Carson Burch ’27 is considering a government major. He likes reading about historical and current events, as well as dinosaurs. Contact him at ceburch@wm.edu.
The views expressed in the article are the author’s own.
As I write this, the 2025 government shutdown is continuing to drone on with no end in sight. Given this state of affairs, our nation has found itself asking why exactly this kind of government dysfunction, once unimaginable, has become a normal part of American political life. Perhaps our nation can find part of the answer by looking in the mirror.
When Harry Truman ran for president in 1948, he won partially by assailing the “Do-Nothing” Congress he often clashed with. That session of Congress passed a little over 900 new bills, with some (like the Taft-Hartley Act) occurring over Truman’s veto, meaning Congress had to scare up a two-thirds majority in both houses. The 80th Congress passed the constitutional amendment banning the President from seeking more than two terms. The session of Congress between the 2022 midterms and the 2024 presidential election, meanwhile, only passed around 150 bills.
The average reader seeing this would probably have assumed that number to be too high (I certainly did before I looked up to check.) The trope that Congress is a sluggish institution incapable of legislating anymore is hardly new or even that controversial. Despite this, re-election rates have never been higher than in recent times — over 90% of incumbent parties were re-elected in 2020. This happens even though Gallup polling of Congress’ approval rating has never exceeded 50% in two decades and has often hovered around 20% for the last 10 years.
This contrast between low approval and high re-election rates reveals a core problem with government dysfunction: Despite Americans saying they decry this state of affairs, they politically do not act like they oppose the status quo that much. In fact, their votes help perpetuate it. If we, the people, really wanted change, we could make it happen — we could collectively vote out every single Congressman in the next election, if we so desired. The fact that we do not do so means we are partially to blame for the ongoing gridlock, and fixing that will require that the American people take responsibility.
Critics of my thesis here will bring up gerrymandering, which entrenches incumbents and has made districts increasingly safe for those in power. While it is true that gerrymandering has contributed greatly to polarization and gridlock by enabling the rise of a class of politicians who pander to their narrow bases at the expense of the rest of the country, the reason gerrymandering works is because incumbents are able to accurately predict which voters will support them in the primary and in the election. If the people who currently support the politicians responsible for the shutdown all voted them out in either a primary or general election, they would all be gone very quickly. Of course this will not happen, but it doesn’t change my point: this situation could change if people voted accordingly.
Other objections will point out that it is impossible for one individual to truly change the world by themselves and that it will require mass action to do. This is true, but mass action partially requires a decision made on the individual level to change behavior being repeated in the minds of millions of citizens. The individual is ultimately the smallest part of a mass movement for change, and it takes individuals to build such a movement. Without individual participation, there is no movement. This is something we learned from reading “The Lorax” as children: “Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing will get better. It’s not.”
This is not to say that individuals are solely responsible and that there aren’t broader systems at work, of course. There is an establishment that has worked to entrench itself and its power at the expense of the American people, and it is very powerful. Nor am I even saying that voting out every single incumbent would fix everything (It certainly wouldn’t if the replacement Congressmen were even more intent upon appeasing their bases above all else.) My point is that, if we really wanted to punish politicians for shutdown behavior, we could do so because all of the mechanisms required are at our disposal.
Because the United States is, at least for now, a free country, we have the right as a sovereign people to make decisions for ourselves about how to run the country through elected representatives. However, the consequence of being a free society is that we assume some responsibility as citizens for the actions of our government. Taking responsibility requires admitting that our own political behavior as citizens is partially (though not entirely) a contributing factor to the current quagmire, and until we do that, we can expect to see more of this behavior.
Blaming Congress is easy. Making real change is hard. Which do you prefer?
