Most Americans look at the beginning of a new year as a fresh start, and an opportunity to set goals to better themselves over the next 12 months – and members of Congress are no exception.

Like millions of people across the U.S., lawmakers are setting their own New Year’s resolutions, ranging from the professional to the very personal. 

House Foreign Affairs Chairman Michael McCaul, R-Texas, who is stepping down from the top spot on the committee after being term-limited, said his resolution was to use his new role as chairman emeritus “to be a strong voice on foreign policy and national security issues.”

On a more individual level, McCaul told Fox News Digital he also set a New Year’s resolution for “daily exercise and spending my time on the things most important in life, like family. And taking time to smell the roses.”

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Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla., said her New Year’s resolution involved cleaner eating.

“My New Year’s resolution is to not eat anything with seed oils. It’s going to be nearly impossible because they stick them in everything,” she said.

Meanwhile, Rep. Pat Fallon, R-Texas, shared a broader goal for unity in 2025 involving his fellow House Republicans – after a 118th Congress marked by historic levels of discord and infighting.

Rep. Pat Fallon shared a resolution for unity within the House GOP. (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

“I always said that the Republican conference is a big family,” Fallon said. “We may be dysfunctional at times, but we’re still a family, and my New Year’s resolution is that we can all sing from the same sheet music enough times to make a difference for the American people.”

House Freedom Caucus Chairman Andy Harris, R-Md., said, “My New Year’s resolution is to help Make America Healthy Again by steering our nutrition policy toward promoting healthy food choices, starting with changes to the food stamp (SNAP) program.”

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Sen. Katie Britt, R-Ala., will provide the Republican response to President Biden’s State of the Union address on March 7. (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

On the Senate side, lawmakers shared resolutions to forward the GOP agenda.

“With a new year, new Congress, and new President, I know we can get America back on track and usher in a new golden era. My 2025 resolutions are to help secure our southern border to make our families and communities safer; return to regular order to cut wasteful spending and ensure Congress is a responsible steward of taxpayer dollars; and pass pro-family tax reform that grows opportunity and prosperity across our nation,” Sen. Katie Britt, R-Ala., told Fox News Digital.

Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, said, “My New Year’s resolution is to become less tolerant of climate alarmism and hasten the demise of the administrative state.” The Republican will chair the energy committee in the new Congress. 

Sen. Steve Daines, R-Mont., revealed his resolution is to “confirm all of Trump’s nominees and secure our borders.”

Donald Trump has promised to do many things once he reoccupies the White House. Among the most famous, and most desired by his biggest fans, is his vow to “drain the swamp” and “demolish the deep state.”

The first and arguably most important challenge for such a project is definitional. What is the deep state? And what is the swamp? Are they different? How so?

Trump doesn’t have a clear answer. He often uses the terms interchangeably. And he’s not alone. Many in the media do the same.

That’s understandable if you try to put yourself inside Trump’s head (something I don’t necessarily recommend). During his first administration, he was repeatedly undermined by leaks and other schemes from within the federal bureaucracy, including his own Cabinet. Whether this was the work of the deep state or the swamp is something of a tomayto-tomahto distinction for someone who divides the world into friends and enemies. But any serious effort to get rid of either one requires making distinctions.

As the metaphor implies, the swamp is a hot, humid, malarial ecosystem teeming with all manner of critters, each with its own self-interested agenda. (And if you’ve spent a summer in D.C., you know the term has more than figurative verisimilitude.) The idea of the nation’s capital being a pestilent redoubt where politicians go native once they contract “Potomac fever” has been around for generations. George W. Bush’s administration even issued a handy memo to his staff on how to spot signs of infection.

The term “deep state,” on the other hand, conjures a colder, more sterile image of disciplined, professional, secretive operators networked across government and united around a single, nefarious agenda.

The biggest difference between these two concepts is the most important one: The swamp exists; the deep state doesn’t.

