Tariff schedules,
navy yards, army posts, rivers and harbors, post offices and federal
buildings, pensions and patronage: these are fed out to concave
communities as tangible evidence of the benefits of national life.
Being concave, they can see the white marble building which rises out
of federal funds to raise local realty values and employ local
contractors more readily than they can judge the cumulative cost of
the pork barrel. It is fair to say that in a large assembly of men,
each of whom has practical knowledge only of his own district, laws
dealing with translocal affairs are rejected or accepted by the mass
of Congressmen without creative participation of any kind. They
participate only in making those laws that can be treated as a bundle
of local issues. For a legislature without effective means of
information and analysis must oscillate between blind regularity,
tempered by occasional insurgency, and logrolling. And it is the
logrolling which makes the regularity palatable, because it is by
logrolling that a Congressman proves to his more active constituents
that he is watching their interests as they conceive them.
This is no fault of the individual Congressman's, except when he is
complacent about it. The cleverest and most industrious representative
cannot hope to understand a fraction of the bills on which he votes.
The best he can do is to specialize on a few bills, and take
somebody's word about the rest.
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