It's easy to go in to Congress and spend. It's much harder to go in and do what's right. Ten years after the wave of Tea Party reformers arrived at the Capitol, we're still spending without any concern for the long-term implications or the next generation.
We just crossed $22 trillion in debt and are heading toward $30 trillion. This year we are running ever-larger deficits while ignoring the underlying cause of the debt, especially entitlement programs.
We're doing the same thing at the state and local levels — spending without the ability to pay and kicking the can down the road. We continue to shirk our fiscal responsibility. And, as long as we do, the new decade will be just as lost as the last one.
Congress can take steps to fix the problem, and if the current members can't get the job done, then it's up to voters to remind them who's in charge. Here are some steps for changing the way the place works that I believe would go a long way toward ending dysfunction in Washington.
Return to regular order. It's simple: Committee chairmen should be freely elected by the committee members, not chosen by House leadership, and they should be focused on running their committees. Then bills should be drafted in committee and debated among all committee members. Then they should be presented to the committee chairman, and if there are enough votes, sent to the floor of the House for more debate.
Lastly, hearings should return to their original purpose of being fact-finding tools so Congress can make better informed decisions. They should not be used to reinforce the party line.
Balance the budget. Every year Congress needs to pass a budget, and the president should give an annual Fiscal State of the Union so that members have a clear picture of the government's financial health.
We need to eliminate the gimmicks — no more continuing resolutions, Rules Committee hijinks with the waiving of budget requirements, and no emergency expenditures unless they're absolutely justified.
Every member of the House should be required to take a turn on the Budget Committee. Since no one wants to take the hard votes, the Budget Committee is Washington's equivalent of Siberia. If we made a rotation on Budget mandatory, it would force everyone to understand the hard choices we face.
Establish term limits. Incumbents' ability to raise money allows most of them to stay in office as long as they want. Putting a limit on their length of service is the only answer. Any limits need to be pure term limits so members can't jump back and forth between the House and the Senate for years.
I would argue for a limit of five terms in the House (10 years) and two in the Senate (12 years). And no person should be able to hold federal office for more than 16 years anywhere, including the presidency and vice presidency.
Reform leadership. Leadership positions in Congress have become too powerful. Committee chairmen and the speaker need to be overseers and administrators, ensuring that members are following the proper protocol and that legislation is progressing as it should. They shouldn't be impeding the process or allowing for partisan victories at the expense of sound policy.
In addition, the House should consider electing a speaker who is not a member of Congress — but an esteemed public servant who has a proven record of statesmanship but is no longer beholden to a political party. In effect, lawmakers would hire an outside administrator, agreed upon by a majority from both parties.
Restrict campaign donations. Simply capping donations at the current limits of $2,700 for a federal candidate from individuals and $5,000 a year from political action committees doesn't work. It's too easy to disguise or spread the money around. We need to limit donations by source, including the political parties.
Vote from home. The main reason lawmakers go to Washington is to vote. If members could vote from home, we could save millions of dollars a year in travel costs.
As it stands right now, the only way to track your vote is for you to vote on the floor of the House or Senate. But this is really just a matter of changing the rules and setting up a secure website, with identity verification, to collect the votes.
Concentrate on committee work. Rather than allowing committees to meet whenever they want, we should squeeze all the committee work into a few weeks and require that lawmakers stay in Washington until their work is done. Combined with voting from home, this would force members to be more productive.
In Texas, lawmakers meet for only five months once every two years. It forces them to get things done. The longer the session, the more mistakes people can make.
Know your adversary. Washington has descended into tribalism and identity politics. No matter how bitterly we disagree, everyone working to govern the country must recognize the need to cooperate.
Committee meetings are segregated by party so Democrats and Republicans have little interaction. Committee chairmen could address this problem by requiring that the entire committee meet in the same room.
Individual members should sit down to breakfast and do whatever it takes to find common ground. The opposing party isn't the enemy. We are all on the same side — the side of America and democracy.
Disagreeing on policy is healthy. Refusing to speak to one another because we disagree isn't.
These are just a few ideas for how to make the federal government work better and get the legislative process back on track, so it's actually fixing problems that matter to people rather than helping the political elite score points and get ahead.
