There’s a letter. And the letter is signed with initials. And the initials belong to more than 200 congressional staffers, according to CNN, telling their “bosses,” the Democrats whom the voters elected to Congress, what they, the staffers, demand.
In a rare move, more than 200 congressional staffers have sent a letter to Democratic leadership in the House and Senate, demanding they close the deal on a climate and clean energy package and warning that failure could doom younger generations.
“We’ve crafted the legislation necessary to avert climate catastrophe. It’s time for you to pass it,” the staffers wrote in a letter, sent to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Tuesday evening. The letter, which staffers signed anonymously with initials, was shared first with CNN.
“Our country is nearing the end of a two-year window that represents a once-in-a-generation opportunity to pass transformative climate policy,” the letter continues. “The silence on expansive climate justice policy on Capitol Hill this year has been deafening. We write to distance ourselves from your dangerous inaction.”
On the one hand, staffers can demand anything they want, After all, they’re just staffers and if they don’t get whatever it is they demand, so what? Are they going to quit? Are they going to storm the capital and scream “hang Chuck Schumer,” like that’s going to work?
It’s not that congressional staffers have never locked arms before to tell their respective employers of their strong views and demand that their feelings be respected, although they usually don’t feel so threatened as to need to conceal their names by only signing with their initials.
In summer 2020, Black staffers penned a letter to leadership urging action in the wake of George Floyd’s killing by a Minneapolis police officer. Over 400 staff members also signed a letter in December 2021 urging House leadership to condemn “incendiary rhetoric” in the workplace after Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert made anti-Muslim remarks against Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar.
And one of the elements of the job is for elected officials to bounce ideas off their staffers, to seek their views on issues of import so that the elected official can potentially gain a more diverse perspective, even if staffers may not be very diverse in perspective.
But what’s curious here isn’t that staffers have views, or that they want to express their views to the elected officials for whom they work, or even that they want to tell the party leaders of their views. What’s curious here is that they are making “demands” of their party leaders, their bosses, the Congress.
Whether you agree with them or not is irrelevant. Another group of staffers could demand the criminalization of chocolate ice cream, silly example though it be, and raise the same question of whether it’s the elected officials in a Republican form of government, the voters who are told are so critically important to the functioning of their government, or the staffers who have direct contact with the elected officials that voters lack and, in a moment of extreme hubris, could put out a press release for their congressman that says something that could completely embarrass him, or worse yet, complain that they were sexually assaulted by a senator in the hallway as he’s running for president.
Jon Adler makes the point at VC that the kids want to be in charge, but nobody voted for them.
It is almost as if voters elected the actual members of Congress, rather than their staff.
But then, is who was elected really the metric of who’s the boss?
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