As U.S. Politics Gets Messy, Disciplined Operators Can Clean Up

Stories from my Capitol Hill reporting days

I was a federal tax journalist for four years starting in November 2014, which turned out to be a pivotal period. My first beat, for two years, was Capitol Hill, where I witnessed the twilight of pre-Trump American politics and aftermath of his election.

The stories I share below mix the fading vestiges of good humor in Congress — which January 6th killed off — with the complacency of Senate Democrats and rowdy dysfunction of House Republicans, which facilitated Trump’s courtship of working-class voters and crushing of the GOP establishment. To quote a friend, Trump’s superpower is making his opponents the worst versions of themselves (lately his supporters too). Another friend observes that in the past ten-plus years Washington went from colorful and full of possibility to paranoid and angry.

I promised myself I would never write an opinion column about national politics, but the spectacle of Trump bragging about his month-old second term in a joint address to Congress while Democrats played into his hands with performative gestures finally got to me. An old man waving his cane at another old man is not our country’s future.

An Opening for Abundance Liberals

Trump’s chaotic incompetence — exemplified by his choice to raise consumer prices and tank the stock market with tariffs — and progressives’ impotence in confronting him have created a large political opening. Disciplined operators can seize it by tenaciously prioritizing voters’ perennial top concern, the economy, which now centers on inflation in the short term and cost of living in the medium term (build more housing). Political leaders will have to help restore our sense that we live in a positive-sum world and can build a better future for ourselves and our loved ones.

I respect people in the arena and fully recognize that it is too easy for me to criticize from afar. I grasp the turbulence and temptations of online media and the rabid bases’ emotional bite. I think all the time about my mentor

Jonathan Rauch

’s 2016 diagnosis of American political insanity as the product of weakening political parties and institutions that attention mongers had reduced to publicity platforms.

House Republicans are ‘terrified of their voters,’ a House GOP staffer told me about three years ago. Still, I have to wonder why so many holders of Federal office do not hold to the discipline that I, a political amateur, picked up as a YIMBY group founder, from message discipline, to not letting opponents bait you, to focusing on a few top priorities. I understand that single-issue advocacy is simpler than being a member of Congress. But our leaders’ antics do not have to be this mind-numbingly predictable.

And yet, I am unsure that the past decade’s political insanity is different in kind from the Congress I saw up close, which barely passed budget and appropriations bills, only meekly asserted its war-making authority, and struggled to build coalitions around any issue. The only exception that united lawmakers was praising the state of Israel, with jarring forcefulness and uncannily precise repetition of specific phrases.

The Senate was more deliberate and restrained, which I liked, yet all of Congress was petty and flamboyant and disconnected from regular people’s everyday economic concerns. I do not recall any mention of the high cost of housing or childcare. I did watch senators open a tax oversight hearing by gushing about their iPhones to Apple CEO Tim Cook. In retrospect, it makes sense that many working-class voters abandoned Democrats for Trump. Democratic shrugging amid weak job and GDP growth prefigured gaslighting about inflation under President Biden. The late Harry Reid, longtime leader of Senate Dems, was amused and baffled when asked (by the phenomenal reporter Alan Ota) about the emerging idea of a student debt bubble.

Bumbling My Way Around the Halls of Power

Roaming the halls of the Capitol and congressional office buildings thrust me against American politics’ sweaty underbelly. My first big memory on the job is watching a reporter query Bill Nelson — former astronaut, then a Democratic senator from Florida, later the administrator of NASA. It was just the three of us. Leering at the reporter, he ignored her question then said, “You remind me of Madonna in ‘Evita!’ ” It was, mercifully, the most inappropriate behavior I ever witnessed as a journalist.

Notwithstanding the importance of transparency, reporting taught me that legislative negotiations must be confidential, even as I worked hard with my colleagues to extract every possible detail from behind closed doors. I particularly remember when a Senate staffer gave us a draft of a sensitive compromise the Obama Administration was negotiating with the Senate Finance Committee, to kill it, which our article did.

Before we get too far, I need to disclaim that I was too inexperienced and, more than anything else, immature to handle being a congressional reporter or, really, almost any professional setting. I was world-class at getting questions answered, an above-average writer, but struggled with deadlines and normal human etiquette. I was part of a team that did excellent, technical work, and I was a dumb kid. On that note …

At the time I was a philosophical anarchist. So my ideology was easy to separate from my work, which I was very intentional about. The only potential exception was my feeling of disgust as I decided not to write about a press conference where business owners expressed hope for a higher minimum wage to damage their competitors. My biases were so impractical as to be irrelevant. I did relish the bizarre dramatic irony of first shaking hands with IRS Commissioner John Koskinen — a good man — in a conference room at the IRS “mothership,” smiling and thinking to myself, “You have no idea that I am an anarchist.”

