When Congress doesn’t work, the system is working

As the latest government shutdown drags on, the older among us are experiencing a sense of déjà vu. We’ve seen this before—during both Democratic and Republican administrations—and after years of watching the same drama unfold, we recognize the pattern. Tempers flare, accusations fly and each side insists the other is to blame, but beneath the shouting matches and the soundbites lies something deeper: a constitutional mechanism working exactly as designed.

Under Article I of the Constitution, Congress alone holds the power of the purse. No money may be drawn from the Treasury except by law, and when appropriations lapse, the Antideficiency Act requires that most government operations cease until funding is restored. That’s not political theater—it’s constitutional structure. The framers, ever wary of concentrated power, created a system in which inaction can be just as powerful as action.

When one party holds the presidency and both chambers of Congress, the minority’s power is reduced to a single tool: obstruction. That might sound cynical, but it’s a vital feature of the system.

As James Madison wrote in Federalist No. 51, “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.” The ability of a determined minority to slow or halt legislation ensures that no fleeting majority can easily impose its will. Republicans used that power to good effect during the Obama and Biden years. Now the roles are reversed, and Democrats, facing unified Republican control, are using the same tactics to press their priorities and resist what they view as overreach.

In the present impasse, Democrats have supported a continuing resolution that extends last year’s spending levels while adding a few targeted provisions. Republicans see those add-ons as partisan excess and accuse Democrats of leveraging the inconvenience of the shutdown for political gain. Democrats, in turn, claim Republicans are holding government funding hostage. Both narratives are familiar, and both contain a measure of truth—but neither tells the whole story.

Much of this stalemate is a function of the Senate’s procedural design. The filibuster, now requiring a 60-vote threshold to advance most legislation, gives the minority extraordinary leverage. While critics decry it as a relic of obstruction, it also serves a constitutional purpose: to slow things down, force negotiation and prevent sudden swings in national policy. The Senate, after all, was meant to cool the passions of the House—to be deliberative rather than impulsive.

The result is a government that sometimes stumbles and sputters, that seems dysfunctional to a world accustomed to streamlined parliamentary systems. Yet this cumbersome machinery reflects the framers’ intent. They valued friction more than efficiency. They feared tyranny more than gridlock. Each shutdown, each budget standoff, is an unpleasant but revealing test of those principles.

To be sure, the costs are real and we won’t overlook our elected officials’ inability to negotiate. Federal workers face uncertainty, services are curtailed and America’s global standing suffers. Yet amid the frustration, vital functions continue—Social Security checks still go out, the military remains on duty (properly groomed and stomachs now sucked in) and the republic endures.

So while the headlines focus on partisan failure, there is another way to view this moment. The struggle, messy as it is, affirms the enduring logic of the Constitution: that power must be checked, ambition restrained, and no faction allowed to rule without resistance. In that sense, the system isn’t breaking down—it’s doing exactly what it was built to do.