My Dispatch colleague Kevin D. Williamson has likened the deep state to the term “Vikings,” a catchall for a disparate “collection of pirates, traders, slavers, settlers, squabbling potentates” and others. Vikings fought Vikings all the time because the Vikings were not a monolithic or unified group.

And neither are the warring factions and fiefdoms that make up Washington. For instance, the Wall Street Journal recently reported intense infighting among and within various intelligence agencies over the origins of COVID-19. The FBI — deep state HQ, according to many in Trump World — was fairly convinced that the pandemic started with a lab leak, the newspaper reported, but competing agencies conspired to keep that verdict from reaching the president’s ears.

The whole idea that the deep state is an evil organization, like Hydra in the Marvel comics or SPECTRE in the James Bond movies, is little more than a conspiracy theory. It’s based on the bizarre assumption that government bureaucrats and political operatives are incredibly competent and disciplined at doing super-secret stuff but fairly incompetent and lazy in their day jobs.

Then there’s the swamp. This catchall term describes something real: Washington’s vast, cacophonous conglomeration of favor-dealing, rent-seeking, back-scratching, self-dealing, special-pleading interests. The founders called them “factions.”

What makes the swamp so hard to drain is the collusion between the state and these factions. Real savings won’t come from purging the federal bureaucracy, a workforce that hasn’t grown appreciably since the 1960s. As the political scientist John J. DiIulio Jr. recently noted, a huge share of the bureaucracy consists of contract managers for private-sector firms. Businesses and nonprofits — including defense contractors and healthcare systems — employ more than three times as many people who ultimately get paid by taxpayers as the federal government does.

Those factions are also political constituencies. And that’s why I suspect we will hear a lot more about fighting the deep state in 2025 than we will about draining the swamp. The nice thing about conspiracy theories is that they can’t be disproved. Blaming failures on shadowy forces is standard fare for politicians because angering their constituencies is hard.

Besides, there’s little evidence that Trump has any desire to drain the swamp so much as to reward those swamp creatures he likes. Industrial policy and protectionism, two of his top priorities, are among the oldest forms of swampiness because they create vast new markets for exemptions, subsidies and anti-competitive lobbying. Indeed, the proliferation of Big Tech moguls and cryptocurrency speculators around Trump makes it seem as if Mar-a-Lago is subsiding into the Everglades before our eyes.

@JonahDispatch

Jimmy Carter, the nation’s 39th president, has died at the age of 100. He served a single term as president, but he also will be remembered for his decades of humanitarian work. 

Those who knew him – opponents and supporters alike – described him as a man of integrity, whatever flaws he may have had as president. 

“When we look at the whole thrust of Jimmy Carter’s life, it’s an amazing American story,” Douglas Brinkley, author of The Unfinished Presidency: Jimmy Carter’s Journey Beyond the White House, told Fox News Digital. 

“He grew up with no electricity, went to work in the… Navy. He became President of the United States at the height of the Cold War and won the Nobel Prize for his post-presidency,” Brinkley said. “All the time, his ambitious humanity was aimed at trying to make sure that everybody he came in contact with, had a better, fair shake at life.” 

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A peanut farmer and former one-term governor of Georgia, Carter beat the odds and was elected president in 1977. 

“Nobody thought Carter could procure the Democratic nomination. But Carter had a unique amount of bulldog tenacity [and] gumshoe perseverance,” Brinkley said. 

American politician Jimmy Carter smiles and waves to the auditorium at the close of the 1976 Democratic National Convention, where Carter was confirmed as the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate, held at Madison Square Garden in New York City, New York, 15th July 1976, Later that year, the former Governor of Georgia won the 1976 United States presidential election.  (Archive Photos/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

His campaign befuddled Democrats, as Carter was deeply religious and ran to the right of his Republican opponent, Gerald Ford, on some social issues. As a Washington outsider, Carter’s agricultural background and accent endeared him to the deep south. 

