Nine out of 10 House members don't agree on much, but they do agree it's past time to make an array of modernizing changes to the place they work.
So the vote was 395-13 on Tuesday to implement 29 unanimous recommendations from a special bipartisan committee, with six members from each party, who worked on the package for almost a year.
Their work is designed to bring the technology, purchasing, travel, and human resources practices into the 21st century, at least on half of Capitol Hill. The ultimate goal is to help strengthen legislative branch muscles that have long been atrophying, for an array of political reasons, in hopes that Congress can perform a bit better in balance-of-powers matchups that presidents of both parties have been routinely winning for decades.
"Trying to solve 21st century problems with 20th century technologies is a disservice to the American people who rightfully expect timely action from their representatives," Derek Kilmer of Washington, the committee's Democratic chairman, said during the brief debate.
There is broad agreement that an essential step in making democracy work better is making Congress more functional, and an essential part of that is returning much more cross-partisan collegiality to the place.
To that end, the House voted to expand the orientation for new members, starting with the class elected in November, to introduce courses where Republicans and Democrats would study together the House's rules, parliamentary procedures and best practices for decorum and mutual respect.
Other parts of the package developed by the Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress (as the panel is formally known) are designed to create more times and places on Capitol Hill where members from both sides can congregate. Such bipartisan socializing has almost disappeared in recent years, in part because of the pressure to spend so much time fundraising, even as there's a universal recognition that strong personal relationships are essential to policymaking collaboration.
Improving staff retention and increasing diversity, by making the House a better workplace, is also addressed in the package. While personnel policies are currently set by each of the 435 members, the House voted to create a human resources hub for all of them to use. And an Office of Diversity and Inclusion was formed to help committees and members recruit, hire, train, develop, advance, promote and retain more people who are not white men.
Hours after the vote, Speaker Nancy Pelosi named Kemba Hendrix, who runs a staff diversity program for the Democrats, to take on the job for the whole House.
The House vote took only a small step, however, toward addressing another major impediment to making Congress work better. The measure will pay for an outside firm to recommend whether the pay scale for aides should be increased along with the size of personal office and committee staffs. Salaries have not kept up with inflation in the past two decades, and staff rosters have shrunk as Congress has decided to apply more fiscal constraints to itself than to most federal agencies.
Low experience levels and high turnover, with the best talent heading to corporate or lobbying jobs, has been a consequence.
The House voted to extend the life of the committee through this year, and its members are mulling an array of additional ideas for improving the place's workplace culture and legislative clout.
A golden tray sits on the Resolute Desk as President Donald Trump speaks during an announcement on American nuclear innovation in the Oval Office at the White House on July 24, 2026, in Washington, D.C. Trump is signing multiple executive orders targeting the nuclear energy sector and easing rules for new reactors and nuclear fuel supply chains.
Trump’s hubris rivals the fallen heroes of ancient Greek mythology
In January, the New York Times asked President Donald Trump if there were any limits on his global powers.
“Yeah,” the president responded, “there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
That was eight months ago, but fortunately Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation of “The Odyssey” has made ancient Greek literature newly relevant. Before that window closes, I’d like to talk about hubris.
Today, the term mostly means excessive pride or arrogance. That’s part of what the Greeks meant by it too, but the meaning was a bit richer and more specific. Hubris was an insolent or outrageous act that offended the gods, often because the transgressor was claiming abilities or authorities that solely belonged to supreme beings.
Nolan renamed and slightly modified the concept of xenia for the film, calling it “Zeus’ law.” In the director’s telling, mortals should follow the rules laid out by the gods, specifically the requirement to treat strangers with respect lest they be gods in disguise.
In a sense, hubris is the opposite, or at least the rejection, of xenia. The hubris of the suitors, and at times Odysseus himself, invites punishment by the gods and their mortal instruments.
Which brings me back to Donald Trump. His claim that there are no constraints on his personal power to dictate events on the global stage was one of the greatest expressions of hubris ever uttered by a political leader.
Trump’s claim was obviously false when he made it.
He vowed that he could end the Russia-Ukraine war in 24 hours. He’s proved powerless to make that happen. If he had divine powers to work his will, why would he have balked at implementing his tariffs so often that Wall Street adopted the “TACO trade” term for his deals? “TACO” stands for “Trump always chickens out.”
And why would Trump have made so many embarrassing concessions to China — from rescinding tariffs on Chinese goods to allowing them to buy crucial and incredibly valuable computer chips?
But Trump saw his success at capturing Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro as proof of his ability to launch missiles to the same effect as Zeus’ lightning bolts. Trump believed he was the most powerful man who ever lived.
This is no exaggeration. In March, when the Iran invasion seemed successful, Trump gave a document penned by“Presidential Historian David King” to New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan purporting to prove that Trump was “the most powerful person to have EVER walked this planet.” King was, in fact, a businessman and occasional caddy for legendary golfer Gary Player.
King compared Trump favorably to many of history’s most powerful, and often heinous, figures: Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun, William the Conqueror, Napoleon Bonaparte, Joseph Stalin, Genghis Khan, Mao Tse Tung, Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Lenin. Many of these men thought they were the most powerful person in the world, too. And many were defeated precisely because they believed it.
At least Napoleon and Hitler had a string of truly impressive victories before they learned the folly of hubris. The limits on Trump’s power have been exposed by far less august forces than the combined might of the allies in World War II or the fearsome Russian winter.
Iran is a comparatively middling power. But the regime’s ability to absorb punishment while imposing its will on the Strait of Hormuz has proved to be a greater constraint on Trump’s power than his morality or mind. We should note that, at least rhetorically, his morality has not proved much of a constraint. He has repeatedly promised to destroy Iranian “civilization” if the regime refuses to capitulate.
But they haven’t — and won’t anytime soon — because the regime’s tolerance for pain far outstrips Trump’s. The combined fear of skyrocketing oil prices, outrage of Gulf state potentates, diminishing weapon supplies and domestic unpopularity is doing the work that international law, congressional oversight and the collective opinion of foreign policy experts can’t or won’t do.
If I considered Trump more heroic than reason and facts could allow, I would say his Sisyphean predicament has the whiff of Greek tragedy to it. Trump is vexed by the fact that the Iranians won’t honor deals or ratify his countless premature claims of victory — giving new meaning to his vow that his presidency would make people tired of winning. It’s almost like they’re out-Trumping Trump.
Things might have gone better if he’d heeded that great Greek tragedian Sophocles: “For Zeus utterly abhors the boasts of a proud tongue.”
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Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.