Transcripts For CSPAN3 Evolution Of U.S. Senate 20180207

Let me try to call this full house to order, if i may. Welcome to brookings. My name is bill gallston. Im a senior fellow in governance studies. Thank you so much for coming and welcome also to the people who are watching this event live on cspan. Todays topic is the past, the present and possible future of the u. S. Senate. The occasion of this discussion is the publication of ira shapiros second book on the senate, this one entitled, broken can the senate save itself and the country . Those of oh you who read his first book on the senate will know how passionately he reveres the senate as an institution and will not be surprised to learn how distressed he is by what he describes as its precipitous decline. This topic could not be more timely. We are just days from the expiration of yet another shortterm continuing budget resolution and perhaps even more pertinently, from a promised open Senate Debate on u. S. Immigration policy. Will the promise be kept . And if it is, will todays senate be up to the job of an open deliberation on the most burning domestic question, which is more than domestic, in its implications facing the country . When it comes to the study of american Political Institutions, there are two kinds of scholars. Type one, people who have been trained in academia, wonderfully trained in academia in many cases, and who study american Political Institutions, using the tools, the concepts, the categories, the empirical techniques of political science. We here at brookings are committed to the proposition there is much to be learned about american Political Institutions through the practice of that trade. But there is a second way of studying american Political Institutions, the scholar practitioner or the practitioner scholar. And ira shapiro is the latter. He began his government career, ill let the number out of the bag, just a little shy of 50 years ago as an intern to the late, great republican senator jac jacob j jacob javvits. Among his distinguished practitioner career, he served as legislative Legal Counsel to the great environmental senator gaylord nelson. He served as counsel to the master of the senate rule book, majority leader robert bird as chief of staff to senator j. Rockefeller. And in addition to his senate service, he has occupied senior positions in the office of the u. S. Trade representative during the clinton administration, and if memory serves, attained ambassadorial rank in one of those positions. His first book on the senate was published in 2012. An updated version with the new preface by the author appeared recently. For fans of popular culture, his first book on the senate appeared on Frank Underwoods desk during season two of house of cards. So, let me now let me now tell you whats going to transpire in the next hour and 25 minutes. For about 25 of those minutes, ira will present the main themes of his book. Well then hear about ten minutes of commentary from brookings congressional expert molly reynolds, a fellow in our governance studies program. She is the author of the brookings book exceptions to the rule the politics of filibuster limitation in the u. S. Senate. Which will indicate why she is the perfect commentator for this book. After molly delivers her commentary, well all convene on the stage for about 15 or 20 minutes of moderated conversation. After which for the last half hour it will be your turn, questions from the floor and responses from these two wonderful scholars. As always, please quiet your cell phones, but that doesnt mean turning them off necessarily, and it certainly doesnt mean that you cant use them. For those interested in tweeting about this event, its hashtag is. There it is, u. S. Senate. And without any further preliminaries, on with the show. Ira, the podium is yours. I couldn. I couldnt have a more generous introduction than the one bill galston gave me. I thank bill for not only that introduction, but for organizing this event, for moderating this event. I dont have enough time to go into bills various credentials, so i wont, except to say that no one else is a political theorist and floss fir, a policy analyst, a teacher and a scholar and has served at the highest levels of government. So we all get a great deal of wisdom from bill always, and particularly i have never missed his weekly wall street journal column. Im glad to be here with molly reynolds. I dont know molly that well, but her important book is very welltimed, as you will hear from her comments, and given my loose mastery of the senate rules, ive decided to defer to molly on the whole rules question. Bill did make one point that is a little sensitive. For a couple of years, ive been planning to advertise my book, the new edition of my old book by using the reference to house of cards. Somehow that doesnt look as good as it used to. [ laughter ] i wasnt sure that this panel would draw such a good audience. And its wonderful to see a spattering of old friends and its wonderful to see a lot of people who i dont know. Donald trumps extraordinary and dangerous presidency so dominates our landscape that its sometimes hard to focus on anything else. And thats particularly true now with the crisis at hand. As the Trump White House and the House Judiciary Committee are on one side and the fbi, the justice department, important institutions are under attack. We wait to see whether the president may force the resignation or fire people. Special counsel mueller, fbi director christopher wray, rod rosenstein. So i thank you for taking the time to come to a panel that doesnt have trumps name in it. As bill said, ive had a long i had a long Senate Career and a deep attachment to it. It was a place that sparked my original commitment to Public Service and it has been an important part of my life now for almost a half a century. There were people that served longer than i did. I was there 12 years actually working when i went back. And people have served longer and theyve done more, but i had an unusual tenure because i spent five years in the Democratic Senate of the late 70s, and then six years in the republican senate. Then one more year when it flipped back. So ive seen the majority and ive seen the minority. Ive dealt with a lot of different issues. So i think i have some possibly something to offer on this on this subject at least. So, the first book i wrote, i started writing in 2008. I was depressed about the long decline of the senate. So i started writing the book at a time when the exciting president ial campaign involving barack obama, john mccain, Hillary Clinton, sarah palin, one of the great exciting campaigns of all time. And i was writing the book, hoping that while i wrote it i would call attention to what the senate had been and what it potentially could be. And i wanted to try to write the book hoping i could help somehow reverse the decline. But at the same time, i was counting on the president ial election. Wed have a new president at a time of possible hope and change, and so i thought maybe the election would help. By the time i completed the book, obviously the reverse was the case. The senate was deeply mired in partisan