He took office at a time when Watergate, the Vietnam War, and stagflation had left the country in a sour mood. In Washington, his populist campaign inevitably collided with establishment Democrats who never fully accepted Carter. 

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“He never had a full grip on his own Democratic Party. Ted Kennedy liberals didn’t like Carter, and the Scoop Jackson Cold War hawks didn’t like him,” Brinkley said. “So, he was kind of an island unto himself as president.” 

Carter’s foreign policy wins included brokering Mideast peace by keeping Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin at the bargaining table for nearly two weeks in 1978. At home, Carter partially deregulated the airline, railroad, and trucking industries and established the departments of Education and Energy and the Federal Emergency Manager Agency. 

Jimmy Carter signs Federal Mine Safety and Health Amendments Act of 1977 ca. 9 November 1977.  (Hum Images/Universal Images Group)

Carter designated millions of acres in Alaska as national parks or wildlife refuges and he appointed a then-record number of women and non-whites to federal posts. He also built on Nixon’s opening with China and pushed Latin America from dictatorships to democracy. 

Yet, his president was also marked by double-digit inflation, long gasoline lines, and the 444-day hostage crisis in Iran. His bleakest hour came when eight Americans died in a failed hostage rescue in April 1980, helping to ensure his landslide defeat. 

FILE: Former President Jimmy Carter addresses the crowd gathered for his 28th annual town hall meeting at Emory University on September 16, 2009, in Atlanta, Georgia.  (Photo by Jessica McGowan/Getty Images)

Carter was also crippled by his – as Brinkley put it – “lack of communication chops.” Oratory, Brinkley said, was not his strong suit. 

In 1979, Carter delivered his famous “Crisis of Confidence” speech in which he lamented that the United States, once a nation “proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God” had descended into “self-indulgence and consumption.”

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“Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we’ve discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning,” Carter said. “We’ve learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.” 

Craig Shirley, a Reagan biographer and historian, recalled watching the speech while working for a senator on Capitol Hill. 

“I remember watching it that Sunday night and feeling for the first time in my life, I felt scared as an American. The speech was such a downer. It was so depressing,” Shirley said. “A president is supposed to tell the truth to the American people, but also appeal to the American people’s hopes and aspirations and not their worst feelings or desires.” 

President Jimmy Carter and his Republican challenger, Ronald Reagan, shake hands as they greet one another before their debate on the stage of the Music Hall in Cleveland, Ohio. (Getty Images)

Carter ultimately served a single, tumultuous term and was defeated by Republican Ronald Reagan in 1980. 

But whatever flaws his presidency may have had, Carter will perhaps be most fondly remembered for the decades he spent post-presidency advocating for democracy, public health, and human rights via The Carter Center. 

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The Center, which Carter opened with his wife, Rosalynn, in 1982, has been a pioneer of election observation, monitoring at least 113 elections in Africa, Latin America, and Asia since 1989. In perhaps its most widely hailed public health effort, the organization recently announced that only 14 human cases of Guinea worm disease were reported in all of 2021, the result of years of public health campaigns to improve access to safe drinking water in Africa. Carter’s work with the Center garnered a Nobel Peace Prize in 2002. 

Haitian President Michel Martelly (2L) and former US President Jimmy Carter (C) visit a housing project on November 8, 2011, in Leogane (33 Km in the south of Port-au-Prince) which built by Carter Foundation for 500 families, victims of the last quake on January 12, 2010, in Port-au-Prince.  (THONY BELIZAIRE/AFP via Getty Images)

For his humanitarian work, Shirley argued, Carter will be remembered as “one of the best ex-presidents of the 20th century.” 

“Carter really wasn’t for PR stunts. He really threw himself into his charitable works and did so for many years,” Shirley said. 

“We’re going to remember him kindly. He was a terrific former president with what he did with the Carter Center and the various initiatives around the country. His book writing stands out [as does] his charitable works. So, he goes down in his history as an extraordinarily good, former president.”  

The Associated Press contributed to this report.