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The digital world grows larger every day, and it can be hard to keep up. Navigating the ever-changing digital landscape is a challenge - especially if you have a business of your own and are struggling to market yourself and make sales.

But you don't have to tackle the trials and tribulations of digital transformation alone. Professionals known as digital consultants can help you reach your goals with their extensive knowledge - and you don't have to be a part of a massive corporation to invest in their services.

And if you're tech-savvy with an understanding of the ins and outs of SEO, user-friendly design, social media, and other key virtual practices, you might consider pursuing a side hustle or full-time gig in the field.

From the skills and degrees or training needed to become one to the importance of hiring one, here's everything you need to know about digital consultants and the job of digital consulting.

Digital consulting includes an expansive list of services related to the virtual world, including SEO assistance, IT counseling, web design, and social media. Although it refers to a multitude of services, digital consulting primarily focuses on efficiently implementing business strategies across digital platforms.

Generally, a digital consultant wears many hats. That makes their work truly invaluable, as they can just as easily help you understand online advertising one minute then help integrate new software company-wide the next.

Source: Oro Inc

The overarching purpose of digital consulting is to help a business digitally implement its strategies to reach its goals. That might mean designing a user-friendly website, offering guidance on optimal social media hashtags and posting times, managing email or text marketing services, analyzing digital marketing efforts, or optimizing website content for search engines.

If you live and breathe tech and dream of helping businesses of all sizes achieve their goals, digital consulting might be for you. From training and education to average salaries and expected job growth, here's what you need to know before getting into digital consulting.

The majority of digital consultants - about 67% - have a bachelor's degree, and around 18% have a master's degree. Around 1% have doctorate degrees, while nearly 10% of professionals in this career have an associate degree.

So what do digital consultants study to start on this career path? Many have a degree in marketing, business, or communications. But digital consultants come from a variety of different degree programs, including economics, journalism, graphic design, and computer science.

You don't have to have a higher education degree to become a digital consultant, though. About 2% of digital consultants have a high school diploma, which can be supplemented with certifications and other training to strengthen the skills needed to become a digital consultant.

Regardless of the nature of their degrees, digital consultants can sharpen their skills and learn more about the continuously changing digital space by attending ongoing training throughout their careers. Earning certifications is a great way to showcase these skills.

One of the most popular certifications for digital consultants is in Google Data Analytics. Other beneficial topics to consider for certification include digital marketing, IT, blockchain, SEO, web design, coding, and social media.

Digital consultants possess dozens of skills to help them do their jobs. That being said, some digital consultants may have specializations that they focus on, while others might offer comprehensive consulting packages. Those areas of focus could include:

Digital consulting is becoming a very in-demand service, and acquiring a wide skillset for this career can mean a six-figure salary.

Digital consultants in California, Delaware, Rhode Island, Virginia, and Washington tend to make the highest salaries. Unsurprisingly, digital consultants in the tech hub of San Francisco make the highest salaries for this job in the U.S.

Although businesses of all types and sizes can benefit from digital consulting, larger corporations in industries like healthcare and insurance typically offer the highest salaries for digital consultants.

Businesses are quickly learning how resourceful it is to work with digital consultants. The projected growth for digital consultants through 2028 is 20%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. A report from Statista also expects the digital consulting market to reach $53 billion in 2021.

Digital consultants can be a game-changer for businesses. These days, 70% of the most impactful business marketing strategies are tied to the internet, such as websites or email marketing, at which digital consultants excel.

For example, McKinsey Digital is a top digital consulting firm with experience growing businesses through digital consultancy. The company helped a pizza retailer by creating a top-of-line, innovative platform for the retailer's online business - resulting in a 40% increase in conversion and a 7% growth in sales.

Similarly, McKinsey Digital was involved with the launch of the first entirely digital bank. By the time of launch, it was already the No. 1 trending topic on Twitter and earned over 19 million impressions on social media.

If you want to grow your business by making it more engaging to customers and more efficient for your team, hiring a digital consultant is worth the investment. On the other hand, if you have a passion for technology, you can put your skills to use as a digital consultant whether for small, local businesses near you or massive corporations.

