All our towns have now navigated through another annual town meeting cycle, and it’s worth stopping to consider the significance of this peculiar New England tradition. Wellfleet Town Moderator Dan Silverman provided a helpful lesson when, during last week’s debate over the development of housing at Maurice’s Campground, he admonished people in the audience for booing one of the speakers.
“You do not boo speakers,” Silverman said. “This is a legislative body.”
His choice of the phrase “legislative body” to underscore the importance and the seriousness of purpose of town meeting got my attention. Legislatures in recent times have sunk low in public esteem — with good reason — but the underlying principles for their existence are the bedrock of democracy.
The first article of the U.S. Constitution enumerates the powers of Congress, reserving exclusively to legislators the authority to make laws and to spend money: “No money shall be drawn from the Treasury,” it says, “but in consequence of appropriations made by law.” Town meeting has the same authority at the local level and the same solemn duty to exercise that authority.
Silverman’s insistence that town meeting members do their jobs without distraction or intimidation stands in contrast to what most Americans are demanding of their legislators. “Congress, stymied by gridlock, has increasingly failed to exercise even its most vital prerogative: the authority to control taxation and spending, which is the legislature’s main leverage over the executive,” writes David D. Kirkpatrick in the April 7 New Yorker. Congress’s failure to pass annual appropriations bills are what all the so-called continuing resolutions are about. “They essentially extend current spending levels in order to prevent government from running out of money,” he writes. It’s like running on fumes because you’re afraid of commitment.
The last Congress passed only 274 bills, “down from about 700 a year during the late ’80s and fewer than any Congress since before the Civil War,” Kirkpatrick notes. And the current Congress is sure to set a new record for helplessness. “Donald Trump’s one hundred days, from January 20 to April 30, 2025,” writes the New Yorker’s Jill Lepore, “will stand as a monument to the bloated, twisted power of the American Presidency and to the impotence of the U.S. Congress.” Trump has signed 143 executive orders since taking office, many of them negating the legislature’s rightful powers, while Congress in the same span has passed just five laws.
Our town meetings did a hell of a lot better this year, working through 43 articles in Provincetown, 40 in Truro, 37 in Wellfleet, and 9 (really 23) in Eastham with admirable efficiency, thanks to the hard work and preparation of town officials and staff.
“It might seem like a good time to keep your head down and stay quiet, but silence at a time like this would be a grave mistake,” Silverman told Wellfleet’s voters. “Here in New England, we always stood against tyranny, including by votes at town meetings like this, and I hope we always will.” Here’s wishing all politics were local.
