The topic of this episode is, “Why should we care about Congress's power of the purse?”Well, we are just getting through the FY2026 budget process, which Congress was supposed to finish nearly half a year ago. And the next budget process has begun.During the second administration of Donald Trump, we have seen an escalation of the longstanding battle between the executive branch and the legislative branch over federal revenue-raising and federal spending. Mr. Trump famously unleashed the Department of Government Efficiency, and he has refused to spend money appropriated by Congress. In other cases, he has repurposed money appropriated for one purpose to another purpose. And this is to say nothing of some of the peculiar revenue-raising maneuvers he has made, such as seizing oil from Venezuela, selling it, and then tucking the money in an overseas bank account.Should we be bothered by any of these doings? Should we really care whether Congress or the president exerts more or less power over the federal purse?To discuss these questions, I have with me Shalanda Young, who has an extraordinary amount of expertise and experience in federal budgeting matters. Ms. Young presently is a Distinguished Scholar in Residence and Adjunct Professor of Law at New York University’s law school.Previously, Ms. Young was the Director of the U.S. Office of Management and Budget from 2021 to 2025. In that position, she also led the development of all four of President Joseph Biden’s budgets and presented them before Congress each year. She was also a lead negotiator for the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023 that averted a first-ever debt default and lifted the Nation’s debt ceiling. Ms. Young came to the executive branch with a load of legislative branch experience. She worked for the House Appropriations Committee for nearly 15 years and served the Committee as the Staff Director.So who better to discuss Congress’s power of the purse?Read the full transcript here.

The topic of this episode is, “What’s wrong with Congress?”I can’t recall the last time I met someone who said, “Congress is doing great. The first branch of government is getting things done and playing its central role in our Constitutional system.Nope. Almost everyone who shares their feelings about Congress with me despairs of the state of our national legislature. They think that it is playing second or third fiddle to the president and the courts.So what’s wrong with Congress? And are things as bad on Capitol Hill as we are told?Usually on this podcast I have a guest who answers my questions. But this time around I am going to share my own thoughts. So let me give you my top line conclusion before I share my thoughtsYes, Congress has some real problems. But it is not a hopeless case; nor is it as bad as it seems. Moreover, legislators, Hill staff, and we the people can improve Congress and revive representative government. We really can.Read the full transcript here.

The topic of this episode is, “What is the primary problem?”Every two years, we have congressional elections, which feature both primary elections and general elections. For nearly everyone who listens to this podcast, this seems like an eternal feature of governance system: primary elections are used to winnow the candidate field, and then general elections give voters the choice between two or maybe three finalists.But in truth, congressional primaries are a more recent development in our political history. They became the norm only about five or six decades ago.And like any other system of rules—be it the laws restricting investments or the rules of baseball—primaries are imperfect and susceptible to gaming by the players. Worse, according to some critics, primaries are fueling toxic partisanship within Congress and curbing its capacity to serve the public.Is there a primary problem? And what is this problem? To help us think through this subject I have with me Nick Troiano. He is the author of The Primary Solution: Rescuing Our Democracy from the Fringes (Simon & Schuster, 2024). Nick is the executive director of Unite America, an organization that advocates for nonpartisan election reform and alternatives to partisan primary elections.Click here to read a full transcript of the episode.

The topic of this episode is, “What are congressional norms and why do they matter?”To many Americans, the United States Congress appears to be a rather nasty place. There are lawmakers calling each other names, introducing resolutions to censure legislators and boot them off committees, and generally behaving towards one another in beastly ways. At least twice in the last few years there were moments when it appeared a couple of members of the House of Representatives might well throw punches at one another.There is a lot of constitutional and procedural hardball being played in both the Senate and the House. Members are ignoring long-agreed-upon rules or stretching their meanings to justify partisan power plays.All of which prompts the question, “Is Congress losing the norms that once helped facilitate collective action amongst representatives and senators?My guest for this episode is Brian Alexander. He is an Associate Professor of Politics at Washington and Lee University. Brian is also the author of A Social Theory of Congress: Legislative Norms in the Twenty-First Century (Lexington Books, 2021), and he is the editor of a new volume titled The Folkways of Congress: Legislative Norms in an Era of Conflict (Brookings Institution Press, 2026).Click here to read a full transcript of the episode.

The topic of this episode is, “Should Congress pass a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution?”The federal government experienced a shutdown in autumn 20025, which is one of many that have occurred in the past 20 years. The nation also has racked up about $38 trillion in debt, and Congress and the president have not taken real action to right America’s fiscal ship.So should Congress pass a balanced budget amendment to the US Constitution?My guest Kurt Couchman says ‘Yes, it should.’ Kurt is the author of the new book, Fiscal Democracy in America: How a Balanced Budget Amendment Can Restore Sound Governance (Palgrave MacMillan, 2025).Kurt has been kicking around Capitol Hill for about 15 years. Presently he is a senior fellow at Americans for Prosperity, a group that promotes the principles and policies of economic freedom and liberty. Previously, Kurt worked for two members of Congress, and has had stints at the Cato Institute and the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, among other gigs. He has spent a lot of time engaged with Congress on matters relating to federal spending and the budget, so I am delighted to have him here with us to discuss the idea of a balanced budget amendment to the US Constitution.Click here for the full transcript to the episode.

The topic of this episode is, what are budget rescissions and pocket rescissions?Rescissions have been in the news recently. This past July President Donald J. Trump sent the House and Senate a rescissions message. This memorandum requested that Congress rescind, or take back, spending authority it had previously granted. Congress passed the legislation, which cut $9 billion from foreign aid, the U.S. Institute for Peace, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. A rescission of funds has not occurred since 1999, when former President Bill Clinton, a Democrat, struck a deal with the Republican-held House and Senate.Now the Trump administration is attempting a maneuver called a “pocket rescission.” What’s a pocket rescission? To answer that question I have as my guest my colleague, Dr. Philip Wallach. He is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He is a colleague and a friend. At AEI he studies America’s separation of powers, with a focus on regulatory policy issues and the relationship between Congress and the administrative state. His latest book is Why Congress (Oxford University Press).Click here for a full transcript of the episode.

The topic of this episode is, “Was James Madison the first majority leader?”Both the Senate and the House of Representatives have a majority leader. At the time of the recording this podcast, Republican John Thune of South Dakota is the Senate majority leader, and Republican Steve Scalise of Louisiana is the House majority leader.Now, congressional scholars tend to argue that the majority leader emerged as a position in each chamber in 1899. Democrat Arthur B Gorman of Maryland was the first Senate majority leader, and Republican Sereno Elisha Payne of New York was the first House majority leader.My AEI colleague Jay Cost has a different view. He thinks the first majority leader appeared on Capitol Hill far earlier, and it was Virginia’s James Madison. So, we’re going to discuss that claim, which you can find in his recent piece, "Icons of Congress: James Madison — The First Majority Leader."So, we’re going to discuss that claim.Dr. Jay Cost is the Gerald R. Ford nonresident senior fellow at AEI and the author of the superb book, James Madison: America’s First Politician (2021), and other fine volumes on politics and history. Regular readers of UnderstandingCongress.org no doubt have seen Jay’s various reports and essays, and if you have not seen them, do have a look.Click here to read the full transcript.

The topic of this episode is, “Does Congress's power to declare war mean anything?”In June of 2025, President Donald J. Trump directed US aircraft to drop 30,000 pound bombs on nuclear facilities in Iran. Some legislators in Congress and some media complained that this was a violation of the US Constitution. They note that Article I, Section 8 declares, “Congress shall have the power to declare war.” That same article of the Constitution also empowers the legislature to “provide for the common defense.”So, was the President’s action constitutional or not? And does Congress’s power to declare war mean anything?To help us think through these questions I have with me my AEI colleague, Gary Schmitt. He is the author of many books and articles on American government and he has written extensively on legislative and presidential war-making.Click here to read the full transcript.

The topic of this episode is, Why are legislators on social media?”We’ve all seen it, and if you haven’t, well, you will soon enough. Social media posts by members of Congress. They are on Facebook, X.com (what used to be called Twitter), Bluesky, and the like. The average voter may be forgiven for wondering, “Why are these lawmakers hanging out online? Don’t they have anything better to do?”To try to help us better understand what is going on here, I have Annelise Russell, Associate Professor of Public Policy at the University of Kentucky. Dr. Russell has been studying legislators’ use of social media for years and is the author of Tweeting is Leading: How Senators Communicate and Represent in the Age of Twitter (Oxford, 2021). So who better to discuss this topic with us?Click here to read the full transcript.

The topic of this episode is, “Is Congress getting anything done?”The 119th Congress convened in early January. Months have gone by, and there are lots of things happening in Washington, DC.But is it all being done by President Donald J. Trump? Is Congress itself doing anything?Gabe Fleisher is here to help us answer that latter question. He is the creator and editor of the must-read publication, Wake Up to Politics. He started this newsletter in 2011, and you may have seen him being interviewed CNN, MSNBC, NPR, and in various other major media.Click here to read the full transcript.

The topic of this episode is a recent book that is titled, Congressional Deliberation: Major Debates, Speeches, and Writings 1774-2023 (Hackett 2024). The book is edited by Jordan T. Cash, a professor at James Madison College at Michigan State University, and by Kevin J. Burns, a professor at Benedictine College. As the book’s title indicates, its coverage is capacious: the very first excerpt comes from John Adams’ diary entries on the debates in the continental Congress, which he wrote in 1774. The books’ very last entry is taken from the debates that led to the ouster of Speaker Kevin McCarthy in 2023.Certainly, I could go on and on about all the parts of the book that fascinate me, but today we’re going to do something better than that. I am going to chat with one of the editors, Jordan Cash.Click here to read the full transcript.

The topic of this episode is, “What does a member of the House of Representatives do all day?”It is not easy for the average voter to imagine how a member of Congress spends each day. We see images of them standing in the ornate chamber, talking with voters, and there’s no shortage of videos of them delivering speeches or denunciations of presidents or the other party. Some polling data indicates that many voters think legislators have cushy, part-time jobs and have legion staff doting upon them.But is life in Congress really like that?My guest is Derek Kilmer, who has written a chapter on this subject for Casey Burgat’s new edited volume, We Hold These "Truths": How to Spot the Myths that are Holding America Back (Authors Equity, 2025).And who better to talk about this topic than Derek Kilmer. He is a former member of Congress. He represented Washington state’s 6th district from 2013 to 2025. Mr. Kilmer served on the House of Representatives’ Appropriations Committee, which helps decide where federal spending goes. Listeners may also remember that Mr. Kilmer also co-led the House’s Modernization Committee, and he previously was on this podcast to explain the various things that were being done to make Congress work better.Click here to read the full transcript.

The topic of this episode is, “Can term limits fix Congress?”Many Americans, including possibly you, dear listener, look at Congress and think, “These people stink. They spend decades in Congress and are out of touch with the American people and pay too much attention to special interests.” This widespread feeling unsurprisingly leads to nearly 90 percent of Americans telling pollsters they favor term limits for legislators.So would term limits be a helpful reform? To help us think through this question I have with me Dr. Casey Burgat, a professor at George Washington University. He is the editor of a new volume, We Hold These Truths: How to Spot the Myths That are Holding America Back (Authors Equity, 2025). It's a fun book, and has contributions from a lot of smart people. The book also includes a chapter that Casey authored on this very topic of term limits for Congress. So who better for us to have on the program?Click here for the full transcript of the episode.

The topic of this episode is, “What is the lost history of Congress’s Offices of Legislative Counsel?”My guest is Beau Baumann, a doctoral candidate in law at Yale University. He studies the intersection of administrative law and legislation. He has published articles in a number of law journals and previously worked as an attorney for the US Department of Justice and clerked for a federal district court. He is the author of a really interesting, new article titled, “Resurrecting the Trinity of Legislative Constitutionalism.” In it he describes some of the lost history of Congress’s offices of legislative counsel (OLC).Click here for the full transcript of the episode.

The topic of this episode is, “What has become of the United States Senate and can it be revived?”The Senate did not have a good year in 2024. The chamber did not pass a budget resolution, nor did the Senate enact any of the dozen annual spending bills. Its year-end calendar of business listed dozens of pages of bills on matters large and small awaiting votes. Lots of floor time was spent on presidential nominations rather than on debating policy or amending legislation and voting on it.To help us get a better sense of what’s not going well in the Senate and what might be done to improve its functioning I have with me Professor Anthony J. Madonna. Tony is a professor at the University of Georgia. He is the author of many scholarly articles on Congress, and most recently published a piece for Political Research Quarterly titled, “Interbranch Warfare: Senate Amending Process and Restrictive House Rules.”

The topic of this episode is a new book on Senator Mitch McConnell, a Republican who served as his party’s chamber leader for the better part of two decades.The book was written by Associated Press reporter Michael Tackett, and its title is The Price of Power: How Mitch McConnell Mastered the Senate, Changed America, and Lost His Party. It was published by Simon & Schuster in November of 2024.It is a fine book, and I certainly enjoyed reading it. I learned a lot about Senator McConnell. For example, who knew that he dated a lot when he was a single guy? Who knew that he had a role in transforming Kentucky from a Democrat-controlled state to one with a vibrant Republican party? And who knew that Senator McConnell recruited a Rep. Tom Cotton of Arkansas to run for the Senate?Capacious as this book is, I could have read one twice its size. Mitch McConnell is fascinating figure, and a historic one.So let’s get to it—the story of Mitch McConnell.Read the full transcript here.