I comfortably cultivated Democratic staffers on the Hill, leaning into my lefty-flavored stances like, ‘Obviously drugs should be legal,’ effectively enough that a couple of them actually glanced around then told me, ‘OK, I can see you are on my side of things, so let me tell you what’s going on.’ If anything, I was harder on the Republicans I nominally agreed with, which was just as well because so was the press corps in general. Reporters’ personal politics leaned heavily left (duh). A few young Politico reporters mocked Senator Bob Corker’s Tennessee drawl, but the vast majority of journalists I worked alongside truly tried to avoid bias, inevitable as it was.

I had positive and negative impressions of and interactions with GOP and Dem members of Congress without too much of a pattern.¹ I gravitated toward the Senate, controlled then by Democrats, which is probably why they feature prominently here.

A World Unto Itself

You have to understand that Capitol Hill is a world unto itself. You cannot assess it from the outside. By the end of my abortive journalism career, I only trusted someone to know what was going on in Congress if they had been on the Hill in the past 24 hours. Caucus leadership largely entails trying to control the narrative and place blame. Republicans were always at a slight disadvantage, which was just the reality.

Still, Harry Reid, every bit as pugilistic as you could hope a former boxer to be, undeniably excelled at this dark art, though Mitch McConnell was a worthy foil. I will never forget Reid forcing Republicans to vote down an amendment to approve the Keystone XL pipeline that he had poison-pilled. With a self-satisfied smirk visible from space, Reid took the Senate floor to lecture his foes: “These Republicans …”

Iowa Republican Senator Chuck Grassley had his own singular gift for knowing which way the wind was blowing in the moment. As a teenager, I thought he was insincere and of dubious principle, which I guess he was, but up close I came to appreciate and even respect him as the ultimate political animal. Maybe my favorite memory from the Hill was with him on the Senate’s little subway:²

Me: ‘Hi senator, may I join you? I want to ask you about something.’

Grassley: ‘Oh sure.’

Me: ‘But we can talk off the record.’

Grassley, immediately and offhandedly: ‘Oh, I don’t care.’

Though Grassley was not trying to be funny, senators had a sense of humor that seems to be missing from Congress these days.

Another favorite memory was with Ohio Republican Rob Portman, who had a fondness for me, maybe because I was always asking technical questions (he was reputedly the smartest member of Congress), plus I was barely older than his son. Late one day, Portman and another senator, I think John Hoeven, sauntered up to me and another reporter outside of the Senate chamber. ‘Look at these reporters! What are these guys doing?’ one asked; the other replied, ‘Yeah, no one really likes reporters.’ And I looked straight at them and said, ‘Well, you know who is even less popular than reporters?’ A bit edgy of me, but they were good sports, immediately lowering their gaze, feigning mournful regret and self-reflection. The whole thing was hilarious.

The Devolution was Televised

Ominously, it turned out, members loved being on TV. Elizabeth Warren — a nice person but the least sincere member of Congress in my experience — did not bat an eye when she got the exact same question from the same reporter twice in one press conference, several minutes apart. They were “getting the shot” for TV: ‘We’ve been hearing a lot about compromise this week, senator, but is this a compromise that goes too far??’ I tried to pin Warren down as she vaguely threatened to block some must-pass legislation, only to have other reporters condescendingly explain as the presser broke up that she never was going to answer. In fairness, the most dangerous place in Washington was between Charles Schumer and a television camera. Maybe it still is:

However, TV coverage seemed to become truly dominant on the Hill around 2017. Print reporters — who write the news, with detailed information — lost a lot of ground. The cause was not Trump’s election per se, but rather Congress and the media’s reaction to it. My colleagues still on the Hill beat said the Capitol suddenly had twice as many reporters, many seeking reactions to Trump’s latest incendiary or simply insane statement. Hallway press scrums became chaotic. Longtime reporters struggled to simply ask lawmakers questions. Senators were mobbed on their way to floor votes; the press galleries (career staff who credential reporters and manage their designated workspaces) had to step in for fear that elderly lawmakers would be knocked over. Capitol Police began randomly stopping reporters to check press passes.

A few reporters started prowling the halls with a small digital TV camera in tow. One from CNBC interrupted me mid-question to interview Trump’s Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who of course obliged her, all of us walking briskly, my exasperated reaction just out of frame. I stuck with him and got my questions in, then peeled off, feeling incredulous as I stood alone. I do not want to know what the Hill is like now.

