, Columnist
It’ll Be Up to the New Congress to Rebuild It
The current group doesn’t seem capable of reform. Plus, Jonathan Bernstein’s morning links.
A real fixer-upper.
Photographer: Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images
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What’s the best path for reviving Congress to its rightful place as the first branch of government?
Tom Mann and Norm Ornstein pour a little cold water on what is, in fact, a fairly fringe movement to improve congressional capacity. Not that they don’t agree with the general idea, but for them, structural reforms are mostly irrelevant until a healthy party runs both chambers of Congress. For them, the overwhelmingly urgent problem is one of partisan asymmetry — or, to put it more bluntly, the problem of the dysfunctional Republican Party: