Pillars of Democracy: The U.S. Congress

welcome i'm carla hayden the 14th librarian of congress we live in a challenging time and polls show that major institutions in american society are less trusted and less respected than at any time in living memory in an effort to grapple with the question of how their decline can be counteracted the john w kluge center here at the library is teaming up with policy think tanks on the left and on the right the brookings institution and the american enterprise institute to bring together historians political scientists legal scholars authors and others from across the ideological spectrum the idea is to create a full picture of the challenges facing american institutions and their potential promise to that end we are holding a 10 event series entitled the pillars of democracy fittingly we start today with one of the institutions of government the article 1 branch the u.s congress we follow with events each month going into the spring of next year and we look forward to your virtual participation today because eventually sometime this fall we plan to transition to doing these and other events in person at the library so thank you for tuning in to the first of these important conversations now i'd like to turn to john haskell director of the kluge center to introduce the panelists john thank you dr hayden and let me add my welcome to our virtual audience over the next many months in this series we'll be looking at the presidency the courts the media academia and other institutions we at the library have enjoyed planning this series with yuval levin of the american enterprise institute and bill bill galston of the brookings institution they are both with us here today on the panel we have three leading figures in the study of congress francis lee is professor of politics at princeton university she is co-author of the limits of party congress and law making in a polarized era as well as the most widely used textbook on congress congress and its members she is the author of insecure majorities congress and the perpetual campaign sarah binder comes to us from george washington university and the brookings institution she's the co-author of the myth of independence how congress governs the federal reserve and she wrote stalemate causes and consequences of legislative gridlock both francis and sarah recently held chairs at the kluge center at the library of congress last is philip wallach of the american enterprise institute he wrote to the edge legality legitimacy and responses to the 2008 financial crisis he has worked at several dc think tanks and in the united states congress please note that we are leaving time at the end of the discussion for questions you may submit your questions through the chat function on zoom the question and answers will be part of the recording of the event and which will be posted on july 22. so to start to start the conversation i'm going to give each of the panelists a chance to summarize his or her view of the state of congress today sarah let me start with you great excellent thanks so much uh for uh including me um i i would answer the question on this data congress this this way this is not a healthy congress and i mean that in both an acute uh and a chronic sense i'll just briefly touch on the acute problem and then spend a little more uh thoughts on the chronic problem the acute problem uh my sense is that this is a traumatized institution from the attack on the capital on january 6 because of the violence uh because of the context of trying to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power uh during the county of electoral college votes and because the challenges i think investigating uh the root causes we see trauma i think at the individual level of lawmakers and staff but also at the institutional level the sense amongst many lawmakers that they're not physically safe in the capital and many do not trust their colleagues to keep them safe and i see that as an acute problem but what i really want to do is say a little bit more about what i see is congress's chronic problem that is its policy performance summarizing i think congress increasingly struggles to address the big issues of the day uh and just be clear what i'm not arguing i'm not saying that congress is a completely deadlocked institution uh there's a lot of ground between congresses meeting the challenges of the day on the one hand and congress is thoroughly gridlocked on the other there's a lot of variation both within a given congress as well as over time but i do want to think a little bit more about the notion that congress has increasingly struggled struggling to address the issues of the day we can certainly point to successes right issues where congress and the president are able to tackle a problem foremost among them certainly the last year or so has been the congressional response to the global pandemic responses spread out over a year optics weren't always pretty but congress did deliver several trillion dollars of fiscal firepower to fighting covid and repairing or trying to repair the economy certainly other successes uh tax cuts 2017 regardless of what one thinks of them sanctions against russia nafta 2.0 and so forth but my point is we register those successes in the numerator right what did congress achieve i want us to focus on the denominator the big public problems that congress and the president could and many say should address congress the president are addressing a dwindling share of those big issues of the day they leave rising numbers of challenges on the agenda immigration reform climate change health care affordability child care access poverty gun violence entitlement reform and so on now why i think our most common answer points towards some version of partisan polarization partisan team play your team's force so my team's against it or ideological polarization just sort of different views of the parties and what the appropriate role of government is in addressing an issue or just sheer electoral competition right that's generating increasingly smaller and smaller majorities and frequently change your part of control now why do these changes leave so many issues deadlocked in the denominator i point to four ways in which the effects of partisanship are manifesting themselves and complicating congress's ability to function first the parties often disagree about whether an issue is a problem such as tightening gun regulations elected democrats or republicans think differently about making it harder to buy guns probably because their base voters think differently about the issue if the parties disagree about whether something is a problem for whatever reason we're not obviously likely to see action even in the wake of horrific mass murders second the parties often agree that an issue some issue is a problem but they care about different dimensions of the issue and they seem unwilling to give ground to the other party probably because they don't fear retribution from their own party for inaction and it's always easy to blame the other side for the stalemate right democrats on immigration say want path to citizenship republicans want stronger border security to get a deal they have to give a little to the other side but they can't seem to get there third some issues neither party is willing to recognize a problem so entitlement reform so the future viability of social security and medicare those tend to be longer term problems right they require lawmakers to impose some concentrated costs today like raising when you can qualify for social security to benefit the future generations and and lawmakers don't like that electoral logic right they like the benefits today and buck the costs uh to the future fourth on some issues there may be bipartisan support to act but too high an institutional hurdle uh filibuster falls in that category we need to be a little careful here sometimes it's easy to blame the rules right divided majorities blame the rules to deflect attention for their own internal cleavages but certainly there are some issues where we have evidence of bipartisan majority support house senate white house