The U.S. Congress is navigating yet another government funding deadline — the eighth in less than six months — and are at an impasse over sending aid to key allies in Ukraine, Taiwan and Israel. Divisions among Republicans in the House and Senate killed a major bipartisan border policy bill. Reforms to bedrock programs like Medicare and Social Security are desperately needed but no closer to getting passed. Meanwhile, the House of Representatives spent close to a month without a speaker last year due to infighting between moderate and hard right factions of the Republican party.
When U.S. Representative Chip Roy, a Republican from Texas, begged his colleagues in November to “give me one thing I can campaign on and say we did,” he was articulating what many lawmakers and observers were feeling: Congress isn’t working.
The simplest expression of this is the number of bills passed by Congress. Just twenty-seven bills were passed last year — a record low — but even before that, the number of bills signed into law by the president has been falling.
If Congress isn't doing its job as a whole, the voters will vote out their individual Congressman, even if they're not the cause. If you know you're gonna lose your job because your coworker is fucking up you're gonna police them. If things get bad enough the entire Congress could be replaced for incompetence.
Voting transparency also allows those backroom deals, but this time the Congressman can show that they did what they were bribed to do. So even if a vote fails the person giving the bribe got what they paid for. Or, to put it another way, are you really gonna try to bribe someone if you can't verify that they're going to do what you paid them to do?
If voters want to be informed of their Congressman's positions, they can look at the records of debates and committee meetings. Votes are not the only way to know if your representative is doing their job.
These are the same reasons we have blind voting as individuals - so that voters can't be intimidated or paid to vote a certain way. I think Congress would work better if they went back to anonymous votes.
Best bet is to break up the 2-party system.
I think getting Congress back to anonymous voting is a far more achievable goal, and might actually help with that.