Protestors vent their displeasure at Congress, but is the institution broken, asks Associate Professor Doug Kriner, or are we just electing the wrong people? Photo by Jae C. Hong/Associated Press

On November 4, midterm elections will herald a new Congress—every House seat is in play, while more than 30 Senate seats are also up for grabs. Most polls have the Republicans sweeping the House elections and—maybe, just maybe—taking control of the Senate. And most polls also have you sitting this one out: nearly two-thirds of all voters are expected to stay at home.

And why bother getting off the couch? By almost every factor, the current assembly has been the worst Congress ever. It’s approved fewer bills than any other in the past four decades and reached a nadir in November 2013 with the lowest-ever Congressional job approval rating: a miserable 9 percent, according to Gallup.

Such grim numbers prompted the American Political Science Association to ask some of the nation’s finest political minds to study ways of fixing the legislative branch. In December 2013, its national task force, cochaired by Professor of Political Science Cathie Jo Martin and featuring longtime Beltway reporter Thomas B. Edsall (CAS’66), made its recommendations in a book-length report, Negotiating Agreement in Politics.

“We tried to think about what we can do to actually effect change now,” says Martin. She highlights four new rules proposed by the 52 experts: a greater reliance on technical expertise to build consensus before drafting legislation; new structures to encourage legislators to meet more often “to develop a shared understanding of a problem and its potential solutions”; the use of penalty defaults—traditionally, fixed deadlines accompanied by an unpalatable forfeiture, such as exclusion from future negotiations or a loss of funds—to punish inaction; and a little more privacy to “truly deliberate”—not the smoke-filled rooms of old, just a space without “the bright lights of the media.”

Martin gave a Congressional briefing on the report and says she got a lot of positive feedback. But, she also says that with both parties competing for “the marginal voters who might swing control of government,” there’s little reason for them to work together.

That’s where your midterm vote comes in.

“Is Congress really and truly dysfunctional, as in institutionally broken?” asks Associate Professor of Political Science Doug Kriner, an expert on the working dynamics of the separation of powers. “Or is it just a consequence of whom we have elected—what do you expect when you put in a bunch of people who simply have very little room for agreement? To what extent can we reform the institution to work better even with a polarized Congress or is change going to have to come at the voting booth?”

Part of the problem, adds Maxwell Palmer, an assistant professor of political science, is that “much of how the Senate functions is dependent on norms rather than written down rules.” The norms say junior senators wait their turn and the minority acknowledges its loss by acting “the loyal opposition.” The new breed of lawmaker—Palmer gives Senator Ted Cruz of Texas as a notable example—“refuses to follow these old rules.” That means, he says, “it’s not a failing of congressional rules, but people operating differently than they had in the past.”

Kriner argues that James Madison might not be too disappointed with the current languor on Capitol Hill: “The system was built to be inertial—it’s supposed to take tremendous events to push a super majority in consensus.” He notes that when the country was doing well in the nineties, most people actually thought a government divided and in gridlock “worked pretty well.” The forthcoming midterms, he speculates, won’t change much—there will still be a veto-wielding Democrat in the White House after all.

Palmer offers one intriguing final scenario, however: the Senate swings Republican and a Supreme Court vacancy opens up. “President Obama’s not going to appoint anybody on the right and the Republicans are probably not going to be willing to approve anybody on the left,” he says. “There’s this real possibility of a two-year vacancy in the Supreme Court.”