but not super majority support failure to create that bipartisan commission investigate january 6th events surely falls in that category where does this leave us uh as francis uh and i have written together both parties need a strong electoral incentive to go to the bargaining table both have to fear being blamed by their own party for failure to act there aren't any naturally bipartisan issues and there's no ideological sweet spot to join the parties and that means lawmakers and increasingly their leaders have to be willing to build bipartisanship in super partisan times that does seem an increasingly high hurdle for leaders to reach i will put that happy view of congress right there francis why don't you go next okay thanks john and thanks very much for including me in this uh in this series uh on on the pillars of democracy so my view of congress today is that it's performing better than it's given credit for i'm almost surprised at myself for saying so considering that so much of my research has focused on party polarization and the challenges that it creates for governance but reflecting on the past couple of years i'm most struck by congress's ability to step up and act forcefully in times of crisis even under extremely difficult circumstances i certainly do not want to minimize the difficulties that congress faces congress has had to contend with some of the most intense party polarization in the institution's history just since december 2019 there have been two presidential impeachments and here we are just six months after the january sixth attacks on the capital the parties are very apar very far apart ideologically but they're not just ideologically opposed to one another the relations between the parties are poisoned by deep mistrust today's congress also has to function with some of the narrowest majorities possible the majority party doesn't even have 51 percent of the seats in either chamber the 2022 midterms already loom ahead and if history is any guide uh party control in at least one chamber is more likely to change than not this is uh these are hard circumstances under which to strike any major deals because the party out of power right now expects to be in a better position in the very near term so there's no doubt that conditions in recent american politics have been exceedingly unfriendly to productive bargaining and negotiation and yet congress has somehow managed to come together to enact major policies no country has had a more effective and robust economic response to the pandemic than the u.s the imf reported in april this year that the united states deployed extra public spending worth 25 percent of its national economic output for stimulus and relief while the corresponding figure in germany was 10 and in france italy and spain even less during the height of the pandemic recession more than 30 million americans lost their jobs and yet poverty did not rise in fact poverty for much of the pandemic has been lower than it was in january of 2020. under the pandemic unemployment programs the average unemployed americans saw 146 percent of their lost wages replaced no other country comes close to that level of income replacement the reason was congressional action principally we're talking about the cares act passed without opposition in both house and senate merely two months after president trump's first impeachment trial somehow amazingly congress in the spring of 2020 came together to pass the most massive piece of legislation ever enacted to that point the polarized congress somehow did this despite divided government a house and senate controlled by different parties amidst the presidential election year i find it hard to criticize congress for policy gridlock so soon after it passed legislation that saved millions of americans from economic devastation preserved whole sectors of the economy from collapse funded hospitals food aid rental assistance state and local governments mass transit and managed to underwrite the fastest vaccine rollout in history pandemic relief wasn't even everything congress accomplished in 2020 there was actually additional significant legislation congress passed legislation protecting 1.3 million new acres of wilderness it also enacted a 35 billion dollar energy package that uh is arguably the most significant climate legislation congress has passed to date since 2017 congress has passed bipartisan legislation overhauling federal criminal criminal justice policy revamping trade policy with mexico and canada updating copyright law for the digital streaming age and mandating paid maternity leave for more than 2 million federal civilian workers furthermore when it comes to legislation congress is far more bipartisan than is generally appreciated as jim curry and i show in our recent book the laws enacted in congress today garner just as much bipartisan support as the laws it passed in the 1970s the affordable care act and the tax cuts and jobs act are highly unrepresentative of how law making normally works today most laws that get enacted including the most important laws still garner bipartisan support polls show that the public wants to see bipartisan cooperation on law making and that is in fact how legislation works most of the time of course there are many pressing policy problems on which congress has not mustered the will to act sarah offered a list you know on that i would add immigration long-term fiscal balance no doubt congress is much more forceful in responding to crises than in dealing with long-term problems as the old saw goes congress is good at two things doing nothing and overreacting but as i reflect back on our recent politics my main sense is that congress is not getting the credit it deserves it's done a more than credible job at handling the most important problems facing the country over the past 18 months and it has done so in the face of fierce polarization and contrary political incentives so even while we may see the need for reform and more problem solving we ought to be able to give some credit where it is due and uh last philip what's your view of the state of congress today well thanks john for having me uh in this event it's an honor to be here with professors bender and lee both of whom i've learned so much from over the years um i'm going to be on on team binder on on on this basic question of is congress well or not my view is definitely that it's not i'll come at it from a somewhat different angle and i'll get back to talking about congress's performance in responding to the pandemic which i do think is a very important case study to be thinking about and i differ somewhat with what professor lee just said so let me step back a little bit and ask you know what is congress's basic function in our constitutional system it's not just to take votes that reflect american public opinion i i doubt that america's founders would have thought of public opinion as very well articulated thing out there to reflect it's not just there to pass laws for the sake of passing laws congress is there to act as a representative body because that's how we have self-government in america that's how america's citizens are directly involved in in deciding the business of the united states um you know there's an awful lot of uh popular opinion around the idea that the president is the only official elected by the whole nation and that gives him a kind of plebiscitatory legitimacy um that really grounds the whole system but that's not that's not really uh a concept that has a long history in american constitutional democracy instead the idea of congress as the basic foundation and source of legitimacy is that we bring these people uh these representatives from all over the nation you know who continue to reflect the views of their differing parts of the nation and that is actually the best way to cope with the staggering diversity of this country which has always been a challenge from the very beginning so i think when we think about whether congress is succeeding or not whether congress is fulfilling its constitutional purpose we have to think about whether that basic role of making the people feel like their concerns