The New Normal on Capitol Hill

This edition of ELFA’s magazine normally contains pictures from our annual fly-in, Capitol Connections, which normally occurs in May. As you all know, the 2020 Capitol Connections was cancelled, and we are all left trying to figure out what the new normal is going to look like.

From an economic perspective, there have been a lot of articles that talk about how the fundamentals of the economy are strong—the logic being that the economy was strong going into the pandemic, so the underlying fundamentals must still be strong. If you view the economy as a collection of sectors, it is hard to see how the fundamentals are strong when the air travel, hotel and lodging, tourism, restaurant, retail, entertainment and sporting events industries are all facing significant headwinds for the foreseeable future. This is compounded by one of the major economic innovations in the last decade—the shared economy—being dropped in the middle of an ocean of uncharted waters.

Additionally, supply chains are out of whack, the labor market has been flipped on its head, especially if you include immigrant labor, and we have yet to see anything close to the full impact of what happens when you hit pause on entire streams of payments (e.g., rent) for several months. The fundamentals of the economy have fundamentally changed.

Even in this remote working environment, your ELFA Federal Government relations team is working as hard as ever reaching out to congressional offices to make them aware of issues facing the industry.

From a governmental perspective, for the last quarter century, and perhaps longer, we have been drifting more toward a parliamentary form of government where all elected officials follow the leader of their political party. The pandemic is likely to accelerate this drift.

On September 10, 2001, one could walk from the House side of the Capitol to the Senate side of the Capitol in tunnels that run under the Capitol complex. On April 19, 1995, you could drive down Pennsylvania Avenue right past the White House. Respectively, September 11th and the Oklahoma City bombing changed that. The point is that when restrictions on first amendment rights to petition our government are put into place it is generally a one-way ratchet.

For the last four months, the Capitol complex has, for all intents and purposes, been closed to the public. Members of Congress have been working in their districts, and when they have come to the “office” to vote and conduct Committee business, it has been with skeletal staffs and measures in place to avoid crowding. The functioning of the government in any efficient manner depends on casual, serendipitous interactions that simply are not occurring today. These interactions occur between staff and between elected officials. The fact that these interactions are not taking place means that the power of party leadership has gone up dramatically because they are filling the vacuum left by the lack of the ability to interact, causing a likely acceleration of the drift toward more of a parliamentary power structure.

The ability of the government to act in a representative way is also under threat. If travel is harder and seeing your member of Congress is more difficult, then constituents will have fewer interactions with their elected officials and their staffs. For example, while a virtual town hall may provide some of the value of an in-person event, the casual interactions before and after the event do not occur virtually, which means that if you don’t have the willingness to raise your issue on the virtual “Brady Bunch” screen, your voice will not be heard.

All of this means that we all need to work harder to make our voices heard. Even in this remote working environment, your ELFA Federal Government relations team is working as hard as ever reaching out to congressional offices to make them aware of issues facing the industry. Many ELFA members have been proactively working with their representatives and senators to address issues they are facing during the pandemic. These efforts have already borne fruit, and we encourage you to do the same. If you need help doing this, please let us know. We stand ready to help. Don’t let the new normal become one where elected officials are walled off from their constituents and their constituencies.