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Think about this. In 1948, Harry Truman ran for president against what he called the Do Nothing Congress. His case was that they'd only passed 906 laws. These days, in a good year, Lawmakers pass around 250. Congress is the first branch of government. It's Article 1 of the Constitution. It comes before the presidency and before the courts. It was given more power than any other branch of government, and lately it seems like it's unable to use it. Today on the show, with Congress's approval rating hovering as low as 10% and a president signing executive orders at a pace not seen Since World War II and the years right after, will ask what's up with Congress? Can a system built to move slowly survive a world that is very much in a hurry? I'm Soni Kassam, and this is 1440 explores a show where we dive into the things everyone hears about but nobody fully understands. Stay with us. On March 27, 1976, a three minute cartoon aired on ABC between Saturday morning shows. Its main character was a piece of paper for millions of American children. It became an unforgettable civics lesson.
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B
I'm just a bill, yes, I'm only a bill and I'm sitting here on Capitol Hill.
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Well, it's one of those kids. Now an adult still remembers the first shot with the sad protagonist.
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The poor little bill comes up and is trying to find its way through the legislative process. As I recollected, it was, you know, that there should be school buses that stop at railroad tracks.
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That kid is Craig Bolden, now a professor at the University of Virginia and one of the country's leading experts on how Congress actually works. And he remembers it pretty perfectly. A little bill is sitting on the steps of the Capitol trying to become a law, just trying to get someone to listen. The cartoon then transitions to a wide shot of Congress emerging from green fields, as if Congress sat not in a modern city, but somewhere out in the countryside, a little like it did in the 1800s when the actual Capitol dome was still going up. It's a simpler picture than the reality of today, but it's a useful one because the cartoon captures something true about what the framers actually intended.
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C
Congress as it was first set up was meant to be as was the federal government on the whole, meant to be pretty small and not get involved in too many policy areas and not constrain the actions of citizens, of businesses and so on.
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The framers had just fought a revolution against a king, and concentrated power was what they feared most. So when they drafted Article 1 of the Constitution, the one about Congress. They baked in some friction. First of all, there are two houses with competing roles, as opposed to just one. The House of representatives with 435 members, each member representing more than 750,000 people. Representatives are elected every two years, so they're basically running for office all the time. Then there's the Senate with just 100 members, two senators per state. Whether that state has 600,000 people or 40 million, these people are elected every six years. So they can actually unpack their things and settle in before having to run again. Unlike the House of Representatives, the framers granted Congress specific powers. These were big things like declare war and control the money. Not a dollar gets spent by the federal government without Congress saying so. The idea was to make Congress act on just a handful of things so that when it did, its words carried a lot of weight. Okay, let's get back to the cartoon. The camera pans indoors to a congressman's office. It's 1976, so there's a typewriter, a landline, a tree stocked with mail, and a nameplate on the desk with his name.
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Representative McCoy introduces that bill. That's interesting in that any representative can introduce a bill, right? We don't necessarily have that around the world. Some legislative bodies, the proposals come from the executive, from the prime minister, from the cabinet, and here they come from individual representatives. And so that's intriguing as a process.
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In many parliamentary systems, including the UK and Germany, most legislation is introduced by the government and its governing majority. But in the United States, any member of Congress, any One of the 535 senators and representatives can introduce a bill. No approval from party leaders or the white house required. 50 years after that cartoon aired, that's still true. So the bill has been introduced. What happens next?
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Then it goes to the floor of the House where it's discussed, maybe possibility of amendment makes it through that, and then it goes over to the Senate
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to pass anything you need. Both houses. That's the friction and the slowness the framers wanted to avoid and impulsive decisions.
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Now I go to the House of Representatives and they vote on me. If they vote yes, what happens? Then I go to the Senate and the whole thing starts all over again. Oh, no. Oh, yes, I'm just a bill. Yes, I'm only a bill.
