Transcripts For CSPAN3 Assessment Of The 116th Congress 20240714

Good afternoon, everyone. First off, id like to thank the Clermont Institute for sponsoring this panel and for sponsoring all of its panels here at the american Political Science association, and thanks to all of you for coming to hear whether congress is still dysfunctional. I suspect you already know the answer to the question, but maybe well provide a fuller background and explanation about whats going on these days on capitol hill. Its no secret to political scientists that congress is a mess. Its no secret to the members of congress that congress is a mess. And nor is it a secret to the American People that congress is a mess. Routinely, congress polls very poorly when people are asked whether they approve of the job its doing, and this trend is bipartisan whether democrats or republicans control congress, most people assign it a failing grade. The trend is also long standing. Over the past Decade Congress has not once achieved an Approval Rating above 30 . It wasnt always this way. During the 1990s congresss Approval Ratings typically were in the 40s and the 50s. Today they hover in the teens and the 20s. Once thought to be the great repository of americas republic principles, congress is now referred to as a broken branch. Why exactly has Congress Come to this point . What are the causes of congresss dysfunction . Has anything changed since trumps election and the democratic takeover of the house . Can this longstanding state of affairs actually be changed . Can congress be reformed, and if so, what do we need to do to reform it . To answer these questions we have assembled a distinguished panel of experts on congress with a variety of perspectives, and ill introduce them all briefly in the order, theyll speak in alphabetical order here, and ill introduce them all at the beginning so we can launch right into their remarks. Our first speaker is katherine peerson. Shes associate professor of Political Science at the university of minnesota. She worked for several years as a legislative assistant to members of congress, and she teaches and writes on congress, Political Parties a, and women politics. Shes the author of Party Discipline in the house of representatives which was published by the university of michigan press. Next well hear from Molly Reynolds whos a senior fellow at the brookings institution. Her research focuses on the role congressional rules play in effecting policy outcomes. Shes the author of exception to the rule, the politics of filibuster limitations in the u. S. Senate. Dr. Reynolds will be followed by Matthew Spaulding who is the Vice President of washington operations for Hillsdale College and the kirby professor of constitutional government, and dean of the van and L Graduate School of government in washington, d. C. He is the editor of the heritage guide to the constitution and the author of several books but most recently the best selling we still hold these truths. Last to speak, but certainly not least, will be james walner. He is a senior fellow in governance at the R Street Institute where he writes about congress, especially the senate as well as on legislative procedure and the separation of powers. Hes the author of two books on congress, most recently on parliamentary war, partisan conflict and procedural change in the United States senate. Well hear initial remarks from each panelists and then probably some exchange among the panelists after that, and followed by your questions. So first up is katherine pierson. Zb thank you very much and thank you to the Clermont Institute for organizing this panel. Im happy to be on this panel. We could talk all day about whats wrong with congress, well limit our remarks. I think its important to note that much of what is wrong with congress did not start in the 115th or 116th congress but rather there have been trends that have been building for a long time and i think its likely that most of us will talk about the increase in partisanship and everything that has come along with it. We have a heightened partisanship, partisan polarization and intense Party Competition in the u. S. Congress, and that has made it more difficult for members to work across the aisle for a variety of reasons. Of course, there is some real policy disagreement. We know this. Liberals and conservatives differ on key issues and key values, but theres much more to it than that. Theres very little ideological overlap between the parties and they differ on issues that are not related to conservative or liberal core values, and because of the way members voters are less likely to split their tickets and the incumbency advantage has dropped to nearly zero despite the fact that incumbents are routinely reelected, members of congress dont have that many incentives to work with members across the aisle. In 2018, for example, House Democrats voted together and against republicans on average 89 of the time. House republicans on average 91 of the time. Senate democrats 87 , and Senate Republicans 92 . These were not even the High Water Marks of party unity. So were looking at a very partisan house and senate. The rise of Party Competition is another sort of dynamic that fuels polarization in a narrowly divided country with fewer voters splitting their tickets, we know that 95 of partisans voted for their partys congressional candidate in 2018 midterms. Currently, there are only 31 house districts won by democrats in 2018 and trump in 2016 and three districts won by clinton in 2016 and republicans in 2018, so not only are we narrowly divided but most members dont have incentives to work with the other party, and this trend has been building really since the 1970s its only been kps ba exacerbated. My book on Party Discipline in the house of representatives shows the ways in which Party Leaders reward their members for their Party Loyalty, not for being institutionalists, not even necessarily for having good ideas, although that can help, but Party Leaders are more likely to give those that vote with their party, use partisan rhetoric on the house floor, sort of support their party and discharge petition efforts or to block discharge petition efforts when it comes to committee transfers, when it comes to getting their legislation on the house floor, so we know that Party Loyalty is very important. Most members have incentives that are constituent based to be loyal and Party Leaders reward that loyalty. This has been combined with a decline of Committee Power and expertise in the rise of interparty factions. We all know the story of the reforms of the 1970s, which increased the power of Party Leaders in the Democratic Caucus and rank and file members as well at the expense of committee chairs. Sort of these trends were magnified in 1995 when republicans took over congress for the first time in 40 years, but today were sort of at an interesting point. For a long time political scientists talked about sort of power as a pendulum. Committee chairs were very powerful during the textbook era. Party leaders became powerful beginning in the 1970s, intensifying in the 1990s, but today certainly as weve seen with speakers boehner and speaker ryan and now even to some extent Speaker Pelosi, we see that Party Leaders are struggling with their own intraparty factions. So committees dont have the capacity that they need, but Party Leaders have a hard time as well because, again, many of the incentives have changed. More members of congress are interested in tweeting out sort of symbolic policy positions than being institutionless. Accompanying this is of course the decline of regular order whereby members have fewer opportunities to take part in the legislative process with many more closed rules whereby they if theyre not really participating in committee and they have fewer opportunities on the house floor, its sort of easy to see how members are incentivized to communicate rather than actually legislate. Another problem with congress is its lack of responsiveness to Public Opinion and major problems. Thats not to say that at the end of the day the 115th congress didnt pass some important provisions. They did. They extended antiterrorism surveillance authorities. They rolled back some of the dodd frank regulations on midsized banks. They passed a new law fighting opioid abuse, and a criminal justice and prison rehabilitation law. But if you look at the most recent pew survey on the most important policy problems in america that people care about no matter what their position is its pretty clear congress is not responding to some of these issues, immigration, health care, climate change, or guns, sort of whatever policy direction were talking about. Another thing i want to focus on briefly, which is not a new problem and, in fact, congress is doing better on this dimension but still is a problem for congress and that is that congress is not representative of the u. S. Population when it comes to gender, when it comes to race and ethnicity and when it comes to class, and we know from a lot of Political Science research that descriptive representation is linked to substantive representation. And not only that, racial minorities, people of color, women who are represented by members of congress who share characteristics with them are more likely to be engaged in the process. Again, the 116th congress is the High Water Mark in terms of representation, but still falls well short of the population with the house comprised of 24 women, with 36 new women, but republican women are dramatically under represented. There are 44 latinx members of congress and 55 africanamericans, so sort of under representation of really every group except for highly educated older white men. When it comes to staff capacity, its more difficult to retain quality staff and staff are not diverse along with others on this panel and others in this room, im part of an american Political Science Association Task force on congressional reform, and one of the things that the task force has been charged with looking at is staff retention and staff diversity, and so we know that theres more turnover than there used to be, and Staff Members are leaving capitol hill to do things that are more lucrative including but not limited, going to sort of the lobbying and Interest Group community. So, again, many of these trends have been brewing for a long time, and so we cant say that they all change with the election of President