According to Gallup, only 7 percent of Americans approve of Congress. An old John McCain quip was “Who the hell are those 7 percent? Family? Friends?” The finicky institution that it is, Congress was designed that way. The founders built the institution like a nuclear reactor, a safe place to contain all the power and passion and factionalism of American politics and channel all those unstable little isotopes into a coherent energy. And while the news media can make it sound like Congressional dysfunction was invented yesterday, chaos and gridlock have always been the standard, not the exception.

So there is a proper ontological debate to be had here. Is the purpose of Congress to pass good laws? Or is it to stop bad laws? Is the congressional chaos we see today just a feature of the institution? Or is it something worse? Has the institution slipped into an inertia from which the country cannot recover? Or is it merely functioning as designed?

The answer is as frustrating as the institution. It’s a bit of both.

As politics become more central to people’s lives, the control rods that the Founders engineered to moderate the nuclear passions of factionalism are more important than ever. Those include the Senate’s role as the “saucer that cools the hot tea” of the House and a judicial branch of government that is independent and coequal to the executive and the Congress.

But as an institution, Congress has slipped into some bad habits. The worse of which is the careless jettisoning of what old graybeard institutionalists call “regular order.” At the risk of sounding like a repetitive episode of Schoolhouse Rock, regular order means that committees elevate legislation to the respective floors of the House and Senate, there is a well-ordered amendment process that ensures germane measures can be considered, and then the bill is granted an up or down vote. That’s how the House and Senate rolled for most of the 20th century. It was a good way to run a railroad.

Today, Congress marches to the tune not of the committees and its once powerful committee chairmen who acted as the House and Senate’s princes and chieftains but the four key members of congressional leadership. That is the Speaker of the House, the House Minority Leader, and the Senate’s Majority and Minority leaders. With some exceptions, those four drop the beat to which the rest of the Congress dances.

So rather than having a dozen or so committee bills that pass in such a punctual and predictable manner that staffers could set their watches to the process, Congress has instead birthed Frankenstein bills which, like the monster, are massive, cumbersome creations cobbled together from the bits and parts of smaller bills. The “Big Four” in the House and Senate call most of the shots when it comes to working all the procedural gears and pulleys and levers in these massive packages. The two most prominent of the powerhouse bills, outside a black swan emergency spending bills as we saw during Covid-19, are the now annual omnibus and always annual defense bills.

The defense bill, being considered in the Senate this week, invites particular scrutiny. Because the defense bill is the only train that still runs on time, it has passed without fail for six decades; Congressmen and Senators rush to pile an eclectic menagerie of amendments onto the underlying legislation. It invokes a wonderful, if not maddening, old clip from the Simpsons. With a meteor looming down on the town of Springfield, Congress is seen debating emergency funds to evacuate the city. With unanimous agreement and the gavel about to fall, a Congressman interjects with a motion to appropriate $30 million of taxpayer money for “the perverted arts.” The bill fails.

Good for a laugh and a bit of an exaggeration, but not too far from the truth. The defense bill is peppered every year with everything from amendments to protect endangered species to an unusual amendment on credit card fees in this year’s Senate bill, to the usual green energy smorgasbord that has become routine over the past two decades. While there are some reasonable guardrails on the amendment process to keep the defense bill safe, the downsides of having only 1-2 legislative packages pass per year are glaring. For one, the loss of regular order is a recipe for dreaded Continuing Resolutions (the rough equivalent of taking taxpayer money by the shovelful and tossing it into a furnace). It further sidelines other committee chairmen and creates animosity towards the bill from members who have their amendments rejected.

George Will said that Congressional gridlock is not an American problem but an American achievement. That is true, within reason. Some bills have to pass, and the defense bill is one of them. Institutions work best when they stick to their knitting. The defense bill is what we called in the nuclear weapons business a “no-fail mission,” but if this consistent bombardment of legislative oddities persists, the process will reach a point where it breaks beyond repair.