gridlock, the narrative of my book ended in 1980, but i wrote an epilog to try to explain what had happened after 1980, and that epilog of the first book kind of became the launchpad of this book. I want to say one thing that i do think is important, i wrote undertook absolutely sure Hillary Clinton would be elected president and couldnt govern unless the senate changed. This book wasnt a response to donald trump. This was about the fact that the senate had failed for so long and it destabilized our political system in my opinion. So let me give you the gist of my argument. Then well try to unpack it. Sort of my elevator speech. We all know the prices in american democracy didnt start when donald trump became president or when he came down the escalator. Our political trump tower. Our political system has been like the proverbial frog in boiling water, slowly dying as the temperature rises. The senate is ground zero for that failure. The Political Institution thats failed us the longest and the worst, going back 25 years at least. At its best, the senate served in walter mondales great phrase, as our nations mediator. It was a place where competing interests of two parties and all of the diverse interests of our country came together to be reconciled through negotiation and legislation and principled compromise. It was in Lin Manuel Mirandas words, the place where it happened. When the senate could no longer perform that role, when it succumbed to partisanship rather than overcoming it, the American People lost confidence and ultimately turned to an outsider. Donald trump would not have become president if he wasnt a unique celebrity. But he also became president because of the justifiable feeling in the country that washington was failing. Now obviously i am painting with a broad brush. In a longer discussion, we would talk about the issues that attracted Donald Trumps voters, globalization in technology, certainly immigration. But today were talking about the performance of the government. And when were talking about that, the Trump Presidency is the result of the polarization, gridlock and dysfunction. But the failure of the senate is the cause. Moreover, the senate reached a new low at precisely the moment that we needed to be at its best because we have an inexperienced and potentially authoritarian president. So thats why my talk is entitled the other threat to our democracy. And the failure of the senate, for failure of the senate, one man bears disproportionate responsibility. It is no accident the senates accelerating downward spiral coincides absolutely with Mitch Mcconnells time as leader. I recognize thats a harsh statement. It may not be intuitively obvious. Historians always debate the question how much of this is the individual actions as opposed to greater forces that are at work. And certainly many factors have contributed to the deterioration of our senate, of our country the politics of our country. The ideological chasm between the parties has grown. The role of money in politics, particularly since Citizens United, the impact of the 24 7 cable tv. Gerrymandered districts, people picking their own news sources, in fact, their own facts. In america over the last 30 years, our politics have been uniquely undermined by the combination of the Permanent Campaign where theres never time for governing, only preparing for the next election. And the politics of personal destruction, with some superb political minds devote their time and talent to poll testing what messages and votes can destroy their opponents and then designing the campaign adds to do so. So theres a lot wrong our mcconnells defenders hes just which say hes just a very ski skilled politician who has adapted to and reflected the reality of todays politics. In fact, one of his best friends, late senator bob bennett of utah praised him in 2010 for understanding exactly what happened to the senate from dole to mcconnell. Think about that for a moment. He understood exactly what happened from dole to mcconnell. In other words, it is a partisan time. We need a partisan leader. Theres no time for a statesman like bob dole. The argument doesnt wash for me. Many people, even senators, get away with the claim that they were victims of their times or merely following orders, but senator mcconnell has earned a substantial place in american political history six terms in the senate, almost 12 years as minority and majority leader. Mitch mcconnell doesnt reflect americas political climate, he has shaped it. Now, my view of the senate obviously is that Senate Leaders really matter. They really matter. Looking back over the history of the modern senate, we find occasions when leaders put their indelible mark, not only on the senate, but on the politics and the government of the time. Of course, the most famous example is lbj, master of the senate, Lyndon Johnson. Robert carrys master of the senate. And lbj did an extraordinary job of dragging the senate into the 20th century. It was a reactionary institution before lbj. And he made a great difference with his incredible tos of nature. Incredible energy. He used all the power he could to overcome what the senate had been before, because before lbj the senate was dominated by Southern Committee elite chairmen and it was described as the only place where the south did not lose the civil war. The souths unending revenge upon the north for gettysburg. So johnson did everything he could in caros book, describes it, how he got the first Civil Rights Act through. A modest measure but it was the first. Johnson wore out his welcome in the Senate Quickly actually. People got tired of his overbearing nature. They were tired of him. When he accepted the vice presidency from president john kennedy, people were surprised. Johnson thought it was the only way to ever become president for a southerner, but also knew his days in the senate had passed. Louis gould, the political historian wrote, for the senate Lyndon Johnson was a noisy summer storm that rattled the windows of the Upper Chamber and then moved on, leaving few traces of his passing. He seemed a towering figure at the time, but his essential vision about the senate limited his impact, which is an interesting thought. To understand the senate, what it was, what it is capable of, what weve lost, you have to go back to the last great what i call the last great senate of the 60s and 70s. And i now call it by a better name mansfield senate. Mike mansfield, professor of ancient history, was perhaps the most Unlikely Senate majority leader. Although widely respected for his intelligence, honesty, his intellect and knowledge of the world, mansfield had no desire to be majority leader. When john kennedy became president , the president asked mansfield to be the majority leader, and mansfield didnt want the job but acceded to kennedys request. But mansfield made it clear he would be a different leader. He had a different personality. He believed in a democratic small d senate where all the senators were adults and were all equal. He believed in the golden rule and acted accordingly. And under his leadership, all of the senators had responsibility. Dirksen and others didnt think it