Congress at the crossroads
How will the first branch function now?
Donald Trump is back and moving decisively to reshape American government. Like Franklin Delano Roosevelt, he aims to do nothing less than reset the terms of American democracy. Like Andrew Jackson, he has proven willing to do so by shattering norms that govern the balance of power between Congress and the president. The first branch is at a crossroads.
Congress faces this moment rife with contradictions. It is outwardly deeply partisan, but below the surface, still capable of a great deal of bipartisan legislation. Authority is highly centralized with party leaders, but new ideological formations and tight margins are making that power look brittle. One of Congress’ main constitutional purposes is to check presidential power, but its partisan logic is to do so selectively. These are tensions born of an age in which the parties are highly polarized but ideologies are in flux.
To imagine how Congress can navigate this turning point in the constitutional order, we must understand those internal tensions and how the first branch has navigated them so far. That is what this issue of Hypertext seeks to unpack.
As Craig Volden and Alan Wiseman argue in the agenda-setting essay that opens our forum, bipartisanship actually thrived during Trump’s first term. An important factor enabling that bipartisanship was the rise of omnibus lawmaking — a combo-meal approach in which multiple bills are assembled into a single package.
The focus now is on the Republican effort to pass a sweeping budget bill using a party-line reconciliation strategy, but there will be more legislating to do after that, and given the tight GOP majority, Democrats will have to be at the table. In fact, Volden and Wiseman — co-directors of the Center for Effective Lawmaking — show that bills with co-sponsors from both parties are more likely to become law than strictly partisan measures.
The combo-meal approach has become preferred because partisan polarization and media scrutiny have made the alternatives difficult, explains James Curry of the University of Utah: “Open committee and floor processes allow lawmakers to gum up the works, attack and embarrass their opponents, and advance partisan narratives.” Omnibus legislation has the benefit of “reducing opportunities for lawmakers to slow things down or muddy the waters with partisan strife.”
If that’s where the action is, Curry argues, Congress-watchers need to adapt — rethinking what makes a legislator effective, and spending less time focused on partisan messaging bills and more on the big, complicated packages where policy change happens.
But Molly Reynolds of the Brookings Institution warns that the system of bipartisan omnibus legislating may be in jeopardy. President Trump’s determination to unilaterally freeze congressional appropriations will make it harder for Democrats to trust that agreements reached on Capitol Hill will hold up in practice.
As Reynolds explains: “In a world where many of the accomplishments members are able to rack up come via attaching other items to an omnibus spending bill, a breakdown of the appropriations process—in this case, because the executive branch is overreaching its authority — threatens a key avenue for legislative achievement.”
Congress could push back on such overreach with more active oversight — a prospect that seems futile if you view oversight in the polarized era as a nakedly partisan exercise. But Matt Glassman of Georgetown University argues that more subtle dynamics have also prevented Congress from flexing its muscle: Polarization has empowered congressional leadership, and strong leadership has made for weaker committees. Feeble oversight, then, is not just a problem of motivation, but also capacity.
“Congress can harm its own standing in the separation of powers system merely by reorganizing its internal legislative processes and behaviors,” Glassman observes, and that reality “has much wider consequences than many appreciate.”
If the legislature’s trend towards internal centralization continues, it risks becoming a parliamentary-style body, “hollowed out and streamlined to become merely a conduit for the rubber-stamping of policy developed elsewhere.”
But “a parliamentary-style legislature bootstrapped onto our constitutional structure would be the worst of all worlds, destroying (the) transformative virtues of Congress, while creating a presidency less efficient and less accountable than the parliamentary executives.”
Many members of Congress cannot imagine a different way of doing business because they have never experienced it. The average length of service for Republican House members in the 119th Congress is six years, just about long enough to have figured out where to get good coffee on the Hill. But if members — and the staffers, reporters, activists, and donors who envelop them — do not understand how Congress has changed, they will not know how to navigate it successfully. They will miss opportunities to make better law — and to help restore the first branch to its constitutional role.
David Dagan (@daviddagan.bsky.social) is director of editorial and academic affairs at the Niskanen Center.