Either way, the advantages of digital consulting are nearly endless. From better web design to more effective content marketing and ultimately increased lead generation and sales, digital consulting helps businesses reap plenty of rewards.

Originally published Oct 11, 2021 4:00:00 AM, updated October 11 2021

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HubSpot Inc. published this content on 11 October 2021 and is solely responsible for the information contained therein. Distributed by Public, unedited and unaltered, on 11 October 2021 08:11:06 UTC.

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HubSpot : What Is Digital Consulting, and How Do You Start? - Marketscreener.com

RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK Triangle employers are still ready to hire tens of thousands of workers across a range of industries, from healthcare to banking to biotech to software.

Even though job creation slowed nationally last month, job boards across the Triangle indicate theres no slowdown in hiring.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics unveiled its latest jobs report on Friday, counting 194,000 jobs added nationwide in September. Thats down from 336,000 jobs added in August and a significant drop from the 488,000 originally forecasted. Still, notable gains spread across leisure and hospitality, professional and business services, retail trade and transportation and warehousing. However, public education jobs slipped significantly, even adjusting for seasonal back-to-school hiring trends.

And even as unemployment claims recently fell by 38,000 in the largest weekly drop since late-June, several factors continue to muddle the job market recovery. Rising COVID cases, vaccine mandates and school reopenings were the backdrop of Septembers jobs report.

Large employers in the Triangle are beginning to require employees to get the COVID-19 vaccine or risk termination. SAS, IBM and Red Hatwhich employ thousands of people across the Triangleare now mandating vaccinations, and more companies are likely to follow suit in the coming weeks. The impacts of vaccine mandates havent come into view quite yet.

Job fairs across Triangle look to match those seeking work with companies

WRAL TechWires weekly Jobs Report compiles the latest information from the regions top job boards, offering a breakdown of how many jobs are posted, which companies are hiring and for what positions. Weve also included upcoming job fairs, student-centric resources and a list of Twitter accounts that track local job openings.

Lets highlight whats new on the job boards since last weeks Jobs Report:

Heres an overview of the number of local jobs posted on national job boards compared to last week, as of Sunday afternoon.

Aside from the boards above, job seekers can also find local startup jobs at SimplyHired (250 startup jobs near Research Triangle Park), LinkedIn (6,907 results in and around Raleigh), Indeed (328 startup jobs in/near RTP), and AngelList (job openings in Raleigh, Durham and across North Carolina).

Heres a look at local and regional job sites, listed in alphabetical order:

AMA Triangle, the fifth-largest chapter in American Marketing Associations nationwide network, aims to be a go-to resource for all things marketing in the Triangle. AMA Triangle provides professional training, free career webinars and a job board offering free resume placement for marketing professionals.

As of Sunday afternoon, AMA Triangles job board shows 91 marketing jobs in Raleigh, 40 in Durham and 15 in Chapel Hill (using the 25-mile radius filter).

A few new jobs were posted last week:

Durham-based startup hub American Underground regularly posts job openings on its job board. Job seekers can filter their search by job function, location, company, industry and job title. As of Sunday afternoon, the site shows 309 jobs at 37 companies.

Dozens of jobs were posted in the last seven days:

Earlier this year, WRAL TechWire and the North Carolina Biotechnology Center launched a Bio Jobs Hub platform focused on biopharma manufacturing one of North Carolinas largest industries, employing over 26,000 people.

Typical biopharma jobs include process technicians, maintenance and/or instrumentation technicians, quality assurance and quality control associates, process development scientists and process engineers. This industry also offers competitive entry-level salaries, from $42,000 to $60,000.

Want a biopharma manufacturing job? Here are 5 key questions, answers about career path

Scientists, skilled laborers and recent graduates can use the Bio Jobs Hub resource to find career and training opportunities in their area. Users can search by location, job category/activity and region.

