As Congress and many state legislatures get under way, there are lots of new lawmakers out there starting to learn the ropes. It’s an exhilarating, exhausting time, and they’ll have plenty of questions about the challenges. But here’s one thing they might not even have imagined: The hardest part of their new jobs may be the most basic – casting a vote on legislation.
It took a constituent asking point-blank what I found most difficult about the role before I grasped this. I thought about the long hours, the time away from home, the criticism and pressure from pretty much every side. Then I realized that it wasn’t the frustrations of the job that made it difficult, but its very core: deciding how to vote.
You have to remember that legislators are asked to vote on a complex array of issues, most of which are far more complicated than tweets and sound bites can possibly capture. For a legislator who is truly trying to do her or his best, deciding how to vote requires hard work.
The first consideration is – or at least, should be – the views of the people a lawmaker serves. From time to time, those sentiments all run in the same direction, but often they conflict, so a legislator has to work hard to find the majority’s sentiment. Making a decision involves sorting through a host of arguments – from legal and economic to practical and moral – and then making a judgment about which are most compelling.
Then, of course, there are the political considerations. On the one hand, politicians these days are often expected just to fall in line with what the congressional or legislative leadership expects. But if the electoral politics of the last few years has made anything clear, it’s that voters do not follow party leadership dictates. Any politician interested in re-election needs to look beyond the loudest and most vociferous voices.
Finally, legislators do not arrive in office as blank slates waiting to be written on. They have their own experiences and convictions to draw from.
You can see, then, why deciding how to vote is rarely the easy part of a lawmaker’s job. Yet on every vote, you’ll be expected to have an opinion and to be able to defend it. So, in the end you’ll cast your vote and then move on, because the next one is coming on fast.
Lee Hamilton is a Senior Advisor for the Indiana University Center on Representative Government; a Distinguished Scholar at the IU Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies; and a Professor of Practice at the IU O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs. He was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives for 34 years.
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