The Real Reason

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This is the first day of the Obama Administration, and I haven’t seen any news since 7 a.m.

Aaarrggggh!

It is amazing how isolating it can be to work in the Capitol. There are no TVs and no radios around. I could listen over the computer, of course, but it is difficult to concentrate on both, so I wind up either working and not hearing the news or listening to the news and not getting any work done. Generally, I choose to get the work done. There are, of course, mounds of it.

The information age has meant that the paper trail is longer and wider every day. Sen. Faust-Goudeau receives e-mails on two aol.com accounts, plus the state computer network, where both she and I have separate inboxes. I try to read the e-mails on at least two of these sites every day, both the “official” inbox every day and alternating aol.com inboxes every other day. Needless to say, I am almost always at least a day behind on the aol.com inboxes.

This is a problem. The Senator does not have time to sift through the inboxes at all, so she is reliant on me to print out the ones I think she thinks she should see, punch holes in the side, and put them in her “dailies,” two notebooks we alternate each day giving her schedule, committee agendas, and all the other e-mails and regular mail. Right now, both notebooks are so full they don’t close properly, and I worry that business is not getting handled.

And we haven’t reached the point in the Session when we will be inundated with e-mails urging her to vote one way or another on a controversial bill.

So the information age overwhelms the system and makes the legislator, even a lowly state legislator, dependent on the quality of her staff to make sure she sees what she needs to see in a timely fashion. I can’t imagine what this process is like in a Congressional office. If we get 100 e-mails a day, do they get 1,000? 10,000? 50,000? Does a Kansas Senator get four times as many as each Representative? Times two Senators? Who reads them, who decides which ones are meaningful, who makes sure the member of Congress sees the ones he or she ought to see?

What is sad about all this is that it means that constituents, who think they have more access to their legislator because they can send an e-mail every time the impulse takes them, get less service. When you are approached about two SRS cases a day, most of them from people who don’t live in the district, it is difficult to do anything to check into the situation and see if a call from a State Senator’s office will unblock a log jam.

These SRS cases soak up a lot of time, and they’re the ones that tear at you the most. Who doesn’t want to help a child who is being failed or even abused by the system? That’s the kind of work every legislator most wants to do, but it’s not really part of the job description, so they pick and choose, often on fairly arbitrary criteria.

And then there are the vets not getting health care or a wheelchair when they need them; the people who are wrestling with Medicare, Medicaid, or Social Security to get services they have paid for all their lives; constituents needing help getting a visa to visit their family overseas or one for a family member to visit here.

But the vast majority of the contacts are, indeed, from someone who wants to influence the Senator’s vote. The lobbyists are the most systematic, holding luncheons, receptions, and dinners to lure the legislators within hearing distance so they can plead their case.

Far more influential, however, are the individual voters who write to support a change to the animal cruelty laws to outlaw puppy mills or to oppose what they see as a bill that eviscerates one law or a bill to create an official overreach in another. These are of far more interest to the Senator because they come from “real people,” even if the people aren’t actually constituents but still come from Wichita or Sedgwick County. The Senator likes to answer all these e-mails, but it isn’t really possible. We do our best, however, and have to hope that is good enough.

So that’s why I haven’t been writing my blog on a regular basis since I got to Topeka. Not exactly a good excuse. Just the real reason.

And I still haven't seen any news.
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