Watching the media’s reaction recently to the recent 427-1 vote in the U.S. House and the Senate’s unanimous consent for releasing the Epstein files, I was struck by two things.

First, that even though the votes went against President Trump’s vehement opposition (until a few days before), they were hardly profiles in courage. As House Speaker Mike Johnson put it afterward, “None of us want to go on record and in any way be accused of not being for maximum transparency,” a recognition that GOP members were under great public pressure to override the president’s original wishes.

And second, as the insider publication The Hill wrote afterward, no one should take that vote as an indication that the president’s hold on his own party has been broken. “To the contrary, he still exerts a vise-like grip on Republicans on Capitol Hill on the vast majority of issues,” they argued. To be sure, others argue differently, and you can certainly find exceptions, like the Senate’s votes in October against the administration’s tariff regime and its willingness to rebuff the president when he sought to eliminate the filibuster. Still, it’s fair to say that on most issues, President Trump still gets what he wants from the Republican-led Congress.

I wish it were otherwise. That’s because I believe Congress has grown listless in the face of presidential authority — and not just when it comes to President Trump. When I first went to the House in the mid-1960s, it was still in a decades-long period of vigorous legislating, muscular oversight of the executive branch, and even — at least in the Watergate hearings — a fierce determination to hold a president to account. The decades since have seen congressional authority erode drastically.

There’s a thread that ties together this journey from handing the president War Powers and budget-making responsibility — explicitly given to Congress by the Constitution — to what we have today: a majority party that mostly refuses to challenge the president, members who prefer to duck town halls rather than face their constituents, and committee chairs who shy away from calling agency and department heads named by a president of their own party to account. That thread, I’d argue, is pain avoidance. Over the decades, many members of Congress have lost their appetite for engaging with people who don’t agree with them and for standing up for what they believe despite presidential pressure.

True, these were both easier to do in the past, when Congressional leaders like Sam Rayburn, Mike Mansfield, and Howard Baker saw protecting Congressional prerogative as worth spending political capital on — they made it clear that they would endure pain on behalf of the institution of Congress, and that they expected their members to do so, too. These days, many members see Congress not as an institution to defend but as a platform for individual brand-building. In this world, taking political risks doesn’t hold much appeal.

Yet, if Congress is to reassert itself as a responsible branch of government, it will need both a leadership and a majority of members who embrace and understand that political give and take, and persuading people who are skeptical of their arguments, are crucial skills to develop in a representative democracy — especially when dealing with one another on Capitol Hill.

In other words, they need to rebuild a sort of muscle memory for persuasion, negotiation, principled disagreement, and compromise.

This is impossible if they opt repeatedly to take the easy route of letting others make tough decisions. Instead, people who serve in or run for Congress need to learn how to persuade and work with members who don’t agree with them — and to stiffen their spines when a president tries to browbeat them into relinquishing congressional authority. To do this, I believe, they need to build their abilities by running in competitive Congressional districts, holding regular town halls, holding floor debates that make more room for amendments, serving on committees that are empowered to make difficult decisions, and reasserting Congressional authority over tough issues like taxes and spending. In other words, they need to rebuild the skill sets that once served members of Congress — and the American people — so well.        

Lee Hamilton, 94, is a senior advisor for the Indiana University (IU) Center on Representative Government, distinguished scholar at the IU Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies, and professor of practice at the IU O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs. Hamilton, a Democrat, was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives for 34 years (1965-1999), representing a district in south-central Indiana.