Grumet opens the conclusion by recalling a March 2012 Bipartisan Policy Center event honoring Senators Howard Baker and Bob Dole. The celebration, filled with affectionate tributes and bipartisan warmth, contrasted sharply with the same day’s anger on Capitol Hill over the fiscal cliff and the anniversary of the Affordable Care Act.

Speakers praised Dole’s respect for opponents and Baker’s courage in supporting the Panama Canal Treaty despite political risk. Senator Pat Roberts’s playful group singalong for Dole briefly united the room, but remarks from Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell shifted the mood by suggesting that Senate dysfunction flowed from the Founders’ deliberately inefficient design.

Grumet accepts that the Founders built obstacles into the legislative process, but rejects using constitutional design as an excuse for paralysis. He argues that Congress was meant to be energetic, argumentative, connected, and capable, not a place where leaders avoid hard governing work.

The conclusion restates the book’s diagnosis: hostile media, ideological sorting, and moneyed interests are real but not new, and attempts to sterilize politics have deepened public disillusionment. Grumet argues that the more urgent problem is the collapse of trust, shared community, and informal relationships among lawmakers, many of whom barely know one another and rarely deliberate seriously together.

Grumet then reviews the reform legacy of Vietnam, Watergate, and later scandals such as Jack Abramoff. Although many transparency and ethics reforms served important purposes, he contends that recent reform impulses have overcorrected, encouraging politicians to campaign against Washington, avoid responsibility for governing, and pass rules that protect themselves politically while weakening Congress.

The chapter ends with a call to rebuild a productive “City of Rivals” through practical institutional changes: more time in session, stronger committees, bipartisan travel, less performative transparency, party-centered campaign finance incentives, election rules that encourage participation, and fewer barriers to public service. As the last Watergate-era lawmakers depart, Grumet argues that democracy needs a healthy midpoint between secrecy and constant surveillance, and that citizens and leaders must direct public anger toward repairable institutions rather than helpless cynicism.