BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON  |  OCT 30, 2026

“Get back, get back, get back to where you once belonged.”
–From the Beatles, Get Back, recorded in the UK in 1969. Lyrics by Paul McCartney

I was a reporter in Illinois in 1969. The state and the nation were recuperating from the Democratic National Convention in Chicago a year earlier where much of the national divisiveness boiled over violently on the streets. Vietnam had just taken down President Lyndon Johnson and launched divisive campaigns to replace him. Vice President Hubert Humphrey eventually won the nomination. But the turmoil in the country had already sealed his fate and gave us Richard Nixon.

It was in 1969 that the Beatles recorded a song entitled “Get Back, Get Back to Where You Once Belonged.”

It was recorded in a time when much of American society was adrift in a sea of confusion, disillusionment, and distrust of authority. Even the Beatles were struggling.

The title of that song just keeps ringing in my ears. I’m still in a fog as to what the other lyrics meant, or to whom they refer, but the title really harmonizes with the political and social climate back then and now.

Those words contain a message attuned to today’s turbulent times. We are no longer where we once belonged – times when we felt more comfortable with our politics and our relationships with each other. It’s not comfortable now. It’s like agoraphobia, the fear of venturing from home into situations and conversations that will most likely end in anger and alienation. Comfort and commonality these days can only be found in cloistered circles of those with whom we agree or in gatherings where we shall not speak of politics lest we be sat on a stool in the corner with a dunce cap atop our empty skull.

It is time for us to get back to where we once belonged, back to the foundational values and principles undergirding what has come to be an ingenious form of government and social order. And back to the ideals that propel us to do better, to be better.

Americans of both parties are fed up with the track our country is on at home and abroad. They are weary from being jerked around, lied to, deceived, and scammed by promises that don’t get kept and decisions in which they have no say. More Americans are turning away from political parties and identifying as independents. More Americans, including Republicans, have lost faith in the President and the Congress. Trust in institutions is atrophied.

Amidst all the turmoil, there is good news. A rapidly growing number of nonprofit organizations, think tanks, and independent citizen movements are taking up the cudgel of change, hosting conferences, roundtable discussions, and information exchanges, writing essays and articles, producing research, conducting educational programs, and designing civics curricula. Politicians are being more vocal, joining with organizations to promote civility, civics education, and politicians committed to making government work. They’re unbuckling the straitjacket that has immobilized governance and gagged political discourse for too many years.

They are revisiting important questions: When did our politics and social order go off the rail? Who or what is to blame? What do we need to do to get back on track, back to where we once belonged?

I participated virtually in one of those initiatives last week conducted by the Miller Center on the University of Virginia campus in Charlottsville, VA, entitled “Remodeling Congress: Inside and Out.” It was a well-designed two-day event. Director Bill Antholis brought together academics, former senior congressional staff, executive branch veterans, journalists, and political operatives to revisit many of those questions and find answers.

I was surprised by the number of panelists who spoke in unison for more civility, a more bipartisan coalition approach to legislating, political party reforms, informed civic engagement, and the need to focus more aggressively on “remodeling” Congress.

The Legislative Branch is, after all, the first step to the restoration of what has been lost by decades of neglect.

The Founding Fathers made clear Congress was to be the first branch of government, the citizens’ first line of defense against tyranny, and the branch of government closest to the people. Congress would be the tabernacle of their new and unique experimental Republic. And the House of Representatives would be the ‘People’s House,’ not the white one down the street that is perpetually under construction.

The Founders entrusted power in the hands of the citizenry. They enunciated values that would define the American character and political principles that would form the nucleus of public policy such as individual freedoms, transparency, accountability, constitutionally guaranteed rights, and the balancing ideal of federalism. Congress would be the citizens’ instrument to make it all happen.

