Picture a bridge with a clearly posted warning: without a routine maintenance fix, it will close. Engineers agree on the repair, but the construction crew in charge refuses to act. The problem is not that the fix is controversial or complex, but that making the repair might be seen as endorsing the bridge itself.
So, traffic keeps moving, the deadline approaches, and those responsible promise to revisit the issue “next year,” even as the risk of failure grows. The danger is that the bridge fails anyway, leaving everyone who depends on it to bear the cost of inaction.
This is precisely how Congress handled the impending expiration of the Affordable Care Act’s enhanced subsidies for millions of Americans in late 2025. The danger was clear, the consequences well understood, and yet GOP leadership allowed the policy cliff to approach simply because they could not—or would not—move their own caucus to act.
Paralysis as a Governing Condition
This paralysis reflects something deeper than ordinary partisan division. It points to a more troubling reality: one of America’s two major parties now struggles to govern at the most basic level.
House Republicans are not engaged in a substantive debate over health-care reform itself. Instead, they allowed a clear deadline to pass that will drive up premiums for millions because party leaders cannot control their caucus or accept even short-term responsibility for an existing law.
A Leadership Failure in Plain Sight
That failure marks a clear breakdown of leadership, where inaction flows directly from decisions made at the top. Speaker Mike Johnson refused to bring a clean extension of the ACA subsidies to the floor, despite a looming expiration date and consequences that were widely understood inside and outside Congress.
Instead of governing through regular order, Johnson attempted to block a vote entirely. The result was a procedural embarrassment: four moderate Republicans joined Democrats to force action through a discharge petition. It was an extraordinary step that signaled not bipartisan cooperation, but the collapse of party leadership and legislative control.
This was not a minor misstep or a tactical gamble. Leadership is the Speaker’s primary responsibility, and Johnson was elected by his party to exercise it. That role requires deciding when a vote must happen, managing internal dissent, and assembling a working majority even when the outcome is uncomfortable.
On the ACA subsidies, Johnson failed each of these tasks. With a clear deadline and well-documented consequences, he could neither marshal enough Republican votes to govern nor contain defections within his caucus. The result was not negotiation or strategy-driven delay, but a leadership vacuum at a moment when governing mattered most.
Power Without Responsibility
None of this should come as a surprise. Johnson emerged as Speaker only after weeks of chaos, when loyalty became more important than demonstrated governing skill. His elevation came only after Donald Trump publicly signaled his approval.
In today’s Republican Party, real power does not flow from the Speaker’s gavel so much as from Trump’s favor. Johnson was chosen not because he could manage a fractured conference, but because he proved himself reliably compliant with Trump’s priorities and instincts. That compliance carries a cost.
A Speaker selected for loyalty rather than leverage is ill-equipped to confront his own caucus, especially when governing requires choices that cut against the party’s dominant political narrative. The ACA subsidy fight exposes the predictable result: a House leader constrained by deference to Trump, unable to lead independently, and presiding over a party that can obstruct almost anything but struggles to govern when the stakes are clear.
What This Means for Democracy
This episode illustrates a broader democratic risk. When Congress cannot pass even time-sensitive, widely understood legislation, it teaches voters a corrosive lesson: representation does not guarantee results.
Over time, this failure pushes power away from the legislature and toward executive action, judicial intervention, and procedural brinkmanship. Policy increasingly happens through emergencies and workarounds rather than deliberation and lawmaking. The ACA subsidies are not an isolated case; they are a warning sign of what governance looks like when paralysis becomes routine.
What Comes Next
What would it take to change this trajectory? Without corrective action, Congress risks locking in a model of non-governance in which foreseeable harm is accepted as routine and legislative authority steadily erodes.
The solutions are straightforward, even if the politics are not. House leadership must reassert the basic norms of governing, beginning with allowing votes on must-pass, time-sensitive legislation even when outcomes are politically inconvenient. Members of Congress, especially those in the majority, must treat preventing predictable harm as a governing obligation, not a concession. Lawmakers in both parties should resist the steady drift toward procedural shortcuts that mask leadership failure rather than resolve it.
More fundamentally, the Republican Party faces a choice it has deferred since the rise of Donald Trump a decade ago: whether it intends to function as a governing party or merely as an oppositional movement organized around one dominant figure. As long as loyalty to Donald Trump outweighs responsibility to the institution, paralysis will remain the norm.
The bridge will keep deteriorating, and Americans will keep paying the price for a Congress that sees the danger coming but cannot bring itself to act.
Robert Cropf is a Professor of Political Science at Saint Louis University.
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.