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So that's the journey as the Constitution's framers drew it up. Any representative can introduce a bill. One House adopts it, then the other does the same. Then it goes to the President's Desk. And that's how it all works today, right? The most important concern of the nation, getting the prompt attention from Congress. Diverse representatives finding smart compromises that last a generation, right? Not quite. A new Gallup poll shows confidence in
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Congress is at a all time low. Lawmakers get only 10% approval.
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An associated GfK poll found that only 13% of Americans are approve of Congress. Turn on any channel, any radio, any podcast and you're likely to hear the same thing. Hyper partisanship gridlock. A political system struggling to find consensus. So what happened between the lawmaking of I'm Just a Bill and the dysfunction of the present moment? The answer can be found in a handful of forces that slowly and then all at once changed everything. That's coming up after the break. Congress was never meant to do everything. It was framed as a limited body. But that changed. It began to stretch. And most of the stretching is due to two discrete moments. The first came in 1913.
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I like to trace a lot of that to the 16th amendment of the Constitution, giving the power of the federal government to raise income taxes.
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And it came, of all things, because Americans wanted to tax the rich. The Gilded Age had minted some of the greatest private fortunes in history. Rockefeller, Carnegie, J.P. morgan and a growing movement wanted the federal government to be able to tax that wealth directly. The result was the 16th amendment giving Congress the power to levy a federal income tax for the first time.
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Before that power, the size of the federal government as spending relative to the size of the overall economy relative to GDP was at a couple to 3%. And after the 16th amendment, we've been spending at 20 to 25% of GDP. So just a sea change.
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All of a sudden, Congress was wading into national decisions that affected every industry in America. Tax rates, infrastructure, spending, decisions worth billions of dollars to those firms on the receiving end. When the federal government was small, corporations could afford to ignore Washington. But when it started controlling a quarter of the entire economy, they couldn't. And so ironically, the same corporations that the 16th Amendment was meant to tax figured out that it was cheaper to influence Congress than to simply pay it. That was the first expansion of Congress's role. The second came 50 years later and went much further.
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C
We did in the 1960s and 1970s have what some political scientists have referred to as the great broadening Congress and the President taking on a wider swath of issues than they had ever taken on before. Civil rights, voting rights, which had been left to states before that.
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It is wrong, deadly wrong, to deny any of your fellow Americans the right to vote in this country.
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Under Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson, the federal government launched the most ambitious domestic program since the New Deal. Medicare, Medicaid, federal funding for public schools, the Civil Rights act, the Voting Rights Act. And then under Republican President Richard Nixon, it kept going. The epa, osha, the Clean Air Act. Whatever your politics, the effect was the same. The federal government was now in your doctor's office, your children's classroom, your workplace, your air and water, which meant your congressperson was, too. And when your congressperson's decisions touch every corner of your life, you start paying much closer attention to who they are, and so does everyone else. Being a member of Congress stopped being a civic duty you did for a term or two and went home from it became a career worth protecting. In the early days of Congress, roughly 40% of members didn't seek reelection. Today, nearly 90% do.
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Between the 1960s and the 1990s, we've seen a dramatic change along the nature of campaigns. What does it take to be reelected? And potentially the need to fundraise around that.
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In 1976, the same year I'm Just a Bill aired.
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Oh, yeah.
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The average winning House candidate spent $87,000 on their campaign. That's roughly half a million in today's dollars. Still a lot of money, but today that number is closer to $2.5 million, five times more, even accounting for inflation. For the Senate, the average winning campaign now costs over $26 million. And that changes the questions lawmakers are asking themselves.
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Are we catering to our constituents, our fundraisers? Are we focused on raising, that the other side is evil and you should fear all these things that they're doing? Well, that certainly helps raise money, but it doesn't give people a very positive view of Congress.
