REQUIRED READING: Great piece about fundraising in Congress

Ryan Grim and Sabrina Siddiqui have an incredibly important piece in the HuffingtonPost about the time Members spend raising money.

One picture captures it all. This is a slide taken from a PowerPoint deck, given to incoming freshman congressmen about how they are to allocate their time. 

Four hours of call time — and even this doesn’t include the time at fundraisers in the evening, or late afternoon or lunch. (As one Member told a Harvard audience last year, in his 6 years in Congress he had had lunch with a colleague 8 time — “if you’ve got time for lunch, you’ve got time to raise money”).

Read the piece. It is a great work of investigative journalism, filled with reflections and commentary by Members and others, about a system literally no one in good faith can defend anymore. 

Indeed, by the end, you’re even feeling sorry for these Members. As Representative Larson put it, “it’s the only system they have to work with.”

Yes, true, unless, um, you were to change the system. (See, e.g., the Sarbanes Grassroots Democracy Act, or the AA Act).

(Original post on Tumblr)