President Donald Trump addresses a joint session of Congress on March 4. (Ricky Carioti /The Washington Post)
Opinion
By Theodore R. Johnson Feel like Congress doesn’t care what you want? You’re right.
Once in office, politicians have little motivation to obey the will of their constituents. July 7, 2025 at 6:15 a.m. EDT, Yesterday at 6:15 a.m. EDT, 5 min
If you want to understand why more Americans find democracy less attractive these days, look at Congress’s handling of Donald Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill.
Polls show most of the public opposes the legislation. Its two primary attributes are that it increases the deficit by more than $3 trillion and cuts social safety net programs by upward of $1 trillion. Republicans are supposed to hate the former; Democrats, the latter. Nearly 60 percent of Americans say reducing the federal budget deficit should be a top priority, and more than 80 percent have a favorable view of Medicaid. But instead of dying in committee, the sweeping bill that defies both public opinion and the parties’ core ideologies passed Congress on Thursday, and Trump signed it into law at a White House ceremony featuring a military flyover and a crowing gaggle of politicians who claim to have the people’s mandate. Which part of this democratic process is supposed to be appealing? Make sense of the latest news and debates with our daily newsletter
There are nearly 100 million nonvoters in the United States, and the two most common reasons they give for opting out of elections are because they think their votes don’t matter and because they don’t like the candidates. That’s a familiar sentiment: I sat out elections for 15 years, thinking, What’s the point? They do whatever they want anyway. Democracy is less charming when there’s little faith that politicians will keep their word in a system that already feels unrepresentative. The real challenge, however, isn’t that campaign promises get broken; it’s that the transactional nature of politics means promises broken to one group are promises kept to another.
