Editor’s Note: This is the first essay in the Democracy Project’s new series on Congress

There is a famous maxim, known as Chesterton’s Fence, that the would-be congressional reformer ought to keep in mind. Before you remove a fence, G.K. Chesterton wrote in 1929, you should first understand why it was put there. Congress is not, of course, the product of anyone’s deliberate design, but the residue of two centuries of struggle and adaptation. Still, the principle holds: before reformers tear down what they find, they owe themselves an accounting of what the institution already does reasonably well.

The reigning portrait of Congress is one of unrelieved dysfunction: a polarized talking shop, slow to act and deaf to expertise. The portrait is not false, but it is unbalanced. Congress does three things—representation, lawmaking, and holding executives to account—better than other institutions in our national government, and better than its critics allow.

Take the most fashionable reform on offer: scrapping single-member districts for proportional representation. The case rests on the premise that our system distorts the popular will. On partisanship, the dimension reformers care most about, the distortion is minimal. In 2024, Kamala Harris won 48 percent of the national popular vote; Democrats took 49 percent of House seats and 47 percent of the Senate. In 2020, Joe Biden won 51 percent of the vote, and Democrats held 51 percent of the House and 50 percent of the Senate. The pattern held in the 2010s. After 2016, Democrats’ seat shares—45 percent of the House and 48 percent of the Senate—closely tracked Clinton’s 48 percent of the national vote. In 2012, neither chamber matched on its own—Democrats fell short in the House (46 percent) and ran ahead in the Senate (55 percent)—but the two errors offset, leaving Congress as a whole proportional to Obama’s 51 percent.

Year after year, the parties win approximately the share of congressional power their national support warrants—despite single-member districts, despite the equal representation of states in the Senate, despite pervasive gerrymandering. Ours is a roughly 50–50 country, and we have a roughly 50–50 Congress.

Proportional schemes would also sacrifice something most Americans value and reformers discount: representation rooted in place. Geography is built into the institution. Most members were born and educated in the state they serve. The impulse to wave this away carries a quiet class bias. The affluent and highly educated are the most mobile, and for them party and ideology eclipse a sense of place. But most Americans live near where they were born, and for them shared geography is a basis for trusting that their representatives know and care about them. The national parties are unpopular, and so are most presidents. But members of Congress are consistently popular with their constituents, winning by wide margins and maintaining high public approval. PR wagers that voters would not miss these place-based ties, when for most Americans they may be the strongest bond they feel to Congress.

On lawmaking, the partisans who complain that Congress won’t deliver what they want are largely right. A party in power can rarely enact much of its program alone; it must win support from the other side or settle for less. That constraint is one of the institution’s most valuable features. About 64 percent of important laws since the 1970s cleared the House with a majority of the minority party in support; in the Senate the figure exceeds three-quarters, and these numbers have changed little in 50 years. The frustration partisans feel is the institution demanding that they build beyond their own base. That is worth recalling when reformers call for abolishing the Senate filibuster. Its importance is often overstated, and removing it would probably change less than its proponents hope. But it is one of the restraints that pushes a party to seek votes from its opposition.

Congress’s high bar for legislating has not made it less productive. It passes fewer individual bills but folds far more into omnibus packages; by pages enacted and titles passed, recent Congresses match or exceed those of the 1970s and 1980s.

That brings us to the function most urgent now: holding executives accountable. Across recent presidencies—Trump’s tariffs, emergency declarations, and agency reorganizations, Biden’s loan cancellations, Obama’s immigration orders—both parties have wielded unilateral power aggressively. Those of us who want the federal government to stay within the broad contours of public opinion would like to see the contemporary Congress wield stronger checks on the sweeping actions of today’s unpopular presidents. But a Congress divided almost evenly—as ours must be when the country splits into near-equal halves—rarely overpowers a president. With that said, we misjudge Congress’s check on the presidency if we picture it only in the blunt terms of subpoenas, defunding, and veto overrides, which a divided Congress can seldom muster. Its most constant check is its informing voice of complaint. Through hearings, floor speeches, town halls, interviews, and social media, members continually inform citizens about what their government is doing, making its conduct legible and empowering them to judge at the next election. A Congress that never stops talking, criticizing, and explaining performs a valuable role in holding executive power to account.

None of this makes Congress perfect. It has its bad days. But reforms cannot be judged only by the good we hope they will do. They must be weighed against the good the institution already does—and against the real possibility that change makes things worse.