Contemporary American politics has a central paradox. The electoral space has become the focus of our financial and media attention. Elections and the mechanisms that support them are subject to enormous contestation and innovation. Yet, the supposed purpose of most elections, self-governance in legislative institutions, has atrophied both institutionally and in our imaginations.

Our understanding of politics is centered on the streets, the airwaves, and, increasingly, on our phones. But strangely, politics is not something we imagine in our actual institutions of government.

This displacement is not only a habit of citizens. It has been absorbed by the members themselves. Lawmakers now arrive in Washington carrying the same picture of politics as the voters who sent them—that politics is what happens in campaigns, on cable, and online, and that the chamber is a set from which to address those venues. The political scientist Frances Lee has documented the result: under conditions of permanent, narrow competition for majorities, members treat the institution as a staging ground for the next election, and legislating gives way to messaging. Seen this way, the leadership-dominated Congress is not an imposition on members who would rather govern. It is the institutional form of the displaced imagination—a legislature reorganized, with the acquiescence of its own members, to serve a mode of politics that happens somewhere else. That is also why the problem cannot be fixed from outside. If members have ceded the practice of politics, only members can take it back up.

The mechanics bear this out. The House and Senate now run on a centralized, leader-driven process that disenfranchises rank-and-file lawmakers and the people they represent. Party leaders negotiate the details of major legislation behind closed doors with committee chairs and administration officials. The rank-and-file find out what is in a bill only at the end of the process, when leadership needs their votes. Deadlines and manufactured crises force floor action before anyone outside the room has had a chance to object, and the debate is structured to foreclose amendments and make passage all but automatic. Mostly Congressional leadership run the legislative process to tee up electoral issues. You must not legislate, because that will get in the way of our real work: winning elections.

Congress does not have to work this way. It hasn’t for much of its history.

Fortunately, we do not need to change the Congressional rules, the constitution, or how we elect people to change how Congress operates. Lawmakers can change this dynamic simply by using an existing tool with a proven track record in the House and Senate: factions. Factions can fix Congress by empowering lawmakers to participate in the process. Robust factions are a precondition for a functioning Congress and rules reform in the current environment. They can make rule changes unnecessary in some circumstances, and they can empower lawmakers to change the rules in others. Factional conflict—not consensus—is what allows a legislature to legislate.

The Gridlock Problem

A legislature reorganized around electioneering governs the way this one does. Crafting legislation in private and relying on deadlines and “cliffs” to force it through the House and Senate limits what lawmakers can pass in any given Congress, even when the strategy works, because there are only so many genuine crises leaders can manufacture or exploit. It also fails to reveal information about what lawmakers actually want in a debate. A private negotiation imposes no political or personal cost on anyone inside it, which means negotiators have every incentive to hold a hard line, take a public position, and quietly reject any offer that falls short of it, all without the accountability that comes from doing so in front of their colleagues and voters.

This dynamic is self-reinforcing. Leaders use the threat of losing the next election to keep members in line, members acquiesce, and Congress starts to resemble a factory that manufactures bills rather than a deliberative body that legislates. Lawmakers in both parties will privately admit they are frustrated by this, even when their own party holds the majority. That is why Democrats and Republicans alike routinely struggle to advance their agendas when they hold majorities in the House and Senate. They are internally divided over which issues to prioritize and how hard to fight for them. And a centralized process that limits the participation of rank-and-file lawmakers is especially ill-suited to resolving intra-party disagreements.

Reformers instinctively respond to this frustration by giving their leaders permission to use even more tools to manage the legislative process: more centralized whip operations, more restrictive floor procedures, more reliance on omnibus bills assembled behind closed doors. This approach treats internal disagreement as the problem to be managed rather than the resource to be organized.

What Factions Are and Why Lawmakers Form Them

A faction is an informal group of lawmakers who work together on a sustained basis to achieve shared policy or procedural goals. They can take many forms, engage in different activities, and often have dedicated staff.

