Pascrell Pens Policy Essay on Fixing Congress in the Harvard Journal on Legislation

WASHINGTON, DC – U.S. Rep. Bill Pascrell, Jr. (D-NJ-09) today shared a new policy essay he has published in volume 60 of the Harvard Journal on Legislation on the origins of congressional dysfunction titled: “A House Decaying: Re-empowering the Legislature and Making Congress Great Again.” The Journal is a publication of Harvard Law School.

“Congress has been sleepwalking towards obsolescence and irrelevance, much of it the product of our own members’ misguided decisions. As our political systems slough precariously towards illiberalism with more than faint whiffs of autocracy in the air, it is bleak that the people’s first branch has been rendered so low. But what is broken can be fixed. We need know only the scale of the challenge and take up the straightforward tools of rejuvenation. This article sets out the scale of the challenges and then provides a blueprint for making Congress great again,” Congressman Pascrell writes in the essay introduction.

For years, Rep. Pascrell has been a leader highlighting congressional dysfunction and the need to increase legislative investment to improve Congress. In 2019, Pascrell authored a front-page piece in the Washington Post laying out Congress’s brain drain in an essay titled “Why is Congress so Dumb?”

A copy of Pascrell’s full policy essay is available here.