What is wrong and right with the House of Representatives? (with Dan Lipinski)
What is wrong and right with the House of Representatives? (with Dan Lipinski)  
Podcast: Understanding Congress
Published On: Mon Feb 07 2022
Description: The topic of this episode is, “What is wrong and right with the House of Representatives?”My guest is Dan Lipinski, who is uniquely positioned to answer this question. He was a member of Congress, and represented Illinois’ third district from 2005 to 2021. He also is a political scientist — he got his doctorate from Duke University in 1998. And if that is not enough, Dan is a former congressional staffer and a socially conservative Democrat. You don’t find many of those anymore. You can see Dan’s recent writings on his website, DanLipinski.com, which includes an essay for The Atlantic titled “The House of Representatives is failing American democracy.”Kevin Kosar:Welcome to Understanding Congress, a podcast about the first branch of government. Congress is a notoriously complex institution, and few Americans think well of it, but Congress is essential to our republic. It’s a place where our pluralistic society is supposed to work out its differences and come to agreement about what our laws should be. And that is why we are here: to discuss our national legislature and to think about ways to upgrade it so it can better serve our nation.I’m your host, Kevin Kosar, and I’m a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank in Washington, DC.Sir, welcome to the program.Dan Lipinski:It's good to be with you, Kevin.Kevin Kosar:Let's start this conversation on a positive note. You served in the House of Representatives for 16 years. What accomplishments are you most proud of?Dan Lipinski:Well, if I had to pick out one bill most proud of — I actually was able to pass about 17 bills in my 16 years in Congress — but the one that I spent the most time on, maybe the longest lasting impact, is the American Manufacturing Competitiveness Act. The requirement of that bill is every four years, the administration needs to create a strategy to promote American manufacturing. We could do a whole podcast on just what it took through five years to get this bill passed. We finally changed it to go to a different committee. In the end, after we spent five years working very hard, first it got attached to one bill, which we strategized to do, and then that bill unexpectedly got attached to an omnibus bill at the end of the year. After five long years of working on it, I was actually shocked when I saw it show up in an omnibus bill. Like I said, we could do a whole podcast on that and the strategy, and all the pitfalls, and what it took to get it through the House and finally get it through the Senate, get the president on board. It took a long time. But the first one was done in the second year of President Trump, and the second one now needs to be done early next year by the Biden Administration. So it's a plan to promote American manufacturing, kind of like the Quadrennial Defense Review, which the Department of Defense every four years needs to look at the defense department and put out a plan for the next four years.Kevin Kosar:So, you're a legislator who got things done. But as you just mentioned, it sure wasn't easy, and it sure didn't follow the script that many of us learned in Schoolhouse Rock all those years ago about how a bill becomes a law. This gets us to my next question. Let's talk about what's wrong with the House of Representatives — why it's so hard to get things done. In an article for The Atlantic, you state that the House, whether controlled by Democrats or Republicans, now acts as if it were a unicameral legislature in a parliamentary system, rather than acknowledging that it is only one of two legislative chambers in a presidential system. Wow. Say more about that. Why is this happening?Dan Lipinski:Well, first of all, it's a shame the listeners can't see video, because I just held up my little Bendable Bill figure, who I did bring to the House floor a few times. The speech that I gave, my wrap-up speech at the end of my time in Congress, I brought Bill out there and I talked about this. The problem that we have right now — you know, Schoolhouse Rock, “I'm Just a Bill,” everyone should see that. It does the basics of how a bill becomes a law. It goes through committee in one chamber, the committee goes to the House floor or the Senate floor, and it has to go over to the other chamber, it passes, and then if it passes that second chamber, it has to go to the president for a signature. Well, it doesn't work quite as smoothly as it shows up in that video now. And it's a shame, because it is supposed to work the way that that video shows. The video shows a legislator having constituents come to him with an idea. And they say, There are ought to be a law. And he says, You're right, there ought to be a law. And he writes up a piece of legislation, and then it goes through the process. And the committee is supposed to — there’s Democrats and Republicans on every committee — they're supposed to debate it, amend it, decide if they want to pass it. Same thing happens on the floor. And it's all portrayed in this video as Democrats and Republicans, both parties, are working on perfecting legislation, deciding if they want to pass it.Well, unfortunately, right now in the House it is so much controlled by the speaker. Everything — I shouldn't say everything. Every major piece of legislation is controlled out of the speaker's office. And so when I say that the House works like a unicameral parliament, if we had a unicameral parliament, first of all, if we had a parliamentary system, we'd have a prime minister who'd be the executive who was chosen by the members of Parliament. We don't have that. Our country was founded specifically not to be that way. We have a presidential system. The president is chosen separately from the House or the Senate. They do not choose him. We oftentimes have divided government. Divided government is when one party does not control everything. If it’s a unified government, one party controls the House, the Senate, and the presidency. Otherwise, it's a divided government. Over the last 41 years, we have had divided government more than 30 years.And the Senate filibuster makes it even more difficult. You need 60 votes in the Senate. There's been one year in the past 41 where one party had the majority in the House, had 60 votes in the Senate, and had the presidency. Unfortunately, what the House does, instead of looking at it and saying, Well, in order to get anything done, we need to get the other party on board, at least some members of the other party on board and supportive — instead, what the House does is basically passes legislation only with the votes of members of the majority party. The minority party is completely left out. Now, if a couple members of the minority party want to vote for the legislation when it gets to the House floor, the majority party's happy. But they don't want to rely on — the speaker does not want to rely on votes from the minority party.So the House passes bills that are crafted by members of its own party, and that usually almost always makes them more extreme than what is mainstream in the country. Maybe it's the middle of that party ideologically, which is either, if the Democrats have the majority, too far to the left, if Republicans have the majority, too far to the right of what mainstream America will support. But the House does this because the speaker’s focused on the next election more than anything else. And trying to pass things out of the House is sort of an ideal for the party. So the House passes these bills and they go to the Senate, and the Senate says, We can't pass that, we cannot get the 60 votes to overcome a filibuster. Even right now with the reconciliation bill, the House passed the bill, the Build Back Better, Biden's agenda. The House passed the bill that, even under reconciliation, where you only need 50 votes in the Senate — and there are 50 Democrats in the Senate — that bill that the House passed cannot pass the Senate. So what usually happens — we'll see what happens with reconciliation. This is what happened with the infrastructure bill. The House passed an infrastructure bill earlier this year. The Senate basically threw that bill in the trash and a bipartisan group of senators got together and said, We have our own infrastructure bill. That's nice you passed yours, but if anything's going to become law, it's going to be ours. This bipartisan group of senators passed the bill in the Senate. It took a few months, the House Democrats finally decided, Okay, we'll swallow that bill because President Biden wants to get this done. And they passed the Senate bill. The House had no input whatsoever in that infrastructure bill. That is what has happened so often over the last 10 years. Major legislation that becomes law has almost always come out of the Senate, and usually the House has no input whatsoever. So basically, the Senate has become the only house of Congress when it comes to passing major legislation, making laws on major...