Philip Wallach argues for a return to frequent debates within the U.S. House of Representatives.

When matters are decided behind closed doors, many citizens suspect they are being sold out—and plenty of members are willing to voice those concerns. Given how little input most members have into the content of final deals, it is unsurprising that they object to the whole process.

Many congressional debates are, in fact, quite stale, but it hardly follows that we are better off skipping straight to the end of the process without bothering with public debates. Reason-giving in a public forum is the essence of republican self-government. Legitimacy is created as much by the “how” as by the “what,” and that is true even if hefty supermajorities support bills. When skeptics of the procedural status quo … call out the process as imperious and complain that their valid criticisms have been ignored rather than thoughtfully rejected, the lack of a public record makes it impossible to write them off.

Withered deliberation is at the heart of many of our most intractable policy issues. The Congress’s ability to deal with immigration and border security, for example, has been poisoned by immigration hawks’ decades-long sense that their perspective was being systematically excluded from debate by bien-pensant dealmakers who derided critics as racists or xenophobes. Even when leaders have supported big deals (as in 2007 and 2018), they have not structured the process to include all voices, and the hawks have found various ways to tank their vaunted bipartisan deals.

Members ought to resist the desiccation of their branch of government—but, for now, they nearly all prioritize acting as loyal members of their partisan teams. Some of the House members who threatened to vote against Johnson in the 119th Congress expressed their dissatisfaction about the structuring of the legislative process, but they ultimately did not put up much of a fight, let alone outline a clear alternative vision. And every one of them supported a new rules package (unlikely to be changed in mid-course) without any public dissent, even though there were few changes from the rules governing the 118th.