Mike Gallagher, GOP freshman from Green Bay, says Congress is toothless, dysfunctional

Congress is a toothless, dysfunctional body that has evolved into a “theater used by both parties to stoke the outrage of their base.”  

That damning verdict doesn’t come from a pundit or political scientist, but a sitting member of the Republican majority in the U.S. House, freshman Mike Gallagher of Green Bay.         

In a colorful and scathing critique for The Atlantic magazine, Gallagher argues that the House, which will be led by Democrats next year, is ripe for reform.

“If you are among the 11 percent of Americans who believe that everything in Congress is going swimmingly, then save some time and stop reading right now. (But first, please share whatever experimental drugs you are on)," the article begins.

"But if you are among the 87 percent of people who are concerned about what is going on in Congress, then I have an important message for you: It’s much worse than you think,” writes Gallagher, who also floated some proposals for making the place work better, including sending some of the power so tightly held by House leadership back to members.

One of his suggestions — letting committee members select their own chairs and ranking members — was considered by House Republicans Thursday before being rejected. 

“I want to be able to walk into the House floor and have a sense (that) this is like a genuine arena of intellectual combat, right? I don’t want it to all just be us throwing bombs on cable news,” said Gallagher in an interview Thursday, when asked why he wrote the article. 

“I feel incredibly honored to serve,” said Gallagher, 34, a veteran of the Marine Corps who won his northeastern Wisconsin district decisively in 2016 and again on Nov. 6.  “What I’m just trying to do is provoke a discussion, so we can do better.”

One thrust of Gallagher’s critique is that power in the House is too concentrated with the speaker and other leaders. The speaker during Gallagher’s first term has been fellow Republican and Wisconsinite Paul Ryan, who is about to retire.

Asked if his criticism of the way the House is run is an indictment of Ryan’s leadership, Gallagher said it wasn’t — that it was a broader critique of how the House has evolved in recent decades. Gallagher praised Ryan, contending he took some steps in the right direction and got as much done as he could in the current political environment because of “the goodwill he built up and his intellectual leadership.”

But asked if Republicans could have implemented some of the reforms he is talking about, Gallagher said, “For sure.”   

One proposal is to let members of House committees elect their own ranking members and chairs. The two parties in the House use panels called steering committees, which are heavily influenced by leadership, to nominate committee leaders, who are then ratified by the membership. The result is that committee chairs are often chosen for their fundraising abilities and partisan loyalty, Gallagher writes.

“This would change the entire incentive structure,” Gallagher said in the interview. “If you’re an ambitious, energetic new member, rather than just raising money or being a team player by voting the party line all the time, you’d channel all your ambition into committee work because you’d have to prove yourself (on) that committee.”

House Republicans considered Thursday a version of that plan that would let members of most committees choose their leaders, with three exceptions: the committees on rules, budget and House administration. But it was voted down by the GOP conference.  

In the article, Gallagher also criticized his party’s policy of term-limiting committee chairs to six years, resulting in a power shift from chairs to leadership.   

Another idea Gallagher floated is to streamline house committees so that appropriations panels (spending) and authorizing committees (lawmaking) would become one panel (not two) for each different policy area, such as defense and health.         

A third is to reform the House schedule, which has evolved into a very short and compressed work week so that lawmakers can return to their districts and families for long weekends.

That schedule leaves members “little time to develop meaningful relationships, particularly on a bipartisan basis, that might form the foundation for legislative collaboration,” Gallagher writes.

He proposed that House members legislate at least five days a week for three consecutive weeks, then spend a full week back in their districts.

Versions of these reforms have floated around for a number of years.

Norm Ornstein, a longtime congressional scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, applauded the proposals. He has advocated similar scheduling reforms.

“There is a consensus among scholars, I think, that there has to be a better balance of power between committee chairs and leadership,” Ornstein said, commenting for this story by email. “Most congressional scholars think term limits for chairs is a bad idea. It encourages jockeying among majority members angling to be the next chair. And more for Republicans than Democrats, the heavy-handed role of the speaker choosing committee chairs has often meant that the winners are the best fundraisers … not necessarily the best chairs.”

Ornstein said Gallagher’s proposals “may be a stretch” when it comes to getting adopted, “but are constructive.”

A broader theme of Gallagher's article that goes beyond the debate over rules is that Congress has ceded too much power to the president, including a systematic surrender of its "constitutional authority on national-security issues to the executive branch."    

Gallagher said his article was written before the Nov. 6 election that determined which party would hold the House majority in 2019 and 2020.

In the interview, he acknowledged that much broader issues related to the political culture of Congress and the country — partisanship, political enmity — are far harder to address.  

But in his article, he argues that the problem of dysfunction in the House has less to do with its membership than the admittedly “boring” domain of process and rules.

Under the current rules, even idealistic members eventually discover they have to "play the game," writes Gallagher. 

"This means that you don’t vote against leadership, you don’t question the status quo, and you raise lots of money. If you do all this, maybe one day 10 years from now you, too, can be a subcommittee chair," he writes.  

“The problem is a defective process and a power structure that, whichever party is in charge, funnels all power to leadership and stifles debate and initiative within the ranks. Your average member of Congress, far from being drunk on power, actually has very little of it outside a cable-news studio,” Gallagher argues in the article.

“This debate about rules and process, more than any Russia-related investigation or wall-funding-fueled shutdown, will determine whether Congress can avoid two years of dysfunction or whether it will continue its slide into irrelevance.”