Politics & Power Quote by Melissa Bean

Accountability, in Bean's telling, is Washington's favorite word precisely because it so rarely comes with a return address. Her line works as an insider's indictment: Congress loves to sermonize about "personal responsibility" and "corporate accountability" because those targets are safely external - voters, CEOs, anyone not holding the gavel. The punch is in the rerouting: accountability is a slogan deployed "elsewhere", a rhetorical boomerang Congress throws outward to avoid catching it on the rebound.

The subtext is less about morality than about power. "Catch phrase" signals messaging discipline, not governing discipline; it's the language of press releases and cable hits. By pairing "personal responsibility" with "corporate accountability", Bean needles both parties' preferred villains - welfare cheats on one side, greedy corporations on the other - suggesting this bipartisan habit of outsourcing blame. That move widens her critique from partisan scolding to institutional critique: the incentives of Congress reward performance over self-policing.

Context matters: as a mid-2000s Democratic member of the House, Bean was speaking from within a body grappling with war spending, deficits, and ethics scandals that had made "accountability" a brand in itself. Her most pointed phrase is "rarely congressional accountability or fiscal responsibility", which yokes ethics to budget math. It's a reminder that fiscal irresponsibility can be a form of moral failure too - and that lawmakers prefer a vocabulary of consequences when someone else is supposed to face them.