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Articles from the 'Comment On Congress' series


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  • A Who's Who of Partisanship and Non-Partisanship in Congress

    Lee Hamilton, Center on Representative Government|Updated Jun 5, 2024

    Back in mid-May, the Lugar Center and the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University released the latest of their studies looking at bipartisanship in the US House and Senate. They summed up the bottom line in their first sentence: "The results show a slight improvement in bipartisanship in 2023 but remained near record lows." In the scheme of news stories coming out of Washington, the "Bipartisanship Index" rarely gets much ink, except for a one-day piece in...

  • Why You Should Want Your Representative to Learn Things

    Lee Hamilton, Indiana University Center on Representative Government|Updated Mar 7, 2023

    In the pantheon of political attacks on sitting legislators, probably none is more damaging than the charge that they've lost touch with the people back home. If they're in Congress, it's usually couched as having caught "Potomac Fever"; in a state legislature, that they don't care about the views of the people who put them in office. The ranks of ex-legislators are filled with people who faced this. Even Abe Lincoln, who served a single term in Congress, was accused as a fres...