As listeners know, every two years the House of Representatives is reborn. After the November election each party convenes in Washington, DC. They discuss and debate how they will run their parties, and what their legislative priorities will be. And if they are members of the majority party, they will discuss and decide what the rules of the House should be. Then when they open the new Congress in January one of the first things they will do is to vote along party lines on a new rules package.A group of scholars and former House members recently released Revitalizing the House (Hoover Institution/Sunwater Institute), a report calling for the House to revise its rules. You can find that report on UnderstandingCongress.org.To discuss why the House should change its rules I have with me one of the authors, Dr. Philip Wallach. He is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He is a colleague and a friend. At AEI he studies America’s separation of powers, with a focus on regulatory policy issues and the relationship between Congress and the administrative state. His latest book is Why Congress (Oxford University Press).Click here for the full transcript of the episode.

The topic of this episode is, “What does the House Ways and Means Committee do? And how does it do it?”The House Ways and Means Committee is the oldest committee of the United States Congress, first established in 1789 and became a standing committee in 1805. It has jurisdiction over raising revenue for the government to spend---taxes, tariffs, and the like. The term “Ways and Means” comes from English Parliamentary practice, wherein there was a committee with authority for finding the ways and means to pay for government actions and policies.My guest is Tom Reed, a former member of the House of Representatives. He was in Congress from 2010 to 2022 and represented New York’s 29th and 23rd districts. Importantly for this podcast, Mr. Reed served on the House Ways and Means Committee and was deeply involved with its tax reform work.Click here for the full transcript of the episode.

The topic of this episode is, “How can the House of Representatives better prepare new members?”My guest is Rep. Stephanie Bice, a Republican who has represented Oklahoma’s fifth congressional district for the past four years. She previously served in the Oklahoma state legislature from from 2014 to 2020. Prior to that, she worked in business for her family’s technology company and her own marketing firm.I first met Rep. Bice perhaps eight years ago. I was studying alcohol policy reform and she was deep in the process of helping rewrite some of Oklahoma’s outdated alcoholic beverage laws.Rep. Bice, I should add, sits on the House Appropriations Committee and the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology. And most relevant for this podcast, she also is on the Committee on House Administration, which has jurisdiction over many matters including the onboarding of new members of Congress.

The topic of this episode is, “How does media affect our perceptions of Congress?’As listeners no doubt know, Americans are down on Congress. Public approval of Congress has averaged about 20 percent over the past 20 years, according to Gallup. Certainly, the people on Capitol Hill are partly to blame. We have legislators who behave as if they are on a reality television show and who spend a lot of time starting fights on social media. Congress also has hurt its reputation by failing to address major public policy issues, like immigration and the soaring national debt. And then there are the occasional scandals that disgust the average American.Yet, Americans’ dour opinion of Congress also is fueled by media coverage.To talk more about this I have with me Rob Oldham, who is a Ph.D. candidate in politics at Princeton University. This year he will be an American Political Science Association Congressional Fellow, and will be spending a lot of time on Capitol Hill. His published papers investigate the relationship between supermajority rules and bipartisan policymaking. His dissertation considers congressional policymaking in response to crises during the era of polarization.And importantly and especially relevant for this podcast is that Rob is the coauthor (along with James M. Curry and Frances Lee) of a fascinating, recent article titled, “On the Congress Beat: How the Structure of News Shapes Coverage of Congressional Action.” This article was recently published by Political Science Quarterly.

The topic of this special episode of the Understanding Congress podcast is a recent book by Michael Johnson and Jerome Climer. The book is titled, Fixing Congress: Restoring Power to the People (Morgan James Publishing, 2024). Mr. Johnson and Mr. Climer each have spent more than four decades in Washington, DC and have had stints working inside Congress.Today, I have with me one of the authors, Michael Johnson, who, I should add, is not to be confused with current House Speaker Mike Johnson.He has a long resume—he has spent about a half century in or around government, with stints in the White House, Congress, and private sector. Mike also coauthored a book with Mark Strand, Surviving Inside Congress (Congressional Institute, Inc., 2017), which we previously discussed on this podcast.

The topic of this episode is, “Does Congress still suffer from Demosclerosis?"My guest is Jonathan Rauch, the author of the classic book, Demosclerosis: The Silent Killer of American Government (Times Books, 1994). Jonathan is a fellow at the Brookings Institution, and the author of numerous books, including The Constitution of Knowledge (Brookings Institution Press, 2021), and Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought (University of Chicago Press, 2014).I first read Demosclerosis nearly 30 years ago, when I was a graduate school student. I was rifling offerings outside the Strand Bookstore in Manhattan, and the book’s title grabbed me. Once I cracked it, the writing got me hook, line, and sinker. Rauch had taken social scientific insights to explain the mounting federal government dysfunctionality. Whereas pundits and politicos blamed Washington’s foibles and corruptions on bad people, Rauch showed that the trouble was caused by people within the Beltway rationally pursuing their own interests.I recently re-read this book and think it is absolutely on to something important about Congress, and I am delighted to have Jonathan here to discuss it.Show Notes:- Demosclerosis (National Journal, 1992)- Mancur Olson- Government's End: Why Washington Stopped Working (Public Affairs, 1999)

The topic of this episode is, "what is Congress' role in a contingent presidential election?"Two centuries ago, America had a contingent presidential election. No candidate got a majority of votes, and thus it fell to Congress to decide who got to be president. Might the United States have another contingent election? Certainly it is possible. Four of the past six presidential elections have been very close. In 2020, had 44,000 voters in Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin picked Trump instead of Biden we would have had a tied election, with each candidate receiving 269 electoral votes.So what is Congress’s role in a contingent election? How does that work? To answer these questions I have with me my colleague, Dr. John Fortier. He is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he studies Congress and elections, election administration, election demographics, voting, and more. John is the coauthor of the books After the People Vote: A Guide to the Electoral College (AEI Press, 2020) and Absentee and Early Voting: Trends, Promises, and Perils (AEI Press, 2006). John also hosts The Voting Booth podcast.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 is 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 am your host, Kevin Kosar, and I’m a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank in Washington DC.John, welcome to the podcast.John Fortier:Thank you, Kevin. Pleasure to be here.Kevin Kosar:Let's start with a simple question. Why must a presidential candidate get 270 electoral votes in order to become the president?John Fortier:There's a short answer and a long answer. The short answer is that 270 is a majority of the electors that are possible to be cast.The longer answer is that there was a debate in the Constitutional Convention about how to elect the president, but it came sort of late in the process. And I would say the first thing that they needed to decide is what did Congress look like? And there were all sorts of debates and back and forth before a compromise was reached where essentially the House of Representatives was one that represented the people more broadly. The states would have a number of House representatives based on their population and the Senate would be equal in the states.Now when coming to the Electoral College—figuring out how to elect the president—there were two big principles. One, they had decided at this point that they wanted the president to be elected separately from the Congress. Not like a parliamentary system, not something coming out of the Congress. And secondly, that they were going to reflect that compromise in Congress.And so, the real number of 270, or the larger number of electors that are available, are basically all of the states have two electors for the senators that they have. And then they have a certain number of electors in the House of Representatives based on their, their House delegation and also D.C. votes. That's what gets you the total, but it is something of a compromise coming out of a compromise, and this is a majority of the votes that you need.Kevin Kosar:So it's a constitutional thing, it's not a statutory thing.Let’s imagine a scenario for the sake of illustrating the process: pretend it is mid-November of 2024, and we have Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump tied at 269 electoral votes each, or, that they each got fewer than 270 votes thanks to a third-party candidate garnering a handful of electoral votes. What happens next?John Fortier:You're right to point to two scenarios. One would be that there's a tie in the Electoral College, and in today's numbers that would be 269 to 269. Therefore, no one has a majority or perhaps there's a third party candidate who takes enough electors so that neither of the of the candidates gets to 270. Those are the types of situations which, down the road, are going to get you to a contingent election: one that doesn't go the regular way of counting the electors.Now, in the meantime, there are steps. The first, of course, is the casting of candidates. The votes by the electors themselves. We the people vote in November, but we are ultimately electing these electors. They are going to their state capitals in each of the 50 states in the District of Columbia, and they are casting ballots in mid-December. Those ballots are ultimately then sent on to Congress and are then going to be counted on January 6. This is typically a very simple process where votes are counted and in almost every case other than two in our history someone has had a majority of the electoral votes. If that is the case on January 6, we have an official president-elect. That person is going to take office on January 20. We similarly do the same thing with the vice presidential votes from the electors for the vice president.But if no one person gets 270 electoral votes, then we go into what is sometimes labeled a contingent election. And if all is clear, the House of Representatives will immediately convene to vote for a president, but they'll do so in an untraditional way. They'll essentially be voting by state delegation. Each state has one vote and then each state delegation, which could be made up of a bunch of people are somehow going to have to cast that ballot.Another interesting thing to note—I think that's important—is you do need to get a majority of states, not just a plurality. You need 26 of the 50 state delegations in the contingent election to elect a president. And there are a number of ways in which you might not get that. One possibility is if there are three candidates, another way is that we might have some delegations that are split and that wouldn't count to the total—assuming both those people voted according to party. And you might have a case where somebody has 25 delegations, somebody has 23, and two delegations are split. That's not enough to elect the president, so there's a potential for a deadlock here, and you don't necessarily easily get to the 26.One more thing lurking in the background, of course, is if for some reason that election is deadlocked or doesn't get to a conclusion, the vice president might be facing the same issue, where the vice president does not have a majority of the electoral votes. In that case, the Senate convenes and votes, but you need to get a majority of the senators to ultimately elect a vice president. Perhaps that might not happen either, but it is more likely that it will not divide in the same way.You could either have a vice president who's elected, no president, and get to January 20th and have that vice president take over. It is possible that both of the contingent elections are held up, in which case we'd go all the way to January 20th, and then we'd have to go down the line of succession, meaning the Speaker of the House in today's line would become president.So it's a complicated process, but there is a role for Congress, the House voting very differently than it typically does, and the Senate voting for the vice presidential candidate if there's no majority for either of these in the case of electing the vice president.Kevin Kosar:As a follow up, we have the House having to vote for the president, the Senate having to vote for the vice president. Imagine in the House, we have a state that has 10 representatives—six of them prefer Mr. Trump, four of them prefer Mr. Biden. Does their state then get counted towards the presidential total, or do they have to be unanimous? Do we know?John Fortier:This would be likely only the case where there are three presidential candidates who are being considered. With the 12th Amendment, the House can only consider the top three candidates. They can't consider anybody else. That was important in 1824 when there was fourth major political candidate who couldn't be considered.So, if there were a state that had nine reps and it was four to three to two, the House is at times believed that maybe the four would prevail, but we're not absolutely sure about that. So the House might have a role. I'll leave it at that.Kevin Kosar:You've already indicated that we could end up in a peculiar situation where if the House can't come to agreement, the Senate could—in theory—come to an agreement about who gets to be the vice president. Would that vice president succeed? Would he become the...