could work. Cant work without a Strong Senate leader after johnson. And pretty quickly, the senate bogged down. Mansfield was under so much criticism, he prepared a speech announcing, explaining his concept of the Senate Leadership, and he announced he was going to give it he made the announcement on november 22nd 1963. He never gave it. It was put in the congressional record. But mansfield then demonstrated his leadership by helping to get the Civil Rights Act of 64 through. Lyndon johnson who knew something about the senate called mansfield downtown and said, basically, you got to break the southern filibuster by wearing them out because Richard Russells old and Allen Ellender has cancer. And mansfield said im not going to do it that way. He told them how he was going to do it, they had a two month debate, and he never did anything like that. And they went on from that. They passed the 64 act and then they went on from that to the greatest period of productivity. Mansfield created a senate based on trust and mutual respect. Bipartisanship was second nature. We all knew that thats the way the senate worked. The senate could battle, senators would battle over important issues and then strike their compromises and go out to dinner together. Mansfields senate was extended by robert byrd and howard baker for another eight years. The air is filled with talk about watergate. Understandably. If you look back, the great senators, they were there for watergate. Mansfield launched the Watergate Committee with the unanimous vote of the senate two months after Richard Nixon got 49 states. Robert byrd and howard baker played similar positive roles in watergate, but mansfield urged these people were great senators during watergate because they were great senators all the time. They didnt change from year to year. It didnt matter who the president was, whether they were in the majority or minority. So lets look at the senates decline for one minute. And my framework is this it was a long decline of the senate that started probably 25 years ago, somewhere late 80s, early 90s you can see it. And theres a long decline. Then all of a sudden theres a second stage of decline. And the decline goes like this and then like that. And the that the coincidesed with arrivals of harry reid on the democratic side and Mitch Mcconnell on the republican side. They inherited a senate that was in gradual but unmistakable decline. Head the experience. They had the obligation, they had the opportunity to address that decline and rebuild the senate. Instead, they became in the words of journalist steven colinson, the terrible twins of dysfunction. Both using arcane procedures to slow and throttle the promise of the others rule. Their supporters would argue about which one was worse, never which one was better. Under their leadership the long decline accelerated precipitously. Their joint legacy would be a broken senate. But the responsibility was by no means equal. Obviously not since reid retired, but not while he was there either. So let me turn to senator mcconnell for a moment. I believe theres a tendency to misunderstand him even after all this time. He has been there so long, he has to be an institutionalist. Really. Just a tough partisan, quite conservative, but moderate relative to the madness thats infected the Republican Party since Newt Gingrich. I see him differently than that. I regard him as the premier political strategist and tactician of our era, perhaps the toughest negotiator. Unfortunately, hes used that power and his political skills solely as a partisan, never as the leader of the senate, which requires collaboration with the other leaders in the party. Well get into the discussion, but let me just give you two quick examples. In 2008, the metastasizing subprime mortgage crisis brought down Lehman Brothers and triggered a financial crisis. Henry paulson, ben ber thanky, Timothy Geithner went to the hill to meet with leaders. If we dont act now, bernanke told them, we wont have an economy by monday. Mcconnell plays a very strong role. He steps up immediately. He understands the urgency of it. He helps the senate get the legislation prepared. When the house in its feckless performance rejected the legislation, mcconnell goes to the senate floor and guarantees the senate will come through. And they do come through. Then the house revers uses themselves and we get the t. A. R. T. Legislation that we sorely needed. He takes pride in it as he should. Three months later nothing, january 2009, nothing has changed except theres a new president , barack obama. The crisis spread from wall street to main street. And only Government Action can make up for an economy thats lost 750,000 jobs. Mcconnell is against anything. Theres a new president. He is more worried about the president s Approval Ratings than he is about the jobs of the people that are losing. He opposes it. He tries to defeat it. Thanks to collins, snow and arlen speck to have, the senate gets it done and the recovery goes ahead. I cannot conceive of another Senate Leader that would behave that way. Last example for the moment. Six years of adamant obstruction to obama. Then he finally becomes majority leader, january 2015. The Senate Changes overnight. The legislation starts moving forward. His most productive year in a long time. What happened . Nothing except the principle obstructionist became a constructive force for one year. It lasted one year and one month. One year and one month. And then in february, 2016, Justice Scalia dies. Senator mcconnell says were not considering any nominee of barack obama, and all of a sudden we plunge back into bitterness. In 2017 with a republican president , senator mcconnell has violated every pledge that he ever made to the senate about how it would work. There is no precedent for the way the Health Care Legislation was handled. So you recall, no process, no hearings, no committee action. When he pulled it down the first time, said he would go onto tax reform, we were done with health care. Comes back with it another two weeks later. Does it a third time. His word in those issues was just not accurate. Reporting on senator mcconnells notable speech in 2014, when he describes the way that he was going to run the senate if he ever gets to lead it, Jonathan Wiseman of New York Times wrote mcconnell portrayed reids senate as a post apocalyptic wasteland, ruled by a dictatorial autocrat, despised by allies and foes alike. Its a great turn of phrase. He must have been looking into a crystal ball, because he perfectly captured the senate four years later. Mcconnells senate. Now, i will say in conclusion, i recognize ive offered a bleak picture. A second threat to democracy . Wasnt trump enough . Yet perhaps ironically, i find myself still relatively optimistic, that is relative to everyone else. And the reason i say it is i believe many of the senators up there on both sides of the aisle know what the senate is supposed to be, hate the institution theyre serving in now. They will at some point rise to change it. They will, if confronted with the constitutional crisis we may face, i think well see the familiar faces step up and some unexpected heroes. So in