Chapter 10: Congress

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If you want to understand why a local ambulance in Oklahoma couldn't reach a dying man back in 2020, you actually shouldn't look at the local mayor.

Right.

You really need to look at a group of political lobbyists, you know, 1300 miles away in Washington, D .C.

It is a devastating real world scenario, and it really exposes the invisible threads connecting federal gridlock to our everyday lives.

Yeah.

I mean, in that specific case, Chad Bird's father, Gene, was suffering a heart attack at home.

First responders were dispatched, but they couldn't get to the house because a massive freight train was parked on the tracks.

Wow.

Just completely blocking the access road.

Exactly.

And the conductor refused to move the train even when a local police officer pleaded with him.

By the time those tracks were finally cleared, Gene had passed away.

Your immediate reaction when you hear something like that is probably, well, the town needs to pass a law, right?

You can't just block a public road for hours.

Sure.

And localities and states all over the country have actually tried to pass laws limiting how long trains can block crossings, but courts consistently throw those local laws out.

Because they rule that under the framework of American government, only the federal legislature has the authority to regulate interstate railroad operations.

Right, specifically the U .S.

Congress.

Which brings us to the paralysis at the federal level.

Congress hasn't set any hard limits on how long these trains can idle.

And every time lawmakers try to introduce a limit,

railroad industry lobbyists just fight the regulations.

Yeah, like during the negotiations for the 2021 infrastructure bill, there was a of American railroads argued it would cause severe network congestion.

So that provision was just stripped out of the final bill.

Entirely, yeah, it was gone.

So an action, or I guess in this case, a total lack of action in a building in Washington, D .C., literally determined the fate of a family in Oklahoma.

And that is a mission of our deep dive today.

We are pulling apart the central concepts of the American legislative system to understand why an institution designed to represent us is so often gridlocked.

Right, we're going to see how that machinery actually operates.

From how these representatives get their jobs, to how a bill survives the meat grinder, to why nothing seems to get done.

To understand the machine, you really have to look at the blueprint.

The framers of the Constitution designed Congress to be the most important representative institution in the country.

But they didn't want a single unified body that could be easily swayed by sudden public passions.

No, so they created a bicameral legislature, two separate chambers, the House of Representatives and the Senate, and they engineered them with entirely different structural rules.

Which balances different types of representation.

The way I've always conceptualized the difference is by looking at the business world.

Oh, that's a good way to frame it.

Yeah, so the House of Representatives operates kind of like a hyper responsive local startup.

You have 435 members.

They serve incredibly short two -year terms, and you only have to be 25 years old to run.

Which means they are tied to a very specific local constituency, meaning the actual residents in a relatively small geographic district.

Right, so they are highly attuned to immediate narrow interests.

If you represent a district in Iowa, your priority is corn subsidies.

If you represent a district in Michigan, you are hyper focused on the auto industry.

And that short timeline is the key mechanism.

I mean, imagine you are a House member.

The very second you take the oath of office, you are already campaigning for your next election.

You don't have the luxury of taking a long -term unpopular stance.

Exactly, because the voters can fire you in 24 months.

Now the Senate, by design, is insulated from that immediate panic.

It operates more like a slow, deliberate board of directors.

Right, there are only 100 members, two for every state.

They serve six -year terms, and the minimum age is 30.

And because a senator represents an entire state, their constituency is massive and diverse.

A senator from New York or Texas can't just tater to one single industry.

They have to balance millions of conflicting demands.

So because they have these fundamentally different time horizons and constituency sizes, it completely changes how they view the job of representation itself.

Yeah, if you are sitting in Congress, how do you decide to vote?

There are basically two distinct philosophies here, the delegate model and the trustee model.

Let's break as a direct voice box for the people back home.

They vote according to the express preferences of their constituency, regardless of their personal opinions.

But there is a mechanical flaw in this model, right?

Because most everyday citizens don't pay close attention to the daily minutia of federal policy.

Yeah, that's the issue.

So the delegate model often devolves into serving only a few very loud, very well -funded special interests who are actually paying attention.

Wait, if the delegate model is flawed because people aren't paying attention,

the trustee model feels almost arrogant.

