Today most Americans hold Congress in low regard. Authentic deliberation is rare because leaders usually can compel members to vote in lockstep and wholly disregard the minority. Often Congress fails to act until an emergency is at hand, as in the most recent debt ceiling crisis. It routinely over-delegates its power to regulatory bureaucracies. It has all but ceased imposing any limits on the president’s unilateral use of force abroad. One could go on.

Why Congress is a thoroughly Madisonian defense of Congress’s proper role in the American constitutional system and an explanation of why the national legislature has become dysfunctional so frequently in the past few decades. Along the way, it returns us to fundamental lessons about the nature of politics and what can be expected of it in the American context, with detailed consideration of how Congress has succeeded, how it has failed, and how it might rescue itself from fecklessness and irrelevance.

Philip A. Wallach, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, addresses these very serious issues in straightforward writing and with nuanced judgments that are fully conversant with the relevant scholarly literature. He is realistic about Congress’s often self-created problems, but nevertheless hopes to prompt reforms that can help the institution recapture both its former vigor and intended role. Readers will get a judicious and timely assessment of what is at stake in this momentous and increasingly urgent endeavor.

Wallach understands and affirms the pluralistic politics that so defines the American experience. The nation has always been vast and diverse, encompassing numerous different interests and goals. Its elements of “manyness” have rarely been in perfect accord. In the spirit of James Madison in Federalist No. 10, Wallach holds that only through representation in Congress can the nation’s diverse interests confront one another in debate and deliberate to fashion law as an accommodation acceptable to all. He is quite clear that it is the proverbial “seat at the table” and the attendant capacity to participate in the process that validates what Congress produces. Neither an executive order nor a judicial decision emerges from this kind of authority.

At its most basic, this is “why Congress.” It is the only institution constituted to make law by mediating the diverse and conflicting interests that assemble within it. Legislation results from conciliation and compromise, and what is created is legitimate, if not wholly satisfying. Wallach further emphasizes that this process builds trust and social cohesion. Differences are aired and recognized, and alternatives and trade-offs are weighed and confronted. Representatives and their constituents are reconciled to the outcome, despite its imperfections, as part of a common enterprise.

If this point is pursued further than Wallach does explicitly, we come to an Aristotelian conception of politics. Competing interests and incompatible conceptions of justice are moderated and cohered to the extent possible for the sake of a shared common life. Politics thus conceived is a practical working out, through speech and debate, of a general rule or shared plan amid the disagreement of a community’s plural interests and views. As such it abjures both universal consensus and tyrannical compulsion.

A lesson to be underscored here, perhaps a bit more than Wallach does, is that inevitably we will be dissatisfied with politics, and Congress as the site of pluralistic conciliation, trade-offs, and half-a-loaf compromises, if we continually ask too much of it. We should not expect politics, or Congress, or government of any kind, to make us whole or solve all social problems; nor should any of them be permitted to superintend us from cradle to grave. Legislation cannot fix much of what ails contemporary American culture or alienates citizens from one another. We cannot all agree, but, as Wallach insists, through a properly functioning Congress we can arrive at rough accords that maintain enough social stability for people to live in peace and freedom. 

To be sure, the founders recognized the danger of majority faction and the inevitable clashing of interests and ambitions—the Constitution was made for a modern liberal republic. Still, they designed Congress to make law for the common good by means of representation, deliberation, and compromise. Wallach understands that politics always includes interest and ambition, even as his analysis of Congress recurs to the older idea of a reasoned and authentic public good that is all too scarce today.

So why has Congress so frequently failed to fulfill its core functions and consequently become reviled by so many Americans? First and properly in the dock is Woodrow Wilson, that nemesis of American constitutionalism whose pernicious ideas continue to bedevil us. Wilson’s self-satisfied historicist conception of progress, his quasi-plebiscitary approach to the presidency, his attack on the separation of powers, and his contempt for Congress pitted him against the Madisonian system. It was to be replaced by “responsible party government,” which Wallach describes as the “idée fixe of Wilsonian reformers down to the present.”

Led by and beholden to the president, national parties were somehow to compose their many internal differences and dutifully enact his program posthaste. Legislative coalitions and deliberation—even committee work—were not much needed. The majority party, validated by the last election, would simply run roughshod over the minority—as in the British parliamentary system Wilson so admired. This way of thinking elevates the president to the supposed representative of the nation above the pluralism represented in Congress, as if one person could somehow embody the nation in its variety. It also tends toward centralization of power in legislative leaders who alternatively marginalize or compel rank-and-file members.

When It Worked, When It Didn’t

Before considering Wallach’s view of that dynamic, we should note the book’s juxtaposition of two sets of case studies to illustrate, and to measure what is gained or lost, when Congress “worked” (Part I) versus when it is “failing” (Part III). The first positive example is Congress during World War II. The representative and deliberative legislature was not an outmoded relic amid the rise of statist authoritarianism, as many people then were suggesting. Through its characteristic mode of negotiation and bargaining, Congress oversaw the distribution of burdens involved in the war effort. It resourced and sustained what was necessary to win, investing the nation in the struggle and legitimating its many sacrifices. It also checked Franklin Roosevelt’s penchant for executive aggrandizement that would have further extended the New Deal. Congress ensured that after the war the federal government would not attempt the folly of a centrally planned economy or become the nation’s employer of last resort.

