Senator Levin and the Right Kind of Congressional Politics

Separation of Powers and Oversight By Philip Wallach October 5, 2026

Editor’s note: Philip Wallach delivered this speech at Wayne State University’s Levin Center on September 17, 2026. His address was given at the conference, Could Rebooting Congress Help Save American Democracy?

So when we say that under the US Constitution, Congress is the political branch—today, that just sounds like an insult. It is astounding how many candidates actively seeking to become members of this body declare, “I am not a politician.” Even worse than ordinary politicians are “career politicians.” Who could make a career playing the angles that America’s national politicians are forced to play, without being utterly corrupted and degraded by it?

I’m not entirely unsympathetic to these ways of thinking, and I’m not here today to apologize for the current state of US politics in this, our country’s semi-quincentennial year. Things are bad and getting worse. There are plenty of reasons to be angry at our national politicians and our congressmen in particular, and I will go over some of them shortly.

But first I want to try to lay out a different orientation toward “politics,” which we ought to be able to think of as something other than a dirty business. I’ll talk a bit about what representative government meant to our founders and what politics looks like when we treat it as “the art of the possible” rather than a substitute for war. I’ll briefly consider the career of the founder of this center, the late Senator Carl Levin, and how he exemplified the possibilities of constructive maneuvering that are opened up by digging into the details of governance.

And only after trying to get that positive vision into view will I turn to the question of why Congress has been having such a hard time in the dozen years since Senator Carl Levin (D-MI) retired and how it can get well again.

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When Aristotle observed that man is the political animal, he was paying the human race a compliment. He argued that what set man apart from the other animals was our ability to use our gift for language to reason and plan together. That allowed us to move beyond “is” to “ought” and “will,” and that in turn allowed us to build a political community bigger than our family or village groups.

Talking together means we can see ourselves as a we; we can take stock of our situation and collectively spell out where we want to go—together.

But of course, each of us communicating is different from all of us agreeing. As we collectively deliberate, we must try to sway each other with logic and rhetoric and with appeals to common values and authorities—and by buttering up and bartering and blustering and bullying, too. That’s politics. Because it always involves a tangled web of social relations, it is never tidy. But, at bottom, it is about a group figuring out how and for what purposes it should undertake common action.

In the prehistory of the United States, colonial legislatures were the places where politics thrived. The king was the ultimate authority, but he was across the Atlantic Ocean, and so consulting him required literally months of delay. By necessity, the men on the ground needed decision-making structures capable of acting together much faster. Their experience with legislative assemblies was intensely practical: 17th- and 18th-century British North Americans debated allocation of land titles, made appointments to church offices, administered taxes, organized militia, and funded lighthouse construction.

The most important political belief of these colonists was that free people are masters of their own affairs and property, which can be disposed of by the public authority only with their consent. In practice, that consent is conferred through the deliberations of a vital representative assembly. When they began to feel alienated from mother England in the 1760s, it was precisely because the laws imposed on them were made in the Westminster Parliament, where they were not represented; they were being ruled by an alien power; politics was being done to them rather than by them.

In the Declaration of Independence of 1776, the colonists’ objections to “a long train of abuses and usurpations” revolved as much around their insufficient protection through representation as around particular abuses. They charged that the pattern of British actions “evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism,” which would have been impossible had their concerns really been represented. The freedom that they fought for, and gave to their posterity, was the freedom to have genuinely representative legislators be the ones to decide which burdens to take on, such that the people’s concerns would never be disregarded.

If we fast-forward to the First Congress under the Constitution of 1789, we again see a legislature that was a forum for a vigorous, practical, self-governing people. Working in the nation’s capital of New York, the assembled representatives of the 13 original states balanced the competing interests of the manufacturing-heavy North and the agricultural, slavery-dependent South. They passed tariffs and provided for customs collectors and port officials to enforce them. They created the first three executive departments. They set up the federal judiciary, established the first federal crimes, and passed a copyright act.

These were people who needed to do politics together because they had a lot of matters to resolve. If the people of this sprawling infant nation were going to make it, their representatives would have to feel each other out, offer, counteroffer, and finally commit to compromises they all could live with. Yes, sometimes agreement can be elusive; sometimes we have to count noses. But representative government in American history has not been geared toward empowering narrow majorities to work their will. Congress’s work has never been reducible to questions of what we will do; our representatives have always been just as concerned with how we will decide, and how we will ensure that all points of view are adequately considered. Most important laws in our nation’s history passed with broad support in both chambers. When the system is working well, even those who end up voting against a particular measure will insist on the integrity of the legislative process that produced it.

