Major legislation of this century – the Bush and Trump tax cuts, Obamacare and Inflation Reduction Act – added trillions to a runaway national debt that will soon crush our economy.

By contrast, the current Grand Bargain would yield far more benefits to society than all the above yet shrink the debt as a percentage of GDP. To craft similarly effective legislation, Congress would need to reorganize itself for that purpose.

For example, consider when Capitol Hill and diverse stakeholders were mired in conflict over environmental policy during the Clinton Administration. To break the impasse, 25 advocates for the various opposing sides agreed to meet. The 25 included top executives from General Motors, Dow Chemical and Chevron Oil; leaders of the Sierra Club, the Environmental Defense Fund and the World Resources Institute; director of the EPA; chair of the African American Leadership Summit; and the president of the AFL-CIO.

In 70+ meetings over 30 months, these 25 long-time adversaries hashed out a 185-page plan for significantly increasing “jobs, productivity, wages, capital, savings, profits and education,” while reducing “pollution, waste and poverty.”

Their secret: “Trade-ups” by which each stakeholder advanced their top priorities by giving ground on other concerns to their opponents. Prime example: Business leaders agreed to a historic rise in environmental standards in return for the EPA agreeing to give businesses the latitude to choose the most efficient way to meet those benchmarks.

Each CEO then won support for the plan from their industry association; the labor leader enlisted the major unions; the head of the EPA got buy-in from other regulators; and the environmentalists won over other organizations in their community. As one advocate put it: “Each of us had earned the trust and respect of our own community, which is how we each won our community’s full support.”

By contrast, congressional leaders from both parties admitted that members of their caucus could not sell such a complex agreement to their respective voters. So, both parties refused to consider equivalent legislation.

In effect, lawmakers who can win elections just by demonizing the other side and offering sound bites as remedies have disincentives to resolve major problems.

Capitol Hill will therefore keep harming most of us until passing three reforms:

• Open up congressional primaries, so candidates across spectrum compete on level playing field and cannot win with extreme messages

• Prohibit either party from drawing congressional districts to benefit itself, i.e., end gerrymandering

• Form task forces where each member is motivated to make progress

For example, for the House to tackle the Grand Bargain’s 36 non-political reforms, we propose that:

• Each House member who wants a seat posts their fiscal, economic and environmental priorities on a website designed for that purpose.

• Every other House member would then pick their ideal spokesperson.

• Task force candidates who drew less than say five supporters would need to drop out.

• Each one who drops out and each of their supporters could then pick one of the remaining candidates as their spokesperson.

• Or the dropouts could organize among themselves to pick spokespeople who would each have support of at least, say, 10.

• As soon as all the remaining task force candidates had the support of at least 10 incumbents, the task force selection process would be complete.

• The task force would then elect a chair, necessarily from outside a dysfunctional Congress, someone whom the vast majority trusted to be a pragmatic consensus-builder, perhaps a former governor

Going forward, the various task force members would negotiate with one another as stakeholders routinely do, looking for trade-ups. “I'll give you this item critical to your cause if you give me that valuable to mine” until reaching an overall agreement that each side sees as benefiting them more than they can by other means.

Each task force member would regularly seek feedback from the lawmakers they represent on whether the evolving agreement was becoming more acceptable.

Organized this way, lawmakers would have no reason to posture when they could gain tangible benefits for constituents of all persuasions. Groundbreaking agreements by which all sectors of society gain historic ground could begin to emerge.

Do you have questions? Please email them to: info@grandbargainproject.org