our country, the shared and disbursed power in our political system and diverse nature of our country guarantees legislating would always be difficult, but should not be impossible. The lubricant in the system is good faith engagement. Commitment to work hard to explore the possibilities of common ground. Thats goodfaith engagement every year, not one year out of ten years, not when the leader feels like engaging. We need people who dont make everything a partisan political calculation, and i am putting my faith in the future and people that actually will be putting country first. Ill stop. I used my time. I used two minutes more of my time. Well have the discussion. Thank you. Good morning, everyone. First of all, i want to thank bill and ira for inviting me to be here today and to provide some thoughts on iras book. As someone who recently wrote a book on the senate of my own, i know how both rewarding and frustrating it can be to spend as much time as ira has, mulling over the institution. Im so glad to have gotten a chance to read the book, ira and speak a little bit about it today. For those of you who havent had a chance to read iras book, i recommend it as a rich, detail oriented look at many of the challenges that the senate has faced in its efforts to legislate, to confirm nominees, and conduct oversite over the past 40 odd years, and how its members have risen or more often not risen to those challenges. It is rare that you find a piece of writing that discusses everything from the omnibus u. S. Trade and competitiveness of 1988 to the impeachment. Ira manages to pull that off and more in this book. So in bills opening remarks, he said there are two kinds of people who study the senate. He said ira is of one model, and i am of the other. I think thats going to come across in my remarks today. What i would like to do is spend some time reflecting on a few pieces of iras argument, use them as jumping off point for additional thoughts of my own about what i see as the primary drivers of the contemporary senates dysfunction, and then towards the end, ill turn to key areas i think we node to focus on if the senate is going to go in a different direction going forward. So for ira, as you heard, much of the blame for whats happened in the senate rests at the feet of Senate Leadership. Theres a point he says the senates inability to overcome partisanship is first and foremost a profound failure of Senate Leaders. There are certain choices leaders make about how to run the senate and use senate rules and procedure that contributed significantly to the environment in which we find ourselves. But what i want to do is think about the environment that those leaders have found themselves in. So first of all, over the period on which ira focuses, there have been major changes in the electoral landscape of american politics. Ira spends a little time discussing the degree to which we have seen disappearance of moderate republicans and of conservative democrats, which has made bipartisan compromise much harder to achieve. Just one data point to illustrate this if we turn to political scientist workhorse measure of measuring members of congress ideology, the distance between the most conservative democrat in the senate and most liberal republican in the senate basically doubled since 1980. So to the extent that major legislation does ever still get done in the senate, it continues to be on a bipartisan basis, but it is much harder to build the coalitions in times of polarized parties. So Senate Leaders are heading into a legislative environment where the ideological positions mean it is much more difficult to work collaboratively, regardless of tactics they use. The electoral experience of inexperienced senators has become more attached to National Political forces, decreasing individual incentives to work with members of the opposite party. One illustrative data point on this 2016 was the First Time Since the advent of popular election of senators in the early 20th century that in every state there was a senate election, the party that won the senate seat also won that states electoral votes in the president ial race. Voters, in other words, are not splitting tickets at the same rate they once were, which means that senators have less incentive to formulate the kind after independent brand that would involve working across party lines. For me, perhaps the biggest electoral difference is the increase in partisan competition for control of the chambers in Congress Since about 1980. Theres a really wonderful book by political scientist francis lee that documents this. She talks about how the period between the early 1950s and early 1980s was dominated in congress by the democrats. The Party Controlled both chambers and republicans did not have a reasonable expectation that they would take control after the next election. Since about 1980, however, majority control of the senate has been more or less up for grabs each election cycle. Because of this heightened competition, both parties have incentive to more messaging activity, those help them win elections. Especially true for minority parties who have little incentive to make Majority Party opponents look like capable legislators. This emphasis on messages and the potential shifts in Party Control also means there can be more value in putting bills on the floor that are intended to fail. So especially under divided government, a Majority Party might think it is worthwhile to write a piece of legislation it knows wont become law in order to signal to its voters and Interest Group allies what it would do if it had more power after the next election. A great example of this is the bill that repealed that would have repealed large parts of the Affordable Care act that president obama vetoed in early 2016. Republicans knew it would be vetoed but wanted to keep the issue active as a Campaign Topic during the 2016 election. Beyond the changing electoral circumstances, weve seen growing incentives from outside the chamber for senators inside the chamber to exploit their individual procedural rights to try to achieve political goals. My brookings colleague, sarah binder and coawe to have steve smith made this point about the the filibuster from the late 90s. So this suspect a new argument. They suggest once Interest Group allies and other external audiences began rewarding senators for using obstructive tactics in the chamber, senators responded to that incentive. So here we may think about ted cruzs decision to engineer shutdown after the Affordable Care act. That helped build his national reputation. When senators believe theres political value in using all their procedural tools, theyre more likely to do so at the expense of bipartisan legislative work. Ira in his book discusses the problem presented to Senate Leaders by jessie helms, that he was willing to pursue an individual agenda. Thats the sort of behavior thats incentivized for lots of senators. These broader political circumstances also made it more difficult for senators of both parties to unite as counter balance to executive power. In the early 1970s, we saw several high profile pieces of legislation, things like congressional budget act and the measure that created the Senate Intelligence committee to oversee executive branch activities. We saw this pass with large bipartisan majorities in part because senators of both parties saw reason to Work Together to increase the legislative branchs power at the expense of executive branch. As the president has become an increasingly polarizing figure, in american politics, however i dont mean just the current president , i mean the president of an institution it can be more difficult to build support for an issue on institutional grounds. Even matters that might be right for crosspartisan coalitions can be harder to get done if the president is too closely identified with them. So my favorite example of this comes from the house. But im still going to talk about it today. In 2015, when president obama was lobbying congress on trade promotion authority, it was reported someone on the staff of representative paul ryan, who was then the chair of the house ways and means committee, called the white house to ask that obama stop asking congress to give him trade promotion authority. Ryan didnt want republicans to think they were granting obama anything special. Merely identifying the issue with the president was making it harder to build a legislative coalition. So given all of that context, i want to turn now to a few thoughts on what it would take to fix the senate. Here i think the most fundamental question to ask is, do individual senators really want to regain more power over the process . And if they got that power, would they actually use it to do the hard work of legislating . There are all sorts of things individual senators could do to try to signal their objection to how the institution is working. Especially in the Majority Party in a narrowly divided senate like the one we have today. The most extreme version of this would be Something Like what we saw senator john mccain do on Republicans Health care bill last summer which is to vote against a major piece of legislation for reasons that at least publicly he claimed were about the process. Senators can object to unanimous consent requests, Work Together in committee to stall, though probably not ultimately prevent nominations coming to the floor, et cetera. The point is, if senators wanted to try to send a signal to leaders that they dont like the way the chamber is working, they have the tools do that. The issue for me is by and large i think senators dont necessarily care as much about changing the way the senate works as they do about getting policy done thats as close to their own preferences as they can get. Take here the experience from last year involving the tax bill and Health Care Bill. Both pieces of legislation moved through the senate on a quick party line process with little deliberation. If senators truly objected to that leadership driven process, they could have threatened to withhold votes until they got what they wanted. Lets assume for a second that senators genuinely would prefer a chamber that operates in an open, deliberative way. What would that look like . One major challenge in a more Deliberative Senate is getting senators to believe any initial efforts to generate more opportunities for collaboration wont just disappear at the first sign of trouble. So take, for example and ira talked before about the senate in 2015. This is an example from early in that year. Majority leader mcconnell allowed an open amendment process on the Keystone Pipeline bill, the first major piece of legislation considered in the senate after republicans had taken control of the chamber in the 2014 elections. Senators filed nearly 300 amendments to that bill. Perhaps in part because they werent sure how long the chance to offer amendments freely was going to last. So in short, the senate needs to find a way to convince its members that any particular change in practice is going to stick, and thats harder said than done. Because i hate to leave things on a pessimistic note, i will note there are still bright spots of potential crossparty collaborations. For me, the major challenge is whether senators are willing to use the tools available to them to force leaders to respect their work. So ill stop there. Ill invite bill and ira to come back to the stage and well have some discussion and then turn it to all of you. Thanks to ira and molly for two really clear, forceful presentations. And i have a very long list of questions. Not going to be able to get to all of them. But i think in fairness, i should give ira minute or two to respond to what i take to be mollys principle thesis. And that is as between the impact of leadership on one hand and on the other changes in the environment that effect both the relationship between the two parties in the senate and the incentives of individual senators to behave in a certain manner, shes more impressed by the impact of the latter two than you are, and less impressed by the impact of the first. And i wondered how you responded to that. Well, first i should say i dont think you could have a better responder or commenter than molly. And i think her book that has come out too recently for me to have read it fully is going to and very important in peoples thinking about the senate. I certainly agree with some of the points that molly is making. I think every point she makes is actually correct. Nonetheless, there are still leaders who bring people together and try to solve certain problems. And there are leaders that dont, who decide the senate should work a different way. I have said in my book in the last chapter i point out that the senate rules have not been looked at in a comprehensive way since 1979. When senators reid and mcconnell came in as leaders, they might have said, the place isnt working too well. What can we do to think about it . Do we really believe that these filibusters should not be real, they should simply be people indicating that they wont give unanimous consent . Do we really think holds should be not temporary courtesies but permanent . There are a lot of things that could have been addressed and indeed should have been addressed, and they should have been addressed when somebody said, were not going to change the rules this week to benefit us. What would it look like if we had new rules two or four years from now . So i think the connection that molly makes important points and i think that real leaders could actually address some of those points and incentives but the other thing i will say, having been in the senate during changes from democratic control to republican control to democratic control, i saw the senate go on functioning. I saw the senate go on functioning because the democrats had good leaders. The republicans had good leaders, and they all worked together. Thats how the two things relate in my mind. One thing i will say in response to iras response to me is that when we think about this question of rule change or procedure change, first of all, i applaud you for thinking about the degree to which we need to look further down the process, if you will, and think about, will the procedure change benefit us now versus in the future . I think one of the major challenges for me to think