Congressional Leaders Did This to Themselves

Politicians have always prioritized reelection, and performative gestures have been supplanting the discrete and thus unglamorous work of actually legislating at least since Newt Gingrich oozed onto the national stage. “Why don’t you write the article about how they should bring back earmarks so they can at least get something done around here?” a particularly flinty reporter told a colleague as they commiserated in the Senate press gallery on April 16th, 2013, when I was still just an intern. I immediately jotted that down because it struck me as outrageous. Wikipedia defines an earmark as “a provision inserted into a discretionary spending appropriations bill that directs funds to a specific recipient while circumventing the merit-based or competitive funds allocation process.” This parochialism, also called pork barrel spending, is widely viewed as a form of graft or even outright corruption.

The next year the same reporter elbowed me away from Reid, who graciously turned to let me to finish my follow-up question. But maybe because of his personality, that reporter spoke a hard truth: limiting parochial appropriations fueled Congress's ineffectiveness and empty show. A few-million dollars would be a small price to pay for a Congress that regularly passes bills — for some semblance of state capacity in our national legislature. It is difficult to imagine how, without earmarks, to reform entitlement or national defense spending and put the national debt on a sustainable course, which a few Republicans back then still claimed to care about, which was nice. A dozen years ago, $10 billion over ten years was a big tax bill — how quaint.

John Boehner crusaded against earmarks, consolidating power in the speakership and committees, limiting rank and file House Republicans’ role in legislating to such a degree that they had nothing better to do than depose him, and push out his successor Paul Ryan, and depose his successor Kevin McCarthy. Nancy Pelosi, Reid, and McConnell similarly centralized power and eroded regular order. Boehner was rough around the edges but had a good heart. I watched his famously weepy eyes well up as he expressed concern about a potentially disturbed young man who was arrested for plotting to poison him, saying something like, ‘I hope he gets the help he needs.’

Boehner also has the unfortunate distinction of being the only politician I ever saw respond to a shouted question after they left a podium. Someone asked a retreating Boehner, “Is a shutdown off the table?” Then some bro-ish reporter said, “So a shutdown’s on the table.” And Boehner turned and said, “What??? ... Agh ... No!” Everyone laughed, a welcome break in a tension that is today almost normal.

McConnell calculated that he could appease MAGA by voting — against his conscience — not to convict Trump for inciting the January 6th riot because he thought Trump’s political career was dead. He gave it life. He failed to do his duty.

Re-Domesticating Our Nation’s Political Animals

Ezra Klein has recently been exploring our … institutional challenges on his podcast, surfacing useful insights. Yuval Levin gave him an astute diagnosis that included Congress surrendering its primacy as the most important Federal branch. I strongly urge you to listen to the whole conversation using a podcast app. Levin notes that our political system no longer aligns ambition with good governance or problem-solving.

Politics inherently attracts plenty of egotistical, feckless, venal people, no question, but even some of our most degenerate elected officials are still extremely talented at getting things done. We must rediscover how to harness all of that slippery talent.

Media theorist Martin Gurri offered Klein a grim prognosis: America’s future leaders must master — as Trump has — always-on, performative social media while still somehow engaging in complex statecraft. I am skeptical and think we can do better.

Klein has recognized and cogently argued that Trump’s political position is fundamentally weak. MAGA is drunk on a razor-thin popular vote win and a Republican House majority that Levin said is the smallest since the U.S. added its 50th state. Levin argues that presidential elections have been narrow for decades for the simple reason that neither party has a clear majority; the constitutional system was designed to incentivize elected leaders to build coalitions and broaden their appeal. Trump’s gains with non-white and young voters in 2024 dispelled any lingering notion of demographic trends inherently, systemically favoring Democrats. Trump won some 43% of the Latino vote in 2024. And states that Vice President Harris won could lose 12 electoral college votes in 2030. Build housing, build power!

Perhaps now that Trump and Musk are showing just how powerful the executive branch is, Democrats will internalize the need to limit that power. One last story:

In the shellshocked aftermath of Trump’s 2016 election, my senior editor gave me a special assignment. I was to ascertain whether Trump as president would be able to unilaterally enact tariffs, without legislative action. After I researched the matter and interviewed some experts, the definitive answer was no: a president technically has authority to enact tariffs as an emergency measure on national security grounds, but that would be a heinous abuse of power. Then, one way or another, Trump … unilaterally enacted tariffs. Biden kept many of those trade restrictions in place, under the same authority. And now Trump is back at it, trashing our alliance with Canada.

For our institutions to function, our leaders will have to mortify themselves enough to respect the bounds of their authority, especially if we are only able to reform our institutions on the margins. It is fashionable for both warring political factions to scoff at “norms.” Right-wing reactionaries grotesquely compared the 2016 election to Flight 93, which crashed in a Pennsylvania field on 9/11 (the memorial is beautiful and worth visiting). Biden left much of Trump’s executive overreach in place and tried to amend the Constitution by fiat days before leaving office. Now Senate Democrats debate whether to shut down the Federal government.