Many biopharma companies are hiring in the Triangle, including large employers like Biogen in Research Triangle Park, bioMrieux in Durham, GSK in Zebulon, Merck & Co. in Durham, Novo Nordisk in Durham and Clayton, Pfizer in Sanford, and others.

Leadership Triangles job board is packed with local jobs. The site displays 615 openings at 30 companies as of Sunday afternoon.

Heres whats been posted in the last week:

The North Carolina Biotechnology Centers extensive jobs board lists open jobs and internships from local life science companies and research organizations. Users can filter by job category, employment type (full-time, part-time and contractor), keywords, postal code and radius.

NCBiotech also touts jobs through its Bio Jobs Hub program.

Dozens of jobs were added to NCBiotechs board over the last week (since Oct. 4):

The North Carolina Technology Association (NC TECH) has an interactive job board you can use to find your next career opportunity. Users can search by keyword, location, category, type (contract, full-time, part-time or temp to full-time), experience and education level.

A few new jobs were added to the site last week:

NCWorks, the statewide job search portal run by the North Carolina Department of Commerce, has nearly 100 career centers located across the state. Users can filter NCWorks database by keyword, location, occupation group or specific occupations, minimum acceptable salary, education level, job sources and date posted. NCWorks also has a mobile app on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store.

North Carolina military veterans, transitioning service members and spouses can find additional resources on NCWorks separate veterans portal.

NCWorks reports thousands of available positions. More than 2,100 people added or updated their resumes at the site in the past week, as of Sunday afternoon.

Here are the top 10 Wake County-based employers with the most job openings:

IQVIA already hiring for dozens of roles at new Innovation Laboratories facility

Here are the top companies/organizations by job openings in Durham County:

Fidelity is looking for talent, not a degree, as it seeks to fill 1,500 new jobs

And here are the top employers in Orange County:

Raleigh Founded, a startup incubator and coworking space, has its own job board. Job seekers can filter results by company, company size or industry.

The site currently lists 304 positions at 30 companies, as of Sunday afternoon.

Heres whats new on the site over the last seven days:

This isnt a job board per se, but the Research Triangle Cleantech Clusters list of job search sources is a helpful resource for job seekers in the clean energy sector. The list has links to career opportunities from the organizations members and partners.

Leadership Triangle, Raleigh Founded and American Underground recently teamed up to create the Triangle Region Job Board, which synthesizes all of the openings posted on the organizations job boards. (Those openings are listed under their respective subheadings above.)

As of Sunday afternoon, the site shows 1,902 listings from 86 companies. The latest Triangle-area openings come from the following employers:

Work in the Triangle, a Wake County Economic Development program, shares new openings daily through its Twitter feed, @WorkTriangleNC. And the search continues to be intense for talent to fill thousands of open jobs both inside and outside the Triangle tech sector.

Every Tuesday, Work in the Triangles #TriangleTuesdays hashtag lists hot jobs.

Posts from last Tuesday (Oct. 5) included openings from:

Scroll through the #TriangleTuesdays hashtag on Twitter for more details on the openings.

Last month, RTP-based Mycovia Pharmaceuticals told TechWire that its hiring for several positions in project management, market access, insights and analytics, marketing and quality assurance. The late-stage biopharma company is developing drugs to meet womens health needs.

A Mycovia spokesperson says it plans to add around nine employees through the fourth quarter of 2021. Its current headcount is 21.

Open positions include:

Read more and apply here.

Chapel Hill-based edtech company Terra Dotta told TechWire in late-August that its continuing to hire in the greater RTP area and anticipates another 10 new hires across sales, product development and marketing before the end of the year. The firm already has about 35 employees in the Triangle area.

Its latest openings are for a product marketing manager and a professional services manager. Read more and apply here.

The boost in hiring comes as the company just made the Inc. 5000 list and is celebrating its 20th anniversary. Terra Dotta CEO Anthony Rotoli says, This level of growth isnt as common in a more mature company, but we are actively hiring to continue a high growth trajectory and support the international program and global engagement priorities of higher education, both in North Carolina and nationwide.

