11.6: The Broken Branch?

An old saying muses that, if con is the opposite of pro, then by the same logic Congress must be the opposite of progress. Such a cynical view may seem justified given how Congress works — or, perhaps more accurately, how Congress doesn’t work. Lacking both the quick, decisive action of the presidency and the impartial, detached aura of the Supreme Court, America’s national legislature can appear to be locked in a perpetual quarrel, one from which it only occasionally emerges to pass a major policy or two before descending back into dysfunction.

One might reasonably conclude from this that the American political machine is in need of repair. But Congress’s tendency toward inaction is in a way proof that it is working as designed. The Founders intended for the national government to be able to pass laws only with difficulty, and fashioning a bicameral legislature with many choke points to ensure that any laws which did make it through the convoluted legislative process would be worthy of enactment. A more streamlined policymaking system would make bad laws as well as good laws easier to pass; the Founders decided that the risk of the former outweighed the possibility of the latter.

This is not to say that Congress is perfect. The strength of today’s congressional parties, the increasing size of the federal budget, the democratization of the Senate through the Seventeenth Amendment’s introduction of popular senatorial elections, and the fact that the average representative today is expected to speak on behalf of over 700,000 constituents would all be regarded by the Founders as changes for the worse. Perhaps they would be right. Or perhaps they wouldn’t, and the features of Congress they favored — the slow, deliberate pace of lawmaking, the disproportionate nature of the Senate, and the ability of members to serve unlimited terms — should be done away with to modernize Congress.

Unfortunately, every congressional reform — both those enacted in the past and those that might be enacted in the future — involves trade-offs. Even a good or necessary reform will come with negative side effects. As with reforms of any kind, the trick to making Congress “work” (however we might define “working”) is knowing whether the cure is worse than the disease.