Unf*cking Congress.

The year is 1830. In his third year in the U.S. Senate, 48 year old Daniel Webster was debating Robert Hayne over the future of the union. Webster’s speech lasted two days and was transcribed and distributed all over the nation. The issue at hand was nullification, which pitted north versus south in a precursor to the Civil War. A massively important procedural and Constitutional issue.

Here’s the last paragraph of Webster’s speech, considered by many to be the finest ever delivered in Congress:

“When my eyes shall be turned to behold for the last time the sun in heaven, may I not see him shining on the broken and dishonored fragments of a once glorious Union; on states dissevered, discordant, belligerent; on a land rent with civil feuds, or drenched, it may be, in fraternal blood! Let their last feeble and lingering glance rather behold the gorgeous ensign of the republic, now known and honored throughout the earth, still full high advanced, its arms and trophies streaming in their original lustre, not a stripe erased or polluted, nor a single star obscured, bearing for its motto, no such miserable interrogatory as ‘What is all this worth?’ nor those other words of delusion and folly, ‘Liberty first and Union afterwards;’ but everywhere, spread all over in characters of living light, blazing on all its ample folds, as they float over the sea and over the land, and in every wind under the whole heavens, that other sentiment, dear to every true American heart-Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable!”

From this, dear Unf*ckers, to this: 199 years later, we literally have conspiracy theorists like Marjorie Taylor Greene, who admits she was never interested in politics until Donald J. Trump came along and that she was running to find out if Congress members ate babies in satanic rituals. That, my friends, is not a joke.

Our task at hand this week is to answer the seminal question of our time: What will it take to unf*ck Congress?

We’ll take a breezy trip through history, highlight some good elected officials (and some real shitbags), examine if and how Congress is more fucked up than it used to be and dive into how this particular Congress has a shot to fix the whole stinking mess.

President Trump held a rally outside of the White House. Throngs of supporters heeded his call to march down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol building to stop the certification of the election. We know now he was watching it unfold and tweeting his support for the protestors by chiding his loyal Vice President who was in imminent danger. They targeted certain members of Congress with specific threats.

As we discussed previously, this was hardly a coup. But it was an attempt to violently disrupt Congress. And the U.S. Senate acquitted the man who invited them, gathered them, directed them, encouraged, applauded them and then said “I love you” to them. That’s fucked up. The question at hand is, was it always this fucked up?

The quick answer is yes. I’m not sure if this is heartening or disheartening. I share your rage at the cowardice in the Senate and the complete inability of the Democratic Party to grasp that the rules of engagement have fundamentally changed.

There are three issues at play here that really matter. Three Ps: People, Process and Power. The House and Senate are made up of people. Fallible people with varying backgrounds, different experiences and perspectives and disparate levels of ability. The process has stayed mostly the same, but it has changed in some very fundamental procedural ways that we’ll cover. Lastly, the mechanisms of power might have changed, but the ones pulling the levers haven’t changed a bit.

People

Remember former House Speaker John Boehner; chain smoking motherfucker who helped block Obama’s agenda in the House? In hindsight, he seems pretty reasonable compared to today’s standards. Boehner is a funny middling figure in recent congressional history. Sandwiched between the Gingrich era and whatever we want to call today, Boehner’s efforts to bring a level of camaraderie and decorum to the House were undone by the insurgent triumvirate of young guns riding the Tea Party wave: Eric Cantor, Paul Ryan and Kevin McCarthy.

McCarthy is the only douchenozzle left in Congress, of course. You know, the one who just visited Mar-a-Lago to ask Trump whether he’s supposed to wipe from front to back or back to front? This luminary was part of the trio of U.S. Representatives that made Boehner’s job impossible and shut down the House while Mitch McConnell obstructed the Senate to ensure that the last six years of Obama’s presidency would be a complete and utter nothing burger, legislatively. That period was probably the most needlessly partisan example of obstructionism that the country has ever seen in terms of parliamentary rule. But it’s far from the worst example of obstructionism over the most important issue that our nation ever faced.

I’m speaking, of course, about the creation of Space Force.

Just kidding. I’m talking about slavery—actual legalized ownership of another human being and the lawful mechanisms that allowed a form of it to endure from Jim Crow laws to mass incarceration. Whenever you hear a pundit talking about the most “dysfunctional legislature in history,” remind them that for the first 100 years of our union, Congress literally protected slavery.

“But those were men of their times!”

Good point, asshole. You know who else were men of their times? Abolitionists.

There is no argument—never has been—that could possibly reconcile the concept of slavery.

“Yeah, but the rhetoric today is just so toxic.”