CRO Career Conversations: Oct 13. 8, 5:30-7 p.m. (online)

In this virtual event, attendees will hear from contract research organization (CRO) industry professionals as they discuss their career paths and responsibilities.

NC TECH Virtual Job Expo: Oct. 20, 8:30 a.m. 4:30 p.m. (online)

The North Carolina Technology Associations virtual job fair will connect employers to job seekers looking for work in a tech role or to support a tech company. The event is free for candidates and job seekers.

NC Graduate & Professional School Information Fair: Oct. 27, 12-6 p.m. (online)

This virtual career event will connect employers with students from Davidson College, NC State University, UNC Chapel Hill, UNC Wilmington and Wake Forest University.

NC Masters & Doctoral Virtual Career Fair: Nov. 4, 12-4 p.m. (online)

Duke University, NC State University, UNC Chapel Hill, UNC Charlotte, UNC Greensboro and Wake Forest University will convene hundreds of advanced degree alumni, candidates and postdocs to meet with companies looking for new talent.

NC States Data Science Virtual Career Expo: Nov. 9, 10 a.m. 3 p.m. (online)

NC State students and alumni who are interested in pursuing a career in data science can join this virtual career expo to meet employers and learn more about the field.

Startup Internship Meet and Greet: Nov. 10, 4 p.m. @UNC Chapel Hill, Polk Place

Innovate Carolina and Central Carolina Community College are hosting an event for students to network and explore internship opportunities with local startups.

NC States Spatial Connect Virtual Career Fair: Nov. 17, 1-5 p.m. (online)

Students interested in geospatial analytics and spatial data science can join this virtual career fair to learn more about the field and network with employers.

Wake Tech Community College Business & IT Spring 2022 Career Fair: Feb. 9, 9 a.m. 12 p.m. (online)

In February 2022, Wake Tech will host an online job fair for business and information technology students looking for new career opportunities.

If youre a student looking for an internship or entry-level position at a local company or organization, your university has resources to help you get started. Quick links below:

Here are some locally run Twitter accounts that regularly share job openings in the Triangle:

Follow this link:
Help wanted: Jobs sites report thousands of open positions across Triangle - WRAL Tech Wire

TUNIS, Tunisia For roughly three months after Tunisians toppled their dictator in January 2011 in an eruption of protest that electrified the Arab world, Ali Bousselmi felt nothing but pure happiness.

The decade that followed, during which Tunisians adopted a new Constitution, gained freedom of speech and voted in free and fair elections, brought Mr. Bousselmi its own rewards. He co-founded a gay rights group an impossibility before 2011, when the gay scene was forced to hide deep underground.

But as the revolutions high hopes curdled into political chaos and economic failure, Mr. Bousselmi, like many Tunisians, said he began to wonder whether his country would be better off with a single ruler, one powerful enough to just get things done.

I ask myself, what have we done with democracy? said Mr. Bousselmi, 32, the executive director of Mawjoudin, meaning We Exist in Arabic. We have corrupt members of Parliament, and if you go into the street, you can see that people cant even afford a sandwich. And then suddenly, there was a magic wand saying things were going to change.

That wand was held by Kais Saied, Tunisias democratically elected president, who, on July 25, froze Parliament and fired the prime minister, vowing to attack corruption and return power to the people. It was a power grab that an overwhelming majority of Tunisians greeted with joy and relief.

July 25 has made it harder than ever to tell a hopeful story about the Arab Spring.

Held up by Western supporters and Arab sympathizers alike as proof that democracy could bloom in the Middle East, Tunisia now looks to many like a final confirmation of the uprisings failed promise. The birthplace of the Arab revolts, it is now ruled by one-man decree.

Elsewhere, wars that followed the uprisings have devastated Syria, Libya and Yemen. Autocrats smothered protest in the Gulf. Egyptians elected a president before embracing a military dictatorship.

Still, the revolutions proved that power, traditionally wielded from the top down, could also be driven by a fired-up street.

It was a lesson the Tunisians, who recently flooded the streets again to demonstrate against Parliament and for Mr. Saied, have reaffirmed. This time, however, the people lashed out at democracy, not at an autocrat.

