What's wrong with Congress?
Well, we have two Congresses: Toxic Congress and Secret Congress
The 119th Congress returned to the U.S. Capitol recently. They have an immense amount of work to get done, policy matters that they should have addressed last year.
Top on the list is completing the federal budget process for the current fiscal year, which began on October 1, 2025. It has passed only six of the twelve spending bills. The remaining half-dozen spending laws are funded by a continuing resolution that expires at midnight on January 30.
Yes, you read that correctly. The country may experience another federal government shutdown only a few months after it endured a forty-three-day shutdown.
This is to say nothing of the habit of Congress standing idle as President Donald J. Trump has usurped legislative authority by establishing tariffs, engaging in military actions against Iran, Yemen, and Venezuela, and withheld congressionally appropriated money on education and foreign aid programs. Trump, to be clear, is only the latest president who has been happy to unilaterally make policy by “pen and phone,” as former executive Barack H. Obama pithily put it.
And speaking of tariffs, the Supreme Court is poised to decide the constitutionality and legality of Trump’s actions. This is only the latest major policy issue that should be decided by the people ending up in the hands of the third branch of government. Immigration, Internet regulation, environmental policies, oceanic fishing regulations: all these matters that should be decided by Congress have ended up in the federal courts.
James Madison famously warned in Federalist 48 that in republics the “legislative department is everywhere extending the sphere of its activity, and drawing all power into its impetuous vortex.” Legislators are lawmakers and possess the power of taxation, two preeminent governance powers. Yet for decades we have seen Congress give up authority and simply not do the things it was built to do.
Why? What’s wrong with Congress?
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Great piece with additional insights defined in the jump piece that your readers should study: https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2026/01/100016/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email . While you touched on several critical reforms, more needs to be said about redistricting and reducing CD size, campaign finance, and, as you implied, decentralization of the internal work process.
This is an accurate if unfortunate description of the Congress in both its exaggerated form that we are suffering today and the historically more complex phenomena that historians and political scientists spend so much time dissecting...
... except that the the solution for the toxicity is not aversion to the central problem any more than the correct approach to a abusive spouse who is a productive parent would be to have him or her spend more time at work.
As with any family, are elected members of Congress - especially in the House - representing *all* of their constituents, even those who did not vote for them or who might vehemently disagree with a position on just one issue in which the majority of their constituents are in broad agreement.
It is reasonable that a representative could have a contentious position on an issue that was expressed clearly during a campaign, but that becomes toxic if contrary views held by a large number of constituents are ignored or even targeted with ridicule or retribution once the member is in office.