Institutions cannot love you back (but don't let that stop you).
Institutions cannot love you back (but don’t let that stop you).
Friday was my last day with the Michigan House of Representatives. It has been nearly seven years since I met Darrin Camilleri — then a college senior — when I visited Kalamazoo College as a prospective student. It has been four years since we won an election in a victory that was improbable at best. It has been three years since I showed up 30 minutes late for the first day of my internship in Representative Camilleri’s office in Lansing because of a blizzard.
“If you stick around here for more than a year, you’ll become an institution,” said Rachel, my internship supervisor who would usher me into her job over the next year. (Rachel, who proofreads this newsletter, eventually left the House herself and was promoted last week to become Governor Whitmer’s director of constituent services).
I did stick around. I officially started working for the House six months before I even graduated from college. When I graduated and moved away from Kalamazoo, my work with the House and my friends there were some of the only constants in my life. The House, its work, and its people gave me stability and purpose nine months later when the pandemic came and my colleagues and I were pressed into service as backup unemployment insurance caseworkers.
My departure (for now) from state government is, as they go, pretty boring. For this, I am grateful. I have the great pleasure of leaving on my own terms for a job with a legislature-adjacent tech startup (more on that soon). I have no great exposé or manifesto to offer because the truth of the matter is that I have — even in a period with lots of political unpleasantness — found great joy and meaning in my work with the House.
Legislative work is not easy (particularly in the minority). For young staff like me, it becomes, for better or for worse, all-encompassing and deeply woven into our whole being. We care about it deeply and we give it everything we have. In return, we make small changes. A few more people get their unemployment insurance benefits a week earlier. The House intranet gets a weird video on how to use office printers. Our bosses get to their meetings on time. Occasionally, we make a good law. If something bombastic and exciting happens, it is usually bad.
At its best, legislative work is done out of optimism and out of love. Do I think that the Unemployment Insurance Agency would be better run if I were personally given a checkbook and a roll of postage stamps? Absolutely. Does it enrage me that this is not the case? Very much. Even so, we recognize our place in the vast legislative oversight apparatus. We keep our heads down and do our work not out of some grand vision for our individual selves, but because we believe in the power of the State to do good work. We plod through on unemployment insurance casework because we believe fundamentally that people out of work in a plague should still get to go to sleep without worrying how they will afford to eat.
The Michigan Legislature that I hope to remember is not the one with a Senate Majority Leader who earned a place on John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight just yesterday or the one with an institutional memory decimated by term limits or even the one that consistently scores lowest of all fifty states when it comes to transparency.
The Michigan Legislature that I know and love — and that I have poured my heart into — is a deeply human institution filled with dedicated, quirky public servants. They are writers, economists, geographers, community organizers, bureaucrats, procedural specialists, lawyers, and social workers who give their work everything they have because they believe in it. It has been my great pleasure to spend a few years among them.
The Legislature turned 184 years old last month. It has survived most of that time without me, and the House will still come to order at 1:30 p.m. tomorrow. The paradox of being an institutionalist is that the love only goes one way. That comes with the territory. The Michigan Legislature is incapable of love. For the people who love it, this is of no consequence. We are all better for that.
Distractions
Things I have been reading, watching, and listening to this week.
Government Design Principles from the UK Government.
Michigan.gov was never a prize to begin with. Like Charles de Gaulle Airport, some parts of it are very beautiful, but the whole thing is functionally useless. Its shortcomings have become even more clear as the pandemic means that the State Government has been faced with the challenging task of actually governing.
The antithesis, as I see it, is the excellent gov.uk. Some of this site’s success is certainly due to a set of principles laid out by the UK’s Government Digital Service nearly a decade ago. These are simple ideas like, “Be consistent, not uniform,” and “Start with user needs.” None of them is revolutionary, but they all combine to produce a noticeably better user experience for government. Once you read them, their absence in the planning of most of the systems we use every day is all too conspicuous.
Mr. Mayor from NBC. Streaming for free on Peacock.
Finally, a good, old-fashioned NBC workplace sitcom! While I am normally very skeptical of anything involving California, Mr. Mayor brings the Tina Fey sensibility that I have missed since the end of 30 Rock to the world of public service. It is excellent.