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      So we must fix Congress. At first blush, however, the barriers to doing so seem overwhelming. Although many members of Congress went into politics in the hope of exercising power responsibly, these legislators find that they must engage in trickery in order to have power to exercise. The reason is that many voters want something for nothing and will reject politicians who fail to promise it. So legislators are “running scared,” as the political scientist and professor Anthony King put it.³⁰ Moreover, when they were first elected to Congress as junior legislators, these politicians found themselves in an institution that did business through tricks. They had to go along or become irrelevant. They found that using tricks to get credit and avoid blame was a recipe for getting reelected, and showing other legislators how to do the same was a recipe for getting the power to shape legislation within Congress. In sum, powerful evolutionary pressures have turned Congress into the trick-playing institution that it is today.

      As a result, we can’t simply get rid of the tricks by ousting the members of Congress who join in using them. Their replacements would also feel pressures to deceive voters.

      The 2014 transportation statute neatly illustrates these pressures. The statute might seem to have been a good candidate for stopping the trickery as newspaper articles on the left and the right noted the funding “gimmick” involved. Yet, even voters who read such articles would have seen only a small portion of the sleights of hand at work. And even those who understood all the sleights of hand at play in the 2014 statute would have had scant reason to feel injured by it. The costs that it left to the future added only a tiny bit to the total bill that the Money Trick had already kicked down the road. Besides, no one knew who would end up having to pay that tiny portion of the bill, or who might lose their pension because of the statute or when. In contrast, the contractors and unions that stood to gain from the transportation statute knew they would gain a lot and soon. So, most legislators would have gotten far-more votes by supporting the bill than opposing it.

      Few if any voters would have taken the time to learn about all the sleights of hand in the bill and then criticize a legislator for supporting it. Even if they had, the legislator would have had a pretty-persuasive defense, which might have gone something like this:

      “If I had opposed the bill, I would have been less effective in securing projects to help our district. And, even if I could have gathered enough legislators to slow down the bill, the bills’ supporters would rightly complain that an alternative bill that did not shift blame so much would have had even more trouble passing. We would have ended up wasting time, but probably passed a bill that was just as bad. That’s how Congress works.”

      So we can’t stop the Five Tricks by voting against the reelection of incumbents who have voted for bills that use them. We can, however, succeed in stopping the tricks by calling upon candidates for office to pledge to change how Congress works. DC Confidential proposes new ground rules for the game of politics to block the Five Tricks. As the saying goes, “Don’t hate the players, hate the game.” Or, if you are determined to hate the players, recognize that the best chance of changing their behavior is by changing the game.

      Switching the focus from whether legislators previously supported a tricky statute to whether legislators should stop the tricks will make it far more apparent to voters how the tricks hurt us. The stakes are ten thousand times greater with the Money Trick as a whole than they were with the individual instance of its application in the 2014 transportation statute. With this trick and the four others in regular use, almost all of us can be sure that on balance, the trickery harms us gravely.

      The question then becomes how, despite the powerful pressures that gave rise to the tricks, we can get Congress to adopt new trick-stopping, game-changing ground rules. Archimedes, the most celebrated scientist of antiquity, having shown how a properly designed lever can move any weight, said, “Give me a place to stand on, and I will move the Earth.” The place to stand to stop the Five Tricks of Washington is the vantage point that lets us see clearly the sleights of hand with which members of Congress and the presidents get away with the tricks and how they hurt us. This book provides that vantage point. From here, we can stop the Five Tricks.