Children watch a July Fourth Parade along the Walkway of Heroes and Independence Avenue on July 04, 2026 in Tappan, New York.
The Great American Grumpfest
Our nation’s 250th birthday party didn’t feel especially patriotic and wasn’t as much fun as the 200th anniversary was.
President Trump, who did his best to co-opt our holiday for his personal aggrandizement, was a major reason. The party he threw in Washington, D.C., was crankier than uplifting, and less about celebrating our shared past and a promising future than about reminding us how far we have strayed from our founders’ plan to create a republic that future Americans would keep in good working order.
Credit Trump this much. He has a singular gift for picking at scabs that other politicians would rather ignore and pushing us into reckonings we don’t need.
The thing is, Americans have seen all this before. Sometimes the makeover we were encouraged to undertake was more conservative, sometimes more liberal. Whatever direction we were pushing, however, the reckoning we had in mind this time had to be more forthright and the conclusion more definitive than it was the last time.
Our current discontents, the ones behind the reckoning President Trump has been trying to inspire, are not trivial. Included among them are immigration, birthright citizenship, exploding healthcare costs, election rigging, a gag-inducing national debt, how we educate our children, too many genders, racial differences we can’t move past, a lopsided economy that favors more well-off Americans, and historic levels of political corruption and graft. Add to these the several foreign adventures he has pushed us into or is anxious to undertake, and you have the makings of a national headache the likes of which we haven’t had in half a century.
All the elbow-throwing and overheated rhetoric we’re using today have begun to look almost normal in all the ways that bickering neighbors and feuding family members appear normal. But they have also made us look mean-spirited and have portrayed our differences as irreconcilable. To ourselves, of course, but also to many people outside the United States who might be forgiven for turning their heads and not looking at the national car wreck we Americans show no interest in avoiding.
The good news, as I suggested above, is that Americans have had a great deal of practice dealing with challenges and national car wrecks like these.
This essay begins to lay out the reasons why.
By way of illustration, we have our seemingly insatiable demand for more bad news about race in America.
Sixty years after being released from the legal constrictions that bedeviled both white and black Americans, many white people have come to believe the color that used to make them unassailable is now a sign of a moral inferiority born of a racial animus they can never wash off. Many black people, on the other hand, are insisting that America is as hopelessly stacked against them as the formerly unassailable white people’s ancestors used to tell their black ones.
The result is that many people today are buying into racist nightmares and mumbo jumbo that their black and white ancestors worked hard and effectively to put in each other’s heads.
This might be dismissed as crazy behavior if it weren’t so important to rituals Americans have long used to express their deepest fears about each other while figuring out what move they can make that won’t end with their world crashing down on everybody’s head.
Unfortunately, the kind of cultural sleight of hand we have used to ramp up our racial differences has been appropriated by people who have many other cultural fears and unresolved differences with each other. Their clumsy but culturally prescribed missteps are making all these other issues look as irremediable as our racial problems.
A good place to start an answer to how we back away from ledges is Alexis de Tocqueville’s writing on early-19th-century American democracy. He had an optimistic take on Americans’ unscripted displays of public bravado, recrimination, and payback.
For him, these were occasions when people tried to mitigate the effects of the unfair hand they were dealing someone else or had themselves been dealt by behaving in ways quite at odds with how they would otherwise be expected to act. These inversions of what Tocqueville called “the natural order of conscience” presented themselves as a loud but culturally muted challenge to the hypocrisies that people had built into the world they’d made together.
One of his favorite illustrations of early-American hypocrisy involved slave masters sleeping with their less-than-worthy slaves. To the best of my knowledge, he didn’t pick up on all the ways that slaves messed with their owners. Their well-chronicled and quiet resistance showed that even severely ill-treated people can exercise more control over their lives than outsiders appreciate.
Be that as it may, such inversions of a people’s “natural order of conscience” make a good public show of them wrestling with demons they can’t or may not want to shake off, but in any case, are nowhere close to figuring out how to cast out.
Implicit in these disruptions was the discomforting idea that people might flip the entire script and turn the world on its head in more permanent ways. That kind of flipping worked out better for us in our revolution against England than in our Civil War. These events taught us the value of stepping back from historically unprecedented ledges.