Really? How about this little ditty from history:

On May 22nd, 1856, Senator Preston Brooks of South Carolina walked into the Senate chamber and proceeded to lay a beating on Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner so bad it almost fucking killed him. He bludgeoned Sumner with his walking cane because he was an abolitionist who criticized slave owners in a speech.

So, yeah. We’re a little less fucked up today in that respect than we used to be.

There are some smart motherfuckers in Congress. Reps in the House like Ro Khanna in California and Marcy Kaptur of Ohio. Renegade Republican Adam Kinzinger, the subject of a recent New York Times piece about his ongoing refusal to support Donald Trump. Senator Amy Klobuchar, who is one of the most effective legislators in recent memory. Squad members Ilhan Omar and Ayanna Pressley. Or the Vermont twins Bernie Sanders and Patrick Leahy. Even Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska. I don’t see eye-to-eye on a lot with him, but he’s really smart and very reasonable. Of course, being smart doesn’t guarantee good policy or lack of corruption, as we know from Ted Cruz, who himself is a pretty highly educated cat.

Bottom line is that we do have some good, thoughtful people in Congress. But in today’s media culture, we tend to focus on the outrageous who will say anything for a sound bite. Like weirdo Matt Gaetz, who is really pushing his 15 minutes of fame. He’s a Florida Congressperson because of course he is. And I know it’s really infantile to say this, but this dude actually looks like Butthead from Beavis and Butthead. Like, seriously. If you haven’t seen the memes comparing the two, it’s fucking great. Apart from being the number one Trump sycophant, he’s just generally one of the douchiest, most mean-spirited people to ever breathe air.

So we’ve always had pieces of shit in Congress that defended concepts like slavery. This we know. But it does seem like we’re a wee less erudite than we used to be. Remember that movie Multiplicity where Michael Keaton keeps cloning himself because he doesn’t have enough time to get things done, only each new version of himself is slightly more fucked up than the one before? That’s a lot of Congress. Each one seems to be a slightly degraded, cheaper version of the one before.

Process

Let’s talk about the process. When people refer to the legislative process as sausage making, it’s a fairly accurate assessment. In a culture that values immediate gratification, watching bills get passed into law can be excruciating. Unf*ckers of a certain age will remember when members of Congress had actual sausage to dole out. They used to have slush funds called “pork” that they could use to deliver programs in their districts. It was great for certain districts, but it gave too much power to incumbents who abused it.

Anyway, it can take years for legislation to be enacted, with most bills never even making it out of committee. The big stuff Congress gets done is typically mandated. It’s why you see both sides try to append their darling pieces of legislation to omnibus bills. But sometimes, even these don’t make it through the reconciliation process between the houses.

In the broadest of terms, the House is the representative body meant to bring district-level concerns to bear. The two-year terms in the House means there is more legislative fervor and anxiety over getting things done. Senators have six-year terms, which reduces performance anxiety by design. Plus, the Senate was intended to be a cooling mechanism for the House and is considered the more deliberative body.

Members of both houses are prone to speaking about the awesome sense of history and grandeur in the halls of Congress. Love them or hate them, most of them have demonstrated an appropriate sense of appreciation for the institution and hallowed halls of our republic. There was a sense of respect for norms and willingness to compromise. Members met in the adjoining cloakrooms and made deals. They ate together, drank together and certainly caroused together.

This convivial relationship too often masked our worst policies. Jim Crow. Indian Removal Act. The Sedition Act. Japanese Internment Camps. The Patriot Act. This isn’t an attempt to absolve these actions; rather, it’s intended to demonstrate that among the members of Congress there was a willingness to collaborate, compromise and co-sponsor. And that if you widen the lens broad enough, the long trend line of our very small history has continually inched slowly toward progressivism.

There are so many important players and moments that have contributed to the so-called norms in Congress, but there’s one person who really changed the character of the House in such a profound way that it haunts us to this day: Newt Gingrich.

Ah, Newt. Never has a man with such a stupid name had such outsized influence on the way the nation governs. Newt Gingrich was first elected in 1978 and worked his way up through the ranks over the next 15 years to ultimately take over as Speaker in 1994. By this time, Newt was tired of the back-and-forth in Congress and how Republicans, in his view, seemed to capitulate on important issues. So he set about implementing a scorched-earth policy of obstructionism, the likes of which Congress hadn’t seen before.

When Newt Gingrich decided to introduce brinkmanship into routine congressional matters, he was largely chastised by colleagues and the media. He was a detestable figure in and around Washington, but his strategy was extremely effective. In an article in The Atlantic, Norm Ornstein, a political scientist who knew Gingrich said:

“His idea was to build toward a national election where people were so disgusted by Washington and the way it was operating that they would throw the ins out and bring the outs in.”

