Ok, here we go, you hear me . The chair is authorized to declare a recess at any time. I now recognize myself for an opening statement. The view from the Chair Seat looks a little different, and that is by design. Hearings should elicit thoughtful discussion and yet most hearings are structured to do just the opposite. Members sit in rows divided by party with senior members sitting above their juniorcollege. We look at each other in profile or even worse, staring out the back of each others heads, which i have two concerns about. One, its not the best way to have dialogue, and two, i am thinning in the back. I know you smell what im cooking. Witnesses who are there to share their expertise are often seated below us, even though they know more than we do on these issues, and a lot of interesting exchanges get cut short because of the five minute rule. There is no flow to the discussion because members are running back and forth between multiple hearings and jump between one topic and another and back again. Instead of generating debate in and good ideas, hearings too often promote political Posturing And Sound bites for social media. It is definitely not what the framers intended. Woodrow wilson once noted that congress in session is congress on public exhibition. Unfortunately, this has not been the case for quite some time. So, the select committee is trying something different today. Earlier this year, we adopted rules that give us this flexibility to experiment with how we structure our hearings, and our goal is to encourage thoughtful discussion and civil Support Exchange of ideas and opinions. Members agree that the ability to look right at each other matters. So does the ability to extend a meaningful exchange with a witness or colleague. These two simple guideposts provided the framework for our hearing today, and given the topic, this approach makes good sense. So, in according with House Rule 11, we will allow one hour for extended questioning for witnesses, and without objection these will not be segregated between witnesses which will allow up to two hours of backandforth exchanges between members and witnesses. Vice chair timmons i will manage the time to make sure every member has equal opportunity to participate. Anybody who wishes to speak should signal, you can just wave or gesture. Gesture. Bird noise. Additionally, members who wish to claim their individual five minutes to question each witness pursuant to rule 11 will be permitted to do so following the two hours of extended questioning. Ok. That is the formal stuff. This Committees Mission is to make Congress Work better. And one way we do that is to practice what we preach. Its one thing to call for a more civil and collaborative process, it is another to actually do it. In trying out new approaches, this committee is modeling what is possible. We understand that what we are doing may be difficult to pull off, but subcommittees can provide a good venue. A simple agreement can open the door to new approaches that inspire genuine participation. Modernization does not happen without experimentation. The institutions evolve through a process of trial and error. We owe the american people a strong legislative branch that is capable of holding up its responsibilities. We also owe the american people a congress capable engaging in constructive conflict. The goal should not simply to be highlighting differences, but to establish clear positions, have meaningful discussions, and ultimately find a way forward. I am consistently struck that congress as an institution has some unique cultural challenges. The first organization in which i worked where there is not a widely embraced Mission Or Set of goals. Congress feels like everyone affiliated with contractors appear to be in a Highstakes Competition for market share. The incentive as one of our witnesses points out in his book, which i read on my airplane flight, is it is often not to build or fix institutions or rather to fashion much of what vexes the institution are not rules, but the breakdown of norms, or for lack of a better phrase, corporate culture. Finally, there is a recognition that polarization in congress is often reflective of disagreement we see in american society. Today we are joined by experts who will help us understand factors and trends that have contributed to the high level of polarization we see in both Society And Congress today. Theyve also get us thinking about how members see their roles, strategies we might consider for normalizing civil and collaborative behavior. I am looking forward to their testimony and conversation. I would like to invite Vice Chair timmons to share some opening remarks as well. Vice chair timmons thank you. We appreciate it and look forward to this conversation. I think this is the most important work this committee will do. We are doing a lot of important work, but making congress more civil, more collaborative is probably the most important thing we can do, because there is no collaboration, there is no civility. Its remarkable this is where we are. But its a symptom of where we are as a country. And we have to work on the country, but we have to lead in congress. So, i spent a lot of time in the 116th congress on the schedule, because i think spending more time together, i call it pinball ing all over the capital complex, and building relationships is the beginning of the conversation, because we are not having policybased discussion. We are using talking points, you never have to defend your ideas in front of your colleagues, and youre on twitter, that gets clicks and then you go on television and say meaner things. Guess what . We are not going to fix immigration that way. We are not going to fix Health Care. We have to have policybased conversations from a position of mutual respect and hear peoples ideas and find common ground to move forward, and that is what we need, that is what the american people deserve. So, i think without fixing the process, giving people the opportunities to get to know one another and spend time together, we will never be able to have these conversations. And so, i just really appreciate you taking the time. I am looking forward to it. I do want to point out that this week is possibly the best example of what is wrong with this place. We had votes at 6 30 on monday. We are leaving in two or three hours. We do not do anything on monday or today. Except for this hearing, which is wonderful. We had two days where three members of this committee at serve on four committees, and i dont know their schedule, but i can promise you they were double booked most of the time. We had four votes yesterday, Seven20 Minute seven 20minute votes. It was probably one of the most inefficient experiences i have had here. Finding opportunities to make this place better, 10 minutes at a time. That is how we are going to begin this process of building the relationships to have policybased conversations, so i look forward to this dialogue, and i appreciate the difference in this format, because i think it will facilitate discussion, so thank you. Ideal back. I am going to invite each witness to give testimony, and i will grant witnesses five minutes to respond to or followup on points on each others testimony. Your written statements will be made part of the record. Our first witness is the director of social, cultural, and constitutional studies at the american Enterprise Institute and holds a chair in public policy of the founding and current editor of national affairs, and senior editor of the new atlantis. He served as a member of the white house domestic Policy Staff under president george w. Bush. He was also executive director of the president s council on ethics. He is the author of several books on political theory and public policy, most recently a time to build, Family And Community to congress and the campus, committing to our institutions can revive the american dream. You are now recognized. Thank you very much. Thank you for the opportunity to testify today. It is an honor to be able to contribute something to the enormously important work you are doing and to think about how to improve the culture of the congress. In my written remarks, i offered some reflections on the sources of how what is happening is related to other trends in our society. Im happy to discuss our conversation. In these opening remarks, i thought i would draw on one part of the testimony which focuses on a few key principles for reform, some crucial points to remember, pitfalls to avoid as you consider ways of improving the culture of the institution. I would start by saying it is important to remember that prescription is not diagnosis in reverse. When we think about how to fix institutions. There are reasons why congress is the way it is, good and bad. Those reasons dont offer us a map for improving things. You cant go backwards and try to play the movie in reverse. Understanding how we got here can help us understand some of the constraints that reformers face in trying to fix things, but it does not offer us a map of where to go next. Secondly, i would urge you to avoid the lure of selective nostalgia when thinking about congress. The problems with contemporary congress is not like it used to be, it is that in some ways it is not what it needs to be today. It is important to think about the difference. It is easy to approach the kind of work you are doing by try to think back to a golden age when congress supposedly worked and everybody supposedly got along. I would say it is very unlikely that whatever golden age you have in mind was actually as golden as you might remember or as people might