We are now in the second week of another government closure and there should be no doubt about its root cause: that members of Congress pay no political penalty for failing to do their jobs.

 Indeed, one reason there is another funding standoff is that members widely believe that the greatest political risk would come from defecting from their party’s hardline position and supporting some sort of bipartisan compromise. 

The other reason is that leaders and members of both parties have convinced themselves they will reap political benefit from the standoff that they made no serious and timely effort to avoid and are in no rush to resolve. 

There was nothing inevitable about this shutdown.  If Republican leaders had instructed the appropriations committees, which have a long tradition of bipartisan cooperation, to report their annual funding bills by the end of July, that would have left plenty of time to debate, amend and approve bills in both the House and Senate and resolve any differences between them.

But that is not what Republican leaders did. They did not set deadlines.  They did not give appropriators the political freedom to do what they thought best for the country and their districts, insisting that they pursue uncompromising partisan positions demanded by the Trump White House and guaranteed to trigger a similar obstinance on the other side.

They did not alter the leisurely congressional schedule that allowed for only 14 legislative days in Washington during all of August and September, when the clock was winding down.  And from the beginning, they assumed they would do as congresses have done for the last 30 years under both Democratic and Republican control: passing a continuing resolution that inevitably would be followed by another and then another, interrupted by the inevitable government shutdown as one party or another attempted to take the whole process hostage. 

With re-election rates running around 95 percent, there is no penalty for this perennial failure to fulfill Congress’s most basic constitutional duty. 

In this, as with almost every other issue — climate, immigration, inequality, balancing the budget, rescuing Social Security — the incentive structure strongly favors partisan gamesmanship over resolving differences through bipartisan compromise, which is the only way they can be resolved in closely divided country.

So how might we change that incentive structure?

It would certainly change the political calculus if a number of members from supposedly “safe” seats were defeated by upstart candidates who managed to tap into the voters’ deep dissatisfaction with Congress (26 percent approval rating in the latest Gallup survey). 

The only way members are able to win re-election is to con voters into believing that, individually, they bear no blame for the institution’s dysfunction — that other members, or the other party, is to blame.  

And because congressional races have been nationalized and run by the same consultants peddling the same tired and tiresome strategies and ideas, challengers rarely run the kind of independent, pox-on-both-your houses campaigns that connects Congress’s dysfunction to the incumbent who has become nothing more than a cog in a partisan noise machine. 

As John Harris, the editor and chief of Politico noted a few years back, nothing so characterizes most members of Congress these days as their mediocrity. 

While members are bright enough and well-intentioned, he wrote, they are largely ineffectual, with little interest or understanding of the major issues of the day or much ambition to have lasting impact on the country they purport to lead. 

So here’s my fantasy: a dozen civic-minded billionaires commit $200 million to finance a dozen insurgent campaigns against supposedly “safe” incumbents of no particular distinction in both parties and both houses. 

Imagine energetic, knowledgeable, courageous, no-nonsense candidates offering real vision and fresh ideas who are able to weave anger, optimism and wicked humor into asking voters to demand something better for themselves and their country. 

Imagine lean, well-managed campaigns free of the suffocating partisanship and interest-group blinders of the Republican and Democratic congressional campaign committees — campaigns grounded on insightful research that can produce imaginative and memorable messages and conjure up clever techniques for turning disaffected voters and non-voters into energized supporters. 

As Samuel Johnson might have put it, nothing focuses the mind of a member of Congress more than the political hanging of a fellow member. 

The “lessons” from the electoral defeats of Reps. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., Eric Cantor, R-Va., Tom Foley, D-Wash., Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky, D-Pa., Joseph Crowley, D-N.Y., and Sens. Thomas Daschle, D-S.D., and Arlen Specter, D-Pa., still reverberate through congressional cloakrooms many years after the fact.  

You could expect a similarly powerful effect on today’s members if a handful of colleagues were to be sent packing because of their complacent and unproductive roles in a perennially failing Congress. 

There will be an honored place in American political history for the visionaries who launch the movement to Make Congress Great Again by electing insurgents who understand what the job should be and will be serious about doing it.  

Steven Pearlstein is director of the Fixing Congress Initiative at the University of Pennsylvania. He was a longtime writer and columnist for The Washington Post. He is also Robinson Professor of Public Affairs at George Mason University. The views expressed here are his own.