11.7: The Broken Branch?

An old saying muses that, if con is the opposite of pro, then Congress must be the opposite of progress. Lacking the quick, decisive action of the presidency and the impartial, detached aura of the Supreme Court, America’s national legislature can seem mired in a perpetual quarrel, one from which it only occasionally emerges to pass a major policy 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. They fashioned 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. Good laws would be easier to pass with a more streamlined system, but so would bad laws. The Founders decided that the possibility of the former wasn’t worth the risk of the latter.

This is not to say that Congress is perfect. The strength of today’s congressional parties, the ever-increasing size of the national budget, the democratization of the Senate through popular 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 Senate, and the ability of members to serve unlimited terms—should be done away with to modernize Congress.

Every congressional reform, whether it was enacted in the past or may be enacted in the future, involves trade-offs. Even the good or necessary reforms will come with negative side effects. The trick to reforming Congress—or, for that matter, any institution—is knowing whether the cure is worse than the disease.