The 119th: Unserious, unprincipled, unproductive
What has the new Republican-controlled Congress accomplished legislatively in its first three months? Just this: fund the government for the rest of the fiscal year under a continuing resolution narrowly passed with only Republican votes that lets the president set spending levels rather than Congress. All the rest has been partisan posturing full of sound and fury, accomplishing nothing.
Oh, yes, each House managed to pass a budget resolution for the coming fiscal year that narrowly passed both the House and Senate, again with almost no Democratic votes – the forerunners to the “one beautiful bill” that President Trump wants to make good on his big campaign promises. But even so, the two chambers remain far apart in terms of how much spending will be increased and decreased, in which programs, and how much additional borrowing will be authorized. On those tough decisions, the only thing the House and Senate Republicans could agree on was to kick the can down the road and head out of town for another two-week recess.
Given the breadth of the issues before them, perhaps it’s understandable why they might be taking so long. Extending the old Trump tax cuts and adding new ones for overtime pay and Social Security benefits. Securing the border. Increasing defense spending. Closing down entire departments, agencies, and programs and shrinking the federal workforce. Ridding the government of every hint of DEI and climate initiatives. Clawing back money authorized and distributed as part of Biden-era priorities. Rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse. Trillions of dollars are involved.
Yet even with so much at stake, there have been few committee hearings on any of those topics to get insights and ideas from government and experts, state and local officials, businesses, interest groups, and impacted citizens. There has been no serious public debate in committee or on the House and Senate floor other than an impassioned 25-hour soliloquy delivered to an empty chamber by a lone Democratic senator from New Jersey. No alternatives have been offered or voted on. To the degree there has been any real discussion among Members, it’s been strictly behind closed doors – and strictly among Republican members. The 260 Democratic members of the House and Senate, who arguably represent the views of half of the country, have had no input or influence.
For Republicans, it seems, the policy details are almost beside the point. They do not start by asking themselves what Americans need or want or are willing to accept. What matters is politics and winning. Does the proposal flatter my wing of the Republican party? Can we ram it through with only Republican votes? How will it play on Fox? Will voting against it draw me a primary opponent or make me the target of the MAGA social media mob? Will voting for it stick it to Democrats and the liberal elite?
The irony, of course, was that while the Members of Congress were very busy pretending to legislate, President Trump and his wrecking crew were rampaging through the halls of government, usurping legislative power and prerogatives in any way he could. A Congress with any backbone or self-respect would have recoiled at these brazen incursions and demanded that the constitutional division of power be restored. But not this Congress. Its Republican members, for the most part, have been thoroughly intimidated by threats of personal harassment and political retribution. Even after Trump’s ham-handed tariff plan sent global stock markets into a tailspin, only a handful mustered the courage to point out that it was Congress that was supposed to set the rates, not the president. The rebellion quickly fizzled.
The republic heads into its 250th year with a Congress that is unserious, unprincipled, unproductive. It is easy to blame Donald Trump and the Republican Members who have become his lapdogs, but in truth, the rot runs deeper than that. Restoring the institution to its necessary constitutional role will require more than simply swapping out one majority party for another. It will require a revolution in the way leaders and Members of both parties think of their jobs and the way they go about doing the public’s business. At Fixing Congress, we see our mission as identifying, encouraging, and empowering the Members who will lead that revolution.
Steven Pearlstein is a Senior Fellow at Penn Washington. He is also the Robinson Professor of Public Affairs at George Mason University and a former Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for the Washington Post. The views expressed here are his own.
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