America's national legislature, consisting of a 100-member Senate and a 435-member House of Representatives.
A member of Congress earns $174,000 a year, a salary that has not changed in 17 years. Adjusted for inflation, it has fallen by a third. Dozens of members camp in their offices to save on Washington rent. Between 15 and 25 hours a week are spent in a dingy building phoning donors to fund re-election campaigns. A typical lawmaker's office on Capitol Hill employs just three or four policy staffers, usually young twenty-somethings. The House has fewer committee staff than it did in the 1980s.
In its most recent full term (2023-25) Congress passed just 274 laws, fewer than in any other Congress since the civil war. Many were trivial, from renaming post offices to mandating that American flags be American-made. According to Gallup, just 17% of Americans approve of how Congress does its job.
The parties in Congress are more ideologically distant than at any point in the past 80 years. Data from DW-NOMINATE, a computer program that analyses voting records, shows no overlap between Republican and Democratic lawmakers. Anyone who bucks the party line risks ejection by their own party in a primary. Since the mid-1990s power has been hoarded in the offices of the speaker of the House and the Senate majority leader. To get around partisan gridlock, congressional leaders try to cram all their priorities into a single "omnibus" budget bill, which is negotiated in secret and passed, largely unread, by the rank and file. Committee hearings have become sets for brand-building and viral video clips rather than serious lawmaking.
In 2025 the Capitol police investigated 14,938 threats directed at members of Congress, their families and staff—a 58% rise from 2024. In 2022 the then speaker's husband was bludgeoned with a hammer. On January 6th 2021 a mob ransacked the Capitol while lawmakers cowered under desks; the rioters were later pardoned by Donald Trump.
By early 2026 some 60 members of Congress had announced they would step down after the midterms, a record number so early in an election year.
Old age is too high a price to pay for maturity.