(Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)

Iowa senator Joni Ernst has gotten herself into some trouble for suggesting that lawmakers will need to take on Social Security reform, and that to do so they’ll have to have some discussions in private. The Washington Post lays out what she said:

“So it’s, you know, a broader discussion for another day,” she added. “But I do think, as various parties and members of Congress, we need to sit down behind closed doors so we’re not being scrutinized by this group or the other, and just have an open and honest conversation about what are some of the ideas that we have for maintaining Social Security in the future.”

The outrage that ensued couldn’t have been more predictable, but Ernst is obviously right. The kind of frank negotiation that would need to happen if a legislative deal is ever to take shape on entitlement reform (or any number of other high-profile policy challenges) depends upon some degree of privacy and even secrecy. Ultimately, the results of such negotiation have to be defended and debated in public, put up for a vote, and subjected to the scrutiny of the electorate (and of “this group or the other”). But that doesn’t mean that the process of policy bargaining could happen in public view.

Our system of government is founded in an understanding of this basic fact. It’s a system built around a relatively deliberative legislature, which is not a parliament that facilitates the imposition of the majority’s will but a congress that compels competing parties to pursue accommodations. And the system itself was framed and formulated through distinctly private, indeed secret, elite negotiations.

The delegates to the constitutional convention voted to keep their deliberations strictly confidential, and they all abided by that code of secrecy for the duration of the convention. James Madison later told Jared Sparks that he thought “no Constitution would ever have been adopted by the convention if the debates had been public.” Of course, the product of those secret deliberations was ultimately put before the public for ratification, but the kinds of bargains required to arrive at it would have been much harder to achieve in the open.


Needless to say, the case for this sort of deliberative privacy is often unpopular. And in the last half century it has gone thoroughly out of fashion in our politics. The reasons for this are easy to understand, and they’re not crazy. The (increasingly metaphorical) smoke-filled room can indeed be a venue for corruption and betrayal of public trust. There has to be some balance struck between privacy for the sake of bargaining and transparency for the sake of accountability. But we have gone much too far in the direction of transparency, so that our core deliberative institutions have become so transparent as to essentially lack an interior altogether.

The push for transparency in Congress, which gained steam especially in the 1970s, was a response to some undeniable corruption in the institution. Beginning with the large post-Watergate class of freshman Democratic members in 1975, rules and norms governing seniority were overturned, and the inner workings of the institution were exposed to the sun. In 1979, C-SPAN was created and began televising live all floor activity in the House of Representatives. By the mid-1980s, Senate floor action was also televised as were many committee hearings in both houses.

The case for such transparency was broadly persuasive, and it would be hard to deny that it has also done real good. But some far-seeing observers warned early on of the potential side effects of pushing too far in this direction. In 1976, for instance, Irving Kristol took to the pages of the New York Times to make this decidedly counter-cultural point:

Take, for instance, the so-called “sunshine” laws which are being passed at every level of government, and against which no public figure seems bold enough to protest. They require that practically all meetings of all official bodies be open to public view. This sounds good, but in actuality it is utterly absurd. It’s no way to run anything, whether it be a school board, a university department, a trade union or a government agency. It penalizes candor and compromise and rewards aggressive “grandstanding.” Does anyone really believe that the Ford Motor Company and the United Automobile Workers could have reached an agreement if their negotiations were transmitted live on television? Or even if minutes of the meetings were kept? Similarly, the only reason Congress can function is because the committee system provides private (i.e., “secret”) occasions for negotiation that are distinct from the public forum where opinions are sharply expressed and debated.

Just so. And it is precisely in the committee system that televised transparency has done real damage. The floor of the House and Senate have never really been all that great as venues for deliberation. It’s likely that no one has ever been persuaded of anything on the floor of either house of Congress. But committee work did genuinely have a different character before it was all televised.

You can get a sense of this now by talking to members of the few committees that still don’t televise everything—particularly the intelligence committees. Members of the Senate intelligence committee, for instance, seem genuinely to love their work on that committee, and to have good things to say about their colleagues of both parties. The Armed Services Committee and to some extent the Foreign Relations Committee still get real work done too.


Every institution needs an inner life—a sanctum where its work is really done. This is especially true in a legislature, where members must reach practical compromises. But Congress has progressively lost that inner life, as all of its deliberative spaces have become performative spaces and there is less and less room and time for talking in private. By now, the leadership offices around midnight as a government shutdown approaches are the only protected spaces left, so it is hardly surprising that this is where a great deal of important legislation gets made.


Most members don’t participate in what happens in those few remaining spaces, and so most members don’t participate in real legislative work. Their work is almost entirely performative, and this shapes their characters and personalities. Queen Victoria once complained of William Gladstone that “He speaks to me as if I was a public meeting.” Time spent with many members of Congress today has this feeling about it too. Too many have just one mode—a performative mode intended to go viral on YouTube—and they employ it even in private conversations, including with one another. A bit more work behind closed doors could help with that.

This doesn’t argue for total secrecy in Congress’s work, or even in committee work, of course. But it argues for degrees of transparency that take account of the fact that bargaining is the essence of legislative work, and that bargaining requires some private deliberation. If the institution is to recover its vigor, it will need to install more doors.