Trump or the most recent congress, but in many ways sort of theyve been on display in the weakness of congress as an institution has been on display. Now we dont just have members of congress communicating via twitter, the president and members of congress are communicating with one another via twitter, and so it is unusual to have a president who is so unengaged in policy making. And i think particularly under unified Party Control in the last congress we really saw how that hurt republican efforts to get a rlot, not all, but to geta lot of the policy priorities they had actually enacted with some key exceptions. In the 114th congress we saw republican Party Leaders really struggle with intraparty factions, and i think many observers, myself included, expected if Speaker Pelosi became speaker again that she would enjoy some of the high party unity that she did back in the 110th and 111th congress. And while its true that democrats are routinely voting with one another and against the other party she too was struggling with intraparty factions to a much greater degree than she had the last time that she was speaker. So more reminiscent of the boehner and ryan era than perhaps of her last cycle. And so i want to turn briefly now to how Congress Might be reformed, and again, there is an apsa Task Force Working on this issue, but i think its quite clear that one of the things that Congress Needs to do is increase its own capacity. That involves bulking up staff, paying them more, training them better, really developing expertise, giving power back to committees, restoring to some extent within reason with what leaders will allow, regular order so that more members can be involved in the legislative process and then legislation on the floor, at least in the house of representatives and increase staff transparency, diversity, and training. Theres no clear reform that will necessarily decrease partisanship, the stiff Party Competition between the parties or the incentives that members have to bolster their party reputation and their own reputations sort of with regard to the other party thinking about the next election. But it is also the case that there are many partisans who formerly served in congress on both sides of the aisle who were also institutionless who deeply cared about the institution, valued its traditions, and so i do think that part of the reform should be to try to under tcult sense of loyalty to the institution in addition to party among members of congress. And that could be also through additional training or just more sessions with former members of congress to share their own experiences, particularly those who were institutionless and really active and involved policymakers. Great, thank you, and thanks to the clermont folks for having me. So i share many of kathryns diagnoses of whats wrong with congress so i will i wont dwell as much on some of them. Kathryns talked about the consequences for congress for the particular combination were currently living with of high polarization and also high macro level Party Competition, so the idea that both parties frequently can look at the next election and say and reasonably expect that their party if they are in the minority now might find themselves in the majority after the next election. And this profoundly affects the incentives that members have to work across the aisle. It also means that, i think, theres a greater incentive among the members of the Majority Party in congress to put bills on the floor that they know will fail simply to be able to say to members of their own party in the electorate to Interest Group allies that these are the kinds of things that our party would do if we had more power and the ability to legislate after the next election. This is i think especially true under divided government like we have right now, but it can also be true under unified party government. When you think about things like why did republicans before 2017 spend a lot of time in the house taki taking votes to repeal the Affordable Care act, even when they knew that was not ultimately going to be a productive legislative endeavor at that moment. I think its in part because the incentives of this combination of polarized parties and high levels of macro level Party Competition incentivize doing that kind of spending that kind of floor time on things that they know will not pass. Kathryn also touched briefly on the increasing nationalization of our politics, and this has profound consequences for the electoral experience of individual members, and their electoral fate has become much more attached to National Political forces than it once was. Kathryn pointed out that voters split their tickets at far lower rates than they once did. One of my favorite pieces of data on this point is that in 2016 it was the First Time Since the advent of the popular election of senators in the early 20th century where every state in which there was a Senate Election in 2016 that the party that won that Senate Election was also the party that won that states electoral votes in the electoral college, so there were no states in which that result was split in 2016. So that because voters are splitting their tickets at much lower rates, that gives individual members less of an incentive to cultivate what we might consider an independent brand, to work across the aisle and to attract voters who identify with both parties. The nationalization of politics has also meant that our system is increasingly presidency centered, centered around the president. As kathr youyn pointed out many these trends are not new to the current occupant of the white house, despite the fact that for particularly those of us in washington it does feel like the president is at the center of every news cycle, but i think here in particular going back to the early 1970s when we saw a number of high profile pieces of legislation, things like the congressional budget act, some reforms to the oversight of the intelligence committunity, that sort of thing, we saw them pass with large bipartisan majorities, in part because members of congress saw a reason to Work Together to increase the legislative branchs power at the expense of the executive branch. As the president has become an increasingly central and polarizing figure in american politics, it can be more difficult to build support for something on institutional grounds in congress. My favorite example of this from recent years actually comes from 2015 and a slightly different era of trade politics than maybe the one were living in right now, but in 2015 when president obama was lobbying congress on trade promotion authority, so he was seeking the ability to negotiate what would be the tpp, someone on paul ryans staff, paul ryan was at the time 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 that they were granting obama something special, even if at that point republicans in Congress Also wanted the trade agreement. This idea of merely identifying the issue with the president was making it harder to build a legislative coalition. Kathryns also talked about the decline in congressional capacity, particularly the dropoff in staff levels on house committees and in the support agencies starting after the republican takeover of the house after the 94 elections. There are also various incentives presented to Congressional Staff that lead them to increasingly pursue opportunities off the hill, and that really does make it more difficult for congress to have the expertise it needs in house to do its work well, which increases the power of special interests and lobbyists. I want to talk a little bit about a couple of things that have changed since trumps election and democrats took over the house, a couple of lessons that i would take away from our first our first twoplus years of the Trump Administration and the first eight months or so of the democratic majority. So one, particularly this year, is weve seen the challenges that are presented in doing congressional oversight when going to court is an increasingly large part of the oversight strategy. So one thing we expected to see and have seen in this congress is a heavy reliance by the house on legal avenues, things like subpoenas, contempt citations is part of their overapproach. We knew going in this is not a particularly expeditious approach to oversight, and thats been borne out. Some of this has to do with much of it has to do with the administrations desire to stone wall a lot of requests from congress but thats not the only part. I think that democrat also have reasons why pursuing a legallyfocused strategy beyond the beyond the fact that the administration has pushed them into that corner, kathryn talked a little bit about intraparty divisions. I think when your party is divided on some of these oversight questions, and here i think prararticularly about the question of impeachment, theres an advantage to the party to taking some of that fight outside of the congressional arena, so its still happening, but your members are not necessarily being forced to go on record regularly in a way that highlights the divisions within your party. I think its also true that other changes in the legislative process have made it harder to use other tools to try to rein in what the executive branch is doing. Here im thinking particularly about charnnges in the appropriation process and the way in which the rise of large omnibus spending bills makes it more difficult to use the power of the purse to limit particular actions by the executive. A second trend to note from the current current period of congress is particularly in the period of unified republican control in 2017 and 2018 is the increasing importance of items that cant be filibustered in the senate, so in 2017 and 2018, more than half of the votes that Congressional Quarterly rated as key votes in the senate were votes that involved either limits on debate or on which only majority support for cloture was needed. So im thinking here about things like certainly nominations, which need only majority support for cloture, but also things like the use of the Congressional Review Act, the use of reconciliation in 2017, and the increasing importance of these legislative vehicles to try to accomplish things even under unified government. Many of these in the first two years involved the republicans trying to use these tools to advance things when they had a narrow majority in the senate, but we also importantly saw