Congress sucks.

That’s hardly a controversial take: four out of five Americans agree. Congressional approval ratings sit at around fifteen percent.

By the end of George W. Bush’s presidency, his approval rating had steadily declined for seven years, the nation was in a financial crisis, and Republican congressional candidates were running away from his record. His approval rating at the time was more than twice what Congress has now.

Since those days, Congress has not once crossed the 40% approval threshold. It’s only breached 30% a handful of times. Congressional quagmire is not news; we’re used to it. It’s the swamp we know. It’s the acrid air we breathe. It is, in some sense, home.

So the more controversial take is this: this is not okay. It really sucks that Congress sucks. We shouldn’t let ourselves get nose blind to how much the situation stinks. We can’t let this go from “the way it is” to “just the way it is”. It doesn’t have to be this way.

To be clear, I’m not saying that everyone in Congress sucks; there are lovely congressfolk. I don’t even care to argue today that anyone in Congress sucks; let's focus on the whole, not the parts. Consider the collective intelligence of an ant colony that far surpasses the intelligence of an individual ant. Or, more relevantly, consider the collective stupidity that emerges when a group chronically misspends its members’ intelligence. Anthills yield smart wholes from dumb parts. Congressional Hill does the opposite.

Not that anyone takes complaints about congressional suckage personally. A big reason we hate Congress is that nobody is particularly invested in our liking it. If a presidential or gubernatorial administration becomes unpopular, its members tend to fret and try to fix it. But nobody in Congress is trying to convince you of how great Congress is. “No, really, the whole of Congress is working together for you,” said no congressperson ever. “And when we don’t,” they’ve never added, “we share the blame equally.” Folks in Congress see little political incentive to stick their necks out for the reputation of their house. In fact, it tends to work better to join the chorus. “Congress sucks,” says the congressman, implicitly meaning the rest of Congress.

That’s not to say your congressperson doesn’t want your love. But if you’re happy with her personally and angry with Congress, well, that’s not so bad. In fact, that’s kind of useful to her; angry voters show up. If her constituents feel anger at, hatred for, or fear of the other party, she is sitting pretty. The more they have to fear, the less she does. Professional political operatives excel at sparking and harnessing these emotions, often trampling the reputation of Congress en route.

The trick seems to work. Even with the dungeon-dwelling approval of the whole, we keep re-electing the parts. In 2024, with an electorate vocally frustrated with inflation and immigration, candidates for reelection won 96.6% of their races in the House and 88% in the Senate. Those numbers would take a dip if you included those who read the tea leaves and opted out of races they were likely to lose, but not a huge dip. The press covered 2024 as a protest election, but the vast majority of Congress coasted. With so many uncompetitive districts, the advantages of incumbency, and the lazy legislator’s legerdemain of pointing fingers at peers, we almost always keep the vast majority of assemblies we think are doing a terrible job.

Seriously, that sucks.

It sucks, because the framers intended Congress, or the House of Representatives at least, to serve as the primary conduit through which the people interact with the ruling class. Judges are appointed by the president. The president was to be appointed by a deliberative body, though the conception of the electoral college as independent deliberators died swiftly. Senators were appointed by state legislatures until the 17th Amendment was ratified in 1913. Originally only the House of Representatives, the weaker house, was elected directly by the people.

(Note that having a ruling class distinct from the people is conceptually impossible in a real democracy. "Democracy" means rule by the people. But I digress.)

It sucks, because the legislative branch was supposed to be the most responsive and most powerful of the three. The now-popular notion of co-equal branches is a coup. The framers didn’t consider the branches equal; they made Congress the prime locus of governmental power. Congress, not the courts, was to be the loudest and clearest voice in interpreting the Constitution. Congress, not the president, was to set the agenda and write policy.

In practice, the executive branch now towers over the legislative. The nation’s strongest legislative voice does not even reside in the legislative branch. Over the centuries presidents of all partisan hues sought to expand their power. Judges increasingly let them, all but inviting strong men into the White House. Meanwhile Congress gradually ceded regulatory power to agencies, meaning massive amounts of our legal framework rest under the president’s thumb without any need for review by a deliberative body.

All of this adds up to a grotesque perversion of our constitutional design. Why do we shrug? Because Congress sucks! How eagerly can we be expected to rally behind the banner of returning power to Congress, when Congress is so unworthy of the role? When we remember how partisan and petty and performative Congress is, it’s hard to get excited about the idea of their leading the national discussion. It feels silly to demand they review all agency policy, when most in Congress don’t even read the laws they pass. It’s laughable to ask that they lead the thoughtful, deliberative process of Constitutional interpretation; Congress doesn’t do thoughtful and deliberative. They’re about anger, hatred, and fear.

These two broken houses continue to brand themselves as the homes of deliberation in a representative democracy, which holds up as long as you’re willing to forget the meanings of the words deliberation, representative, and democracy.

