Washington
Monthly

June/July/August

2014

Why did Congress not see the health exchange disaster coming? Why was it caught unawares by the extent of the NSA's surveillance programs? Why are senior House committee chairmen in safe seats quitting Congress altogether?

These seemingly disparate phenomena share the same profound but poorly understood root cause: Congress is getting stupider. Not in terms of the IQ of its members (though that's debatable) but in the capacity of the institution to evaluate information and understand complex topics. The reason is a 25-year campaign by conservatives to cut congressional staff, shrink investigative agencies like the General Accountability Office, and generally lobotomize Congress' brain. As Paul Glastris and Haley Sweetland Edwards explain in the cover story of the latest Washington Monthly, the result is increasing outsourcing of policymaking to K Street lobbyists, think tanks, and other vested interests while Congress looses its ability to conduct oversight of the executive branch, thereby setting up government to fail.

Read "The Big Lobotomy: How Republicans Made Congress Stupid."

Can Listicles Fund the Baghdad Bureau?

How BuzzFeed and HuffPo manage to do real journalism. For now.

by Steven Waldman

 Talk of the TOONS 

  Why the White Working Class Matters  

The bad news: Dems can't govern without them. The good news: Blue-collar whites are far more diverse than during the era of the Reagan Democrats. 

 Beyond Identity Politics

To reach the white working class, promise an economy that "works for everyone."

The Last Interesting Centrist

How corporations became people you can't sue.
by Lina Khan

N POLITICAL BOOKS

 Alone on His Own Ice Floe 

How Antonin Scalia ceased to be a powerhouse jurist and became a crank.
by Michael O'Donnell

The visionary guidance counselor in a poor urban high school discovers why some top colleges don't want even his best students: money.

by Elias Vlanton

How FDR redefined freedom and changed America.

by Moshe Z. Marvit

Two D.C. schools, a traditional public and a nonunionized charter, are experimenting with socioeconomic integration.

by Richard D. Kahlenberg