are reflected and being brought in by their representatives and then have them fight it out and work to some compromise work to figure out how to live together how to move forward together that again that's the basis of self-government in this country and so uh i think it's more than just passing laws it's more than just getting money out the door it has to be that people actually feel like their concerns are actually getting aired in washington dc in the halls of power we have other ways of trying to do that through through the bureaucracy and notice and comment rule making people can certainly bring cases into courts but really having having their voices reflected in the halls of congress is the the major way that people are supposed to have their views reflected in our in our system of government and so when congress does provide a forum where these views you know fight it out and then work to a compromise people have faith in self-government when it becomes a forum for name-calling and for ratifying deals that are made sort of off stage people start to think that representative government is just kind of window dressing for the real power plays being made elsewhere that uh you know the the the political system depicted in the house of cards is is not so far off from the truth uh and then they start to think about sort of well how can we influence the royal court to get our people uh what they what they want rather than working again to compromise with others who have different interests different values but nevertheless we see as our fellow citizens and can work for us so let me turn to kovid to make all this less abstract so i agree with professor lee uh if you thought congress is everywhere and always beset by paralysis the responses to covet 19 show that that's not the case overwhelming bipartisan majorities passed historically large supplemental appropriations bills and set up all kinds of programs to help people have have enough money to go on living their lives and that is that is something but from my from my point of view the the actual debates in congress were incredibly anemic um and especially they lacked the future of actually figuring out how could we actually stop this virus we sort of dusted off our playbook from the financial crisis and said well we know a lot of things about how to prop up the financial system and how to help people uh weather difficult economic times so we're going to do that and we're going to take all those responses and put them on steroids this time around and so a lot of what was argued about was just how much cash we were going to send out the door but there was a striking lack of of talk about well how could we actually help people go about their lives without transmitting this disease how could we work on keep doing things that are very important to us like keeping schools open uh while while figuring out ways to suppress this virus and so when i think about you know it's true if you look at pure countries some some of them certainly didn't do any better but it's not the case that there are no countries that that that thought more clearly and acted more expeditiously about this we look over to south korea for example and they really devised a response that suppressed the virus so they didn't need such a massive economic bailout on the back end so you know my fear is that congress is becoming kind of a place where deals worked out off stage between uh the president uh and maybe some congressional uh leaders get voted on and and maybe we can vote things through maybe it's not just a matter of being a giant morass where nothing can pass but it's not providing the kind of forum where we actually hash out our differences and figure out a way to live with each other and that in turn is part of why this country is having such a difficult time seeing itself as a single nation thanks phil sarah i wanted to pose this question to you and kind of put you on the spot um you know at first blush it may seem like you and francis are in disagreement in your assessment of congress or is it really the case that you're using a different metric in assessing policy performance i mean so in your view how much i mean you and francis know each other how much in disagreement are you can we sort this out so that's an excellent question um one way to think about the differences and this doesn't entirely do justice to the differences but one basic difference and and with the caveat i'm sure francis can uh point out caveats here about why she might think not think of it this way there's certainly a numerators versus denominators difference here and and and francis obviously acknowledges the issues that aren't getting traction um i really do put more emphasis on trying to answer the question is congress able to solve problems and i i think that demands a broad sense of what is on a broad agenda and i use the agenda very loosely because obviously the parties disagree at times about whether something something is a problem but i think the more we emphasize what congress has been able to achieve and i and francis makes important part that first we uh tend to i think the public tends to not really uh i think they give do give congress a bad rap but the more we emphasize what congress does achieve i i think it lessens the attention to what are the issues on the agenda year after year or congress after congress that just don't ever get resolved even when it is seems that you and i and many people i'm sure uh on on this webinar could in a room come up with a solution um daca right it seems the past that solutions have been in reach uh climate change even if it's just like a small portion of it why why don't congress why don't they seem unable to like take the low-hanging fruit at times even though the issues have been out there and there are lots of policy solutions is the the politics seem uh overly uh suppressing the types of decisions uh that i think a reasonable people could could come up with um you deserve a rejoinder francis i am i don't really disagree with sarah's central point here you know that that there are many issues that congress is failing failing to address many pressing problems long-term thinking is not congress's strength congress tends to be a reactive institution i mean it's a it's a large collegial body it's bicameral uh it needs to be it needs leadership and it's going to respond to leadership that you know that it that it's not you know it's it it it it's a body of generalist something that phil wallach's work has emphasized that this is not uh you know they are not policy experts um so you know it faces many challenges in in responding i suppose that if i'm looking for how to understand uh the different perspectives that sarah and i are bringing to bear to the question today is that i i focused on the scale of the problems that congress has faced recently which is just unthinkably large and it had then had to do so in a context where congress couldn't even meet in its usual procedures last year uh and so you know just to struggle to you know to find a way to continuing functioning as a legislative assembly and then add in the difficult political problems that congress has to contend with that i suppose i i'm looking at congress with a more empathetic view and then i'm putting myself in the shoes of the members you know trying just grappling with the difficulties that they face uh you know a looming election narrow majorities divided power they were very difficult relations with the executive branch and yet you know in recognition of all those challenges somehow congress did an awful lot that ameliorated americans lives over the past over the past year uh in in highly consequential ways and so looking at you know looking at what congress faced and the difficulties that it had to contend with you know i come away thinking you know i'm impressed that they that they did as as well as they did uh francis is grading on a curve right so phil you know tied to that um you know you say hey congress has certain constitutional responsibilities that it should serve a certain function is that being done more poorly now was there a time it was done better um