say. And its important to see that change has to happen going forward and not going backward. Your committee very wisely describes itself as devoted to modernization of congress. Modernization involves adapting to changing circumstances, and that is the right attitude to maintain, even if there are lessons we can learn from the past. Third, i would urge you to focus on incentives when thinking about culture. Members of this institution behave the way you do for reasons, for series reasons. You are all intelligent men and women, ambitious men and women, and you are trying to succeed and achieve something for your constituents and country. So when culture breaks down, there are reasons that have to do with incentives, with the kinds of pressures you face, and if we want to think about how to change the culture, it is important to think about how to change incentives. Some of the strongest change of incentives are electoral incentives which are not so easy for congress to change. But there are also incentives created by the nature of legislative work itself, the nature of the schedule, nature of the structure of the institution, which can be very powerful, which shapes behavior as much as they shape work. And it is important to think about change in terms of altering incentives. Fourth, and related to that, i would say that reforming the culture of congress requires reforming the work of congress. It is worth thinking about things like how to encourage members to spend more time together, how to encourage members to take retreats together or have dinner together. That matters, but i would say ultimately ultimately what matters more is the work of the institution. The cultural change of the work encourages a different kind of culture. And just spending time together is not really a way to get at the core of the culture of the institution. You have to think about how Congress Works, therefore how its members work. And fifth and finally, i would urge you to think explicitly the how you understand the purpose of the congress. Reforms of the institution, including improving culture have to take for granted some idea of the purpose of congress is work, but there is a rather deep disagreement about that purpose which i think is implicit in a lot of the thinking that surrounds congressional form, and that sometimes leave some of that working coherent. Simply put, i would say reformers have to ask yourselves whether the purpose of the congress is like the purpose of a european parliament, to enable the Majority Party to achieve its objectives while its in office until the public throws it out, or whether the purpose of the congress is to enable or even compel accommodation across lines of difference in american society, to bring people together across difference. Those goals are not mutually exclusive, but particularly in an era of closely divided parties, they can point in different directions. That latter purpose, enabling accommodation, bargaining, compromise, Deal Making is implicit in the constitutional design of the legislative branch. The u. S. Congress really isnt like a european parliament. It is intended to work across lines of difference. I think the distinction is especially important when thinking about the culture of the institution. A culture of implacable partisan polarization is not necessarily an obstacle to the functioning of a purely majoritarian legislature like a european parliament, but it is absolutely an obstacle to the cause of the more accommodationist compromisedriven model. In essence, i think reformers need to decide if the goal of reform is to make cross partisan engagement less necessary or more likely. That you are concerned about that kind of question and you are concerned about the culture of the institution suggest to me that you take that kind of cross partisan engagement to be an essential goal of congressional reform, and that is certainly my own view too. I think we have to wrestle with that question of what ultimately is the purpose of the institution . How do we expect it to solve problems . My written testimony suggests a few categories of reforms that can be useful in moving the culture of congress in a particular direction, and im happy to get into those. But i thought that starting with general principles might be a way a broader conversation. In any case, i now stand in your way of hearing from one of the great congress experts, knowledgeable in no way i could not hope to be. I will get out of her way and let her inform you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Our second witness is molly reynolds, a senior fellow at the brookings institution, Studies Congress with an emphasis on how congressional rules and procedures affect policy outcomes, and is the author of a book which explores the Creation And Use of consequences of the Budget Reconciliation Process and other procedures in the u. S. Senate. The current research projects include work on oversight in the house of representatives, congressional reform, and the congressional Budget Process, and supervises the maintenance of vital statistics on congress. Brookings longrunning resource on the first branch of government. Vectra committee. We were now recognized. Molly thank you. My name is molly reynolds. I am a senior fellow at the program at the brookings institution. I am so appreciative of the opportunity to be back today to testify on how congress might improve its culture. With my time this morning, i want to is that better . Ok. With my time this morning, i want to build on two of the principles that have been laid out in testimony. It is not a prescription that is not a diagnosis in reverse, and the necessity of avoiding the lower of selective nostalgia. I will draw on my own research and that of other political scientists, i want to offer observations on why these principles are so important. To begin a review of familiar but useful trends in american politics may be helpful. Voters today are better sorted into the two parties, alongside ideological lines and social identities. Research also suggests this has led voters to see partisanship as a stronger component of their social identity, which in turn leads him to see themselves as different from and to dislike members of the other party. Second, on the issue of polarization in congress, while any approach will have drawbacks, the measure most often used by political scientists indicates that polarization in congress was relatively low between the 1930s and 1970s but for to group to record levels by the 2000s. It is asymmetric to the extent it has been more essays he did with the movement of republican legislators to the right and democratic members to the left. The extent the democrats have moved in a more mobile direction, being driven by demographic change, additional female representatives and representatives of color have been elected as democrats. Indeed, the house is nine times as many women, 4. 5 times as many africanamericans, nine times as many as latinos and 7. 5 times as many asian americans today as it did in 1971. To be clear, a more diverse house of representatives which better reflects diversity is a good thing for our democracy, but a more diverse chamber cannot and should not operate under the same institutional culture that its predecessors did. The changing demographics are not the only reason why we cannot divorce the conversation from one from racial politics. We must also consider the consequences of the realignment of southern white voters to the republican party. As political scientists have argued consequence of the long , one postwar dominance of the democratic party in congress is that it shaped members expectations about the outcome of the next election. Members of both parties believe democrats would hold the majority during this period. Beginning in 1980, both parties begin to see the majority is winnable. When Party Control seems to hang in the balance, members see more value in a style of partisanship that disincentivizes cooperation. Charting a course for change requires being honest about elements of previous congresses that may have encouraged collaborative culture to which we cannot return for other good reasons. Here i would point to the example of calls for members to move their families to washington. The notion that the culture of washington has changed for the worse because members and families do not socialize with each other is widely held. The shift away from relocating one family is often attributed to changing expectations whereby members should avoid sitting in being seen to have gone washington. Time spent in washington as if something that is seen as detrimental to the health of the institution and we should bar to change the understanding of it. Even if this framing is harmful, but does not mean the push to rollback consequences and calling from our members to relocate to washington is automatically the right thing to do. We lacked comprehensive data on occupations of congressional spouses, either historically or today, but many more Members Today come from dualcareer families. We do not want to create systematic barriers to individuals with caregiving responsibilities from serving in congress. Finally, i will urge you as you think about improving the norms of interpersonal behavior that are distinct from legislative behavior, consider what a culture of civility is in service of. Civility and good behavior more generally can encourage collaboration in other productive methods. Calls for civility also have a long history of serving at the means of attempting to suppress marginalized groups. The norms that persist are the ones that members believe will