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Congress wasn’t designed to work this way
Story by Dennis Lennox, Washington Examiner

Washington dysfunction is usually explained as a failure of people. The wrong politicians. Too partisan. Too extreme. Too unwilling to compromise.

That’s comforting. But it’s also wrong. The deeper problem is structural. Congress isn’t just failing because of who is elected. It is failing because the institution itself has evolved into something the framers of the Constitution never envisioned: two competing democratically elected chambers locked in a system where virtually nothing gets done. Start with the Senate. The framers did not design it to be democratic in the modern sense. Senators were originally chosen by state legislatures. The Senate was meant to represent states as political entities, not to represent the people directly. That distinction mattered. It created a natural hierarchy. The House reflected public opinion. The Senate refined and restrained it.

That system is gone. Since the ratification of the 17th Amendment, senators have been directly elected by voters. In theory, that made the system more democratic. In practice, it created a second House of Representatives with longer terms and statewide constituencies.
Now, both chambers claim democratic legitimacy. Both can say they speak for the people. And neither has any reason to defer to the other in ordinary lawmaking. That alone would create friction. But layered on top of this is a Senate rule that has quietly transformed from a rarely used tool into a routine veto: the filibuster.

Most legislation effectively requires 60 votes to pass the Senate. Not because the Constitution says so, but because the mere threat of a filibuster allows a minority to block action. Even bills that formed key parts of the majority party’s platform can be stopped.

This is not some ancient tradition. It dates only to 1975, when the Senate lowered the threshold for ending a filibuster from two-thirds (67) to three-fifths (60). The result is paralysis.

Today, neither Democrats nor Republicans has any realistic path to a 60-seat majority. Not only is the country, relatively speaking, evenly divided, but too many states have uncompetitive political landscapes.

The numbers show just how unrealistic the 60-vote expectation has become. Since the turn of the millennium, a Senate majority has exceeded 55 seats only twice: during the 109th Congress from 2005 to 2007, when Republicans held 55 seats, and briefly during the 111th Congress in 2009 and 2010, when Democrats reached 60 seats before that margin quickly disappeared after Scott Brown won a special election in Massachusetts.

As a result, Congress has operated in permanent gridlock. Even relatively noncontroversial legislation stalls. Not because a majority opposes it, but because a minority has the power to stop it and every incentive to do so.

This is not how a functioning legislative body is supposed to work. It also helps explain why power has steadily shifted away from Congress. Presidents of both parties increasingly govern through executive orders and administrative action. Courts are asked to resolve policy questions that legislators cannot. Voters, frustrated by inaction, grow more cynical with each passing year. And yet Washington keeps treating this as a messaging problem rather than a design flaw.

More bipartisanship is not a serious answer. Better candidates will not fix a structure that pits two equally legitimate chambers against each other while empowering a minority veto in one of them.

At some point, it is worth asking a more uncomfortable question: Is this version of Congress capable of functioning at all?

The framers designed a system with checks and balances, not one with built-in stalemate. They expected disagreement. They did not expect a permanent inability to act.

What we have today is something different. It is a Congress caught between its original design and more than a century of structural changes, operating under rules that make governing the exception rather than the rule.

Until that reality is acknowledged, the dysfunction will continue. Not because Washington cannot agree, but because increasingly, it is not allowed to.


Link: Filibuster