This topic of this special episode of the Understanding Congress podcast is a recent book by a former Hill staffer. It is titled Fire Alarm: The Investigation of the U.S. House Select Committee on Benghazi (Lexington Books, 2023)The author is Bradley F. Podliska is an Assistant Professor of Military and Security Studies at the U.S. Air Force Air Command and Staff College in Montgomery, Alabama. Brad is a retired U.S. Air Force Reserve intelligence officer with the rank of lieutenant colonel. He was deployed to Iraq in 2008 and also worked as an intelligence analyst for the Department of Defense.Dr. Podliska is a former investigator for the U.S. House of Representatives Select Committee on Benghazi. He is the author of two books, and that latter experience working on the Hill formed the basis for his book, Fire Alarm: The Investigation of the U.S. House Select Committee on Benghazi.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 is 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 am your host, Kevin Kosar, and I’m a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank in Washington DC.Professor Podliska, welcome to the podcast.Bradley Podliska:Thank you, Kevin, for having me. I appreciate being here.Kevin Kosar:You were an investigator for the House of Representatives. I introduced you as a professor, but you had on-the-ground experience inside Congress as an investigator for the House of Representatives. For audience members who have never heard of that position, what do House investigators do? And how did you get to that position?Bradley Podliska:Investigators are another term for subject matter experts, usually based on their executive branch experience. The role of an investigator is to interview witnesses, request documents, analyze those documents and then provide new information back to the members for the committee so they can conduct their investigation. Now with that said, the titles when it comes to the Benghazi Committee were completely and totally arbitrary. Attorneys had “counsel” in their title and if you were a non-attorney, you either had the title of investigator, professional staff member, or advisor, but we all did the same work. So we were all analyzing documents, we were all interviewing witnesses, and then we were reporting the results to the committee members.In my particular case, I spent 17 years in the intelligence community and the Defense Department, and I knew someone that had known the Republican staff director of the Benghazi committee for over two decades. So I submitted a resume and I was hired soon thereafter, and this is a point I actually make in my book Fire Alarm, which is that you're basically hired on perceived party loyalty. I refer to this as a non-compensatory dimension. In other words, merit is a secondary condition. You might be the best person for a job, but if you are not perceived as a partisan, you are not going to be hired in the first place. This is done is through those personal connections that I talked about. I am not aware of any staff member that was hired on the Benghazi committee that either did not have prior Capitol Hill experience or did not know somebody on the committee itself.Kevin Kosar:And that should—for listeners who have heard some of the other podcasts I have done on the Congressional Research Service, Congressional Budget Office, Government Accountability Office—that is a very different thing from what happens at those legislative branch support agencies. Over there, it is a nonpartisan hiring process, based on merit, and once they are hired, they are tenured for life once they get through their one-year trial period to make sure that they are a right fit for the job. It is a very sharp contrast.This committee that employed you—we will call it the Benghazi Committee, since the title is rather long—was not the same thing as the typical standing committees, the ones that have lasted forever (e.g., the Agricultural Committee or the Armed Services Committee). Where did this thing come from? How was it created and how was it different from the usual Congressional Committee?Bradley Podliska:That is certainly correct. This was a Select Committee and it was established through a resolution for the purpose of investigating a particular issue. The resolution is going to detail the power and authority that a Select Committee has, and—unlike a Standing Committee—it is not limited to a particular subject area.Now when it comes to the Benghazi attack, the government had actually conducted 11 prior investigations prior to the setup of the Benghazi Select Committee. The FBI had conducted an investigation. The State Department and County Review Board had conducted an investigation. There were five House committees and four Senate committees that had conducted investigations.The Benghazi Select Committee in particular was forced into being by an outside group referred to as Judicial Watch. On April 29, 2014, they obtained an email from Obama advisor Ben Rhodes via a FOIA request. And in that email, Rhodes is going to tell Ambassador Susan Rice that she should emphasize that the attacks were, “rooted in an internet video and not a broader failure of policy.” This email forced then-Speaker Boehner—who at the time did not want to set up a Select Committee—to hold a vote on May 8, 2014 to establish the Select Committee on Benghazi. It's going to be given a mandate: nine investigatory tasks that it's going to look to when it comes to the 2012 Benghazi attacks, which boil down to why did the attack happen, how the Obama administration respond to the attack, and did the Obama administration stonewall Congress in its prior investigations.Kevin Kosar:What did this special committee look like? Was it a lot of staff working for it? Was it a sprawling operation or was this a tight-knit group of people?Bradley Podliska:It was a small staff—24 staff members in total: two press secretaries, two executive assistants, security manager, and the interns. Arguably, there was a 25th member, who was actually a reporter. The committee would link information to this reporter and she would publish the results of this. So, you know, de facto 25. However, of this 25, there was only 15 staff members who could be identified as actually being actively involved in the investigative work of the committee. This included the staff director, the deputy staff director, the chief counsel, and 12 investigators, counselors, and advisors.Kevin Kosar:I think it is easy for people—when they hear committees—to think about what they see on TV, which is a bunch of legislators sitting at a dais with maybe a staffer or two lurking in the back, and a clerk tapping out notes of what is going on. But that is not all the people power involved.How often were legislators working with the staff, poring through documents? What percentage of that time were they there doing that hard work?Bradley Podliska:In general, very, very little. Now this did vary from member to member. I actually looked at this in Fire Alarm, so I can say that Representatives Jim Jordan, Lynn Westmoreland and Trey Gowdy were actively involved in investigation. They were attending those witness interviews, and getting briefed on a regular basis. But then we have Rep. Peter Roskam on the opposite side. He only attended four high profile interviews in total. I think I saw him for a total of maybe one staff meeting, so simply not involved.The day-to-day activities of the committee are actually done by the staff. You are going to tee up that information for the committee members and it is up to them on what they are going to do with it. We can get into details on Rep. Roskam’s Clinton hearing, what it looked like in terms of not being prepared. But generally speaking, it varied greatly between the members.Kevin Kosar:It is a good reminder of the old quip by Woodrow Wilson, 120 some years ago, that Congress at work is...

The topic of this episode is “Why is Congress struggling to manage the nation’s finances?”My guest is Representative David Schweikert of Arizona. He was first elected to Congress in 2011. Prior to that, he was a businessman, served in Arizona’s state legislature, and as Maricopa County Treasurer.He is a Republican and holds a seat on the Ways and Means Committee, which writes tax policy. David also is the Vice Chairman of the bicameral Joint Economic Committee (JEC) and co-chairs both the Blockchain and Telehealth caucuses. He is passionate about economics and finance, which makes him an excellent person to ask, “Why is Congress struggling to manage the nation’s finances?”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.Dave, welcome to the podcast.David Schweikert:Kevin, thank you for having me.Kevin Kosar:What is the state of the federal budget? Do we even have one in 2024?David Schweikert:That is sort of the magic question. You have one, but it is not the one you want. In many ways, we are operating on the spending authorization from previous years, which has been renewed over and over. In other words, we are funding things that were supposed to have expired and not funding things that we are supposed to be getting ready to do.It is the absurdity of a dysfunctional Congress. Priorities that go back to when Nancy Pelosi was speaker are still being funded today.Kevin Kosar:Why is that?David Schweikert:I actually have an overarching theory, and then we can get into the nitty-gritty of some of the chaos. There is a general lack of understanding of the level of financial stress that the US Congress and the entire country are under.We play this bookkeeping game in the United States of, here is publicly borrowed money, and here is the money we are borrowing internally. On Friday (February 23, 2024), I believe we hit an all-time record of borrowing about $92,000 a second. Now you hit this sort of constant stress where every dime a member of Congress votes on now is on borrowed money: all defense and all non-defense discretionary.If my math is correct, we are going to borrow almost a trillion dollars of Medicare into mandatory this year. So now, you come back and you get a member who is all excited, saying he is going to cut spending on HHS (Department of Health and Human Services), some other agency, or some part of discretionary, and he is going to save $500 million.That is a lot of money. But when you are borrowing about $7.5 billion a day, many of the fights we are having are over a few hours’—if not just a couple days’—worth of borrowing. It is a way we can look like we are doing something because we are terrified of getting in front of a camera and telling the American public that 100% of borrowing for the next 30 years will be interest, healthcare costs, almost all Medicare, and backfilling the Social Security Trust Fund—if we decide to backfill it.Kevin Kosar:Those are astounding numbers. I think it was on Friday you tweeted out some numbers on the national debt, including a figure of how much we are racking up per second. If memory serves, our national debt is north of $30 trillion. Is that right?David Schweikert:We are currently at around $34.3 trillion right now. You are going to hear apologists go out and say, “We're only $27 trillion publicly borrowed.” The absurdity of that is you still have to pay back the several trillion dollars you have borrowed from Social Security, the Medicare trust funds, the Highway Trust Fund, railroad retirement trust, etc. And you will have to pay back with interest. And because you do not actually have enough tax receipts, you are going to borrow the money to pay back the very money you have borrowed.Kevin Kosar:That’s not good. I would be quite concerned if I had an uncle or somebody who was borrowing money to pay money that he had borrowed.David Schweikert:And I only bring it up because this is my moment to tell those out there in the intelligentsia in Washington, DC who were mocking me and my JEC economists about four or five months ago when we were saying interest will be a $1 trillion—over $1 trillion gross—in the 2024 fiscal year. Well, a couple of weeks ago, Treasury confirmed that.That makes interest the second biggest expenditure after Social Security in your federal government—more than Medicare, more than defense.Kevin Kosar:I recall a book from some years ago by Eugene Steuerle, who has written on and thought about budget matters for a very long time. He spoke of the deficits and debt and the crowding effect it can have, and he called it “a loss of fiscal democracy”, because you just do not have as many choices now because you are locked in so many things.David Schweikert:And in a weird way, it goes back to your previous question. Why don't you have a rational budget? Why don't you have rational appropriations? Why can't you do rational policy? How do you do those things when you now have to go home and explain to your voters that waste and fraud is huge, but still small compared to what we are borrowing? All foreign aid might be five, seven days of borrowing. Or on the left, taxing rich people more.There is a great paper out of the Manhattan Institute from about three, four months ago that talks about if you did tax maximization on everyone earning at least $400,000—maximized every tax: estate tax, income tax, etc. to the point where you got peak tax receipts before you started to lose receipts—and adjusted it for its economic effects, you might get 1.5 or 2% of the entire economy. And for many of us on the right who want to cut things, we can only come up with 1 to 2% of cuts in government GDP. That is a lot of money, but—and I am doing this math off the top of my head—I think we have borrowed about 9.6% of the entire economy so far this fiscal year, in a year when the economy is actually pretty good.So the left's idea only gets you 1.5 to 2% of GDP, and the right’s idea gets you another 1 to 2%, but in a time of good economy, you are borrowing 9.6% of GDP. Do you see a math problem?Kevin Kosar:Yeah, I recall that paper you referenced by Brian Riedl at Manhattan Institute. He is a fearless truth teller, knows his stuff, and unlike you or other legislators, he does not have to face voters so he can give the unpleasant facts of the matter. Some time back, I spoke with a budget expert who reminded me that it was the habit of the US government since the Founding to try to have a roughly balanced budget over the long run. You hit rough times, a war, or other problems that cause you to run deficits, but then you turn around and make some adjustments and get yourself back to where you are supposed to be. That was Paul Winfree, who used to be at Heritage and now has his own organization.That seems to have been lost. Everybody seems to want to talk about running structural deficits as a

The topic of this episode is, “What is legislative effectiveness?”We voters often say that we want our senators and members of Congress to do things, and preferably, the right things. We tend to dislike it when we see people on Capitol Hill who are all talk and no action. And in theory, we should vote out of office those lawmakers who are ineffective.Let me have a caveat here. To be sure, there are some legislators who have turned noise making into a profitable brand, and they do use it to get reelected again and again. But in my 20 years of watching Capitol Hill, it's my estimate that they comprise a small percentage of the total membership. Most people in Congress are, to varying degrees, trying to get things done. So how, then, are we voters supposed to tell which of these legislators are effective and which are not?To help me answer that question, I have with me Craig Volden. He is a professor of Public Policy and Politics at the University of Virginia. Dr. Volden is the author of many publications. Critically for this podcast's purpose, he is the founder and co-director of the Center for Effective Lawmaking, which produces scores of legislator effectiveness that you can find at: thelawmakers.org.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.Welcome to the program.Craig Volden:Thanks so much for having me. It is a delight to join you, Kevin. Kevin Kosar:So let's cut straight to the topic of the program. What is legislative effectiveness?Craig Volden:This is something that I have been thinking about for a long time working with Professor Alan Wiseman at Vanderbilt University. We wrote a book on the subject about a decade ago called Legislative Effectiveness in the United States Congress: The Lawmakers.In that book, we defined legislative effectiveness as, “the proven ability to advance a member's agenda items through the legislative process and into law.” So the key elements of “legislative effectiveness”—proven ability, the agenda items of the member, advancing into law—are in there. Kevin Kosar:So as the title of the book indicates, it really does focus on the lawmaking function of an elected official. Craig Volden:That's right.And here, Alan and I founded the Center for Effective Lawmaking. And we like to stay in our lane—it is not the “Center for Effective Oversight” or “Center for Effective Communication with Constituents.” The Center is about lawmaking: what it takes to move those bills into law in the Congress and increasingly now in the state legislatures. Kevin Kosar:So you mentioned there was a book about a decade ago. In my intro of you, I mentioned the website, thelawmakers.org.When did that launch, and what was the motivation behind putting that out there? Craig Volden:Our book came out in 2014, and there was certainly some academic interest. But there was also some broader level of interest among members of Congress, in the good governance community, and some private foundations. We were blessed enough to get some grant money and to have a conversation about whether we wanted to continue our research on effective lawmaking into the future and, if so, did we want it to be a purely academic exercise or were we interested in maybe more engagement with Congress and with the good governance community? We are both at career stages after tenure where we can combine those—do research and hopefully make that research of use to others.As part of that, we looked into what would be the best way to make that contribution, and decided that setting up the Center for Effective Lawmaking—a partnership between Vanderbilt University and the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy at the University of Virginia—made a lot of sense. We have, for example, two dozen faculty affiliates at a variety of colleges, universities, and think tanks, an annual conference, a working paper series, public release of our scores on thelawmakers.org, a small grant competition, etc.—all of the things on the research end that are really helpful to building up a community of knowledge.On the engagement front, we—along with our good governance partner organizations—generate a new member guide and get involved in orientation materials for new members coming to Capitol Hill. We speak with a variety of organizations that are trying to get people to run for Congress who would be effective once they get there or institutional reformers who are thinking about how to how to make a better Congress.We aim to be grounded in the research, but simultaneously be of use to the good governance community and to Congress itself. Kevin Kosar:Yes. A book is a static creation that cannot be updated unless you release a new edition—you cannot insert new data; you cannot put information on new members of Congress. So a website has got clear attraction to it. Everyone should know also that the website is not behind a paywall—anybody can go take a look at thelawmakers.org.Now put in terms for non-political scientists out there, how do you measure legislative effectiveness? Do you just count the number of laws that a member's name is attached to as a sponsor or cosponsor? What is the method? Craig Volden:We returned to that definition—“proven ability to advance a member's agenda through the legislative process and into law”—to think clearly about how we would objectively measure that.Prior to our work, there was just the counting up of laws. There was some subjective, “Let's do a survey and see who people think is effective.” We were more interested in a holistic measure, so we actually combine 15 metrics in a weighted average based on the number of bills that any member sponsors, how far they move through the lawmaking process, and how important they are in a substantive sense.We track five stages of the lawmaking process. For each member of Congress, how many bills did he or she put forward as the main sponsor? But then, how many of those bills received action in committee—a hearing, a markup, a subcommittee vote? How many of them received action beyond committee on the floor of the House or the floor of the Senate—getting to a vote? How many of them passed their home chamber, and how many of them became law?Since we know that not all of these bills are the same, we downgrade the commemorative bills (e.g., post office naming, minting of coins) and we upgrade the substantive and significant bills—those that get a lot of media attention. These five stages of the lawmaking process and three levels of bill significance combined to 15 weighted average metrics. The things that are rarer—having a law, having a substantive and significant law—then have a much greater weight on one's legislative effectiveness.We are also recognizing that we are increasingly moving from passing stand-alone bills to conglomerations of bills and ideas into law. The omnibus budget bills or the National Defense Authorization Act (the NDAA) often has embedded within it dozens or hundreds of different pieces of legislation. We are now able to now detect that and give credit for it by using plagiarism style software to find the language that is in bills and see whether it appears in laws later on.The data available to us is great such that on our website, we are able to give scores for every member of Congress in each Congress from the 1970s right up through the most recently completed 117th Congress and in 21 different issue areas as well. So somebody wondering, ‘Who's really getting something done on defense or in education or in health care?’ can find answers to that and a lot more on our website.Kevin Kosar:So I have heard your definition of legislative effectiveness, which is a very individual-centered definition. That would imply that a legislator has a certain extent of authority or power to raise their own effectiveness score. Put a different way, are the most effective legislators inevitably the individuals who lead the House of Representatives or the Senate, the power brokers, those who have been in committee chairs forever and always rack up the high score by virtue of position, or not?Craig Volden:We went in with the expectation that we would find that a tenth-term majority party

