While Congress is deeply flawed for many of the reasons that Norm Ornstein flags in his most recent lament on the body, where partisanship, ideological polarization, the breakdown of salubrious institutional norms, and a decline in substantive debate have all contributed to years of alarming dysfunction, I have to dissent from his assessment that the 114th Congress, the one now in session, may be “the worst ever,” even granting its inability to pass a budget, its failure to fill judicial vacancies, its inaction on the Zika epidemic, and its failed approach to drug policy.
I dissent for the same reason that I cited when Ornstein declared the 112th Congress among the worst ever because of the GOP’s political brinksmanship; while legislators ill-serve their country when they cynically let their political posturing undermine good governance, failing to compromise even when doing so would improve on the status-quo, a gridlocked, “do-nothing” Congress, as suboptimal as it is, is nevertheless preferable to a “do-something-awful” Congress.
To find a Congress unambiguously worse than the ones that Ornstein dubs the very worst, we only need to go back a little more than a decade, to the 107th Congress, when legislators joined in lots of bipartisan cooperation that proved catastrophic.