The U.S. Congress is navigating yet another government funding deadline — the eighth in less than six months — and are at an impasse over sending aid to key allies in Ukraine, Taiwan and Israel. Divisions among Republicans in the House and Senate killed a major bipartisan border policy bill. Reforms to bedrock programs like Medicare and Social Security are desperately needed but no closer to getting passed. Meanwhile, the House of Representatives spent close to a month without a speaker last year due to infighting between moderate and hard right factions of the Republican party.
When U.S. Representative Chip Roy, a Republican from Texas, begged his colleagues in November to “give me one thing I can campaign on and say we did,” he was articulating what many lawmakers and observers were feeling: Congress isn’t working.
The simplest expression of this is the number of bills passed by Congress. Just twenty-seven bills were passed last year — a record low — but even before that, the number of bills signed into law by the president has been falling.
I think the reason they’re not held to account is because everyone else can just point to that individual and say it’s not their fault. But with anonymous voting, acts of Congress would be blamed on the entire Congress, and would incentivize Congressmen to police themselves lest they lose their jobs along with the at-fault party.
Also, there’s a lot of other bad behavior that individual Congressman can engage in that would be firmly pinned on that individual. Their words in committee or on the floor, would still be available, and their voters could vote them out on that.