The topic of this episode is, What is the State of the Union Address, and Why Does Congress Host It?Once per year, the President of the United States comes to the U.S. Capitol to deliver a speech known as the State of the Union Address. Usually this happens in late January or early February, but it has occurred as late as March 1.Both members of the House of Representatives and Senators assemble for this speech, along with nearly all members of the president’s cabinet. Justices of the Supreme Court also are there, as are some other individuals. In modern times it has become quite a spectacle—with television cameras beaming the event to millions of homes.To discuss this grand affair, I have with me Matt Glassman. He is a senior fellow at the Government Affairs Institute, where he studies Congress. Prior to joining the Institute, Matt worked with me at the Congressional  Research Service for ten years. There he wrote about congressional operations, separation of powers, appropriations, judicial administration, agency design, and congressional history.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 D.C.Matt, welcome to the podcast.Matt Glassman:Thanks for having me.Kevin Kosar:Let’s start with the why. Why does Congress host a state of the union address? Does the U.S. Constitution require it?Matt Glassman:The Constitution doesn't require, per se, the State of the Union Address as we know it now, but Article 2, Section 3 does sort of contemplate the idea of a State of the Union message. It says the president “shall from time to time give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union, and recommend to their Consideration such Measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient.”So this idea of the president reporting back to Congress on what's going on in the administration and what he would like to see happen in the legislature is contemplated in the Constitution. So, yes, it is there. It's not required to happen every year; it says from time to time. That's been interpreted as annually, but we don't have a State of the Union message every year.Sometimes presidents don't do it in their last year in office. Sometimes presidents don't do it right after they're inaugurated—they just deliver a different message to Congress. But the idea is rooted in the Constitution and in Anglo-American tradition. It was very traditional for the monarchy to go speak to Parliament as it opened in English history as well.Kevin Kosar:So it's discretionary, which means Congress could—if it chooses—refuse to hold a State of the Union address. One could imagine— in these high partisanship times—a House with a Democratic majority that might have refused to allow President Trump to appear or a Republican majority of the House could refuse President Biden's wish to come and speak.And for president to actually show up for a State of the Union, there's got to be an actual resolution passed, right?Matt Glassman:Yes, in theory. Certainly, for the president to come stand on the House floor and talk, he is going to need either the rules of the House and Senate or a specific resolution from the House and Senate to approve that. The President of the United States does not have any right to be in the House of Representatives or in the Senate giving a speech under the House rules. In the Senate rules, the president currently has floor privileges to the chamber, but it is a function of the rules. There is nothing in the Constitution that would allow the president to come give this message in person.So first, they work out behind the scenes when the president has a date available that works for everybody. Then the Speaker of the House formally sends a letter to the president inviting him to come over. Then a concurrent resolution is passed by the two chambers setting up the joint session where they'll hear the president's address.It's absolutely correct that, that you could imagine animosity between Congress and the president getting so high that there wasn't a State of the Union as we know it. The president could still send over a letter—that was traditionally how it was done for 19th century. During the Trump administration, people saw the possibility of Nancy Pelosi saying, “You're not coming over. Send a letter and tell us what you think, but we're not giving you a stage in our chamber to do it.”Now, of course that didn't happen and there's lots of reasons both politically and normatively that you don't want that sort of partisan animosity to upend the State of the Union, but it's totally plausible and you could imagine a situation where it happened.Kevin Kosar:And I guess with the chambers being presently divided—Democratic control in the Senate, Republican control in the House—if both chambers don't agree, then it doesn't happen. The president doesn't get to come over, right?Matt Glassman:Doesn't get to come over to speak at a joint session that the current resolutions and practice contemplate. But imagine—for instance—that the House Republicans decided for whatever reason that they didn't want Biden to come over for a State of the Union message this year. I think it's totally plausible that Biden might come over to the Senate and deliver his State of the Union address there. Again, that could be filibustered too, in theory—you can imagine situations. But just because you can't get a joint session going in Congress doesn't mean the president can't come over and give an address in one of the chambers. All sorts of combinations are possible.And this is a level of partisan animosity that even Trump versus the House Democrats didn't create, so it would have to be something sort of even more extraordinary than anything we've seen over the last decade in order to break this tradition.Now, could you imagine a president of the United States deciding he was done with these in person things, and just sending a letter instead and having someone in his party read it on the floor the way they did in the 19th century? That's also plausible. That would require less partisan animosity. It would just require a president who saw things differently.I don't think that's likely either. I think most of the time the president believes the state of the Union address is a politically advantageous moment for him and the administration if they do it in person. The letter would sort of downplay it a lot, so I don't see that happening either anytime soon.Kevin Kosar:I suppose one could imagine this trend line where thanks to technological advancements over the last 120 years, it's been easier and easier for a president to “go public.” You could have a president who just decides to sit in the White House, do a speech to the nation that way, and basically call up the State of the Union and send over a piece of paper and be like, “Okay, I'm just not putting up with you people.”Matt Glassman:Yeah, I think that’s totally plausible. I think the trappings of the State of the Union address give it a little more sort of public influence—a little more. Sometimes in Washington, you get a sense that everybody is watching something like this when in reality, very few people are watching—the Monday Night Football game will vastly outdo the Union address in ratings. But I do think the State of the Union address will get a higher audience than a typical presidential address from the Oval Office or from wherever, so the president see that as somewhat advantageous to getting their message out.But you can imagine lots of different ways to deal with the State of the Union address, where the climate in the country around a particular issue makes a president decide to completely upend what we expect from a State of the Union Address and just give an address on one topic. We've seen that on occasion in presidential addresses during moments of crisis. Buchanan's address in December of 1860 at the opening of Congress was almost entirely about the slave crisis. Lincoln's First Inaugural was almost entirely about secession. If the moment was more of a crisis situation, you can imagine presidents giving a very different type of address.Kevin...

The topic of this episode is, “What is congressional capacity, and why does it matter?”As regular listeners know, almost inevitably I have a guest on my show. But this episode, you get just me. The reason is simple: I have been working on congressional capacity for years, and I would like to share my thoughts and hear your feedback.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 D.C.It is probably not news to you that the American public is not pleased with Congress. According to Gallup, fewer than 8 in 10 Americans approve of the job Congress is doing. For sure, part of the dourness is not really about Congress. People are annoyed because what media they see on Congress focuses heavily on conflict and crazy behavior by legislators. The news rarely covers instances of Congress doing good things.That said, it is still fair to say that Congress is not doing well. Most obviously, it has failed to tackle some of the biggest problems facing the nation, like immigration, and often sits back and lets the executive branch and courts wade into these issues. Which is not how our system is supposed to work. So what is wrong with Congress?Many scholars, media, and members of the public diagnose the ills of Congress think in terms of the Three P’s: People, parties, and polarization.It’s Kevin McCarthy’s fault; it’s Chuck Schumer’s fault. If we had better people, we would have a better Congress.Others point to the parties. The Democrats are out-of-touch liberals. The Republicans are proto-authoritarians. The Democrats and Republicans have sorted into ideologically conformist enterprises. Gone are the days when we had liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats.Still others emphasize polarization as the cause for Congress’ failures. We are a nation of red and blue voters and states, so Congress itself is polarized. Gridlock and fighting is the result of Americans being grossly in disagreement with one another.There is some truth to all these contentions. But these explanations have their own shortcomings.Critically, the Three P’s ignore an important unit of analysis: the institution itself.The U.S. Congress is an organization—a firm. Like any firm—a business firm, a school, or a music band, Congress’ performance is greatly affected by its capacity. It can only do as much as it is capable of doing.In the congressional context, capacity can be defined as “the human and physical infrastructure Congress needs to resolve public problems through legislating, budgeting, holding hearings, and conducting oversight.”  Some specific aspects of congressional capacity are its funding, its processes for executing tasks (e.g., how bills go to the floor), its technology for completing its work, how it internally organizes itself, its leadership structure, and its people. So that is the framework I and my coeditors and coauthors adopted. And this lens for looking at Congress has proven illuminating. What you see is an institution that has experienced escalating demands upon it over the past 50 years yet has done little to empower itself to meet the escalating demands.Escalating demandsOver the past 50 years, the day-to-day demands on Congress have skyrocketed. By law, Congress must fund and oversee 180 federal agencies and 4 million civilian and military employees that administer thousands upon thousands of policies and programs affecting the public. Annual spending is about $6.5 trillion, which is seven times higher than it was in 1980 and a dozen times larger than the outlays by the world’s largest corporation, Walmart. The Senate is obligated to review and vote upon 300 executive branch nominees and thousands of nominees to independent agencies, the military, and the service academies (e.g., the US Naval Academy).The immensity of federal activity also leads to more demands from the public. In the average year, Americans—whose numbers have swelled 45 percent since 1980—write, email, or otherwise contact Congress between 25 million and 30 million times per year, which amounts to more than 46,000 communications per legislator. That is to say nothing of the escalating demands from interest groups and lobbyists to meet with legislators.And let me say one more thing about voters: the average member of the House of Representatives has 760,000 constituents. Yet he serves them with a staff of fewer than 20. And the situation in the Senate is even more challenging since there are only 100 senators (many quite aged) who have to collectively serve 330 million Americans.Yet, very little congressional reform to bolster capacity.The last major reforms of the institution took place in the early 1970s. And crazily enough, about 30 years ago the people on Capitol Hill thought the public would be pleased if they downsized the workforce of the legislative branch.Today, legislators have fewer staff (10,000) than they did in 1980 (11,000). Speaking of staff, the average staffer is 25-29 years old, and most of them will quit their jobs on the Hill before they hit 7 years of experience. They can find more pleasant and more lucrative jobs in the executive branch or the private sector.Congressional committees, which are supposed to be the engines for policymaking and oversight, also have fewer staff (3,100 in 1980 and 2,300 today).Congress also has fewer nonpartisan experts working at the Congressional Research Service and other legislative-branch support agencies that help legislators make policy and conduct oversight (from 11,400 in 1980, this figure is down to 7,000 today).But the troubles do not end there. Consider the committee system, the division of labor with the organization. Which committees work on what legislation—that has little changed in the past 50 years. The House, remarkably, select the chairpersons who lead each committee based heavily upon whether they are good fundraisers and dependable partisans. Knowing something about the subject matter and being good at bargaining with members of the opposite party, sadly, are not the sole criteria for selection to these important positions. The way committees hold hearings looks much as they did 75 years ago. Legislators sit on the dais with one party on one side and the other party on the other side. And they give each witness 5 minutes to deliver a speech and then lob questions at them. Then there is the legislative process. How about that budget process? We almost had another shutdown on Saturday. We still might in six weeks. The budget process is 50 years old and has very weak incentives for legislators to complete it in an orderly and timely manner. So they do not.And I would be remiss if I did not talk to you about technology. Newly arrived legislators are often shocked at the sorry state of the technology they have. They are shocked that legislation does not come with “track changes” nor does it typically make clear how it is changing current laws or reference existing programs that serve the same purpose.Take another example. A few years ago, I was talking to the legislator and he said he was astonished that when he showed up to Congress to work in the House of Representatives, he was handed a pager. He was told that this is members of Congress are notified through when it was time for them to vote. His response was something along the lines of, “why isn't there an app for that?”, but he did not get a good answer. On technology, work processes, internal division of labor, etc., congressional capacity is not where it needs to be.ConclusionTo be sure, there is some good...