about is how do you get how do you actually build a coalition of individual senators to move from the current procedural situation to a different procedural situation . And when you have senators who have come to use the procedures that are available now to enhance the reputations, how do you convince them that it is in their interest to change to a new set of procedures in the future . I will respond just briefly which is to say one reason i believe you can do it is that i think most of the senators, 75 or 80 of them, hate the institution they are in now. They cant stop talking about how much they hate the institution theyre in. They know that the senate should work differently. They have in their mind what the senate is supposed to be. So i do think there is a positive constituency for that change. I think i took some solace in the emergence of the Common Sense Coalition by Susan Collins, led by collins and manchin. Which was responding to the Government Shutdown but may have lasting value. Let me now invite the two of you to take an even broader historical view if such a thing is imaginable. Ira, you and i are both quintessential baby boomers and i think its becoming clearer and clearer to us as we swim upstream towards old age that we were privileged to grow up and live in extraordinary times extraordinary economic times, political types, extraordinary times for the role of the United States in the world. The question i ask myself all the time and will address to you is are we taking the exception for the rule . Are we taking as a baseline an extraordinary period in the history of the country that created an environment within which the kind of desirable senate behavior that you describe was more possible than it was before or since . I note the fact that you yourself described the senate before Lyndon Johnson grabbed it by the throat, as a quote, reaction nary institution. That doesnt sound like a Great Institution to me. So there was a before as well as an after. To what extent is it perhaps an analytical mistake to assume it that what remains what was possible under the most favorable circumstances remains possible now . Thats why hes bill galston. Its a great question, and i have thought about it. I said in my first book that the senate i was describing from 1963 to 1980 was a senate that was different than any that had come before or any that had come since. So i agree with that. But you have to at least have in your mind a model or a vision of how the senate could work. And then you look at certain aspects of it and see whether they can still apply. So you have to make sort of we cant replicate those times. Bill, i completely agree with that. The men and they were all men at that time. The men who served there were unusual men. It was an unusual period of time for the United States. Having said that, you have got to decide, would you rather a more bipartisan basis, or an egalitarian institution . Do you want a senate where leaders Work Together or where they dont Work Together . Is it going to be more like the house . There are all kinds of questions. I take the point that it is completely different and you still have to model off something. So, i think the political scientists often refer to the period youre describing as the textbook congress, so i think increasingly we have asked whether its the right way to think about it. I am somewhat of a different generation. I am inclined to think that that period was an aberration. Certainly since the 1980s, the rise in political competition for particularly control of the senate, i think has come to profoundly effect the environment in which the senate works. Part of what made it possible for there to be bipartisan and collaborative legislating was in the middle part of the 20th century was the persistence of both southern democrats and northern republicans. We have seen both of those groups largely disappear. And i think that part of what led to the demise of the southern democrats are social changes to which we would not object. So just kind of thinking about what has changed more broadly in the United States and what that has meant for the way the senate works. Im now going to share with you the single piece of the book your book that i found most shocking, and its not going to be anything that youve talked about up to now. And this is im going to take all of us back to the fall of 2002, when it was very, very clear that the country and the senate faced the most momentous decision that a country can face do we go war or not . On page 79 of your book, you talk about the National Intelligence estimate, a lengthy analysis that was used to support the proposition that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, certainly chemical and biological, and was pressing hard to reconstitute his nuclear arsenal. It was a long, important document and you report that out of the 100 senators, precisely six availed themselves of the opportunity to read that document. I was shocked. Because that had nothing to do with partisan, polarization, leadership. It had to do with the sense of individual responsibility on behalf of the senators who knew they were going to have to vote on that. I wondered what was your reaction to that episode . And what did you take away from it . I was appalled by it. And its an important thanks for reminding me, bill, because it is important to not focus on only one thing. I would say there has been sort of a secular decline of the senate over time, and people and committees not quite doing the job the way they should. So i was appalled by that. The other points i made in that section were to cite the very powerful arguments that were made by senators kennedy, levin, and byrd against the rush to war, as opposed to the people who seem to want and sadly i would blame the democrats, for the sentiment that we got to get this behind us and move on to talking about the economy or health care. I found it to be a terrible abdication. And thats why i spent some time illustrating how much what byrd said and what some of the others said. Yeah, well, i will i think its an interesting counterpoint to the other arguments, because it does suggest to me let me back up for second. I find it difficult to believe that an earlier sense with such an issue at stake, that senators whatever their position would not have availed themselves of the opportunity to become as fully informed as possible about a decision that in my judgment turned out to be the pivotal decision for the United States in the 21st century up to now. Because it has colored everything foreign and domestic that happened since. It was a decision undertaken with fully half of the Democratic Senators in support. Well, i agree and i think that what it reflects, it reflected the tenor of the times. After 9 11, there was a tendency to sort of support the president even when the president and the Vice President and the team changed the mission and broadened the war to try to go to iraq. It was a tenor of the time. And it is an unfortunate reflection of what had happened. The senators we call the great senators, jackson and fullbright, disagreed on everything but they would have read the intelligence report. Ill do