Minority Party senators either on their own in the case of, for example, a Congressional Review Act resolution on shortterm Health Insurance or in cooperation with Majority Party senators in the case of yemen using these procedures to force votes on issue that they cared about, even when the Party Leadership in the senate did not necessarily want to see those things on the floor. The last trend necessarily see things on the floor. The last trend that ill note from the current congressional experience is were starting to see some important consequences of previous delegations of power to the executive branch by congress. So weve been on a long, continued path in which congress has delegated substantial powers to the executive branch, often because it is easier to give the president the responsibility to do something than for congress to do the hard work of retaining the power for itself. Historically, those delegations of power often either included or were later brought under some sort of congressional review process. So here im thinking about things like the war powers act, the statute giving the president the ability to declare a National Emergency and then subsequent congressional review, the procedures that allow ko congress to review arms sale, that sort of thing. Many of these review provisions were weakened in the mid 80s when the Supreme Court ruled that the legislative veto was unconstitutional. Requiring that the congress exercise of these review powers be in the form of a joint resolution that would need to be signed by the president rather than a concurrent resolution. Were also learning in recent years that a highly partisan congress isnt necessarily well equipped to use these tools that it has. Both because of the need to get to a twothirds vote to override a veto when it does want to try and use them, and because the procedures have become an attractive way to force issues onto the attend. Again, im thinking here about something that the votes that the senate took on yemen this year. So kathryns also covered a number of things that i would point out where Congress Might be reformed. I agree wholeheartedly that some of the changes that we would want to see to make the institution work better require big changes in the underlying political system or the set of incentives that members of congress face. And i agree that capacity reforms are one, perhaps, more feasible avenue, and i also think we should think about potential procedural changes that encourage the offthefloor processes in congress that are wo continuing to work somewhat well even if theyre paired with more restrictive onthefloor processes. So i think here particularly about the use over the past several years of what weve called mini bus appropriations bills, the process of having the house and Senate Appropriation committees continue to top spending legislation like they historically have but packaging these bills together into small multibill packages for congressional consideration which is an interesting compromise that Congress Seems to have struck, making sure it continues to work while also recognizing the political incentives that members face. Thank you, joe. I know joe put a lot of work into these panels as well. Id also like to point out the work of the institute is important in many ways. Back there, one of the best publications in political thought today. Id also point people to their, i guess, online journal, the american mind. So, here we are once again. Another apsa. Joy, oh, joy. And congress is still declining. Indeed, i think its declining at increasing rate, to put it in i guess those are more economic terms. Regardless of who controls it, republicans, democrats, or some division thereof. You wonder whether theres something maybe larger afoot. Seemed to me that you cant really understand Congress Without understanding the relationship between congress and the modern executive. Indeed, we also need to throw in the Supreme Court for good measure because theyre now involved in lawmaking. How the branches interact, their institution institutional roles as institutions under the constitution and how that has all changed. It seems to me decline of congress is a problem but in more ways a symptom of a larger problem. Id like to back up and take a deeper look at and relate that to congress and thats the rise of modern bureaucratic rule or the Administrative State. That seems to me the change thats driving this transformation as selfgovernment is being overwhelmed by this new form, this new bureaucratic way. Congress is now suffering from its successes. For the american founders, the idea of a constitution preceded, ant anticedent to government. Constitution is created by a people who constituted the constitution comes from a people who then constituted government. A sovereign people possessing rights by nature, delegate powers, those powers are separated and structured in a constitution, checked and balanced. That will allow majorities to rule while protecting minority rights. At the turn of the last century, american progressives began to reinterpret that relationship in response to new conditions as they like to say. Rights are understood to be natural, but social and determined by history and so grow and adapt. There would be a new compact now between the government and the people. And the government would play the role, the key role in actually determining those conditions. Thus, rights, and thus the limits and expansion of government. And so the replacement of a rightsgrounded nature by history made it possible to replace politics with the rational Administrative State. And here, i have to give credit and point out the great work done by john marini. Hes someone whos thought long about this question. I want to think about it in terms of congress and especially the political branches in particular. As the law became a tool for social reconstruction, government then can become an instrument for progress. So the founders were went to Great Lengths to preserve consent and limit government through Public Institutions and the separation of powers. The progressives held it that the barriers erected by the founders had to be removed or circumvented so government could be unified and expanded through the combination of powers which would consecrate authority and direct its actions toward achieving more and more progress. Politics in the realm of expr s expressing opinions. The real decisions and details of government would be handled by administrators, separate and immu immune from influence of politics. Hence the separation of Administration Politics thats throughout progressive writings. The constantly changing structure of this Administrative State requires management as well, hence their theory of leadership. Footnote, hagel and max vaber and woodrow wilson. So the United States has been moving down this path of an administrative government which we already made reference to, in fits and starts for some time, from the initial progressive s through the new deal expansions, but the Administrative State was not really institutionalized in a permanent way until the Great Society and its progeny. Before that time, until that time, america was centrally governed under the constitution but was administratively decentralized at the state and local level. When administration is nationalized, it creates a new source of conflict between the executive and legislative branchs. So at first, progressives liked to look to the presidency. Woodrow wilson, teddy roosevelt, and president s pushed ko eed co to expand administrative powers. Congress was reluctant to do so. They remained a defender of decentralized administration. But congress seeing the writing on the wall adapted and between 1968 and 1978 passed more regulatory legislation than in all previous history. Delegating anumeral legislative powers, authority to bureaucracies and agencies, all of those things they created. Since 1970s, congress has been reorganizing itself continuously. Committees, subcommittees, leadership role, in a way to in a way that could oversee and interact with the daily operations of this modern bureaucratic apparatus. Congress thought to develop the powers overed at stati eed admi bestknown example of that, as you referred to, was the legislative veto. A great, a good, perhaps, ironic example of the National Emergencies act of 1976, to control president s, in particular, richard nixon, which originally the congress could override with majority. The Supreme Court declares that unconstitutional in 1983 in the chata case. Thats the piece of legislation that donald trump is using to build his wall. Congress having delegated the authority to him. Over time, congress has largely focused less on actual lawmaking and more and more on oversight, bringing regulatory relief from the bureaucracy. When congress does legislate, is broad and turns over pow toreer agencies and various places who for all intents and purposes do the things we would associate with law and lawmaking. Indeed, what goes much for law, at least the back and forth of lawmaking nowadays, isnt in the legislature at all, by which i mean on the floor where legislatures actually deliberate. Its between the executive and leadership in very closeddoor small meetings. Then more interestingly between the executives and various courts fighting over a administrative application. That along with things like the chevron doctrine show how deeply engaged the court are in maintaining not the constitution but the administrative process, itself. Today the modern congress is almost exclusively a supervisory body exercising limited oversight over administrative policymaking. Congress, used to be the keystone of the washington establishment, is replaced. Hat tip, john marini, by the bureaucracies, the keystone of the national state. Now, all of this has changed how the branches operate. Think of the founders understanding of contrary to naive notion that bureaucracy is neutral and scientific, it turns out hard to keep politics out of politics. And as a result, much of executive legislative affairs and back and forth historically is actually a fight over the control of the bureaucracy. Early progressive president s had grandiose ideas. Fdr did much to legitimize the Administrative State. And set it up under the new executive office of the president. Nevertheless, during the first part of our bureaucratic history, congress had the upper hand. Indeed, executives, especially since 1968, posed