Lessons from Energy Politics for our Polarized America

Last month, a bipartisan group of senators introduced the FREEDOM (Fighting for Reliable Energy and Ending Doubt for Open Markets) Act. The bill aims to address challenges associated with what has become one of the most widely discussed policy topics in American politics: energy. Recognizing that permitting delays, as well as the weaponization of permitting against oil and gas under Biden and against clean energy under Trump, have kept gigawatts of power from coming online, the bill introduces significant reforms to the energy project approval process. By accelerating the addition of new generation capacity to the grid, these reforms would help meet growing demand and reduce costs for consumers. It arrives with something increasingly rare in this Congress, namely broad support from voters of both parties, a point I will return to.

The bill is primarily procedural rather than determinative. Concerned with the use of executive power to stall projects, it hands the agency reviewing an energy project a fixed window, generally 90 days for a routine authorization and one to two years for a complex one. If that window closes with no decision, the delay is treated as agency action unlawfully withheld, allowing the project sponsor to seek relief in federal court. The court may compel the agency to act, set binding deadlines for each remaining step, or hand the unfinished analysis to an independent contractor working under the court's own supervision. The second part of the bill ensures a project that has already cleared review cannot be unwound by a future administration, of either party, absent a substantiated and immediate harm for which no other remedy exists, a principle likely voters endorse by a 62% to 21% margin.

Now, you may ask: what do the mechanics of energy infrastructure policy have to do with the broader ailments of the American political sphere? Quite a lot, I think. One of the most consequential pieces of energy legislation before this Congress is not aimed at delivering a particular policy outcome in response to voter concerns or economic conditions. Rather it seeks to repair a burdensome, obstructive, and anti-democratic process. In that respect, it mirrors our constitutional order, which largely refrains from prescribing outcomes and instead establishes the framework through which they are determined. The broader lesson of the FREEDOM Act is that healthy institutions do not predetermine outcomes. They establish clear rules and allow competing interests to succeed or fail on their merits. The same principle should guide reforms to our democratic institutions.

Let's start with how we choose the people who represent us. In many states, state legislatures determine congressional maps, with relatively free rein to allocate seats. As we have seen in the 2026 gerrymandering battles, this has been pushed to the extreme, with FairVote projecting that 81% of the 435 House seats up in 2026 are already safe for one party. The general election in those districts is often a formality, empowering the dominant party's primary to determine the election, meaning just 14% of eligible American voters cast a meaningful vote determining their House representation. In essence, we have created a situation in which partisan control of offices during redistricting cycles almost wholly determines representation, and where, in many of those districts, those in the partisan minority have almost no voting power. Luckily, Congress can address both of these issues through its legislative powers. It can require that congressional maps be drawn by independent commissions whose members are screened to exclude officeholders, party officials, and lobbyists, a design feature the Brennan Center found to be the single strongest predictor of whether a commission actually works, and who are bound to criteria fixed in advance. It can require top-two nonpartisan jungle primaries, open to every voter and every candidate, which increase independent voter engagement and meaningful voter share. These reforms negate the ability of whoever happens to hold power in a given decade to decide an election before it is held. In doing so, they address the same underlying institutional failure the FREEDOM Act seeks to address in permitting: the concentration of gatekeeping power in the hands of political actors. The goal in both cases is to create an environment of fair competition, whether for investment and innovation or for voter support.

Congress's own rules require similar examination and reform. Currently, the respective majority party leadership, through the House Rules Committee and through the majority leader's scheduling power, holds largely unreviewable control over which bills reach the floor. This often creates situations in which legislation, commanding a clear majority of the whole chamber, can die because it lacks a majority within the majority party alone. The supposed remedy, the discharge petition, has gathered its required 218 signatures fewer than 10% of the times it has been attempted since the 1930s, in part because signing one is a public act of defiance against leaders who possess considerable influence over committee assignments, fundraising, and other institutional opportunities. The public has drawn the obvious conclusion: 70% say Congress is not effectively addressing the country's biggest problems. This again mirrors a failure the FREEDOM Act was written to correct: political actors holding indefinite discretion with no deadline forcing a decision either way. Congress functions with discretion, just as agencies governing energy permits do, and that discretion need not be unlimited, since it can just as easily be bound by transparent rules, deadlines, and accountability. Any bill reported out of committee, or carrying a supermajority of cosponsors, should receive an automatic up-or-down floor vote within a fixed window, a rule the House has already half-written in its dormant Consensus Calendar yet simply declines to enforce. Steering committees, stripped of the extra votes party leaders currently hold over them, should control committee assignments, so that leadership cannot quietly punish the members who force those votes. These reforms, again, do not dictate outcomes. They instead replace the nearly indefinite, oft-abused discretion of partisan politicians with a deadline and a default, just as the FREEDOM Act does in requiring agency timeliness and compliance, and leave the question of what actually becomes law to a democratic vote of the full chamber.

The final, maybe most important lesson we can learn from energy politics is consensus building and resisting partisan polarization, especially at a time when bipartisanship among bills proposed in the Senate has decreased, and agreement across partisan lines has started to falter on certain policy issues. Permitting reform is one area where that agreement has held, with 66% of likely 2026 voters saying Congress should modernize permitting rules to speed up energy projects, with support across party lines. The same cross-partisan agreement already exists for the democratic reforms above, with 82% preferring congressional maps drawn by nonpartisan commissions rather than by the party in power, and 67% of voters saying they would rather their representative work collaboratively to pass legislation than hold the line alone. The abuse of traditional norms on many fronts makes it clear that we need structural reform, and rather than fighting over who controls the procedure of government, we should focus on designing procedures that neither side can exploit. We have seen the start of that translate into action on the FREEDOM Act, backed by a bipartisan group in the Senate and the Build America Caucus in the House, and hopefully we'll soon see the same reflected in the passage of similar legislation. Inspired by the lessons from our energy politics, Congress and other elected officials should act on the similarly broad support for reforms to our democratic institutions, from our electoral systems to how our legislature functions.

Imre Huss is a Democracy Architects Council Fellow and emerged as a standout member of the inaugural class of Carnegie Young Leaders, a national initiative by the Institute for Citizens & Scholars that elevates youth-led civic innovation across the United States.