BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON  |  APR 18, 2024

This first appeared in Katie Couric Media

Congress is broken and needs to be fixed…but there is a path forward.

Do you believe the federal government ought to be active or passive, bigger or smaller, weak or strong, socialist or anarchist, isolationist or internationalist — or somewhere in between?

Don’t dwell on it too long. Your opinion doesn’t matter. You know why?

Because the vast majority of those options can’t be transformed into public policy when government can’t function; and more to the point, if Congress can’t legislate. Which is exactly what’s happening now.

Almost all changes in the way we are governed require congressional action. And when our representatives in Washington talk the talk but don’t walk the walk, we get what we’ve got now: a dysfunctional government and a political system that relegates citizens to the back bench where they can’t be heard over the din.

Congress is broken and needs to be fixed before the rest of government can function in the best interests of the country. But there is a path forward.

In the business of public affairs — in which I was engaged for years — the first step to bringing about major change is “conditioning the environment,” or creating an atmosphere in which change can occur. Think of it like pouring a foundation before building a house or clearing a field before planting a crop.

In this case, beginning the long road back to a functional, responsible, and trustworthy Congress requires five essential elements, all of which are discussed in detail in a new book I co-wrote called — what else — Fixing Congress: Restoring Power to the People. They are:

• Civics education
• Structural reform of congress
• Reducing the influence of outside interests
• Restoring of civility in our public discourse
• Citizen engagement

The first priority is education.

Young Americans are being taught less and less about how the Congress came to be, how it’s supposed to work, why it currently doesn’t, and how they can control more of their own destiny. Older Americans have simply fallen behind in their understanding of and competence in self-governance, for some because they simply don’t care anymore and others because governing has drifted so far from the way they experienced it, that they simply don’t recognize it anymore and feel alienated.

The evidence of that failure is laid out for all to see in studies and survey research that dates back decades. The most recent is the annual Annenberg Public Policy Center survey, conducted just before Constitution Day last September.

Annenberg found that one in six Americans adults could not name any of the three branches of the government. While 77 percent knew that the Constitution’s First Amendment protects freedom of speech, only 40 percent knew that the Amendment protects freedom of religion. Just 9 percent knew about the right to petition government for redress of grievances. Only five percent could even name all five basic freedoms the First Amendment protects.

There are now 11 states that don’t require civics education courses in their schools, and half of the states don’t require passing a civics course for graduation. Funding for civics and history instruction pales in comparison to that of science and math.

Actor Richard Dreyfus, a champion of civics education, said it well: “I want the people to remember that they are the sovereign power here…We’ve stopped teaching civics, and now we can’t have a civil political discussion. The American experiment may fail if we don’t act.”

Next we need to overhaul the institution of Congress.

The budget process doesn’t work and hasn’t for years. That hurts the economy, leaves administrative agencies with no long-term guidance, weakens national defense, and delays or prevents legislative action on a whole host of issues and programs. The Budget committees should only decide the broad categories of spending, income, and debt, and leave the specific cost of each program to the Appropriations Committees.

Too many pieces of legislation are lumped into one. More issues should be considered separately on their own merits. That means eliminating the countless logjams in the process.

The Legislative calendar should be changed so that legislators can spend one week a month at home with their constituents, and three consecutive weeks in Washington legislating the way things should be done. There should be more bipartisan interaction between the parties, between the House and the Senate, and between the Legislative and Executive branches. D

ecorum and regular order (aka following the rules) should be restored. It may be time to consider enlarging the House, so that each member represents fewer people, instead of the current number of about 760,000. I could go on and on.

There’s too much theater in media today, and too little substance.

The third element that needs restructuring is the access and influence of outside institutions. Topping the list are the media, the political campaign system, partisan political parties and professional lobbying. Each of them has an important function in the conduct of governmental affairs. Two — media and lobbying — have protections under the First Amendment. But each has also managed to carve out for themselves an outsized piece of the pie, leaving only crumbs for the general public.

