Congress’s ironic enfeeblement

Commentary on Congress By Yuval Levin August 15, 2025

It is, after all, a phenomenon in need of several layers of explanation. Why would ambitious politicians undermine their own power?

Part of the answer surely lies in the evolution of our political culture in the direction of rhetorical performance art rather than substantive legislative action. A more performative politics almost necessarily advantages the president, who, as a lone figure, is simply better able to carefully stage his actions and manage his brand, and better positioned to draw the attention of the nation. Legislators thus increasingly come to understand themselves as supporting actors in a fundamentally presidential drama, and to behave accordingly.

But another crucial part of the story, as Wallach suggests, has to do with the excessive centralization of power within Congress. That dynamic has left most members with too little legislative work to do, and put most of the agenda-setting authority in the hands of a few party leaders who tend to be closely aligned with presidents of their own party or implacably opposed to presidents of the other party. This has focused Congress’s attention on the presidency and has created less room for interesting differences to emerge within both parties. That in turn makes it difficult for strange-bedfellow coalitions to form in ways that might facilitate legislative negotiation both within and across party lines.

That such centralization has happened is beyond dispute. But that it should have led to a weakening of Congress in the inter-branch struggle for power is actually profoundly ironic, since the centralization of power in the hands of congressional leaders has generally been pursued with the intent of strengthening Congress and its members, not weakening them. A better grasp of why a more consolidated Congress has become a weaker Congress could teach us a lot about this constitutional moment.

The modern push for centralization began in earnest in the House of Representatives in the mid-1970s. It was driven in large part by a perception among younger and more progressive Democrats that their policy agendas were routinely thwarted by the power of committee chairmen—who were generally older and more conservative Southern Democrats. Congressional politics meant intra-Democratic Party politics back then, about halfway through what would ultimately be a four-decade stretch of Democratic dominance of the institution. The majority party in Congress felt itself stymied (and therefore also weakened in its struggle against a Republican president) by its own internal diversity.

In an effort to better distribute power in the institution and empower the increasingly dominant progressive wing of their party, congressional Democrats pushed to reduce the power of committee leaders in favor of party leaders in Congress. And this centralization of power (along with the consolidation of the budget process, which the same Democratic majority pursued at the same time) was also viewed as a way to concentrate and increase Congress’s power in relation to the executive.

That trend toward centralization, pursued with both of those aims in mind, advanced gradually over the subsequent two decades but was then supercharged by the Republican takeover of Congress in the mid-1990s. In an effort to strengthen the position of a Republican Congress against a Democratic president, the Gingrich Republicans sought to empower the Speaker of the House to more effectively wield their coalition at will and so command a power center that could compete with the president’s control of the executive branch. For this purpose, committees were further weakened, and party leaders came to exercise an unprecedented degree of control over the legislative process and the policy agenda of Congress. As had happened two decades earlier under Democratic control, these changes began in the House and then the Senate embraced them too, if a little more modestly.

The same dynamic was pressed even further in congresses under the control of both parties over the past 25 years. By now, members have come to think of the sheer managerial dominance of party leaders in Congress as a natural feature of the institution. But in historical perspective, it is actually quite unusual. And it has badly deformed Congress’s understanding of its own role.

That deformation has led to what now looks like an intentional weakening of the institution by its members. But that is as much an effect as a cause of Congress’s modern travails. The centralization and consolidation of the institution were intended to strengthen it, and even to give the average member more power (since party leaders are accountable to their broader memberships, while committee chairs are focused on narrower interests). But it has done the opposite, because it was rooted in an error about the fundamental purpose of our national legislature.

That error is a function of a progressive conception of Congress, which argues that Congress’s core purpose is ultimately to advance major legislation in pursuit of a coherent policy agenda on behalf of the majority party. This is not a crazy notion, but it reflects an incomplete understanding of the goals of our system of government.