We stomach a weak Congress, because Congress sucks. And it sucks enormously for the rest of us that they are completely unsuitable for the task of guiding a profound national conversation at a time when we desperately, desperately need it.

In a time of transformative technology, we have to find ways to think deeply together about how we as a society want our people to relate to our machines. Can we trust Congress to play a healthy leading role in that inquiry? Obviously not.

We live in a time of growing international tension. Can Congress lead a healthy national dialogue about a path forward? We wish.

Our country is increasingly cleaved in two. Can Congress weave us back together? Of course not; electoral politics largely got us here. That’s not to say without them we’d all be unified, but we’d be far more woven, agreeing and disagreeing in more richly nuanced ways instead of dividing into two great armies. Congress is actively cleaving us.

Can Congress help us find shared truth? Find camaraderie in attacking shared challenges? Celebrate the beauty of our widely varied contributions to the fabric of America? “Sure,” you can practically hear Congressman Doe saying, “our side can, but the other guys can’t.”

We urgently, urgently need the very thing many like to imagine Congress could be: deliberative bodies where people listen deeply to each other, learn together, cultivate respect, seek wisdom, weigh possible answers, and yield wise results.

Congress is just so not that. And the most hopeless thing you can do is imagine they might someday be. They’ve never been that, even if they have in the past been less nauseous. Don’t expect the nausea to subside. All of the forces suspected of driving congressional decline – the professionalization of politics, the distortions of social media, the data-driven exploitation – are only growing stronger. Without a big, systemic change, Congress will keep sucking and may even get worse.

That is not okay.

Nor is it okay to blame ourselves, at least for the wrong things.

If you ever hear that “we get the Congress we deserve,” buck up. It’s not true. In theory they are our voice, but do we really think that ruckus is emanating from us?

Electoral systems, and ours in particular, set traps, and we’re caught in them. We’re stuck with the kinds of people that are capable of thriving in this system. They’re stuck doing the things they have to do to thrive in it. Elections are a big oligarchic game, where voters are more pawns than players. We, the living, didn’t design this system, and we didn’t do anything to deserve being trapped in it.

But if we watch the game play out the same way over and over again and make no effort to work together to escape the trap… Well, perhaps at that point we must accept some blame. So let’s work together, because there is an escape route, and involves embracing far more democracy, not less.

We as citizens are capable of creating what we want Congress to be: deliberative bodies where people listen deeply to each other, learn together, cultivate respect, seek wisdom, weigh possible answers, and yield wise results. But we can't create that with elections, which give us partisan rancor and manipulation and soundbites and suppression and misrepresentation and, well, politics. Elections, even reformed, will never get us out of this.

To paraphrase Aristotle, elections yield oligarchy; democracies run on lots. If we don’t want a ruling class, we need democratic lotteries, also known as "sortition." Assemblies of everyday citizens, it turns out, are humbler listeners, better learners, and deeper deliberators than elected politicians, precisely because they are not elected. Elections poison, but lots can heal.

Citizen deliberative democracy is catching on all over the world; we badly need it here. We need citizen juries to appoint people to roles that require political independence, like judges, and heads of many departments and agencies. We need large national citizens’ assemblies to tackle the major issues of our time, like Social Security and Medicare and Artificial Intelligence and Climate Change and Immigration. We need them to have the conversations, that is, with which we cannot trust Congress.

To go further, we should consider, on this 250th anniversary year, whether we as a country need to invent ourselves again by redesigning our governments (state and national) around sortition. The conversation won’t fit here, but I’ll say that the solution is not just to stop electing and start drawing lots for all-purpose legislatures. No legislature is capable of addressing the enormous and rapidly growing scope of challenges that we face without subdividing the issues. Those do need to be integrated into a greater whole. The magic of multi-body designs, like the one advanced by Terrill Bouricius in Democracy Without Politicians, is that many different assemblies of everyday people can check and balance each other and create a coherent whole.

I’m not suggesting sortition-based democracy is utopic. But the more the national conversation moves from professional politicians to everyday citizens, the healthier it will be. With more than 800 experiments with citizens’ assemblies around the world, I’ve never once heard of an individual participant publicly bashing the assembly as a whole, as congresspeople do routinely. Instead, dissenters feel heard and respected. They tend to feel pride in having helped shape the result, even when they don’t find it ideal. Participants tend to understand and even enjoy explaining opposing views.

Many assembly participants enter with cynicism and leave with civicism. Helene Landemore tells the story of a man who brought his carry-on to the first meeting of the first weekend of a monthslong process, announcing he was just there to see enough to confirm his suspicion that it wouldn’t be worth his time before heading back home. He stuck around all day, then all weekend, and then for the whole process, impressed by his fellow citizens and what they were able to do together. He left lifted.

New folks in Congress, by contrast, often charge in with a white hat ready to fix things and leave years later darkened and despondent about the state of politics.

Never forget how much that sucks. Or that there’s another way.