the greatest threat to the Administrative State fighting to control and, if possible, diminish it. But by 1984, exactly when Party Control of congress changed for the first time in 40 years, about that time, president s had come to figure out the allure of bureaucratic power. And so as Congress Expanded the bureaucracy, creating agencies, delegating lawful lawmaking authority, losing control of the details of budgeting, focusing on expose facto checks, president s came to realize they could use and lead the bureaucracy through a combination of executive discreti discretion, poorly written law, willful neglect, disregard for their own policy ends with or without the cooperation of congress and as the constitution rule of law centered on legislation give ways to administrative or executive discretion, so the administrative congress of the 1970s and 80s is replaced by the administrative executive of more recent years as the branch that dominates our politics. This seems to be the case where congress has sold the rope with which they will hang themselves. Having delegated significant legislative powers, they now find themselves far removed from the action. They try to sustain their power through committees, oversight, but the distinction between general lawmaking and, in particular, execution, has been overcome to the advantage of the power closer to the deed, as macavelli would say. This Congress Seems to me as a reflection of all the same problems. Though torn by divides within the Democratic Party. On the one hand, its still small and petty. No serious agenda beyond omnibus spending. On the other hand are those vocal members who have been driven more by National Ideological debates. Something that both previous speakers have pointed out. That doesnt surprise me given the balance of power and donald trump. Having said that, it seems to me donald trump has been rather restrained in all this which is to say hes not pushing the constitutional edge of executive powers as much as hes simply using powers delegated by congress. An example, the trade powers hes been using. And the feckless precedent of one branch appealing to another to challenge the third, i. E. , Congress Running to the courts, that, of course, was a precedent started by republicans under the obama administration. So, my conclusion, to be brief, bureaucracy can accommodate the executive and executives, it turned out, can accommodate but also use and direct the bureaucracy. Thats quite problematic. Although it suggests to me that it might be and probably is the best option for checking the Administrative State and challenging its legitimacy is going to come from the executive and not congress, even though congress, at least in theory, should have the powers over the Administrative Branch or the fourth branch. The larger problem, of course, the bureaucratic government failed to represent democracy and the rule of law. By here, i mean those oldfashioned things passed by congress. The Administrative State, bureaucratic government, amounts to a new form of rule. Its less democratic, less subject to consent, and makes government less representative and us, as a result, less selfgoverning. It has transformed and disfigured our constitutional institutions. The separation of powers weaken as a practical check on the abuse of power does not work to create any governing consensus of the American People. Ing together, the Political Institutions no longer pursue the common good. I am tempted to say that congress, seemingly oblivious to their own demise, fiddles while rome burns. It may be excused as a great scholar said of the new Political Science in its infancy, it may be excused by the fact that it does not know it fiddles and it does not though that rome is burning. For organizing this panel. Thank you to my fellow panelists. It is thank you, thank you to the claremont university. Thank you, joe. Its a treat to appear with some eminent people. I only try to appear in public next to people that are much smarter than me because i hope it will eventually rub off and people will assume that i must be such an eminent persona as well. Thank you, all, for letting me join you. Thank you to the audience. Its friday afternoon. What better place to be than washington, d. C. , in august talking about congress . I love congress. I love the senate, i love the house. My family is probably a little tired of me talking about congress so much, but i love it. Thank you, all, for being here and letting me talk about it just a little bit more. As i approach these questions that weve been asked to consider, i want to share with you briefly how i think about it by posing a question to you all, which is is there a place for congress and how we think about Politics Today . Think about that. Is there a place for congress in how we think about Politics Today . Wherever you turn, there is frustration. Thats sure. Theres a sense that congress is broken. That nothings working as it should. I share in that frustration. I worked on capitol hill for over a decade. Ive studied capitol hill and congress and how it operates for over a decade. In my nearly 30 years now, its kind of depressing, combined study and experience with this fabulous institution that i love so dearly, the best answer i can come up with is this. Theres not enough conflict inside congress. Its a bit unorthodox, but theres really not any conflict there. So what do i mean by this . We have political change. It happens. Control of the house and the senate shift. Control of the presidency shifts. The Supreme Court is very important. The judiciary, the composition of the judiciary, is very important. The stakes are high. Right . But as all of this is playing out, as all of this tumultuous churn is happening, theres a backdrop in that how we think about politics has changed, i think. Electoral politics is the primary lens through which we see and understand politics. Right . I dont think many people would disagree with that. Electoral competition is everything. Its the key to achieving ones goals. Part of my job in the senate, i would sit in the Senate Republican lunches and one thing that the majority leader at the time, minority leader, and i can reveal this because he says it in public as well, but he would say, Mitch Mcconnell, winners win and losers lose. Winners win and losers lose. I never understood it for a long time. It sounded like kind of a schoolyard grag deebragadicio t bully would say. Thats how members see Politics Today. And this in and of itself is not new, right . I mean, david mayhues told us for a very long time that members care about election. Of course, thats common sense. B members care about election. Now i think they conceive of election, they think of election in terms of the party brand, in terms of the party, not just themselves. Not their individual persona and their own individual constituency. Again, not much different than what a lot of other people and scholars would say. Despite the constant activity thats generated by this kind of tumultuous nature of electoral politics, the legislative status quo persists. Isnt that funny . Nothing changes. The status quo persists, i think you cant, common sense tells us, change something unless you act to change it. Theres no action. Theres not two opposing actions canceling each other out. If youre on capitol hill today, youre struck by the complete and utter absence of action. Its remarkable. Members dont want, in my opinion, conflict because the legislative process they dont want the conflict that the legislative process generates because it divides their parties. When you think of elections in terms of parties, the last thing you want to do is divide your party. You believe that winners win, losers lose, when you are united and the other sides divided. The result, my colleagues mentioned this, saw this bipartisan agreement to shift decisions to administrative agencies to the courts because thats where were going to handle tough and controversial decisions. Well talk about them all day long. Well tweet about them. Well do all kinds of stuff, but we wont act. We wont act inside congress. On the floor, in committee, behind closed doors, anywhere. Were not going to act. You see this with former speaker ryan telling his moderate republicans who are pushing a discharge petition to get a bill to codify daca out of committee. Dont do that. Chuck schumer, the head of senate democrats, tells his members, issues press releases after the Trump Administration says theyre going to put a question on the census to ask about ones citizenship. The court should solve this issue. The court should solve this issue. The Republican Party emphasizes in the senate that they confirm judges. Why . Because judges will act. Most voters dont care who a judge is, only in relation to what . The policy. The implicit understanding is this is good for us, vote for us, because the people were confirming will act while we dont. I guess theyre confirming the judges. This reinforces the importance of those elections which creates the cycle. Theres this paradox thats lurking everywhere, i think we miss the this, how we think of Congress Today and why its broken. Polarized parties do what . Theyre polarized. Of course they act. They have no problem acting. Parties that are locked in competition and want to do everything in their power to win do what . They act. Parties dont force votes in congress anymore. Polarized parties arent trying to achieve their ideology. Theyre trying to hide from the issues that divide their parties. And so when i consider whats changed since 2016 or 2018, i think this process has solidified and you see this new norm of inaction in both parties. If youll recall, i believe it was in 2018, this isnt a malicious thing. I believe the members on both sides of the aisle in the house and senate are good people, theyre doing the best they can. This show they sis how they see today. In the summer of 2018, former president ial candidate kirsten h on the floor, about the administrations policy of separating mothers and children, migrants. It was a very controversial issue. She gives this very, very heartfelt speech. Shes tearing up. Shes banging her fist on her desk. Shes talking about japanese internment internment of japaneseamericans during world war ii. Shes saying things like darkness is descending and says if the president wont act, we will. At the end of her speech, she said please cosponsor this legislation i introduced with