In Ernest Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises,” a down-on-his-luck Scottish veteran of World War I is asked how he went bankrupt. “Two ways,” Mike Campbell responds. “Gradually, then suddenly.”
That famous line, written 100 years ago, has become a catchall phrase to describe institutions that are in the midst of collapse, something that slowly and steadily decays until the moment everything implodes.
And that dynamic could soon apply to Congress, according to independent experts and those that have served in the body. These critics are sounding the alarm that the institution needs a major course correction or else it will slide into a permanent state of weakness that further empowers the presidency.
Earlier this month, the Bipartisan Policy Center began publishing a report that suggests the decades-long slide on Capitol Hill is reaching a point of no return.
Under the headline of “Congress at a Crossroads,” the initial report cites the often mentioned “polarization” and “nationalization” of politics that pushes lawmakers toward trying for attention in this new media era without putting in the necessary work to pass laws.
“Despite decades of bipartisan offenses and bipartisan critiques, nothing seems to change,” wrote J.D. Rackeyand Michael Thorning, the center’s main authors of the report.
None of these symptoms is particularly new but no one has done anything major to fix it and instead things keep steadily getting worse, Rackey and Thorning wrote. “This has been the status quo since the late 20th century; however, it is starting to fray.”
Longtime lawmakers who recently retired, as well as members who decided to quit after short and frustrating tenures, choose more blunt phrases to describe today’s Congress.
“I learned ninth-grade civics: You’ve got three equal branches of government. But right now, the Congress is not one of them. It abdicated everything to the White House,” Fred Upton, the Michigan Republican who served more than 35 years in the House before retiring in 2023, recently told The Post’s Liz Goodwin.
“I don’t want to sound like a prepper. I believe there will be a tipping point, and I think that we’re actually pretty close to it,” Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minnesota) told the New York Times, explaining her decision to announce her retirement plans after just seven years in the Senate.
These dire warnings have been a regular feature of my reporting on Congress for nearly two decades at The Washington Post, particularly the last decade of writing this @PKCapitol column that was meant to be a more analytical look at what was going right and wrong.
This is my last column at The Post, as I head out for another job, prompting a lot of reflection, particularly about the institution at the heart of this column.
Year after year, decade after decade, past House and Senate leaders brushed aside warnings about the disappearing Congress as sky-is-falling hyperbole. The result, almost everyone agrees, is a weakened legislative branch that gets steamrolled by the president (Democrat or Republican) and a Supreme Court that has taken an openly hostile tone to lawmakers.
“Yes, legislating can be hard and take time. And yes, it can be tempting to bypass Congress when some pressing problem arises,” Justice Neil M. Gorsuch wrote in an opinion rejecting President Donald Trump’s tariff policies that also excoriated Congress for not doing its job.
The question is whether, at this juncture, Congress can recover and become a vibrant, equal branch of government to the presidency and the Supreme Court.
Or, quite possibly, the institution has gradually decayed to the point where it may remain permanently weakened, a far cry from its designation in the Constitution as “article one,” the first branch of government.
The optimistic case is that there have been moments of progress that showed some glimmer of hope.
By late January the House and Senate, on bipartisan votes, passed funding bills for every federal agency except the Department of Homeland Security. And last fall a collection of rank-and-file Democrats and Republicans overruled objections from Trump and House GOP leaders, passing a law mandating the release of the Jeffrey Epstein investigative files.
But the cynics would argue that these are the sort of basic blocking-and-tackling drills that Congress should be doing without the drama that went into these particular actions.
Lawmakers approved 11 of the 12 bills funding federal government about four months after the Sept. 30 deadline, and only after a six-week shutdown of funding for almost every agency in the fall. Moreover, because of battles over Trump’s deportation policy, Homeland Security has remained without funding for more than a month.
The release of the Epstein files took months of prodding from rank-and-file lawmakers, deploying rarely used parliamentary tactics. They eventually forced Trump into accepting that an overwhelming majority wanted to vote for the legislation, and he agreed to sign the legislation.
This was hardly the type of aggressive oversight that was common earlier this century. From 2004 through 2006, the Republican leaders of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee dove into a corruption investigation involving a GOP lobbyistwho plundered his tribal casino clients in a massive scheme that led to dozens of criminal convictions and politically crippled some senior Republican lawmakers.
In 2005, Republicans leading the Senate Armed Services Committee fought the Bush administration over reports of torture, forcing White House officials to agree to new laws limiting techniques used with detainees in the Middle East.
Today’s House and Senate Republicans have rejected even holding public hearings to discuss the objectives in the war against Iran, an attack that was launched Feb. 28 with no input from Congress.
Democrats can complain all they want about the lack of oversight from today’s GOP-led Congress of the Trump administration, but their recent track record with President Joe Biden wasn’t exactly stellar.
Top leaders like Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-New York) and Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-California) spent several years saying that Biden, in his early 80s, was perfectly fit and encouraged him to run in 2024 for a second term — only to see his public flailing in a televised debate expose his faltering state.
In terms of legislative futility, last year easily came in with the lowest number of laws passed in the first year of a presidency going back to at least 1989.
Instead, Trump issued executive orders at a record pace — more than 225 in his first 11 months in office, a larger tally than he issued in his previous first four years as president.
In the Senate, Majority Leader John Thune (R-South Dakota) has a home-state economy reeling from Trump’s tariff policies, which, in normal times, might have compelled a debate on a policy that many Republicans privately had not supported. Instead, other than a few resolutions forced by Democrats, the Senate stayed silent on the controversial policy.
Gorsuch went public with his dismay about congressional atrophy in his tariff ruling. “The deliberative nature of the legislative process was the whole point of its design. Through that process, the nation can tap the combined wisdom of the people’s elected representatives,” he wrote.
Simply flipping the majorities is not likely to lead to a major renaissance of public support for Congress.
Democrats appear to be on the cusp of claiming the House majority in November, needing just a three-seat gain, but voters have already changed that majority in four of the last five midterm elections. The Senate majority has changed hands four times in the previous 10 elections.
The result has been a public thoroughly disgusted with Congress no matter who’s in charge, according to monthly polling data compiled by Gallup.
Last month just 16 percent of Americans approved of congressional job performance, a little lower than the 20 percent who approved of Congress in February 2022, when Democrats held both chambers. In February 2018, when Republicans controlled Congress, 15 percent of Americans approved.
Every September, Gallup asks how much “trust and confidence” Americans have in Congress as a coequal branch. In 2002, 67 percent of Americans said they had “fair amount” or a “great deal” of trust in Congress, with only 6 percent saying they had “none at all.”
By September 2025, only 32 percent expressed some trust in Congress, with 24 percent of Americans saying they had no trust at all in the legislative institution.
In 2011, Tim Kaine (D-Virginia) visited John Warner (R-Virginia), who retired in 2009 after 30 years in the Senate, to discuss running for a seat in the upper chamber. Warner told Kaine how he used to encourage people to run for Senateeven if they had just a small chance of winning.
He told Kaine, who has gone on to win three terms, that it had become a much different place, but the problem wasn’t in the institution itself.
“It’s not in the water supply,” Warner said. “It’s not sick-building syndrome. It’s just the character and inclination of the people who walk in the building every day.”
“So it could be different tomorrow,” he added.
Fifteen years later, things haven’t gotten any better. Tomorrow is coming faster than many lawmakers realize.
It might only be gradually getting worse — or it might be about to suddenly fall apart.
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