My Congressman is Representative George Miller. Last Monday, I learned that he was to appear as the guest of a local Peace and Justice group for a public meeting. I learned of the meeting about five hours before the meeting began. I didn’t really want to go to the meeting, but my sense of duty reared up. I began thinking that if I went to the meeting I could publically ask Rep. Miller to support a letter being circulated by Rep. Jan Schakowsky to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The letter’s purpose is to urge Sec. Clinton to make a $375 million U.S. commitment to the Global Partnership for Education at an upcoming replenishment conference. Supporting the GPE is one of the key foreign aid reforms in Education For All Act of 2011 that RESULTS groups across the U.S. have been advocating for over the last three months. The GPE has a better track record of cost-effectively advancing foreign education programs than does our own US Agency for International Development.
So, a couple hours before Rep. Miller was to appear, I decided to go. The parking lot outside the meeting area was surprisingly full; I ended up parking a little ways down the street. The meeting itself, was similarly packed. Luckily, the friend who had told me about the meeting was already there and had saved me a seat.
Rep. Miller was introduced as the second most powerful Democrat in the House of Representatives. House Minority Leader and former Speaker of the House Rep. Nancy Pelosi is the most powerful Democrat. Rep. Miller spoke on a range of topics for about 25 minutes and then the meeting was opened for questions from the audience.
One or several people would raise their hands and Rep. Miller would pick someone to ask their question. At one point in the meeting he said he was picking people out a random. Given that everyone was asking tough questions, I believe his statement.
About fifteen minutes or so into the question and answer session, one person asked him for his opinion on what it would take for the Republicans and Democrats in Congress to work together.
His answered that he didn’t know. He said that in all the 36 years he’s served in the House of Representatives, this last year is the first year one party’s primary goal has been to limit the standing President of the US to one term. Many times, Rep. Miller said, he’s seen one party disagree with a president’s policies and work with the president’s administration to change the policy—essentially to find a compromise that the two parties in Congress and the administration could live with. But to work to make the president fail so badly that he’d be voted out of office, Rep. Miller said was basically the same as working to make the nation fail. (To my knowledge, a first-term president has always won re-election if the nation is doing well and always failed to be reelected if the nation is doing badly.)
So given the situation where the Republican primary goal is to make President Obama fail, Rep. Miller’s said his only hope was that members of both parties would eventually become exhausted fighting each other and begin the time-honored tradition of compromising their positions to find common ground.
The questioner sat down and Rep. Miller picked another person, answered his or her question, and picked another for another 10 minutes or so. Finally, one woman got frustrated with not being picked and shouted out her question about why Rep. Miller wasn’t working to pull U.S. troops out of a couple African countries. The troops were there and acting as advisors to the countries’ own troops on handling rebel armies. Given that the meeting was hosted by a Peace and Justice group, the question was not unexpected.
What was unexpected, to me anyway, was that the woman’s question ignited a shouting match between audience members. The fact that she did not wait her turn, the tone of her question, and the critical way she asked it, brought the question and answer session to a stand-still for several minutes as various audience members angrily supported and opposed her right to ask the question.
Eventually, calm was restored and Miller said he would answer the question, but first wanted to go back to the question of Congress getting along with each other. He pointed out that people on both sides of the aisle and at all levels of government, from politicians to grassroots members of society, care deeply about issues and at the same time disagree on solutions. Given that situation, how can civility be restored, he asked. The question was left hanging while he directly answered the woman’s question about getting troops out of Africa.
He said he shared her concern and was trying to get answers from the Administration on what their plans and intentions were for the advisors. Basically, Rep. Miller’s position and the woman’s were fairly similar. She wanted the troops out immediately; he wanted them out unless the Administration could show compelling reason for keeping them there.
In hindsight, it seemed to me the woman thought Rep. Miller should be able to force the Administration to recall the troops. Constitutionally, there are mainly two controls Congress has on U.S. troop deployment. The requirement that only Congress can declare war and the power of funding, or not funding, the military forces being deployed. As commander-in-chief, the President has considerable, though not unlimited, power to send U.S. forces wherever he believes they are necessary.
Her apparent belief that Rep. Miller, even as the second most powerful Democrat in the House of Representatives, can force the President to recall troops, strikes me as an example of how ignorant native born U.S. citizens are of the powers bestowed by the Constitution. I say native-born U.S. citizens because naturalized U.S. citizens have to pass a test on the Constitution that I think most native-born citizens would fail. (Try some sample questions here and see how you do.)
And did I ask my question of whether Rep. Miller would support Rep. Schakowsky’s letter? I didn’t. I hesitated at first because I wanted to give others a chance to ask their questions and I knew I had already started to get Rep. Miller to support the letter. The night before this meeting, I’d sent an e-mail to Dan Mauer, the legislative assistant who handles foreign issues for Rep. Miller. Then I wondered if asking Rep. Miller to support a funding for foreign development would be a tactically smart thing to do when people are so concerned about the federal debt and believe that the government already spends more than it does on international development. And then time simply ran out. It was announced he would answer one more question and several people already had their hands up.
In hindsight, I with I would have raised my hand. I remember my first town hall meeting with Rep. Miller in which I stated I was a volunteer in RESULTS and he spent several minutes commending RESULTS for the advocacy work we did. By asking him to support the Rep. Schakowsky letter, I could have furthered the goal of getting additional Congressional support of the letter, I could have highlighted the primary importance education has in advancing all other development efforts, and he might have again publicly lauded RESULTS–and this time in front of an audience with a fair chance of someone becoming interested enough to ask my or my friend about RESULTS.