my colleague, dianne feinstein, and she leaves the floor. Not once after that to this day does she lift a finger inside the senate to force action. Not once did she force a vote, react to unanimous consent request, not once did she do anything you would imagine senators would do and have done throughout history to force issues they care about, to force actions on those issues, either because she wants to win and shes cynical and democrats agree with her position or because she believes truly and it is the truth, but neither is happening. Why . Because the way the place where you saw that issue is the administration. Its the presidency. And you dont become president when you have a divided party. In the same way, senator jeff merkley from oregon, he issues a press release at the time and says, were going to the border, were going to the border to solve this problem. Well, the place where you solve the problem is in the senate, right . I get it. You can go to the border to generate a lot of attention for this issue a, legislating from weakness to pressure colleagues to pass your amendment or bill but he didnt force any action on that issue, either. Not once. Right . You see this with the reaction to aoc whos not been socialized into this thing. So she comes in with this kind of naivety, if you want to do something, you have to act. Right . You dont need to be some fancy political operative to know this. You dont need a ph. D. Right . What does she do . She starts looking around for her leverage and she sees it and she uses it and the parties dont like this. You saw this with the reaction to ted cruz in 2015 when he came in and said im going to act. The people arent acting. The reason why is because action is uncertain. It cant be controlled. Its unpredictable. It reveals divisions because it reveals information. How can we fix Congress Amidst this . This is really interesting. I think today its not that the government is unlimited. Yes, government has grown beyond its limits but its also very weak if you think about it. How do i appreciate this . First i think we need to recognize how we talk about legislators, we see them in this passive sense, we see them as victims of some impersonal force, they have no agency anymore. And i think that we need to understand that how political scientists, how interested observers, how members and even voters understand politics has changed. The conventional approaches, i think a lot of this did originate in the academy, this is one of the few times where i think political scientists can stand up and say, yes, we really had a major impact, the conventional approaches we had today, you see this on the news, you read it in the newspaper, you read it in any judge, we treat legislators as interchangeable. We interpret incorrectly how legislative rules operate in practice. We theorize the legislative process in terms that are both static, right, static, never changing, its just constant. Also spaticial. You think if youre left and right we cant do anything because all the people are over there, were all over here, its not going to work. Theres no overlap. We assume that conflict between legislators that arises and will always arise in any legislative process makes legislating harder. Viewing the congress in these terms changing how we think about the practice in which its members are engaged. It transforms the legislative process into a production process. The purpose of which is to manufacture or fabricate legislative widgets. In fact, if you go to grad school, one of the articles im sure you read rg one of the leading articles in Political Science is called the Industrial Organization of congress which quite literally models the legislative process as a production process. It treats congress as a firm. A factory. And viewed in these terms, legislators become craftsmen, factory workers, who apply Technical Knowledge to make a specific product that is being made according to a blueprint that has been designed elsewhere. I think of the former majority leader, democratic majority leader, in the 60s gave an incredible speech on the senate floor. He submitted it for the record. He was originally going to give it the day president kennedy was assassinated so he ended up holding it back and putting it in the record the following week. We forget that no one likes mansfield when he came in. No one liked mansfield because he made them work. He thought all senators were equal and it created a lot of chaos and uncertainty and it was tough being a senator coming from kind of johnsons welloiled machine, what they also didnt like, to mansfield. So he was defending his record. I highly recommend this speech, if you look it up. He says that, you know, basically senators arent factory workers. Theyre not coming in every morning clocking in with a timecard and assembling assuming their place on the floor, awaiting instructions. No. Theyre senators. Thats not their job. Politics is not production. And so this, i think, has really been facilitated by efforts in the academy to develop a science of politics. So we have all these Sophisticated Research techniques today and i think our the scholars who are very, very wise, very intelligent, when they developed them, they believed they could explain and predict legislative behavior, they could predict legislative outcome reliably. So these scholars produced a body of work that whatever its merits, and there are a lot of merits, it affirms implicitly this politics is production view of what happens when legislators legislate. So the result, it shifts over time how we think about congress away from an arcetectonic view of politics, which is its an activity you participate in. Its never ending. And it occurs in a place. And the whole point is to make decisions because were in conflict or disagreement with one another or the basis of equality. Thats what selfgovernments all about. The congress isnt needed when you see things as production. Congress is its like the worst place to design a car. Right . You do not want to design a buick on the factory floor. Its not going to look very good. Right . You want to design the buick somewhere else where the experts are in control. Then you bring it to the factory floor then they assemble the buick, they make it, they fabricate it. Thats not politics. Thats how we think about Politics Today. And so when i think about how to fix congress, im not going to give you any specifics, but i would like to do is give you a way to evaluate the specifics you heard and continue to hear. One, i think we need to acknowledge this gap between theory and practice and need to bridge it. We need to acknowledge the role that conflict plays in politics. Burcham gross, a fabulous scholar of the 1950s, wrote an incredible book, one of the best books if not the best book on Congress Called the legislative struggle. He says in it compromise emerges from the struggle. By definition, you have to disagree before you can compromise. When we talk about compromise, we think consensus. We think consensus because were thinking production, not politics. So we dont need to insulate congress and members from conflict. We need to expose them to conflict because thats the whole point. And we cant do big things like the Civil Rights Act of 1964 unless you have conflict. Thats why we dont pass big legislation today. You cant insulate something from conflict and then pass big change. And then lastly, we need to design reforms that facilitate action. Not stifle it. Because at the end of the day, we need men and women inside Congress Acting. It doesnt matter why theyre acting. It doesnt matter what they hope to gain from it. The whole purpose of selfgovernment is acting. Thats the point. And what comes out of that is the dessert or the freedom or whatever else you want to call it. And i think if we think about politics in these terms, then i think it will take care of itself very quickly. It may be regular order like the 1960s. It may look like something completely different. But for it to work, we have to recognize that it cannot be controlled. It cannot be predicted. It is inherently uncertain. And, yes, it is shot through with conflict. That conflict is the answer. Thank you. All right. Thank you, all, for remarks. Before we turn it over to the a audience for question and answer, i thought maybe id give each of you an opportunity to bring up any responses you might have to the other panelists and their remarks. If there are none okay. Oh. We have one. I would just generally say since i didnt talk about solutions at all, i agree with james. I think there needs to be more politics. In many ways, that is the ma mattsonian solution, right . Thats also the way youre going to get something coming out of the legislative process. It was designed that way so that it would force deliberation and would force them to come to something. I guess my point is that conflict and more politics in Congress Needs to actually end in Congress Acting as an institution and congress only speaks through they speak now through twitter as an institution, they only speak through legislation. And what the conflict i would like to see more of is the conflict between the branches which means they need to actually pull back their authority so they can actually engage in that kind of conflict with the executive and, perhaps, a little less running to the courts to solve their problems. I would just add real quick, i think thats right, but we have to recognize that the only way congress can act as an institution is if its members act, so what come s out of that process, that conflict in the house and senate, theyre outcomes. When i worked there, the whole if you wanted to stop a piece of legislation, you tried to freeze the process. You figured out whatever you could do to freeze the process and once you did that, you were halfway there because then all of a sudden, the pressure starts building and it gets harder and harder to get it going again because the legislative process, once it gets going, is almost impossible to stop. It always ends in an outcome. We dont like that today because you cant control it, but my point is that congress will act as an institution. I dont know i cant tell you how in every given instance, but it will work as an institution if its members act. As long as they refuse to act, it will never act as an institution. Youre not changing around the filibuster. I havent seen any filibusters, like, i i like to see actual ones, right . We