The Broken Branch

There’s a lot of anger right now — and most of it is understandable.

People are angry about how voting rights are being interpreted and contested in the courts and in the states.

They’re angry about executive power — whether it’s war powers, regulatory authority, or the growing use of unilateral action.

They’re angry at the judiciary for stepping into issues that feel like they should be settled politically, not legally.

And yet, in all of these fights, there’s one common thread:

Congress isn’t in the arena.

It’s on the sidelines.

And that’s the real problem.

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The Fight We Keep Having — Over the Same Chairs

We spend enormous energy fighting over representation — who gets it, how it’s drawn, how it’s protected.

But here’s the part we don’t confront:

We’ve been fighting over the same number of seats in the House of Representatives for more than a century.

And that didn’t happen by accident.

In 1929, Congress passed the Reapportionment Act of 1929, effectively capping the House at 435 members.

It has never been meaningfully revisited — not even during moments, like the Voting Rights Act of 1965, when Congress was actively rethinking representation itself.

At the founding, the Constitution set a ceiling of one representative for every 30,000 people. In practice, the first Congress operated at roughly one for every 57,000.

By 1929, when Congress locked the number in place, it was already roughly one for every 250,000.

Today, it’s nearly one for every 800,000 — closer to the population of a major city than anything the Founders would recognize as a community of interest.

Same table. Same number of chairs. A country that has more than tripled in size is trying to fit into a political structure that hasn’t meaningfully expanded to match it.

So the fights get sharper. More zero-sum. More existential.

Because when there are no new seats at the table, every gain for one group feels like a loss for another.

If the House had grown with the country — as the Founders envisioned — many of these representation fights wouldn’t disappear, but they would change. They’d be less absolute. Less suffocating. Less likely to end up in court.

More seats mean more voices. More diversity of ideology, geography, class, identity — you name it.

In other words: more politics — and less litigation.

And in this case, “more politics” is a good thing.

Remember why civilizations created politics in the first place: to resolve disputes without violence.

More politics, at its best, means more engagement — and less pressure spilling out somewhere else.

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The Rules That Replaced Governing

Of course, the size of Congress is only part of the problem.

Even at its current size, the institution could function better than it does.

But over time, Congress layered on rules—and more importantly, workarounds to those rules—that slowly turned a system designed to resolve disagreement into one that avoids resolving it.

The clearest example of that shift is the filibuster.

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The Filibuster Didn’t Create Bipartisanship—It Created a Loophole

The filibuster is often defended as a tool that forces compromise.

In theory, it raises the bar — 60 votes instead of 51 — so majorities have to work with minorities.

In practice, it’s done almost the opposite.

Instead of forcing bipartisanship, it has made partisanship more rigid — and more procedural.

Because when you can’t pass legislation the normal way, you find another way.

And that workaround has become reconciliation.

What was once an obscure budget tool is now the primary vehicle for major legislation. And here’s the catch: reconciliation is explicitly designed to be partisan. It allows a simple majority to pass sweeping policy changes—as long as they can attach a price tag to it.

So instead of encouraging cross-party dealmaking, the system now incentivizes something else entirely:

If you have 51 votes, you don’t negotiate—you wait your turn.

And when your turn comes, you pass as much as you can, as fast as you can, knowing the other party will try to undo it the same way.

That’s not compromise.

That’s policy ping-pong.

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The Result: More Partisan, Less Durable Government

The combination of the filibuster and reconciliation has created a two-track system:

• Most legislation requires 60 votes, and therefore doesn’t happen

• The most important legislation gets jammed through with 51 votes—but only if it fits inside a budget box

Which means the biggest policies we pass are:

• More partisan

• More fragile

• More likely to be reversed

And everything else just… sits there.

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Congress Didn’t Just Shrink — It Gave Away Its Power

But the size of Congress is only part of the story.

Over the last half century, Congress hasn’t just failed to grow—it has actively hollowed itself out.

Some of that erosion began earlier — during Vietnam and the Civil Rights era — when Congress proved either too divided or too slow, and the courts and the executive stepped in to fill the vacuum.

But the real accelerant came in the 1990s.

The Republican takeover of Congress in 1994 was supposed to reform the institution.

Instead, it transformed it — cutting staff, centralizing power, and replacing legislation with confrontation as the dominant political strategy.

What had been a slow erosion became a structural redesign.

And the effects are still with us.

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Congress Hollowed Out Its Own Brain

That loss of capacity isn’t abstract.

Congress has also shrunk its ability to understand the policies it’s supposed to write.

Since the 1990s, staff levels have declined. Internal expertise has been cut back. Institutions designed to provide independent analysis were eliminated or weakened.

So where does Congress get its information now?

Lobbyists. Advocacy groups. The executive branch.

You can’t legislate what you don’t understand.

And when you don’t have the capacity to write detailed law, you default to broad directives—and let someone else fill in the details.

That’s not just delegation.

That’s dependence.

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From Committees to Command Centers

Congress used to be a committee-driven institution.

Figures like Tip O’Neill or Dan Rostenkowski operated in a system where committee chairs built expertise, wrote legislation, and cut deals across party lines. That’s where governing actually happened.

Today, power is centralized in leadership.

Speakers and party leaders decide what gets a vote, when it gets a vote, and often what’s in it.

Regular order is mostly gone.

A committee-driven Congress is issue-driven.

A leadership-driven Congress is message-driven.

And once leadership controls the agenda, it has a natural incentive to govern through leverage, which is how you end up governing by crisis.