it from here. Theres a half hour, as i promised for questions from the floor and responses from our panelists. Okay, ill just do it from here. And i have just a couple of requests. Thats an understated now for what i actually have in mind. First of all, do identify yourself by name as youre recognized. If theres an institutional affiliation you think is relevant, please state that, then state a question. There are many opportunities for giving speeches, this is not one of them. Yes. And there is a roving microphone. I see a woman with her hand up right there. Thank you, bill. Its paula stern. Congratulations, ira on your book, and thank you for your presentations, both of you. My question is about the aberrant issue that was raised. Was the period in which ira and i worked together with bill on the hill in the 70s an aberration . The vietnam war, civil rights, the protests this was a period of the greatest activity and congressional assertiveness vis a vis the white house and yet we also had nixon being called the imperial president. So my question really to you is to go back to this discussion. You think it is maybe the baby boomers that explain the aberration. Im wondering if there is something more systematic so that we can go back to that period of congressional assertiveness and responsibility taking. So i will say one of the things that i mention in my opening remarks is that i think that period involved a willingness by congress to try for institutional reasons to reassert power for itself vis a vis the executive branch. And i dont think its unconnected, actually, from the expectation that democrats would just be in the majority for a long time. I think that given that expectation, it was a little bit safer for some republicans to work with democrats on these questions of, you know i do a lot of work on the congressional budget process so thinking about the budget act and the willingness of the parties to Work Together to stand up to what they had seen as an overreach by the executive branch. I guess my perspective on it would be that the congressional reassertion of authority was a reaction to the imperial presidency and the imperial presidency as manifested by the vietnam war. But not just the vietnam war. The sense that president johnson overreached and made a mistake in vietnam and the senate wanted to make up for that as did the house and that president nixon was overreaching in other ways including the budget, so congress reasserted itself. Now, from my standpoint, it would be a nice time for congress, if it had the independence and any bipartisanship, to be reasserting itself given the fact that we have the Trump Presidency. You know, and yet it hasnt worked out that way as yet. So the question will be what happens when the crisis really hits . Next question, please. I see a hand all the way in the back on the row there. Thank you very much. Its an interesting conversation. Larry checkov. To your point, ira, leadership and environment, what happens when de facto leaders like flake, corker, mccain end up leaving the senate, and hatch, as well . I think that theyre a check on this current president. What happens when they leave . Do you have any visions for the future for the senate . I mean, what i would say is what we think about one of the things that i asked us to do in my opening remarks was to think about the role of individual senators, not just leaders in trying to rebuild the senate that works. So for me it is troubling to see senators who are willing to try to assert some power for themselves and the institution to retire, but it is equally troubling for me to see them only be more willing to do that after they have announced that they are leaving the chamber. So i think the fact that you just listed for us three republican senators flake, mccain and corker two of which announced they are not running for reelection, including bob corker in a seat that i dont think anyone thought would be in trouble for him. The flake situation is a little different because he is facing a primary challenge from the right and a strong democratic challenge in the general. But i think its concerning to think about the degree to which reasserting authority within the chamber and using the chamber to reassert authority vis a vis the executive branch is something at this moment we are associating with the members of the Republican Party who are not seeking reelection. I thought about that a lot. And i guess i would say the following. The individual senators that we think about as showing some degree of independence, mccain, corker, flake i would add Susan Collins and i would add lamar alexander. There are different models, right . Collins thinks for a long time about whether to run for governor of maine. She decides to stay. Alexander leaves the Senate Leadership in 2012 because although mcconnell is his friend he doesnt like the way the senate is functioning. He goes off and tries to legislate day after day with patty murray of washington. It actually can be done. Flake, if anyone hasnt read senator flakes book you really should. Its one of the great books ever written in terms of what people should think about politics. Corker, i dont know bob corker from a hole in the wall. I guarantee you that anyone who talks to bob corker who knows him would say he is leaving because he hates the way the senate works. He has resented the leadership of the senate since he got to the senate. They have stifled everything he has tried to do. And look, i need to add one thing to put my comments in context, because my comments are a Harsh Criticism of the current leader, Mitch Mcconnell. I didnt come to that with any great enthusiasm. I came to that by studying the situation. I dont believe in singling out individuals for blame. I think that he has played an extraordinary destructive role. And the thing i wanted to basically say about it is, because we have the Trump Presidency, almost Everything Else looks like some modification or some version of politics as normal, usual politics. And im suggesting that Mitch Mcconnells leadership of the senate is not, that it crossed way across the line. Its not politics as usual. Its not the senate the way it is supposed to work. It is destructive to the institution. Okay. I now see a sea of hands in response to that. I see this gentleman here. I see other hand in the back. And ill try to get to all of you. Thank you. I wonder if the senate can be changed for the better in the Current Media environment. The good old days that you have talked about in the 70s, which maybe werent such good old days, deals could be struck by senators without fear that they would be immediately attacked on fox or msnbc, that twitter feeds would not fill up with invective, they wouldnt be countless blogs in which they were criticized and attacked in this sort of highly democratized media environment. Deals were made quietly behind closed doors, and people moved ahead. What do you think is the implication of the current democratized media environment in which all voices count the same for making the senate a more well functioning operation . Sure. So this is something i think about a lot in response to, lets say, calls to reinvigorate