Political historians credit Gingrich for accomplishing this objective, with many saying that without Gingrich there would be no such thing as Trump. Most Americans don’t need much incentive to hate the government, and Gingrich fanned the flames of discontent like never before. He brought legislation to a standstill, and though he was ultimately booted from leadership when it was discovered he was having an affair with a staffer, the damage was done and the Republicans learned a valuable lesson in governing: that they don’t have to govern to wield the ultimate power.

When you acknowledge that the entire ethos of Congress was built on compromise, then you can begin to understand how Gingrich did more to undermine the political process in this country than perhaps anyone before or since.

Actually, there is one guy...

(Unf*ckers, this works better if you read it aloud like Michael Buffer announcing a Tyson fight)

Double MM. The Bad Boy of Kentucky. Sorry Bob Caro, you can forget LBJ; there’s a new “Master of the Senate” who looks like a turtle fucked a potato. Ladies and gentlemen, Mitch McConnell!

Most recently, McConnell was able to sell Americans that the Senate impeachment trial shouldn’t happen while Trump was in office, then voted to acquit him because Trump was no longer in office, while also stating he thought he was guilty. This, my friends, is a masterclass in gaslighting and the type of outmaneuvering McConnell has been doing to the Democrats since he announced that his top priority in Obama’s first term was to ensure he didn’t have a second. While he was specifically unsuccessful in this respect, he was able to scuttle virtually all of Obama’s legislative agenda.

But we shouldn’t judge McConnell simply on his ability to manipulate senate rules. After all, he’s also the proud senior representative of the great state of Kentucky, where 17% of Kentuckians live in poverty, which places McConnell’s state at a smooth 46 out of 50. The winning doesn’t stop there.

According to U.S. News and World Report, Kentucky is ranked 36 in infant mortality rates, 36 in pollution, 44 in employment, 45 in long-term fiscal stability and 47 in health care quality.

But hey. They’ve got great bourbon and the Derby.

Okay. Something to add to the reading list, Unf*ckers. Check out Kill Switch by Adam Jentleson. I got through it in a couple of days and I highly recommend it, because it breaks down the history of the filibuster in an accessible way and with great firsthand insight. It really helps explain how, first of all, the filibuster is not a Founding Father invention. It’s a southern racist tactic popularized by John Calhoun and expanded throughout the 19th and 20th Centuries, almost always for the purpose of stifling progress on issues of civil and voting rights.

One of the things Jentleson does best in the book, by the way, is explaining how the filibuster is exactly the opposite of what the founders wanted—including an anecdote of an old James Madison literally saying as much directly to Calhoun. Kind of a problem when the dude claiming the Founding Fathers would have wanted it this way finds out one of the main Founding Fathers is still alive.

Today we equate the filibuster with McConnell because no one, not even the southern racists from yesteryear, used it to the extreme extent and level of success as McConnell. He effectively turned the minority into the majority by forcing nearly every single bill to stand up to the 60 vote threshold. So we tend to think of the filibuster as a tool in the pocket of leadership, which isn’t entirely accurate. In fact, the concept of majority and minority leaders is only 100 years old. And the relationship between the two roles was intended to be productive, and was largely considered so until the most recent congresses.

Even Bob Dole, who alternated between majority and minority leader over a 12 year period famously said, “We never surprise each other on the floor.” Such was the collaborative intent of this framework. It’s a more modern invention that only the leaders determine policy and legislation with the expectation that all caucus members are to fall in line.

Legislative victories never come easy and are usually attacked the moment they’re codified. Emancipation was met with Jim Crow. The Voting Rights Act was met with voter suppression tactics. Glass Steagall was unbound by decades of deregulation. Social Security was undermined by Reagan, as we outlined in our recent Reagan essay. It seems that for every progressive action, there’s an equal and opposite regressive response. The hope is that the tide turns in your favor in the long run and that the swinging pendulum slows and never touches the furthest reaches of the past.

Power

Taking stock of where we are, we know that procedural fuckery, most notably the filibuster, was created and popularized by southern racists looking to maintain the status quo of repression in America. Even still, we got things done—slowly—because representatives and senators were able to reach across the aisle and make deals. Then Newt came along and stripped Congress of civility. So things got shittier and the element of compromise disappeared.

The other important development, not to be overlooked, is the multi-decade effort on the part of Republicans to win at the state level and gerrymander districts to ensure that they could hold legislative sway in the House. Super, super important tactic that Democrats have failed to prevent for the longest time. And despite all of this, we pushed through things in the modern era like marriage equality and the Affordable Care Act. And then Mitch McConnell put the fucking brakes on everything by whipping out the filibuster more than Anthony Weiner whipped out his dick on Instagram.