you know uh what's changed well i think congress of every era has its problems that that both insiders and outsiders find with it um i find myself looking back to the era of very powerful committees with a certain amount of um nostalgia and yearning because that was a time when uh there was a sense that there were many power centers in congress it was a complicated and confusing thing to know just what kind of compromises were going to get worked out but they by and large did get worked out and congress today has become a much more leader-dominated institution than than at almost any other time in the last century and to my mind that sort of de-emphasizes the qualities of the institution that make it distinctive within our constitutional system congress is a plural body as as professor lee points out that makes it difficult for it to do lots of things efficiently and that's always been true but congress really flourishes when it allows this plurality of voices to come together and then work together to some compromise um if if instead we sort of have uh the sense that there's a lot of yelling going on over here and then the leaders the grown-ups as as they're sometimes called have to work things um work things out between themselves elsewhere and then you know get their members to come along at the last minute that really diminishes the sense that that congress is um you know this this engine of self-government that i that i was talking about so to my mind this this leader domination really is distinctive in the 21st century um and uh you could date it you could date the rise of it back to the 1980s i suppose if you wanted to uh especially in the house but um but i think it really is is the thing about our modern congress that we have to grapple with sarah what do you think about what phil said that that that when congress had i probably referring to the 1950s and 60s more committee-centered policy making process as opposed to leader directed um is it is it what do you think about that as being better were they better at representing the people were they better at addressing problems um so i i interpreted bill to be talking about the 1970s and into the 80s um which i'll come to in a moment so tell us what he what he really meant yeah so what did you really mean more like what john said okay okay um well i i think when everyone is talking about the 50s and 60s one needs to bracket it as a period before the voting rights era and the civil rights era and so the the types of voices who are at the table in a committee system dominated typically by conservative democrats because they're the ones who never lost their seats on the rare chime when republicans took control in the briefly in the in the 40s and brief in the 50s that it wasn't a terribly um representative body uh so i i i see phil's point about uh the the possibility of uh some sort of devolution of policy making or decentralization of the policy making process less leader dominated um perhaps generating the conditions uh of better problem-solving uh as it were um i am a greater favor uh fan of the 70s uh in into the 80s where there seems in part because the the parties are less sorted we've got liberals and conservatives really in both political parties uh both democrat parties and republican parties uh you have a greater tolerance i think because of the ideological uh and partisan diversity greater tolerance on the leader's part for the uncertainty that comes from putting issues on the floor and allowing lawmakers to vote um and you you see that even into the 1980s where life has become pretty partisan right we see partisanship over the reagan budgets so i don't want to say it's a nonpartisan period but you you do even in that period get um the types of laws that francis is pointing to uh that we do periodically see today right simpsons is only 1986 a major tax reform 1986 a whole range of clean water act we have major trade bills we have kind of a a world where legislating is happening both in committee but then uh the power of the floors to try to build on these uh these solutions so um that looks quite different than the intensity of the partisanship we we see today uh and uh all due to making sure like francis's point it's not always debilitating uh but we certainly see the ways in which the cloistering of these parties uh into the left and to the right and and i would call the civil war uh going on within the republican party undermining the ability of the parties to get to the bargaining table uh in the first place francis why isn't partisanship uh debilitating i mean that's that's the the conventional wisdom is partisanship's out of control it clearly seems to be but in your view it necessarily it hasn't necessarily stopped the policy making from happening so why hasn't it what what's the danger here i agree with sarah's point that that partisanship gets in the way of policy progress and many issues i mean the disagreement between the parties often does stymy progress but congress still does a lot it's still it it still acts on a wide range of issues i mean the level of bandwidth we saw just last year in addition to the covid legislation it's pretty impressive i mean the the major national parks legislation the climate energy bill uh the the finally addressing the whole issue of surprise medical billing i mean this was last year in addition to all the problems congress faced with uh faced with covet now it tends to happen these days you know not in the the the individual pieces of legislation that were characteristic of the committee era they this tends to be put together in these large omnibus packages many of them were were negotiated at the committee level or with the committee principles involved but they can't pass by themselves so you have these large vehicles right before a deadline that where congress does most of its policy making i think this is one of the reasons why congress has a public relations problem that people don't realize everything that congress is doing because it tends to happen in these big bills right at the end of the deadline right before the holidays or uh you know right before uh recess and then there it's too much for the news media to even process what actually happened uh and so there isn't coverage of you know the breakthroughs that congress did manage to achieve in many cases you know these achievements happen because congress because the parties in congress are still capable of doing the old-fashioned log rolls that democrats have a set of priorities in many cases those priorities are not anathema for republicans and vice versa so they put together these packages where democrats get their wins republicans get their wins and it is bipartisan and so they can do this as long as it's not one of those issues where the two parties disagree whether there's a problem at all uh and so there's room for for maneuver there and i i take the the climate legislation at the end of last year as as a hopeful indicator of the the possibilities there that even on an issue like like climate change where the parties disagree about the extent of the problem they managed to agree on legislation they couldn't the two parties i think if you were to you know to talk to the negotiators involved didn't necessarily agree on what they were accomplishing with that piece of legislation that the the two sides disagree about what they're going to what they're achieving and yet they can still move the ball forward they can still make progress and so that is still how uh uh you know how congress can achieve breakthroughs even under these exceptionally difficult polarized conditions that the congress has to contend with so so many years ago there was a political scientist who said in effect that congress had congenital problems it was you know based on its constitutional uh genetic structure it was slow it's going to be slow it's going to be parochial maybe vitriolic uh it you know we're all hampered by whatever genes we got and so what's at the end of the day what's reasonable to expect from an institution like congress can can is there a way that we can help our audience understand and maybe have a more sophisticated