By Phil Huber, ADVANCE COLUMNIST
A quarter of Fredericksburg-area workers draw a federal paycheck or a federal contract—Quantico and A.P. Hill, VRE riders bound for Washington agencies, contractors, veterans, retirees—so when Congress can’t do its job, we feel it before most of the country does. Article I of the Constitution made Congress the first branch of government for a reason: It writes the laws, controls the money, and declares the wars, so no single man could act like a king. Not the president. Congress. That’s the whole design.
This 119th Congress has walked away from nearly every part of that job description, and it didn’t take a leak, a whistleblower, or an investigative unit to find the evidence—it’s sitting in plain sight on Congress.gov, in GAO reports, and in the Congressional Record. On raw legislative output, it has enacted only 104 laws in over 600 days—a pace that, while ahead of its record-low predecessor at the same stage, is still far short of the 360-plus laws Congresses routinely passed in the 2000s. Anyone with an afternoon and a search bar can compile this list. Here it is, ten counts deep, followed by the sentence that sums up how the country feels about it: Gallup has Congress at 10 percent approval and 86 percent disapproval, tying the all-time record, with only 3 percent of Democratic voters and a collapsing share of Republican voters approving of the job either party is doing with the gavel.
1. Immigration. This is the one job the Constitution names outright—Article I, Section 8 gives Congress, not the president, the power to write the rules of naturalization and admission. Both parties have dodged doing it for more than thirty years, telling voters every election cycle that the system is broken while never fixing it. Republicans killed their own party’s bipartisan 2024 border deal within 48 hours because Trump wanted the chaos alive for his campaign more than he wanted it solved. Then in 2026, after CBP agents killed Alex Pretti, both parties took turns triggering two shutdowns fighting over enforcement rules and a voter ID bill instead of passing an actual law. Thirty years, two parties, zero statute.
2. War powers. House Republicans voted down a resolution forcing debate on the Iran conflict. Even the ranking Democrat calling it out has his own party’s record of ducking war votes when it’s inconvenient.
3. Tariffs. Only Congress can lay duties, yet it let Trump tax imports by declaring “emergencies.” The Senate passed bipartisan resolutions to stop him; the House let them die “at the desk.” The Supreme Court struck the tariffs down 6–3 in February 2026—and Congress still hasn’t reclaimed that power, letting the administration swap in new tariffs on dozens of countries under other statutes instead.
4. The power of the purse. Congress alone is supposed to decide how tax money gets spent, and it wrote the 1974 Impoundment Control Act specifically to stop a president from overriding that after Nixon tried it. The GAO—Congress’s own watchdog—has since found the administration illegally withheld approved funds at least six times, including money for Head Start, FEMA aid, and school energy upgrades. Zero enforcement followed any of the six.
5. Oversight, selectively applied. A former attorney general has skipped two House Oversight subpoenas with no consequence, while the same committee found energy to hold the Clintons in contempt for the identical offense.
6. Attendance versus pay. Two shutdowns this year plus a 43-day one last fall, 900,000 workers furloughed, TSA officers quitting by the thousands unpaid—and the members who caused the mess kept their own full salary the entire time. Fewer than four in ten bothered to voluntarily decline it. Try explaining that to anyone who has ever punched a clock: No call, no show, full pay, on schedule.
7. Self-dealing. Decades of promises on stock trading produced only a July 2026 House bill that lets sitting members keep what they already hold, now stalled in the Senate, while ten senators trade in sectors their own committees oversee.
8. Artificial intelligence. The House buried a ten-year ban on state AI laws inside last year’s budget mega-bill; the Senate stripped it 99–1. A year later, a bipartisan House discussion draft proposing a narrower three-year preemption is still stuck in neutral, unlikely to clear committee—so there’s still no federal framework and no state backstop, just a debate that keeps not happening.
9. Social Security. The 2026 Trustees Report moved insolvency to 2032—an automatic 22 percent benefit cut for retirees absent action. Nothing is being done.
10. Regular order. Budgets now pass almost entirely by party-line reconciliation instead of debate and committee work, whichever party holds the gavel, cutting the minority and the public out of the room.
Ten counts, one term, and that’s only what fit in a thousand words, no indictment followed any of them, because the only jury that can convict this Congress is us. So, here’s what conviction looks like, starting now:
· Vet before you vote. In every primary between now and 2028, ask each candidate: will you legislate on immigration, tariffs, and spending instead of using them as fundraising props, and will you show up for the inconvenient war-powers and oversight votes?
· Show up earlier than November. County committee meetings, both parties, are where candidates get picked, months before a general election ballot ever exists.
· Back the accountability bills with teeth. Support Graham’s push to withhold congressional pay during a shutdown, a real stock-trading ban with no loopholes, and enforcement of the Impoundment Control Act Congress already wrote.
· Recruit someone. If nobody on your ballot will say yes to any of that, go find a plainspoken neighbor willing to run, or run yourself.
This Congress isn’t going to fire itself for missing ten assignments in one term, and no ethics committee is coming to do it for us. We have exactly one tool that works, and only if enough of us use it every time it’s available, not just in presidential years: the ballot. Use it and bring a neighbor who’s never bothered before.
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Phil Huber is a retired Army Reserve colonel, federal civil servant and consultant who writes on civic education. He lives in Fredericksburg.
On point.
Unsettlingly accurate.