How so?

Well, a trustee is empowered to make decisions based on what they personally think is best, using their own judgment.

But how can one person legitimately make decisions for me or act in my best interest if they share absolutely zero life experiences with me?

Right, if they don't know what it's like to pay your rent, how do they know what's best for your community?

Exactly.

That tension is exactly how political scientists measure representation.

They break it down into descriptive representation and substantive representation.

Okay, so descriptive representation is the idea that a representative should mirror the demographic traits of their constituents.

Right, race, gender, social class, occupational background.

The theory is that lived experience shapes policy priorities.

And substantive representation is the counterargument.

Yeah, that it doesn't matter what the politician looks like or where they come from, as long as they act in the constituents' best interests and are held accountable at the ballot box.

But if we look at the actual data and specifically the demographics of the 118th Congress, which took office in 2023,

that descriptive representation argument just completely falls apart.

The demographic mirror is completely shattered.

Yeah, women make up roughly 51 % of the U .S.

population.

Yeah.

But in that Congress, they only made up 25 % of the Senate and 29 % of the House.

And the occupational and age divides are even more severe.

I mean, over 50 % of U .S.

senators hold law degrees.

Wow.

Yeah, and in the general American public, lawyers make up about 0 .4 % of the population.

And while the median age in the U .S.

is just under 39 years old, the median age in the Senate is over 65.

Okay, I have to stop you there because the math isn't making sense.

Congress is overwhelmingly older, far more educated, and much wealthier than the general public.

True.

At the same time, we know that national approval ratings for Congress are historically terrible, often hovering around 15 % or 20%.

Yeah, people are not happy with the institution.

So if voters are so consistently frustrated and these politicians don't reflect the public how on earth are they winning reelection?

Who is voting for them?

It seems like a paradox, but it all comes down to the mechanical power of incumbency.

An incumbent is simply the person who already holds the political office, and they possess a staggering advantage.

Even with those low national approval ratings.

Even with them.

In most elections, roughly 90 % of House and Senate incumbents seeking reelection actually win it.

They win because they have access to taxpayer -funded tools that essentially stack the deck in their favor before a challenger even enters the race.

What are they actually doing with those tools?

They are building localized loyalty through casework and pork barrel legislation.

Okay, so casework is direct personalized constituency serving.

Exactly.

Members of Congress have large staffs dedicated purely to helping individuals in their district navigate the massive federal bureaucracy.

Like if your elderly parent's social security check is delayed.

Right, or you have a complicated immigration visa issue, you can call your representative's local office.

When that staffer intervenes and fixes your problem, you and your entire extended family are likely voting for that incumbent for life.

You might hate Congress, but you love your congressperson.

Precisely.

It's essentially a taxpayer -funded customer service operation that doubles as a PR machine.

And the pork barrel is the macro version of that,

securing federal appropriations like funding for local projects.

Yeah, a bridge, a highway expansion, a research grant for a local university.

The project might not be strictly necessary for the country, but it brings federal money and jobs into the district.

Which looks fantastic on a reelection flyer.

Right.

But you know, money and goodwill aren't always enough if the electoral map is drawn against you.

That is why the real battle for happens every 10 years through apportionment and redistricting.

Because after the decennial census counts the population, apportionment takes the fixed 435 house seats and reallocates them among the 50 states based on who gained or lost population.

Yes.

In the 2020 census, for example, a rapidly growing state like Texas gained two seats, which means other states had to lose them.

And once a state knows how many seats it gets, it has to physically draw the geographic borders for those districts.

That's redistricting.

And because state legislatures control this mapping process in most states, it is a ruthless, highly partisan blood sport.

It is the ultimate exercise in political survival.

State legislatures will meticulously draw the district lines to pack their opponent's voters into a few districts while spreading their own voters out just enough to guarantee safe majorities across the rest of the map.

Yeah, it sounds like serving a cherry pie.

Oh, the pie analogy.

I love this.

So if I'm cutting the pie and I want to make sure my friends get all the cherry filling and my rivals only get the crust, I'm not going to cut standard, even triangular slices.

Right.

You'd carve these weird winding snake -like slices that weave all over the pie pan just to scoop up the good stuff for your team.

