Giving C-SPAN full control over what it can show viewers of House and Senate proceedings would make Congress more dysfunctional, not less.
Giving C-SPAN full control over what it can show viewers of House and Senate proceedings would make Congress more dysfunctional, not less.
L ast week’s speakership battle is probably one of the few times in recent memory that the proceedings on the House floor got attention outside of the frenzied orbit of Twitter addicts and political junkies. The spectacle of members of Congress chatting, negotiating, and losing their tempers was high political drama.
This has led to renewed calls for the House to open up the floor to independent cameras. Currently, congressional officials control the cameras on the House floor and allow for a relatively limited set of shots, mostly focused around the dais at the front. After Kevin McCarthy was finally elected speaker, C-SPAN wrote a letter asking him for the right to film with its own cameras, and Florida Republican Matt Gaetz has also proposed legislation to that effect.
No doubt, allowing cameras to film what’s happening elsewhere on the House floor could provide some interesting viewing: the negotiations, the arm-twisting, the frantic texting, and so forth. Last week’s drama was certainly entertaining.
But the spectacle was also, to some extent, a one-off. All members of the House had a reason to be there for a series of high-stakes votes, and cameras usually don’t film the House floor under those circumstances, so the show felt unusually candid. That would change if filming the floor became a regular practice. Then, the whole process would be much more choreographed, with members engaged in performative spectating and chatting for a global audience.
Consider the spectacle of contemporary State of the Union addresses, coverage of which is full of calculations of who stood, who clapped, and who booed. Members of Congress know that they’re being watched during such set-pieces, so they offer performative displays of partisanship. Regular filming of the House floor would bring that same reality-TV spirit to everyday floor proceedings. And once that happened, all bets would be off. A member might read It Can’t Happen Here or The Communist Manifesto while one of his political opponents spoke. Loud applause or a demonstrative thumbs-down might be offered at the end of every speech. Different cliques of members might start wearing color-coordinated outfits. All this would make for great viral content, but it would also likely interfere with the ability of members to deliberate in those spaces on the House floor that C-SPAN’s cameras don’t currently cover under most circumstances. Granted, there are other places where members can deliberate, but every square inch of space for deliberation matters these days.
This whole controversy has a bearing on questions of transparency in government and what transparency even is. Congress has no fundamental duty to be the beau idéal of transparency in the sense of allowing every instant of political sausage-making to be filmed. Its foremost duty is to defend the Constitution, promote the common good through legislation and oversight, and create an institutional structure that advances those aims. Transparency can often help Congress fulfill that duty. It is a good thing that votes are recorded and that legislative proceedings are published. It is a good thing that websites such as congress.gov post legislative text, the Congressional Record, and various committee reports. And C-SPAN has been an important institution for the broader democratization of political knowledge (as well as a tempting distraction — Washington Journal clips from the 1990s can be a real rabbit hole).
But transparency has its limits, too. For instance, mandating that every member of Congress wear a body cam while on the job would drastically interfere with the work of legislating. Broadcasting the weekly conferences of Supreme Court justices would vitiate their purpose (and I’m not yet persuaded by arguments for bringing cameras into oral arguments, either).
During Bill Clinton’s impeachment drama, the novelist Jonathan Franzen anticipated contemporary anxieties when he claimed that “the real reason that Americans are passive about privacy is so big as to be almost invisible: we’re flat-out drowning in privacy” — atomized and anonymized. A similar point might apply to questions of transparency. In a sense, our congressional representatives are more transparent than they have ever been. Untold thousands of hours of digital footage of them haunt the internet. They have podcasts, TikToks, and, of course, Twitter feeds. A stray remark from a member’s discussion with voters can be picked up by a camera phone and sent around the world in an hour. Yet this superficially transparent Congress has become regarded as a site of dysfunction and frustration.
In a time when cameras are devouring one foot of the public square after the next, there’s a case for drawing a red line somewhere — for saying from here, you shall go no farther. And the push to liberate C-SPAN’s cameras just might be that somewhere.