A Government of Citizens

By Hugh Sidey

The Presidency

He who refuses to rule is liable to be ruled by one who is worse than himself. --Plato's Republic

That concern was being discussed at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue last week. Presidential Counsel Fred Fielding is worried--because of low pay, conflict-of-interest suspicions, financial disclosure requirements and press probing of their private lives--about the increasing difficulty of luring citizens into executive positions. What troubles Fielding most is the growing assumption that a person of achievement from the private sector who agrees to take an important Administration post must have an ulterior motive--and therefore must prove his honorable intentions. Excellent people still volunteer for Government service, notes Fielding. "But I wonder how many talented men and women these days never show any interest and we never hear of them because of these problems."

On Capitol Hill, the question of how to attract wise men and women, and how to keep them wise, was also weighing on Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker. His pensiveness came as the Senate debated what to pay members and how much outside income to allow. Baker says that Congressmen are becoming "elected bureaucrats" and not the citizen legislators envisioned at the beginning of the Republic. "We think of ourselves as permanent full-time employees of the Federal Government instead of the elected representatives of the people of our districts and states," Baker declared on the Senate floor. The Congress, he believes, should be made up of merchants, farmers, workers and teachers who keep jobs at home and come to Washington only part time for modest pay.

Other lawmakers, like Wisconsin's Senator William Proxmire, insist that any member of Congress who keeps a job has an automatic conflict of interest. Baker responds that only those who live and work back home really appreciate the needs of constituents. Today's Congress, says Baker, spends most of the year in Washington worrying about the minutiae of complex legislation. "I cannot see any place in the Constitution or the early documents of the Republic where it says Congress was supposed to compete with the bureaucracy in the detailed daily nitty-gritty of governing this country," Baker adds.

It is doubtful that we could go back to a Congress of citizen legislators at this stage of our national life. But the drift toward a Congress of elected bureaucrats has touched off a profound philosophical confrontation. One side believes that all Government servants must be thoroughly divorced from the private sector so as to eliminate conflicts of interest and corruption. The other side argues that a Government of the people, by the people and for the people must have leaders who move back and forth between the private and public sectors. Without cross-pollination, this thinking goes, the Government loses touch and the public becomes restive, even hostile.

Some of that tension is evident today. There are now 19 million people at all levels of American government, and they absorb 36% of the wealth that this nation produces. More and more, their ideas collide with a populace that finds the tax burden too great, regulations too profuse, waste too prevalent and sympathy for ordinary people too limited.

"As there is a degree of depravity in mankind which requires a certain degree of circumspection and distrust," wrote James Madison back in 1788, "so there are other qualities in human nature which justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence. Republican government presupposes the existence of these qualities in a higher degree than any other form." Madison bet on that. Perhaps it is time to reaffirm the belief that there still is sufficient virtue among us for citizens to play a leading role in government. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.