Exactly.

That is gerrymandering.

You manipulate the electoral boundaries to give an unfair advantage to a political party or a specific racial group.

And for decades, the federal courts were deeply involved in policing how those slices were cut.

Under the Voting Rights Act of 1965, states and localities that had a documented history of racially biased election laws were required to get federal pre -clearance.

Which essentially means they needed a permission slip from the federal government before they could change any voting rules or redraw their district maps.

Right.

But in a pivotal 2013 Supreme Court decision, Shelby County v.

Holder, the court struck down that pre -clearance requirement, arguing the formula used to target those states was outdated.

And critics point out that the moment that federal oversight was removed, it opened the floodgates for a new wave of aggressive, racially motivated gerrymandering and restrictive voting laws.

Yeah.

So surviving this electoral gauntlet is brutal.

But once these politicians actually arrive in Washington, you have 535 highly competitive independent actors.

If everyone just started shouting their own ideas, it would be absolute chaos.

How do they actually organize to govern?

They rely on the architecture of the political party system.

It's fascinating because political parties are not mentioned anywhere in the Constitution, yet they are the fundamental organizing force of the institution.

The parties write the rules, they assign the offices, and they select the leaders.

Exactly.

In the House of Representatives, the Supreme Authority is the Speaker of the House.

They are the chief presiding officer and the majority party's top leader.

And they dictate the legislative agenda, meaning they decide which bills live and which bills die before they ever see the floor.

Yes.

Below the Speaker, you have the majority leader, the minority leader, and the whips.

I always thought whip was just a dramatic Washington title, but it's incredibly literal.

They are responsible for whipping the votes into shape.

Yeah, they poll the party members, find out who is wavering on a controversial bill, and apply pressure or offer deals to secure their vote before the role is ever called.

But even with strict leadership, you still have the problem of volume.

Congress has to filter thousands of complex policy ideas every year.

You cannot have 435 people debating agricultural subsidies and naval appropriations at the exact same time.

So they use a division of labor, the committee system.

So they break into smaller groups to build expertise.

Precisely.

There are standing committees, which are permanent and have the power to actually propose and write legislation.

The House Ways and Means Committee is arguably the most powerful, right?

They have jurisdiction over taxes, trade, and massive entitlement programs like Medicare.

Yep.

Then you have select committees, which are usually temporary, set up to investigate a specific event or crisis.

Like the select committee created in 2021, specifically to investigate the January 6 attack on the Capitol.

Exactly.

You also have joint committees, which include members from both the House and the Senate to coordinate policy,

and conference committees.

Conference committees are crucial because if the House passes one version of a bill and the Senate passes a slightly different version, a conference committee has to sit down and hammer out a single, unified compromise.

Right.

And most of the real grinding work happens in subcommittees during a process called markup.

This is where lawmakers literally go line by line with red pens, amending, debating, and rewriting the actual text of the legislation.

And historically, who got to hold the gavel and run these powerful committees was decided purely by seniority.

Whoever had been breathing the air in Washington the longest got the job.

But leadership realized that was a terrible way to enforce discipline.

So since the 1990s, party leaders have increasingly selected committee chairs based on their loyalty to the party's agenda and their ability to fundraise for other members.

But we are missing the most important part of this architecture, the invisible army.

Oh, yes.

Congress currently employs roughly 11 ,500 staffers.

That's incredible.

They're the ghost in the machine.

They really are.

The sheer complexity of modern policy means elected officials cannot possibly read every bill or understand every issue.

Those 11 ,500 staffers are the ones drafting the proposals, organizing the committee hearings, and taking the meetings with lobbyists.

So often when two senators are negotiating, it's actually their top staffers sitting in a room trading policy language.

Exactly.

So with this massive infrastructure, the parties, the committees, the thousands of staffers, how does a bill actually navigate the maze and become a law?

We have to draw a hard line between regular order and the modern reality, which political scientists call unorthodox lawmaking.

Right.

Regular order is the classic idealized version we all learned in civics class.

A member introduces a bill.

It goes to the assigned committee for debate and markup.

It comes to the floor for a public roll call vote where everyone's yes or no is recorded.

