My ballpark estimate: Within the not too long ago concluded midterm marketing campaign season, Democrats ran roughly eleventy-bajillion adverts accusing Republican officeholders of voting — 98%, 99% or 100% of the time — “with Donald Trump.”
Calling your opponent a “rubber stamp” is a great tactic when the president is traditionally unpopular, as President Trump is.
However there’s a hitch. When Joe Biden and Barack Obama had been president, GOP challengers efficiently made the identical cost towards Democratic incumbents. And, when the White Home was managed by one celebration and Congress one other, the adverts’ expenses would declare that Candidate Smith voted with Nancy Pelosi 100% of the time or Candidate Jones voted with Kevin McCarthy 100% of the time.
And with only a few exceptions, they had been proper, too.
That’s as a result of Congress is damaged. And its brokenness is spiderwebbing out into our politics like a cracked windshield. Congress was not designed to be a parliament the place events vote in lockstep with their celebration chief within the White Home. However that’s the way it’s labored for many years.
Starting in the 1970s, Congress was quietly revolutionized from inside. It was all completed within the identify of “reform,” however the higher phrase is “deform.”
Younger Democrats started the method by searching for to wrest energy from the barons who ran omnipotent committees. As a result of the barons rose up by way of the seniority system, they tended to be older and extra conservative than the brand new crop of Watergate infants and different progressives. The reformers needed to empower rank-and-file members. What they acquired was a course of that inspired the centralization of energy in management.
What began as an inner Democratic reform grew to become a bipartisan institutionalized transformation in 1994, when Georgia Congressman Newt Gingrich led the Republican Revolution along with his “Contract with America.”
Gingrich’s reforms embraced the thought of unified, centralized, celebration management of the legislative course of. I’m skipping the technical and procedural lingo, however the upshot is that below Republican and Democratic majorities, energy was more and more concentrated within the gavels the speaker of the Home and Senate majority chief wielded. They’d negotiate their events’ agendas with the president when the president was of the identical celebration. When he wasn’t, the leaders would craft the agenda themselves.
The outcome? Rank-and-file senators and representatives misplaced loads of their potential to affect laws. Beneath the previous “common order,” laws was developed and debated by the related committee or committees. It was extraordinarily uncommon to go across the jurisdiction of a related committee to go a invoice, now it’s in impact the norm. It additionally was potential to your consultant to amend a invoice to deal with your district’s wants.
At the moment, legislators are sometimes merely given a fait accompli on payments and are simply advised to toe the celebration line. Generally they aren’t even given time to truly learn the invoice. And more often than not, they’re advised it could possibly’t be modified. In 2025, 84% of measures despatched to the Home ground for a vote had been barred from being amended by the Guidelines Committee, which is managed by the speaker.
Even convention committees, which historically negotiate the variations between the Home and Senate variations of laws, have been minimize out of the loop. Within the 106th Congress (1999-2000) 38 payments went by way of a convention committee. Twenty years later, within the 116th (2019-2020), solely three did. Within the 117th, it was zero. Within the 118th Congress, one invoice went to convention. Within the present Congress we’re again right down to zero.
If you see these adverts saying so-and-so voted with fill-in-the-blank 100% of the time, you’re alleged to assume that’s an indictment of their character and independence. What you may not understand is that the system was designed to disclaim legislators the chance to point out character or independence.
Pennsylvania Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick broke with the president greater than some other Republican in 2025. He nonetheless voted with Trump 67% of the time. Sen. Rand Paul is meant to be a maverick who votes his conscience. He broke with the president greater than some other GOP senator and nonetheless voted with Trump 89.4% of the time.
Sens. Mike Lee, Josh Hawley and Ted Budd are ranked by Roll Name among the many eight least supportive 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 test on the presidency. The deformers of the final half a century made Congress an extension of the presidency. And that’s an enormous a part of why our politics are damaged.
