The job: Work together, avoid distractions and keep promises

There’s a scene in the TV show “Seinfeld” in which Jerry finds that the car he had reserved is not available, and he begins to lecture the rental car agent on the meaning of a reservation.

“I know why we have reservations,” she says with mild indignation, to which he responds: “You know how to take the reservation, you just don’t know how to hold the reservation, and that’s really the most important part of the reservation, the holding. Anybody can just take them.”

Political promises are a lot like reservations. Every politician knows how to make a political promise, but keeping the promise is really the most important part.

A lot of promises were made during the congressional campaigns that culminated with a Republican resurgence and retaking control of the House of Representatives in November. Now comes the trickier part, keeping the promises.

Already there appears to be some waffling.

As the Associated Press reported, a pledge to cut $100 billion from the budget in one year has already been deemed unrealistic. The first spending measure to come to the floor, a 5 percent cut in lawmakers’ budgets for office expenses and staff salaries, goes only about a third of the way toward cutting congressional expenses to the goal of pre-Obama levels. And the Republican leadership has said lawmakers won’t be allowed to propose changes to the legislation repealing the health-care overhaul, despite promises to end what they described as heavy-handed tactics by Democrats when that party was in control.

Familiarity breeds cooperation

Closer to home, and in the spirit of a former House speaker who held that all politics is local, representatives from the Mahoning and Shenango valleys were reported by The Vindicator’s David Skolnick to be looking forward to working together in the 112th Congress in a spirit of mutual respect and cooperation. That would best serve their constituents and the nation.

U.S. Rep. Bill Johnson of Poland, R-6th, the newcomer and a member of the new majority, said, “Democrats will have a chance to be heard.” U.S. Rep. Tim Ryan, D-17th, Niles, talked about “room for compromise,” and U.S. Rep. Jason Altmire, D-4th, McCandless, Pa., said working together in a bipartisan manner is imperative to progress.

If small bipartisan delegations such as this can agree to work together as colleagues, there may be hope for the entire Congress to do so. Unfortunately that’s probably wishful thinking.

Everything becomes more complicated in Washington, where the pressures of party loyalty, the entreaties of lobbyists and the unending need to raise campaign funds can quickly have a distorting effect on even the most well intentioned representative.

On top of that, members of Congress must constantly wrestle with just whom they represent. Everyone claims that his congressmen represents him. But in every congressional district there are roughly 700,000 hims and hers, and there isn’t an issue under the sun on which they all agree.

Besides, this is not a pure democracy, it is a republic, which means there is more involved in being a representative of the people than holding a finger skyward to see which way the wind is blowing. We send our representatives to Washington to serve us and the nation, and their job is to take informed, intelligent votes — sometimes even knowing that a particular vote is not the most popular one back home.

Their oath, it should be remembered, is to the Constitution, not to the voter. And that’s the ultimate promise they must keep.