The topic of this episode is, “Delegates to the House of Representatives: who are they and what do they do?”My guest is Elliot Mamet. He is a Postdoctoral Research Associate and Lecturer at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs. Previously, he served as an American Political Science Association Congressional Fellow. Elliot holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Duke University.Also important to note is that Dr. Mamet spent time working in the office of Washington, D.C. delegate, Eleanor Holmes Norton. All of which makes him a great person to ask the question, "Delegates to the House of Representatives: who are they and what do they do?"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 D.C.Welcome to the podcast.Elliot Mamet:Thank you, Kevin. It's great to be here.Kevin Kosar:Let's start with a really simple question. Listeners are all too familiar with the fact that the House typically has 435 members. But they also have delegates. How many delegates are there to the House of Representatives?Elliot Mamet:Currently, there are five delegates to the House of Representatives. They serve from Washington, D.C., Guam, American Samoa, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and the Northern Mariana Islands. There's also a Resident Commissioner—a non-voting member—from Puerto Rico. So there're six total non-voting members in the House. Kevin Kosar:Representatives in the House come from districts these days. Where and who do these delegates and non-voting members represent? And is represent even the correct term for what their role is?Elliot Mamet:The non-voting members of Congress represent Americans who live outside the several states. Throughout their entire history, they've represented people who don't live in states—whether that's in the federal enclave of the District of Columbia or in territories either on the path to statehood or not on the path to statehood. Today, they represent 4 million Americans. Of that group, 3.5 million live in the United States territories—those people are 98% racial and ethnic minorities—and the remainder are the residents of the District of Columbia who are majority black or Hispanic. So the delegates represent overwhelmingly non-white constituents, and they represent a group of Americans who lack the same citizen rights and lack political equality to those people living in the several states.Kevin Kosar:Now, on this program, there's been a number of episodes where I and a guest have talked about earlier Congresses—the Congresses at the founding, early 20th century, etc.—and non-voting representatives just didn't come up in the conversation. Are they a recent development, or have they always been with us?Elliot Mamet:Great question. The non-voting representative has been a feature since the earliest Congresses. The institution dates back at least to 1784 when a committee chaired by Thomas Jefferson suggested that territories prior to becoming a state would be able to send a delegate to Congress with the right of debating but not of voting.That proposal was codified by the Northwest Ordinance, and the first delegate sent to Congress was James White of the territory South of the River Ohio, who was admitted to be a delegate to Congress in 1794. And since that time—with a single exception—non-voting members have sat in the United States Congress.For much of American history, those delegates represented territories on the road to statehood. That changed in two different periods. First was in 1898 with the Spanish-American War, where the U.S. acquired so-called “unincorporated territories,” which were not destined for statehood, including Puerto Rico and the Philippines. Those territories were given resident commissioners, non-voting members of Congress. And second, in the 1970s, Washington, D.C., Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and American Samoa were given non-voting seats. Even though those places didn't seem like they were on the road to statehood, Congress thought it was a way to incorporate the voices of citizens living outside the states in the federal government. The most recent delegate added was the delegate from the Northern Mariana Islands. And last year, the House Rules Committee held a hearing on admitting a delegate from the Cherokee Nation, which has a right to a delegate to Congress under an 1835 treaty, so that issue is pending before the Congress—the Congress has not acted on that yet. But that just goes to show that delegates have been a feature of Congress since its earliest days and I think have played an important role in representing people living outside the states in our national legislature.Kevin Kosar:First I want to offer a comment, and then a follow up question. The first comment is for listeners: I want to underscore that we are talking about the House of Representatives. We're not talking about the Senate. We've not had these in the Senate.But you mentioned earlier that delegates and non-voting members in theHouse were coming typically as a product of a territory being on the path to statehood. The 70s sounds like it was a qualitatively different situation or motivation and part of it sounds like an idea that if you are going to be Americans, then you have to have some sort of representation within the People's House in the name of fairness. Were there other motives in the mix there? Was it, “If we have them, perhaps this will boost the effort to move down the road to statehood,” or some other sort of factors that came to play?Elliot Mamet:Great question. So I have a project with Austin Bussing of Trinity University on the expansion of the delegate position in the 1970s. And what we find is that the overwhelming driver of that position was racial preferences. In other words, the delegate position was championed by civil rights organizers here on the mainland and advocates in the territories themselves as a way to give voice to Americans living outside the states. It was also blocked on racial grounds from conservative Southern chairmen in the House, for instance. The D.C. delegate position was also deeply tied to racial politics. D.C. home rule is often thought of as a product of the civil rights movement, and the D.C. delegate was a way to give this then-majority black city some sort of representation in Congress. So we argue that racial preferences were central to understanding why the four delegate seats were added in the 1970s.I'll also say to answer your question, Kevin, politics mattered—political entrepreneurship mattered. One example of that was Philip Burton, the famous liberal leader in the Democratic Caucus. He advocated expanded seats for the delegates, both because he thought it was the right thing to do—it comported with ideas of political equality and civil rights—and also because it gave him increased power in the Democratic Caucus. He famously lost his leadership election to Jim Wright by one vote in 1976, and if it wasn't for the delegates, he would have lost it by more. His biographer said if Burton couldn't rule the Congress, at least he could rule the territories. And so he was very focused on territorial seats, both because he thought it was the right thing to do and as a way to gain power within the House.Kevin Kosar:Interesting. They're called delegates and non-voting members. They're...

The topic of this episode is, “How is Congress involved in foreign policy?”My guest is Jordan Tama, a Provost Associate Professor at American University’s School of International Service. He is the author or editor of five books on foreign policy. They are:· Polarization and US Foreign Policy: When Politics Crosses the Water’s Edge, co-edited with Gordon M. Friedrichs (Palgrave Macmillan, Forthcoming)· Bipartisanship and US Foreign Policy: Cooperation in a Polarized Age (Oxford University Press, 2024);· Rivals for Power: Presidential-Congressional Relations, sixth edition, co-edited with James A. Thurber (Rowman and Littlefield, 2018);· Terrorism and National Security Reform: How Commissions Can Drive Change During Crises (Cambridge University Press, 2011); and· A Creative Tension: The Foreign Policy Roles of the President and Congress, co-authored with Lee H. Hamilton (Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2002).Jordan also has written many papers on foreign policy, so it seems to me he is a great person to have on the podcast to help us understand how Congress is involved in foreign policy.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.Welcome to the podcast.Jordan Tama:Thanks so much for having me on, Kevin.Kevin Kosar:Some months ago, our listeners heard me chat with Alissa Ardito about the formal powers of Congress in foreign affairs. We talked about things like how the Senate has the authority to approve treaties and to consider nominees to fill high positions in the State Department, the military, and other agencies that are involved in foreign affairs. We also talked about the fact that Congress has the power to declare war and the discretion to fund and create agencies that deal with matters overseas, like the United States Agency for International Development. And we also pondered in a philosophical manner about how we're supposed to have a representative democracy influencing foreign affairs.But I wanted to bring you in because you're so well prepared, well-studied, and scholarly on the matter of where the rubber hits the road and how the wheels actually turn. So let me start by asking, where should the bewildered citizen first look when trying to understand how Congress is involved in foreign policy?Jordan Tama:Congress is involved in foreign policy in a lot of ways, more than most Americans realize. This includes both Congress exercising its formal powers and Congress exercising influence in more informal ways. I'll say a quick word about both of those areas, the formal and informal powers.Certainly, the formal powers are important, and the most important of these tends to be the power of the purse. When it comes to spending on diplomacy, defense—and defense is half of the discretionary federal budget, so that's huge—and foreign aid, the president simply can't act without Congress appropriating the funds. This gives Congress a power that it exercises every single year, and in recent years, Congress has sometimes challenged the president assertively on foreign policy spending. One example of that was when Donald Trump was president. He wanted to cut the budget of the State Department and the US Agency for International Development (USAID) by a third, and Congress said no and instead maintained the budget at roughly constant levels, which was important in allowing the U.S. to continue playing an active role in the world and providing foreign assistance to other countries. Congress also routinely influences foreign policy by passing legislation that authorizes or mandates foreign policy stances or actions. For instance, Congress has mandated sanctions in recent years on many countries, including Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea. This is an area where Congress tends to be quite active legislatively.But Congress also influences foreign policy through its informal powers, which can include public statements by members of Congress—particularly the more prominent members of Congress like the chairs or ranking members of the key foreign policy committees, or the House or Senate leaders. It also can include trips to foreign countries by members of Congress. It could include private meetings between members of Congress and senior executive branch officials. I'll just say a quick word about a couple of these informal tools.Public statements by members of Congress on high profile foreign policy issues can sometimes be pretty important because they can generate a lot of media attention, and that can shape public attitudes. So one recent example of this is “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) Republicans in Congress along with Donald Trump and some of the MAGA Republicans running for president have been making public statements in opposition to US aid to Ukraine. And this seems to be moving Republican public opinion away from supporting US aid to Ukraine, even though legislatively the MAGA Republicans don't yet have the majority on that issue in Congress. Foreign trips can be important. A lot of members of Congress have gone to Taiwan in recent years, and this can send a strong signal to Taiwan, can infuriate China, and complicate things the Biden Administration is trying to do with regard to China. And then there're private conversations going on all the time between members of Congress and executive branch officials. Sometimes these can be important, but they're not going to be reported in the media. But that sort of thing is happening all the time.Kevin Kosar:One of the things you mentioned is that both individual members of Congress and the committees who have formal jurisdiction have a role to play. And that's interesting because that means you have a president and his foreign policy apparatus, but you also have 535 other people who can be getting involved in these things in one way or another, which—like you said—doesn't create a necessarily clear message all the time for foreign nations to pick up on. They instead may be getting a bit of a cacophony, right?Jordan Tama:That's absolutely right, and on a lot of foreign policy issues, there is no consensus position coming out of Congress—there're just a lot of different positions. When that's the case, Congress is often not going to be able to pass legislation on the issue, so all you get from Congress is a lot of different messages. But those messages can sometimes still be quite important, and there are issues where there is a prevailing position in Congress. So I'll again go back to something during the Trump Administration. Trump was very critical of NATO and he privately talked about the idea of withdrawing from NATO. Members of Congress who supported NATO heard that and they passed a resolution reiterating US support for NATO—even though there are some members of Congress who are on Trump's wavelength on NATO, the majority was not.

The topic of this episode is, “Can Congress access classified information?”My guest is Daniel Schuman. He is the Policy Director at Demand Progress, a grassroots, nonpartisan organization that has worked to improve the legislative branch and to make government more transparent to the public. Daniel also is the editor of the First Branch Forecast, an extraordinarily informative newsletter that you can read and subscribe to at no cost at https://firstbranchforecast.com/.We last spoke with Daniel on episode 8 of this podcast, where he enlightened us on the process by which Congress funds itself. This time around, we will dig into the subject of Congress and classified information.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.Daniel, welcome to the podcast.Daniel Schuman:Thanks so much for having me.Kevin Kosar:I suppose we should start by defining our subject matter: classified information. Pardon the vanity here, but I'm going to refer to a report I wrote some years ago for the Congressional Research Service, where I defined classified information as "information or material designated and clearly marked or clearly represented, pursuant to the provisions of a statute or Executive order (or a regulation or order issued pursuant to a statute or Executive order), as requiring a specific degree of protection against unauthorized disclosure for reasons of national security (50 U.S.C. 426(1))." How's that for clarity?Now, let's make this a little more clear. Classified information, put really simply, is government information that only certain people in the executive branch can see. Is that roughly correct?Daniel Schuman:Yeah, it's roughly right. There are folks inside the legislative and judicial branches who have a right to have access as well. And as your excellent report actually indicated, there're two major ways in which you get classification. One is by statutory authority, which is what we did largely for atomic information. Then there's everything else, which was just sort of made up by the President through executive order. But as a general rule, 99.9%—or something pretty close to that—people with access to classified information are people inside the executive branch.Kevin Kosar:Okay, so a listener might be hearing this and saying, “Wait a minute, isn’t this inherently problematic for representative government? We, the people, elect the people who are supposed to make the laws and the people who make the laws are supposed to oversee the executive branch, which executes the laws. But if stuff's classified and the public can't see it and people in Congress generally can't see it, do we lose accountability? What do you think?Daniel Schuman:We absolutely do. There're two concepts worth separating. One is whether you have the technical right to see certain information, and the other is whether you actually have the means to see it.Members of Congress and federal judges do not need to obtain a clearance. Nor does the President for that matter, which sometimes works out to our advantage and sometimes does not. In theory, members of Congress and the Judicial Branch, the executive orders don't apply to them and they should be able to see any information that they need to be able to see. And by extension—at least in theory—so should their staff. In Congress, that would the personal staff, the committee staff, and the support offices and agencies.But beyond this mechanical problem of do you have or need a clearance, there’s also the issue of, “do you have this need to know?” Members of Congress don't need a clearance because they are constitutional officers, but that is a different question from, “should they be able to see this information?” Sometimes the answer is yes, sometimes the answer is no, but the people who should decide that are the members of Congress themselves. It's the legislative body. They have a fundamental right to oversee the executive branch. The House of Representatives used to be known as the Inquest of the Nation. They do have a right to get answers to all the questions, including things that the executive branch says is classified.But the executive branch plays games here a little bit. The executive branch is very large; Congressional staff are very small. So they will not necessarily provide them the information. There is a long-standing fight where the executive branch doesn't want to hand over information, so Congress has created special committees that are focused on these matters. But then they play a game with those committees as well—“Well, we'll give it the Intelligence Committee but we won't give it to Armed Services,” or, “We're going to classify it at a different level so your staff can't see it.”One final point is that while congressional staff—at least as a matter of theory—don't need to have a clearance, as a practical matter, they do. And the people who conduct the clearance reviews are the executive branch, which is not the greatest thing in the world to have happen. Some of these clearances can happen quickly, some can happen slowly.There's a story that in the 1970s, the executive branch went to Congress and said, “We're going to reduce the number of people in the executive branch with clearances, and you should also have fewer people in Congress.” So the head of the CIA [Stansfield Turner] made a deal with Tip O'Neill and Senate leaders at the time to reduce the number of people with clearances. But they didn't get rid of the number of clearances for people in leadership, of course. They got rid of it for the rank and file. Long story short, the number of clearances in the executive branch went up astronomically, but Congress never changed the way things work for them, so they have great trouble overseeing matters that are happening inside the executive branch.Kevin Kosar:From the perspective of representative government, it is a little jarring that Congress has delegated so much control over classified information, controlled information, and all the other different types of information. They've delegated so much of that to the executive branch. We’ve alluded to this, but presidents file these executive orders, which set the rules on how much information gets classified, how long it gets classified for, etc.Now, who in Congress gets to see classified information on a regular basis? Is it particular committees? Is it any individual who's been elected? Who is it?Daniel Schuman:That's a good question.Again, we have theory and practice. In theory, every member of Congress has a right to see classified matters. But the House and Senate have each adopted rules that compartmentalize this information. So things that relate to the Armed Services Committee, members of the Armed Services Committee—in theory—can see. The committee will also have cleared staff, but now you start getting into principal-agent problems. Committee staff work for the committee chair and not the members of the committee. On the Senate side—in the Senate Intelligence Committee—you have staff designees, so each member of that committee has their own staffer who is hired and fired by them, so they can actually support the members. On the House side, that's not true at all. On the House Intelligence Committee, every member who is on the committee does not have a staffer who works for them, so they’re reliant on committee staff.There is one exception, which is that the Speaker of the House and the Minority Leader get staff designees because they are ex officio members of the committee. So you have large information asymmetries inside the chamber and then as it relates to outside. Classified information is not just shared inside the United States. We share it with our allies, sometimes we inadvertently share it with our adversaries, but there are many people who are allowed to be in access to classified information.But Congress is where there's a real rub. Lots of people who should be able to see it, can't see it. They haven't kept up with the way that clearances have changed. A lot of information that used to be classified as secret way back in the day is now classified to being top secret, and we'll have compartmentalization on top of that.So while interns in the executive branch can often be in access to information that is highly classified, members of Congress and their staff have real difficulty accessing this. And even when they're voting on matters that are highly classified, it's often very difficult for them to get access to that information. And the way access is...

