both come to Washington, DC and they're supposed to address matters of national concern—not merely local or parochial—which is another tension within there.

Let's set that aside and go to another thing that pulls at us when we think about the role of representative and Senator. Your book mentions these classic terms from political science—viewing the job of the legislator as being a delegate versus a trustee. What do you mean by these?

Casey Burgat:

Political scientists have helped us try to create a framework where we can quickly see the frustration with members of Congress as they attempt to impossibly satisfy everyone with every single issue at every single moment. The framing creates two classifications of members.

The first is a delegate model, where members of Congress should do exactly what their constituents want them to do with no variation. As the representatives of the people, the individuals we gave our vote to should represent the will of their constituents. They're effectively given instructions on how to vote on issues, what to care about, what not to care about, and it's their job as the person in power to go do exactly those things. Then there's this other idea—the trustee model—where members are the professionals who see these issues every single day. They talk about them, they live them, and they have access to much more information. For a ton of issues, there's no possible way that we the people can have an informed viewpoint because we're out there living our lives. We have kids, mortgages, jobs—we don't want to pay attention to politics to this degree, so we elect trustees. We want them to act as our trusted representative and we trust that they will use their best judgment to make decisions on our behalf.

These both sound good, but they are not the same things. One is practical and one is theoretical. There're lots of things that—if we are being honest—we don't know enough about or even care enough about that lawmakers have to vote on. There’s no way that we can give them instructions on all of these issues in a way that is filterable and aggregated up. Even the smallest districts in the country are hundreds of thousands of people. There's not going to be unanimity in what they agree on, let alone unanimity on intensity of how much to care about this. It's the representative's job to represent the will of the people on all things, and try to make these impossible calculations of what to care about, by how much, and then consider the trade-offs that are inherently built into the policymaking process. Again, this leads to frustration with our members, where people think, ‘They're not representing us on this issue at this time in the best way, they're not fighting hard enough, they're compromising too much or not enough.’ It’s impossible to satisfy everyone all the time.

Kevin Kosar:

It occurs to me that one thing that was on display not terribly long ago—when the House was attempting to choose a new Speaker—was the issue of partisanship as implicitly being part of the job, according to some Americans. Namely, you heard people saying like, "The GOP is embarrassing itself. They all should vote unanimously in favor of Kevin McCarthy for Speaker. The fact that they are showing open dissent is a sign of dysfunction. They should do their jobs, pick McCarthy, and move on." Yet at the same time, we often hear the refrain of, "It's always Democrats versus Republicans, and they're always playing politics. Why can't they just focus on the issues instead of partisan identification?" This seems to be another contradiction in our ideas about what these guys are supposed to be doing.

Casey Burgat:

Understanding voter sentiment and what motivates voters to pay attention is a very hard thing to do. It’s hard to get voters to care enough to pay attention healthily and contribute to the conversation, rather than just add volume to it. It’s hard get them to show up to vote—to say nothing of volunteering for a campaign or showing up to local political efforts. It's really hard to get people to pay attention past the sexy cable news topics that're generated for you to pay attention and keep your eyeballs on certain content. Based on what we know about voters, the best way to get most people to pay attention is to appeal to their ideological interests—whether they have them or not—and to lean into their in-group versus out-group tendencies. And this is where it quickly gets very sociological—an “us versus them” mentality.

We send our members to be a part of “us.” If they're representing “the other” too much, then—all of a sudden—we need to look for someone more like “us.” That cycle warps these incentive structures when you think about what the institution is supposed to be and the type of products that it can reasonably produce. So there's definitely a partisan expectation for a lot of voters for their representatives to get to DC and represent those interests. Candidates are part of the problem, too, because they lean into this. They say, "I’m going there to represent your interests. I am explicitly not going to be a compromiser or give up on my principles." That has downstream effects on what's possible in an institution and what the institution decides to focus on. Instead of legislating when you can't reasonably get compromise—because that will cost you your job—you do what else you can do. You provide oversight, investigate, use your resources to paint the other side as corrupt or unpatriotic or incompetent as a means to get more of your leaning in-partisans effectuated and more of your partisans elected to office. There're these contributing factors that just create a doom loop of partisanship because we expect our members to be partisan. They told us they would be.

Kevin Kosar:

You used the word “sociological,” which brings up one more thing: voters frequently judge their representatives and Senators based upon these kind of group identifications. You will have a Senator who will style himself as the person who is speaking for the forgotten blue collar American. You will have legislators who come to Congress and say, "I was sent here by African Americans and I am a member of that community, so my job is to look after their interests first." It seems there's this whole pluralistic aspect that gets poured into this job description.

Casey Burgat:

A hundred percent. Let’s limit the universe to three issues for the sake of this example. We have issue representation where we say, "Okay, there're these three issues. I need a lawmaker to represent what I believe on these three issues." That's one version of representation. There's also demographic representation, where it matters that the people elected to the halls of Congress look and talk like us, come from where we come from, experience our same experiences, etc. There's something to be gained by having demographic representation—independent of issue representation—whether it's gender or religion or race or ethnicity. It's really hard to have full faith in an institution that only looks like one segment of the population.

All of this stuff matters to create an institution that we can look at, see ourselves in, and know that if we're not paying attention on each and every issue, we at least know that the people who are can relate to us. So when you only have rich white dudes in there debating topics and issue areas that rich white dudes fundamentally can't know, it contributes to our frustration. Think of abortion rights or single-mom issues, public education, healthcare, daycare, etc.—it really matters independently of how you come down on these issues. You can be represented perfectly on all the issues, but if they don't look like you, think like you, act like you, talk like you, come from where you come from, you’ll still have questions about their effectiveness as a representative body.

Kevin Kosar:

And you mentioned that there's kind of issue representation versus group or identity representation, and those often overlap. We often see members of Congress who will be accused of not being truly Black, or, being told "You're a woman. The right to an abortion is a woman's healthcare right—a human right. But you as a woman are against it, so you are basically acting like an old white dude and you are not representative of we women." The issue content gets poured into the identity content too.

Casey Burgat:

It’s another sign that you can never be enough of whatever it is you're trying to be to satisfy everyone, which may be—depending on where they stand—too much for other people. For instance, you care too much about women's issues, or you care too much about the wealthy. For most people, this will break down pretty cleanly on ideological grounds. Even then, it gets complicated by these identity factors where, for some people, you're not enough, and for the other side of the aisle, you're too much. So there's no great line to be, and you're automatically screwed from the get-go.

Kevin Kosar:

And looping back to the matters of districts and states and the sort of interests...