serve them well. That could also mean they preserve the existing norm. Building new norms will help accomplish their goals. With that, i yield back. I would like to ask both witnesses if they have any additional comments they want to make. Thank you. I appreciate that and i appreciate the opportunity to respond to those thoughtful remarks. I think as suggested at the end, it might be worth spending this brief period thinking about specific ideas for change that might build out from some of the points we have made in our testimony. And i would do that by stressing the point i suggested, which is that changing culture means changing work. And it is important to think not only in terms of how we can get members to cooperate more, to get to know each other more, all of which matters, it is important we think in terms of categories like Budget Reforms. The budget has always been a core at the culture of this institution. It is the essence of what congress does and power of the purse shapes the ambition that members come here with and the nature of the work they do. And congress has moved to change the nature of the Budget Process , very often in response to what are in effect challenges to its Culture Or Ability to work effectively. The Budget Process that you work with today which comes from the middle of the 1970s is not wellsuited to the needs that congress has now. I think that is true in terms of needs that involve spending federal money, but as well as the need to work together across party lines. It is an institution that is divided, and has been closely divided for a generation. This Budget Process comes at a time where one party has held control for 20 years and expected to hold control forever, and did for another 20 years after that, but that has not been the case for quite a while. And a Budget Process suited to a congress where each party thinks it might gain control of the time might look different. If you about it, it assumes an enormous amount of coordination capacity, which is difficult and congress. I think its very important to think about in terms of Budget Reform if you want to change the culture and the nature of the institution. Secondly, i would urge you to think as this committee has in constructive ways about ways of reempowering the committees of the house, the congress. That is important both for advancing the work of the institution, but allowing members to see how they can matter, even if they dont happen to be the speaker or the Majority Leader or even the a committee chair. And allowing members to see how their time is spent in ways that translate into meaningful work they can show their constituents and point to, explaining how they are improving the country. Committees are enormously important, and i would distinguish strengthening the committees from individual members. Its not just about decentralization, it is about that middle level where members work together and engage with each other over concrete, substantive policy issues. I think that is enormously important if we want to think about changing the culture. And finally, i would just point to one idea that is my testimony which i think can be a sensitive issue in congress, but has to do with the question of transparency. There are a lot of ways in which the increased transparency of this institution has done and enormous amount of good. A public institution needs to be transparent. A lot of work is bargaining and negotiation. Bargaining and negotiation are not well served by absolute transparency, so that while it is important that Members Answer for their votes, proposals, and ideas, there has to be some room for negotiation. That fact is now dealt with members working with each other outside the structure of the congress, creating little groups where they meet and talk about what a bill could include. That is what a committee is supposed to be. And the reason that does not happen in the committee is frankly, that it is hard to do that on television or live streamed to your most engaged constituents. There has to be room for some engagement with one another before members step out in front of cameras and do the part of their work that is ultimately public. I know that is easier for me to say than for you to say, but i think it is very important to think about as you ask yourselves how to improve the culture of institution. Thank you. To start, i will endorse many of the ideas you have offered in your remarks. I would say generally what i think is important to improve legislative behavior is creating opportunities for members to have efficacy in the legislative process. I would encourage you to think about more ways to provide opportunities to claim credit for legislative wins, even when they do not involve the passage of a bill in which you were the lead sponsor. This would include things like formatting committee reports and such a way that make clear which provisions were added since the result of member requests in the Drafting Stage or the results of specific amendments. Providing a clear accounting of which standalone bills are incorporated into omnibus packages, that would help acknowledge the hard work of members and committees that went into those individual components. Another approach would the elite big coauthor, an additional category between the formal sponsor of a bill and the cosponsors to signal something in some formal way that someone else had made major contributions to the origins of a bill. The last thing i will say is that while i think these reforms in the kinds you have all mentioned our important, there are limits to what you can change without changing the rules and procedures of the institution. I say that to not discourage you from this hard work, it is incredibly important, but to acknowledge, if anything, to make it more important that you do the best work you can come to acknowledge there are lots of things outside of these four walls that shape your culture as well. Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate your testimony. Until the end of the hearing, this will be the last formal thing i say. I now recognize myself in the Vice Chair to begin extended questioning. Anyone who wishes to speak should signal the request to meet or the Vice Chair. We had a little bit of the discussion around some of the things that were in the testimony. Both in your written testimony, you mentioned Committee Empowerment, Member Empowerment. There were discussions of budget appropriations reform. I know Vice Chair timmons wants to hit on the issue of time and how that impacts things. As we mentioned at the start of this hearing, and intent is to have this more freeflowing so that rather than being a regimented five minutes per person, that if we are hitting on a topic you want to ask a question about, let us know and you can ask the question. That is part of the idea. So maybe just to kick us off, i want to get a better sense from you of what Committee Empowerment looks like. If i airdropped you onto this committee, other than running screaming for the door, what would you recommend to better empower committees . I know that you actually reference the fact in your book that some of what we see now in terms of centralization of power was due to reforms in prior generations. So what do we unwind, what do we change, what does Committee Empowerment look like . Thank you very much for the question. I would start by stressing that point, which is that a lot of the problems we face now were solutions to problems that members faced in a prior generation. That is natural and how institutions evolve. It does not mean they were wrong. A lot of the transitions of power in congress began in the 1970s in response to excessively powerful committee chairs and a sense among younger members that some committee chairs, especially southern democrats, were standing in the way of important reforms a lot of members felt they had been elected to advance. They worked to take away some of the power of those committee chairs, and the way they could do that as young members was to move that power to leadership and to empower their party leaders to take away some of the authority that committee chairs had. And that began a process of centralization. I think there was another waiver of that in the 1990s when republicans took control of congress for the first time in decades, and frankly they did not have much experience of running the institution through the Committee System. They had been elected thanks to a speaker or Majority Leader and they gave that speaker or Majority Leader a lot of power , which ended up centralizing power away from the committee in ways that did advance some important agenda items but have left us in a situation now where a lot of members feel like their time on a normal week in congress is not devoted to enough work that is going to ultimately matter and result in legislation, result in something they can show their constituents. I come to me, it is very important to think about the answer to that in terms of Committee Empowerment, more than individual empowerment. Congress is plural. It is not an institution where a single member can really drive the agenda. And empowering individual members i think often results in grandstanding. Because that is what members can do. They can find a camera and make their name that way. The committees have a very distinct and unusual role in the institution because they allow power to flow in ways that enable groups of members to work together and represent some of the diversity of the larger institution. It can then result in legislation that might have a chance of moving. So to me, empowering committees really means