Leadership Quote by Major Owens

Legislating is designed to be slow, and Major Owens is blunt about the trap hidden inside that design: if you accept the grind as an excuse to go quiet, you effectively volunteer for irrelevance. The first sentence concedes what every Capitol Hill veteran knows - coalitions fracture, committees stall, gatekeepers kill bills in polite procedural ways. It reads like empathy for the public’s impatience and for a lawmaker’s own frustration.

Then Owens pivots to the real message, and it’s a warning aimed as much at colleagues as at constituents. “Constant power” isn’t chest-thumping; it’s a theory of institutional survival. Power in Congress is less a possession than a practice: you build it by showing up in hearings, forcing votes, dominating the narrative, cutting deals, and making other actors respond to you. Stop doing that and your formal authority (a seat, a title, a vote) becomes ceremonial. In a system where attention is currency, silence isn’t neutrality - it’s surrender.

The subtext also nods to how marginalized communities experience governance. For lawmakers who represent constituencies routinely deprioritized, waiting patiently for the system to work can mean watching urgent needs get “studied” into oblivion. Owens, a civil-rights-era figure who served through the hard-edged partisanship of the 1990s, is arguing that political gains are perishable. The machinery resists change; the antidote is relentless engagement. Not because power is noble, but because power unused is power lost.