The 119th Congress has passed fewer bills than almost any Congress in modern history, handed a sitting president the power to start wars and set tariffs without them, and can't quite figure out whose fault that is. Experts who study this stuff for a living are using words like 'broken,' 'marginalized,' and 'atrophied' — and that's the polite version. Will Rogers said every time Congress makes a law it's a joke. These days they're barely making laws.
The Numbers Are Bad, and Everyone Knows It
Nearly nine in ten Americans say they're unhappy with Congress, according to CBS News. That's not a polling quirk. That's a national consensus. The only thing Americans agree on more is that pizza is food.
The 119th Congress has passed fewer bills than most of its predecessors, CBS News reports. What it has managed to produce includes a GOP mega-bill that cuts taxes by $4.5 trillion over ten years, a bipartisan housing bill, and a partial government shutdown over homeland security funding. So: a massive giveaway to the wealthy, one small win, and a self-inflicted crisis. Good session, guys.
Carl Hulse, the chief Washington correspondent for The New York Times and a man who has covered Capitol Hill since the Reagan administration, told CBS News flat out: 'Oh yes, totally' broken. He added, with the weary specificity of someone who has watched this slow-motion collapse for four decades, 'I've spent my career covering the decline of Congress.' That sentence should be carved into marble somewhere.
They Had the Power. They Gave It Away.
Here is the thing that should make your blood pressure spike. Congress is not actually supposed to be this weak. Article I of the Constitution gives Congress the power of the purse, the power to declare war, and authority over trade. These are not suggestions. They are enumerated powers written into the founding document of the United States.
And Congress has handed them to the executive branch like a Golden Retriever dropping a ball at someone's feet. President Trump has issued over 260 executive orders in his current term, CBS News reports. He has bypassed Congress on trade, bypassed them on the war with Iran, and is currently pressuring them to overhaul federal voting rules. Congress is watching all of this from the sidelines and arguing about whose fault it is.
Hulse put it plainly to CBS News: 'I think what's happened with the Republicans in this Congress, and ceding power to the administration, has been a real mistake on a lot of fronts — tariffs, war powers, the things that are actually enumerated in the Constitution. They're giving away the store. And once you give away some power, you never get it back.' He's right. And the Democrats who think they'll claw it back the next time they hold the White House are kidding themselves.
The Experts Are Not Being Polite About It
Sarah Binder, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told CBS News that Congress is both 'broken' and 'diminished.' Philip Wallach, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, went with 'marginalized.' These are think-tank scholars, trained to speak in measured, careful language. When people like this start reaching for words like 'broken,' something has genuinely gone sideways.
Binder's diagnosis is particularly grim. She told CBS News the institutional 'muscle memory' for legislating, deal-making, and problem-solving has 'really atrophied.' The muscles exist in theory. They just haven't been used. It's like finding out your fire department has perfectly functional hoses but has decided arson is an executive branch issue.
Wallach identified something even more corrosive: members of Congress no longer see their job as solving problems. 'What we've lost,' he told CBS News, 'is the sense that I'm sent here to solve the problems of the American people.' Instead, lawmakers see their function as either defending the White House when their party holds it or fighting against it when the other party does. They're fans in a sport they're supposed to be playing.
The Finger-Pointing Is Truly World-Class
Asked who is responsible for Congress being a catastrophic mess, members of Congress have a ready answer: the other guys. Senator Peter Welch of Vermont told CBS News, 'The Republicans don't control the House; the place is chaos.' Senator Katie Britt of Alabama responded that 'Democrats have chosen to play politics and put that over people time and time again.' Senator Chris Coons of Delaware said Trump is 'fighting against his own Congress.'
Three different diagnoses. Zero self-reflection. Not one of these people said, 'Actually, I have been pretty useless and I should do more.' They are each individually correct that everyone else is failing. The idea that they themselves might be part of the problem does not appear to have landed.
Meanwhile, the Senate is in particular turmoil. CBS News reports that former majority leader Mitch McConnell has been hospitalized for weeks, and South Carolina Republican Lindsey Graham died suddenly this month. Whatever you thought of either of them, those are serious institutional disruptions in a body that was already barely holding itself together.
The Damage May Actually Be Permanent
Hulse made one point that deserves to be read slowly and carefully. Republicans ceding power to Trump might make sense to them in the short term because he's their guy. But as Hulse told CBS News: 'The next Democratic president isn't going to turn around and say, that was a big mistake letting Congress get so weak. We need to empower them again. No, it's not gonna happen. It goes for good.'
That's the real story under all of this. It's not about Trump specifically, or Republicans specifically, or even this particular Congress. It's about an institution that has been slowly hollowing itself out for decades, and has now reached a point where the hollowing has become self-reinforcing. Every power Congress gives up makes the executive branch more dominant, which makes Congress feel less relevant, which makes members less likely to fight for their authority, which makes the next power grab easier.
CBS News notes that many of the problems Hulse describes predate this administration. The gerrymandering, the partisan alignment, the refusal to compromise, the sense that the real action is in the White House and the courts rather than on the Hill. Trump didn't invent any of this. He just accelerated it to a speed that's hard to ignore.
The Dingo Take
Let's be clear about what's actually happening here. The most powerful legislative body in the democratic world, the institution that is constitutionally supposed to control the budget, declare wars, and check presidential power, has decided that its primary job is cheering for the right team. And because it has spent decades practicing this version of the job instead of the actual version, it has genuinely lost the ability to do anything else. The muscles, as Binder put it, have atrophied. That's not hyperbole. That's a Brookings Institution scholar telling you Congress has forgotten how to Congress.
The Republicans who handed Trump a blank check on tariffs, war, and executive authority will spend the rest of their careers arguing they had no choice. They had every choice. They had Article I. They chose not to use it because it was politically convenient not to. And Hulse is right: that power is not coming back. The next Democratic president will simply pocket the expanded executive authority and use it for different ends, and congressional Republicans will suddenly rediscover their passion for the separation of powers, and none of it will matter because the lever is already gone.
Nine in ten Americans are unhappy with Congress. The question is whether being unhappy translates into demanding something better, or whether it just becomes ambient background noise, the way you're unhappy about traffic or the price of eggs. Based on current evidence, the country seems to be settling for the noise. Congress is counting on it.