theorize the filibuster as a veto. The filibuster is not a veto. We do, our economic models theorize the filibusters of veto, common sense does the way we talk about it. There are no vetoes inside the senate of the United States unless you ask for them. By that, i mean unless you ask for unanimous consent. But you dont have to ask for unanimous consent. If you do, objecting to that is not obstruction, in my book, its a vote where everybody has to vote yes for it to pass. Its not a request if the other person cannot say no. But we think about congress in these terms its just completely nonsensical to me. Questions from the audience . Yes. I have two questions. First of all, thank you to the Claremont Institute again. This is usually one of those panels where thats worth it right here coming to the convention. So, thank you, again. Two predictions. I understand what youre saying about the filibuster, but my guess is that if democrats get unified control after 2020, the filibuster is dead and my guess is that even if its republicans, despite what Mitch Mcconnell is saying now, that its dead as well, legislative filibuster, with everything that you said. So im just asking for a prediction on that. The other one is basically on kathryns point. Theres even more polarization even more data to support the polarization you were talking about, such as record numbers of people saying that they would be mad if their son or daughter married one of their kind, politically speaking, but at the same time, were its declining but we still have near record numbers of people registering as independents. Thats starting to come down and i think president ial primary politics will make that further decline go further. Given we are so polarized on so many levels, what will it take for registration Voter Registration figures to really turn around in a massive way and people reregistering with their parties again . Right. Microphone. So, interesting thoughts and questions and i guess the first i will address is the polarization, and Political Science literature really shows, today, in 2019, that the polarization has occurred not only in congress but also at the mass level. I im a scholar of congress, not mass politics. For a while, it was, okay, we know at the elite level american politics is really polarized among partisan lines but if you look at a normal distribution of voters, theres still more people in the middle, but the mass public is polarized as well to a much greater extent than in the past. And so the independent voters, i think, royou know, depends on t state, depends on state law and depends whether or not were talking about surveys. Of course, we know way back from the myth of the independent voter with ray wolfengers work, a lot of people who respond to polls, oh, im an independent, actual polls and dont get that followup question, you know, but if you had to classify yourself, would you be a republican, a democrat or what . If they dont get that followup question that then identifies an independent leaner, its hard to tell. Of course, we know the independent leaners act in just as partisan way as those people who actually do identify as weak partisans. And so its a little bit hard to know what to make out of that, but i think i would sort of think about, you know, john h b hibbings work. A lot of americans are also turned off by politic. They dont like conflict in congress but they also dont like compromise in congress. The transparency of congress is a wonderful thing for congressional scholars but for the mass public it just looks like a mess, and i think in 2019, thats more true than ever. And so while i agree with james that there needs to be more substantive conflict in congress where theyre really grappling with policy issues and sort of the debates of the day or the appropriations cycle and also addressing these issues headon, i dont think we need more messaging votes like the ones that molly brought up with the aca because i think that just, you know, further alienates the public and sort of brings us back to joes earlier statistics about one of the many reasons why people dont like congress. So i think i to pick up on a couple things kathry said on this. Before saying two words about the filibuster you may or may not hold me to in two years. On this question of why do we see fewer people registering with the parties but also see very high levels of partisan voting and polarization of the mass public, i think that illustrates a really important conceptual difference between parties as institutions and how people feel about the parties as institutions and partisanship and how that as an attitude manifests itself in peoples behavior. Like kathryn, im not a scholar of Public Opinion or voting behavior, but i do think about w when we think about how people what leads people to register, for example, as a member of a party or not, theres a question about how they feel about what a party is and what they see parties doing that is different from sort of how they might organize, how they think about Politics Around a partisan identity or somethin thats the same as a partisan identity. On the question of the filibuster, ill be honest and say i am somewhat more skeptical than you are that the filibuster the legislative filibusters demise is coming. For me, the question that you have to ask yourself about the legislative filibuster is what is the piece of legislation that either party could come to an agreement on that they would be willing to eliminate the legislative filibuster to get . And here i really think that the experience of the republicans in 2017 with the failed attempt to repeal the aca is illustrative. The republicans in 2017 pursued a legislative strategy that meant that they only needed 51 votes to get that through the senate. And what ultimately killed it was the fact that there was not a piece of legislation that they agreed on that they would move through that process and so you i think that for me, what would that be for either democrats or republicans . Im not quite sure at this point, and until someone presents me with a piece of legislation that i think either party would be willing to make that change to get, im going to remain somewhat skeptical. I share mollys skepticism. I think its interesting, juxtaposing that to the notion of polarization or partisan competition, if we cant identify a piece of legislation that the party can unite on to act on Something Like this, but we all agree if they could, they would, i think that really speaks to the fact that the parties are not in agreement to the extent we think they are or that they are capable of competitive action in concert with one another to the extent we think they are. I think the filibuster right now is much more valuable to the leaders as a way to keep everything under wraps, so i think if schumer and mcconnell have their pay, they dont want to get rid of it because once you get rid of the filibuster, theres really no way to keep individual senators in line because right now when a senator says, im going to offer an amendment even though the amendment trees already full and i can do it under the rules even though the precedents say i cant, the leaders come to them and say, if you do that, then the filibusters going to be next to go. And so they lose that. And the leaders have no real capability to control the senate because unlike the house, the Vice President presides. So theres no you cant exert the same level of control over the senate that you can in the house even if you have a majority and even if you agree. The senate only gave the Vice President substantial authority once. That was john c. Calhoun. They let him pick committees and he started putting people he liked on committees and they took it back really quick. I think also the filibuster as we once knew it i think is long gone because were talking about it as a means to an end. Right . When you think about rules as means and ends, youre back in this production world and youre no longer thinking about them as leverage to help you achieve your goals and act. If you think about them in that way, i think this is why i write about in my book on parliamentary war, the minority is not powerless. The minority has lots of stuff that can be traced back to the Vice President that they can employ as leverage to raise the cost on members of the majority to dissuade them from Going Nuclear which is what youve seen time and time again. In fact, james allen in the 70s did this, just one senator and ended up forcing the senate to reverse itself after it nuked the filibuster in some sense, right, then they compromise, thats whey we have ty we have threefifths rule today. Parties make people vote. Thats what we know. Voting is high when parties are very mass parties highly organized, parties in the electorate, party organizations, the van buren model. Progressive reforms really undermine a lot of that. Parties can certainly come back in and do that but, again, parties are ultimately whats going to help deliver arive up r participation. As far as messaging goes, this idea of substantive conflict or whatever, somebody may say thats substantive, somebody else may say its not, somebody may say its a waste of time. I think the important thing is that its action. When i think of the legislative process, i dont think of it as static. I think of it as something that just extends forever as long as the republics here pitwhich me messaging and legislating are the same thing and if you are if youre aoc or jesse helms or, you know, jim demint and youre con fro confronting a chamber that doesnt want to do what you want to do, use the outside game as leverage to force them to. Maybe you win in that congress, maybe you win in 20 years. It requires messaging votes. It requires going out and ta talking to the people and using them as pressure to force your thats how the Civil Rights Act pof 1964 passed, ultimately, and ultimately pushed the balance over. I dont think that that thats the activity we need. It can be used for things that may be unproductive that we dont like. That activity has to happen. Until it does, congress is going to remain how it is and not going to be doing anything. I hope i want to say briefly about this question about polarization and partisanship because i think on the one hand, i agree with it. On the other hand, that might e be, i kind of favor polarization and partisanship. Both Political Parties seem to me right now to be riven, so to speak, between