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 and do not reflect the views of Penn Washington or the University of Pennsylvania. The plot…
The always perspicacious Jonah Goldberg has a new column at The Dispatch, which he edits, that could easily serve as the mission statement for Fixing Congress. “The abdication of Congress’ role as the arena where political fights happen has turned the House and Senate into a stew of de facto pundits and lobbyists of…
There is a lot of talk these days about what “Democrats” on Capitol Hill should do to resist the Trump blitzkrieg or whether “Republicans” will be able to resolve their disagreements over spending cuts and Ukraine. Implicit in such questions is a widely shared assumption that the way things ought to work, the natural order,…
This story was originally published on April 29, 2025 in Penn Today Wallander will assume leadership and operational management of Penn Washington, and its mission and bridge Penn research with policy discussions on pressing issues, beginning June 1. Provost John L. Jackson Jr. and Vice Provost for Global Initiatives Ezekiel Emanuel have announced that Celeste A. Wallander will join the University…
“We can spend an entire year getting nothing done.” Sen. John Kennedy, R-LA, in Politico on the possibility that the House and Senate will not agree on President Trump’s “one beautiful” tax and spending bill.
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…
To hear it from Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, Democrats were faced with two terrible choices: force a lengthy government shutdown that would have hurt millions of ordinary Americans and given President Trump and Elon Musk an opportunity to disembowel more government programs, or acquiesce to a six-month Republican funding bill that would have hurt…
Some Democrats believe the only viable strategy for slowing and eventually halting the Trump steamroller is all-out resistance on every issue in every forum. Others prefer giving Trump plenty of rope, confident they will pursue radical policies that will prove so unpopular that Republicans will lose the next two elections. The first approach is likely…
Brendan Buck, a top aide to former Republican Speakers John Boehner and Paul Ryan, posted an eloquent essay in the New York Times today recounting the many ways in which Congress has allowed its legislative muscles to atrophy and its power to be usurped by a succession of presidents. The essay echoes many of the…
New York Times columnist Ezra Klein offered an insightful column last weekend on the utter failure of Congress to assume its role as a check on the hostile takeover of the federal government now being carried out by President Trump and his billionaire henchman, Elon Musk. Like us, at Fixing Congress, he assigns some blame…