The other positive example is Congress during the civil rights era of the 1960s, going somewhat against the usual interpretation that it was merely obstructionist until the last minute. Desegregation made little progress after Brown v. Board of Education and subsequent judicial decisions, but it happened rapidly and widely after the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Wallach traces how the long build-up, the welding of political coalitions (often rooted in churches), the likely success of a discharge petition from the House’s recalcitrant Rules Committee, and even the last-ditch (but largely substantive) filibuster all converged. They showed ad oculos that a majority of Americans, and their representatives in Congress, had come to agree that segregation would end. The issues were openly debated in a fair process. The racist protestations of a now carefully isolated minority lost decisively, as they should have done much earlier in our history.

But it is Wallach’s point that only Congress could register the changed politics of the issue and facilitate the morally correct result in a way that could be broadly accepted, that the losers could be reconciled to, and that consequently became widely effective and abiding. A presidential order mandating desegregation likely would not have been any more effective at the grassroots than the Court’s several decisions had been. Only Congress could realize the change with the legitimacy and permanence that was needed.

Congress’s characteristic strengths in composing and accommodating the nation’s many interests and factions were scarce in the two negative case studies: immigration/border control and the COVID-19 pandemic. Since the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, and partly because of it, Congress has been unable to reach a compromise that can satisfy critics who demand more robust enforcement and greater legal limitations. Consequently, this policy domain has defaulted to presidential unilateralism that circumvents Congress and swings in direction from one administration to another; a patchwork of incompatible local and state regulations; and judicial interventions that occasionally rescramble all of the above. Congress has failed in this area, despite there being ample interests from which a multifaceted compromise might be reached. In a judgment illustrating his understanding of what Congress was intended to be, Wallach concludes that “we have not gotten the conflict we deserve,” the conflict that must be represented and worked through in order to reach an agreement.

The story is similar for the response to the pandemic: Congress proceeded as usual, ceding its power and deferring to the executive and the judiciary. It threw massive amounts of money in all directions and then welcomed regulation by bureaucrats and judges, mostly failing to deliberate about the trade-offs necessary for stable rules to govern lockdowns, disease testing, or mask and vaccine mandates. All of these topics divided the nation amid the emergency. Unlike World War II, Congress declined to take responsibility for hashing out a shared approach to thorny issues in a way that would have aided social cohesion and national stability.

Congress’s Past and Future

Wallach reviews the complicated organizational, procedural, and political history of Congress’s transformation since the 1970s, which today conduces to its recent negative performance rather than the older instances of success. This intricate material is the bread and butter of scholars of Congress and Wallach treats it more clearly than most writers. The very short version is that, in successive periods of reform and reorganization, Congress moved from a decentralized structure with much power in (mostly Southern) committee chairs to an intervening period of more extreme openness, fragmentation, drift, and meddlesomeness. The institution lost its way as subcommittees proliferated and much posturing for the public ensued, while oversight of the executive increasingly rewarded favored factions and obstructed sound administration. The Democratic majority often froze out the Republican minority from meaningful participation.

When the reaction came, it centered on Speaker Newt Gingrich and the Republican majority that took control of both chambers in 1994. The return to centralization and strong leadership was even more intense, via various mechanisms that control the agenda, restrict debate, stifle intraparty disagreement, bypass committees, and marginalize the minority. And here we now sit, whichever party is in the majority. Wallach illuminates the details of this transformation and shows convincingly that how Congress organizes itself, and the procedures it uses, can either exacerbate or mediate the division inherent in politics. Congress cannot manufacture unanimity where there is none, nor can it alone overcome our political polarization. But it can choose to work in ways that seek to conciliate division rather than magnify it.

Wallach uses the metaphor of a pendulum to describe Congress’s movement from organization based on tight leadership control and confining order to organization that is more open, dialogic, and collegial. There can be too little or too much of both or either, with predictable shortcomings in each direction. Only with prudent awareness of where Congress is now in the swing of the pendulum can reforms be broached. Wallach writes, “One can try to describe the properties of a desirable moment of balance” knowing that “a functional organizational system will always be a moving target.” We want the judgment to recognize where we are now, and how much change in the right direction can be achieved given the limitations of circumstance. Here too the Aristotelian tone is welcome. We can improve things with wise and prudent action, but we should not expect any once and for all solutions to political problems.

Wallach offers three possible futures for Congress. First is “decrepitude,” in which current trends continue and the legislature further decays into irrelevance while others do the governing. Or Congress may become merely a “rubber stamp” for Wilsonian presidents as a result of “reforms” that remove its capacity to moderate their programs, while simultaneously guaranteeing automatic spending. In the hope for “revival,” among Wallach’s recommendations are changes that would restore the primacy of committees and thus the authentic deliberation that historically occurred there, along with more open rules of debate on the floor so that actual persuasion can happen through members’ dialogue with one another and with the work that committees bring to their colleagues.

He concludes with an “open letter” to Congress that urges members to recognize that only they can reform the institution from within, as was done several times throughout its history when enough people became dissatisfied with the status quo. For Congress decline is a choice, whether or not the institution’s members can admit it to themselves. This is the profound truth of what self-government entails under our Constitution. The stakes could not be higher. Wallach has done a great service by highlighting that the time has come to act if we hope to preserve government by reflection and choice and not regress to accident and force.