The Arab Spring will continue, predicted Tarek Megerisi, a North Africa specialist at the European Council on Foreign Relations. No matter how much you try to repress it or how much the environment around it changes, desperate people will still try to secure their rights.

Mr. Saieds popularity stems from the same grievances that propelled Tunisians, Bahrainis, Egyptians, Yemenis, Syrians and Libyans to protest a decade ago corruption, unemployment, repression and an inability to make ends meet. Ten years on, Tunisians felt themselves backsliding on virtually everything except freedom of expression.

We got nothing out of the revolution, said Houyem Boukchina, 48, a resident of Jabal Ahmar, a working-class neighborhood in the capital, Tunis. We still dont know what the plan is, but we live on the basis of hope, she said of Mr. Saied.

But popular backlashes can still threaten autocracy.

Mindful of their peoples simmering grievances, Arab rulers have doubled down on repression instead of addressing the issues, their ruthlessness only inviting more upheaval in the future, analysts warned.

In Mr. Saieds case, his gambit depends on economic progress. Tunisia faces a looming fiscal crisis, with billions in debt coming due this fall. If the government fires public workers and cuts wages and subsidies, if prices and employment do not improve, public sentiment is likely to U-turn.

An economic collapse would pose problems not only for Mr. Saied, but also for Europe, whose shores draw desperate Tunisian migrants in boats by the thousands each year.

Yet Mr. Saieds office has not made any contact with the International Monetary Fund officials who are waiting to negotiate a bailout, according to a senior Western diplomat. Nor has he taken any measures other than requesting chicken sellers and iron merchants to lower prices, telling them it was their national duty.

People dont necessarily support Saied, they just hated what Saied broke, Mr. Megerisi said. Thats going to be gone pretty quickly when they find hes not delivering for them, either.

For Western governments, which initially backed the uprisings then returned in the name of stability to partnering with the autocrats who survived them, Tunisia may serve as a reminder of what motivated Arab protesters a decade ago and what could bring them into the streets again.

While many demonstrators demanded democracy, others chanted for more tangible outcomes: an end to corruption, lower food prices, jobs.

From outside, it was easy to cheer the hundreds of thousands of protesters who surged into Cairos Tahrir Square, easy to forget the tens of millions of Egyptians who stayed home.

The people pushing for Parliament, democracy, freedoms, we werent the biggest part of the revolution, said Yassine Ayari, an independent Tunisian lawmaker recently imprisoned after he denounced Mr. Saieds power grab. Maybe a lot of Tunisians didnt want the revolution. Maybe people just want beer and security. Thats a hard question, a question I dont want to ask myself, he added.

But I dont blame the people. We had a chance to show them how democracy could change their lives, and we failed.

The revolution equipped Tunisians with some tools to solve problems, but not the solutions they had expected, Mr. Ayari said. With more needs than governing experience, he said, they had little patience for the time-consuming mess of democracy.

A Constitution, the ballot box and a Parliament did not automatically give rise to opportunity or accountability, a state of affairs that Westerners may find all too familiar. Parliament descended into name-calling and fistfights. Political parties formed and re-formed without offering better ideas. Corruption spread.

I dont think that a Western-style liberal democracy can or should be something that can just be parachuted in, said Elisabeth Kendall, an Oxford University scholar of Arabic and Islamic studies. You cant just read Liberal Democracy 101, absorb it, write a constitution and hope that everything works out. Elections are just the start.

Arab intellectuals often point out that it took decades for France to transition to democracy after its revolution. Parts of Eastern Europe and Africa saw similar ups and downs in leaving dictatorships behind.

Opinion polls show that emphatic majorities across the Arab world still support democracy. But nearly half of respondents say their own countries are not ready for it. Tunisians, in particular, have grown to associate it with economic deterioration and dysfunction.

Their experience may have left Tunisians still believing in democracy in the abstract, but wanting for now what one Tunisian constitutional law professor, Adnan Limam, approvingly called a short-term dictatorship.