allowing the everyday work members do in committee to result in legislation. And it is not nearly enough the case now that that work has any chance of really resulting in legislation. One practical idea i point to is something a lot of State Legislatures do now, more than 20 State Legislatures allow committees to control some floor time. So that once a month in most cases, a certain amount of time that belongs to the committee, to the chair and the ranking member, or different legislatures do this differently, where generally speaking what happens is that legislative proposals that have passed the committee, so they have some support the reflect some of the breadth of the largest legislature larger legislature, can move to the floor regardless of whether the party leaders want that or not. That time belongs to the chair or committee. That means the work of the committee, especially when that work is somewhat consensus driven, has the support of a large number and some State Legislatures require there be a super majority on the committee for a bill to meet the requirement of that time, can actually get to the floor. And that means members dont have to think about whether what they are doing will satisfy the party leader. They can see this work can get somewhere. If we can work together and agree, the larger legislature can do that. But the point of that is to enable work that is done in committee to matter. I would describe the problem now as a sense that that work really does not matter enough and what you do in committee can do it committee is better someone in a way that might get you on your favorite Cable News Channel that night rather than thinking about producing legislation that might actually get somewhere. I will start where you ended where which is to say i complete leah agree with this notion that one of the challenges with committees right now is that there is no reason to believe the hard work done in committee will result in legislation that comes to the floor and has a chance of becoming law. You all suggested one way to address that is by giving committees protected floor time, sort of a related proposal would be to guarantee each committee some number of hills that they of bills that they get to bring to the floor each session. I think there are a number of ways you can approach echo fundamentally, i think that is the central challenge here. The other thing i would say, going back to the history where you all started, is that when we talk about empowering committees, we need to be careful to specify what we mean by that. What i think we want is committees where individual members feel like that is the place where they can have a say in the legislative process. And one of the parts of how we ended up where we are today is reforms that disempowered committee chairs, where you wouldve said in the middle of the 20th century that committees were quite powerful, but they were not powerful in a way that meant individual members felt like that was the avenue through which they could have input into the legislative process. As we think about empowering committees, i think we want to be clear that we want them to be places where real legislative work is done by all of the participants, and not just the leaders of each individual committee. I know Vice Chair timmons wants to get in on this. Mr. Phillips as well. Thank you chairman. Im going to step back a little and try to frame this. I am seeing three kind of areas of focus. Time is one. We talked about the calendar. In 2019, we were here for 65 days. That is crazy. We made a recommendation to congress of two weeks on, two weeks off, but it is not just about the time we are here and how we are positioned to not be in multiple places at once with committees and subcommittees, so we are working in that area. Im sure we can talk more about that. So the first is time. The second is relationship to building opportunities. We have talked about a number of different ways that we can do that. And we are going to go deeper in that category. And the third, i definitely agree one of the most important, i refer to it as restructuring incentives. You have got budget before, and that is huge. I mean, that is just crazy. I like the idea of restructuring committees and empowering members. We have been talking about that. And another thing would be expedited hearings. We have that, but it is useless. It is just a messaging device. Maybe creating a lower threshold for a Discharge Petition but making it equal rs and ds, so 80 each, and you get the hearing in the committee and you get 50 or 40 of the committee but it has to be equal , anything we could do to create an incentive for bipartisanship, because i think that is huge. Do you agree those of the three categories we should be focused on, time, relationship opportunities, and restructuring incentives. Is that fair, or is there another area that would be important to add . Well, thank you. I do agree that those are three important categories. I think i would place the third of those first, in that it is particularly important to think about Nature And Work of the institution. I would also say one other thing. The way you put things and the way i would also put things too, which is, it is crazy that we have not passed a budget in 30 years, or really seven since there was an organized Budget Process. Maybe it is not that crazy. Maybe the question is if this is how Congress Works now, which of the rules be to enable that to a way to pass legislation . How can we establish that as a way to lead to legislation, it is worth our while his numbers to think about how are we working. If what it takes to possibility pass a bill on infrastructure is to put aside the Committee System and get members together in a private room to talk right about infrastructure, then maybe that is what the Committee System should be. If we cant seem to get a budget passed in the way that the Budget Process requires but there are other ways we do spending bills, let us think about what the Budget Process would look like if it actually enabled members to do what the evidence suggests they want to do. This is your institution. You can change the rule. The constitution creates very, very broad frameworks for what your work has to involve, unless and lets be you set the rules within that. None of these things are sacred. None of these things have to be this way. If you ask yourself on that flight where you spend most of your time, if you ask yourself why, spending so much my time here, the answer to that could be maybe i should not in their and there are ways to change it. I would think the same way about the Budget Process and the Committee System, you really can change the premise of this committee, it is a premise a lot of members need to internalize and realistically, before attacking congress for failing to do something, think about how to change congress so it could succeed. I know mr. Phillips was to get in on this. Thank you. I want to continue on the theme of incentives, you both refer to it, the incidence here are perverse, i think it is fair to say. I would like to go further upstream. We all know members who come from very safe district not only are not rewarded for working together, they are punished or labeled as traitors. So my question is, are there some changes to our system that might reward people on both sides of the aisle who would come here with de 1000 working together, voting, independent redistricting committees, is any thoughts on how to create a Reward System before people come here to incentivize collaboration . So, reforms to the electoral process are beyond my expertise, but i would say it is important to think about the biggest incentives possible when you are asking yourself why do the incentives you face shape your behavior in the ways that you do. So the question is absolutely the right one. I cant speculate. I dont know if you all would vote on the specific reforms, but it is the right question to ask. I would say i think it is important to experiment with changes on that front because that is the most powerful incentive a lot of members face. I say experiment because it is easy to get things wrong in unexpected ways. I think the incentives the members confront now have to do a lot of time with a set of election reforms that were advanced in the that created the 1970s primary system we know now, that were intended to solve real problems. And that ended up creating, i think, in some ways, bigger problems. That was not the intention of their designers, they were not meant to make our system more partisan, but they absolutely have made our system more partisan. So i do believe that there is great value in experimenting, particularly with ranked Choice Voting with the house. But i think it is important that is experimentation. I think it is valuable because this institution is meant to be representative of our society. That means it has to represent more finely some of the differences that exist. One of the strange things but congress is there are not a lot of interparty factions, polarization on one hand means the parties get more and more different from each other. It also means the parties get more and more similar internally. There are fewer internal differences among democrats and republicans that might allow for some republicans to work with some democrats. The electoral system can help with that. And there is some experimentation, in alaska next year, and its being considered in a variety of places. I think that is very constructive. It is important that when we face an element of our system that we think is failing we ask ourselves how can we change it and we try