Congress should be a fiduciary

The word “fiduciary” has many different definitions all revolving around the concept of trust and acting in the interest of another person or entity.  Here are two definitions:

“An individual in whom another has placed the utmost trust and confidence to manage and protect property or money.  The relationship wherein one person has an obligation to act for another’s benefit.”  http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/fiduciary

“A fiduciary owes (among other obligations) the duty of loyalty, full disclosure, obedience, diligence, and of accounting for all monies handed over, to the principal.  A fiduciary must not exploit his or her position of trust and confidence for personal gain at the expense of the principal.  Law demands a fiduciary to exercise highest degree of care and utmost good faith in maintenance and preservation of the principal’s assets and rights, and imposes compensatory as well as punitive damages on the erring fiduciary.”  http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/fiduciary.html

I am currently a fiduciary as an officer and member of the board of directors of a non-profit corporation.  At least two friends have appointed me as the executor of their estates and trustee of their trusts.  At one time, I served at the trustee of a retirement plan.  I believe I have a pretty good understanding of the duties and obligations of a fiduciary.

I can think of many friends and family members whom I would be comfortable appointing as a fiduciary.  I can think of many other people that I would consider appropriate fiduciaries.  Many, probably most, judges, teachers, clergy, lawyers, doctors, and plain old regular folks would make excellent fiduciaries.  There are millions of fiduciaries in this country at any given time, acting in the best interests of various orphans, incompetent people, and others.  Each of them is charged with acting in the best interests of the person or entity for whom they are the fiduciary.

Yet at any given time, the 600 or so people with the most direct influence over the other 320 million of us act on our behalf without the strictures and responsibilities of a fiduciary.  I’m talking about Congress,[1] the executive branch,[2] and governors.[3]  There are of course numerous others, Supreme Court Justices for example, who exercise considerable influence, though not as directly.  I want to focus on the politicians.

Each of them is charged with protecting the constitution.  I have taken a similar oath as both an attorney and a member of my local community’s Parks and Recreation Commission.  The latter oath is bizarrely substantive given that the commission is advisory and exercises no direct control over anything.

I think we should demand more from our members of Congress, certainly more than a Columbus suburb demands of its Parks and Recreation Commission members.  We should require members of Congress to be fiduciaries of our country.  We should require them to act in the best interest of the United States.

It’s pretty clear that they currently do not.  I can think of at least three interests that members of Congress put ahead of the country’s.

The first, the most obvious, and the most insidious, is their own reelection.  Have you ever heard of a member of Congress whose most important goal wasn’t reelection?  The disproportionate time devoted to raising campaign funds is another strong indicator of the member’s real interest.

The second obvious interest that trumps the country is party.  So many votes in Congress are along party lines that it is unreasonable to believe the results are solely driven by the merits of a given issue.  Mickey Edwards wrote a book, The Parties Versus the People, (review coming soon) that outlines the problem and some reasonable steps to address it.

Finally, and (perhaps) most reasonably, many members of Congress put the interests of their district or state ahead of the country.  How else to explain the various bridges to nowhere and monuments to nothing that pork barrel politics has engendered through the years?  This is tied up with reelection, but it is also something more.

There are likely other interests that unduly influence members of Congress more than the best interests of our country, among them personal gain.  I believe members of Congress and high ranking members of the executive branch should always put our country first.  I believe they should act in the best interests of the country and that they should be held to the same fiduciary duties as trustees.  I believe they should “exercise highest degree of care and utmost good faith in maintenance and preservation of the [country’s] assets and rights.”  As long as we continue to complacently vote (almost) exclusively for Republicans and Democrats, they will have no reason to act in the country’s best interest.

[1] 100 Senators and 435 members of Congress

[2] Including the President, Vice President, members of the cabinet, and various high level appointees and directors (for example of the CIA and FBI).  Here I estimate 65 for simple math, the only kind I have conquered.

[3] 50 governors, who are different because, in my opinion, they should act in the best interests of their state, though of course not to the detriment of the country.