Of course, Congress has also been the leading forum for partisan competition, ever since, in the Second Congress, James Madison helped organize defenders of republican liberty against the encroachments of the National Bank. At their best, parties serve to organize the agenda in ways that are responsive to citizens’ concerns, thereby clarifying lines of political responsibility and offering voters a clear means of accountability at the ballot box.

At their worst, parties become machines devoted to consolidating factional power and distributing spoils. Throughout our history, some Americans have sought what 20th-century political scientists called “responsible party government,” but it is just as clear that “irresponsible party government” is a recurring threat to republican vitality.

Let me turn from the founders of the nation to the founder of this center.

Throughout his long career, Senator Levin saw parties at their best and at their worst. He showed that one can be both a committed partisan and a genuine institutionalist.

When Senator Levin came to Capitol Hill in 1978, his background was in civil rights law and municipal government. But early on, he decided to devote much of his energy as a legislator to military affairs. He knew that this was one issue area in which lawmakers were rewarded for demonstrating seriousness and depth, and where bipartisanship was a living reality. Sure enough, by digging into the details of the military’s operation, this lifelong civilian found ways to shore up our nation’s defenses, in the details of the yearly National Defense Authorization Acts and in the generational reforms contained in the Competition in Contracting Act of 1984 and the Weapon Systems Acquisition Reform Act of 2009. Levin’s partnerships with Republican lawmakers on these reforms ensured they would endure through many political seasons.

Of course, Senator Levin also left his mark as the longtime chair of the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, the descendant of the famous Truman Committee that stood guard against war profiteering and fraud during World War II. His variety of vigilant oversight was designed to uncover abuse—not just for the sake of embarrassing political opponents (although that never hurts), but principally to enable effective legislative reforms. His partnership with Susan Collins (R-ME) in investigating offshore banking informed the ambitious anti-money-laundering measures enacted in the USA PATRIOT Act. His partnership with Tom Coburn (R-OK) in investigating high-risk home loans shaped parts of the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010.

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The lesson I take from the senator’s long resume of enacted legislation is that when our legislators pursue their constituents’ interests into the halls of government, they can find plenty of room for improvement, often in ways that run entirely perpendicular to normal partisanship. Armed with detailed knowledge, they can build good-faith working relationships with colleagues, even when separated by profound ideological differences. This is politics as figuring out when and how we need to act together, not as an endless wrestling match in which one side’s gain is the other side’s loss.

Near the end of his career, in November 2013, Senator Levin courageously dissented from his party’s position on a key procedural change: he was one of just three Democratic senators to vote against the so-called nuclear option, by which the Senate changed its cloture requirement for executive branch nominees and lower court judges from 60 votes to a simple majority. Democrats did so not by changing the Senate’s formal rules but by overturning precedent on the fly, on the strength of a majority vote.

I can’t get into a full discussion of the uses and abuses of the Senate filibuster here, but I will say that the higher threshold for confirmation forced presidents to come to some kind of understanding with members of the opposite party.

What Senator Levin objected to was not the lower threshold for confirming executive officers and judges; he said that Republicans’ “partisan gamesmanship” had made such a change desirable. Rather, his objection was to how the change was made. Allow me to quote the senator’s own words:

This is not about the ends but the means. Pursuing the nuclear option in this manner removes an important check on majority overreach. As Senator Vandenberg said: If a Senate majority decides to pursue its aims unrestrained by the rules, we will have sacrificed a professed vital principle for the sake of momentary convenience.

Levin concluded by sharing his fears that the Senate would become a different sort of institution “if the majority can do whatever it wants by changing the rules whenever it wants with a method that has not been used before in this body to change the very rules of this body.” He said he feared that the end of the legislative filibuster would inevitably follow. Taken as a whole, his fears were about much more than Senate procedure: he was warning us of a political culture in which partisan advantage-seeking crowds out the culture of coalition-building, in which each side tries to squeeze out every bit of edge that its formal powers afford it, no matter the costs to its relationships with legislators across the aisle.

