Two recent books address that question:  The Broken Branch, by Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein and Winning the Future, by Newt Gingrich.

For Mann and Ornstein, the legislature is broken due to a combination of larger forces and failed leadership. The macro political force that has most affected Congress is the slow march toward polarized parties.   Democrats controlled the House of Representatives for sixty of sixty-four years between 1930 and 1994, but their caucus was by no means ideologically unified. A large southern wing of the party often allied with Republicans against progressive Democrats. What this meant was that Democrats often had a governing majority, but did not have ideological unity or party discipline. This lack of party discipline made the institution of Congress stronger than the wishes of the Democratic Party. This was frustrating for many, especially in the case of determined blocs in Congress stalling civil rights legislation, but it made the institution of Congress itself, its functioning and its procedures, and a measure of bipartisanship, of utmost importance.

Today, especially in the House, Mann and Ornstein believe that party concerns trump institutional ones. The Republican majority of the past few years, especially in the House, has shown concern for passing legislation that reflects the policy concerns of the majority of the majority party, but cares little for institutional norms. The list of problems is long including the frequent use of closed rules, the lack of oversight of the executive, the threat to end Senate filibusters with the “nuclear option,” and the way fundraising and lobbying has reinforced party interests over institutional ones.

Gingrich’s book is a larger blueprint for the future of America, a “twenty-first century contract with America” to follow the more famous contract of 1994, and a number of his recommendations focus on the institution that he led.

Gingrich’s original contract was born out the long suffering of the Republican minority in Congress. This led to Republican criticisms that the final years of Democratic rule were dismissive of the minority, using secret and heavy handed tactics to keep Republicans from airing their side of the story. The book is not openly critical of the Hastert speakership, but in other places, he has hinted that Republicans have gone back on some of the reforms that they advocated in 1994, especially with regard to allowing more open rules and more votes on the alternatives of the minority party.

Gingrich’s main themes in his book are transparency of government, congressional oversight, and employment of some of the best practices of the private sector. On oversight, Congress, he notes, gets most of its information from outside experts, and he sees room for great improvement in the process of collecting and synthesizing this information, calling for task forces and other bodies that cut across the traditional committee jurisdictions to seek out links to experts on discrete policy proposals.

Gingrich is also for sunshine. Here he focuses his contempt especially on the appropriations process, which is too secretive and leads to too many poorly thought out earmarks. He advocates at least a seventy-two hour public disclosure of earmarks.

Whether the prescription is the return to traditional norms advocated by Mann and Ornstein or the breaking down of secrecy and old jurisdictions by Gingrich, both books get at the same fundamental issue. Can Congress be an effective independent player in a world where party interests are unified and magnified?

Norman Ornstein and Newt Gingrich work with Fortier at AEI, and Thomas Mann has been a colleague on joint AEI-Brookings projects. Fortier is a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.