The topic of this episode is, “What does the U.S. Government Accountability Office do?”To answer that question we have Gene Dodaro. He is the eighth Comptroller General of the United States—that means he is the head of the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO). He has held that position since December 2010. Prior to becoming the top dog at this government watchdog agency, Gene held other executive positions at GAO, including Chief Operating Officer. Remarkably, Gene has spent a half of a century at the agency. So, with all that experience I can think of nobody better to ask the question, “What does the Government Accountability Office do?”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.Gene, welcome to the program.Gene Dodaro:It's a pleasure to be with you, Kevin.Kevin Kosar:Let's start at the very beginning. GAO was created a century ago. WhyGene Dodaro:GAO was created in 1921—right after World War I. The government had created a large debt during that time in order to promulgate the war, and there was concern about having a better, more disciplined way to handle the federal government's budget process. In the same legislation in which we were created, the Bureau of the Budget—which is now known as the Office of Management Budget (OMB) in the executive office of the President—was also created, and the very first requirement was put in place for the President to submit a budget annually to the Congress. Then GAO was placed in the legislative branch in order to provide a check and balance on the receipts and expenditures of federal funds and the proper application of those funds to meet the intent of the appropriation legislation for the Congress. So it was an arrangement put in place to provide more fiscal discipline to the federal government's budget process and execution.Kevin Kosar:At that time, GAO had a different name, which to some degree reflected its more limited mission at the time. What was it called back then?Gene Dodaro:It was the General Accounting Office. That's what it was when I first joined GAO in 1973. But at that time even, we were doing more than accounting, but that was our original name—the General Accounting Office.Kevin Kosar:It seems that fundamentally GAO was initially established to deal with a basic kind of principle-agent problem that Congress faces, which is: Congress as the principle passes a law puts money towards achieving the objectives in the law, but then the job of actually spending the money and doing the execution is over in the executive branch.In terms of visibility and understanding, “Is this money going where it should go? Is it being used improperly?”, how is Congress to figure that out other than by hauling executives over and asking them, in which case you're relying upon information they provide. So GAO has the ability to get into the books of agencies, and to follow the money.Gene Dodaro:Absolutely, Kevin. One of the roles of GAO is to make sure that the appropriation laws enacted by the Congress are properly implemented. We audit the federal government's consolidated financial statements every year, and we’ve worked to create an arrangement where the Inspectors General of each major department and agency audit or arrange for independent audits of the books of the financial operations of each federal agency across the federal government. And then we review that work. It's done of course with our methodology, and then we audit some agencies individually, like the IRS for example. We audit all the receipts that they collect for the federal government. We audit the Bureau of Public Debt, we audit the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and then we review all these other audits across government and then issue our report on the government's consolidated financial statements. We also issue legal decisions that anyone has a question in Congress about the proper application of the funds and whether it was done in accordance with appropriation law.So we're very much in the business of oversight. Congress is very resourced by the executive branch, and that's why they need a strong GAO in order to provide that oversight over them, so the system of checks and balances in our government work properly and that the executive branch properly executes the laws that are put in place for Congress. And we've grown over the years to not just on fiscal issues, but also looking at whether or not government programs and activities and everything the federal government does is accordance with the authorizing legislation of the federal government's activities.Actually, only about 10% of what we do now is in the original role that we had back in 1921 in the financial management area. The vast majority is looking to see whether programs, policies, regulations, and other activities put in place by Congress are operating as intended, and to make sure the government is operating as efficiently and effectively in accordance with congressional direction as possible, or whether there's need to make refinements and regulations and to help Congress with their fundamental oversight functions as well as their appropriation and responsibilities.Kevin Kosar:So the listener who surfs over to gao.gov and starts scanning all the great stuff you have there, might see the term "bid protest" and say, "Huh, what is that about?" What is bid protest and what's GAO's role there?Gene Dodaro:We've had that role for decades through the Competition in Contracting Act (1984). Every year, the federal government spends $500 billion or more to procure certain services items, etc. If you're a contractor that bids on a government contract and you don't win and you're concerned that the federal agency or department didn't follow the laws or things weren't properly clear in their procurement process or you think you weren't treated fairly, you can come to GAO and file a bid protest and say you don't think this was followed for the following reasons. GAO will issue an opinion within 100 days as to whether or not we sustain the protest or deny the protest.Sometimes the agencies—once the protest is made and understanding the concerns that are being had—will take immediate action to rectify the situation. And so we have a team of highly skilled procurement experts in law here at GAO in our Office of General Counsel. They'll hold hearings, they'll take documents from the protestors and agencies, and then eventually they'll render a decision. We probably get about well over 2,000 of these bid protests every year. Competition for federal contracts is key. And in some areas there's been consolidation in the industries, which makes the competition a little bit more intense.Kevin Kosar:So I want to talk a little more about something you alluded to already, which is that GAO had this more limited mission 100 years ago, and it's subsequently been expanded. And if memory serves, one of the first expansions occurred around 1974. This was a period when Congress as a whole had just decided to bulk up its power. It was tired of being pushed around by the executive, whether it was President Nixon or President Johnson, and it just started investing in itself. It created a Congressional Budget Office, it created a new <a...

The topic of this episode is, “What is the Congressional Research Service, and what does it do?”The guest of this show is me, Kevin Kosar.  I spent a little over a decade at the Congressional Research Service (CRS) working as a non-partisan analyst and as an acting section research manager. Subsequent to my time at the agency, I was one of the individuals who advocated that Congress make CRS reports available to the public and not just legislators. I’ve also written about CRS and the other legislative branch support agencies, like CBO and GAO.But it would be weird for me to ask myself questions and then answer them, so I asked my AEI colleague, Jaehun Lee, to serve as my interlocutor.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.All right, Jaehun, take it away.Jaehun Lee:Let's start simple. What is the Congressional Research Service?Kevin Kosar:The Congressional Research Service is the rare government agency where its name actually accurately describes what it does. It is a research and reference service for Congress. Congress is its lone client. CRS is an agency in inside the Library of Congress. So it is a federal government agency—not some sort of private sector research outfit—and its job is to support Congress and to do so by providing nonpartisan research, analysis, legal opinions, and just about anything else that Congress may require.You think about Congress, it's comprised of regular Americans—anybody can run for Congress and anybody can become a congressional staffer. And when those people come to Washington DC, they're suddenly saddled with this immense responsibility of governing: they have to make laws, they have to oversee executive agencies, and they have to respond to lots of constituents. They have to receive interest groups who come through their doors, making demands of them related to policy and spending.Nobody who enters that position is fully equipped to handle it. We're all amateurs when it comes to governing, and CRS plays a critical role in helping those folks govern. So if you're a brand new legislator and you're trying to figure out, “How do I introduce my first bill? Where do I even get this thing drafted?” You can call up CRS and they'll say, “Okay, here are the steps. Here's how you should reach out to legislative counsel within the chamber who can actually put your ideas into a template and grind it through.” They can help you on these sort of things. They can teach you the basics of legislative procedure: what's a filibuster? How does a congressional budget process work?They also are a giant resource for facts and nonpartisan—and this is key, nonpartisan—analysis. Everybody in DC in the private sector to one degree or another has an angle, a perspective. Often, especially when you're talking about interest groups or lobbyists, they have specific policy goals and they are going to make arguments to persuade you to pick their policies or to support them. CRS doesn't do that. It doesn't tell Congress, “Here's the policy you should pick.” Instead, it says, “There are your options. All of them have benefits and costs. Here are the benefits. Here are the costs. Now you Congress decide.” That makes them a special resource, and that's why they are so trusted on Capitol Hill because they don't have a skin in the game. They're not pushing an agenda.What do they do? They run training classes to teach you how to be a legislator or staffer. They'll look up facts and figures for you. They write short reports and primers that explain the history of various policies and programs so you as a legislator can understand why these programs and policies exist and how they have evolved over time. They do so much for Congress.Jaehun Lee:How many people work at CRS, and how are they different from staff working in the House and Senate?Kevin Kosar:Presently, a little over 600 people work at CRS, so that makes it a sizable think tank and reference service within the library. But I should put that number within context. About 40 years ago—during the 1980s—CRS had over 900 employees. It had a lot more people power than it does today.How are they different from staff working in the House and the Senate? CRS staff are civil servants, meaning they are hired on nonpartisan objective criteria—the so-called KSAOs: knowledge, skills, abilities and other characteristics. It's a rigorous process with lots of stages where—if you want to get a job at CRS—you have to show you got the education credentials, the research chops, and the various skills that you need to do the job. One of the things that helped get me a job at CRS was the fact that I had spent four or five years reading congressional documents in the course of producing my dissertation, so I was very familiar with the committee processes for doing oversight and policymaking and the larger legislative arena and how it operates.That's different from Capitol Hill. If you want to work for a member of the House, member of the Senate, one of the committees, you're going to be picked with some consideration of your partisanship. That doesn't happen at CRS. Not at all. Not ever. People who work on Capitol Hill, their jobs are very diverse in nature. You have some people who are just devoted to constituent service, whose job is not really to think about policy. You have people who are devoted to working on press and public communications. You have folks who do a whole lot of different things. CRS is a lot more narrow-banded; you primarily have people with academic expertise-type training and experience. And of course, you have the critical core of the reference librarians, knowledge services folks. That's what comprises the agency.Jaehun Lee:Why did Congress create CRS?Kevin Kosar:The story starts at least a hundred years ago—around 1914. To a degree, what we had going on was this recognition of an aspiration of the Enlightenment, which had happened centuries before, which is that reason, facts, analyses should come to bear on governance. Now, we all know Congress is comprised of individuals representing diverse districts and states, and they are very much influenced by parochial interests—people back home—and they're influenced and informed very much by interest groups.CRS was created at a time when there was a broader effort to bring facts, analysis and reason into the legislative process. This got its start in Wisconsin and New York, where the legislatures there got the idea, 'Maybe we should have some experts we can rely upon who can give us the information we need to give us the ability to make smarter decisions and make policy that works better.' To a degree, that—making good policy that works and pleases voters—can help with the eternal goal of a politician getting re-elected. So that's why CRS was created in 1914. It was created as the Legislative Reference Service.To a degree, it built off infrastructure that had been created back in 1800. I mean, why did we have a Library of Congress? Answer: there was this idea amongst the Founders that it would be good if we looked at some books, studied some facts and figures before we legislate, and so that's why the Library of Congress was created initially. But 1914 was a moment where they said, "We should have people in there who are devoted to producing materials that are useful to legislators—such as compilations of statutes about particular topic (e.g., maybe tariffs or something related to agriculture) and having them on hand—and these people should be available at the beckon call of the legislature as needed. That was the original Legislative Reference Service.Fast forward to 1946, Congress was in the process of clawing back power. The executive branch had grown massively during the Great Depression, New Deal, and World War II. Congress in the mid-40s said, "We have to reassert ourselves as the First Branch." And they did a whole lot of things, but one of which was they beefed up the Legislative Reference Service and started requiring it to have real policy nerds on staff in particular issue areas. During the early 70s, the ballooning of the executive branch prompted Congress to reassert itself and it took the LRS, <a...

