Maybe Washington Does Need More Lawyers
For most of U.S. history, Congress has been dominated by people with legal backgrounds. Now they’re in the minority.
Not the worst place to have a few lawyers handy.
Photographer: Alex Wong/Getty Images
There’s something different about the new U.S. Senate. For what appears to be the first time ever, lawyers are in the minority in the “world’s greatest deliberative body.” In the House of Representatives, where they fell into the minority in the late 1970s, lawyers are now down to just a third of the total.
These numbers, part of the Vital Statistics on Congress database updated this week by the Brookings Institution, only go back to 1953. But Stanford University political scientist Adam Bonica has assembled data back to 1789 indicating that the Senate has until now always had lawyer majorities. In the 1800s, both the House and Senate were often more than 75 percent lawyers. The decline in lawyer-legislators, which has also been occurring in state capitals, thus marks a big change in how politics is done in this country.