If Congress’s purpose were merely to advance major legislation, it would be reasonable to attribute its problems to its radical inefficiency. Bills move too slowly, too many of them never reach the finish line, and the process of legislation is just too chaotic and unfocused. If that were the source of Congress’s weakness, then centralizing the institution might be a reasonable solution. By giving party leaders more power, reformers could improve the efficiency of the institution and get more done. Such a view would see the reforms of the past half-century as justified, and call for more moves in the same direction—perhaps eliminating the filibuster, or further consolidating the budget process in the hands of party leaders.

But the fact that changes in this direction have only made Congress weaker should cause reformers to reconsider their premises. And that fact is hard to dispute. Centralizing power in the hands of party leaders has left most members with little to do (sending them in search of cameras and social-media followers), and has driven Congress to view itself as structurally ancillary to the presidency. In other words, it has had exactly the opposite effect that the reformers sought when this trend toward centralization began.

The same is true of the modern budget process. The mechanisms intended to allow Congress to consolidate its strength in opposition to the president are now routinely used to render Congress a mere facilitator of the president’s agenda. This is particularly evident in the uses of budget-reconciliation bills, which have come to be understood as a way for a president to achieve key goals when his party has only narrow majorities in Congress—a repurposing that would have seemed utterly bizarre to the authors of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974.

Why have reforms of Congress achieved the opposite of their intended aims for decades? Because Congress’s most fundamental purpose is not to advance major legislation. It is to facilitate bargaining across factional and party lines. This is what the institution exists to do, and it is why the legislative branch is meant to be the focal point of political action in a system intended to sustain the political life of a vast, immensely diverse democracy.

Congress is intentionally inefficient so that getting anything done will require relatively broad majorities, which can only be achieved through negotiation across factional divisions. The system is intended to restrain narrow majorities, to maximize the legitimacy of legislative outcomes. But reformers who value efficiency above legitimacy have undermined the institution’s capacity to achieve its core purpose—they have tried to make bargaining less necessary, and in the process, they have led members to think of themselves as less necessary.

The failure to facilitate negotiation and bargaining is a key reason why Congress so rarely passes major legislation now. But that is one symptom of the underlying problem; it is not the heart of the matter. The weakening of rank-and-file members of Congress is another symptom of the same failure to facilitate negotiated accommodations. And so is the weakening of Congress in its struggles for power with presidents.

Properly understood, Congress’s strength, and the strength of each of its members, is a function of the institution’s plurality and internal diversity, and of its capacity to facilitate broadly acceptable negotiated legislative bargains. By losing sight of that source of its power and pursuing mere efficiency instead, Congress has lost the bulk of that power (without actually gaining much efficiency). And by continuing to misdiagnose its shortcomings, Congress now actively surrenders its power on purpose, and increasingly falls into what Wallach aptly describes as “an overwhelming sense of passivity.”

An unintentional loss of congressional power thus preceded the willful surrender of congressional power that we now see. In essence, reforms of Congress over the past half-century have operated on the premise that members are the problem and leaders are the solution. This has led members to recoil from power, and since congressional leaders are actually answerable to members and their priorities, that has, in turn, led Congress as a whole to recoil from power. Addressing this problem would require re-empowering the middle layers of Congress, and especially the committees. Reformers would have to recreate the possibility of members wielding power in order to reawaken the desire for it.

This suggests that any revival of the legislative branch would require members to become reacquainted with the sources of Congress’s strength, and therefore with the core purpose of the institution. Congress is a venue for negotiated legislative accommodations. Reforms of Congress that seek to render it stronger need to focus on making such accommodations more likely to happen, rather than on making them less necessary. Fifty years of reforms have fallen on the wrong side of that line.

The sorry state of the legislative branch, which Wallach so ably describes, is therefore intentional only in part. Ironically, Congress became weaker partly through reforms aimed at making it stronger. Those efforts backfired so badly because they were rooted in a misunderstanding of the fundamental purpose of the institution. Recovering a proper understanding of that purpose is key to Congress’s future.

Yuval Levin is the director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute and the editor of National Affairs. He is the author, most recently, of American Covenant (2024). This essay was previously published by Law & Liberty.