A new book on Congress offers a lens for thinking about a legislature’s duties—and how to revitalize Congress. Some links at the end on family policy, conservative approaches to poverty, the meaning of freedom, and a lot more.
From The Washington Post’s “Democracy dies in darkness” motto to the academic cottage industry cataloguing various alleged threats to democracy, elite American culture is suffused with anxiety about the sustainability of democracy. American Enterprise Institute scholar Philip Wallach’s new book, Why Congress, is less about “democracy” in some abstract sense and instead focuses on one of the central institutions of the American republic: Congress. Wallach’s study of Congress offers very promising insights about what’s involved in making a democratic republic work.
Briefly, Wallach argues that Congress used to be a place where grand compromises could be hashed out and which could act as a counterweight to the executive branch. He chronicles the way that Congress checked some of FDR’s most sweeping proposals during World War II, for example. But, since the 1970s, Congress has grown more dysfunctional. As leadership has increasingly centralized power, both chambers have seen sharper polarization and the body as a whole has become more prone to deadlock and performative stunts. This dysfunction has strengthened the hand of the executive branch and helped drag public opinion of Congress to somewhere underneath the basement floor.
Wallach homes in on concrete issues to show this change: He contrasts the way Congress exercised oversight over the executive during World War II with the way it handled COVID-19 policy (issuing a gusher of money but not really weighing in on particular coronavirus-containment policies, deferring to the executive branch). While Congress eventually came to a consensus on civil rights in the 1960s, a similar consensus on immigration has evaded it in recent decades.
Polity—Not Just Policy
The thematic core of Wallach’s book is a reconsideration of what a legislature is supposed to accomplish. Here, he offers a welcome corrective to various ideological accounts of democracy (or “Our Democracy”). For Wallach, legislating is only partly about achieving specific policy goals. Another purpose of the legislature is to be a vehicle for channeling conflicts in order to find some kind of workable compromise. (See also Shadi Hamid’s The Problem of Democracy for another development of that theme.)
To some extent, Wallach starts from the same premise as John Rawls in Political Liberalism, which begins from the assumption of the existence of diverse viewpoints in modern societies. However, whereas Rawls attempts to create a theoretical mechanism for coping with this diversity (the model he terms “political liberalism”), Wallach instead offers an institutional account of how Congress can be a vehicle for navigating disagreement. As he writes near the beginning, to “be a free, self-governing people is to commit to a political system that copes with our differences rather than seeking to suppress them.”
Cope is the telling verb there. Wallach assumes that difference will persist, even (and especially) about some of the most important issues. The task of statecraft in part means coming up with institutions to manage these persistent disagreements: to allow them to play out without revolutionary violence or civil war erupting. Wallach makes clear that the goal of statecraft, then, is not just about policy but instead about creating the conditions for a sustainable polity: “A viable and functional politics is far more valuable to our social-well-being than a few technocratically optimal policy choices ever could be.”
In Wallach’s view, Congress plays that indispensable role of polity-management in the American constitutional order. He portrays that body as representative—as a vehicle for representing and bringing together diverse factions. While the executive branch speaks with one voice, Congress has many voices. By this account, the legislative horse-trading that repels ideologues has many political benefits.
Beyond the Wilsonian Temptation
One of Wallach’s great targets is the specter of “responsible party governance” that has haunted American political-science wonks since the late 19th century. A professional academic in political science before his political career, Woodrow Wilson was a major proponent of the thesis that American politics was too decentralized: political coalitions were so diverse that voters were not offered a clear party-line choice in the ballot box. Wilson thought that Congress should instead present voters a sharp contrast of visions. Those more strongly centralized parties could be thus held responsible by voters. In 1950, the American Political Science Association built on this Wilsonian legacy in its report “Toward a More Responsible Two-Party System.” There, the APSA fatefully argued that American political parties should have more centralized discipline.
By this wonkish vision doesn’t always work in reality. In recent years, Congress has become an institution run much more by partisan discipline. And it seems much more dysfunctional and irresponsible. I’ve written before on why I think the U.S. federal government may not be optimized for the kind of partisan discipline that characterizes parliamentary systems.
In contrast to that centralizing narrative, Wallach instead argues that Congress works better when it is more diffuse. He sees the checks on centralized power not as limits on “progress” or a threat to “our democracy” but instead as crucial for preserving the American constitutional order. Why Congress documents how both Republicans and Democrats have attempted to centralize more control in partisan leadership in Congress—and how such efforts empower the executive branch. One possible future he sketches for Congress is that of the “rubber stamp,” in which it becomes simply an adjunct of the executive branch. The “rubber stamp” Congress is one in which leadership has completely centralized power.
There are big institutional stakes here. In the first two years of Joe Biden’s presidency, Washington echoed with the drumbeats of a campaign to nuke the filibuster in the Senate—and to make Congress that much closer to the “rubber stamp” future. One “open letter” after another called for the Senate to nuke itself in order supposedly to save democracy. Rather than blowing up institutions in the name of some ideological reckoning, Wallach instead argues that we should recognize the virtues of American institutions for mediating conflict. He indicates openness to certain reforms to change some of the political incentives of the current electoral system, most notably the use of multimember districts (something the US has had before) as well as ranked-choice voting. He also suggests that perhaps the House could be modestly expanded—something I’ve seen defended by voices on both the left and the right recently.
