I have a recent post where I stated, without argument, that our current set of institutions, political and otherwise, is so badly broken that we need to come up with new ones. This article is one example of the sort of thing I have in mind: Brendan Buck, Is This Really How We’re Legislating Now? NYTimes, July 4, 2025:
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.
Committees and expertise:
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. Editors’ Picks Should I Be Worried About Arsenic in Rice? What Makes Someone Cool? A New Study Offers Clues. Can the ‘Princess Treatment’ Go Too Far?
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. [...]
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.
That's only one example.
* * * * *
And then there's this article over at 3 Quarks Daily: Bill Murray, Managers and Clowns, July 4, 2025. I won't attempt to excerpt the whole thing, but the first part is about NATO, and then comes America under Trump:
For a long time the United States held on to one huge advantage: since World War II it presented a template for how the world’s most successful prevailing models of both politics and economics could work in tandem. Now eighty years on, American Democracy just delivers volatility and gridlock, and American Capitalism has come to represent rent-seeking inequality.
•••••
Institutions once held weight and countries addressed each other through them. Now no country has a particular reason to aspire to former goals like transparency; the US doesn’t itself. So countries follow their own self interest and the world fumbles about.
What is NATO but a series of nerve-wracking meetings managed to assuage the erratic Americans? What is the G7 but a string of photo-ops with resort backdrops? What is Davos but grating opulence?
Nobody has confidence in any of it.
There's more at that link.
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