THAT TIME CONGRESS ACTUALLY DID WHAT WE TOLD IT TO.

• Date: 01 November 2019
• 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...