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" &amp;quot;And I&amp;#039;ve said that to them directly because some of the things that they have said are just absolutely offensive. And I was like, &amp;#039;You guys can&amp;#039;t really believe this.&amp;#039; And to be honest with you, I don&amp;#039;t know whether they do or not. But they&amp;#039;re rewarded for it.&amp;quot; For an  article in our November issue, which will be out next week, on the crippling dysfunction in Washington, I interviewed ninety members of Congress \u2013 from both houses, both parties, across the ideological spectrum \u2013 to find out what they think the problem is. Contrary to what you might expect of an institution with an 8 percent approval rating, I discovered many of them to be capable people of good faith who spoke with surprising candor about being stuck in a dreadful system. Some were particularly articulate or revealing about the state of things in Congress, and I will be writing  individual posts about them between now and the election. Representative Donna Edwards, Democrat, Maryland. A lawyer, long-time community activist, and the first executive director of the National Network to End Domestic Violence, Edwards had worked in and around Congress for a long time before being elected to her first term in 2008. Although generally regarded as a very liberal member, she has proven her willingness to negotiate with anybody, on any subject, a rare trait now in both houses of Congress. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;d worked around Congress a lot in my professional career, but had kind of an idealized vision of what it would be like to be a member of Congress. And I&amp;#039;ve had a reality check since then,&amp;quot; says Edwards. &amp;quot;For example, you know, I thought that there was a lot more\u2014Oh, how do I say this in a respectful way?\u2014kind of intellectual work put into policy development. That&amp;#039;s kind of disappointed me. You know, I like to read, I like to study, I like to learn new things. And I feel like sometimes in the committee structure as it is now, that there actually are not as many opportunities for that as there should be. I think in part that is because over the last twenty years, the committee structure has completely broken down in the Congress. &amp;quot;If I had to identify something that could, you know, go toward fixing the dysfunction, it would really be to restore that process. Because that&amp;#039;s a process in which you would then naturally have to work in a more bipartisan fashion, where you would have to engage in inquiry, where you would need to figure out whatever the middle ground is. What happened over the last 20 or 30 years is that so many of the legislative policy decisions are not made at the committee level at all\u2014they&amp;#039;re made by the leadership. And that&amp;#039; s true whether it&amp;#039;s Democrats or Republicans controlling the Congress. Also, people talk about the partisan divide, and it&amp;#039;s not so much the partisan divide as the polarized party lines. Norm Ornstein and Tom Mann have written about how Democrats have not moved as far left as Republicans have moved far right. I mean, there isn&amp;#039;t a time where you find Republicans like the ones that I grew up with and voted for \u2014people like Connie Morella or Mac Mathias. As a young person voting for them in Maryland, I never really had a hesitation about that. They were good people. They were trying to do good things. I didn&amp;#039;t agree with everything that they said, but they, you know, worked across party lines. And I think you just have fewer and fewer people like that.  &amp;quot;I think some of the things that [the more aggressively outspoken conservatives] express are their party&amp;#039;s philosophy, but they do it in a way that is incendiary on purpose. I think that there are other people who share some of the same philosophy but the way that they approach it is not incendiary. And that fact right there then puts you in the camp of trying to work on some issues together, even though you recognize that you may not have the same ideological viewpoints. &amp;quot;And I think that they\u2026 Louie [Gohmert, Republican of Texas] and Steve [King, Republican of Iowa]\u2026I traveled with them, and so I had a chance to get to know them a little bit, and one-on-one, they&amp;#039;re fine. They&amp;#039;re absolute gentlemen. And then you see them on television, you go, &amp;quot;Who are these people?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;And I&amp;#039;ve said that to them directly because some of the things that they have said are just absolutely offensive. And I was like, &amp;quot;You guys can&amp;#039;t really believe this.&amp;quot; And to be honest with you, I don&amp;#039;t know whether they do or not. But they&amp;#039;re rewarded for it. &amp;quot;And that&amp;#039;s why I go back to the committee process, because that is one way where we could structurally create opportunities for us to have to iron out our difficulties that are not all ironed out on a television screen.&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/news/a30331/profiles-in-congress-representative-donna-edwards/>