Politics & Power Quote by Cal Thomas

Congress gets dinged here not for being slow or corrupt in the abstract, but for being structurally unserious in the one way Americans intuitively understand: it has no opponent. Cal Thomas borrows the clean moral geometry of sports - two sides, clear rules, a scoreboard, a winner who has to earn it - and uses it to expose how politics often evades that kind of accountability. A club that loses to rivals changes coaches, benches stars, revamps strategy. Congress can "lose" in public approval for years and still keep its incumbents, its perks, its procedural choke points. The joke lands because it reframes dysfunction as a lack of competitive pressure, not just a lack of virtue.

The subtext is a critique of incentives. If there is no credible external challenger, the real contest becomes internal and self-referential: party leadership games, fundraising, cable-news positioning, and procedural one-upmanship. The "other team" Congress competes against is less a foreign adversary or even the opposing party than the electorate's attention span, which is easier to outlast than to satisfy. Thomas, a conservative columnist shaped by late-20th-century Washington cynicism, is tapping a familiar frustration: institutions built to deliberate have evolved into institutions built to endure.

The line also quietly flatters the reader's sense of common sense. You don't need to know parliamentary rules to get the point. Everyone understands what happens when competition disappears: performance drifts, insiders protect themselves, and the game becomes about running out the clock.