Does it really matter which party controls Congress next year?

In this week’s episode of Politics In Question, Philip Wallach joins Julia, Lee, and James to consider how the 2020 elections will impact Congress. Wallach is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute where he studies and writes about the administrative state, Congress, and the separation of powers. He is the author of To the Edge: Legality, Legitimacy, and the Responses to the 2008 Financial Crisis (Brookings Institution Press) and has published articles in numerous publications, including in the Brookings Center on Regulation and Markets, Studies in American Political Development, Fortune, National Affairs, National Review, Law & Liberty, The Los Angeles Times, RealClearPolicy, The American Interest, The Bulwark, The Hill, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. Most recently, Wallach examines how Congress fell behind the executive branch in a chapter in the forthcoming edited volume, Congress Overwhelmed: The Decline in Congressional Capacity and Prospects for Reform.

Does it really matter which party controls Congress next year? Will the House and Senate still be dysfunctional if Democrats control both chambers in the 117th Congress? Or is a change in Congress’s partisan balance of power just what it needs for its members to get back to work? These are some of the questions Philip, Julia, Lee, and James ask in this week’s episode.