To Fix Congress, Party Leadership Must Give Power Back to the Lawmakers
It’s not enough simply to replace congressional party leaders. Their power has to be reduced.
PRESIDENT TRUMP, IN A PUNCHBOWL interview last week, pointedly declined to put his support behind John Thune to remain the Senate’s Republican leader for another term. For several weeks, Trump had pressured and cajoled Thune to use his power as majority leader to force fellow Republicans to eliminate the filibuster that Senate Democrats are using to block his election “reform” bill and other legislative initiatives. Several Trump allies in the Republican caucus have at times appeared open to ousting Thune as leader, as have several Trump acolytes running this year.
The Senate’s Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer, faces a similar revolt from several of his party’s more progressive Senate candidates—Juliana Stratton in Illinois, Troy Jackson in Maine, Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, and Peggy Flanagan in Minnesota—who have publicly stated that, if elected, they don’t intend to support keeping him in the role. Their complaint is that Schumer has been insufficiently aggressive in opposing Trump. Among his sins: He “allowed” eight veteran Democratic senators to vote with Republicans last December to end the longest government shutdown in history without winning the policy concessions Democrats had demanded.
Over in the House, meanwhile, members of the right-wing Freedom Caucus spend their days trying to prevent the Republican House from transacting business unless the speaker, Mike Johnson, agrees to alter committee-approved legislation to their liking, and then forcing the rest of the Republican caucus to go along.
A revolt of sorts is also brewing against Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries. Several of the party’s most progressive House candidates and nominees—Melat Kiros of Colorado, Mai Vang and Angela Gonzales-Torres of California, and Adam Hamawy of Pennsylvania, along with Darializa Avila Chevalier and Claire Valdez, two democratic socialists from New York—have all signaled ambivalence about or outright opposition to backing Jeffries for party leader (or speaker, should Democrats win the majority). The progressives are unhappy about his taking campaign money from pro-Israel groups and donors and want a commitment that he will push Democrats to abolish ICE, impeach Trump, and promote Medicare for All.
What all of these self-styled rebels have in common is an acceptance of the idea that party leaders control—and ought to control—what happens on Capitol Hill. It’s certainly undeniable that members have abdicated their legislative responsibility and handed much of their power to party leaders. To a large extent, leaders now decide what issues are taken up by committee, what solutions are considered, what special interests are catered to, and what alternatives and compromises can be debated and voted upon by the full House and Senate. Given that reality, the renegades calculate that the easiest way to change legislative outcomes is to change the leaders—or at least threaten to change them.
Consider, however, how much better it would be for Congress and American democracy if, rather than trying to co-opt and harness the leaders’ extraordinary power, the renegades focused on reducing it and returning initiative and responsibility to members and committees.
After all, we know from the last thirty years that the concentration of power in the hands of party leaders has gone hand-in-hand with the partisan gamesmanship, gridlock, and dysfunction in Congress, making it almost impossible for either party to address, let alone resolve, the most important challenges facing the country. It is hardly a coincidence that as party leaders were consolidating power and influence within Congress, the power and influence of Congress was eroding, and with it the capacity to govern. And that was true during periods of both Republican and Democratic control.
The members and candidates now challenging party leaders may believe that they are channeling the voters’ preferences for populist solutions of the far left and right. In reality, what they are mostly channeling is Americans’ overwhelming disenchantment with both political parties and the Congress itself. The best way to address that disenchantment—and the best way to get a shot at enacting a different set of policies—would be to fix Congress’s internal plumbing and return it to working order.
SEVERAL YEARS AGO, A GROUP of two dozen former members of both houses and both parties got together and hammered out a practical agenda for doing just that—a project I helped organize under the auspices of the University of Pennsylvania. The Fixing Congress agenda includes such “radical” ideas as moving from a three-day to a five-day work week when Congress is in session, letting committees choose their own chairs, and guaranteeing members the right to propose, debate, and vote on amendments with significant bipartisan support. Senators wanting to filibuster bills could be forced to actually show up and talk day after day. There would be more opportunities for members of opposing parties to travel or just have lunch together. And no longer would leaders be allowed to bypass committees by writing huge legislative packages behind closed doors and then forcing members to vote them up and down without serious debate or time to even read them.
Such a reform agenda ought to be of particular interest to three independent candidates for Senate who are offering serious challenges to Republican candidates in bright red states. Seth Bodnar in Montana, Dan Osborn in Nebraska, and Brian Bengs in South Dakota have all taken a “pox-on-both-your-houses” approach and stated they would join neither caucus if elected.
For them and for the Senate, however, a better strategy would be to offer to caucus with the party whose leadership offers to open up the legislative process, return power and initiative to members, and make it possible to negotiate, debate, and vote on the kind of bipartisan compromises these independents say they want to enact.
In the end, it matters less who serves in party leadership than what rules, norms, and processes govern the way Congress operates. The real renegades are those willing to challenge leaders by reducing and redistributing their power, not simply by usurping it.
Steven Pearlstein, a former columnist at the Washington Post, is now director of the Fixing Congress initiative at the University of Pennsylvania.
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