to do that and see what happens. And so i am encouraged by those experiments, but we should not assume we know how to go, because these things have a way of surprising us. Thank you. I think he wants to get in on this. I want to respond to the dean. I will use colorado as an example. We went to allow all unaffiliated voters to vote in the primary. And they get a democratic ballot, they get a republican ballot, they can choose one and move forward. I was supposed to. I said you had to be a member of the party. You are working hard. We did this two years ago. As an example, a former governor, a moderate Centrist Kind of guy, dealmaker, was running against our speaker, who was the darling of the left. And based on what we saw from sort of party things, andrew was going to clean his clock. He ended up clobbering him because the unaffiliated voters and moderate democrats said, no, this is our guy. So that did moderate the extremes in that instance and i was supposed to going to this. I was wrong. I think weve got a couple of more questions around incentives before we shift gears. I have one on incentives, and i know Vice Chair timmons does as well. So example of where the , one incentives have broken down is on the floor. I came out of a State Legislature where every bill was taken up under an open rule and in eight years in the State Legislature, can count maybe five or six times where people used that to make political hay. But by and large the incentive was, or the norm was, dont be a jerk. In part because you dont know when you are going to be in the minority and you dont want people to be a jerk to you. And yet, we see a lot of the activity in our nations capital, certainly much more focused on making political statements than on trying to make law. So, how would we change the incentives on that . I think this gets into this issue of Member Empowerment. People want to have a sense of efficacy, but it is this tricky dynamic. I think this gets into the issue of Member Empowerment, people want to have a sense of efficacy, but its this trip tricky dynamic i shared with dr. Reynolds. When i was 10 years old my parents gave me the opportunity to have free reign over the pantry and to use the stove. I quickly gained 70 pounds. It was very empowering, but i abused it. And then i lost the keys to the pantry, which is why we have closed rules. We have taken away the keys to the pantry. So what do we do . I will say that i think one of the biggest challenges here is convincing members that any opening up of the Amendment Process would be a durable, persistent change. One of the things we have seen when both parties in both chambers have made steps down the road to a more open Amendment Process. The first time members are confronted with the open pantry you gave us a chance and we all failed us. I think this is a concrete proposal to say that they are getting to a to z on a more open for process would be messy, and there would have to be some willingness to push through that middle period before there was an equilibrium. I would add only that it requires members to have a tolerance for the unpredictable. We complain about centralization of power and members complain. Part of the reason it happens is the party leaders protect members from both stated want to take in from votes they dont want to answer to election time. Open rules can be used by one party to force members of the other party to take exactly those kinds of votes. I think part of what it would take to think in terms of empowering members is building up a greater tolerance for expressing views on questions that are put on the table by the other party, where you may not want to tell your voters were thats your view on the question. But you dont get to just not express an opinion when you run for congress. If you chose this whining, you have to be willing to vote on hard questions. I think its a mistake to think that the rules are closed because the leaders on all the power. Part of the reason is members dont want to be exposed. Anna calling for more open rules, in which i think will be helpful in a lot of ways, there has to be the openness for chaos that results. The openness is the process of Negotiation And Bargaining and sometimes its politics too. I think members have to know what they are in for and what they are asking for. As was said, not be shocked this is the first time this was abused and say, we have to go back to what we are doing before so we dont face this threat. If i can add one thing, the one part of this is that one of the consequences of having more restrictive roles of fewer amendment votes is that there are fewer votes overall. So the ones that you do take cap more attention then they would if you are voting up a of things. So, yes, you are forced to take one vote over here that you did not necessarily want to have to take, go on the record of something, but worlds were its part of a much bigger set of votes, a much bigger voting record. The consequences that even one vote may not be as high as they are in this. Before i get to my question, i am going to start with addressing this issue. I was in the State Senate for two years before i came to congress. Every time we were in session and we sat in a Room And Anybody could stand up and ask anything and propose. We only had two instances in the entire two years where someone abused that process. I think part of it is because when you take the whale and say something ridiculous and propose the ideas, you say something ridiculous because you see the faces of your colleagues. You have intentionally done this to make half of the bad and the other half of your party is looking at you like, you are really doing this . This is not appropriate. I think, in large part, we will have to do some self policing. If we do go down this more open route, the fringe is always going to try to take advantage of it and its going to be hard to police the other side. We have to police our own side. We have to keep people moving in the right direction because creating problems is not going to solve these huge challenges facing this country. To my question, all these changes that we are discussing involve decentralization of power. Whether its not being here when you are pin bawling around, that centralizes power. When the Committee Structure is currently structural eyes. When the incentive is for people making all the decisions in congress and you get a bill 5000 pages long and six hours later you are expected to vote on it. All of these changes do decentralize power. My question is this, i will give you my thoughts and then i will ask for yours. The fact that this committee exists indicates a willingness for change. The fact that we have been one year into full congress indicates a willingness to consider changes. The dysfunction is so severe that even leadership, i believe, is open to making some legitimate structural changes. Could you talk a little bit about your thoughts on the challenges with decentralization of power in regards to leadership . I would begin with a point related to something that involves response to the last question. Which is that one of the Reasons Power is centralized in the way that it is is because it is challenging four a in some situations, for individual committees to come to agreement on what a proposal should look like, and when an individual committee cannot do it a gets run up to the leadership. And there are situations in which leaders are the ones that have the power to say, this is what the deal is going to be. Im not saying thats true in all of the cases, but these are all pieces of the same puzzle. So, in order for some power to flow away from the leadership, you need somewhere else for its ago, and i think we would both say one place for it to go would be to committees. Any need committees to have the tools and resources they need to be able to do the work and feel like if they do the hard work of getting to a proposal on which they agree, that that proposal is going to go somewhere. So, as is the case of many things in congress, i think sometimes we blame the centralization of power in the hands of party leaders for more of congress pathologies then is necessarily the chief cause of. In some cases, it is the response to other challenges that Congress Faces. It is how congress has evolved to deal with other challenges. I very much agree with that, and i think its important to see it. I would say the centralization that happened in the late 1990s, i was a staffer in the 1990s on the budget committee, and then i worked for Speaker Gingrich in the final two years. I would say that a lot of that centralization happened because republicans had gotten elected on a very ambitious agenda, institutional reform, and none of the committee knew how to do that. They came in realizing they promised to do things they werent equipped to do. So they felt like the only way to do this is to put all the power in the Speakers Office and let this move. I think that that, over time, created a culture in the house that left members without much experience of a more decentralized house, and without a sense that they could really do it. So that while its easy to complain when it feels like you have no power, it isnt simply obvious what a decentralized house would look like. Because of the matter of moving a legislative agenda now. One of the points i would make is there is a way in which decentralization should be attractive to leaders. Obviously nobody wants to give up power, but the power that is now centralized in both party leaders in both houses is excessive in their own view. We had a strange situation to congress is ago now where the speaker