view of what we can reasonably expect from congress any of you wants to start if you have a pithy way that we can we can get there i'd like to circle back to phil wallach's point about congress as representative it's true that congressional processes today are less deliberative than they used to be but congress is still representative in that you've got the range of views that exist in the public represented in the institution uh yes that involves vitriol it involves a lot of disagreement and the public doesn't like it when it looks in the mirror and sees itself represented that um people tend to overestimate the extent to which the views they personally hold are widely shared uh but congress forces you to confront the fact that that's not that they're not universally shared and that there's strong disagreement with your values with your priorities and so you don't like the image that you see but i see the problem in that sense is you know sort of the public not having a realistic expectation of a representative body given the massive size of the country and given the um the the diversity of views that exists in the public that we need to come to terms with that that congress is a legitimate representative body that reflects those differences across the continent phil what do you think is reasonable to expect from a body like congress well i i very much agree with what francis was saying i mean there's a reason we have the old uh the old saying about the sausage the law making and sausage making right i mean to some extent people like the abstract idea of compromise but when it gets to actually seeing people giving half a loaf to each other in the process of trying to gain leverage over each other in negotiation they find it rather unseemly and they tend not to really like like it very much so in some ways congress is not likely to become a popular institution if it even if it is performing as it's supposed to now i think this question of is congress functioning as this representative body right now i i think professor lee is right that uh there are all kinds of people in congress but the problem we're having right now is that they don't all acknowledge the legitimacy of of the process that they're involved in a lot of them are coming in and playing along some of the time but then turning around at the end of the day and speaking to millions of people not just their constituents in their districts or their states but speaking to a kind of national audience and saying i'm involved in this but i know it's a i know it's fundamentally it's out to cheat you and uh advantage special interests who are are trying to rob and steal from the from the common inheritance and i i'm i'm a champion for you because at the end of the day i know not to believe in this system and that it's all a big fraud um i i think that's a bigger problem uh certainly on the republican side today but i think there's some some of that flavor across across the political spectrum um and that's a big problem that's what i look back at the 1950s and 60s and see um something to admire is that yes conservative southerners did have an outsized influence um and yes that was uh very regrettable in many many ways i wouldn't wouldn't claim otherwise but at the end of the day when they lost you know senator richard russell went home to georgia and said i think this was the wrong thing for congress to do and now it's the law of the land and this is the legitimate act of congress and you all need to get in line and follow the civil rights act until we can overturn it through the legitimate legislative process i don't hear a lot of people saying things like that today i hear a lot of people saying if if i lost it's because the other side must have cheated if if any one thing that i wasn't able to get through didn't happen it's because the whole system is is rigged um and when when you're willing to sort of throw the whole thing under the bus like that it really creates some big legitimacy problems that i'm very worried about sarah i know you brought that that very issue up at the beginning that phil just touched on uh what's your view of of what's reasonable to expect from congress um so i think uh francis and phil have really put their fingers on it i think uh just reflecting on what phil just offered um i think he's really right to contrast what we're what we're used to in the past of this notion that members of congress will run for congress by running against it but as phil said it's something very different today um when a there's a lot of lies uh and as as phil said if i can't win then i'm gonna tear down down the institution um there is this notion i think that we have lost that lawmakers can have some sort of institutional loyalty right that notion that your interests as a lawmaker are in part conditioned by the fact that you're you're part of the legislature right you're not just uh a a politician with a d or an r uh next to your name and so i mean these questions that we we we see them on things like the war powers questions uh questions about the national emergency uh in the during the trump administration um trying to circumvent congress's power of the purse uh so there's this notion of the sense that lawmakers no longer willing uh to have any type of institutional priority that comes before their partisan identities what's reasonable for what would be reasonable for the public to know i would just distill francis and phil's point that there are trade-offs politics and lawmaking is all about trade-offs and the public and i guess i don't really blame them usually they don't usually see them explained in this way of their trade-offs right it's impossible to both pursue a lawmaker's parochial interest in a national interest and the national interest requires tradeoffs um and so and not just in partisan trade-offs geographic trade-offs uh industries and so forth so um and lawmakers often have a sense of just to fuel uh feel the anger feel the anger back home um so if i could have a magic wand uh it would be just like a greater appreciation of how difficult it is particularly in a pretty evenly 50 50 nation uh how how difficult it is to reach these types of decisions so the uh and you brought up the things at the beginning sarah you brought up that thing seemed to be different and more bitter um after the the january sixth siege of the capital um yes and do you see that as affecting uh you've written some and you're researching some on norms of behavior that enabled congress to do its job um are these at real risk right now the kind of norms that enable a legislature to do its job well they're always uh not all not all norms should be kept and sometimes there could be good new norms um but it does seem that something was breached uh pretty severely on january 6th and we don't i don't have at least i don't have any kind of systematic evidence here but you you do hear stories of pairs of lawmakers democrats republicans who in recent congresses have worked on either a local issue a geographic issue or a smaller issue in a bipartisan pair and the democrat because the republicans say voted against certifying arizona um in pennsylvania have have broken off that uh that type of bipartisanship which is often where we see bipartisanship at that local smaller level in congress how widespread that is and i don't uh i'm not casting judgment on whether or not they should or shouldn't break those ties off um but the events were traumatic enough uh that i'm not surprised uh there's apprehension about um kind of how you're gonna rebuild any type of trust whether that's generalizable beyond the one or two stories i've heard i i don't know but i wouldn't i wouldn't be surprised yes can i offer a footnote on january 6 yes that as i think back to the incidents of that day you know and this speaks very much to the points that sarah and phil were both making about you know members participating and delegitimizing the institution of which they're apart and that's a problem in american politics no doubt and we saw a great deal of that in the aftermath of the 2020 elections where the whole election was called into question yet what did congress do