Patton is director of the Rebuild Congress Initiative and a co-founder of the Harvard Negotiation Project. Fitch is president and CEO of the Congressional Management Foundation.
In an era when polls show head lice is more popular than Congress, something unusual is happening in Washington. Twelve politicians from all ideological stripes are regularly getting together to address serious problems, demonstrate mutual respect and make unanimous recommendations about improving our democratic institutions.
This unlikely group of superheroes is called the House Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress.
This committee was approved 418-12 by the House in January to "investigate, study, make findings, hold public hearings, and develop recommendations on modernizing Congress." This mandate may sound mundane, but it's actually very broad and there is an urgent need for Congress to upgrade its processes, systems and resources. Consider: The number of expert staff supporting Congress is down by a third since 1995, and the average age of a staffer is now 26.
These are the people who help Congress investigate problems, identify waste, oversee bureaucrats and regulators and come up with policy solutions. So perhaps it is no wonder the federal budget is up 50 percent, meaningful oversight is now rare and lobbyists are often asked to draft legislation.
Congress' technological resources are antiquated: Members cannot get "redlined" versions of proposed legislation, showing exactly how existing law would be changed. They are consistently overscheduled, often for multiple meetings at the same time. And much of the legislative process is still required by law to be paper-based. This in a world where constituents expect an Amazon-like timeline for service.
The committee is led by two results-oriented members, Chairman Derek Kilmer, a Democrat from Washington, and Tom Graves, a Republican from Georgia. These leaders wisely chose to operate their committee differently — not just from select committees of the past, but than any committee in the history of the Congress. The Democrats, as the majority in the House, could have created a committee with a majority of their party. Instead, the committee has six members from each party. Those members deliberately include representatives serving on other committees with jurisdiction over House operations, including the House Administration, Appropriations, and Rules panels. Those stakeholders not only bring the perspective of their respective committees, they also can later be advocates for recommendations that require broader congressional support.
Procedurally, the select committee has tried what many might consider "little" changes, but which constitute real change in congressional processes. For example, in one hearing, instead of the all Democrats sitting on one side of the dais, and Republicans on the other side, they sat side by side, donkey next to elephant.
In another hearing, on developing future leadership in the Congress, the chairman and vice chairman gave up the gavel and allowed the committee's two freshman lawmakers to chair the hearing. (Question to seasoned observers of Congress: When was the last time you saw a Democratic or Republican chairman willingly give up the gavel at a committee hearing?)
The select committee has already issued some strong recommendations that will improve the operations and transparency of Congress. They include opening up the committee process so Americans can see the inner workings of Congress; improving the orientation process for new members and making it nonpartisan; creating a central human resources office; and streamlining a vast array of technology processes and tools to save money and improve services to constituents.
There have been some disagreements, but these have been resolved in the kind of hard-headed working sessions the American people expect. In this sense, the select committee is not just offering substantive solutions to challenges facing the Congress; it is demonstrating by example how elected officials can solve problems collaboratively.
The committee's working motto is to create a Congress that "works better for the American people." Its members understand the ultimate assessor and benefactor of their work isn't a bunch of politicians in Washington, it's their constituents.
Unfortunately, the clock is ticking on this admirable team. The committee was given an initial budget and mandate that expires in less than five months. But surely their demonstrated accomplishments, pioneering new methods for decision-making and increasingly strong working relationships merit an extension. Kilmer, Graves and the rest of the panel serve as a useful example of what is possible to their colleagues and are entitled to another year of effort. With their track record to date, who knows what this committee could accomplish with more time working to restore the functionality to our first branch of government.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.