Perhaps the biggest path for reform Wallach emphasizes is internal: Congress needs to take action to strengthen regular order in order to protect the autonomy of individual members and check the powers of leadership. His work recounts how Congress has continually reformed its internal mechanisms to find some balance between the competing imperatives of organizational control and openness. To some extent, restoring its vitality is up to Congress itself.
Which Way, Congress?
And Congress may be at a crossroads, poised between continued degeneration, the “rubber stamp” rule of partisanship, and some prospect of renewal. Nuking the filibuster for nominations helped make the nominations process much more contentious—and escalated attacks upon the legitimacy of both executive and judicial appointments. (The rise of party-line appointments increases the temptation of congressional partisans to declare other branches illegitimate—look at the new attacks upon the courts, for instance.) In 2021, The Senate almost buckled before the nuclear campaign, but both Joe Manchin and Kirsten Sinema stood up for the filibuster and the Senate as an institution. However, Sinema has now left the Democratic Party, and Joe Manchin could face a real political challenge in going up for reelection in 2024. There’s a risk that nuking the filibuster could harden into a litmus test for Senate Democrats over the long term, placing the body at risk of succumbing to the dynamics that Wallach diagnoses as so dangerous to constitutional self-government.
In 2021-2022, some argued that the only alternative to nuking the Senate was continued sclerosis. The body had been reduced to—in the words of former Harry Reid aide Adam Jentleson (who now is chief of staff to Pennsylvania senator John Fetterman)—a “kill switch” for legislation. However, the last Congress was in fact very productive, with many important measures passing with significant bipartisan majorities, including infrastructure, CHIPS, and reforms the Electoral Count Act. Rather than being frozen in partisan deadlock, the Senate in fact became a hub of bipartisan dealmaking
.
This indicates that the Senate can pass legislation without becoming a partisan rubber stamp for the president. That is, renewal is possible. Whether all those compromises are all well-designed is separate from the structural question about whether Congress actually needs to be further centralized in order to be productive.
As a provocation, I might add that defending regular order (and all the checks on central control that it entails) may be the most promising route forward for a possible policy realignment. The pressures of forging the kind of diverse coalitions required to pass things under regular order can encourage creative policy thinking. As I’ve mentioned before, there seems considerable bipartisan interest in many elements of a “resilience” policy agenda (on industrial capacity, for instance). Maintaining regular order can encourage Congress to work on those areas rather than more divisive partisan measures.
A recent J.D. Vance profile by Dave Weigel hits upon those themes: Though quite willing to mix it up with Democrats, the freshman Ohio senator has also worked to find areas of bipartisan collaboration. Vance’s most prominent effort in this regard is the Railway Safety Act of 2023, and much of the informal “realignment” caucus within the GOP is represented among the cosponsors of this bill (including Marco Rubio, Josh Hawley, and Mitt Romney).
Wallach’s work highlights the tensions of the party system in the United States. To some extent, the American political infrastructure incentivizes a two-party political system, which has some real benefits. But James Madison and others were aware of the fact that a proliferation of factions could help balance the American republic and that settling down into two warring camps could instead destabilize the country. A heterogeneous Congress—dominated by two parties that themselves have various internal factions—could be a way of finding some equipoise between those two tendencies. However, Congress can only be that kind of body if there are limits to the power of leadership; those limits give space for the forging of the weird coalitions that are characteristic of American government.
In a time of deep political anxiety, Why Congress offers a helpful account about what it takes to sustain the institutions of self-government. The word trust appears throughout this work, and Wallach argues that partisan disputes in the legislature play a key part of developing trust. Because different factions ultimately have to come together to pass legislation, there’s a broader sense of political buy-in. Wallach argues, for instance, that the massive coalition required to pass civil-rights laws in the 1960s helped create a sense of broad-based public trust in those revolutionary measures. Without that trust (which must be earned), public institutions have a much harder time functioning. Credibility is one of the most important currencies for governance, and Wallach offers an incisive examination of how Congress can offer an institutional vehicle for channeling conflict and building trust.
Other links:
Some pieces by me since the last newsletter:
This weekend, I had a longish feature in City Journal on the different traditions of freedom in American culture. This brings together some material from a bigger project I’ve been working on.
For National Review: Is the Trump a threat to, or an enabler of, what he claims to oppose?
For CenterClip: On how politics and policy intersect for a political “realignment” on the right.
Around the Web:
An interview between Philip Wallach and Geoff Kabaservice on…Why Congress.
Mark Wickham-Jones on that infamous APSA report.
A tale of two realignments: American Compass’s Rebuilding American Capitalism, a compendium of ideas for policy reform, and the UK think tank ResPublica’s The Right Response: Conservative Ideas to Tackle Poverty.
Dimitrios Halikias on Adam Smith and the invisible hand reconsidered.
Geoffrey Cain on North Carolina and regional industrial strategy.
The Minneapolis Fed presents some data on stay-at-home parenting (and caregiving more generally).
Michael Brendan Dougherty wonders what comes after populist disruption.
Joe Pitts on reading Robert Nisbet and James Q. Wilson.
Every political nerd’s fantasy: Bryan Curtis has an extended interview with Billy Ray on the 20th anniversary of Shattered Glass. Lots of backstory for a film about political journalism that (I think) really holds up.
Thanks for reading this, and, if you enjoyed, feel free to like, share, and subscribe!