Those points of view came through in Charlottsville either in the form of discussion or in essays written by several panelists. They also explored how we got here. Some of the seeds of our discontent include:

• Political, demographic, and cultural realignment.
• Loss of and the partisan exploitation of congressional oversight.
• Decline in civics education and citizen engagement in the political process.
• Decline in political coalitions that once played a more integral role in finding common ground in governance, especially in Congress.
• Decline of civility and civil behavior in politics and society.
• Media obsession with conflict and senseless theatrics. Also discussed was the media’s disinclination to focus on legislating and what AEI’s Kevin Kosar called the “secret Congress,” where work gets done with little fanfare.
• Excessive control of “outside” influences that has nationalized politics and elections and isolated constituents from their representatives.
• A long list of needed changes in institutional, procedural, and operational functions of Congress, from inadequate staffing, to conflicting schedules, to the ratio of members of Congress to constituents, and to gerrymandering of congressional districts.

The Charlottsville conferees had some ideas on how to fix what’s broken. Here are a few:

• More bipartisan meetings of members and staff.
• Better scheduling of district/state and Washington work.
• Jurisdictional realignment among committees.
• Enlarging the House to reduce the number of constituents per member of Congress (now around 760,000).
• Election of more legislators and fewer dogmatic partisans.
• Modernized technological capacity.
• Defenders of the institution.
• Building pressure for change.
• Campaign finance reform.

There were other valid solutions deserving of consideration. One conferee, however, made a telling point, “There are a lot of ideas, but nothing ever changes.” Do tell.

How do you get relatively boring, but critical reforms from kickoff to touchdown when the goal line keeps moving?

That, to borrow from Winston Churchill, is “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.”

I’ve been deterred by the one-step forward and two steps back syndrome for decades. More than 16 years ago, a bipartisan group of mostly former members and senior congressional staff met over breakfast to talk about our deepening concerns that Congress was broken and needed fixing fast. We deliberated for months and came up with more than 40 reforms, some of which were still being debated in Charlottsville a week ago. We posed them to Congressional offices including the leadership in both chambers on both sides of the political aisle. There was interest but no action. My good friend Bill Pitts, a breakfast participant and parliamentary wizard, in a moment of exasperation said we don’t need more ideas, we need a way to get them enacted. We needed to create a vehicle.

And so, we did. We proposed, in 2015, that Congress create a Joint Committee on the Organization of Congress, similar to efforts made in 1921,1946, and 1974. Illinois congressmen Darin LaHood, a Republican, and Dan Lipinski, a Democrat, introduced the joint committee resolution with the backing of then Republican Conference Chairwoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington, one of the most underrated members in Congress.

Senate leadership said no dice. House leadership bought in and eventually agreed to a resolution that dealt solely with the House. Having a vehicle for reform, we got more than 70 cosponsors from both Democrats and Republicans. What ultimately came out of it without the Senate was a bipartisan Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress. Over the next four years the select committee produced 200 recommendations, many of which were adopted by the full House. The co-chair of that select committee in its first two years was Georgia Rep. Tom Graves, one of the conferees in Charlottsville.

The Select Committee was equally divided between Democratic and Republican members. It was one of the last vestiges of bipartisan legislating on a broad scale, even though it didn’t tackle colossus issues. It wasn’t supposed to.

The Select Committee and the Charlottsville conference were examples of getting us back to where we once belonged. But it is and will continue to be a “Long and Winding Road,” to borrow from Paul McCartney once more.

The challenges are immense and will take time to overcome but momentum is building. It cannot be done without restoring power, authority, access, and influence to the citizenry and the citizenry meeting the responsibilities of that high office. Get back. Get back…

Editor’s Note: Mike Johnson is a former journalist, who worked on the Ford White House staff and served as press secretary and chief of staff to House Republican Leader Bob Michel, prior to entering the private sector. He is co-author of a new book, Fixing Congress: Restoring Power to the People and an earlier book, Surviving Congress, a guide for congressional staff. He is co-founder and former Board chair of the Congressional Institute. Johnson is retired. He is married to Thalia Assuras and has six children and five grandchildren.