The promise our next Speaker will make — and break
We don’t know which party will win the majority in tomorrow’s midterms, and so we don’t know who will take the Speaker’s gavel from the retiring Paul Ryan. But, here’s… Read More
Book review: Unelected Power: The Quest for Legitimacy in Central Banking and the Regulatory State
Sir Paul Tucker is an unusual type. He is a consummate bureaucratic insider—a 30-year veteran of the Bank of England and now the chair of a group of ex-central bankers… Read More
Congress: Difficult by design
Daniel Patrick Moynihan once remarked that “the United States is the one nation in the world with a real legislature.” The senator from New York was boasting of our system, but… Read More
Polarization is an output of our process, not the cause of all our woes
Our recent piece, “Congress is Broken. But don’t blame polarization,” provoked a number of useful discussions about how political scientists should interpret the results of empirical models like DW-NOMINATE. Read More
LegBranch Conversations: An interview with David Schoenbrod
David Schoenbrod is the Trustee Professor of Law at New York Law School. Over the course of his career, he has been a leading practitioner and scholar of environmental… Read More
When Congress won the American people’s respect: Watergate
Those of us who make our livings trying to improve the state of American politics must constantly strike a balance between realism and hopefulness. There are a lot of… Read More
Building Article I Conservatism
By Philip Wallach The Federalist Society has been famously influential in shaping conservatives’ constitutional vision since its founding in 1982. Its promotion of original-meaning originalism and the concept of… Read More
How intraparty organizations reshape Congress. A review of Building the Bloc: Intraparty Organization in the U.S. Congress, by Ruth Bloch Rubin (Cambridge University Press, 2017)
How can one legislator in 435, or even in 100, change the way things are done in his or her chamber? Putting aside the highly unusual cases where… Read More
What would heal Congress?
Congress as an institution faces a critical juncture. Continuing on its current path will make it an extraneous appendage, whose presence is tolerated only grudgingly, as a nod to… Read More
Ten ways to unsuck Congress
“This place sucks.” Sen. Joe Manchin’s candid commentary came during discussions with Democratic leadership about whether the West Virginia senator would run for reelection. Manchin’s remarks were less a… Read More