The unfortunate decline of Congress as a deliberative body
My ballpark estimate: In the recently concluded midterm campaign season, Democrats ran roughly eleventy-bajillion ads accusing Republican office-holders of voting — 98%, 99%, or 100% of the time — “with Donald Trump.”
Calling your opponent a “rubber stamp” is a smart tactic when the president is historically unpopular, as President Trump is.
But there’s a hitch. When Joe Biden and Barack Obama were president, GOP challengers successfully made the same charge against Democratic incumbents. And when the White House was controlled by one party and Congress another, the ads’ charges would claim that Candidate Smith voted with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi 100% of the time or Candidate Jones voted with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy 100% of the time.
And with very few exceptions, they were right, too.
That’s because Congress is broken. And its brokenness is spiderwebbing out into our politics like a cracked windshield. Congress was not designed to be a parliament where parties vote in lockstep with their party leader in the White House. But that’s how it’s worked for decades.
Starting in the 1970s, Congress was quietly revolutionized from within. It was all done in the name of “reform,” but the better word is “deform.”
Young Democrats began the process by seeking to wrest power from the barons who ran all-powerful committees. Because the barons rose up through the seniority system, they tended to be older and more conservative than the new crop of Watergate babies and other progressives. The reformers wanted to empower rank-and-file members. What they got was a process that encouraged the centralization of power in leadership.
What started as an internal Democratic reform became a bipartisan institutionalized transformation in 1994, when Georgia Rep. Newt Gingrich led the Republican Revolution with his “Contract with America.”
Gingrich’s reforms embraced the idea of unified, centralized party control of the legislative process. I’m skipping the technical and procedural lingo, but the upshot is that under Republican and Democratic majorities, power was increasingly concentrated in the gavels that the speaker of the House and Senate majority leader wielded. They would negotiate their parties’ agendas with the president when the president was of the same party. When he wasn’t, the leaders would craft the agenda themselves.
The result? Rank-and-file senators and representatives lost a lot of their ability to influence legislation. Under the old “regular order,” legislation was developed and debated by the relevant committee or committees. It used to be extremely rare to go around the jurisdiction of a relevant committee to pass a bill; now it’s effectively the norm. It also used to be possible for your representative to amend a bill to address your district’s needs.
Today, legislators are often simply given a fait accompli on bills and are just told to toe the party line. Sometimes they aren’t even given time to actually read the bill. And most of the time, they’re told it can’t be changed. In 2025, 84% of measures sent to the House floor for a vote were barred from being amended by the Rules Committee, which is controlled by the speaker.
Even conference committees, which traditionally negotiate the differences between the House and Senate versions of legislation, have been cut out of the loop. In the 106th Congress (1999-2000), 38 bills went through a conference committee. Two decades later, in the 116th (2019-2020), only three did. In the 117th, it was zero. In the 118th Congress, one bill went to conference. In the current Congress, we’re back down to zero.
When you see these ads saying so-and-so voted with fill-in-the-blank 100% of the time, you’re supposed to think that’s an indictment of their character and independence. What you might not realize is that the system was designed to deny legislators the opportunity to show character or independence.
Pennsylvania Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick broke with the president more than any other Republican in 2025. He still voted with Trump 67% of the time. Sen. Rand Paul is supposed to be a maverick who votes his conscience. He broke with the president more than any other GOP senator and still voted with Trump 89.4% of the time.
Sens. Mike Lee, Josh Hawley and Ted Budd are ranked by Roll Call among the eight least supportive Republican senators of the president. In 2025, Hawley voted with Trump 98.6% of the time. Lee and Budd: 99.5%.
The framers envisioned Congress as a check on the presidency. The deformers of the last half-century made Congress an extension of the presidency. And that’s a big part of why our politics are broken.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.