But that wasn’t all folks. On top of gerrymandering and the filibuster, something far more sinister happened a decade ago that, left unchecked, will render the remediation of these other procedural hurdles null and void.

Citizens Fucking United, baby.

The Democrats can kill the filibuster. People like Marjorie Taylor Greene can be stripped of their committees. We can balance the equation on gerrymandering. The pendulum of procedural power and process will always swing, but the question is whether or not the party in charge of progress will have the guts, backing and willingness to do the two most important things they can to preserve democracy: Repeal Citizens United and institute real campaign finance reform.

I know most, if not all, of the Unf*ckers are familiar with Citizens United. But in the event you ever want to pass this along to someone who just doesn’t fucking understand how badly Citizens United fucked up our politics, I’ve rewritten the description of it so a child can understand.

In 2010, the Supreme Court decided that corporations could spend money on political advertising and that they had the same rights as people under the First Amendment—as long as someone running for office didn’t help them make the commercials. Until 2010, political action committees called PACs were only allowed to raise small amounts of money. But then another decision after that said that corporations could give as much as they wanted to the PACs and that they didn’t have to tell anyone who gave them that money. Then they started calling them Super PACs. Now, they raise a lot of money from rich people and companies without telling anyone who they are and they make bad commercials that say mean things about people running for office.

In a New York Times Op-Ed, former New York Congressman Steve Israel, who was very high in the ranks of the Democratic caucus prior to his resignation, said out loud what others in Congress were too afraid to say. In the op-ed, he says that from the time he was elected, “I’ve spent roughly 4,200 hours in call time, attended more than 1,600 fund-raisers just for my own campaign and raised nearly $20 million in increments of $1,000, $2,500 and $5,000 per election cycle. And things have only become worse in the five years since the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, which ignited an explosion of money in politics.”

Not only does dark money have the ultimate corrupting influence on our politics, the sheer amount of money necessary to fight these forces means that members of Congress quite literally spend less time legislating or providing constituent services than they do raising money. By a long shot.

So where does that leave us?

Well, one of the things I try to provide on Unf*cking the Republic is context. With so many Americans freshly tuned to the political process, misinformation abounds, abetted by a lack of historical perspective. Up to this point with the podcast, I’ve admittedly fallen short on providing some prescriptive action items that accompany the topics we tackle.

In fairness, context is the first part of the prescription. Developing a shared language by understanding history is how you begin the process of remediation and healing. Plus, it’s always fun to know shit that others don’t, because if you’re anything like me, you like to win arguments.

So here’s our first collective effort that we can all take part in. First off, don’t worry about learning all the members of Congress. It’s a fool's errand. What’s important is that you know your congressperson. Find your congressperson, get a staffer’s email from their web page and the local district number.

We are currently in the 117th Congress. Every congressperson has a bill in front of them called H.R. 1. (It’s carrying the number one because it’s the first bill introduced this session. Also, this isn’t the first bill of its kind and, in fact, most of the text was brought over from the prior Congress.) H.R. 1 is sponsored by Representative John Sarbanes, who knows a thing or three about getting legislation passed. (And there’s an accompanying bill in the Senate as well.) Here is its stated purpose:

“To expand Americans’ access to the ballot box, reduce the influence of big money in politics, strengthen ethics rules for public servants, and implement other anti-corruption measures for the purpose of fortifying our democracy.”

As of this recording, there are 217 co-sponsors on the bill, and yes they’re all Democrats because Republicans don’t care about you. (Note: Democrats don’t really either, but they’re much better at pretending, so let’s support them while they’re trying hard to impress us.)

The Democrats have the ability to kill the filibuster if they have the fucking guts to do it. They also have the ability to unwind much of the last decade of gerrymandering, though that’s a much more complex issue, as not every state operates on the same timeline and the pandemic fucked up delivery of the census. Again, above our ability to influence. But literally none of this will matter if we don’t start to pressure our congressional representatives, especially you Unf*ckers that live in a Republican district, to get on board with H.R. 1.

It’s arcane, seems unlikely, kinda fucking boring and all that, but it is literally the single most important issue that faces us because, unless and until we get dark money, super PACs and lobbyists out of the system, nothing will change.

Generations past have fought more glorious battles, I know. Being on the right side of the Civil Rights Movement is a lot fucking cooler than being like, “In my day, we saved democracy by changing campaign finance requirements.” But, it’s literally that important.

We might still elect idiots and assholes, and there will always be procedural fuckery that makes you want to puke, and Mitch McConnell will always be a potato turtle fuckface, but we the people will finally reclaim our rightful place in this democracy and have our voices heard.

Here endeth the lesson.

Image Sources

• Harris & Ewing, photographer, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Changes were made.