October 31, 2000 The Congressional Record

Halloween, Tuesday, October 31, 2000, we were in Washington D.C., and had hopes to visit the Capitol.  But it wasn’t prime time.  The 2000 Election was one week away, and the odds of seeing much was pretty low.  I called the office of our then-Congressman, Bill Luther, and discovered that there was a session of the House of Representatives that evening.  He would have tickets that we could pick up to visit the House and sit in the Gallery.

We picked up the tickets and at 7 p.m. joined a small group from some other places to see the goings on for perhaps an hour.  It was not impressive.  A Congressman was seemingly talking to a camera, C-Span,  about Ergonomics; two groups of legislators were in their separate corners, chatting about whatever.  Nobody seemed to be listening to the speaker.  A Congressman actually came up to the gallery and spoke briefly to us, basically apologizing for what we were witnessing below, which seemed dysfunctional.

On return home, I wrote Rep. Luther and asked him if we could get a copy of the Congressional Record for the day, and very soon it came in the mail.  The cover is above.  I have kept it for the last 24 years, and this week decided to take a closer look at it.  I’m glad I did.

I won’t bore you with the content of this single day report of the Congress (House and Senate) of the United States, but it was helpful to me to do a quick review of it.

The document is 165 pages, 58 for Senate and 92 for House.  (The other pages were Extensions added after the session adjourned, and a Daily Diary).

It didn’t take long, navigating this record of a single day in Congress, to understand that the effort to govern a nation of over 330,000,000 people (280 million in 2000) by an institution of 435 elected representatives is not an easy thing.

The OSHA/Ergonomics speech was found on maybe two pages beginning at H11670, starting at about 1900 hours (7 p.m.)  The evening session began at 6 p.m.  Assorted representatives went on the record about assorted things, witnessing to the assorted concerns of their constituents back home.

The Congressional Record is the official record.  Representatives have a month to correct or append to the record, before it becomes the official record of the day.

The session we observed included names of representatives, some of whom are still serving.  Every single one of them has to run for reelection every two years; their next stop would be back home to campaign.  District boundaries for the legislators we saw would change as a result of the 2000 census; they changed again after 2010 and 2020,

Back home the Sunday before the 2000 election, we voted.  For President, the candidates were George W. Bush and Al Gore.  This was the election not settled until Dec. 12 by the U.S. Supreme Court.  Key was approximately 500 vote win in Florida, among several million votes cast.  Al Gore conceded, though he would have had a substantial legal case to defend himself.  Life went on.

Next Tuesday, every Congressperson is again up for election.  Who we select to represent us in Congress and the Senate, and their equivalents at the state level, are as important as the President, and our state Governor.

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The few minutes with that old Congressional Record was an opportunity to reflect on how complicated a country we are, and how marvelous it is that we function pretty well in such a diverse community.    Governing is extremely difficult.

In the last 24 hours I have probably seen about 100 people, most who I do not know, who in my tiny share of the universe probably have hundreds of priorities, most different from my own.

We live in an immense community (our state, country and world), where our individual wants often compete with others, and we need to share space with everyone else.  “We” is much more than “Me”, and that rabble on the House of Representatives floor on October 31, 2000, was simply demonstrating that, live.

In those 20 years I have seen a deterioration in even that imperfection I witnessed that Halloween night – where we’ve divided into tribes, where the game is more and more win versus lose.  It is not healthy.

There is much more to be said.  Let this suffice for now.

 

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