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And it changes something else, too. Something less obvious, but just as corrosive. It used to be that members of Congress actually lived in D.C. if you're
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there for more than three days, you might actually socialize with other people and live nearby them. Maybe your family would live there. I mean, so classically, this is how Congress worked. They would get to know each other very well and would build those relationships that go beyond just, you know, what are the party leaders telling us or what are our constituents going to yell at us about?
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Today, members fly in Tuesday, vote, and then fly home Thursday, back in the district, back on the phones, raising money, which means two things. They don't have time to actually study the problems they're supposed to be solving, and they don't know the people they're supposed to be negotiating with. So to recap, Congress expanded, and with that expansion, Americans expect more from it. But that same expansion attracted money. And money, it turns out, is the enemy of compromise, because outrage raises more than cooperation ever will. And an outraged voter, it turns out, is a reliable one, which leaves Congress unable to do the one thing it was built to do.
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And without a doubt, people are disappointed with Congress. Right? So if you look at any polls you're seeing, you know, they're less popular than almost any other institution out there, you know, sitting in the teens. Usually, if you were to talk about numbers, you would see that the number of bills that become law in Congress today is smaller than the number of bills that became law, you know, in the 1970s.
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Smaller is an understatement. In the 1970s, Congress routinely passed more than 700 laws per two year session. The most recent, Congress passed 274. As we mentioned, Harry Truman ran against the do Nothing Congress of 1947. That Congress passed 906 laws, more than three times what Congress does today. But here's where Craig Volden brings a measured view to the picture. Congress, he says, hasn't stopped working entirely. It's actually found two workarounds. The first, a good old fashioned crisis.
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Now to growing concerns about the deadly coronavirus officially hitting the US President Biden's historic $1.9 trillion Covid relief bill has passed the House and now heads to the President's desk to be signed on Friday.
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Congress does act when the building is on fire. We saw it during COVID when trillions of dollars were mobilized in weeks. We've seen it on the debt ceiling, on emergency disaster funding and Ukraine aid. When the stakes are high enough and the deadline is real enough, Congress can still move. The problem is you can't run a country purely from crisis to crisis. Governing by emergency means, you never get ahead of anything. You just keep reacting. So this isn't a particularly sustainable way of doing things long term. The second workaround is a little quieter and possibly sneakier. And to understand it, Craig says, we need to look at a law making quirk.
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There are some kind of must pass pieces of legislation more or less every year we have to pass a budget. Our defense policy requires the National Defense Authorization act pass every year. Every five years or so there's a big farm bill. And so we say, hey, you know, let's just attach that to the budget bill. We know that's going to act, you know, going to move anyway. We won't spend a lot of our time on it. We won't waste committee time, we won't waste floor time.
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The second workaround makes use of the omnibus, a giant bill which is often thousands of pages long, and then pushes dozens or even hundreds of smaller bills quietly inside of it. The whole thing is passed in a single vote, often hours after members receive it. To be fair, bundling bills together isn't new. Congress first experimented with it back in 1950 as a one off workaround. But what's new is the intensity of it. In 12 of the past 15 fiscal years, all regular appropriation bills were combined into after deadline package deals. The 2022 omnibus ran more than 2,700 pages long, and members were given hours to read it before voting. And here's something the omnibus also does that most people don't realize. In the Senate, any single senator can talk indefinitely to block a vote. It's called a filibuster, and stopping them requires 60 senators to agree. Some budget related laws, like reconciliation bills, can bypass that rule altogether. So tucking your proposal into an omnibus doesn't just save time, it skips the very process designed to force compromise. Which is exactly the problem. And here's why that's bad and what legislators miss when they rely on that approach.
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They didn't do what Congress does in many ways best, which is take the sharp edges of a bunch of proposals by one party and smooth them down because the other party has to agree to this as well and come up with something that's broadly agreeable that can last a long time.
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When you skip that process, when you bundle and rush and attach, you lose the thing that made the legislation worth passing in the first place, the buy in from both sides that makes the law stick. And this isn't just academic. This has pretty real consequences.