Factions have been especially prevalent in the House. Prominent examples include the Democratic Study Group and the Republican Study Committee in the mid-twentieth century, followed by the Freedom Caucus, the Congressional Progressive Caucus, the Blue Dog Coalition, the New Democrat Coalition, and the Republican Governance Group. But they can also form in the Senate. For example, conservatives formed the Senate Steering Committee in the 1970s to help them prevail in important debates.

Lawmakers form factions when Congress’s formal structures—committees and parties—aren’t helping them achieve their goals. Liberal Democrats formed the Democratic Study Group in 1959 because conservative Democrats from the South controlled the House’s committees. Conservatives formed the Republican Study Committee in 1973 for largely the same reasons - committee chairs and party leaders were advancing legislation they opposed and slowing policies they supported. The dynamic in both examples is the same: lawmakers pool resources and hire staff to help coordinate their efforts. By working together, they get leverage that an individual member, acting alone inside a committee or a party conference, doesn’t have.

Why Factions Help Congress Legislate

Factions can help fix Congress by empowering its members to participate in the legislative process. In doing so, they generate conflict, and conflict reveals the information Congress needs to function. A negotiation between a handful of party leaders and committee chairs behind closed doors doesn’t reveal the information lawmakers need to compromise. It also makes it harder to reconcile people to a debate’s outcome when they disagree with it. Those not involved in the secretive negotiations—rank-and-file lawmakers or their constituents—can’t see what either side actually wants or how much they are willing to give up getting it.

Organized factions help members bring closed-door negotiations out into the open. In a public debate, both sides must try if they want to prevail. They must be willing to bear the costs of fighting. And their willingness to do so signals to everyone involved—including the other side—how far they are willing to go to prevail, which clarifies the stakes of compromise. In the process, lawmakers must take visible positions on issues that their constituents can evaluate and reward or punish them for at the next election.

Such an open and adversarial dynamic makes compromise possible. As long-time scholar-practitioner Betram Gross put it in his book, The Legislative Struggle, compromise arises out of “the development of the group struggle itself, for the vicissitudes of this struggle create the conditions that promote cooperation and make it possible.” Conflict, not its absence, reveals information that makes a deal possible.

This is not a new insight. It is an old truth that Congress has forgotten. James Madison argued in Federalist No. 10 that the causes of faction cannot be removed without destroying the liberty that produces them in the first place; conflict among rival interests is the natural condition of a free society. The question his constitutional science set out to answer was not how to eliminate that conflict but how to make it do work. The “regulation of these various and interfering interests,” he wrote, “forms the principal task of modern legislation”—faction was not an interruption of governing but its ordinary substance. What Madison feared was a stable, permanent majority. What he expected was shifting coalitions. In Federalist No. 51 he explained why: in an extended republic embracing a great variety of interests, a majority coalition “could seldom take place on any other principles than those of justice and the general good.” The safeguard was never the absence of conflict—it was the coalition-building that conflict, channeled through institutions, compels. By 1792, Madison was more explicit still. In an essay titled “Parties,” published in the National Gazette, he wrote that parties are “unavoidable” in every political society and that the republican remedy for their evils is “making one party a check on the other.” Congress is the machinery in which that checking and combining was meant to occur. Strong parties governed through centralized leadership are precisely the stable blocs his design sought to prevent—and a legislature engineered to suppress conflict among its members has not tamed faction. It has disabled the mechanism that made faction safe. Reforms that seek to eliminate factional conflict, or insulate Congress from it, are not fulfilling Madison's design. They are abandoning it.

That is why factions can help fix Congress. As the political scientist Ruth Bloch Rubin has observed, “intraparty organization represents a unique source of institutional authority that does not first require members to control majoritarian institutions.” Members of a faction do not need to belong to the majority party to participate in the process. They merely need to organize enough of their colleagues around a shared demand and use the tools at their disposal to make ignoring them costly, which gives them a clearer path to influence. In doing so, they can facilitate negotiations within political parties and between them.

By empowering rank-and-file lawmakers and concentrating disagreement inside the House and Senate—in committee work, floor strategy, amendment fights, and coalition building—factions keep political conflict where the Constitution intended it to be resolved. They do not push it to elections, the courts, or the executive branch to resolve it instead.