on january 6th you know congress's role in that day was to reconvene that evening in the face of all after you know after all that violence in the face of ongoing physical threat there's no there's no way members felt safe reconvening that evening and yet there was no disagreement about doing so republicans democrats everyone people from the far left to the far right all showed up to finish the work that night and that was the that's the key moment in legitimating the 2020 elections you know when you have a candidate who doesn't concede the election where was the process to bring it to close to a close you had lots of lawsuits in the courts but none of them speak to the larger question of whether the election is over only congress could do that and they they did it and all the members who persisted in voting in favor of some of the challenges to particular states slates slates of electors they knew what the outcome of reconvening would be the certification of the election they knew that when they showed up to do it and yet they participated so i see that as as as a backstop that congress provided for um for legitimating the that uh the the 2020 elections and for moving forward beyond them so francis to follow up on that if there were one thing that you were concerned about going forward about congress and american democracy congress's role in american democracy what would it be i worry a lot about the pressures on the institution from uh you know from social media and extreme transparency you know the reference is you know when when um when uh phil and sarah were talking about the negotiations that congress used to conduct in the committees in the 50s 60s 70s and 80s those were all environments where there was a little more space for give and take a little more privacy a little bit more ability for lawmakers to speak to one another instead of prepostering for audiences but now you know whether you know recording committee meetings and you know members looking to get the sound bite that goes viral uh the video clip they're not talking to one another that it's members that is this congress you you using institution as a platform for position taking rather than for for serious legislating i see that as a serious threat to the institution being able to do its business phil what's the one thing you worry about the most going forward with congress well politics makes strange bedfellows that's what we've been told anyway um i think that's that's the key to making this institution in our constitutional system work is that it has to it has to be an institution that can bring forth strange compromises uh and if congress is just an outpost in the culture war um then there's none of that strangeness there's there's no everything is just about bashing heads together um and and articulating how much we fear and distrust the other people um the whole thing isn't going to work so um you know to me the most the thing that i would do if i could wave a magic wand is get members focused on particular issues that are concerning their constituents and making their lives more difficult think about how they could improve the business environment in america think about all those kinds of things because if you focus on those issues you do end up finding common ground you do end up finding log rolling opportunities politics works you you get those strange bedfellows if you just focus on uh what are all the other what are all the values that that my uh opponents my enemies hold that i don't that i don't subscribe to uh you you never get off square one um so to me uh i i do think trying to turn to the issues uh and away from culture war litmus tests is the way congress can move forward sarah what's the one thing you worry about the most you've mentioned a few things already today um i think i worry about the future about the types of problems that get worse when they don't get addressed whether it's really tackling global warming or whether it's really tackling the future potentially far off but future viability of social welfare programs so security medicare medicaid and so forth so um before we go to questions is does anybody have you know there's a lot of reform options that are put forward in washington with respect to congress is there anyone that you think would actually make some sort of a difference anybody can start we can do a lightning round here um i'm going to make two set alone um one uh this is in the increase staff pay um i think you'd see dividends in a way that attracts and keeps uh talent uh so that people would spend longer than two years three years there to develop expertise uh as a counterweight to i see a lot of questions in the chat about the influence of money so raise staff pay would also diversify i think it may make it a more uh attractive and affordable for a broader array of uh diversity of folks to come to work so that congress as the staff can be more representative and we haven't gotten to this at all just tack on the table for later um i think it's it's time to reduce those super majority uh thresholds uh i'd be in favor uh as i have been for 25 years of nuking uh what we now call the legislative filibuster without any illusions that it's going to be to solve uh the great uh the great uh magic bond well phil what's your one which could expand to two apparently i'll put in another word for for increasing the role of committees um you know francis is right that committee work does oftentimes feed into these giant omnibus bills but that's really not the best way uh to get their work to matter and it's really kind of hit or miss i think a lot of members turn to social media and that kind of game because they don't see any they don't see the angle in working diligently as a workhorse on a committee because they just don't don't know that it's going to go anywhere so i like i like the idea that committees should have some guarantee of moving legislation onto the floor and getting it debated uh if they knew that they could they could create more of a system where they know that the work they're doing is meaningful and that would hopefully draw members into again that focus on the policy substance instead of uh the fireworks francis i i don't disagree with any of the reform proposals that uh phil and sarah are focusing on here i think that those are that those would all um uh you know be helpful but my view is that the the big problems that congress faces today are political more than they are institutional you know the uh the fault your brutus is not in the stars but in ourselves and and by ourselves what i mean here is in in the divided public that congress represents the evenly divided public that congress represents that is that's a challenge for any legislative institution uh to you know to to manage these the the the you know bridging the gulf the divides in that uh in in this in the society it's also a political problem in that you know we that members have to you know face elections repeatedly you know every two years with the question of you know which party will be in control uh you know after the dust settles and that that creates all kinds of problematic incentives for for thinking long term and for and for productive negotiations this the unsettled nature of our politics that you know a party might almost by accident win unified control and it tends not to last long um and so you know i think congress would perform better if elections would would provide a more decisive result a more decisive outcome a clearer picture of what the public would like to see in terms of public policy and that we haven't been getting that and congress has to muddle through in the absence of that guidance well let's move on to questions one of the the uh partners in this in this effort is uh the american enterprise institute so yuval 11 is here he's been monitoring the questions that have come in through chat and through the q and a functions so he's here to ask the questions that have been raised in the chat let me let me uh bring you all back in welcome back yvonne well thanks a lot john thanks to all of you for a really great conversation uh both deep and broad and you've covered a lot of