Image: NYT
The lesson is not that tearing things down requires any less of a legislative majority than building things up does, as shown by the fact that Trump’s only truly successful tear-downs — the ones not still snarled in court battles — are the ones he was able to get a congressional majority to support. Tearing things down unilaterally can generate a lot of chaos, and a lot of headlines, and even a period where things grind to a halt or are consumed by confusion, giving the appearance of victory. But it is much too early to say that tearing things down unilaterally works.
Strangely, one lesson from the Trump era (for those willing to learn it), may end up being the importance of respecting process. Accomplishments are only secure when codified by legislation, and even more secure when codified by bipartisan legislation, which means they have garnered the support of a broad-based majority and are unlikely to soon be overturned. This is something our most successful presidents have understood, and it’s something that has become clear once again in the Trump era, even as the president has tried to promote the appearance of success via unilateral action. Cutting corners (mostly) hasn’t worked; Trump’s most successful efforts to tear down agencies have still happened through a congressional process. [...]
It turns out that if you want to successfully run a government — whether “success,” to you, means expanding bureaucracy or slashing it — it helps to have people who know about the government.
And the same is true of Trump’s attempts to slash the government, which were similarly foiled by a lack of expertise.
[ed. Recommended. See also: The Best-Kept Secret in Washington (NYT):]
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These days, Congress, which hosted President Trump’s State of the Union address on Tuesday night, is often seen as the third wheel of the federal government, forever overshadowed by the presidency and Supreme Court, with a truly dismal approval rating.
But Kevin R. Kosar, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, thinks Americans might have gone a little too far in their Congress bashing. Congress — or at least the “secret Congress,” as he calls it — is not nearly as gridlocked or incompetent as its reputation suggests. The “toxic Congress,” on the other hand …
John Guida: You recently called Congress “both deeply dysfunctional and surprisingly functional.” While it frequently fails even to pass a budget on time, it also does plenty of “valuable things that are nearly invisible to Americans,” like raising the compensation and benefits for veterans last year to keep up with inflation.
At the heart of your qualified defense of Congress is what you call the “secret Congress.” What is that?
Kevin R. Kosar: The secret Congress is the Congress that operates mostly in plain sight but that the average American simply does not see. This is not because our legislators are spending time squirreled away in a secret, plush room in the Capitol with leather chairs and covertly governing the country. (Although they do have some private rooms where they haggle.)
No, most of what the secret Congress does is readily visible, but most of us do not look. Very few of us, for example, surf to Congress.gov to see how many laws have been passed by Congress in recent weeks or months or spend much time watching hearings on C-SPAN. [...]
Guida: The flip side of the coin is what you call the “toxic Congress.” I take it that is where you identify the biggest shifts over the years in how Congress operates.
Kosar: The toxic Congress is the Congress we Americans are all too familiar with. It is the Congress that does not make much policy, and when it does, it passes laws by party-line votes. The toxic Congress is the Congress where legislators behave in truly awful ways to one another, where partisans openly speak of members of the other party as radicals and fascists. The toxic Congress is mostly what we see when we open X or Bluesky. It’s individuals refusing to do what Congress was built to do: bring diverse people together to bargain out policy the country can live with.
At the heart of your qualified defense of Congress is what you call the “secret Congress.” What is that?
Kevin R. Kosar: The secret Congress is the Congress that operates mostly in plain sight but that the average American simply does not see. This is not because our legislators are spending time squirreled away in a secret, plush room in the Capitol with leather chairs and covertly governing the country. (Although they do have some private rooms where they haggle.)
No, most of what the secret Congress does is readily visible, but most of us do not look. Very few of us, for example, surf to Congress.gov to see how many laws have been passed by Congress in recent weeks or months or spend much time watching hearings on C-SPAN. [...]
Guida: The flip side of the coin is what you call the “toxic Congress.” I take it that is where you identify the biggest shifts over the years in how Congress operates.
Kosar: The toxic Congress is the Congress we Americans are all too familiar with. It is the Congress that does not make much policy, and when it does, it passes laws by party-line votes. The toxic Congress is the Congress where legislators behave in truly awful ways to one another, where partisans openly speak of members of the other party as radicals and fascists. The toxic Congress is mostly what we see when we open X or Bluesky. It’s individuals refusing to do what Congress was built to do: bring diverse people together to bargain out policy the country can live with.
Guida: Who are the heroes of the secret Congress?
Kosar: Certainly Representative Tom Cole, Republican of Oklahoma, and Representative Rosa DeLauro, Democrat of Connecticut. These are not household names, like the right-wing firebrand Representative Lauren Boebert of Colorado and the democratic socialist Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York. Cole and DeLauro sit atop the House Appropriations Committee. They are in charge of initiating trillions of dollars in spending legislation. They are two very different individuals with distinct views about government, and yet they quietly worked together to get pending bills to President Trump’s desk, which he signed, and these bills, I’ll add, do push back on the executive branch in various ways.
There are many others who are workhorses, not show horses. And I should add that many legislators behave as both — raging partisans on high-salience issues that get lots of media coverage and that are core to the party brand (like immigration) and professional lawmakers on boring, low-salience, wonky matters.