Still, Ms. Kendall cautioned that it is too soon to declare the revolutions dead.

In Tunisia, rejection of the system that evolved over the last decade does not necessarily imply embrace of one-man rule. As Mr. Saied has arrested more opponents and taken more control, last month suspending much of the Constitution and seizing sole authority to make laws, more Tunisians especially secular, affluent ones have grown uneasy.

Someone had to do something, but now its getting off-track, said Azza Bel Jaafar, 67, a pharmacist in the upscale Tunis suburb of La Marsa. She said she had initially supported Mr. Saieds actions, partly out of fear of Ennahda, the Islamist party that dominates Parliament and that many Tunisians blame for the countrys ills.

I hope therell be no more Islamism, she said, but Im not for a dictatorship either.

Some pro-democracy Tunisians are counting on the idea that the younger generation will not easily surrender the freedoms they have grown up with.

We havent invested in a democratic culture for 10 years for nothing, said Jahouar Ben Mbarek, a former friend and colleague of Mr. Saieds who is now helping organize anti-Saied protests. One day, theyll see its actually their freedom at risk, and theyll change their minds.

Others say there is still time to save Tunisias democracy.

Despite Mr. Saieds increasingly authoritarian actions, he has not moved systematically to crack down on opposition protests, and recently told the French president, Emmanuel Macron, that he would engage in dialogue to resolve the crisis.

Lets see if democracy is able to correct itself by itself, said Youssef Cherif, a Tunis-based political analyst, and not by the gun.

Mr. Bousselmi, the gay rights activist, is torn, wondering whether gay rights can progress under one-man rule.

I dont know. Will I accept forgetting about my activism for the sake of the economy? Mr. Bousselmi said. I really want things to start changing in the country, but well have to pay a very heavy price.

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What Have We Done With Democracy? A Decade On, Arab Spring Gains Wither - The New York Times

Fan-favorite guest James Carville returns to ask, What is Merrick Garland doing by the way? I dont think this man knows whether to wind his ass or scratch his watch while arguing that its time to lock up Steve Bannon on the way to locking up Donald TrumpYou cant have the most famous person in the United States blatantly committing crimes.

And Carville talks with Molly Jong-Fast about the critically important... high stakes Virginia raceThis shit is hard but if you dont do it Im not exaggerating to say that they come back in power in 2024, you can kiss this democracys ass goodbye, its goneand explains what Democrats are getting wrong about their most frustrating senator:

Subscribe to The New Abnormal on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon Music, or Overcast. To listen to our weekly members-only bonus episodes, join Beast Inside here. Already a member? You can listen here and sign up for new episode email alerts here.

Manchin is an Italian, Roman Catholic Democrat from Virginia. A Democrat has not carried a county in West Virginia since 2008. Your choice is not Manchin or Bernie Sanders. Your choice is Manchin or Marsha Blackburn. So what do you want?

Plus, Alec Ross, former senior adviser for innovation to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, talks about his new book, The Raging 2020s, and why We need to fundamentally rewrite the social contract, and author and activist Ryan Hampton, talks about the Sacklers great deal in the Purdue settlement, and how this whole thing was a set up from day one in which victims were sidelined every step of the way.

Listen to The New Abnormal on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon and Stitcher.

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Either Merrick Garland Gets to Work or We Can Kiss Democracy Goodbye - The Daily Beast

By fleeing to the political extremes, a co-equal House of Congress is abdicating its lawmaking power.

About the author: Daniel Lipinski is a former U.S. representative from Illinois.

In the fight over if and when a vote on the bipartisan infrastructure bill would take place and whether it would be tied to a vote on President Joe Bidens broader economic agenda, one fact was overlooked: House Democrats passed their own infrastructure bill in July. The reason you havent heard much about that measure is that the House acquiesced to the Senates demand that it vote on the Senates bill without amendment. In doing this, the House accepted a bill that not only omitted many progressive priorities but also had no input from its members.

