Congress Isn’t Broken. It’s Corrupted To It’s Core.

The problem with Congress isn’t that lawmakers don’t know what they’re doing. It’s that most of them know exactly what they’re doing, and it has very little to do with serving the public. Watch almost any vote, hearing, or headline long enough and the pattern becomes obvious. Decisions aren’t made for voters. They’re made for donors, lobbyists, and whoever is funding the next campaign.

Money runs Washington from top to bottom. Members of Congress spend an absurd amount of time fundraising, sometimes more than they spend actually working on legislation. That alone tells you where their priorities are. If a policy helps everyday people but doesn’t benefit donors, it usually goes nowhere. On the flip side, bills that heavily favor corporations or special interests move quickly, often with bipartisan support.

Lobbyists have far more influence than most people want to admit. Entire sections of legislation are regularly written by industry insiders and then handed directly to lawmakers. Those same politicians turn around and present the bills as their own work. In reality, many of them are just middlemen passing corporate interests into law. The fact that this is legal makes it even worse.

Then there’s insider trading, which has become almost laughable at this point. Members of Congress somehow manage to make perfectly timed stock trades right before major announcements, votes, or economic shifts. If a regular person did this, they’d be investigated immediately. In Congress, it’s brushed off, self investigated, and forgotten.

Career politicians are another part of the problem. When someone stays in office for decades, their focus slowly shifts. Representing people takes a back seat to protecting power, relationships, and income streams. Long tenure allows them to build massive donor networks that make challengers nearly impossible to beat, even when the public is clearly unhappy.

Despite the loud arguments you see on TV, both parties play this game. The public fights are mostly performance. Behind closed doors, the same donors are being protected, the same financial systems stay intact, and the same loopholes remain open. Voters are fed outrage while the real deals happen quietly.

Accountability barely exists anymore. Scandals come and go, investigations are announced, hearings are held, and statements are made. Eventually the news cycle moves on and nothing changes. The system counts on short attention spans, and it works.

At this point, expecting Congress to clean itself up is unrealistic. The structure rewards corruption and punishes honesty. Real change would require serious outside pressure, term limits, strict rules on money, and transparency that actually has teeth. Until then, Congress will keep doing what it does best, serving everyone except the people who elected them.