The topic of this episode is, “Does the Senate still work?”To answer that question, we have Martin Gold, a partner with Capital Council, LLC, a government relations firm in Washington, DC. Marty spent many years in the US Senate working for individual senators, committees, and a majority leader. He also is the author of the book, Senate Procedure and Practice (Rowman and Littlefield, 2018), which explains how the Chamber operates.So, Marty has both an inside view of the Senate and he has a long view of it, which is why I wanted to have him on the program to answer the question, “Does the Senate still work?”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.Welcome to the program.Martin Gold:Thank you for having me, Kevin.Kevin Kosar:The subject of this episode is, “Does the Senate still work?” So it occurs to me that—to answer that question—it might be helpful if I first asked you, “What does a working Senate look like?”Martin Gold:A working Senate is a Senate that is mindful of its constitutional responsibilities, which it has many. Some powers are expressly stated in the Constitution and are unicameral powers, like the power over nominations, the power over treaties, or the power to run impeachment trials. And then a number of other powers that are obviously exercised on a bicameral basis.But I think if you go beyond the text of the Constitution itself and consider the constitutional purpose of the Senate, its purpose is to slow things down and be a more deliberate body. James Madison talked about, in the Federalist Papers, the Senate being a necessary fence against the passions of the House of Representatives. The rules and the precedents of the House and the mechanisms of the House allow it to move very quickly when the majority party wants to move quickly and the minority has very little, if anything, to say about it and it can push things through on a fairly instantaneous basis. It's a legislative juggernaut.The purpose of the Senate is to be the necessary fence against that, to slow things down, and to create a more deliberative process. And when you get beyond the stated powers of the Senate and the Constitution and look also to the purpose of why we have a bicameral legislature, I think the Senate, in fact, does serve that function quite well. It doesn’t serve it in exactly the same way as it may have served it years ago. Senates do change, not only on the basis of the people who are serving in the body but also on the national mood of the country. When people talk about polarization in the Senate. It has to be remembered that the Senate is a political institution and that the polarization in the Senate reflects the polarization of the American people. If the Senate were really out of step with the American people, query how many of those senators would remain senators as the public thought that somehow or other they really weren’t being appropriately represented in the place. So how the Senate goes about serving the constitutional functions—both formal and informal—is different perhaps than it may have been in the past. Nevertheless, I still think it is the necessary fence in the great constitutional structure we have.Kevin Kosar:I want to quote something from the start of your book where you write, “If one were to encapsulate the difference between House and Senate procedure in nine words, they would be ‘Dominance of the offense versus dominance of the defense.’” I think it’s useful for our listeners to get a sense of how is the Senate different from the House. Okay, they play more defense over there. They are the fence you were talking about. Why does it work that way?Martin Gold:I should begin by explaining what that terminology means because I’ve used it for years and years and it remains true. If they got rid of the filibuster in the Senate it might not be so true, but it’s true now anyhow. The House is an institution, particularly as that has evolved over American history, where the rules and the precedents of the institution and the mechanisms of the institution—such as the House Rules Committee—all served to enhance majority party power. Meaning, in effect, that a majority that can hang together, particularly on procedural questions, can not only set up the terms for debate and consideration in the House but can really push things through on a very rapid basis without, again, much accord being given to minority perspectives or viewpoints. That’s dominance of the offense.The Senate is exactly the opposite. The rules of the Senate and the precedents of the Senate and the absence of mechanisms such as a rules committee all serve to enhance the power of minority parties, minority coalitions, and individual senators. So it is a place where the defense really can dominate the institution. It isn't to say that the defense can just stop anything it wants to. It is to say that things take longer to get through. Sometimes they can be stopped and sometimes the defense can use its power to modify the procedures by which things will be considered. But the bottom line of it is: not only is the Senate different from the House in obvious ways such as the sense of the length of terms of the members and the way we have two per state equality of membership (as opposed to proportionality) or the just general size of the body, it is also different in terms of how it exercises its power under the Constitution.It's one of the things in the Constitution that people tend to overlook. The framers of the Constitution did not write the rules of the Senate, nor did they write the rules of the House of Representatives. They wrote no rules at all. They, however, gave both senators and representatives the power to govern themselves however they saw fit. And so it can be argued that the rules that have developed in the House over the course of time serve the constitutional purposes that the House is supposed to serve and that the rules of the Senate—as they have evolved over time—serve the constitutional purposes of the Senate. Again, the framers did not arrange for those things. Senators could have structured rules however they wanted to structure them, same with representatives. But the evolution over time, I think does, in fact, serve the broad constitutional purposes that you have in a bicameral legislature. Otherwise, you could just have a unicameral legislature.Kevin Kosar:Since you mentioned rules, I figured I want to just drill down a little bit more on this. Every two years we have elections and we get a new Congress. As part of that, the House of Representatives will review its rules and they’ll vote to alter them. And this is typically a partisan exercise where whichever party has the most people gets to rewrite the rules. Senate doesn’t work that way, does it?Martin Gold:The Senate does not because 100% of the House of Representatives is freshly elected every two years. Therefore, the rules of one Congress do not carry over to the next Congress. There is, I should say, substantial similarity between the rules of one Congress and the rules of the next. The rules of the Pelosi Congress and the rules of the present Congress are substantially similar—although not identical because the Republicans, when they came in and had that highly-publicized rules controversy wrapped around the election of Kevin McCarthy as Speaker, did make some changes to the last set of rules that Pelosi had had as Pelosi and the Democrats made changes to the Ryan rules that preceded them. So while there is vast similarity, there are also important differences. The Senate, however, is a continuing body. Two-thirds of the senators continue over from one election to the next. It is supposed to be that way.You could have otherwise had the framers elect the entire Senate all at once. But the framers divided the Senate into three classes, making sure there was always a quorum of the Senate present so that if you replaced every single senator who was up for election in a particular election cycle, you would still have stability in the chamber. And because of that, the rules of the Senate do carry over from one Congress to the next. They are sometimes changed, but when Mitch McConnell was the majority leader, for example, there was not a single time in his tenure as leader where he proposed a rules change. And Chuck Schumer has been the leader now going on three years, he hasn't made changes either. The last time they formally amended...

The topic of this episode is, “Why is congressional oversight important, and how can it be done well?”To help us tackle this subject we have Elise Bean. She is the Director of the Washington Office of Wayne State University’s Levin Center. Elise spent 30 years in Congress working as an investigator for Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) and for the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Elise handled investigations, hearings, and legislation on matters involving money laundering, offshore tax abuse, corruption, shell companies, and corporate misconduct. She is also the author of the book, Financial Exposure: Carl Levin's Senate Investigations into Finance and Tax Abuse (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). So who better to have on the show to discuss the topic, “Why is congressional oversight important, and how can it be done well?” 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, D.C.Welcome to the program.Elise Bean:Thank you for inviting me, Kevin.Kevin Kosar:All right, let's begin with something very fundamental. What is Congressional oversight, and who in Congress can do it?Elise Bean:Well, Congressional oversight is when members of Congress, on a committee or individually, ask questions and try to find out: What are the facts? Is a program working? Is there really an abuse? If you want good government, you need good oversight because things change over time and what worked at one time doesn't work at another. That's what Congressional oversight is.Kevin Kosar:Yeah, we should dig into that a little bit. I think often Americans don't like to see politicians fighting amongst themselves, yet the legislative branch, last time I checked the Constitution, says that Congress makes the laws, Congress decides where the money is to be spent, but they're not the ones who actually do the execution of the law. They're not the ones actually spending the money. So does that seem to imply some sort of constitutional obligation to engage in oversight?Elise Bean:So the Supreme Court has said that that's exactly true, that if Congress can't do what it's supposed to do under the Constitution, unless it has some facts… I mean, wouldn't it make sense—if you're going to change your program or decide where money's going—that you have informed decision-making based on the facts? In fact, there's a 1946 law that requires all Congressional committees to do oversight within their areas of jurisdiction, and that's because they want you to find out what the facts are before you start to pass laws, give out money, and approve nominations.Kevin Kosar:Right. And as you hinted at earlier, when Congress says, "Hey, here's a new program we authorized and here's some new money for it, go out and do well, executive branch," sometimes the executive branch doesn't follow Congressional intent. Sometimes a program may not work as it was hoped. So Congressional oversight, we shouldn't just view it as kind of a response to some bad thing reported in the newspaper where Congress has to react, right? Rather, it sounds like it's something that they should be kind of engaged in as a matter of course.Elise Bean:Well, there are two kinds of oversight. One is what you were just talking about, routine oversight, where you look at the laws within your jurisdiction, see how they're working—and God knows a lot of times they don't work well—and what can you do to improve them. Other times there's a scandal, there's an earthquake, there's a hurricane, and Congress reacts to that scandal or to that event, tries to find out what's happening, and—maybe—how Congress can help.Kevin Kosar:Yeah, I mean, it seems inherent to the concept of representative and responsible government that you've got to have that oversight component there. Otherwise, you get money spent on things that don’t work, and the tap will never be turned off and taxpayers will be aggravated, to say nothing of scandals not being addressed and bad behavior being punished—or at least curbed so it doesn't repeat.Now, some listeners of this podcast, when they hear the words Congressional oversight, they might flinch, in part because there's a tendency amongst the media to show oversight happening in the form of a hearing with a member of the dais whose face is getting red and they're getting all worked up—it's a political conflict, often a left and right conflict. That stuff happens, but that is certainly not the whole of Congressional oversight. There's bad oversight. There's good oversight. What does good oversight site look like?Elise Bean:Well, to me it's when there's a good-faith effort from both parties to try to find the facts. It's a complicated world out there and getting consensus on the facts is sometimes really hard. But when you do it, it creates a foundation for change. And when you think about it, Congressional oversight is all about affecting change. We want to improve laws. We want to address abuses. It's about fixing problems. But Congress isn't the executive branch. They can't prosecute anyone. They can't throw them in jail or fine them. It's all about policy changes. And we're talking about policy changes, good oversight—to me—involves people who have really fundamentally different worldviews. That way, they challenge each other. They look at the facts differently. They look at more facts, and the end result is something that is more thoughtful, more thorough, and certainly more credible if you have both parties involved.Kevin Kosar:Yeah, and that brings up the question of oversight and what it looks like. Again, it's forgivable that folks might think, oh, oversight, it's hearings. It's the guys on the dais asking the questions, the witnesses at the table, and that's oversight. But that's just part of a much bigger process. What does that overall process look like? What are the steps of that process?Elise Bean:You're absolutely right, Kevin. The hearing is sort of at the end of the process. When you start it, it's first fact-finding. What happened? Get documents, do interviews, maybe go visit some sites, visit victims, and find out what happened to them. That's the fact-finding phase. The second phase is you write it up because if you don't write it up, nobody knows what you ever found out. So that's often a report or a memo or a letter writing up what you found. Then you have the hearing. If it's important enough, you have a public hearing. But then there's a fourth stage which is as important or more important than the rest, which is doing something about the problems that you uncovered. So it's a very long process, four stages. That can take a year. It can even take two years.Kevin Kosar:Yeah. Going back to the beginning of the oversight process, how do you pick what to oversee? When I think of Congressional committees and the sheer breadth of their jurisdiction, they often have multiple agencies, and every agency has tons of programs and et cetera, et cetera. Where to begin? How do you choose amongst all these competing priorities for oversight? How do committees do that?Elise Bean:Well, that's the most important issue of all because you can't do a lot in a year. I mean, the most you could do is maybe once a month, and then you don't have any time to really investigate. The really best investigations, you usually do two or three a year. And to pick those, what usually happens is the staff makes some suggestions to the chairman of the committee or to the ranking member of the committee, and they decide out of that selection what they're going to do. So you think about, what promises has that member of Congress made to their constituents? What are some of the biggest problems in the subject area they have? Has there been a scandal or has there been some event that really needs to be addressed? And you have to just make some pretty hard choices about what your priorities are.Kevin Kosar:I can see that. It would have to be a negotiation amongst a number of competing goods with different criteria thrown into the mix. You mentioned the first stage of once you pick something, getting the facts. And you can do that through interviews and requests for documents. How easy is that, whether it's reaching out to the executive branch or the private sector? In your experience, how responsive do they tend to be when you say, "We want these documents from this file or this person, or we're insisting these guys come over and talk to us, not in a hearing, but just talk to us as staff." How tough is that?Elise Bean:It's not easy. I'll just tell you that. It's a very difficult process because you're...

