What’s Wrong With Congress (And How to Fix It)

Congress is terribly unpopular, and no one who watches it closely is satisfied with how it is working. Our national legislature barely manages to do its most basic work (such as funding the government), let alone take on complex national challenges (such as modernizing immigration policy). Congress’s regular order—the committee work, oversight, and routine policy negotiations that ought to be the bread and butter of a legislature—has become deformed nearly out of existence. When bills do advance, it is typically by going around these structured processes, either through the work of ad hoc “gangs” of members of both parties or through leadership fiats that deny most legislators any meaningful role. What members end up doing instead too often looks more like political performance art than traditional legislative work, and only exacerbates the partisan frenzy of our civic life.

Yet there is not widespread agreement about just what the underlying problem actually is, and therefore what solutions should look like. If Congress is dysfunctional, what function is it failing to perform?