what's in the questions but i think that i can take a few of the questions that have been put forward and wrap them into a couple of themes that maybe haven't quite come up and i think i'd start with a question that came up in a variety of different ways um and that relates really to what francis just ended with and that is whether there are changes to the electoral system that might be constructive as ways of thinking about how congress works um you know there's there's there's talk of all sorts now about whether it's ranked choice or multi-member districts or things of that sort um and if the issue is the way in which congress represents uh the public are there electoral reforms that to any of you seem like they might actually be constructive or are these not really ways to change how the institution works if it's always going to reflect what is really a divided country which of you like to jump in first phil you want to you want to jump in first well we have a member of congress um jared golden of maine who who is in there because of ranked choice voting he didn't get the most first-choice votes but he won on uh once the ranked choice process played out and i think it's great for districts to experiment with that and i i think it's likely to produce positive results so i'm all for it um i wouldn't want to pretend it's some kind of silver bullet that's going to solve everything because it's not but you know it's definitely worth a try you know i'd say same with multi-member districts congress would have to change the law to make that a possibility in my opinion why why not let the states make their own decisions on that so congress should absolutely let a thousand flowers bloom uh or at least i guess 535 uh flowers bloom on these questions i mean i think that the the deep repression is just the primary process which is not an ancient practice in american democracy the way it is the way we have things today it really only dates back um 50 years at the most and it was probably a bad mistake if we could go back to having really strong local parties that are deeply rooted in their communities and they're the ones who pretty much choose who the congressional candidates are i think i think that our recent experience shows that there's a lot to be said for that i don't think that that's exactly on the political agenda today it's not a reform that sounds consistent with the way we think of democracy functioning today and so i i don't see great prospects for it unfortunately but yeah to my mind anything that we could do to shake up the way that the primary process functions in our system right now would be would be to the good sarah electoral reforms um i i agree with uh phil and the thousand flowers uh bloom uh i one the one issue of course that always comes up is the question of uh methods of uh redistricting and whether there are more better ways to do it that would create depends on what one's goal is uh but conception more competitive um districts so i i think the literature and when political scientists have looked at this in the past that redistricting doesn't really drive so much the the nature of how many safe seats and contested seats it has a lot to do with partisan geography uh within a state um it's hard to create competitive democratic leaning districts in the middle of rural kansas and uh hard to do that safe republican seats obviously are in the middle of manhattan so within limits here i do think there's probably some uh in the thousand flowers bloom category some worth expect experimenting with the type of the california redistricting which um had its uh has issues as well but california uh non essentially nonpartisan citizen redistricting uh there's a new one being put in place in michigan this time around some experimentation uh seems uh seems worthwhile uh with the understanding that many of these district lines are sort of bipartisan agreements uh to lock in uh to lock in uh incumbent sort of incumbent protection so there are there are a lot of issues here to be addressed but i think some sort of mixing and uh mixing up the system could be uh beneficial francis have a lot to add here i have been watching the experimentation that has been occurring on rake choice voting and on redistricting reform the top two primary these are all um these all are promising but not none of them yet i think you know have the weight of evidence that commands you know uh you know us to say yes we need this reform imposed nationally so i think this is a time for watching what is happening around the country and for studying it and you know and and waiting to see what what emerges now in the end control of congress there's got to be a coalition whether it's you know whether it's a two-party whether we continue to have a two-party system or not in the end someone has to be elected speaker someone has to control the committee someone has to control the agenda we can't get rid of some of these fundamentally some aspects of of of politics and so we can't take the politics out of politics in that sense that you know that sometimes i think reformers uh uh are you know looking to do that um and you know we need to recognize you know where whether where the limits are that congress is a political body um but i i i i take heart in the in the uh in the innovation that's occurring around the country and uh and and uh you see it is worth monitoring closely you've all you have uh other questions so a number of people have asked in different ways about the return of earmarks um and some in general would like to see if you think that will be transformative and there's a particular question about this notion in the house of letting members keep earmarks in a bill even when they vote against the bill which seems to this questioner to be counterproductive and against the whole concept of of of what earmarks can achieve to enable uh accommodation and bargaining what do you all think about the return of earmarks i think earmarks are useful for congressional negotiations i mean uh you know you know when you know sarah and i were uh working on that topic uh uh you know and you know how how how can negotiation in congress work and how can it be improved you hear from lots of members that the earmark ban made things harder made negotiation more difficult it took away one tool that coalition leaders had to get buy-in on on legislation you know there's still room for other kinds of log rolling and in fact you know that's you know how often how these large omnibus packages get put together they're fundamentally big log roles but this was a mechanism that congress you know denied itself and that uh you know bringing it back with reforms about you know uh you know try to avoid corrupt practices in the use of your marking that i you know i you know i see this as congress in some ways you know you know acknowledging that it has a has a legitimate role uh in how uh funds get distributed and that this is not you know that in the end it's still a political it's still a political matter that you know that the executive branch is not outside of politics you know as it might make uh decisions about you know where to allocate uh roads and bridges and uh and uh and and government uh grants so i you know i i see that as a step forward but not a transformative step sarah you want to go ahead um sure so i was a little surprised when i saw a quote i'm forgetting who uh which committee chair it was from about what what the questioner had referenced about well if the if the republican minority party member um gets an earmark or vote gets bill then we're not going to strip it strip it out um we'll we'll see if that's the actual outcome we don't know but if it is it does um it is a little bit of a head scratcher at least according to the sort of theory of earmarks that it's a way uh to uh get buy-in uh to build these broader coalitions or log role for a policy change and it may be that that that that expectation that giving a concentrated benefit to a minority party member will induce them to vote for an appropriations bill it may be that that fit well in a world where congress individually it's been probably at least 20 years