Friday, November 19, 2004
Rotten Boroughs
Interesting editorial in a Pittsburgh newspaper this morning about whether Senator Rick Santorum is really a resident of Pennsylvania or not. He owns a house in Penn Hills, Pennsylvania, but rents it out; his family lives in Leesburg, Virginia, where his five kids are homeschooled through an online charter school, which is receiving voucher funds from the Penn Hills district--or it was, until light was shone on the whole thing and the Santorums withdrew their kids from the school. Whether they'll actually move home or not remains to be seen.
We've got something similar here in Wisconsin involving one of our high-profile pols. State Assembly Majority Leader John Gard of Peshtigo has been known to go off on out-of-touch Madison liberals as if he'd just shucked his flannel lumberjack's shirt, put down his axe, and come down from the woods of northeastern Wisconsin to speak truth to power. Except he owns a house in the Madison suburb of Sun Prairie, even though he continues to collect the legislative per diem intended to pay for the 180-mile one-way trip from Peshtigo to Madison. His kids attend school in Sun Prairie, and have for several years.
Santorum and Gard (a likely candidate for governor here in 2006) are neither the first nor the highest-profile Repugs with such impressive powers of bilocation. George H.W. Bush of Kennebunkport, Maine, ran for vice-president and president as a Texan, thanks to the Houston hotel room that served as his legal address for filing purposes. Dick Cheney, ostensibly of Wyoming, is currently serving as vice-president, but was mostly a resident of Texas following his stint as Defense secretary under Daddy Bush. (Of course, nobody knows where he lives now, secure undisclosed location and all.) Most recently, there was Alan Keyes, who ran for the Senate in Illinois despite being from Mars. Sure, the Democrats have Hillary Clinton, and although I'm a fan, I was opposed to her decision to move to New York and run for the Senate in 2000. She's done an admirable job of learning what matters to her New York constituents, but there's no denying that her high national profile makes her a kind of Senator-at-large.
For hundreds of years, the system of representation in the British Parliament grew like a weedy thicket. By the early 19th century, nearly a fifth of the members of the House of Commons came from so-called "rotten boroughs," which were controlled by powerful members of the aristocracy despite the fact that almost nobody lived in them. Fifty of the 150 rotten boroughs had populations of 50 people or less, while growing industrial cities like Manchester and Birmingham, with tens of thousands of residents, had no representation at all. One of the great parliamentary reforms of the 19th century was the abolition of such boroughs. Yet even today, it's not necessary for an MP to live in the place he represents. In the past, when an influential cabinet minister had the misfortune of being defeated in an election, he could often be returned to office by election from another district. (Winston Churchill got back into office this way at least once.)
The great British constitutionalist Edmund Burke didn't see a problem with this sort of representation, saying that the kind of people chosen to Parliament could be depended on to represent the best interests of the country as a whole, an idea known as "virtual representation." Clearly the Rick Santorums and John Gards of the world would say that they can represent their Pennsylvania and Peshtigo constituents just fine by visiting on the weekends. And some would argue that people like Santorum and Gard are representing people across the country or the state who believe as they do, but whose direct representative believes something else entirely. (Certainly a fair number of Democrats across the country feel that way about my man Russ Feingold, if the number of small contributions he receives from states other than Wisconsin is any indication.)
In the end, though, widespread "virtual representation" just won't fly in a country whose governmental roots go back to the New England town meeting, and whose great hero, George Washington, was a gentleman farmer called upon to lead first the Revolutionary Army and later, the government itself. Plus, we like thinking we might run into our representative at the grocery store or the basketball game, just like a regular person. So yeah, it matters that the home residences of Santorum and Gard are a legal fiction. It's just another way in which actions are divorced from rhetoric; just another little bit of dishonesty to fuel the hypocritical bonfire that's raging in the new Repug America.
Interesting editorial in a Pittsburgh newspaper this morning about whether Senator Rick Santorum is really a resident of Pennsylvania or not. He owns a house in Penn Hills, Pennsylvania, but rents it out; his family lives in Leesburg, Virginia, where his five kids are homeschooled through an online charter school, which is receiving voucher funds from the Penn Hills district--or it was, until light was shone on the whole thing and the Santorums withdrew their kids from the school. Whether they'll actually move home or not remains to be seen.
We've got something similar here in Wisconsin involving one of our high-profile pols. State Assembly Majority Leader John Gard of Peshtigo has been known to go off on out-of-touch Madison liberals as if he'd just shucked his flannel lumberjack's shirt, put down his axe, and come down from the woods of northeastern Wisconsin to speak truth to power. Except he owns a house in the Madison suburb of Sun Prairie, even though he continues to collect the legislative per diem intended to pay for the 180-mile one-way trip from Peshtigo to Madison. His kids attend school in Sun Prairie, and have for several years.
Santorum and Gard (a likely candidate for governor here in 2006) are neither the first nor the highest-profile Repugs with such impressive powers of bilocation. George H.W. Bush of Kennebunkport, Maine, ran for vice-president and president as a Texan, thanks to the Houston hotel room that served as his legal address for filing purposes. Dick Cheney, ostensibly of Wyoming, is currently serving as vice-president, but was mostly a resident of Texas following his stint as Defense secretary under Daddy Bush. (Of course, nobody knows where he lives now, secure undisclosed location and all.) Most recently, there was Alan Keyes, who ran for the Senate in Illinois despite being from Mars. Sure, the Democrats have Hillary Clinton, and although I'm a fan, I was opposed to her decision to move to New York and run for the Senate in 2000. She's done an admirable job of learning what matters to her New York constituents, but there's no denying that her high national profile makes her a kind of Senator-at-large.
For hundreds of years, the system of representation in the British Parliament grew like a weedy thicket. By the early 19th century, nearly a fifth of the members of the House of Commons came from so-called "rotten boroughs," which were controlled by powerful members of the aristocracy despite the fact that almost nobody lived in them. Fifty of the 150 rotten boroughs had populations of 50 people or less, while growing industrial cities like Manchester and Birmingham, with tens of thousands of residents, had no representation at all. One of the great parliamentary reforms of the 19th century was the abolition of such boroughs. Yet even today, it's not necessary for an MP to live in the place he represents. In the past, when an influential cabinet minister had the misfortune of being defeated in an election, he could often be returned to office by election from another district. (Winston Churchill got back into office this way at least once.)
The great British constitutionalist Edmund Burke didn't see a problem with this sort of representation, saying that the kind of people chosen to Parliament could be depended on to represent the best interests of the country as a whole, an idea known as "virtual representation." Clearly the Rick Santorums and John Gards of the world would say that they can represent their Pennsylvania and Peshtigo constituents just fine by visiting on the weekends. And some would argue that people like Santorum and Gard are representing people across the country or the state who believe as they do, but whose direct representative believes something else entirely. (Certainly a fair number of Democrats across the country feel that way about my man Russ Feingold, if the number of small contributions he receives from states other than Wisconsin is any indication.)
In the end, though, widespread "virtual representation" just won't fly in a country whose governmental roots go back to the New England town meeting, and whose great hero, George Washington, was a gentleman farmer called upon to lead first the Revolutionary Army and later, the government itself. Plus, we like thinking we might run into our representative at the grocery store or the basketball game, just like a regular person. So yeah, it matters that the home residences of Santorum and Gard are a legal fiction. It's just another way in which actions are divorced from rhetoric; just another little bit of dishonesty to fuel the hypocritical bonfire that's raging in the new Repug America.
