Steven Pearlstein, a former Post columnist, is the Robinson professor of public affairs at George Mason University and director of the Fixing Congress initiative at the University of Pennsylvania.
One big reason Congress has become so dysfunctional is that there has been no political penalty for members’ doing nothing to solve the nation’s problems while spending their time and energy on partisan gamesmanship.
That ended with last Tuesday’s election.
Yes, voters delivered a Big Beautiful Rebuke to a narcissistic president who begged them to make the referendum a referendum on him. But they also issued an unambiguous reproof to members and leaders of a Congress that had done nothing about rising prices for food, gas, health insurance and housing, nothing about runaway deficits and undeclared wars, nothing about income inequality and the power of Big Tech. Congress couldn’t even manage to do its most basic job of passing annual appropriations before the start of the fiscal year.
President Donald Trump’s approval rating may have fallen below 40 percent, but Congress’s recently clocked in at 14 percent. An October Gallup poll showed that only 15 percent of voters felt that most members of Congress deserved to be reelected. For their own representative, it was only 43 percent — the first time ever under 50 percent.
The best evidence that voters were no longer willing to give a free pass to a do-nothing Congress was the number of incumbent Republicans from relatively “safe” districts who were turned out, or nearly so.
Almost all these defeated or nearly defeated incumbents had marched pretty much in lockstep with Trump and the Republican leadership, providing unquestioning support and zero oversight for unpopular and misguided policies. But these lawmakers also had another thing in common: They had little impact on policy or the institution of which they were members.
These results should be a warning to Democrats and their leaders as they begin to think about how they will manage both houses of Congress over the next two years with an erratic and uncompromising president still in the White House.
Democrats have two choices:
One is to succumb to the intense desire to challenge Trump at every turn, to undo as much of the past two years as possible and launch an unending series of investigations as an unhinged lame-duck president goads them into impeachment. It is also to succumb to the Democratic members’ desire for revenge by treating their Republican colleagues just as badly as Republicans treated them — shutting them out of the legislative process while using party-line votes to ram through “messaging bills,” knowing that they will be vetoed. The logic behind this strategy is that by keeping the focus on Trump’s corruption and malfeasance and forcing Republicans to vote against popular measures, Democrats will be able to energize their base, continue to attract swing voters and sweep the board in the next election.
That strategy, of course, should sound familiar, since it is the same one Republicans followed after they took complete control in 2000 and 2024. And the result is likely to be the same: another two years of partisan gamesmanship and overreach resulting in legislative gridlock and, eventually, political defeat.
The other option is for Democrats to take the first steps toward ending the partisan blood feud and the gridlock it caused by trying to govern in the bipartisan manner that a decisive plurality of Americans — and, in particular, Democratic voters — told Gallup a year ago they wanted.
What would such a focus on governing look like?
It starts with passing a series of bipartisan bills with enough Republican votes to overcome the inevitable Senate filibusters and override presidential vetoes. That would require identifying a dozen Republican Senate colleagues, and several dozen in the House, willing to chart a new course in the wake of an electoral drubbing that has dramatically weakened Trump’s hold over the GOP. And it means giving those Republicans sufficient input into the process to get them to defy their leaders and their caucus and to win their votes on final passage.
There are any number of issues that lend themselves to such bipartisan cooperation. A resolution to end the war in Iran. Legislation limiting the president’s power to unilaterally raise tariffs. Ethics legislation to prevent the president and members of Congress from profiting from their official acts. A substantial hike in the minimum wage. Restoring cuts to Medicaid and Obamacare subsidies. Setting up a bipartisan commission to craft a plan to save Social Security and bring down the federal deficit. A bill to regulate artificial intelligence and the excesses of Big Tech.
Getting the first such initiative passed with a filibuster- and veto-proof majority will be hard, requiring concessions that some Democrats and the party base will find difficult to swallow. Within the Democratic caucus, there will be all sorts of self-righteous denunciations from ideologues and presidential hopefuls and hand-wringing about disappointing the base and maintaining party unity. But when the bill is finally enacted, the public and the mainstream media will cheer, the stock market will rally and a large and unrepairable fissure will have been opened within the Republican Party. One success will lead to another, and then another, each one coming a little bit more easily and passing with an even wider margin.
To many Democratic members, the idea that they might give any consideration to the views and concerns of Republican voters who didn’t support them sounds both radical and naive. In fact, that’s the way things worked in Congress for most of what we now nostalgically refer to as the “American” century. The Progressive Era reforms that limited the power of big corporations, protected consumers and workers and gave women the right to vote — those were all bipartisan initiatives. So were Social Security and Medicare, the space program and the National Highway System. The civil rights acts, the food stamp and school lunch programs, all started with difficult compromises enacted with bipartisan support. It is only in recent years that legislating has been turned into a team competition in which the aim is to deny the other party a win.
Democrats would also do well to consider other steps to end the destructive partisanship.
In the House, they could go back to apportioning seats on committees to reflect the same partisan ratio as the full House, as is still the custom in the Senate. Committee chairs and ranking members should be selected by committee members, rather than chosen by party leaders and caucuses, as a way of giving individual members more independent say in the committee agenda. And as was once the custom, the minority party should be allowed to offer at least one germane amendment to every bill during debate on the House floor.
In the Senate, Democrats should extend parliamentary courtesies and favors to Republicans who agree not to routinely filibuster every bill Democrats try to bring up, as has become the norm, while denying such courtesies and favors to Republicans who cling to their obstructionist ways. And when the GOP hard-liners try to filibuster legislation that has overwhelming public support — constitutional amendments to limit money in politics and prevent partisan gerrymandering would be a great place to start — Democrats could break out the cots, enthusiastically join the debate and keep the Senate in session day after day, week after week, until public opinion forces the opposition to relent. Win or lose, that’s the kind of political theater that will restore luster to the Democratic brand.
Democrats now have an opportunity to use their stunning victory to build a more durable majority. The best way to do that isn’t to give the political stiff arm to Republican members anxious to distance themselves from Trump and MAGA; it’s to reward them for participating constructively in a new bipartisan governing coalition.
Yes, in the short run that may improve the political prospects for those Republicans in the next election. But in the long run, such a divide-and-conquer strategy is the best way to convince millions of young, independent and disaffected Republican voters that Democrats are the natural governing party and draw them into an even bigger Democratic tent.
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