-Welcome to the United States capital,
where the nation's laws are made
and the people's voices are heard.
-Wow. That's amazing!
-Yeah, whatever you say, kid.
Congress just doesn't work like it used to.
Nowadays, you're lucky if they even let you in the door.
You see, Congress is not getting much of anything done.
Whoa!
-They see a government
that's either uninterested or incapable.
-And so what we mostly do around this body is not pass laws.
-Regular order -- where a bill goes through committee,
passes both legislative bodies, and then a compromise is struck
between the House and Senate version --
is more a myth from the past
than the way Congressional business is handled these days.
-One way to understand the lack of involvement
of rank-and-file members these days
is to think of committee hearings and committee work
and also amendments, especially in the Senate.
-Rank-and-file Congressmen now attend fewer committee hearings
than ever before that are related to actual legislation.
By 2007 and 2008, less than 15% of legislation
was considered under open rules.
Now they don't even exist.
Leadership has total control
over what gets a vote on the House floor.
And when those bills reach the floor,
lawmakers have fewer chances than ever to amend legislation.
-In the Senate, an amendment
is what used to be a treasured aspect of life,
and it was a way for the rank-and-file senator
to get involved in legislation.
It really fundamentally changes the nature of the Senate
if 55% of what they're doing
is just confirming presidential nominees
and they're not doing the legislative work
that they used to do.
More often than not, the way legislation works today
is it's all based on looming deadlines --
some of them real, some of them imposed by Congress.
-Each incoming leader has promised things
would be different.
-Senator McConnell, I believe this is a new day in Washington.
-We need to return to regular order.
-Let's open up the process.
Let people participate.
-We need to open up.
-Our efforts are going to be to work on a bipartisan basis.
-In other words, we need to return to regular order.
-But eventually, everybody ends up abandoning that pledge.
It just gets to this point where each leader
eventually sees an easy path or a hard path,
and they all take the easy path.
-In our system, the legislative branch
is supposed to be the center of our politics.
Number two, it's not.
-One of the most frightening things
to both longtime veterans of Washington
and even newcomers who are quick learners
is that Congress is now a lesser body than the executive branch.
How does it get better?
That's the question that I asked a couple dozen people,
and the answers were bleak and more bleak.
One answer that came from a longtime veteran --
Dick Shelby, senator from Alabama --
was, "Stay in session longer. More days.
Be around here more often."
-But today's Congress is in session
for about the same amount of time as their predecessors,
except these lawmakers are so much more inefficient
that they work much later into the year.
-Ultimately, I talked to David Krone,
the chief of staff to Harry Reid when he was majority leader,
and he was the one who gave the most bleak answer.
He said that he often now gets asked how to make things better,
when's it gonna get better,
and he compares it to the Hollywood movie
where an asteroid is hurtling toward Earth.
Always in the movie, someone -- Bruce Willis, Will Smith --
is launched up in outer space and saves the Earth.
David tells anyone who asks,
and when he describes this about Congress and the situation,
he always says the same thing.
"The asteroid is gonna hit.
The asteroid is going to hit."