Inside the Dystopia of Congress Missing the Moment
As Republicans steamroll immigration policy and Democrats wait for collapse, a new reporter wonders who—if anyone—still believes in America?
WASHINGTON — There’s something deeply unnerving about sitting in the Senate gallery and realizing that nobody in the room—not the lawmakers, not the aides, not the press corps—actually seems to live in the America I know.
As a first-time reporter covering immigration and policy, I expected dysfunction. What I didn’t expect was the indifference. Not just to immigrants, but to everyone. Immigrants are merely the first sacrificial offering—easy targets in an era where rage is currency and dehumanization is part of the legislative toolkit.
Republicans, to their credit, are doing exactly what they said they would do. The Laken Riley Act, the Big Beautiful Bill Act, the slew of DHS rule rewrites—they’re passing immigration laws with breathtaking aggression.
These aren’t policy proposals as much as ideological sledgehammers. Where there is budget tightening and cuts across nearly every federal domain, immigration enforcement is not just spared?—it’s lavished. They’ve made sure that the one thing Congress can still fund is a bigger cage.
The GOP’s transformation of immigration into a moral panic is complete. The rhetoric no longer circles around “border security” or “rule of law”—it’s now raw cultural triage: deport them all, fear the flood, guard the walls. Every corner of the country is imagined as a new Ellis Island under siege, and every immigrant as a Trojan Horse.
But what’s more jarring is the Democrats’ failure to even pretend to fight. Their immigration messaging, if it exists, is anesthetized. Some whisper resistance. Most wait it out. They hope voters recoil in horror from Republican overreach—but instead, voters seem to be sliding deeper into nihilism, or worse, into the arms of a newer, shinier authoritarianism.
It’s hard not to notice how calculated Democratic performances have become. Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) gave a floor speech that played well on social media and earned him a book deal.
Rep. Robert Garcia (D-CA) staged a semi-diplomatic junket to El Salvador in search of a missing constituent—and got himself a committee leadership role. Even Senator Padilla’s scuffle with DHS agents at a Noem presser seemed more choreographed than courageous. If you resist just enough, the Party rewards you with a halo and a headline.
The truth is, immigrants only matter when their pain becomes a stage. And that stage only exists if it comes with a bump in polls or donations.
And yet, somewhere between the legalistic jousts and hollow floor speeches, something fundamental is breaking. Congress, as it stands, is not a representative body. Not of the immigrants who serve your coffee in Boston. Not of the students crushed under grad school debt in Ann Arbor. Not of the first-gen families that now call Des Moines or Flagstaff home. Not even of the digitally native, nihilistic, credentialed, disillusioned younger generations they keep ignoring.
This Congress reflects power, not people.
Republicans rule with zeal. Democrats manage with dread. And everyone is obsessed with optics. There’s no intellectual humility. No curiosity. Just a mad scramble to dominate the day’s discourse. And increasingly, the only thing that breaks through is anger.
Look at the rise of Zohran Mamdani in New York. His language is sharp, his image curated, his wife the perfect Instagram-friendly intellectual muse. He says what many young people feel: the rich are stealing everything, the poor are being forgotten, and we are being lied to about our futures. It’s seductive. It feels righteous. But the solutions are vapor. The anger is real, but the roadmap is vibes.
This country is breaking apart into realities that no longer speak to each other. Texans don’t care what Californians want. Students in Chicago have no idea what drives farmers in Kansas. The internet was supposed to connect us. Instead, it shattered our common language. We’re angry, not because of what’s been done to us, but because we don’t know what else to do.
Our generation is not lost. It’s enraged. Unmoored. Perpetually online, perpetually pissed off, and using memes instead of manifestos. What matters isn’t action—it’s virality. The best takedown. The most righteous tweet. The most performative collapse in the Capitol rotunda. It’s not persuasion. It’s dominance through clout.
Even law, the last pretense of order, has become performance art. DC is crawling with lawyers—some heroes, most opportunists—who treat the legal system like an improv stage, twisting statutory language like balloon animals to score wins. The “Era of Lawyers” has replaced the “Era of Legislators,” and with it, any hope that Congress might reclaim its purpose.
Because underneath all the noise, the debt grows. The wars multiply. The climate simmers. And the Ohio Clock ticks forward, unmoved.
This is the view from inside the Capitol. Not a temple of democracy, but a soundstage for American decline. The debates feel scripted. The legislation feels cynical. The people in power—old, young, progressive, conservative—seem to have forgotten what the country actually feels like right now: anxious, overextended, fragmented, furious.
And no one—not one member of Congress I’ve met—has really tried to address that feeling. Does America still have a path forward? Or is this just the long echo of something we’ve already lost? No one inside the chamber seems to know. And outside, fewer and fewer of us still believe they ever did.
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