For 43 days last fall, the United States federal government ceased to function. Nine hundred thousand workers were furloughed. National parks shuttered. Small business loan processing halted. Veterans' services stalled. And throughout all of it, members of Congress continued collecting their paychecks.

The shutdown that began October 1, 2025 — the longest in American history, surpassing the previous record of 35 days set in 2018–2019 — was not the result of any great ideological crisis. No constitutional principle was at stake. No emergency required immediate resolution. It was the product of something far more mundane and far more corrosive: lawmakers who had decided that making the other side look bad was more valuable than making government work.

This is the defining reality of the 119th Congress. Bipartisanship is not merely difficult. In many domains, it has effectively ceased to exist.

The Collapse of Public Trust

The American public has noticed.

Pew Research has been asking Americans whether they trust the federal government to do what is right "always or most of the time" since 1958. In that first poll, 73 percent said yes. By late 2025, that number had fallen to 17 percent — a five-decade collapse that tracks almost perfectly with the rise of partisan polarization on Capitol Hill.

Just 2 percent of Americans say they trust the government to do what is right "just about always." Two percent. In a nation of 340 million people, that is a number that should stop anyone cold.

The numbers break further along partisan lines. With Republicans controlling the White House and both chambers in 2025, Republican trust in the federal government jumped to 42 percent — four times higher than it was under the previous administration. Democratic trust fell to 31 percent. This is not citizens evaluating the government on its merits. This is citizens evaluating whether their team is winning.

That is the essence of negative partisanship: a condition in which voters and their elected representatives are motivated less by what they support than by what they oppose. Research published in the journal Political Behavior in 2024 found that negative partisanship now shapes how voters prioritize nearly everything — candidate selection, issue salience, even factual perception. Studies of the 2020 election found that 27 percent of votes cast for Joe Biden were primarily votes against Donald Trump, rather than for Biden. The same dynamic held in reverse.

When a democracy is organized primarily around the logic of "defeat the other side," governing becomes nearly impossible. Every act of compromise becomes a betrayal. Every concession to the opposition becomes ammunition for a primary challenger. The incentive structure rewards obstruction and punishes cooperation.

Madison's Design — And Where It Went Wrong

James Madison understood factionalism. He spent the years following the Constitutional Convention wrestling with the problem of how a republic could survive the ambitions of competing interest groups. His answer, articulated most fully in Federalist No. 51, was structural: pit ambition against ambition, divide power across branches and chambers, and create a system in which no single faction could dominate without first assembling a coalition broad enough to represent genuine majority will.

"If men were angels," he wrote, "no government would be necessary."

The bicameral design — House and Senate, each with different terms, different constituencies, different rules — was intended precisely as a check against passionate, short-term majorities. The House, with its two-year terms and district-based elections, would be responsive to immediate popular will. The Senate, elected statewide and serving six-year terms, would provide deliberation and continuity.

What Madison did not fully anticipate was the degree to which partisan loyalty would eventually override institutional loyalty. Senators who would once have voted their states or their consciences now routinely vote their party. The filibuster, which once forced genuine bipartisan negotiation on major legislation, has become a reflexive obstruction tool invoked on bills that would have attracted comfortable cross-party margins a generation ago.

The veto points Madison built into the system — meant to force deliberation — now mostly produce paralysis.

A Case Study: The SAVE Act

Consider the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act — the SAVE Act — as a window into how contemporary Congress operates.

Introduced by Representative Chip Roy (R-TX) on the first working day of the 119th Congress and passed by the House on April 10, 2025, with a vote of 220 to 208, the bill requires documentary proof of citizenship to register for federal elections and photo identification to vote. Republicans frame it as a common-sense safeguard against non-citizen voting. Democrats characterize it as a voter suppression measure targeting populations that disproportionately lack the required documents.

Both framings contain facts. The Brennan Center for Justice found that approximately 12 percent of registered American voters — roughly 21 million people — lack the forms of documentation the bill would require. Analysis of who falls into that 12 percent shows disproportionate representation among the elderly, low-income voters, and voters of color. Democrats are not wrong that the demographic effect is asymmetric.

Republicans are also not wrong that the bill's stated purpose — ensuring only citizens vote — is something both parties nominally support. Every member of Congress on both sides of the aisle will tell you they believe only eligible citizens should vote in federal elections.

And yet the bill passed the House on a nearly perfect party-line vote, with every Republican supporting it and virtually every Democrat opposing it. In the Senate, it could not clear the 60-vote threshold needed to overcome a filibuster. The legislation stalled.

This is how much of contemporary legislation works. A real policy dispute gets filtered through partisan logic until the actual question — whether this specific mechanism to prevent non-citizen voting is the right one — gets lost inside a larger tribal contest. The bill either passes or fails based on which side can absorb the political cost of the outcome, not on the merits of the underlying policy.

The Shutdown as Governing Philosophy

The October 2025 shutdown was the most expensive manifestation of this dynamic in recent memory.

When Congress failed to pass a budget — or even a continuing resolution to keep existing spending levels temporarily in place — the immediate casualty was the federal workforce. Hundreds of thousands of workers went without pay for over a month. Social Security applications backed up. The National Institutes of Health suspended new clinical trials. Border Patrol and TSA agents worked without paychecks. The Congressional Budget Office estimated the shutdown cost the American economy somewhere between $11 and $14 billion in direct losses, with downstream effects on GDP growth in the fourth quarter.

Through all of it, lawmakers continued receiving their $174,000 annual salaries. The people they represent suffered. The people doing the representing did not.