In the past dozen years, we have seen just how prescient Senator Levin’s warning was. Congress has increasingly organized itself to facilitate hard-edged political competition, but it has yielded anything but “responsible party government.” Policymaking itself has taken a back seat to messaging bills meant to twist the other side into knots, and legislators have sunk into a distressing habit of passivity. More often than not, they act like supplicants of the president rather than the primary actors in the drama of republican self-government.

We have seen new extremes of self-abnegation in the last two years. We recently had a Speaker of the House announce that the war in Iran and the trade war with Canada were examples of “the executive branch . . . doing their thing,” with little relevance to Congress. Yet this is not a tendency confined to one side. Congressional Democrats during the Biden administration did not strike many blows for legislative supremacy; indeed, on some of their key priorities, including student loans and COVID-19 vaccination, they assiduously avoided legislative action while cheering on executive branch actions premised on dubious legal authorities.

A major part of the problem today is how much rank-and-file members see themselves first and foremost as loyal soldiers in an ongoing struggle—which many of them sincerely believe has existential stakes for the country. If your sense of politics takes as its starting point that many of your fellow citizens have become part of a cult determined to ruin our country—and, make no mistake, there are an awful lot of people on both sides who believe that—then what use can you have for deliberation? How naive the positive vision of politics that I laid out earlier must seem.

Not surprisingly, people who think this way want to bulldoze through whatever obstacles frustrate their side’s desires. Although the legislative filibuster is still in place today, it is easy enough to imagine it dropping away should the circumstances make it convenient, perhaps as soon as 2029. Meanwhile, we have seen an enormous expansion of the budget reconciliation process, which was once upon a time designed to help us balance the annual budget in a timely manner, but in recent years has become little more than a vessel for single-party lawmaking.

Our current politics are collectively driving us crazy; when people convince themselves they are living on the edge of apocalypse long enough, many are bound to start falling in. The people who command our attention in this environment are those who possess the gift of social media virality, which is almost diametrically opposed to the kinds of civic virtues that we have traditionally prized.

It must also be said that our current back-and-forth political environment produces bad policy. Many areas of law swing wildly whenever partisan control of the White House shifts, leaving citizens, businesses, and trading partners with a bad case of whiplash. One area I’ve followed closely over the years is climate change, where policies invented by Barack Obama were reversed by Donald Trump, restored by Joe Biden, and have now been reversed by Trump again.

It is much easier to complain about all this than to find our way out—we are genuinely stuck in a bad equilibrium. For any given member of Congress who fears what the other party will do with power, the rational course is to be a loyal foot soldier. Raise as much money as you can for your colleagues who face close elections; empower your leaders to keep discipline in the ranks as best they can, the better to fight out the next election. Pick your spots on low-salience issues when you can, but mostly realize that you are fated to ride the waves of national politics.

We need institutional changes that alter these incentives. We need our committees to be stronger. If a committee is an undoubted power player, like Senator Levin’s Armed Services Committee, then it becomes a forum for serious work. The Armed Services Committees have that reputation in part because everyone knows that they are going to convert their work into annual National Defense Authorization Acts, without which the military simply cannot go on. We need to set other committees up with similarly weighty duties, such that members have a reason to invest in becoming policy experts. That means restoring reauthorization processes that have fallen into disrepair.

We also need to give those members who want to be serious policymakers more of a chance to build coalitions and advance legislation on their own terms. Right now, both the House and Senate are extremely leader-dominated institutions, so that working the leadership really is just about the only way to get consideration of your legislation. That dominance is a problem. We need to promote other channels by which legislation can move. We might guarantee bipartisan committee efforts a path to floor consideration. We should take away some of the tools that leaders use to suppress amendments and stifle debate.

To make any of these changes, though, what we need most is a critical mass of members willing to make the right kind of politics their priority—who say, I took this job to do important things for the American people, and if partisanship is strangling and enervating my institution, then I need to go against the partisan grain. That is a risk. That may lead to a harder primary contest. Yes . . . and so? Going with the flow is a good way to watch Congress go down the drain. We are in danger of squandering our political inheritance, of giving up on the idea of republican self-government through meaningful representation in Congress. It is worth taking risks to fight for that ideal.

Philip Wallach is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of Why Congress (Oxford University Press).