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Governing by Crisis Is Still a Choice

Look at budgeting.

Congress hasn’t consistently passed on-time budgets in decades. Instead, it lurches from crisis to crisis — continuing resolutions, shutdown threats, debt ceiling brinkmanship.

That’s not structural inevitability.

That’s institutional preference.

Because the fight has become more valuable than the outcome.

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War Powers: The Clearest Failure

If you want the clearest example of congressional abdication, look at war powers.

After 9/11, Congress handed the executive branch sweeping authority to conduct military operations.

And it never seriously took it back.

Presidents of both parties have used that authority to wage conflicts Congress never formally declared.

That’s not executive overreach.

That’s legislative retreat.

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Why None of This Gets Fixed

At this point, it’s tempting to say: fix the rules. Fix the structure.

But underneath all of this is something more fundamental:

The incentive system.

Members of Congress aren’t rewarded for legislating — they’re rewarded for positioning.

Low-turnout primaries dominated by ideological voters punish compromise and reward confrontation.

The safest move politically is not to solve a problem, but to keep it alive.

Because unresolved issues raise money.

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The Dirty Secret: Dysfunction Pays

This may be the most uncomfortable truth:

Congress benefits from not solving the biggest issues.

Abortion, guns, voting rights—these are not just policy debates. They are fundraising engines.

For years, it was more valuable for both parties to campaign on these issues than to settle them.

And when the courts step in?

Even better.

Now you can run against the outcome without having taken responsibility for it.

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The Bottom Line

If you look at the last half-century, the through-line is clear:

Congress didn’t just fail to keep up with the country.

It shrank itself.

It gave away its power.

It centralized authority.

It hollowed out its own expertise.

And then it discovered something:

The dysfunction works.

Because the dysfunction isn’t accidental.

It’s incentivized.

And until that changes, the pressure doesn’t go away.

It just finds somewhere else to explode.

Sidebar: The Simulation That Assumes Congress Doesn’t Matter

I want to share an experience I had recently, because I haven’t quite shaken it — and I’m not sure I’m supposed to.

I participated in one of these political crisis simulations run by an organization called the Atoll Society.

If you’re not familiar, the Atoll Society is a network of academics, technologists, former government officials, and strategists who design high-stakes simulations to stress-test democratic systems. Think of it as part war game, part tabletop exercise, part AI-driven modeling lab. They’ve been running these exercises across the country — and increasingly around the world — refining them with real-world data from moments when governments were under extreme strain: contested elections, democratic backsliding, institutional breakdowns.

The idea is simple, if unsettling: assume the guardrails fail. Then see what happens next.

The simulation I participated in was built around a premise that would have sounded extreme a decade ago, but now feels… uncomfortably plausible. It assumes that January 6th wasn’t an anomaly — it was a preview. A stress test. A moment that revealed where the system bends.

From there, the exercise becomes a kind of structured role-playing game — three teams, each representing a different force in society:

• The Institutionalists — defenders of the current constitutional order

• The Nationalists — those seeking to fundamentally reshape the system

• The Capitalists — not ideological actors, but economic ones, representing capital, markets, and the business community

And here’s where it gets interesting.

The entire game turns on the capitalists.

Not voters. Not parties. Not even the courts.

The capital.

The central tension becomes transactional: who can secure the confidence of the people who control the economy? Because in the simulation’s logic, legitimacy doesn’t just come from ballots — it comes from whether the people with money believe the system is stable enough to protect their assets.

If capital flees — or picks a side — the outcome is basically determined.

That’s the vulnerability the simulation is probing: how easy is it, in a moment of crisis, to align political power with economic power and effectively bypass everything else?

And then there was the part that stuck with me.

Congress barely exists in this world.

Not literally — but functionally. It’s background noise. A weak, slow, largely irrelevant institution in the face of aggressive executive action and fast-moving political maneuvering. The simulation assumes, almost without question, that Congress cannot meaningfully constrain a determined executive — especially one willing to push or ignore norms.

That assumption isn’t debated in the game.

It’s baked into it.

And that’s what bothered me.

Because if you accept that premise — that Congress is too dysfunctional, too slow, too divided to act — then the rest of the simulation starts to feel inevitable. Power flows around it, not through it.

Even more striking: the simulation often rewards behavior that, in the real world, we’d call norm-breaking or even undemocratic. Transactional deals. Pressure campaigns. Strategic escalation. Meanwhile, actors who assume “the system will hold” tend to lose.

Now, you can argue that’s the point — that these exercises are meant to be uncomfortable, even provocative. They’re designed to surface worst-case scenarios, not affirm our faith in institutions.

But it raises a deeper question:

Are we modeling reality — or are we training ourselves to expect its failure?

Because if every serious stress test of democracy begins with the assumption that Congress is irrelevant, then we’ve already answered a fundamental question about the health of our system.

And here’s where it landed for me.

For all the debate we have in this country — about presidents, courts, norms, rhetoric — this experience was a reminder of something more basic:

We have a Congress problem.

Not just a partisan problem. Not just a leadership problem. A structural problem.

Because if the legislative branch — the one designed to be closest to the people, to check the executive, to force compromise — is assumed out of the game in every crisis scenario, then we shouldn’t be surprised when power consolidates elsewhere.

Or when people start looking for alternatives.

In that sense, the simulation didn’t just test the system.

It exposed where we’ve already stopped believing in it.

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If you’re a fan of sports history—or just interested in how greatness is built and maintained—this one’s worth a listen.

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