Media has transformed from its primary role of informing, to their now-preferred role of influencing: not just telling you what’s going on in your world, but what you should think about it. There’s too much theater in media today, and too little substance.

Elective politics are also out of whack.

I don’t want to sound like the ghost of Congress past, but when I was on the Hill, there was a campaign season and a governing season, a time to legislate and a time to pontificate. The late House Republican Leader Bob Michel lamented in an op-ed piece years ago that one of the critical problems with our political system is that campaigns never end. It used to be that politicians would campaign for office, but once elected, close their campaign offices and turn to the work of governing, making a distinction between the partisanship of the campaign and the politics of governing the country. No more.

There’s too much money involved in full-time campaigning, and campaign contributions should be more transparent. Non-traceable dark money distorts the campaign finance system. If you can’t follow the money, why follow the candidate? Candidates should get their contributions from the people who reside in the state or district they represent.

A related problem is the overwhelming influence of political parties, not only on the campaign infrastructure whereby the political parties decide who’s running before voters get to decide. We’re heading into a presidential election in which some voters don’t really like either major candidate. How is that possible in a nation of more than 300 million people?

Former Congressman Mickey Edwards discussed the dominance of parties in government in his book, The Parties Versus the People, concluding that we’ve wandered way too far away from what the Founding Fathers intended for our Republic — government largely free of political party influence.

“It takes no genius to understand why things are the way they are,” Edwards wrote. “We have created a political system that rewards intransigence. Democracy requires divergence and honors dissent, but what we have today is not mere divergence, and does not deserve the label “dissent”, it’s a nasty battle of dominance, and it’s often the dominance not of an idea or a great principle, but a private club (political party) that demands undeviating fealty.” He said that the “…stranglehold of parties on the political process must be ended.”

That burst of wisdom was written 12 years ago.

Lobbyists exercise an excessive amount of influence, largely because of their ability to give and raise large amounts of money for candidates for Congress. Many organizations that lobby Congress can also pour money into the influence infrastructure, from conducting slanted polling to advertising and deploying hired guns into the fray.

Our public discourse is in shambles.

Underlying much of what stifles governing is incivility, not just in politics, but in society in general. It was astonishing for me when columnists and commentators began offering advice to families on how to speak civilly at their Thanksgiving dinner table. The frustrations are so pervasive among Americans that they’ve become destructive to our ability to govern. It has got to stop. We all have opinions, and we all disagree. But we can find common ground in our beliefs.

In a home, when the atmosphere gets stuffy, we open a window and take a deep breath of fresh air. Similarly, when conversations get stifling, we should open our minds and take a fresh look at what we hear, see, and feel, making judgments with reason over emotion. We must give the benefit of the doubt to each other’s motivations. If frustration is not checked, it inevitably leads to anger and even hatred. Trust is lost and without trust in a republic, effective governing is impossible.

There’s a chronic need for constructive citizen engagement…

Particularly in the community, where neighbor can talk to neighbor and find mutual understanding around which they can organize and flex their political muscle with their local, state, or federal elected representatives. If citizens are better schooled in how to organize, how to contact their representatives and get results, how to make their opinions known and felt publicly through media platforms, and how to combat the negative forces influencing Congress, good things can happen. Change isn’t possible in this day and age without a citizenry willing to do more than vote — but also to fulfill their responsibilities and exercise the inherent power in the office that Thomas Jefferson said was of greater importance than all others: that of citizen.

Read Fixing Congress: Restoring Power to the People

Editor’s Note: Mike Johnson is a former journalist, who worked on the Ford White House staff and served as press secretary and chief of staff to House Republican Leader Bob Michel, prior to entering the private sector. He is co-author of a book, Surviving Congress, a guide for congressional staff, co-founder and member of the Board of the Congressional Institute, and a participant in the Congress of Tomorrow congressional reform project. Johnson is retired. He is married to Thalia Assuras and has five children and four grandchildren.