Is There a Doctor in the House?

Actually, there are 20 – 16 in the House of Representatives and four in the Senate – plus five dentists. There are also two pharmacists, three nurses, one EMT, and one psychologist in the House and one ophthalmologist, Dr. Rand Paul, in the Senate.

And so, should someone suffer a medical emergency while Congress is in session, he or she should be in relatively good hands.

Unfortunately, the same could be said about needing an attorney to represent you in a divorce, a personal injury case, or some other legal matter because an astonishing 30% of House members (roughly 130) have law degrees while a whopping 51% of Senators have practiced law.

It’s no wonder we are so screwed up – and litigious – as a country!

Meanwhile, 352 House members (80%) and 82 Senators have held previous public office, some of them for decades. In other words, they left the “real world” behind and entered the hallowed halls of Congress when Joe Biden still had hair and before Al Gore invented the internet.

Sadly, there are only five ministers in the entire 535-person Congress (.93%). Conversely, six of the 91 members of the First U.S. Congress in 1789-1791 were clergymen (6.6%).

And we wonder why America is going to hell in a handbasket.

Likewise, just five members of that original Congress were career politicians. Idealists to the core, they were under the assumption that a representative was supposed to be a well-respected member of the community who was tasked by his fellow citizens to represent their interests in Washington D.C. for a few months per year… and then come back home. After a term or two, he was also expected to pass the baton to someone else so that no one person became too powerful, too estranged, or too corrupted by the political process.

Potomac Fever, they call it, and it has stricken the most well-intentioned public servants who overstayed their welcome in the Washington swamp. Term limits, anyone?

Our Founders had it so right… and we have gotten it so wrong.

Somehow, we have allowed a closed clique of legal eagles to make our laws and then trusted and empowered them to enforce them, too. That’s like asking the fox to guard the hen house… and being surprised to discover that the roosts are empty and there are feathers everywhere.

Until 80% of the American people are lawyers, 80% of our elected officials should not be practicing attorneys. Instead, our representatives should represent a broad cross-section of our population, including business owners who have signed the front of a check and not the back, farmers and ranchers who have raised the food we eat, and veterans who have defended the freedoms we hold dear.

A healthy 27% of the First Congress held one of those three jobs and if you add doctors and ministers, that percentage rises to 38%. And if you ask me, they did just fine without getting so many lawyers involved.