Why can't Congress do its job?

Published: April 14, 2021, 7:16 p.m.

In this week\u2019s episode of Politics In Question, Kevin Kosar joins Lee and James to consider why Congress can\u2019t do its job. Kosar is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, where he studies Congress, the administrative state, American politics, election reform, and the US Postal Service. Before joining AEI, Kosar served as the R Street Institute\u2019s vice president of policy, vice president of research partnerships, and senior fellow and director of the Governance Project. He also cofounded the long-running Legislative Branch Capacity Working Group to help strengthen the legislative branch. Prior to this, Kosar spent more than a decade focusing on a wide range of public administration issues while working at the Congressional Research Service. Kosar has written numerous books and journal articles. Most recently, he co-edited Congress Overwhelmed: The Decline in Congressional Capacity and Prospects for Reform (University of Chicago Press, 2020).\n\nWhat is Congress\u2019s job? Is it a place where the peoples\u2019 representatives interact with one another to make decisions on their behalf? Or is it a factory where workers clock-in each day to assemble products according to a blueprint that was designed elsewhere? Why can\u2019t Congress do its job? What happens when Congress fails to do that job? And what reforms can its members adopt to avoid those consequences in the future? These are some of the questions that Kevin, Lee, and James discuss in this week\u2019s episode.