one group that wants to kind of maintain the status quo, the Democratic Party largely wants to kind of play the old ombudsman role theyve played for some time and got an ideological element that want to fight National Politics all the time. That existed under ryan, to the republicans to some extent as well. Is that a cause to the problem or something that has come up because the legislative process no longer capable of reflecting majority opinion through an active legislative process . I think part of my point is trying to want to raise the sides a bit, i think theres a larger political debate going on in the rest of the country and donald trump comes along and ripped the bandaid off to and he kind of pulled the curtain back to show that, that theres a growing ideological divi divide, especially among elites, which means especially among those who are political leaders. And i think its something thats not going to go away in a civil way through reform. Its going to have to be fought out politically, hopefully within the confines of the institutions and through electoral process, but right now, i think one of the problems that congress is not set up in a way that the opinions of the American People, divided as they are, is actively being reflected through the legislative process in a way that actually affects policy and instead, theyre increasingly, both parties, especially the conservatives, see a country thats increasingly making policies over which they have very little to say and thats increasingly frustrating. Thats part of, i think, what is playing out, or not playing out, in how congress is currently operating. Years ago, politicians wearing robes, dont have to run for reelection, just make the tough decisions, soon bring force a class, a political class, who have the reflexes of civil servants. They simply want to do errands for constituents and have life tender. The power of the judges, the president has been turned into the chief elector. Hes important because he will choose the people who truly will elect us. We saw that it worked in that last election. I want to offer just a couple comments and see what our friends make of it. We have had discharge positions that the republicans in the house have been pushing to bring to the floor the protection act where we had two runs, virtually every democrat in the house voting against the attempt to protect to punish the man who would kill a child born a liliv during an abortion. The democrats are not apologetic about this. Theyre willing to vote down the line on this issue. So the republicans in the house are trying to bring this forth as a discharge position. This looks like a disposition to act. And im just thinking back to the days of george w. Bush when the courts started injecting themselves into decisions made on the battlefield and we saw the Republican Congress responding quickly to change the jurisdiction of military tribunals and they were responding to the crisis at hand and not diddly. What do you make of this record . Does it run counter of the claim of congress what do you make of this digs positisposition of republicans in the house to force action on this question . Do you think its serious or just a bit of a play . I think those are excellent observations. One, from what i can tell, you know, these things are always kind of this is always happening around us, politics and how it changes. I think this norm of inaction, i saw it happening around me. I couldnt put my finger on it, c i couldnt articulate it. This is a relatively new thing. The last bill placed on the floor of the senate where you didnt know how it was going to end was the Affordable Care act. The last one. If you waited until you knew you could pass it, the 1964 Civil Rights Act never would have passed. Sometimes you have to kind of get going and then you see how it goes, but that doesnt happen anymore. As far as so i think it is a new thing. Its happened very recently. As to the willingness to hold the court accountable, larry cramer has a fabulous book called the people themselves. It came out in 2004. Hes picking up on this in that book, thats 15 years ago, where all of a sudden you see this hesitan hesitance. Right now, you cant see in either party we should impeach a judge that you say made an unconstitutional decision. You cant do it. Thats not a good idea. Jurisdiction stripping is i guess the negative term. You could exercise your power. Thats no longer they dont do that anymore. You cant control you cant structure the way courts are structured. The congress has removed all of its power in the way both parties now talk about the confirmation process is that its apolitical when in reality the whole point was to be political. And the idea is, but then they engage in Political Action on the outside and run multimillion dollar ad campaigns to pressure people to vote for their judge who they then make arguments that they say are apolitical. Right . So the whole its a technique in how we combat our opponents in politics now. We try to exclude them from that. As far as the discharge petitions, i take your point and i think both kathryn and molly have mentioned this, the dynamics theyre talking about, i think this is where theyre manifested. Parties will act when they feel like its safe to act. I dont believe that all democrats are against this bill. I dont believe that all republicans are for it. Democrats voted and that may be, but they act when its safe to act. Right now, take daca, for instance. So far as i can tell, some members of Congress Want to codify it. Theyre frozen. Why . They have no idea what theyd have to vote on as a process to codify it. Theyre hoping somebody will act. The president is hoping the courts will act. He could ignore a district judge, in here netheory, but he. Parties do act when they feel its safe and theres an explanation for why theyre acting that way. My guess is the democrats who oppose this bill will not talk about the substance of the bill but talk about the importance of procedural control and all this other stuff. When action actually reveals information about where they stand and theyre divided, they run away. And just to follow up on that, i mean, discharge petitions, the signatures on discharge petitions have been public since 1993 and so we have some sense of the patterns of members of congress in the current era and theyre very much, you know, viewed as something thats an anaf ma to the Majority Party because it essentially takes away the Majority Partys agendasetting power. Not substantive. Not substantive. Shaysmean was a successful example of a discharge position and a couple others where signatures were getting close so the leadership brought up people who had either signed or about to sign so they could work out a compromise and still have control. One of the things thats interesting about todays discharge patterns where minority members sign them, majority Party Leaders dont because majority Party Leaders get really mad when they do is how Different Things were from the late 1930s through the 1960s. So the National Archives after 30 years makes this public, so with eric shikler, i worked on this project for a long time and discharge positions used to be signed primarily by liberal democrats because southern democrats in concert with republicans really had a lot of agenda control. And that is just one illustration of how much congress has changed whereby, you know, the conservative coalition, they werent just a voting bloc. They also had jaeagenda setting power which is sort of manifest in the sense that it was northern liberal democrats who felt the need to use these discharge positions. Yes . So about 30 years ago, a book on congress was published, calling it the keystone of the washington establishment. From what i hear, what you all have presented, many of the motivations he points out are still very much in place. I mean, theres very little motivation to act in favor of some sort of legislation. Theres much more motivation to do what, you know, constituent services, pork barreling, which gets you reelected, and yet, matt spalding, you say that congress is no longer or not as much the keystone of the washington establishment, the force is more in the hands of the executive now. Is does his analysis still hold true . I mean, what do we all think . I mean, has there been has polarization changed the dynamics that he points out, the motivations for acting, in any way . Thanks. Ill start there. Its not that i think that hes been proven false. I think that its been taken to weve now entered a new phase, and i think the point of gravity has shifted. The center of action has shifted. I mean, my point i was going to make to the last question was, yeah, wheres the real debate over these things . Its in hhs. Right . I mean, so the congress is not the keystone anymore in the sense that its not the center of that iron triangle. Right . I mean, so often, congress, itself, is a lobbyist and theyre lobbying the administration for thats where legislation is written, thats where deals are made, thats where afterwards, you negotiate how its being enforced. Right . Which means its gotten that much worse. I mean, it used to be that i remember hearing stories about when john dingell would send what he called a dingellgram over to someone in the administration and they would quake, right . Because they were willing to use all the powers of congress to get done what they wanted to get done. That doesnt happen anymore. They can just ignore them. And i think thats more than just a subtle change. I think by shifting it out there was already a problem, but by shifting it so much out of the legislature and the legislative branch where you dont have the normal processes of consent and election, and congress is now trying to keep up with that, and its under the executive but the executives have complete control over it, either. I just think we need to recognize that something fundamental has shifted and as a practical matter, the vast majority of things that we, being commonsensical people, would consider to be laws, are actually passed by people that are not immediately subject to the back and forth of open legislative debate and election and actually not subject to the normal judicial process even. That is a fundmental shift when we back up and see where this has started and gone to, were making the forest for the trees if we dont see that as a crucial shift, and the loss of that, i think, really is not quite