

The moon rises behind the dome of the U.S. Capitol, currently undergoing renovations, in Washington on Oct. 8, 2014. REUTERS/Jim Bourg

Esquire's executive editor Mark Warren did something really interesting. Seeking answers for why Congress stinks, he asked the men and women who serve in the House and Senate. Ninety of them. His piece "Help, We're in a Living Hell and Don't Know How to Get Out," which features long excerpted quotes from many of these members, is one of the best things I have read about what it's like to be a member of Congress. Mark and I had an email conversation about his story and his process; that conversation is below, edited only for grammar.

FIX: You started this project by asking Members of Congress why they were so bad at their jobs. But it transformed into something else. When and why?

Mark Warren: No one sets out to interview 90 Members of Congress on purpose. When I began, I was motivated by the public mood, and by the dumb intransigence of members for whom failure is their measure of success – those stalwarts who come to Washington not to govern but to stop governance entirely, because most often that’s what they promised to do in their campaigns. I was mad at those guys (and still am, more so than ever). And so I was feeling impertinent, and mostly just wanted to hold all of them to account, and see who they would blame. I thought who they blamed would be instructive, and be revealing of character. But then a couple of important things happened. 1) By about a dozen interviews in, the candor, humor and true anguish I was finding in conversation after conversation was startling, and very human. Almost no one talked in familiar talking points. Almost everyone took some responsibility for the catastrophe. It occurred to me that there might be something deeper and richer here, and more important. Fairly quickly, I realized 2) what a cheap question “Why are you so bad at your job?” was, and stopped asking it. It’s a question that is not interested in an answer, which is an impulse that is central to our current malaise. Instead, I would listen, I wouldn’t argue, and the men and women in Congress kept talking. The process itself changed my mind. One member told me that the only other person who has spoken to as many Members of Congress is the House psychiatrist, which I took as a joke, as I don’t know that there is a House psychiatrist. But there should be one.

FIX: You talked to 90 Members of Congress -- House and Senate -- for the piece. Who, that you can say, surprised you the most with either their candor or their views?

MW: There were many, many surprises in this experience, many of them very pleasant ones – the sheer quality of the Members of our Congress chief among them, which is very surprising for an institution with an 8 percent approval rating. Some old staff I talked to ascribed the current breakdown to the quality of the members (or lack thereof), but after this experience I don’t believe that to be true. I just believe that these people are stuck in a terrible system with dysfunction baked in via redistricting and fueled by institutions that prosper from the miasma and spend money obscenely.

Amid a lot of candor, I would say that the most candid views were the Republicans who strive to be “governing conservatives” and were very frank in their criticism of the intransigent elements of their own caucus, and of Speaker Boehner for being responsive to them and giving in to the dysfunction they came to Washington meaning to cause. And in general, the Republicans I interviewed both had a greater sense of grievance and were more likely to be self-critical than the Democrats I spoke with. This brought home strongly just how sharply divided that party is, especially in the House.

FIX: Ted Cruz -- and the bipartisan dislike of him -- came up again and again in your piece. Is he the most hated member of Congress? And what were the main reasons people cited for not liking him?

MW: Ninety members is a pretty decent sample size (interesting side note: It was only Republicans who would ask who else I was talking to before agreeing to speak to me), but yes, people would mention him by name. Certainly not everyone, but when he was mentioned, it was only to criticize him. Even genteel Republican Senators who didn’t say his name would remonstrate that “members who are perhaps more interested in profile than in policy can be very counterproductive.” Those are practically fighting words in the Senate. And that’s part of the two-count indictment against him: He is arrogant beyond all reason, in the service of nothing so much as his ego and his future political ventures, and is at the same time destructively amateurish, as evidenced by his dundering role last year in the government shutdown, the pied piper of dysfunction, leading the children in the House to that special secret place where nothing works and everybody feels bad. So one comes away from this sample of Congress with the distinct impression that many of them think Ted Cruz is a fool.

FIX: Members of both parties agree the system is broken. They even agree on why -- redistricting, outside money etc. But, they part ways on who is to blame. So, does their agreement on why it's broken even matter?

MW: Well, all members are subject to crushing pressures internal and external – oligarchic sums of money, pernicious use of redistricting which creates pure districts and dis-incentivizes compromise, the deleterious effects of the commuter Congress, the devolution of power in both houses to the leadership and away from the committees, etc. – and those pressures definitely exacerbate the age-old political fights, creating chaos. But it’s too simple to say that beyond agreement on those things they part ways on who is to blame. Because while I did find plenty of people willing and ready to play the familiar role of partisan warrior (thank you, Senator Hatch!), frustration was high and bipartisan among those who recognize by and large the obstructionists are to blame. Republicans are harshly critical of Harry Reid for invoking the nuclear option on some presidential appointments, but they cannot plausibly argue that Reid did that because he wants to shut the process down. He was actually trying to move the process along and move some Obama appointments that had been chronically stalled, some for years. The strident Republicans argued to me that the rules are meant to force compromise, but clearly that isn’t what they were being used for. They were being used to obstruct progress for a political goal. While almost all of the grievances aired on both sides were essentially true, the lack of productivity by this Congress has less to do with Senator Reid filling the amendment tree, and more to do with Senator McConnell pledging in 2009 that his number one goal wasn’t a policy agenda at all, but rather a political one – making Barack Obama a one-term president.

So it does matter that they agree on why things are broken, and it does matter that many members report that the most meaningful work they do is when they find common cause with somebody from the other party – the hard and satisfying work of compromise - and it does matter that the freshmen in the House seem to have had it with the warfare. Because from that will come a way out of this.

FIX: What was the best, practical solution to begin to end the nightmare that is serving Congress that you heard? Who did it come from?

MW: Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon has thought a lot about ways to reform the Congress itself and has several sensible ideas designed to rein in abuses of the rules in order to prevent them from being used in ways they were never intended to be used.

And repeatedly, I heard grumbling from members of both houses and both parties that too often bills were being produced by the leadership, that committee chairs were being disempowered, and that committee work itself was in decline. This is of critical importance because it is in the subcommittees and committees where compromise is most easily fostered, and in years past, more autonomous chairmen have stridently defended committee prerogatives. Many members spoke of this, perhaps none more passionately than Congressman [Jim] Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin.

But there are many institutional fixes that could make the Congress work better tomorrow. The companion piece to this one is called "How to Fix Congress Now", and was born of a commission that Esquire put together in Washington during the summer, made up of former senators Trent Lott and Tom Daschle and former congressmen Bob Livingston and Barney Frank, and chaired by Lawrence O’Donnell. The former members came to unanimous agreement on a couple dozen recommendations on everything from implementing a 5-day work week (so members can get to know each other again) to requiring 41 affirmative votes to sustain a filibuster, to the restoration of earmarks!

FIX: After writing the piece were you more, less or equally depressed about the state of Congress? And why?

MW: Well, I was already pretty depressed about things, so I'd have to say that after talking to so many of these people, I actually have a higher regard for the men and women who put themselves on the line and run for Congress. It's a terrible job right now, and I certainly wouldn't want to do it. They are, by and large, capable people, working in good faith. It just happens that they are currently subject to some new problems -- post-Citizens United dark money should worry Americans more than Ebola -- and some old problems that are worse than ever. Add to that a toxic political environment and a relative few bad actors who mean to shut down the system, and you've got the recipe for our current disaster. There are institutional fixes to be made, but getting rid of the bad actors is up to the people. What are the prospects for that? Not good.