'Congress is in a coma.' Former lawmakers sound alarm on health of the House

'Congress is in a coma.' Former lawmakers sound alarm on health of the House Congress is wrapping up the year in the shadow of the longest government shutdown and with a growing reputation as the least productive in modern history. "Congress is in a coma. It has a pulse, but not many brainwaves," said former Rep. Jim Cooper, a Democrat who represented Tennessee for 32 years. "It's hard to tell that it's even alive as an institution." A record number of lawmakers are calling it quits ahead of the midterm elections next year and are running for the Capitol exits, pursuing different offices or retiring from political life altogether. While there's a temptation to look at a diminished House as a symptom of the first year of the second Trump administration, former members told NPR that legislative stagnation and low morale have been building for quite some time. Barbara Comstock, a Virginia Republican who serves as president of the Association of Former Members of Congress, said the issues are growing deeper. "We've done studies showing the reason a lot of people are leaving is because it's not functional, because of death threats, because they're not getting anything done," she said in an interview. "The polarization is just dramatically different from even from the 'good old days' when you had the Clinton impeachment, but you got things like welfare and tax reform done," said Comstock, who was a congressional staffer in the 90s and served in Congress from 2015 to 2019. "Even while Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton were going at each other, they realized you still had to get governing done." More than a dozen former House members told NPR they see significant challenges for lawmakers and the institution of Congress. "I don't think anybody wants to have a job where you can't get the job done," said Illinois Democrat Cheri Bustos, who helped recruit candidates to run for office when she led the party's House campaign arm. "Right now," she said, "it's increasingly difficult to get the job done." "You go to Congress because you have ambition to try to fix problems that you see. I got tired of just voting on a bunch of messaging bills that were never going to be taken up by the Senate, that were all pretend." - Former Rep. Reid Ribble, R-Wis., 2011-2017 Former members detailed an increasing centralization of power in party leadership they said comes at the expense of committees. Members once saw committee leadership roles as a path to wield influence and power. Dan Lipinski, an Illinois Democrat who served from 2005 to 2021, said a committee gavel means less now than it used to. "The speaker's office will tell the committee chair, 'this is what we want to see in this bill, this is what we don't want in this bill,'" he told NPR after a day back on Capitol Hill talking to current members about their concerns. "If the committees aren't working, then members don't really have an...

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