Congress is down, but how close is it to being out? What is the ultimate source of its vitality, and how might it return to that wellspring in our deeply cynical political moment?
The three excellent responses to my initial essay, “Choosing Congressional Irrelevance,” helpfully probe these questions and bring to light some useful disagreements. Yuval Levin, Joseph Postell, Shep Melnick, and I look at Congress from different enough angles that we each perceive different possibilities for further marginalization or, perhaps, revival.
In this response to their perspectives, I start by probing what I take to be the fundamental question: what animates Congress? I then consider just how gloomy we ought to be about Congress’s prospects and briefly take up a few solutions.
Do We Believe in Representation?
As is so frustratingly often the case, Yuval Levin lays out many of my central ideas with greater clarity and force than I mustered. Although Congress is our lawmaking body, Levin insists we remember that “Congress’s most fundamental purpose is not to advance major legislation.” Rather, “It is to facilitate bargaining across factional and party lines.” To the extent we think of Congress as a tool for efficient action, we will naturally come to think that “members are the problem and leaders are the solution.” If we want a congressional renaissance, we will need members to take their own role in producing a legitimate political order more seriously.
Postell takes nearly the opposite tack. He says that giving members more opportunities for influence is likely to be a recipe for institutional stagnation. In his reading of the historical record, “decentralized structures and procedures such as open amendment processes, leadership shorn of committee assignment and agenda control powers, and powerful committees, have tended to fragment Congress and render its collective action more difficult.” Were we to move away from the centralized, omnibus-heavy procedures behind most of the contemporary Congress’s enactments, our legislature would quickly find itself even more stymied by internal dissent and even more irrelevant than it is today.
Postell is surely correct to say that, at present, congressional policymaking depends on this path—but, with Levin, I take very different lessons from the historical record. Members have sought efficiency, but their energies have dissipated. As Levin puts it, the ironic result of prioritizing programmatic, ideological coordination has been to devalue their own representative function.
What does that mean, exactly?
What makes representation potent is the sense that there is something real in each congressional district that needs to be made present in national deliberations. This is something different than the political beliefs held by the majority of a district’s voters. I’m happy to go with Postell in identifying the relevant distinction as being between (national partisan) ideology and (locally rooted) interest. I share Edmund Burke’s belief in the solidity of interests, separate from opinion, as a sturdy basis for politics. We want to grapple with realities, not fantasies, even when they are somewhat grubby. Henry “Scoop” Jackson of Washington was, for decades, known as the Senator from Boeing. This was meant as an insult, but it seems healthy for a corporation at the heart of America’s military-industrial complex, which employed many tens of thousands of Washingtonians, to have had its say. (Jackson, in turn, forcefully brought the public’s concerns into the corporation.)
Narrow-minded “parochialism” is generally contrasted with high-minded universalism, but I hold with Willmoore Kendall in believing that the two values need to be in constant conversation with each other, and that Congress is the appropriate venue for the rooted interests to contend with each other and temper the grand schemes that often emanate from the White House.
For that vision to make sense, we must believe in the connection between the organic community and its representative, who has a distinctive way of knowing about his or her community and its needs. There are three components of that: 1) believing that the organic community itself is real and distinctive; 2) believing that the elected representative has a special relationship to it; and 3) believing that, in carrying out the activity of representation, the representative will hold faith with the community, rather than betraying its interests. If all those hold, then, as Levin says, Congress takes on the emergent “capacity [of facilitating] broadly acceptable negotiated legislative bargains,” which is of immense value to our constitutional republic. (This is what I argued makes Congress “indispensable.”)
Each of these three necessary beliefs is strained today. Our belief in the integrity of geographic communities has waned as people forge more of their connections in life through the Internet, and more people work for firms far away from their homes. We are justifiably more skeptical of the idea that our representatives orient themselves toward their districts, given how much more nationalized our politics has become. If the “D” or “R” appearing next to a candidate’s name vastly outweighs everything else about them, how special of a relationship can that person really have with the district? And, finally, as Melnick points out, we live in a time when we are generally dubious of fidelity in all forms. This certainly holds regarding the public’s views of their legislators. Recent research indicates that Fenno’s paradox, in which citizens hold their own member of Congress in high esteem even as they mistrust the institution, has lost steam in recent years. Many voters clearly feel that their members of Congress care little about them, rather than their place in the news cycle. With representativeness itself under strain, Congress’s institutional self-confidence sags.