a deathnell but close to being a deathknell to legislation which is supposed to be the most important of the three branches. The first of three. So its less that he was wrong. Its more that i think weve now entered a new era, a new time in which what he was already perceiving has itself become a form of rule. I want to make one point that has not been made that is sort of related, is that the fact that congress isnt doing much legislating has actually pretty big implications for federalism. So what were seeing is state legislatures, the majority of which are now under sort of unified Party Control of all three branches, state legislatures are making a lot more policy in the absence of congressional policymaking. Shoot mean so that means that blue states are producing liberal bills. Red states are producing conservative bills. So Congress Lack of action, i mean, theres sort of results and implications for not just separation of powers but also for federalism and more active state policymaking. Yeah, i think just real quick on both those points, theyre both excellent both excellent points, this is bigger than just kind of left or right. We have to think about what legislatures do, and the administration in theory at least resolves problems with the application of expertise, so if youre wrong, youre just kind of dumb or youre wrong, but a legislature, you adjudicate disputes and concerns of equals, of citizens, and so its about persuasion and bargaining and compromise, and if you lose, then you can come back the next day. In reality when you lose overwhelmingly and you had your shot, you say okay, right, and it reconciles you to the outcome but when the most controversial decisions are being made then in virnmentes that dont do persuasion barring nipping and negotiation for very good reason, right, you want the administration to apply expertise in a lot of things, but it doesnt legitimize and reconcile losers in a debate to the outcome, so it has this, its very difficult to make policy in that kind of environment, and thats a a bad thing. It doesnt matter if youre a democrat or republican, liberal, conservative. The whole ability of the federal government to separate i think does, is weakened considerably, and i think it does shift things back to the states because at the end of the day, politics wins out and if you have a state legislature thats making decisions that are seen as legitimate by its people, its going to triumph over some far distant shadowy thing where people dont know and dont believe its legitimate. Thats an excellent point. One thing i would add is, for the same reason we object to be ruling by judges, not because not only because theyre unelected but because they tend to make binary decisions, theres not a dlab rayive process you can have compromise in the kind of deliberation that you have in law, in legislation for the same reason we object to that we should object and congress should be objecting to the fact that, of how regulations are doing more of the lawmaking, not because its bina binary, because its increasingly arbitrary. Its unpredictable. Its hard to see how the process works. You know, congress itself has to lobby them to figure out how its going to be enforced. They have their own courts of adjudication. I mean, thats not a constitutional process. Thats not the rule of law, and that is at the heart, kind of the heart of the problem. I think we have time for one more question. I have about 100, but if anybody else wants to pose it, otherwise i think ill maybe ask everyone on the panel a broad question, so you can speculate a little. What does the future hold for congress . Is Congress Going to come back to i abetter place in the american, in the view of americans, or do you think that this trend towards sort of irrelevance is going to continue . What do you see in the future for congress . Anybody want to predict or speculate . Ill start very quickly. I try not to think in terms of trends because that brings us back its very hard to decide if you have progress and going to this direction. In reality, its what are the men and women in congress in the future, how are they going to act, and if in the past its been bad, things have been, people have been unhappy but you have new members come in, 1958 in the senate, barbara sin santa clara writes about this in the transformation of the United States senate fabulous book. Im not seeing the new members. You have aocs, ted cruzes come in and get into the environment if we act, the best way to win is not act, which is nonsensical. As long as the people that are coming in to congress think like that, theyre going to continue to not act and were going to continue to see this kind of dysfunction that we have. But ultimately, in our, this great nation, this fabulous nation that we have, at the end of the day it comes down to the citizens and if they think about politics differently and they want their members to act, then theyre going to act. I dont know how, but theyre going to act and then it will change. Its a hard question, because its hard to imagine the incentives of members of congress changing all that much, at least in the short term, the incentive tops sort of vote with their Party Leaders, to have all these messaging votes, to sort of appeal to their constituents via tweets as opposed to the hard institutional work that it takes to do good legislating. However, there are signs of hope. One sign is the bipartisan problem solvers caucus. Another sign is the task force on congressional reform. So it does seem that there are a growing number of members of congress within the institution that recognize that theres a problem. Not a majority, who are willing to act on it, but as some of these leaders who have been more recently elected get reelected and maybe feel a little safer, its possible, and i think it might also take a leadership change in both parties. Im with what james said, its always hard to predict these things. Ill just make two observations. Im always optimistic will congress reforming it self and learning and realizing that its actually given away so much of its own authority, it ought to draw it back for its own selfish reasons, but it doesnt seem to happen. When the current president was elected, i actually had high hopes precisely because there were republicans, in his own party, who had real serious differences with him and paul ryan was serious about things like the budget and trying to restore powers properly, but it didnt happen. So im less optimistic about that. I dont think change will come from congress. Indeed, i think this trend actually drives everything increasingly towards a National Debate in a very president ial centric system that will be increasingly so, and will probably be focused on National Elections that will in turn then have implications for congress, but i dont see how congress in and of itself based on democrats, republicans, in any combination thereof, shows signs that theres life there. Their best bet is they might be saved by an executive who realizes for the sake of constitutionalist government that we need a legislative branch. I will also say that i dont particularly like to predict things, and that if i was better at it, i would be in a different line of work, but i will say first of all that i agree with catherines point about how its difficult to see the incentives to which members of congress are responding, changing in the short term. I do think, however, its important to remember that somewhat inevitably though not entirely, we will see demographic change coming in congress. Weve started to see this already. Just by virtue of generational differences in the demographics of the country, particularly on the democratic side of the aisle, the caucuses becoming more diverse along both race and gender lines, and at the end of the day, the folks who are in congress, whether theyre acting or not or individuals who bring a certain set of perspectives to washington, so who knows what that will mean in 15 or 20 years, but the set of people who will be in the institution and we should be rightly concerned about whether they will have sort of Institutional Knowledge and memory, but they will look different and they will have different ideas and approach politics i think differently than some of the folks who are in the chamber now, and its hard to say what that will mean but when i think about what will bring change to congress, i think a lot about that. Thank you all for coming, and please, join me in thanking our panelists. [ applause ] later today President Trump holds a Campaign Rally with voters and supporters in fayetteville, north carolina. The president is visiting the tar heel state on the eve of a special election for the ninth congressional district, and will campaign for republican candidate dan bishop. That district has yet to be decided from the 2018 midterm elections. You can see President Trumps comments live today at 7 00 p. M. Eastern on cspan2, and if the senate is still in session, well bring you live coverage on cspan3. Tomorrow testimony from housing and urban Development Secretary ben carson and treasury secretary Steve Mnuchin on Housing Finance reform. Theyll be speaking before the Senate Banking committee that gets under way tuesday live at 10 00 a. M. Eastern on cspan3. Following that the House Judiciary Committee meets to consider several gun prevention bills including measures that aim to ban highcapacity maing scenes while urging states to create a process that stops highrisk individuals from buying firearms, it starts live tups at 2 00 p. M. Eastern, also an cspan3. Wednesday is the 18th anniversary of the 9 11 terrorist attacks. Watch our live coverage at 8 30 eastern on cspan3 from the 9 11 Memorial Plaza in new york city, the moment of silence, the reading of the names, and the ringing of the bell. At 9 00 a. M. Eastern on cspan, from the pentagon, a wreath laying ceremony at the 9 11 memorial. Live coverage of the 18th anniversary of the 9 11 terrorist attacks, on cspan, cspan3, and online at cspan. Org, or listen live on the free cspan radio app. With the Supreme Courts next term scheduled to begin on october 7th, a panel of legal experts review the courts most recent term and preview the next term. Speakers analyze the courts rulings on gerrymandering, the 2020 census citizenship question, and other major cases involving free speech and prison sentencing. The american Political Science association hosts this 90minute event