Working in Congress Sucks

How to fix everything with one neat trick.

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Sarah, Steve, and Jonah take a break from the typical roundtable punditry to get a little more big picture. How do we fix Congress? What does the Israel-Hamas hostage swap mean for the future of the war? Should you lie to your kids for the sake of certain holiday traditions? Has feminism cost us Thanksgiving? All that and:

β€”Congressional term limits

β€”Expanding the House of Representatives

β€”Repealing Citizens United

β€”Easy answers to the Israel-Hamas War

β€”Biden’s endorsement of a ceasefire

β€”Elf on the shelf: literally 1984?

Show notes:

–Thursday’s Morning Dispatch

–George Will: Restoration: Congress, Term Limits and the Recovery of Deliberative Democracy

–Jonah: George Will Called Me An Idiot

–Restoring the Guardrails of Democracy

–Jay Cost on The Remnant

–Jonathan Martin: To Departing House Members

–Guido Sarducci – Pay For Your Sins

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Comments (94)
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  1. Aaron H Frank

    Christmas has always made me a little queasy. But I like that my daughter still believes in magic. I am the one who usually moves our elf. My daughter told me she didn't believe in our elf anymore but she still will not touch or move her.

    At the start of the show Sarah was complaining about having to do the show. Now, I am a big fan of Sarah but what about hearing some of the other Dispatch women? Does "The Dispatch" have a Lina Lamont problem?

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  2. Markurk9

    True, reforming campaign financing to something like the Texas β€œNo Limits - Full Discloser” model, will not immediately resolve the issue with week political parties. Donors big and small will give to the shiny spectacle candidate. In time those donors, especially the large donors will want some return on there investment. Improving return on investment will require winning not just one, but several seats in the House and in the Senate and the Presidency. This will lead like minded donors to cooperate and select candidates that can win elections and will work to fulfill the donors’ priorities. These cooperations with begin to look like political parties. With the donations to political parties and candidates being public, the constituents in the House district, in the State, and Nationwide, will have a fair idea where the candidate and the donors stand on issues. I may not happen this way, but I think it might.

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    Peter Markevich

    My β€œone neat trick” to fix Congress is multi-member districts, in combination with a moderate increase in House members.

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  4. James Bennett

    Where's the Steve's wife's turkey recipe?

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    Simon J. Dodd

    Here's what I like about Sarah's solution. Most of the time, foolish, failed change begets more change. Congress passes a law, it doesn't work and it causes unexpected bad secondary effects, so Congress passes another law to patch it up, then that doesn't work; rinse, repeat. Sarah's solution fixes failed change in the best way, the way of Dobbs: It reverses the original mistake and stops.

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    O.W.L.

    Sarah--your moral intuition about Elf on the Shelf is right on. Not only is it 1984-ish, it teaches kids a transactional form of morality. You only do the right thing because somebody is watching. Same problem with the "naughty or nice" Santa stories.

    We taught our kids that they got presents from Santa because they are loved. We also were up front about some of the presents being from grandparents or from us. The idea was that if you love somebody, you want them to be happy and surprising a person you love with a present makes them happy, and seeing people you love being happy makes YOU happy. When they got a little older and started asking logistical questions about how Santa could defy gravity and then drop down a chimney we explained that Santa is a saint (or a spirit, or a story, YMMV) that teaches us how to give joyfully.

    We weren't super concrete about Santa--it was more of a story than "he's going to be here tonight--leave him some cookies." All of our kids are responsible taxpayers, so nobody was traumatized by being lied to.

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      Everett Zabriskie

      From my perspective as a pastor for now 62 years, father of three, grandfather of five and countless Sunday School kids and children's sermons during worship, this sounds right. On the question of lying to your kids: there is a difference between serving your own interests at the expense of your kids morality and telling your kids a story that fits their current emotional and intellectual abilities to help them learn something important. The first is comprehensive and unmitigated lying, as you must first lie to yourself about parenting and then to your child. The second is being a loving and competent parent.

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  7. Tkmaeder

    Great podcast! I really like the idea of pulling out further to examine issues of the day, spitballing solutions and debating outcomes. I look forward to more of this this month.
    I agree with Sarah that something is lost when you don't spend the entire day together preparing a meal. Divvying up the work as my girls have gotten older, while initially hard for me, has become something they look forward to and keeps us engaged and involved in our favorite holiday!

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  8. Ines.Maricel.Perez

    I just went to a vegetarian Thanksgiving. It was great! Family get together, half cooking together, half potluck, going without a turkey does not mean no Thanksgiving spirit.

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  9. Bard Geesaman

    You were doing great until the very end. When it comes to explosive diarrhea, it’s all about the destination.

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    Michael Berkowitz

    Note: The eight kids and seventeen grandkids do not make me think I'm any kind of expert on child-rearing, but at least my experiences haven't shown what I'm about to say to be definitely π˜„π—Ώπ—Όπ—»π—΄: Kids learn from their environments 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. I doubt that this or that lie, this or that bad experience -- or this or that swat, for that matter -- is likely to have lasting effects. We sometimes remember some particular event or some particular thing that someone said when we were young and think, "That's how I got to be this way," but it seems more likely that the day-to-day feelings of care or neglect, attention or indifference, approval or disdain (and, of course, a healthy dose of genetics) are what's determinative. And, of course, there's free will, so kids aren't going to be just the sum of what you've done to them.

    Furthermore, there's value to the time your family spends π—»π—Όπ˜„, regardless of how it affects the trajectory of your kids' lives. So if your elf-on-the-shelf creates good times, I doubt that by itself it will cause such harm as to outweigh that.

    (Note, too, that the Berkowitzes have never experienced an elf-on-the-shelf.)

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