Data point: 81 of the most recent 100 Senate votes have been on nominations
And lets set the record straight about who has been leading the effort to fix Congress
James Wallner and I wrote a column about the Senate’s troubles. Then the Washington Post’s Paul Kane published a piece, which included some eye-popping data.
From early January 2023 through this month, the Senate has held 272 hours of debate, just 18 percent of the time it was in session. That’s almost 175 fewer hours of debate than the Senate held through the same time frame of 2021-2022. It’s a small fraction compared with the more than 1,200 hours of Senate debate that came in this time span of the 115th Congress (2015-2016), when the deliberating accounted for almost 60 percent of all the time in session. The current Senate has spent twice as much time (551 hours) holding roll call votes than senators spent debating actual legislation.
Now here’s my latest effort to inform the conversation and spur action: only 19 of the last 100 Senate votes have been on bills. The other 81 votes have been on nominations. Consider the implications of that fact, which appears in my latest column for the Washington Examiner magazine.
The Right Discusses Its Own Worries About Health of Representative Democracy
This week we at the American Enterprise Institute convened conservatives to discuss some of the current challenges to governance in our nation. Speakers included Joseph Postell (Hillsdale College), Matt Germer (R Street Institute), Beth A. Williams (Former Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Policy, US Department of Justice), and Andy Busch (University of Tennessee).
The problems are real, and raging against the system and hoping to elect more “fighters” is not going to restore our republic to health.
Instead, more of us need to think institutionally. That means deepening our understanding of our constitutionl system and the varying roles citizens and elected and unelected officials are supposed to play within it. Please click the video above to watch the discussion.
The WaPo: So Much for the First Draft of History
In late 2014, I began an effort to upgrade Congress for the 21st century. My early partners were Daniel Schuman and Lee Drutman, and over time many other individuals and groups joined in the effort. We held our first Hill event in late 2015 and released our first report, Restoring the First Branch, in early 2016. We have published tons of stuff, done innumerable briefings of legislators and staff, and testified at plenty of hearings. Members of this group supported the push to create a Select Committee on Modernization years ago and the succeeding Modernization Subcommittee. Some of us have created newsletters on congressional reform, like the LegBranch.org, First Branch Forecast, and more. At some point (2019?) we merry changemakers started referring to ourselves as “Fix Congress.”
So imagine how I felt a couple days ago when I saw the Editorial Board of the Washington Post reporting on the effort of a former Post business reporter to fix Congress in partnership with a health policy scholar (yes, really) at U Penn’s Biden School. Oh, and the Post refers to this effort as “Fixing Congress.”
Seriously?
Our work is not secret—and frankly we have gotten a lot done to improve Congress. Yet the Washington Post editorial board either has no idea we exist or simply doesn’t care. Journalism at its best is the first draft of history. The Post blew it here.
Quote of the Week
“[T]he notion that the people we see every day sitting in traffic jams and watching porn on the subway and trying to return 11-year-old truck tires at Walmart suddenly acquire a mystical power of sanctification when they enter a voting booth is pure superstition.” -Kevin Williamson, “The One Who Will Not Give His Consent,” The Dispatch