The Vote That Explains Everything

Nearly nine in ten Americans think members of Congress should not trade stocks in the companies they regulate. Eighty-six percent. Eighty-seven percent of Republicans, eighty-eight percent of Democrats, eighty-one percent of independents.

You cannot get eighty-six percent of Americans to agree on pizza toppings.

Last month the House finally voted on it. What passed still lets members sell whatever they already own. On the way to the floor it got tied to an unrelated fight about voter ID. It split almost exactly along party lines.

An idea almost every American in every party supports, and Congress could not produce a clean version of it.

Your first thought is probably that they are crooks — that the people who profit from trading stocks wrote themselves a bill that lets them keep trading. It is the obvious reading, and I held it myself for a long time.

I no longer think it is right, and what actually happened is worse.

Every person in that story can defend what they did. The members who voted no had real objections. The ones who attached the voter-ID provision were running an ordinary legislative play, the same one every majority has run for two hundred years. Nobody took a bribe. Nobody broke a rule. Nobody had to.

The machine produced that result while working exactly as designed.

That is the harder problem, and it is why this pamphlet exists. A crook can be caught and replaced. A design that reliably grinds near-total agreement into nothing has to be repaired — and until somebody repairs it, it will do the same to every other item on your list.

I want to be clear that repair is what I mean. Not replacement. The foundations of this country are sound and I would not touch them. What has failed is a layer of rules and habits that accumulated on top of those foundations over two centuries — most of them adopted for sensible reasons, none of them designed to work together, and several of them now doing the opposite of what they were meant to do. Gaps have opened as the country changed around them. Those gaps can be closed without disturbing anything that makes America America.