Americans of late have been giving loud expression to a long list of things they don’t like about each other and the last makeover they started but didn’t finish a half-century ago. The outcome of our fights today will be as revealing as they are embarrassing to everyone who imagined they could recast our country in a way that privileged their favorite kind of Americans.
Their disappointment with the accommodations they strike will be palpable, but the middling results they achieve with all their pushing and shoving won’t be anything they can’t live with.
Anthropologists who have written about such moments in other cultures less “advanced” than our own show that people find ways to work around their seemingly irreconcilable differences without ever fully resolving them. Indeed, the patches and repairs people make have the unheralded effect of reinforcing rather than undermining the legitimacy of the practices and values they thought were fundamentally flawed.
For example…
White guilt and black pessimism do more good than putting cash into the pockets of professional shamers and handwringers. They give the rest of us who don’t feel guilty or powerless more time to make the world less racially unequal. Good news.
Regarding illegal immigration, the entrance requirements for future immigrants will remain stringent. Americans will applaud the continued detention and deportation of the few illegal immigrants who commit serious crimes. Good news.
All the people who came to the United States without being legally vetted and were locked up for a time will be released in numbers small enough to avoid serious media attention. Along with the several million other good people who snuck in but avoided capture, the former detainees will go to school, find gainful employment, pay their taxes, and stay out of trouble. Many will eventually become citizens. Good news.
Investigations into election tampering and Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential loss will come to an unceremonious conclusion the day after his second term ends. Many Americans will grumble about this, but there will also be some quiet partying, too. Good and bad news.
Congressional hearings into all the grifting accomplished by people tied to the Trump administration will end without anyone having to pay a dime back to the American taxpayers. Bad news, we’ll learn to live with.
New laws and regulations will be created in the hope that the kind of corruption practiced by President Trump will not be repeated for another 250 years. Good news, I hope we’ll live long enough to enjoy.
Show trials for people who allegedly vandalized the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, if they happen, will get big television viewer ratings. Good news.
Trials for pardoned Capitol insurrectionists who committed serious crimes after their release should get more attention, but won’t. Bad news.
We will continue to hear nothing from most of the people who were pardoned for crimes they committed in the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. They will keep their mouths shut and their heads down for the rest of their life. Good news.
The gold-gilded ornaments that Donald Trump had plastered all over the White House will be shipped to Mar-a-Lago, where the former president will sell them on eBay. Fun news.
American taxpayers end up paying for most of the new East Wing, the removal of the miniature gladiatorial arena that was built behind the White House, and the restoration of the White House rose garden. Bad news.
The Triumphal Arch was never built. Good news.
Trad wives and gay couples raise perfectly lovely children. Good but unsurprising news.
Trans men and women learn that most Americans can’t figure out who they used to be. No one gives a second thought to their use of “family bathrooms” or “unisex bathrooms” in public settings, businesses, and schools. Communities will sponsor athletic teams that have trans boys and girls just to show they can. Good news.
Budget deficits will be kicked down the road for someone else’s children to pay down. Bad news.
Federal agencies that had their budgets and employee ranks slashed during President Trump’s second term are getting some of the money and lost positions back. Good news.
Elite universities will buy their way out of DEI purgatory by competing for conservative scholars whose inflated salaries dwarf those of their liberal colleagues, who will think about suing their institutions for reverse discrimination but won’t be able to figure out who would pay for it or care. More fun news.
Okay. I’ve probably missed some ways that Americans will step back from the ledges they have been making noises about leaping off. But to the extent that my predictions pan out, the best and most important moral of the stories about us stepping away is this: everything we lost and took back, or had returned to us, will have happened without our government collapsing, civic traditions crumbling, or our people beating each other up.
The reason why is that the differences Americans have with each other really weren’t as irreconcilable as we made them out to be. The empty-sounding bromide that Americans have more that unites us than divides us turns out to be true, not just metaphorically but in fact.
Now that is really something to celebrate.
Daniel J. Monti (danieljmonti.com) is Professor of Sociology at Saint Louis University and the author of American Democracy and Disconsent: Liberalism and Illiberalism in Ferguson, Charlottesville, Black Lives Matter, and the Capitol Insurrection.