Three Women Showing Disciplined Leadership

Three Democratic women in Congress have recently shown how our leaders should speak and act in this difficult, divisive era, focusing on solving problems.

House member Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, a Democrat representing a rural Washington State district that Trump won, got a lot of attention after the 2024 election, drawing praise for her pragmatic, plainspoken devotion to working-class issues like right to repair. As chronicled by

Jennifer Pahlka

, Gluesenkamp Perez told the story of how a constituent complained that daycare workers were not allowed to peel bananas to give kids a wholesome snack, which was considered food preparation, but could open bags of chips. The congresswoman investigated and, after various bureaucrats told her the claim was false, discovered that food preparation laws did in fact regulate banana-peeling. Instead of giving up or dismissing her constituent, she got to the bottom of the issue. Then she set to work on legislation to fix it.

Stop telling constituents they're wrong

Representative Sarah McBride, a freshman Democrat from Delaware, refused to take the bait when House Republicans sought to limit her access to women’s restrooms. As the first out trans person elected to Congress, McBride was already in an inherently tough position before the House GOP debased itself. She pointedly does not want to be reduced to her gender identity, nor do I wish to do so, but her dignity and resolve is truly exceptional and worth celebrating. This is real leadership I rarely saw on the Hill:

I honestly had barely heard of Elissa Slotkin, freshman senator from Michigan, before she delivered the Democratic response to President Trump’s recent joint address, so the standard caveats apply. Yet her speech was an obvious triumph, all the more notable because response speeches are usually tinny and often embarrassing. I think her CIA and DoD background contributed to her authoritative poise and cool restraint, rare qualities in the standard former prosecutor/trial lawyer politician. (I do not like the national security state, just work with me here.)

The speech itself, including her delivery, seemed like it might actually connect with normal people and effectively speak to their kitchen table concerns, starting with the economy and the cost of living crisis. I can only assume a lot of folks on the left hated her appeals to Regan conservatives, but you know what? Reagan conservatives are the new Reagan Democrats, which is to say, potential Democratic voters. You want to defeat MAGA? You need moderates and some conservatives. You need a coalition of people who think differently from each other and have fundamental disagreements. Please, figure it out. Trump has hardcore Zionists and antisemites working for him.

Unfortunately, Senator Slotkin’s message was overshadowed by her fellow Democrats’ theatrical interruptions of Trump. My greatest concern for the YIMBY and abundance movements is that we might allow ourselves to be distracted, and lose our focus.

An Abundance of Hope

Mood music:

Covering Congress shifted my politics from idealism and a rejection of institutions to pragmatism and a desire to make them work on a basic level. I am no longer an anarchist. I realized that coercion is a fact of life, core to human nature, if you like. It cannot be eliminated, only minimized. As the impulse to justify my most extreme beliefs faded, I saw value in centrism and taking more situational stances on issues. I want to underline this point. Partisans and ideologues scoff at centrism and moderation but pragmatists gravitate toward them because they are effective. The median voter picks the winner of an election. Broad appeals work best in the long run.

All of this reflection leads me to cautious optimism and, I hope, reassurance to my friends and fellow travelers in the YIMBY and abundance movements, that we are on the right track. One good sign is that our work is dry and obscure. Another is that we are building power from the bottom up, into a community of action-oriented, results-driven individuals and organizations. The YIMBY movement really is as simple as trying to figure out how to build more housing. The abundance movement similarly seems to boil down to: How do we build the things we need, create state capacity, and restore major institutions to be functional? How do we make our civilization succeed?

Longtime readers know I often come back to the four core values I set for my YIMBY group: civility and integrity, action orientation, focus on housing, and non-partisan pluralism. The Abundance Network’s values are humility, curiosity, and outcome-focus. We are offering an alternative for Americans frustrated by the politics of hubris, rage, and legalism. They will be attracted to our vision and work. We will win.

Thanks to my 964 subscribers, especially my 14 paid subscribers. If you enjoy this blog or want to work together please contact lucagattonicelli@substack.com. I founded the grassroots pro-housing organization YIMBYs of Northern Virginia and live in Alexandria near DC.

1. In case you are curious, even for a Senate freshman, Kamala Harris had a surprisingly low profile, considering that she represented California. I had heard from a friend that she was Democratic elites’ great hope for the future after Trump’s 2016 win, but she was unremarkable and otherwise underwhelming when I saw her participating in a hearing.

2. To be fully accurate, the Senate has two subway lines while the House has one.