If the irrelevance of the House in this negotiation were an unusual case, it may not be cause for concern. But this is the way most major laws have been made for the past decade: They are products of the Senate with little or no House involvement. This is because the Housewhether controlled by Democrats or Republicansnow acts as if it were a unicameral legislature in a parliamentary system, rather than acknowledging that it is only one of two legislative chambers in a presidential system. It routinely passes partisan legislation that cannot pass in the Senate, because it is too far out of the American ideological center. The result is a House of Representatives that now serves only to either block orin the case of must pass legislationrubber-stamp Senate bills on major issues. Members of the House have largely given up their power, and thus their constituents power, to create legislation that addresses our nations biggest problems.

From the November 2018 issue: How Newt Gingrich destroyed American politics

This state of affairs is not what the Founders intended. Two of the main reasons the Framers of the Constitution created two chambers of Congress were to provide Americans with multiple access points to the lawmaking process, and to force representatives and senators to deliberate and compromise. They believed that this would not only produce the best laws but also promote the legitimacy of these laws, because the manifold voices in our nation would have the potential to be heard through their representatives as well as their senators.

As I wrote in a chapter of Under the Iron Dome, a recently published anthology, members of the House now mainly represent their party and its platform rather than their constituents diverse views. Through changes in the rules, members have relinquished much of their individual power and disempowered committees in order to give their party leaders the ability to shape legislation for the purpose of pursuing the partys goals. In formulating legislation, party leaders cater to interest groups, activists, and donors aligned with the party to build electoral support. These supporters tend to be further toward the ideological extremes. Little to no effort is expended to pick up votes from the other party in the legislative process. This may be a reasonable way to legislate in a single-chamber parliamentary system, but the House is only one half of one branch in the American lawmaking process.

The problem with the House legislating in this manner is compounded by the prevalence of divided government, where control of the White House, the House, and the Senate is split between the parties. Divided government has occurred more than 30 out of the past 41 years, or 40 out of 41 when considering the need for 60 votes in the Senate to overcome a filibuster. During these periods, only bipartisan bills can become law, and partisan House legislating only contributes to gridlock. Sometimes, however, a consensus emerges that legislation must be passed to address a particular issue. When this has occurred in the past decade, the necessary bipartisan compromise bill has been written in the Senate and passed without changes by the House. This happened in October 2013 and January 2018, when Republicans controlled the House and a compromise was needed to end a government shutdown. But it also happens when the House is in Democratic hands. In 2019, when there was a humanitarian crisis at the southern border, a bipartisan bill produced in the Republican Senate became law, because the bill passed by House Democrats could not pass in the Senate.

Read: Political polarization killed the filibuster

When one of the two chambers of Congress is not contributing to lawmaking on the most important issues facing our country, our democracy is not healthy. It is especially troublesome when the weak link is the House, because that chamber was intended to play a preeminent role in ensuring the peoples democratic control of the republic. The House has always been considered the bulwark of American democracy.

Could we solve this problem by eliminating the Senate filibuster? Perhaps. But divided government is now prevalent. And even when Republicans had unified control in 2017 and 2018, and used the budget-reconciliation process to skirt the filibuster in their attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act and enact big tax cuts, the Senate still largely determined the outcome on both bills. The Build Back Better reconciliation bill will again test whether the House can generate leverage vis--vis the Senate even without the filibuster.

Jane Chong: This is not the Senate the Framers imagined

Another option to make the House more effective at legislating, and to open up the possibility of more voices being heard in the lawmaking process, would be to change the chambers rules to re-empower individual members and committees, thus providing more opportunities for bipartisan legislating to occur in the House. The bipartisan House Problem Solvers Caucus, of which I was a member, attempted to do this in 2018, when it endorsed a package of rule changes. Leveraging our votes in the January 2019 speaker-of-the-House election enabled us to win a few changes. A new speaker will be elected in the next Congress (assuming that Nancy Pelosi keeps her pledge to step down or Republicans become the majority), presenting another opportunity to secure rule reforms. But if nothing changes, the peoples House will continue to produce more theatrics than solutions, failing the people and our democracy.

The rest is here:
The House of Representatives Is Failing America - The Atlantic