resigned, retired, whatever you want to say and everybody looked around and said, who wants to be speaker . Someone literally got forced to be speaker. I think the reason for that is the job has become very, very challenging. As a matter of managing a coalition that looks to you to keep it from becoming unruly. I think its just an unreasonable expectation to have of the speaker, that speakers know that and that there is some appeal of allowing more of the work of the institution to happen through the committee where the speaker can say, this is working its way through the house. Speaker say that, but it isnt really true. In some ways their qualities of life would be improved by being more true. The argument needs to look like that as made to them because they have to be persuaded that it makes sense to give up some power, which is never obvious or easy. I would also say, from purely legislative throughput standpoint, the less power is in the hands of Power Part Party leaders, the more work can be done right now, often, the m of is you have to get the leaders to sign enough sign off on the agreement. Its a matter of workflow. So, as you think about devolving some of that power, it opens up the possibility to do more work when there is not the one potential bottleneck in the process. Can i quickly asked, your recommendation about giving the committees for time, isnt that in the rules now, like calendar wednesday . Isnt that basically in the rules . And we wave them . There are ways you can have the existing rules and do that, i think the bigger challenges convincing committees that they will actually get the opportunity to do that. And there are other ways. The time is one piece of it. I think if you are thinking about it in terms of units of legislative proposals, it might be another one. The idea that each committee gets the ability to bring a package of some size to the floor and thats protected and is another way. In my limited time here, i have been there since 2013. I see ideas flow to the floor, and then you have people who make a habit out of going out and saying, nobody could have read this bill. We work on these bills for long amounts of time. Unfortunately we know the things that are in it. Would it make more sense . Would it make more sense, and i was not here for that, but to have that Health Care month so all the committees of jurisdiction but have those hearings . Thats all that would take place in the institution. To have witnesses come in and talk about, like in the Cleveland Area we had to find institutions. We knew talk to the people they have great ideas of how to bring the debt of Health Care down. But have those people come in and testify whether its ways and means, and thats all the news media would have to focus on for that month would be the issue. So the american people, i believe they are bright enough when presented with, here are the problems, here are the cause, these are the potential resolutions, reach out to your congressman or senators and let them know where you stand in that we have input throughout instead of having people running against the institution and against the bill to the detriment of american people. Does that sound like something that would work . I think thats certainly one way to think about how to focus the attention of members on their subsidy of work, rather than nonparticipating in the larger theater of cultural world politics, which is what you do when you dont have other ways of using your time constructively, frankly. It does not seem like the rest of whats available to you would be of any purpose. At least this is something voters care about. One thing i would say about that, there is value in the committee of the congress. Working in parallel on different issues. Congress can work on a lot of different things at the same time when it isnt the case that one person has to approve everything that gets done. So there is a kind of advantage to parallel processing where different committees can focus on different areas at different times. And members dont have to think that their job is to focus the attention of the public on this issue in an intense way right now so that we can get something done. But rather see their everyday work. Working on a variety of important public policy issues that move on the schedule that the system allows for. I agree with you members have to take account of the reality we are living in. That means there are times when significant legislation can only move when there is public pressure within that theater of our politics, and there has to be ways of using the Committee System and not just the platforms available to leaders to make that kind of change happen. So you have to be creative about how to do it. I will add one note on the point about parallel processing, that is the Reason Congress has committees in the first place. If we look at the history of the development of the Committee System over time, the Reason Congress created committees to handle specific jurisdictions of work was so that it could process more and more complicated issues in parallel at the same time, rather than having the whole congress have to take up every, and do the work on every issue and create durable groups of members that could specialize in particular areas. I think, in that sense, allowing for a parallel processing goes back to the origin of why we have committees. Health care is something that needs to be dealt with. Infrastructure. Ever since ive been here, nothing has more bipartisan support that infrastructure. And here we are talking about it again. In our markup in the committee does not make a bill and it takes more for us to figure out what the needs are for the country because they are different in all 50 states. Im just trying to think of a way people have Input And Work through these things and work together in congress versus us versus them. I know we have been talking about Member Empowerment and i know she wants to ask about Freshman Empowerment and how members are on board. Thank you. I sit in a seat where all of you have been as a freshman. We have that in common. My Freshman Orientation might have been a little bit different than all of yours. Coming in during covid and having everything separated, wearing masks, not really getting to know new members. Im interesting interested in finding out a couple of things. From your perspective, Freshman Orientation was very different and it seems like we are very different separated. Republicans, democrats. The reason for that was we did not have enough room. Events that we would normally have that are much more informal or not available to us. But we are still learning. And when we are going into committee hearings, when we are going into meetings, we understand completely this and yorty perspective and how freshman and your freshman is tough, being a Freshman Minority is even tougher, but working our way through that. When we are in these sessions when the cameras are on, a lot of people are talking into the cameras, they are only there to talk to the cameras, everything seems to be so overly formal that where you need to have conversations, we dont, evening committees. There is very little conversation. There is no back and forth. This is a much different committee than most. But normally, the chairman has five minutes, you ask questions of the witness, you dont talk to each other and thats it. One Freshman Orientation, what things do you think we should really address and Freshman Orientation to get that kind of camaraderie from the get go. And in committee hearings, or committees in general, how do you set up an informal way where you dont lose it to the floor where you have people bantering back and forth, but you can at least have conversations where this compromise or discussions take place and not just speech giving . I think its a wonderful set of questions. One thing i would stress in terms of orienting new members is helping members understand the history of the institution. Especially helping members see that Congress Hasnt always worked the same way. That at different times, if you encounter the house of representatives, he would find a very different kind of institution, very different Budget Process, very different sorts of relationship across party lines. I think the reason it is important to see that is that its very easy to come into an existing structure where things are going a certain way and think, i have to find my Place And Figure out how do i find the Cnn Camera and stand there and complain about congress . There really are other ways for this institution to work, and its up to the members. So that reform is possible. If there is something in particular that stands in the way of enabling the kind of work you want to do, that something that could change and its possible that other members agree that it could change. Thats very important. Just helping members see that its up to them and could be different. To your second question, i would get back to the question of cameras everywhere. There should be cameras in some places in congress, there needs to be transparency. Their Work Cant be done in ways that dont allow members to be accountable to the voters. But there also needs to be room for members to talk to each other, a bargain, to negotiate, to raise ideas that dont end up going anywhere. To raise suggestions of someone says why thats not a good Idea And Someone says, thats not a good idea. You cant do that in public. I think a lot of members now feel like in order to actually advance anything, theyve gotta be part of some group that meets outside the normal process. That should leave you to think about how