the Committee Process in either chamber, frankly. And i ask myself what would it look like for committees to have long deliberative markups that are covered minute by minute on twitter . And i think thats a why have the answer to that question. And i dont know quite where i come down, but i do think thats a serious question that we have to think about. When and it fits in with this broader idea of asking, do individual senators want the power back . Do they want to have to deal with those kinds of consequences in the modern media environment for doing the open deliberative work that many of them say they would like to see. I dont know the answer, but i dont necessarily think its a for sure yes that they would love the idea of doing this open deliberative work in a way that has so much attention drawn to it. I think i always try to say that its much, much more difficult to be a senator now than it was 40 years ago or 20 years ago, for all the reasons particularly that you are citing. There is no doubt about it. And yet there are always some of them that seem to manage to do it. I said patty murray and lamar alexander. We can think of other examples. The senate broke down entirely in 2016 over the garland thing. And there is alexander and murray grinding away producing a major education bill, producing a major Health Care Bill. It can still be done. I cant none of us can change the overall environment. What we can have is people who function like senators and function like Senate Leaders are supposed to function. And there is no excuse for the way they are functioning now. So i take those examples and id say collins now, id say carl levin who recently retired. There is any number of them. Have any relative optimism, its and my sense to the extent i have any relative optimism, its that some of them, many of them actually want to function differently although certainly everything molly says about the change in incentives is absolutely true. Im going to take one more question from the front here and then im going to move back again. Excellent presentations. Im ralph nase, former chief counsel and former director of the leadership on conference rights and also a good friend and colleague of ira shapiro and bill. I love the first book. I havent read the second one. The one disagreement we have in the first book is i thought that the 1981 to 1993 was an era of bipartisan cooperation whether the Social Security act or Tax Reform Act or strengthening all the major civil rights laws. Now i hear what youre saying about how to reform the senate and get back to the senators of the 60s, 70s and 80s. 1994 was the line of demarcation. How can we do that without changing the structural system of our electoral politics . How do we have people not afraid of being primaried on the right or the left . Does either book get into how we get senators, republicans and democrats, who want to engage and provide incentives to have them engage in timely partisan compromises . Briefly, ralph in defense of my first book, the book cuts off in 1980. The epilogue points out that the senate came back together and functioned through the 80s. So i, like mostly everyone else, identify a point in time that we usually identify with Newt Gingrich as part of the problem anyway. I think that i cant change the whole system. I support a lot of the reforms that people are working on particularly with respect to gerrymandered districts and changing that. The reason i focus on the senate besides the fact that is where i spent my life, as you know, is that they dont have that same excuse, number one. Number two, there is a big cause and effect question here. Bill has thought about it probably more than anybody has. Of course, were a partisan and polarized country. So the leaders have to respond to that. And i would argue that were a polarized country in part because of the leaders, basically, because the people have not seen anyone come together to try to solve any problems. If in 2009 the republicans had joined obama in a bipartisan economic stimulus package, the economy would have recovered quicker and the public would have had more confidence. If in 2009 the republicans had said, that Health Care Proposal of his looks a lot like the republican idea we had at the Heritage Foundation and that governor romney used in massachusetts, and they could have come together on a Health Care Bill and the people would have felt better about it. There is a cause and effect thing that is quite profound. Yes, a woman in the middle on the aisle. Hi. Laurie sherman and former colleague of iras who i adore. And now for a tough, hard hitting question. Well, im in total despair, actually. I have come back from an event in new orleans with a lot of people interested in fixing democracy in the United States, which gives me some hope. My question you just mentioned gerrymandering. To me the fundamental issue is Citizens United and Campaign Finance. I would be interested in you addressing if there was some way to get the big money, the dark money out of politics would things change . So i do think that one of the reasons that, say, folks like senator flake who we were just discussing has to fear a primary challenge from the right in his case is because of the ability of big money, the interests to mount those kinds of campaigns. I think it is worth noting that we have also seen to varying degrees of success more what we might call establishment republican interests to try to counter that in the Republican Party. So i dont think its helped matters at all. Im not terribly at this point optimistic on a major change to Campaign Finance law in the near term. So i think as with most things that we have put on the table today, the question is how do we work within the existing set of incentives to change peoples behavior . Yes. Let me just say sorry, ira. Yes, two things. First of all, on the going back to ralphs question about being primary, it is obviously on peoples minds. I would suggest that one way to respond to it is the way Lisa Murkowski responded to it when she lost her primary or the way Joe Lieberman responded to it, by running as an independent or a third party candidate. They both won. Jeff flake who i think will have an extraordinary career in whatever he does, he could have run as an independent in arizona. That would have been one way to respond to it. On the money question, look, im given to overstatement and simplification. Citizens united decision was the worst decision of the Supreme Court since dred scott. Its a very terrible decision. Not withstanding that, both sides raised a lot of money and sometimes the candidates with less money win. And Bernie Sanders deserves enormous recognition for showing you can raise 27 million 27 at a time. The energy that is out there in the country is going to make up for some of the money problem, but i do believe the constitutional crisis that may be coming if the president decides to fire mueller or try to force the resignation of him through some other way, will put the republican senators to the test. Do you care more about the country or your republican donor base led by the Koch Brothers . I think at that point many people will come forward and