Yes, Congress is Broken
Yes, Congress is Broken
Joseph Postell, Professor of Politics, Hillsdale College
Most Americans agree that Congress is a failing institution, yet the overwhelming majority of congressmembers are re-elected every cycle. This fact alone tells us that something has gone wrong with Congress.
According to Gallup’s surveys, the last time a majority of Americans approved of Congress was over twenty years ago, in 2003. Since 2009, Congress has only reached a 30 percent approval rating once, for a very brief period at the beginning of 2021.
At the same time, well over 90 percent of congressmembers running for re-election win each cycle. How can we deny that Congress is broken, when most Americans disapprove of its performance, but the same people continue to be re-elected?
Congress’s brokenness is visible on a variety of fronts. Deliberation—the practice of showing up, giving arguments, seeking to persuade each other, and listening to each other—no longer occurs. Instead, debates are scripted, and speeches are delivered for the cameras. The members of Congress are not talking to each other like they used to. Their focus is on the national debate that is happening outside of Congress, rather than having a conversation within it.
Turning the cameras off might get them to start talking to each other, but there are deeper systemic issues plaguing Congress. Members are increasingly disconnected from the constituents who send them to Washington. Just as the Anti-Federalists predicted, the size of their districts prevents them from truly knowing and understanding the concerns of the people they represent. The vast majority of people never meet their representatives and senators.
In addition, most of the money that funds congressional campaigns comes from powerful interests outside of their districts in the form of PACs. This has transformed members into voices for national, ideological causes, rather than the specific and local interests in their home districts.
Local newspapers and other sources of local information have nearly vanished, so people are less interested in the traditional services that members offered, like funding for local projects. Therefore, members have stopped focusing on providing those services and begun focusing more on fighting with each other on television and social media.
Congress was originally designed to represent the local interests and needs of the people. “All politics is local” used to be conventional wisdom. But nobody thinks that is true anymore. Members of Congress have become more responsive to national debates and less responsive to local needs. Those national debates are ideological and divisive.
Primary elections have made ideological division—often referred to as “polarization”—even worse. Most congressional districts lean firmly towards one party—rural districts largely to Republicans, and urban districts largely to Democrats. In those districts, members are not worried about getting re-elected in the general election. They are worried about losing their primary elections to a more ideologically “pure,” less compromising member of their own party. Just as Federalists predicted, the more purely democratic we make the government, the less democratic it becomes in practice. Today, the loudest and most extreme voices are the ones that determine Congress’s priorities.
Finally, members of Congress simply do not make the important decisions anymore. They have delegated most of the power to make law to administrative agencies. Across all of the important areas of government—food and drug regulation, environmental law, financial regulation, labor relations, and the like—the real power to make law resides in administrative agencies. Most of the laws Congress passes are not really law, but are delegations of lawmaking power to the bureaucracy.
With good reason, people care more about presidential than congressional elections, because they understand that the real power to make change in our society is in the executive branch. Congress is responsible for its own irrelevance.
In short, the American people disapprove of Congress because it is broken in multiple, fundamental respects. It no longer engages in real deliberation, and the members spend more time talking to cameras than to each other. The members are increasingly disconnected from constituents and do not represent their specific, local concerns. They have given away much of their power to make the most important decisions affecting our daily lives.
Rebuilding Congress should be a top priority for anyone who cares about the health of our representative democracy. One of the United States’ greatest achievements was the creation of a government by the consent of the governed, through representation. It would be another great achievement to restore Congress and prove that representative government is still possible in the twenty-first century.