By Steve Brawner, © 2025 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

Congress is a mess. I asked Dr. Hal Bass what might could be done to fix it.

Bass has taught political science at Ouachita Baptist University in Arkadelphia for 49 years. He was my professor when I attended school there from 1987-91. Retired since 2016, he still teaches one class a semester. This semester, it’s “The American Congress.”

In a phone interview, he said James Madison and the rest of the Constitution’s framers believed Congress would be the “first” of the government’s three branches, the others being the executive and the judiciary. 

That’s not the case now. The presidency has become more and more powerful in recent decades when his party controls Congress. That’s especially the case now under President Trump.

“I just don’t think there’s been a president who could count on the unflinching support of congressional majorities like Trump can,” he said.

Old and new factors have led to the situation. The president has long been his party’s leader, but, for centuries, that role was muted by the parties having competing factions within. Democratic Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson contended with conservative Southern Democrats, for example.

Bass said the framers designed the Constitution to try to prevent cohesive majorities from forming. The intent was for members of Congress to protect their own branch of government’s powers. Ambition would counteract ambition, and Congress and the president would reach a stalemate. 

The framers wrote the Constitution without political parties in mind. Instead, parties appeared almost immediately after it was written and now dominate the scene. Those parties in the past were diverse and internally divided. Now they are polarized into liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans. As a result, each party is more unified. When one party controls both Congress and the White House, there are few checks on what the president can do.

Bass said that throughout American history, one party generally has been relatively dominant. But in recent decades, Congress has been led by “insecure majorities” that have no confidence they will maintain control after the next election. That’s definitely the case now. In the House of Representatives, Republicans hold a thin 219-213 majority with three vacancies, two of which were formerly held by Democrats. 

With those numbers, Republicans are trying to maintain control and keep everyone in line. Democrats, meanwhile, have no incentive to work with the president and majority party. Instead, their goal is win back the House of Representatives in the next election and then defy Trump.

“Whereas back in the ‘40s and ‘50s, Republicans really didn’t expect to win Congress most of the time, but they were able to work with conservative Democrats and get a lot of their policies accomplished here,” he said. “If we had one party more clearly in control, I think that would ease the tensions because the minority would essentially have to accommodate itself to that reality. Right now, these insecure majorities keep us on kind of a knife’s edge every two years.”

Furthermore, these narrow majorities put enormous pressure on members of Congress to toe their party’s line. 

“If you’ve got healthy majorities, then that gives individual members a little more leeway to represent their constituents occasionally, their own conscience occasionally, preferred interest occasionally, and not make party in and of itself the reason for being,” he said.

I asked Dr. Bass what he would do to make Congress work better. He offered four prescriptions. 

First, he said members of Congress must protect their branch’s institutional prerogatives, as the Constitution requires them to do. 

Second, he said Congress would be more effective if one party were more dominant, as has been the case throughout much of American history. 

Bass also would reinvigorate the committee structure. In recent years, Congress has passed huge, take-it-or-leave-it omnibus bills, like this year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act. That kind of legislation gives power to the party leaders. In the past, smaller pieces of legislation percolated in committees led by powerful chairs – including notable Arkansans such as Rep. Wilbur Mills and Sen. John McClellan. It produced better results, Bass said.

Finally, Bass noted that Americans get the Congress they elect. It’s up to them to vote for a better one.

“I think part of the way out is more thoughtful deliberation by voters, and not simply reflexively saying, ‘Red good, blue bad,’ or ‘Blue good, red bad,’” he said. 

Those are Dr. Bass’s prescriptions to create a healthier Congress. Got any ideas?

Steve Brawner’s column is syndicated to 21 outlets in Arkansas. Email him at brawnersteve@mac.com.