to change the normal process so it enables that kind of work to be done and be the appropriate and proper work of congress. I love cspan, im a cspan junkie, but there are rooms in which there should not be cameras. That idea has to be socialized in this kind of institution. Rep. Van duyne dr. Reynolds i would encourage more committees to experience experiment the way we are today. Particularly this sort of notion of drawing out one issue into members who have questions, or who want to speak on that issue who have had a chance to do so. From the perspective of a witness, an hour or so into the hearing, i have found it effective. Just in general, being willing to try more different ways, and getting out of the five moments for member of the majority, five members five minutes for majority. Out of that box is a place i would encourage folks to think of. One of the advantages of having subcommittees is its another venue for experimentation. Particularly since they are much smaller than the full committee. If the subcommittee is having a hearing, that would be a great place to start experimenting with different formats. In this room. Democrats on one side, republicans on the other psych, we each have our own room, and there is no real if we just had one anteroom where we all have to come in and we are visiting, and its not in front of the camera, you might get a little more socialization. But the physical premises in the premises upon which the physical premises are designed is to separate us. So what do you think about that . And Theres Nothing that stops us. And i often will go over to the republican side if i want to get a deal done on something. But the layout of the places designed for separation. Dr. Reynolds i think that is a very important point, and i will underline something you yourself just said. Nothing is stopping you. This is a point that you all have made several times is that, if there are changes that you want to see made, you are the people to make those changes. And maybe that starts with breaking down the norms of only gathering with other members of your party before a committee hearing. Which are actually right, the evolution of the congress and its physical space means that you are sort of physically separated in many situations. But i would just encourage you to be the change. The part the primary difference is which Cable News Channel they are turned to. One has a whole food sandwiches on other has chickfila. I want to talk about Committee Structure. And i am going to clarify this. Remove partisanship from this because i think if the tables were turned it would not be any different. Right now there are 25 ds in 18 ours on the ways and means. 33 ds and 26 ours, i can keep going down. Ask is the only one close at 3128. Services is 3024. There was a huge tussle over the number of members on each committee at the beginning of the year. My understanding is that its to the Speakers Discretion and there is historical precedents argued over, but its kind of wild west, you dont know its going to happen. Everybody has ideas. But until the speaker says this is how we are going to do it and then it goes into negotiation after that. Is there anyone, given a slim majority, you would think that the committees would be more similar to that . If republicans were in the upper opposite situation, it would be the same. Is there any thought to an algorithm that dictates it as opposed to just saying we are going to figure this out and you are going to deal with it to the other side . Dr. Levin in a sense, its a matter of prioritizing that. I would urge you against bargaining with an algorithm. I dont think that is the way to , and certainly to take on the culture of this institution. I would say that this kind of decision has to be made right what you describe as a tussle, by a Bargaining Process. I think it makes sense that if a majority is exceptionally large that it has an exceptionally large majority in the key committees. A very tight and majority should allow for closer votes in those committees and closer party alignment. But i think it makes sense for that to be worked out in the Negotiating Process at the beginning of each congress. This institution is an arena for bargaining, for dealmaking, or accommodation, for dealing with each other. It is very important over and over and at every layer of the institution to see it that way because congress is the only place in our political system where people with different views representing different elements of our society actually deal with each other. Literally deal with each other. That is why legislation can allow for durable solutions to public problems, because people are heard, views are moderated in order to get to the process. That kind of Bargaining Process is what this institution is for. That is how legislation should move and how internal decisions ought to be made. Representative conversely, i am very clear to say that if the tables were reversed it would be the exact same. Next congress, if the tables do turn, and there is a very slim majority, i would say it would be inappropriate for there to be a seven C2 Difference on ways and means if it was a six seat majority. Yuval let ought to be a fight between the two party leaderships. Representative the response is going to be, we have got to do what you all did. Yuval i agree with that, but here is a member saying so. That is the only way it can happen. Molly i agree with everything you yuval said, but some of this is driven by demands of who wants to be on the committees. Among the things that go into the tussle are some committees are more attractive than others. One of the things that has to be balanced is who wants to be on each committee. It is at the end of the day a political question. I dont mean that in a pejorative way. I mean that in in everything you do is politics way. I agree with yuval. Representative i was thinking about this a little more. The idea of wanting some laws to be adhered to and transparency. I am not sure if i cannot recall ever happening. When we go on a retreat and the democrats going to retreat, would it make more sense if they had bipartisan Infrastructure Committee Retreat . On appropriations, many members on other committees do not understand how we operate, but we understand how we operate and can have discussions. Has that existed before . Do you think it can be worthwhile . Molly i do not know if it is existed before. Mr. Kilmer, you can correct me. I seem to remember this being an idea ideas of this kind were ones that you discussed in the last congress. Representative in the last congress, we both talked about having the institution have a bipartisan retreat, impart to acknowledging that they are going to be differences in goals but that there may be Relationship Building and at least some alignment on these bigticket issues. Similarly, within committees. Part of the reason our committee did a bipartisan retreat is that we recommended other committees should. Representative ours was by zoom, unfortunately. Dr. Reynolds, in your written testimony, and you spoke to this im trying to remember how you worded it. We are looking at legislative behavior and personal behavior. At next weeks hearing, we are going to dive into these issues around interpersonal behavior, but i feel like it is to some degree one of the big challenges. The working part of this is hamstrung sometimes the inability to get past the interpersonal. Are there levers you would pull on that front . Sometimes the work is stymied by we have members who do not want to be in a room with each other. Sometimes we have this notion that trying to work together is somehow leaving her at ideology at the door. I do not think that is what it means. People come here to represent their values, but sometimes we cannot even move forward on things on which we agree. Thoughts on levers that this committee might recommend to get to some of these interpersonal issues, whether it be bipartisan retreat or other stuff we have not thought of . Yuval those kinds of ideas are one way to do that, which is that they both allow members to get to know each other and allow them to talk substantively without being on display, which i think makes an important difference. Some of this is also a function of allowing changes in the structure of the work to gradually change Members Sense of what happens in this institution. Im over talking about experiences in State Legislatures, saying people just did not abuse the open rules. Part of the reason for of that that should part of the reason for that is a sense that after the that after well, the culture of the institution changes around the structure of the work. He made some of the changes to the structure that we are talking about, early on, the first result would look pretty ugly. It would be people using those new venues to grandstand. But over time, as it became apparent that there is not any camera here, so why are you talking to me like i am a Cable News Theory . It would become people would, through experience, come to approach each other differently. It is hard, because this is not a kindergarten class. You cannot just tell people to behave. Everybody here is an adult who has achieved a lot and is very ambitious, worked hard to get here, and deserves to be here. There is no one who can really tell anybody else to behave. The only way to change behavior is to build a culture around forms of work that encourage people to take themselves and others seriously. That is not a civil thing. Molly i agree. At the end of the day, it is important to ask yourselves as people who come to work in a workplace, how do you establish the