Penn Washington Senior Fellow Steven Pearlstein‘s latest piece in Roll Call examines the congressional dysfunction preventing consensus on health care premiums. Twenty-four million Americans face big premium hikes in January when ACA tax credits expire—a bipartisan fix should be straightforward, but both parties would rather have a campaign issue than a legislative win. This is…
Penn Washington Senior Fellow Steve Pearlstein’s new piece in Roll Call on the compromise that ended the government shutdown, part of our continuing “Fixing Congress” series. Pearlstein argues that the eight Senate Democrats who broke ranks to end the federal shutdown should be celebrated for choosing bipartisan compromise over party unity. He contends that rigid…
In his recent opinion piece for Roll Call, Penn Washington Senior Fellow Steven Pearlstein rejects the partisan finger-pointing and instead blames all members of Congress for choosing political gamesmanship over doing their jobs. Insisting that the shutdown could end immediately through straightforward compromises if members had the courage to defy their party leaders and act…
We are now in the second week of another government closure and there should be no doubt about its root cause: that members of Congress pay no political penalty for failing to do their jobs. Indeed, one reason there is another funding standoff is that members widely believe that the greatest political risk would come…
Has Congress now fallen so far into dysfunction that its Members are ready to do something about it? That is the question posed by three excellent columns that have appeared in recent weeks following passage, on a party line vote, of Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill that many Republicans acknowledged was the deeply flawed product of a…
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…
Many Americans have been shocked recently as Republican senators set serious concerns and supinely vote to confirm patently unqualified and inappropriate nominees for the most powerful positions in government. For secretary of defense, a philanderer with a reported (and unrefuted) drinking problem and a well-documented disrespect for females in combat. A political henchman who promises…
Five-day work weeks. Bringing more bills to the floor. More debate with plenty of opportunity for members to offer amendments? Is John Thune channeling the “Fixing Congress” agenda? The Senate’s new Republican leader is certainly sending signals that he intends to restore the upper chamber as a functioning and deliberative legislative body. The tentative schedule…
Nothing sustains a political blood feud more than memories of outrageous injustices. Democrats have never gotten over the refusal of Senate Republicans to take up the Merrick Garland’s nomination to the Supreme Court. Republicans still nurse a deep grudge over the impeachment of President Trump over a ham-handed and failed attempt to get Ukrainian officials to…
From one angle of view, the Republican sweep of the White House and—as now appears likely—both houses of Congress will offer a temporary reprieve from the political dysfunction of recent years. We’ve had plenty of recent experience with such one-party “trifectas”—Ronald Reagan in 1980, Bill Clinton in 1992, George W. Bush in 2000, Barack Obama…