And if it passes, it has to the other chamber.

But the Senate has a trap door, the filibuster.

Yeah, because the Senate prides itself on unlimited debate, a single senator can hold the floor continuously to block a final vote on a bill.

And the only way to break a filibuster is through a mechanism called cloture, which requires 60 out of the 100 senators to agree to end debate.

Think about how difficult it is to find 60 votes in a fiercely polarized, evenly divided Senate.

It means that effectively almost every major piece of legislation now requires a super majority just to be voted on.

And if a bill somehow survives all of that, it goes to the president who can sign it into law, veto it, or use a pocket veto if Congress adjourns within 10 days.

But regular order is essentially dead.

Because of intense partisan division, leaders don't trust the committee process anymore.

They use unorthodox lawmaking to bypass the traditional choke points and consolidate their own power.

Right.

They use tactics like multiple referrals, taking a single complex bill, and sending different pieces of it to several committees at once.

It dilutes the power of any single committee chair to hold the bill hostage.

Or they use ping ponging, bouncing amendments back and forth between the House and Senate leadership to completely avoid the public scrutiny of a formal conference committee.

The ultimate weapon of unorthodox lawmaking is the omnibus appropriations bill.

Historically, Congress would pass 12 separate individual budget bills to fund different departments of the government.

Agriculture, defense, transportation.

Right.

Imagine packing for a trip and using 12 separate, neatly organized, clearly labeled suitcases.

If one suitcase gets lost, the others still arrive.

But an omnibus is the exact opposite.

Party leaders take every single government funding measure and stuff them all into one giant, bursting 4 ,000 page suitcase.

Yeah, they dump it on the floor and force a single massive up or down vote.

And they use it purely for leverage.

Because they negotiate these massive bills behind closed doors in the final hours before a funding deadline.

They do this intentionally to force -follow the leader voting.

In 2019, a breakdown in the regular budget process over defense appropriations led to a crippling 35 -day government shutdown.

Wow.

Yeah, and to avoid that kind of political disaster,

leaders use the omnibus so members are trapped.

You either vote yes on a bill you haven't had time to read, or you vote no and take the blame for shutting down the federal government.

It completely eliminates public deliberation.

So if the leaders are forcing these massive, unreadable bills onto the floor with zero debate, what actually goes through a representative's mind when they have to press the green yes button or the red no button?

What influences that decision?

There are immense external pressures.

First, as we discussed, is their constituency.

Every member operates with a persistent fear of the next election.

They know a controversial vote will be weaponized in a 30 -second attack ad in their district.

Second, you have the profound influence of interest groups and lobbyists.

And it isn't just about handing over campaign checks.

In 2022, five tech giants – Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, and Microsoft – spent nearly $69 million lobbying the federal government.

That is a staggering amount of money.

Yeah.

They were fighting to kill antitrust bills that threatened their incredibly lucrative app payment ecosystems.

And they won.

They blocked the antitrust bills and simultaneously secured government incentives for U .S.

computer chip production.

But how does that $69 million actually manifest in the building?

It buys the time and attention of that invisible army of staffers.

Lobbying firms hire former congressional staffers who know the system intimately.

They use that money to draft highly detailed white papers, provide alternative legislative language, and create comprehensive legislative scorecards.

They literally do the research homework for overworked congressional offices.

And those scorecards are public grades rating members on how often they align with the group's interests.

Right.

A failing grade from a powerful interest group signals donors to fund a primary challenger.

But the data shows that the most dominant influence on a vote today is party discipline.

We track this through something called a party unity vote.

A party unity vote happens when at least half of one party takes a position entirely opposing at least half of the other party.

Right.

In the 1970s, party unity votes were relatively low members crossed the aisle

But today it is skyrocketed.

In 2023, between 60 to 80 percent of all roll call votes were party unity votes.

The parties have sorted themselves into deeply polarized ideological camps on high stakes issues, health care, financial reform, immigration, abortion.

And crossing party lines is viewed as a betrayal.

And leadership punishes defectors by stripping them of committee assignments.

This fierce polarization has caused a catastrophic drop in legislative output.

Let's look at the numbers.

The 117th Congress managed to pass 362 bills.

