Americans know Washington is broken. That’s why they elected an outsider who promised to “drain the swamp.” But while President Trump can undo Obama-era executive orders, he does not have the power to fix decades of broken statutes and regulations.

Congress won’t fix it either. What I learned from 16 years in Congress, 10 in the Senate, is that Congress doesn’t see its job as going back to repair or eliminate obsolete laws. In his new book, Try Common Sense, Philip Howard says that “Congress is like the Roach Motel, where the laws check in but never check out.”