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If we look at the early Biden administration, we saw that they passed the Inflation Reduction act that had a lot of climate policy or green energy policy attached to it. One way to view that is they took advantage of having their majorities and these budget reconciliation rules to address a major issue. But they did it with only Democratic votes.
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And the moment Trump came back in, those policies were gone, because laws built on workarounds don't last. And a Congress that can only govern through crisis and omnibus packages is a Congress that has quietly stopped doing its actual job. If you start to pull that thread, you start seeing something else. More and more, the ground that Congress yields gets filled by different actors.
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There's this balancing act throughout of what's done by government and what's done by the free market. And if Congress doesn't step up, that leaves more to the free market. And so maybe we'll have some economic inequality, maybe we'll have some market failures, but at the same time, we'll have a very robust, thriving economy.
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If Congress steps back, private industry tends to step in. On one hand, think of the Internet, built out almost entirely by private industry, which ended up connecting 250ish million Americans. On the other hand, think of drug prices, which left to the same market, became among the highest in the world. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it leaves people behind. But Craig says there's also another player eager to fill the vacuum.
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That's where the President will step in.
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And step in he has. President Joe Biden averaged around 40 executive orders a year. President Donald Trump, in the first year of his second term alone signed 225, a pace not seen since President Franklin Roosevelt was fighting the Great Depression and a world war at the same time. But executive orders also carry a fundamental flaw. They represent one person's decision, not a coalition's. So as with the omnibus bill, there's no buy in from the other side, and they last exactly as long as the President who signed them. Climate policy. In, then out, in, then out. Trade tariffs flipped overnight. You get the idea. And perhaps it's fitting that today we don't have to imagine what a new I'm just a bill would look like in the 2020s. There is a version. Well, sort of. We're back at the Capitol steps with the familiar little bill, only this time it's Saturday Night Live on NBC. The original bill gets kicked down the steps, and from stage left enters a bizarro twin, shifty, smoking a cigarette.
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I'm an executive order, and I pretty much just happen.
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Wait a second. Don't you have to go through Congress at some point? Aw, that's adorable. You still think that's how government works.
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All pretty grim. But I will say this. Before we wrapped up, Craig left me with some partial reasons for hope. Of all places, from deep inside those omnibus bills. Turns out Craig and his team have spent years doing what few do actually reading them. And I mean all of them. Thousands of pages of bundled legislation tracking which bills make it in and who put them there. And when they dug into the guts of these Frankenstein laws, they found something.
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What we found is there's a lot of what we still like about Congress in them, or could like about Congress, since nobody likes Congress. And that is, we find that on average, the bills that become law as part of these bigger packages they tend to be put forward more by moderates than by extremists. So it's not just extremists trying to sneak in their proposal on, you know, some highly liberal policy or some highly conservative policy through something big. In fact, when they're bundling these together, party leaders are trying to be very careful that they don't put in any poison pill. They want this bill to pass.
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It's not like a massive sigh of relief, but it is something, because what Craig is describing is the original logic of Congress, a group of people finding unglamorous common ground. And that is still quietly at work. Maybe not in the way we'd hope. And yes, buried on page 4000 of a bill and nobody read, but still there, the kernel of the democratic progress process. Buried but not dead. Waiting for the next group of kids watching cartoons to be inspired.
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He signed your bill, now you're a law. Oh, yes.
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Many thanks to Professor Craig Volden for joining us in this episode and thanks to all of you for listening to 41440 explores. I'm Sony Kassam. If you enjoyed this episode and would like to help the show grow, please give us a five star rating and drop a comment on Apple, Spotify or wherever you listen. That's the best way to support us. 1440 explores is a production of Rhyme Media for 1440 Media. This episode was produced by Nicolo Minoni and edited by Dan Bobkoff. Our fact checker is Alice Jones and our sound designer is Jay Cowett. The executive producer at Rhyme is Dan Bobkoff and the executive producers at Fortune 40 are me and Drew Steigerwald.