Word: ombudsmen
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...ombudsman, Alfred Bexelius, 63, is a unique national mediator who serves the public by prodding laggard civil servants. He and his ten assistants already have counterparts in Denmark, Finland, Norway and New Zealand. Britain recently joined the movement by appointing a "parliamentary commission," and agitation for the appointment of ombudsmen has suddenly become popular all over the U.S. So far, however, the word does not even appear in U.S. dictionaries...
Clogged Channels. The strongest argument for American ombudsmen comes from Columbia Law Professor Walter Gellhorn, top U.S. scholar on the subject. Last week Harvard University Press published two Gellhorn books, one a survey of "citizens' protectors" in nine countries, Ombudsmen and Others ($6.95), the other a U.S. study, When Americans Complain ($3.95). Although the U.S. is rich in responsive administrators and procedural safeguards against official abuse, says Gellhorn, the country's channels of complaint are so clogged that citizens either get no hearing or win isolated victories that rarely cure the root causes of their grievances...
...skeptics argue that, in effect, all U.S. Congressmen and state legislators are already ombudsmen. Not so, says Gellhorn. To be sure, Congress receives 100,000 letters a day, a vast percentage of them constituents' requests for anything from Fort Knox gold bricks to intercession with regulatory agencies. Unfortunately, says Gellhorn, the episodic results merely assure individual votes rather than broad reforms. Worse, most state legislators cannot even help their constituents. Thirty state legislatures meet only biennially, and newcomers fill half the seats at each session; only eleven states pay legislators more than $5,000 a year, and funds...
...More Ideas? Wisconsin's Democratic Representative Henry Reuss suggested that Congress establish an office of administrative counsel, which would represent constituents in their battles with administrative agencies. "The time has come to consider very seriously the Americanization of this ombudsmen-device," Reuss said...
...Ombudsmen are officers, in Scandinavian countries and New Zealand, to whom a citizen with a grievance against the government can turn for intercession and relief...