norms for what is acceptable conduct . Who do you look to to enforce those norms against one another . Yuval and i can give you suggestions, but at the end of the day, this is the place where you do your work. Which is fundamentally what people sent you to washington to do. It is about what do you consider acceptable behavior . How do you set that for yourselves in the same way that would have been if you were that would happen if you were in the job you had before you came to congress . One challenge that the Reform Community and folks who are thinking about Congress Face is drawing lines between what makes congress unique and what does not. This is an area where there is a launch to be learned from how do we build a good workplace . I am eager to watch the folks that you bring for the second hearing on this topic, because they will have some constructive thoughts as well. At the end of the day, you are all coming to work in a place. It is up to you to determine how to enforce good standards of behavior with your colleagues. I have sitting on the desk in my office a framed version of the rotary fourway test. Is it the truth . Is it fair to all concerned . Will it build goodwill and better friendships . Will be beneficial for all concerned . I am reminded on a daily basis of how often we violate that in this place. It is a problem. It is not an Gender Goodwill or the ability to be productive. I want to make sure if other members have threads they want to pull i know votes will be called soon. Go ahead. Representative we talked about Budget Reform earlier. We made a number of recommendations last congress. I think there were seven of them. We used the joint select committee was ultimately unsuccessful. We built on what they started. Any additional recommendations that you think we could make . Yuval one idea i get at in my written testimony. As illustrative of a change it might affect culture and i am confident of saying this is to think about the Distinction Congress draws between Authorization And Appropriation as an open question. What we are asking is, how do we make the work of the Committees Matter more . Then surely anybody who had the experience of seeing and authorizing committee at work should recognize that much of what happens in their work does not seem like it is going to make a difference, while the appropriators are firing real bullets and spending money. There are ways of thinking about combining Authorization And Appropriation that could really change the way we think about what the Budget Process is for and what members do at their time. The distinction between Authorization And Appropriation is longstanding in congress. It has been done since the 1830s. It was done with this notion of parallel processing. It became difficult for congress to spend necessary funds, there were debates about broader legislative questions. House and then the senate decided they would put spending on its own path so that necessary things could be done while these other debates were happening. We are at a point now where, if the question is how do you get members to become interested in channeling their ambition to work at the committees they are in, breaking that barrier between authorization and appropriate station is something to think about. It is not a new idea. There was a proposal like this in the 1980s. It got pretty far in the process. Obviously, appropriators tend not to like it. That would be a dramatic way to change the Budget Process. It would be a way to help the work of the Committees Matter. [laughter] representative we might get 10 votes. We are not getting 12, though. Molly my advice here would be to to go back to something mr. Joyce said. He made a Passing Reference to the degree to which you as an appropriate or appropriator, you actually are very red very well read into the details of what you have worked on. To the extent of the Appropriations Process continues to work, it is because you and your colleagues do the hard work of digging into those details. Even if what we ultimately end up with is one big vote on the floor, having done the deliberative work in the early stages is not to be lost. And in fact, that is what we should protect. That is less of a specific recommendation but more of a principal for thinking about Budget Reforms. We want to make this place work. You have to turn on your mike mic. Its this chicken and a, the structure of the place and the type of work we do can add to collaboration and working together. But we were just talking about the womens softball team. William and i played elf against each other and david and i played baseball against each other. Does a context that isnt legislative but its normal. Not so much Baseball Or Anything else, but sports are outside of this place, relationships can be developed, especially the Womens Team is a partisan. It develops relationships not just here, but across the way and you still have the electoral theme. In that instance, relationships are developed that go beyond whats in the Budget Today or just pure work. All of a sudden you have a relationship on a different level that allows you to have the conversation, even in a setting where you are divided like this room. Molly building relationships among members is important. I feel a little out of place feeling this. When this is one of the chambers greatest examples, but i dont want to oversell the importance of those opportunities to build relationships. This gets back to something i said about my written oral testimony, which is we have to ask ourselves what are the interpersonal relationships in service of, and they can be helpful. But at the end of the day, what matters is the degree to which you can use them to do good legislative work, and making sure we are not romanticizing or being overly nostalgic about a world with members because they live here with their families, had dinner together. That is important, but i dont want to oversell it as a solution to the challenges that you face. I is i it is a Chicken And Egg system. You cant just use another member as a prop, and have to think that somebody i will see on thursday at the baseball game, or that somebody whose family i know. That obviously does make a difference. But i think its easy to overstate the degree to which change can work in that direction. I think that, ultimately, if you want to change the culture of the institution so it can be a more effective legislator, the kinds of changes that involve actually structuring the work to enable cross partisan Bargaining And Accommodation are going to matter more. Just a matter that you see each other as human beings. Ultimately you have to work together as legislators. If ive got an idea that i need some help with and i think he might be interested in it, or at least im not afraid to approach him or i know that i can approach him to help me shape this thing. So, our business is a peoples business. It isnt just a legislative business, its a people business. In these relationships are key. I agree with you guys. You have to feel like, even if you work together, can you get something done and can you have a real product that benefits america in some fashion or another. So thank you. Any other questions . I think that buzzer was the sound of votes being called. So, i actually have one more quick win. Both of you made references to state legislators as models. As the notion of having coauthors listed that might be cross partisan. The notion of having a Budget Process that actually looks like what you are doing, the idea of providing control to the committees at times. These are all recommendations he made to foster better cultural and collaboration that we can learn from state legislators. Any other lessons from state legislators that we should be looking at . Yuval i think it makes sense for this committee to think in a formal way about legislators. Inviting members to offer ideas that come from their state their own ideas. For those that were state legislators, there are a lot of ways in which the state legislators are built on the model of congress. They have to solve various problems along the way. They have innovated the legislative process in ways that congress can learn from. From many state legislators there has been a lot of innovation. In this century, in the past 20 years. They are living in the same political culture and same country. Surely there are a lot of ways to learn. I want to thank our witnesses for their testimony and for participating in our first roundtable hearing. I would also like to thank our committee members for their participation in willing to try something different. Without objection, i would like to thank the folks recording the proceedings and the folks from cspan. I think we are on cspan eight today. Without objection, all members will have five legislative days in which to submit additional written questions. It will be forwarded to the witnesses for their response. I asked our witnesses to respond is probably as you are able. Without objection all members will have five legislative days in which to submit materials for the record. I want to thank our Committee Staff are putting together a great hearing with two terrific experts. Thank you very much. With that, we are adjourned. Thanks. [captions copyright national Cable Satellite Corp. 2021] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its Caption Content and accuracy. Visit ncicap. Org] indistinct conversation] we want to do a photo real quick. Standard and ensures that lenders comply with federal law. The Senate Committee is in order. This hearing is held in virtual format. Once you start speaking, there will be a slight delay