When it comes to the kerfuffle about Minnesota House Minority Leader Melissa Hortman (DFL-Brookly Park) calling out the “100% white male card game in the retiring room” during a House floor debate, most would probably guess that I would be cheering on Hortman. After all, I’m a committed liberal, and a strong believer that white male privilege has unfairly benefited me and is a significant problem in all aspects of our democracy and society.
But Minority Leader’s Hartman’s self-righteous speech didn’t sit right with me. In that particular case, the use of “white male” felt gratuitous, an over-the-top attempt to inject race and gender as a partisan bludgeon, because the opposition party is increasingly made up of whites and males.
The core objection at that moment was inattentiveness, so why make it about race and gender? When race and gender get shoehorned into partisan zingers, I worry that it cheapens more legitimate criticisms of serious race and gender discrimination.
Don’t get me wrong. As a white male, I certainly didn’t feel discriminated against by Representative Hortman, or in need of an apology, as oh-so-wounded Republican legislators apparently do. That’s silly. I just thought the “white male” part of Hortman’s speech was extraneous to the legitimate core criticism.
More importantly, though, the charge felt hypocritical and selectively applied. Anyone who has spent time at the State Capitol has watched all types of legislators being inattentive during proceedings, often quite brazenly and rudely. Legislators are engrossed in their social media monitoring. They’re giggling over whispered inside jokes. They’re dozing. They’re gossiping in the hallway or back of the room.
Last year about this time, I penned a humor piece entitled “The Five Anthropological Certainties of Minnesota Hearings,” and two of the five were dedicated to legislator inattentiveness.
#2. The iPhone Prayer. The reason legislators continually have their heads bowed is not because they are prayerful or otherwise contemplative. It’s because of smart phones.
The hearing observer will quickly notice that legislators much prefer their smart phone to their smart constituents. Therefore, visitors should expect to mostly see the crowns of legislators’ heads, as they stare down smirking at their latest epic text or tweet.
You see, the State Legislature is like high school, with its complex network of cliques constantly angling to mistreat each other. But the environment is actually much more toxic than high school, because unlike high school, unlimited smart phone use is permitted in class.
#3. The Extras. Visitors will notice that the least relevant person in the committee room is the lowly testifier. The person delivering testimony is an extra, a volunteer who is cast by legislators to create the illusion of information gathering and democratic participation.
Seemingly unaware of the ruse, many testifiers spend hours earnestly preparing their thoughtful, fact-filled remarks. But they quickly discover that committee members have much more pressing needs to attend to, such as epic texts and tweets.
You’ll notice that the anthropologist’s observation was not limited to any one gender, race, party or ethnicity, because the observation applies to just about every single legislator in the building. If you ever have occasion to attend a legislative committee hearing or floor debate, I guarantee you will see plenty of non-white non-males among the inattentive herd.
So, Minority Leader Hortman, thank you for speaking out about the problem of legislators being inattentive during legislative proceedings. That’s a worthwhile cause. I’d encourage you to look at systemic approaches to making the place more respectful of democratic debate and citizen input, such as asking party leaders to be more vigilant and consistent about insisting that their colleagues at least pretend to pay attention during legislative proceedings, or maybe even closing or repurposing the “retiring room.”
But you lost me when you tried to portray the problem of inattentiveness as something that is specific to a subset of legislators. Because inattentiveness at the Minnesota State Capitol is endemic to all parties, races and genders.
Yes, as another beneficiary of WMP I suppose I’m the wrong person to complain. Especially since I’m too lazy to dig into the underlying kerfuffle (I’m out of state at a client and the issue has not risen to anyone’s attention here). Even so, I’ll use your post as chance to make a “grumpy old guy” observation that one of the reason legislatures all over the country are dysfunctional is that there are fewer card games than there used to be.
Used to be back in the old days, legislators hung out with one another, even – gasp – across party lines. They went to dinner together, had drinks, played cards. In DC, some of them actually lived together and lots of them moved their families there and – another gasp – didn’t always go back to the district for four-day weekends.
Yes, these social interactions were often exclusionary, reinforced the status quo, susceptible to manipulation and there are numerous – too many to count – examples of what mischief a bored, drunk legislator can make for himself (sorry fellow males, but it’s ALWAYS the guys who do the stupidest things) and others, but they also promoted personal relationships, common understanding and forums to explore common ground out of the glare of special interests who insist on issue purity at every turn. Things got done because of those card games. Good things.
The trend over the last half century – as our society has lost faith in government and in response to a concerted campaign to demonize government employees and elected officials – has been to steadily and relentlessly wring every possible enjoyment out of public service. Heaven forbid a government employee spend a discretionary dollar on decorating his or her office space, celebrating a coworker’s birthday, attending a conference or wanting to work in a building constructed in the most utilitarian manner by the lowest-cost bidder. Never mind paying a salary commensurate (or even in the same order of magnitude) with what they might get in the private market.
Government does necessary and important things. It’s worth paying for and the people who do that important and necessary work should be valued and rewarded and encouraged to find the fun and the joy in their jobs. Otherwise, we will absolutely get the government – or to tie this rant back to Joe’s post – the legislature we deserve.
I agree that legislators should socialize more, but not during hearings and floor debates, which was the issue in this case.
In fact, a while back, I passed along an idea of former Senate Minority Leader Duane Benson that legislators from different parties, gasp, office next to each other, for the very reasons you describe here. Alas, the idea did not catch fire.
You clearly did not do much research into this article. The debate was about how minority groups can protest. The debate was should we put people in prison for 1 year for blocking a road during a protest, or should we put them in jail for 90 days. Black Lives Matter was told, don’t kneel in protest of being shot by police as you reach for your ID, don’t set fires in protest, don’t tear down statues erected to honor those that put you into slavery and then fought for that right. So what did they do? They took to the streets. Republicans wanted them to spend 1 year in prison instead of just 90 days as was the law at the time. This was all about race. So when Hortman called out the white men who were not paying attention to the discussion of injustices in the system to minorities and she called out the white men who were ignoring the debate it was NOT, I repeat NOT as you put it “extraneous to the legitimate core criticism.” It was core to the legitimate criticism.
As for your concerns about collegiality you are right that there needs to be more of it, but during a floor session is not the time to run in the back and hide from those hard discussions as was done by this group of white males.
PS I am a white male, I am not anti white male, I just think when appropriate, we should be called out when we do stupid stuff.