Speaker Mike Johnson once again defied skeptics and found a majority in a high-stakes vote, with the House passing the president’s big policy bill on Thursday along party lines. He and John Thune, the Senate leader, ably made whatever deals and promises were necessary to get the bill through their chambers, and Republicans are celebrating it as a major victory. But the wobbly passage of the fiscal package says more about the frivolity of the game Congress now plays than it does about how well G.O.P. congressional leaders played it.
Few seem happy with the actual product. Republicans and Democrats alike have found plenty to criticize about the substance of the bill: the cost, the cuts, the gimmicks. Just as concerning, though, is the way it came together — and what that says about America’s once admired legislative body.
The process was marred by dynamics that have increasingly undermined Congress’s status as a dominant and deliberative institution: The bill lacked a clear and inspired purpose; it supplanted the expertise of congressional committees for the whims of holdouts and the president; and it relied on the make-or-break reconciliation mechanism that limits the ability to write sound policy.
Congress is no longer in the business of thoughtful legislating. Its role has been reduced to putting political points on the board for the president.
There has been a series of changes in how leadership and legislating in Washington work. Republican House members have long argued that too much power is centralized in the speaker’s office. They’ve chafed at speakers, including the two I worked for, who have presented them with a plan and told them it was either the right way to go or the best we could do.
Mr. Johnson has taken this criticism to heart, and his staying power as speaker can in part be attributed to the light touch he takes with his conference. This bill was not viewed as the Mike Johnson plan. Seemingly his only restraint was what could get 218 votes in the House.
But members of Congress today are not well suited to fill that policy vacuum. Too many see their jobs as playing characters in the Trump melodrama rather than serving as policymakers in a separate and equal legislative branch.
The downsides of this dynamic should now be clear.
Congress, particularly the House, is a body built around committees, which have jurisdiction over various areas of policy. This is where expertise is supposed to be housed. Historically, members of these committees have jealously defended their policy terrain, and they have been given deference to do their jobs.
However, this critical architecture has been collapsing in recent years. In this instance, Mr. Johnson allowed rank-and-file members to end-run the committees of jurisdiction. After the committee process, the bill was workshopped through a series of hasty negotiations with holdout members such as with the changes to the state and local tax deductions. Medicaid policy, affecting tens of millions of Americans, appears to have been made on the fly.
In the Senate, the bill didn’t even go through a full, open committee process, and policy was still being written last weekend as senators began voting to proceed.
With committees relegated, there was no ownership of the product — and certainly little pride in it. With Medicaid, changes on the table ranged from adding work requirements for those receiving benefits to a wholesale restructuring of how the federal government funds the program. Until late in the process, many members didn’t know what was in or out, and certainly not how to sell it.
This lack of definition allowed Democrats to pounce. Bad process can lead to bad policy and bad politics.
I don’t mean the all-night voting in the Senate or both chambers passing legislation before official scorekeepers had even provided final cost estimates. Those are just unfortunate realities of legislative politics. There’s another process story that has been building for decades across both parties, as Congress increasingly relies on large legislative vehicles like this. Many of the issues with this package can be traced to the decision to put everything in one big bill. With little interest in policymaking through regular order, or bipartisan compromise, the majority is left to place all its eggs in the basket of the budget reconciliation process.
The wonky rules of the reconciliation process give the majority a narrow crack at avoiding the Senate filibuster — but the process also significantly limits how policy can be written. Generally speaking, everything must be drafted to address matters of spending or revenue. The 1974 Budget Act that created this process was intended to help Congress balance the budget. It’s now being used for issues like artificial intelligence standards and immigration policy.
This is a poor mechanism for addressing the nuances of complex policy. It also functionally means that the biggest policy changes both parties are making are increasingly partisan ones. Since Republicans are uninterested in working with Democrats through regular order, this bill was also viewed as the only train leaving the station — so anything and everything Republicans could think to throw in the bill, they did.
The legislative stew that resulted is not fine-tuned policy, nor does it offer a cohesive purpose. It’s just good enough for a Congress that doesn’t particularly care about being any better than “good enough.”
The bill does not improve America’s tax code. An extension of the 2017 tax law — which significantly simplified the tax code and which I helped pass as well as later working with groups that wanted it extended — ended up littered with new carve-outs and gimmicks, like no taxes on tips or overtime.
It does not strengthen our health care system. While the bill makes significant policy changes, and millions of Americans will feel the impact of Medicaid cuts, the motivation behind the bill’s health care reforms was budget savings — not better health care service or outcomes.
It will not better the nation’s fiscal trajectory. Despite the Medicaid cuts, no serious effort was made to cover the costs of the tax cuts and new spending.
There wasn’t even anything particularly MAGA about the bill.
None of that mattered. Leaders bet that members would not deny President Trump his bill signing, and they were right. Before final passage, there were gaping pockets of opposition from every corner of the House conference, almost all waved off by the simple argument that Republicans could not let down Mr. Trump.
In the opening of his 2006 book, “The House,” the historian Robert Remini wrote: “The United States House of Representatives is regarded by many as the finest deliberative body in human history. A grand conceit, to be sure. But one that is not far from the mark. It is an extraordinary instrument for legislating the will of the American people.”
Less than two decades later, the passage reads as comedy — or is deeply depressing, depending on your lens.
Brendan Buck, a communications strategist, was a counselor to Paul Ryan and a press secretary for John Boehner when they were speakers of the House.
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