Melnick calls our attention to an even deeper concern: Counterintuitively, the juggernaut of democracy itself may be working against representation in a development that spans centuries rather than decades. Citing Tocqueville’s apprehensions of the individualistic, leveling tendencies of the democratic spirit, he notes that the purest little-d democrats may be naturally “allergic to forms and formalities. They want their favorite policies, and they want them now.” Citizens who think in these terms are likely to be skeptical of the complicated give-and-take of congressional bargaining and attracted to the presidency’s promises of instant gratification, even if they are dimly aware that the president is offering sugar highs rather than real sustenance. I, too, worry that the democratic logic triumphant in our time promotes distrust of intermediaries of all kinds. Why should representatives have any greater voice than you or I? This impulse flares up constantly in the public’s relationship with Congress.
How Bleak Is It, Really?
Then again, that point surely rang true at much earlier points in our nation’s history, and Congress has time and again shown its resiliency. We have to be careful of taking any sort of historical logic to its endpoint, or presuming we live there.
Attending to our own specific moment, we should consider: Is anything so bad about Congress in the present moment? Postell reminds us of the ongoing importance of “Secret” (“low-salience” Congress, which can achieve a good deal with little fanfare. And he (with me) notes that members of Congress did play a large role in shaping the reconciliation law that is the centerpiece of Trump’s busy 2025. He also asks whether overall productivity might be holding up just fine, notwithstanding consistently negative media coverage of Congress. Maybe legislators have changed how they work, without losing influence.
I hope these suggestions (which, to be clear, Postell offers as helpful provocations) turn out to be right, and that Congress is poised to unleash a gusher of productive legislation. But I doubt it. I tried to make clear in my original piece that Congress still does a great deal, and that it would be a mistake to simply write it off. But my sense is that the institution is genuinely on a downward trajectory. Based on previous research, I can say with some confidence that the 118th Congress (2023–24) was historically unproductive. It is too early to judge the 119th, but I’m willing to bet on low output (coupled with continued historically high reliance on omnibuses). We have lost a great deal, without reaching a nadir. We can lose much more.
Supposing that is correct, how difficult would it be to turn things around? In a different vein of his response, Postell brings out an inevitability argument: “Reducing partisan loyalty and incentivizing cross-cutting policies may simply be out of touch with the mood of the people, and perhaps no amount of institutional reform within Congress can change that.” Our Congress is what it is because we are what we are, and no amount of reformist messing around can change that. Melnick also strikes a pessimistic note, saying Americans’ dislike of open conflict will make it difficult for Congress to ever regain people’s trust.
I (try to) maintain more hope for Congress because I feel that the American people really are more complex (and interesting) than our current Manichaean style of politics, which repulses enough people to make burnout and reinvention a live possibility. Especially because of the rise of artificial intelligence, we are heading into a time of massive social upheaval, and we need a functioning politics to help us find our collective way through. Trust generated by shared experience of place may be harder to come by, but it is still a real force, which makes geography-rooted representative government the best solution. That’s especially clear given how obvious it’s become that the public fora of social media can never function as an acceptable “universal town square.” The deficiencies of mass plebiscitary democracy, unmediated (or poorly mediated) by a powerful representative legislature, are clearer every day.
How to Make It Better
Of course, articulating the good that a more self-assured Congress could bring is no recipe for actually delivering one. So let me conclude with a brief run-through of some of the suggestions laid out by my interlocutors. Postell recommends:
Rather than seek a reformist groundswell, my inclination (shared by Levin) is to urge members of Congress to reorient their chambers toward committee work, especially in the House. That this sounds dull as bricks to outsiders is an advantage; it is a program that can be pursued underneath the din of national politics. Members who care about policy and plan to spend years in Congress need to see how institutional reconfiguration can serve their own ambitions. Hard work needs to be rewarded with agenda control. Back benchers have nothing to lose but their leashes.
Philip A. Wallach is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He is the author of Why Congress (2023). This essay previously was published by Law and Liberty.
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