THAT TIME CONGRESS ACTUALLY DID WHAT WE TOLD IT TO.

• Author: Desai, Saahil

Compared to the never-ending drama of the Trump presidency, the plight of unpaid congressional interns may seem trivial. For decades, most of the roughly 6,000 interns who descend each year on Capitol Hill have earned nothing for their labor. But does anyone really care if some moneyed Yale student has to spend a summer answering constituent calls and leading Capitol tours for free?

We should. Today's congressional interns are tomorrow's staffers and elected officials, and Congress's penny-pinching has long skewed the pipeline toward the type of people who can afford to work an unpaid stint--in other words, moneyed Yale students. One intern I talked to, from a working-class background, commuted an hour and a half to get to the Hill and worked late nights as a server to make her internship feasible. Others in her situation don't even bother to apply for unpaid positions.

This helps explain why Hill staffers tend to be far wealthier and whiter than the constituents they work for. In 2015, the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies found that among the 336 top staffers in Senate offices, only twenty-four were people of color. House aides aren't much more diverse--as of last year, more than 85 percent of top staffers were white.

In 2017, I set out to write about the problem for the Washington Monthly. I started with a tip from Jean Bordewich, a program officer at the Hewlett Foundation's Madison Initiative and a former Hill intern. For decades, Bordewich said, Congress did pay its interns, opening up government to the nonwealthy--including a working-class Harvard student from Brooklyn named Chuck Schumer. But while I tracked down a few former paid congressional interns, I lacked data to prove the theory, or explain why the stipends had dried up. When I filed my first draft, Monthly editor in chief Paul Glastris said the words you never want to hear from an editor:

"This is a great start."

To my chagrin...