individually did appropriations bills but now they come inevitably into one big honkin package uh at a deadline and when our department members will tell you they don't know what's in it or uh there may be other prominent salient issues in the bill that they are not going to vote for uh which would overweight um having happening earmarks so i think it's a little bit of a learning uh experience here uh if not an experiment to see how does the majority deal with minority party members who renege on an implicit promise here uh and how widespread uh that is um just keeping in mind i think earmarks at least from the police scientists who study marks have shown that they're valuable to majority party members for electoral purposes um i haven't seen as many studies some but not as many showing that they're valuable for the sort of building of large broad general welfare measures in the in the congress phil you're on newton okay you know i i will say just a historical perspective about 15 years ago and when earmarks were at their at their height the the chairman of the the labor hhs appropriations bill at the time got extremely frustrated it was a republican ralph regula in the house and extremely frustrated because democrats got their earmarks and wouldn't vote for it so this is uh this is how this happens in both directions and and maybe as a function of the partisanship uh you know that ends up winning the day over against uh you know the log rolling impact you you might hope it would have you've all any other questions sorry i'll just say one quick thing yeah you know to my mind it's it's better for for i don't think we shouldn't be embarrassed of members parochialism it's it's and it seems healthy to put it in the laws right there for everybody to see in some ways rather than sort of asking members to become lobbyists within the bureaucracy where really their work is a whole lot less clear so you know i think parochialism doesn't have to be a dirty word um and and letting members be above board for for pursuing uh projects for their districts seems seems healthy to me you've all well uh a lot of what's in the questions has already come up in the discussion so maybe i'll just take one last question from these that i thought was particularly interesting which took up the where you really began which was congress has done an impressive job of crisis governing in the past year and in some ways in this century in general has governed well in moments of crisis is there something to learn from how congress functions in response to crisis that might inform how congress functions normally and might inform some changes in rules or in the way that members think about their jobs so that what it's doing well now could help it do more well going forward that's a great question who wants to start francis boyce i worry that we can't generalize from crisis response to other problems you know what crisis does is it forces a deadline puts immense pressure on congress to act the agreement that there is a crisis you know a crisis does a crisis it only exists by virtue of the fact that that it's widely acknowledged you know that you often hear people refer to say the crisis of gun violence or the climate crisis but if that crisis is not widely shared it's not a crisis for purpose widely perceived it's not a crisis for purposes of congressional governance and so the conditions that that give rise to congress's ability to respond in crisis are just not present for other long-term issues that congress also needs to deal with and so this is this is um you know it's an institutional problem that our institution is institutions you know because they're hard to move there's lots of friction bicameral you know divided power you know all those features in the institution that make it hard to get it get to get action you know crisis helps to overcome that but the the norm is that you you've got to deal with all of that friction leadership can make a difference there or the perception that there's a real mandate after an election for action on some issue or another that can help overcome it but in general i think that crisis is just going it's just fundamentally except exceptional and uh and that you know we don't get great guidance for how to make congress function better across the range of issues on which we need it to act phil i think what francis said is right what may what is a crisis is not always clear and so one of the one of the things you see because congress is so much livelier when there is a sense of crisis is there there's an attempt to force everything into a crisis framework to get anything done at all so we engineer these cliffs uh in order to force action on things that can sometimes cause um real problems uh we engineered a debt ceiling crisis a decade ago that doesn't really in retrospect look like a very healthy way of of of dealing with our fiscal problems to to me uh i i suppose it forced some kind of action on the plus side but um you know i think i'm i'm in i'm in general a little bit uh leery of saying that congress has done a good job in response to crisis it's been it's gotten things over the transom it's gotten things out there but in part crises have allowed to pretend that trade-offs don't exist i i really like the invocation of trade-offs before congress really ought to be a body about sorting through difficult trade-offs and in crisis congress has found a way to just open the floodgates of cash and then everybody gets some and it seems like we don't have to make any really difficult decisions but in my view they're they're skating right past a lot of really difficult trade-offs that are being made you know with the financial crisis uh a decade back you know some of that was well if you just give out a lot of cash today what kind of incentives are you creating for the future for the financial system uh to build up risk in in unsustainable ways um i'm not sure that that trade-off will look so great when we look back from 50 years from now for example even if it looks not so bad uh today anyway so i i think i think trying to make everything into a crisis is is precisely the wrong way for congress to go forward because it needs to be a place where we can acknowledge trade-offs and work through them and not just uh act as if everything is is a unifying moment of uh you know do or die sarah last word on on this question um sure i'll just add just a small addendum to francis and phil's points um i think of these crises as fundamentally electoral episodes that is if if you watched after the cares act majority minority leader went to the senate floor and said the people expected us to act and we acted and they're sort of quite pleased with their statesmanship and so forth but the reality is is you only get action in a crisis if both parties believe they're going to be blamed right and lawmakers and parties don't want to be blamed and if it's clear which party is holding up the works and your own party's going to blame you you come to the bargaining table and you get it done so and i think that's probably giving rise to uh as francis and phil said look lawmakers like to try to claim other things are crises but unless both parties uh think they're going to be blamed for failing to address the crisis it's not really a crisis and again that just gives i think rise to uh phil's what phil's pointed out is you get a lot of stuff thrown in the barrel because both sides get their most preferred what they want uh without um either taking more time to figure out uh what might be more effective policy although that's not unique to crisis but probably exacerbated during the process as well well phil sarah and francis thank you for this fascinating and important conversation i think a great many people will benefit from it uh now and and in recorded uh when it's recorded and and posted i also want to thank the american enterprise institute uh represented by yuval 11 and the brookings institution um for for partnering with the library of congress on this this event and the the nine nine subsequent events on american institutions you

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Published: Mon Aug 09 2021