A Do-Nothing Congress, But in a Bad Way

Plus: Debating Catturd

A monument to the originator of “bunkum.”

I have a new piece at Discourse that went up a few days ago.

We’re in the middle of a fierce and consequential presidential election—keep scrolling down to get my reaction to Tuesday night’s debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump—but this in itself is partly a symptom of a deeper, long-term problem. As I ask, “What if our legislature no longer legislates—and has little interest in doing so?”

A Reuters analysis looks at several reasons for the decrease in legislative productivity, including intense partisanship that makes it difficult to pass small bills, causing everything to be crammed into a few “must pass” omnibus measures. Another is a restricted legislative schedule, with lawmakers spending a lot of their time back in their home districts:

Representative Derek Kilmer, a Democrat who chaired the now-defunct House Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress, said the issue of Congress’ shortened schedule was the main thing he would fix if given a choice.

“Part of the reason why when people are watching C-SPAN and no one’s there, it’s because they’re on three other committees at the same time,” he told Reuters. “The dynamic that creates is members ping-pong from committee to committee. It’s not a place of learning or understanding. You airdrop in, you give your five-minute speech for social media, you peace out.”

But the causation here is backwards. Members of Congress are only spending the time needed to make a “five-minute speech for social media” because that is what being in Congress is all about these days. Another congressman tells Reuters, “I have somebody running against me (in the primary election) that agrees with all the votes that I make, he just doesn’t agree that I don’t scream and yell.” Perhaps this is because the screaming and yelling have become more important than the voting.

I explain the more recent roots of this problem by reference to one of my favorite political theories: Secret Congress. “The theory, in a nutshell, is that Congress can still pass important legislation, and do it with bipartisan votes, so long as nobody knows about it.”

If the theory of Secret Congress is that you can pass legislation so long as you don’t get yourself on TV, the flip side is: You can get on TV all the time, so long as you don’t care about passing legislation.

The logical extension of this is members of Congress who don’t focus on legislation at all and instead focus on the culture war. Changing the culture, which is the product of innumerable individual creative decisions by artists, intellectuals and entertainers, combined with the spontaneous responses of their audiences, is something Congress is fundamentally unequipped to address. There is no way a bunch of politicians can regulate us into a cultural golden age. But the culture war appeals to politicians precisely because it is something they can’t really do anything about.

Normally, I would not complain that much about a do-nothing Congress: “Some of us might be tempted to borrow a line from the colorful House Speaker ‘Uncle Joe’ Cannon and announce, ‘The country don’t need any legislation.’”

And yet:

As the war in Ukraine reminds us, there are very real problems that are clearly within the legitimate powers even of a limited government, and they require vigorous and competent legislative action.

Moreover, the failure of Congress to act on matters that ought to fall within its purview creates a power vacuum that someone else will be eager to fill. Think about how the ruling on Chevron deference compares to the Supreme Court’s decision on presidential immunity: One ruling limits the bureaucracy, while the other removes limits on the president. This is not a pro-liberty combination of rulings. It’s a combination that expands the power of the person in the oval office by ensuring he or she is less hemmed in by government institutions.

This brings us back to the increasingly higher stakes of our presidential elections, which is the result of the declining significance of our congressional elections.

Read the whole thing.

The Era of the Do-Nothing Congress

Debating Catturd

That brings us back to Tuesday night’s debate and why I think it was important. And yes, I know my subhead for this section is particularly unpleasant, but it reflects an unpleasant reality. Hold on for the explanation below.

Let’s start, though, with the actual content of the debate. There were two big things of substance that were not new, but which are important confirmations.