But the 118th Congress, paralyzed by internal divisions and narrow majorities, passed only 78 pieces of legislation in its first session.

It's a huge drop.

Though to be fair to the institution, when the system faces an absolute existential crisis, it can still move with blinding speed.

Like in March 2020,

as the pandemic triggered a global financial collapse, Congress bypassed the gridlock and passed historic multi -trillion dollar relief packages almost immediately.

Right.

The gears can turn when the pressure is high enough.

But writing laws is only half of the constitutional design.

Congress is also built to act as the primary check against the power of the other branches.

Which is the mechanism of oversight and impeachment.

Yeah.

Oversight is the continuous process of holding hearings and launching investigations to ensure the executive branch, federal agencies, and even private entities are actually following the law and executing policy the way Congress intended.

To enforce this, committees wield the formidable threat of subpoenas to compel documents and the threat of perjury or contempt to compel truthful testimony.

And we see this oversight power used across the ideological spectrum.

The text points out a major example from 2023.

The House Education and Workforce Committee summoned the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and UPenn to testify regarding their university's responses to anti -Semitism on campus.

They were investigating whether they were violating the Civil Rights Act.

And the public scrutiny from that single hearing led directly to the resignation of two of those university presidents.

Another major example in the text was the intense, heavily partisan battle over the 2017 congressional investigations into whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russia.

Right, which ultimately led to the appointment of special counsel Robert Mueller.

And when oversight reveals severe misconduct, Congress possesses the ultimate constitutional emergency break the power of impeachment.

The Constitution grants Congress the authority to remove federal officials, including the president, for treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.

The mechanism is split between the two chambers.

The House of Representatives acts essentially as a grand jury.

They investigate the allegations and vote by a simple majority to formally charge or impeach the official.

And if the House votes to impeach, the official isn't removed yet.

The process moves to the Senate, which acts as the trial jury.

Yeah, the senators hear the evidence.

And it requires a supermajority two -thirds of the Senate to actually convict the official and remove them from office.

Looking at the historical record, it is a power that Congress has used very selectively.

Over the entire history of the United States, the House has initiated impeachment proceedings over 60 times.

But fewer than 20 officials have ever been formally impeached by the House.

And of those, only eight have ever been convicted and removed by the Senate.

All eight of those officials were federal judges.

The history of presidential impeachments really highlights how difficult that two -thirds threshold is to reach.

Donald Trump is the only president to be impeached twice.

In 2019, House Democrats impeached him on charges related to withholding military aid to Ukraine.

He was acquitted by the Senate in 2020.

Then, in 2021, he was impeached a second time on a charge of inciting an insurrection related to the January 6th Capitol attack.

And again, the Senate failed to reach the 67 votes required for a conviction, resulting in a second acquittal.

The central tension of impeachment lies in the constitutional text itself.

Because the phrase high crimes and misdemeanors is incredibly vague.

Exactly.

It isn't a strict criminal code.

It is an inherently subjective standard.

Therefore, impeachment is not a purely legal proceeding.

It is fundamentally a deeply political process.

An impeachable offense is basically whatever the majority of the House of Representatives considers it to be at any given moment in history.

Which perfectly encapsulates the reality of the United States Congress.

It is a highly structured, fiercely partisan, and profoundly consequential institution.

And bringing it all the way back to the Byrd family in Oklahoma, waiting for an ambulance that couldn't cross the tracks because of a regulatory vacuum in Washington,

it forces you to confront a profound question.

Yeah, if the current structural gridlock is actively hurting everyday Americans, what happens if we fundamentally rewrite the rules of the game?

What if we stripped the power of redistricting away from partisan politicians entirely and handed it over to independent citizen commissions to try and map out more moderate districts?

Or what if the Senate completely abolished the filibuster, allowing a simple majority to pass any law, immediately ending the legislative traffic jams?

Would changing those foundational rules finally save the institution of Congress?

Or would it break the machine entirely?

That is the ultimate test of the American experiment, and a question the next generation of voters will have to answer.

Something for you to mull over the next time you hear about a bill stalled in Washington.

We want to extend a warm thank you from the Last Minute Lecture team.