The beginning of the 117th Congress has been anything but typical. But one thing about this Congress probably won’t be much different from the last one and nearly every session for the past few decades: Our nation’s representatives are unlikely to tackle many of the nation’s pressing problems. By many
Something surprising happened on the floor of the House this week. Representative Don Young, a Republican from Alaska, was supposed to rise and swear in Nancy Pelosi to be leader of the chamber, and then sit down. Instead, the longest serving member of the House chose another course of action.
Fifty years ago, Edward C. Banfield published The Unheavenly City: The Nature and Future of Our Urban Crisis at a time much like our own, with poverty, crime, and racial unrest seemingly ascendant. It was also a time in which both Left and Right engaged in a great deal of hyperbolic commentary
For the past 15 years, public disapproval of the performance of Congress has averaged around 70 percent. Typically, when people look at Washington, as former Speaker Paul Ryan once observed, “It looks like chaos” — not leadership or governance, regardless of which party is in control. What’s wrong with Congress?
AEI and I launched a new podcast: Understanding Congress. It features short discussions explaining how the First Branch works—and doesn’t. Check it out at https://www.aei.org/tag/understanding-congress-podcast/.
Something remarkable happened this spring—Congress’s public approval rose to 31 percent. If that sounds like little to celebrate, bear in mind that the percentage of Americans who are happy with Congress had not been that high since August of 2009…. (Read more)