Frost is president of the Association of Former Members of Congress. A Democrat, he represented Texas in the House of Representatives from 1979 to 2005.
Last month, I was honored to testify before the House Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress.
I represented the 24th District of Texas for 13 terms in the House, and for 26 years I was a member of the Rules Committee. I also served on the Budget and House Administration committees. I was Democratic Caucus chairman for four years and chaired the Caucus Rules Committee for 10.
Congress has been on my mind for much of my adult life.
Before I testified in front of the committee, I read all the statements of the previous witnesses. All were helpful but I must admit that my favorite proposal was Rep. Bennie Thompson's No Couches for Congress Act. Stopping members from sleeping in their offices would certainly modernize Congress, and improve its image among Americans.
Transparency will also improve that image, as my good friend Majority Leader Steny Hoyer noted when addressing earmarks. Hoyer was right when he said that earmarks can create bipartisan cooperation in appropriations. Importantly, he focused on transparency in any return of earmarks. American citizens must know where their money is being spent and who asked that it be spent that way.
The only way to effectively do the people's business is with transparency.
Doing that business also requires trusted, talented staffers, who are mentored by their bosses. I am proud that one of my former staffers, Marc Veasey, now represents part of my district. An intern of mine on the Rules Committee, Dennis Cardoza, eventually became a representative from California.
These two men, and hundreds of women and men working in Congress today, share important career aspirations: public service and improving our nation. Congress must identify leaders – and servants – in its staff. Then, they must be given the education and career growth needed to advance their public service careers. Congress runs the largest employer in the country, the American government. You don't run a company by failing to retain – and grow – your best and brightest.
Transparency and growing talented staff should be bipartisan.
Bipartisanship is very important for me.
I was pleased to chair the Frost-Solomon House Task Force, created to help mold the legislatures of 10 emerging Eastern and Central European democracies, following the breakup of the Soviet Union. I focused on bipartisanship in all our actions. We worked hand in hand with George H.W. Bush's State Department. No congressional delegation was sent unless it was bipartisan.
That bipartisan spirit led to great impact by our task force, creating new allies in Europe.
Without bipartisanship, we cannot accomplish great things. We can only fight.
I now serve as president of the Association of Former Members of Congress. We are the premier organization using bipartisan work by former members to foster bipartisanship in today's Congress.
I think what FMC does can be instructive to our conversation today. We are all united, Republicans and Democrats alike, by the appreciation of what a great privilege it was to represent our constituents in Congress. We understand like few others the honor of earning the trust of thousands of our fellow Americans, who chose us to be their voice in the government of our representative republic in Washington.
FMC's membership is uniquely aware that public service is a noble calling. Through FMC, there is a united, bipartisan effort to share with the next generation that our representative democracy is one that thrives when citizens participate and when engaged men and women step forward to run for office and put their ideas to the test.
FMC is an organization of more than 600 former lawmakers, from both the House and the Senate, and we are 100 percent bipartisan. We have members from all political persuasions working together energetically under our umbrella. We are proof that healthy partisanships can co-exist with collegiality and a willingness to work together. Our members do so through myriad programs, most prominently the Congress to Campus program, which sends bipartisan teams of former members to almost 40 university campuses per academic year so that we can engage the next generation in a dialogue about civic participation and public service.
This ability to work together is not solely based on the fact that we are former rather than current members of Congress, but primarily because we have a chance to get to know each other and build relationships that transcend political labels.
For many of FMC's members, there was more to be accomplished after leaving Congress. FMC is a way to encourage current lawmakers to use bipartisanship to achieve as much as they can, to avoid that regret of unfinished improvement.
In fact, FMC is collecting oral histories of dozens of members of Congress who left after last session. When it is finished, it will be donated to the Library of Congress. But, I hope we'll be able to share our record and analysis of these interviews with the Modernization Committee soon.
Hopefully that work, combined with all the other efforts of reformers, can create the better Congress we all look forward to.
Rep. Dan Lipinski testified before the committee as well. When he was a teacher, his government classes watched the Schoolhouse Rock video "How a Bill Becomes a Law." My students at George Washington University do the same. Unfortunately, I have to tell them that's not how Congress works today.
I hope the work of reformers, and the Modernization Committee, will help get us closer to the Schoolhouse Rock ideal of transparency, bipartisanship and public service and, in doing so, help prevent some of the public cynicism about our 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.