The work of deputies and the plenary meeting of the Congress

One of the classic obsessions of the Spanish press is to complain that the deputies do not work too much. This article is a classic example: photo of the empty average chamber, more or less important debate, and a bitter complaint of the columnist saying that the legislators give not even blow.

The big Egocrata, explaining of simple form the work of the deputies and the role that plays the final voting in the plenary meeting (the debate that goes out for the TV, in a channel that not even the mothers of the politicians see). I sum it up to you in a pair of paragraphs:

To write laws is a complicated, technical and involved thing. To negotiate them is complicated, technically, involved, slowly and heavily. Both things take a quantity of considerable time, with most of the work in hands of the people of the department of the branch (in case of the parliamentary democracies) or the small army of lawyers and advisers of two or three conferees (in the United States). (…)

What we see in the plenary meeting, in the room with the armchairs and 350 benches, is basically ritual, a theater. The Congress, before the cameras, is staging the work that they have written earlier behind the scenes. The politicians tell what they have done and justify (with vote and countervote, speech and reply) why they have decided to do it, but the work (intense and hard, especially when the government is in minority) it comes of behind. To use the empty benches in the Congress like metrics to know if his lordships are working is a cheap demagogy. The deputies, when they are in the plenary meeting, are not working; they are practising of set.

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