Kosar is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He is the co-editor of “ Congress Overwhelmed: Congressional Capacity and Prospects for Reform ” (University of Chicago Press, 2020). He hosts the Understanding Congress podcast.
The public has been really down on Congress for about 20 years. A Gallup poll in September found public approval of our nation’s legislature was a mere 17 percent. The ugly fight over the speakership quite probably did not buoy Americans’ feelings.
For sure, some of this grumpy public sentiment is driven by negative media. The old saying is that in journalism, what bleeds leads. Coverage of Capitol Hill focuses heavily on conflict.
A survey conducted by Daniel Cox, my American Enterprise Institute colleague, found that “more than 8 in 10 (82 percent) Americans who say their preferred news topic is politics and government say the coverage was mostly negative.” The most outrageous partisans in Congress get a disproportionately high amount of coverage, and one finds more clips of political fighting on social media than of Democrats and Republicans working together like adults doing the public’s business.
Americans likely also are dissatisfied because they do not hear about much of what Congress does. For example, Sen. Rick Scott’s (R-Fla.) office provides superb constituent services. But I cannot recall the last time I saw a media story on that happy news. I have, however, seen plenty of coverage of Scott’s feud with Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).
The work of oversight and legislation moves in fits and starts on Capitol Hill, but few people beyond the Hill hear of it. During the previous Congress, laws were passed to increase the supply of baby food, speed up payments to relatives of deceased Armed Services veterans, strengthen the nation’s cybersecurity defenses and more. Yet, public approval of the first branch remained abysmal.
Those points noted, Congress is to blame for some of its low standing. The Democratic and Republican parties’ intense battle for majority control of each chamber has led to lots of toxic behavior on the Hill. The parties feel an incentive to own high-salience issues and to use them to fundraise and campaign against the other party, rather than to solve the problems through bargaining.
This is why we do not see sober discussions on tough issues like immigration reform or reducing the nation’s sky-high deficits and debt. Lost upon these partisans is that their squabbling is making more and more voters dislike the parties and our legislature.
Congress also has made it harder for it to please the public by failing to upgrade its own capacity. Think about it; any entity can only do as much as it is capable. A charity can only feed as many people as it can afford to acquire food. A factory produces only as many cars as its assembly lines and workers can assemble.
The same holds true for Congress. Demands on Congress have been escalating for 40 years. The number of voters has gone up 45 percent since 1980, leaving the average member of the House of Representatives with 760,000 constituents to serve. The amount of federal spending recently hit $6.5 trillion, and we expect Congress to oversee how all of those dollars are spent. Interest groups have proliferated, all of whom knock on Congress’ door and shower it with communications demanding attention.
Meanwhile, Congress has not significantly upgraded its capacity since the early 1970s. Today, Congress has fewer staff (10,000) than it did in 1980 (11,000). Congressional committees, which are supposed to be the engines for policymaking and oversight, also have fewer staff (3,100 in 1980 and 2,300 today).
Everyone in Congress knows the budget process is a mess, yet they continue to refuse to replace the 1974 statute that created it. Most hearings continue to be conducted in the way they were a century ago, with Team Donkey on one side of the dais and Team Elephant on the other. Witnesses sit at tables below and read statements and respond to the questions lobbed at them.
Just about every aspect of Congress’ capacity is behind the times, from its work processes to its technology to its internal organization and staffing. Happily, the U.S. Constitution authorizes the first branch to organize itself and appropriate whatever money it needs to do its job. We voters would be wise to tell Congress to rebuild itself for the 21st century and get on with the public’s business.
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.