Congressional Capacity

Pitzer alum running for the House (h/t Sam)

From Vital Statistics on Congress (essential reference)





Personal and Committee Staff

Constituent communication and its connection to congressional capacity and lawmaking

When advocacy groups target thousands of calls or emails at a single member of Congress, it's these low-level and in some cases unpaid interns and junior staffers they inundate. In one particular office the OpenGov Foundation staff observed, those interns sat side-by-side at a shared desk in a walk-in closet that was so small, one of them had to stand up in order to let the other one out. On the wall inside the closet, they'd taped a poster with a drawing of a window on it.

"We're looking at building capacity for Congress," Meag Doherty, one of the researchers, who previously worked as a congressional staffer, says of the tools OpenGov Foundation builds. "Seeing something like interns in a closet reminds me that is needed."

Report on constituent communication

Capacity

• Multiple charts
• Declining committee capacity

Staffs.......1995.......2015

CRS.........746..........609
GAO.....4,572.......2,989

CBO .........214.........235

Problems at CRS

The Imperial Presidency

Hamilton in Federalist 8: "It is of the nature of war to increase the executive at the expense of the legislative authority."

Tocqueville, p. 126: "If the Union’s existence were constantly menaced, and if its great interests were continually interwoven with those of other powerful nations, one would see the prestige of the executive growing, because of what was expected from it and of what it did."

"Do you think Americans care about Ukraine?”  --  Mike Pompeo, Secretary of State and former congressman from Kansas