This is not an accident of timing or circumstance. It is the logical endpoint of a political culture in which the performance of partisan conflict has displaced the practice of governance. A shutdown does not resolve any underlying dispute. It does not clarify any policy question. What it does is generate media coverage, inflame bases, and sharpen the partisan lines that make the next election easier to fight.

Then, before the dust had even settled on the October shutdown, Congress manufactured another one in January 2026 — this time over immigration enforcement funding — demonstrating that the lesson of the previous record-setter was not, apparently, that shutdowns were a catastrophically bad idea.

The Structural Causes

Blaming individual politicians for this state of affairs misses the structural forces that reward the behavior.

Gerrymandering has produced a House of Representatives in which most members represent safe districts where the realistic electoral threat comes from a primary challenger within their own party, not from the opposing party in a general election. A Republican member from a deep-red district has no incentive to compromise with Democrats, because compromise costs them primary votes without gaining them anything in November. The same logic applies in reverse to safe Democratic seats.

The result is a House that is systematically sorted toward the ideological poles. Political scientists who track congressional voting ideology using DW-NOMINATE scores — which place members on a scale from negative one (most liberal) to positive one (most conservative) — have documented that the current Congress represents the highest levels of partisan polarization since the Reconstruction era. The parties have not merely diverged on policy; they occupy ideological universes that barely overlap.

Partisan media has accelerated this sorting. The economic model of cable news and political podcasting is built on audience capture, and the audience for political content is disproportionately the most partisan slice of each party. Content that complicates, qualifies, or questions tribal narratives generates less engagement than content that confirms them. The media ecosystem that politicians inhabit — and through which they communicate with their base — structurally rewards performance over governance.

Finally, the rise of negative partisanship means that voters are less likely to punish their representatives for obstruction and more likely to punish them for cooperation. A bipartisan deal that genuinely serves constituents can still lose a member their seat if the base perceives it as giving the enemy a win.

Where Bipartisanship Has Survived

It would be too easy — and inaccurate — to say bipartisanship is entirely dead.

The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, passed in 2021 with 19 Republican Senate votes and 13 Republican House votes, committed $1.2 trillion to roads, bridges, broadband, and water infrastructure. It was signed by a Democratic president. It demonstrated that when a concrete, constituency-deliverable issue is on the table — when every member can point to a highway project in their district — cross-party cooperation remains possible.

The First Step Act of 2018, a bipartisan criminal justice reform bill that reduced mandatory minimum sentences and expanded prison rehabilitation programs, passed the Senate 87 to 12. It had vocal champions in both parties because both parties had something to gain: conservatives wanted to reduce federal spending on incarceration, progressives wanted reduced prison populations.

In the 119th Congress, bipartisan legislation has been introduced on homeownership (the American Homeownership Opportunity Act), health insurance affordability, background checks, and sanctions against Russia. Whether any of these will pass depends on whether they can be insulated from the broader partisan environment long enough to build a cross-party coalition.

The pattern that emerges from successful bipartisan legislation is consistent: it tends to address concrete, verifiable problems that both parties can frame as victories, avoids triggering strong cultural identity signals, and either involves a genuine overlap in constituency interest or is wrapped in national security framing that makes opposition costly.

That is a narrow lane. But it exists.

The Cost of Dysfunction

The cost of the current system is not just measured in shutdown-days or polling numbers. It is measured in what does not happen.

The United States has not passed a comprehensive immigration reform bill since 1986. It has not enacted a major infrastructure bill until 2021 — and even that required extraordinary political conditions to pass. The federal tax code has accumulated four decades of partisan additions and remains a framework that virtually no serious economist defends as optimal. Healthcare costs continue climbing without a durable legislative response. These are not problems with unknown solutions. They are problems whose solutions are blocked by a legislative system that cannot produce the cross-party consensus required to address them.

The Founding Fathers designed a system that requires broad coalitions to make lasting change. That was the point. But the system assumes that the parties are willing, at some threshold, to work across lines when the national interest demands it. When that assumption breaks down — when party identity becomes so totalizing that national interest itself becomes a partisan concept — the design stops working as intended.

A Path Forward — If One Exists

The historical record offers some guidance.

Bipartisanship tends to recover after major national crises — wars, depressions, attacks — when the immediacy of a shared threat temporarily overrides partisan logic. It also recovers through procedural reform: ranked-choice voting and open primaries have shown, in the states that have adopted them, some capacity to reduce the extremism-rewarding dynamics of closed primaries.

Some reformers have proposed changes to congressional rules — automatic continuing resolutions that eliminate the shutdown threat, for instance, or modifications to the filibuster that would force genuine floor debate rather than silent obstruction. Others have focused on redistricting reform, seeking independent commissions that draw district lines without partisan intent.

None of these reforms is politically easy. Each requires the side that currently benefits from the existing system to surrender an advantage. The structural incentives that produce polarization also produce opposition to anti-polarization reform.

What may ultimately matter most is simpler than any structural fix: whether elected officials decide that governing is more important than winning. Whether they decide that a negotiated outcome that serves constituents is preferable to a pure win that serves the base. Whether, in Madison's framing, they choose the republic over the faction.

That is not a structural question. It is a question of character. And character, as Madison also understood, is something constitutions can encourage but not guarantee.

Sources: Pew Research Center, Public Trust in Government 1958–2025; Congressional Research Service, 2025 Government Shutdown Economic Effects; Bipartisan Policy Center, SAVE Act Analysis; Political Behavior, "Winning At All Costs? How Negative Partisanship Affects Voter Decision-Making" (2024); Congress.gov, 119th Congress legislative record; Bloomberg, "What Caused the 2026 Government Shutdown?" (February 2026); unitedstates/congress-legislators data.