Lawmakers have been striking important deals lately. The lack of fanfare is intentional.
A mong American institutions, Congress is at once the most transparent and the most reviled. Its votes, hearings, and debates are broadcast live for anyone to see; inside the Capitol, reporters can walk up to just about any of its 535 members and ask why they voted a certain way, or whether the latest reported scandal is true. Unfortunately for lawmakers, all of this visibility has helped make Congress only slightly more popular among U.S. citizens than Vladimir Putin. In early January, just one in six Americans said in a Gallup poll that they approved of the job Congress was doing. The 18 percent rating was the lowest for the legislative branch since the end of the Trump administration and a smidge above the 17 percent of U.S. respondents who said they approved of Putin in a separate survey last year. In the weeks since, however, lawmakers in Washington have gone on something of a bipartisan winning streak. The House overwhelmingly passed legislation to reform the beleaguered U.S. Postal Service. Days later the Senate approved, without a single vote in opposition, a bill proposed in response to the #MeToo movement that bans the use of forced arbitration in workplace sexual-harassment and assault cases. A bipartisan group of senators also announced an agreement on a long-stalled reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act, likely clearing the way for its passage. The secret to this outbreak of productivity is, well, a bit of secrecy. Although these bills would make meaningful changes to American law, none of them has drawn anywhere close to the same amount of attention as the proposals on which Congress has recently floundered— major voting-rights legislation and President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better Act. Camera crews weren’t staking out the negotiating sessions for the mellifluously named Ending Forced Arbitration of Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment Act, nor was every twist and turn of the debate over postal reform generating headlines and news alerts. Two of the proposals did have celebrity advocates: The former Fox News anchor Gretchen Carlson lobbied for the passage of the arbitration ban, while the actor Angelina Jolie pushed to reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act. But for the most part, the authors of these measures were able to haggle quietly over their details, and that’s exactly how they wanted it. “I like to keep as much of the negotiation and the actual compromise private, because otherwise people are forced to the corners by lobbyists and special-interest groups,” Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois, the Senate’s second-ranking Democrat and chair of its Judiciary Committee, told me.