Factions in Action

The role factions can play in Congress is reflected in recent history. The test in each case is not whether the episode produced good policy. It is where the politics happened.  For example, the Congressional Progressive Caucus refused to allow a bipartisan infrastructure bill to advance in the House in 2021 until Democratic leaders committed to a vote on the Build Back Better Act. Its members created leverage to get what they wanted by delaying what the leadership wanted. Their threats worked because they were credible, and they were credible because the members who made them were organized.

The influence of factions can also be seen in 2023 when members of the Freedom Caucus withheld their votes from Kevin McCarthy’s Speakership until he agreed to give them seats on the Rules and Appropriations Committees and to change House rules governing how bills reach the floor. The lawmakers had leverage because McCarthy could not become Speaker without their votes, and they made it easier to use that leverage by working together. And in 2017, when House leaders tried to move a replacement for the Affordable Care Act, it was the Freedom Caucus on one side and the more centrist Tuesday Group on the other whose competing public demands determined what made it into the final bill and what did not.

Contrary to the story that sees this as Freedom Caucus-induced chaos, this is not new. A century earlier, in 1923, a progressive faction of House Republicans refused to support Frederick Gillett for Speaker until they secured an open debate on a package of rules reforms. They too won most of what they asked for.  In 2019, moderate Democrats held out their votes for Nancy Pelosi for Speaker in exchange for reforms to the discharge petition and the Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress.

In all these examples, members of factions banded together to make it harder for party leaders to prevail without negotiating with them. In each instance, factional conflict revealed information about what rank-and-file lawmakers wanted and would accept—information a closed-door negotiation between a handful of people wouldn’t have produced. In each case, a faction’s willingness to fight publicly at an inflection point in a debate, when they could use their leverage, led to negotiations that helped House action rather than frustrating it.

Factions give their members leverage in three overlapping ways. First, they provide policy services. Their staff research issues that committees are ignoring, draft alternative proposals, and run policy clinics so that lawmakers who lack deep subject-matter expertise can still participate credibly in debate. Second, they coordinate their members’ floor activity—the Senate Steering Committee, for example, created its own floor-watch system in the 1970s, separate from the party’s own staff, to make it easier for conservative senators to track what happened there. Third, factions make it easier for their members to build coalitions with outside groups—the Club for Growth, Heritage Action, Third Way, the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation—to advance their agenda in the House and Senate. Those groups provide research and staff training and generate pressure on non-faction lawmakers. For example, the Democratic Study Group produced detailed legislative reports and fact sheets in the 1960s to counter information from committees controlled by conservative Democrats. The Republican Study Committee and the Congressional Progressive Caucus engage in operational activities today, each crafting its own alternative budget resolution and proposing it on the House floor every year.

Overcoming the “Faction Stigma”

Fixing Congress by encouraging rank-and-file lawmakers to form factions is challenging because of the stigma surrounding such groups. Party leaders tend to see factions as headaches - as obstacles that slow down or frustrate their plans. Philanthropic organizations interested in fixing Congress have largely absorbed the same instinct, investing for years in technocratic reforms while avoiding factions as too partisan or destabilizing.

Both views get the diagnosis backward. Factions are not the source of Congress’s dysfunction. The source is the centralized process Congress has engineered to suppress conflict between its members. Encouraging factions—their policy staff, research capacities, and organizational infrastructure, in ways that are compliant with House and Senate rules—is one of the most direct and cost-effective ways to fix Congress. Doing so strengthens the very mechanism by which rank-and-file lawmakers adjudicate their constituents’ concerns and try to achieve their goals. And it channels much of the current conflict in elections (primary and general) back into Congress and its deliberations between elections.

Congress doesn't need fewer factions. It needs more of them. Lawmakers willing to form factions and do the work of sustaining them aren't obstructing the House and Senate—they're restoring the branch to what it was meant to be: the place where American politics actually happens. That is what a working Congress looks like.