The topic of this episode is: “What are the job descriptions of representatives and Senators?”To answer that question, we have Dr. Casey Burgat. He's the director of the Legislative Affairs program at the Graduate School of Political Management at George Washington University. Dr. Burgat also has had stints at the Congressional Research Service, and he worked with me back when I was at the R Street Institute. Recently, he and Professor Charlie Hunt authored the book, Congress Explained: Representation and Lawmaking in the First Branch. Casey has been studying Congress and how it operates for years, which makes him a great person to ask the question, what are the job descriptions of representatives and Senators?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.Dr. Casey Burgat, welcome to the program.Casey Burgat:Thanks for having me.Kevin Kosar:It's not unusual for Americans to grumble about Congress and to complain that these elected officials are not doing their jobs. But last I checked, there're no official job descriptions for the positions of representative and Senator. So in thinking about what these guys are supposed to be doing, I think we should probably start with the US Constitution. It certainly has some clues.Casey Burgat:Yes. Always, always start with the Constitution. It takes us back to the Founding. It sets the framework for how we're supposed to think about a lot of these institutional questions. This is one of them.The Constitution does provide at least some clues, but definitely not as many as we assume are in there—especially in regards to the actual duties of Senators and representatives. It does give eligibility requirements of who can serve: you have to be 25 years old to be in the House, 30 in the Senate, seven years a citizen, etc. But after that, it gets surprisingly and oftentimes frustratingly sparse in terms of what individuals are supposed to do once they're elected. We have to look more broadly and deduce our expectations of job descriptions.We can take some hints about what the individual members are supposed to do based on what the Constitution says that Congress as an institution—and the individual chambers—are tasked with. So Congress-wide, all legislative powers are granted to Congress. It's right there at the top—Article I, Section 1—no debate about it: Congress is the legislative branch. Then, they itemized what other powers Congress is supposed to have: to declare war, coin money, and—Kevin, I know this is for you—establish post offices, etc. We know that they're supposed to do that. Then each of the chambers has its separate roles: the House deals with revenue legislation, impeachment, etc. The Senate has advice and consent on treaties and nominations, and exclusively conducts the impeachment trials that the House sends them. Because Congress and the individual chambers are constitutionally tasked with these types of duties, if they don't do them, no one else will—at least in theory; in practice, we know it's not always that simple.So given that the Constitution gives them these duties—both as an institution and as individual chambers—we can at least somewhat deduce that they are part of their constitutional job descriptions. But that's about where the Constitution runs out of the details on exactly what these 535 powerful members are supposed to do every single day. In fact, the vagueness of the Constitution is intentional. The Framers explicitly punt on a lot of these specifics that we often assume they've detailed for the individual members and Congress as an institution.For example, the Constitution says things like “each House may determine the rules of its proceedings,” so it's left up to the members to decide how to operate and organize. This means they have to decide things like what—if any—committees to have, how to elect leaders (if they will have leaders), and how to process its business through procedures, especially in regards to legislation. Despite us thinking that it's an unbending, unmovable, and slow-operating institution, Congress has changed these things over time to suit the wants and needs of its membership.But getting back to your original question about the frustration, this ambiguity and letting Congress figure out the details of the job on its own and changing things as they see fit has absolutely contributed to the public’s frustration with Congress. It's not like throwing a job posting up on Indeed of “Senator” and “representative.” It's up to all of us to decide exactly what these powerful people should be doing with their powers and their hours. And when we don't agree, we inevitably get frustration because you can't be everything to everyone at the same time. This is nothing new and has been a constant challenge for members since the beginning.Kevin Kosar:Americans also tend to have conflicting feelings about representatives and Senators. On the one hand, they'll say, "You guys just need to get things done." On the other hand they'll say, "Why aren't you deliberating more? Why aren't you bargaining?" And then on another hand, they'll say, "You need to stick to your principles and quit doing all that compromising and horse-trading." The very nature of the body of Congress itself—that it pulls these people from all over the place with different interests, and throws them into a big soup bowl together—seems to create its own theoretical problems with the expectations we should have for members.Casey Burgat:Absolutely. We are full of contradictions and it really helps to admit it. Then we can get past the lazy answer of what they're supposed to do—the bumper sticker version of all this stuff—and have conversations about what Congress is supposed to do and what's possible given all those contradictions baked right into the system.Every few months we'll see a survey of Americans saying the vast majority of us—90% of us—say we want Congress to get something done, find common ground, compromise on things, etc. That's the lazy version. When we get down to the individual incentives of who these people represent, the thing you might want to compromise on is the thing that I deem as a principle that is uncompromisable. And in fact, the minute that my representative compromises on an issue like that, I'm looking for someone else to take the job.We see this baked into campaign platforms where candidates will say this explicitly. "Send me there to stop them. Send me there to stop President Trump or President Biden.” Then this message is spun as standing up for principles. This just gets to the conflict that we've had since the beginning. We take all of these constituencies—all of these collective action problems—elect some people to be our voice, and say “Good luck.” Then we blame them when we don't feel represented on the one thing that really matters to us. It is just an incredibly hard job that leads to unrealistic expectations, which—in turn—lead to frustration that is easy to capitalize on. It's an impossible job, and I'm sympathetic to the members who have to navigate this every single day.Kevin Kosar:You just mentioned something that's important, which is that we have Senators whose job it is to represent whole states, whereas you have representatives who are supposed to represent districts. At the same time, they both come to Washington, DC and they're supposed to address matters of national concern—not merely local or parochial—which is another tension within there.Let's set that aside and go to another thing that pulls at us when we think about the role of representative and Senator. Your book mentions these classic terms from political science—viewing the job of the legislator as being a <a...

The topic of this episode is: "What is the congressional debt limit?"To answer that question we are once again speaking with Philip Wallach. He was the very first guest on this podcast, where we pondered why we need a Congress. Phil is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and the author of the book, Why Congress, which was published by Oxford University Press in 2023. Phil also has written previously about the debt limit, which makes him the right person to ask: What is the congressional debt limit?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.Phil, welcome back to the program.Phil Wallach:Thanks for having me back.Kevin Kosar:Let's start by getting clear on what we're talking about. There are deficits and there is debt. How do these two things differ?Phil Wallach:It's a stocks versus flow kind of thing. Each year, we have spending and revenue—in almost all years in recent memory, we have more spending than revenue. That creates a deficit. So the accumulation of all of the past deficits is the debt. So the debt is our total of all the spending we've done minus the revenue we've taken in, and it is now officially north of $30 trillion.Kevin Kosar:So when the Treasury needs to issue more debt, it's got to sell bonds—basically, these IOUs that say, "Please give us money that we can spend now, and we'll pay you back later." Is that essentially what's happening when we're taking on more debt?Phil Wallach:Yeah. A bond is a legally obligating instrument, and debt put out by the United States government is considered the lowest-risk kind of debt instrument in the world. So the government is not just saying, "If we feel in a good mood, we'll pay you back,” but, “we are legally obligated to pay you back with interest." That's very valuable to investors. And of course, United States bonds form the gold standard of collateral used not only in this country but around the world in the global financial system.Kevin Kosar:So this leads us to an important point, which is that an executive agency called the US Treasury that is issuing debt, but it doesn't do it simply at the behest of the President. The President can't say, "Well, let's just issue as much debt as we want on this day of the week or during this year." We have a law that limits the amount of debt; that is, our legislature has a role here.We keep finding ourselves—with some frequency—in a situation where Congress will run these yearly deficits where they're spending more than the revenue coming in, and the debt grows and grows. Then, when we hit this legally mandated limit, Congress has to vote to pass a new law so that the limit is set higher so that more debt can be issued.So let's just turn back the clock. This practice of setting a debt limit by law: why do we have it, and when did Congress first start doing it?Phil Wallach:Okay, so go back to the Constitution. Article I, Section 8 lists Congress's powers and pretty clearly gives the power of the purse to Congress. So Congress is responsible for making decisions about spending and taxation, and it's also, therefore, responsible for making decisions about financing deficits.  Through the 19th and early 20th centuries, whenever the Treasury wanted to sell debt, Congress would specifically vote to approve every single bond issue. Now, it didn't really think very hard about the way it did that; the Treasury Secretary pretty much came over and said, "This is what we'd like," and Congress generally said, "Okay, that sounds all right with us." But it was approving every single bond issue. Now we come to World War I, and the federal government was spending money like never before, and Congress started to feel like this was too much of a burden for it to have to approve every single bond issue. So instead, in 1917, it put in place a ceiling, a limit. So up to this amount, Treasury can issue bonds as it sees necessary, and then once it hits that amount, it's going to have to come back to Congress. Congress will have to raise the ceiling, and the process involves the legislature again. But they put in place a dollar limit, and periodically raised that.Somewhere around World War II, it took a modern statutory form. And ever since then, Congress has been raising the debt limit periodically, because we keep accumulating more debt such that if we didn't raise the limit, the Treasury would find itself unable to service the debt (i.e., unable to meet all of the obligations that Congress has incurred).Kevin Kosar:Is the United States unusual in having this debt ceiling policy where the legislature has to enact an increase to the debt periodically?Phil Wallach:Yes. It's not a normal thing for countries to have. In most countries, debt issuance seems to be thought of as a ministerial function of the Treasury Department, and not something that the legislature involves itself in so much. This is another aspect of America having an unusually powerful legislature that gets involved in more activities than legislatures in most countries do. But it is fairly clearly rooted in the Constitution that the US Congress has to be involved.Now, it could just raise the limit really high. It could put in some sort of default rule that as long as we've passed spending laws, we're automatically authorizing the Treasury to sell enough debt such that we can spend all that money that we have voted in approval of. But we've never done that yet, so the debt limit has been the way we've coped with this congressional involvement for the last century.Kevin Kosar:It's worth pausing here to point out that the function of spending seems to have three big legislative steps. Congress passes a law to authorize spending on a program, an agency, etc. Then, Congress passes another law to appropriate the actual dollars that the executive agency can spend. But if the aggregate amount of those dollars exceeds the amount of revenues, you're going to have to take the next step to borrow. And in the olden days, as you referenced—a hundred years ago and earlier—Congress would just regularly pass these things ad hoc.  But that became such a frequent thing, it probably made very little sense to spend that much time on the floor of both chambers pushing those bills through. So they just set a higher number and put it there. That still is a third step. So instead of doing this third step every few weeks or every few months, every year or so we have to go through this debt limit situation.Phil Wallach:And it's not always so newsworthy, because sometimes neither party is all that interested in fighting over it—Congress puts through a raise of the limit in a bipartisan manner, and life goes on as before. So it doesn't have to be a moment of drama.  But ever since the standoff in 2011 especially, there's been a lot of attention to the debt limit, and a lot of sense that this is just a fight waiting to happen every time we come up against it.Kevin Kosar:We often hear the demand by some elected officials—presidents, members of Congress, etc.—that they want to "clean debt limit increase". What do they mean? And are these "clean increases" the norm?  Phil Wallach:So a clean increase would be if legislators introduced a bill that was very short and very simple, and all it did was raise the amount of money that the debt limit is set at. Or something they've resorted to in recent years is: instead of choosing an amount, a dollar amount, they suspend the limit until a certain date. And that's a different way of getting at the same thing of saying, “We're going to be able to issue the debt we need through this time period instead of up to this amount.” And so Congress has sometimes passed bills that are more or less “clean increases.” I wouldn't say that's the norm, though. Most of the time, whoever is not in the White House uses debt limit raises as a chance to hold the White House's feet to the fire a little bit on spending that they don't like, or on debt accumulation generically. If you go back to 2006, for example, the Democrats gave the George W. Bush administration a bit of a hard time on raising the debt limit then. It wasn't a big fight, in the end; the Republicans and Democrats got together and passed it in the end. But for example, Senators Joe Biden and Barack Obama, both voted against that increase as a

The topic of this episode is, “What do congressional committees do?”My guest is Dr. Maya Kornberg. She is a political scientist in the Elections and Government Program at the Brennan Center. Dr. Kornberg leads the center’s work related to information and disinformation in politics, Congress, and money in politics. Maya also is the author of Inside Congressional Committees: Function and Dysfunction in the Legislative Process (Columbia University Press, 2023.) All of that makes her the perfect person to answer the question, “What do congressional committees do?”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, D.C.Dr. Kornberg, welcome to the podcast.Maya Kornberg:Thank you so much for having me. I’m excited to be here.Kevin Kosar:Since its earliest days—more than two centuries ago—each chamber of Congress has had committees and used them for lawmaking, oversight, etc. Why committees? Maya Kornberg:As you noted, committees have been essential institutions in Congress since its inception. One of the reasons for this is that Congress is a big organization with an enormous number of issues to handle. So committees act as sub-organizations that can help Congress perform specific duties. Congress delegates work through its committees, so they also serve as indicators of how Congress is apportioning responsibility and resources. And in terms of power within the chambers, committees help to decentralize power, and encourage and give space to more legislators from both parties to be active participants in the policymaking process. Kevin Kosar:You note in the book that committees have four core functions: deliberation, education, theater, and personal connection. What do you mean by these terms?Maya Kornberg:These are the core functions that legislative scholars have identified as key roles of committees in legislatures, generally.First and foremost, scholars identify committees as a deliberative forum within Congress. Woodrow Wilson once wrote that “The House both deliberates and legislates in small sections. It delegates its legislative and deliberative functions to stand in committees.” And what does deliberation mean? As you and your co-authors touch on in Congress Overwhelmed, deliberation is really about weighing the different aspects of a question and reasoning through the different causes and consequences. This is a crucial part of any policy formulation, and something that committees handle in Congress.Traditionally, committees are where research is brought in and technical learning takes place, and that’s what I mean by education. Congress is a body in which many lawmakers have to legislate on specialized topics that they don’t have any training in. Committees give them the space to learn—they are a place where lawmakers gather information and educate themselves about specific policy areas.  Committees are also one of the major bipartisan institutions in an increasingly partisan Congress, so they form a space for members of Congress to cultivate personal relationships with each other and with the witnesses. Members from both parties come together on a regular basis in committees for hearings and other regular work. And this forms a space then for potential personal connection between members.  In my book, I tell the story of a particularly notable friendship that came from a committee, and that is the friendship between longtime senator, Dick Lugar, whom I interviewed before he passed away in 2019, and then-senator, Barack Obama. Republican Senator Lugar told me that Barack Obama was frequently one of the only members left in the committee when Senator Lugar was chairing, and would sit there and ask questions and be engaged. Also as a result of their joint membership in the committee, they went on several trips together—what’s known as CODELs, or congressional delegations—and were really able to maintain a friendship and fruitful working relationship across party lines for many years after, that originated in their joint membership in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. So that’s what I mean by personal connection.Finally, committees can act as what Woodrow Wilson terms “the theater of debate upon legislation.” One of the staffers that I interviewed in the book explains that sometimes the purpose of a hearing is to give a public forum to discussions that largely happen behind closed doors. This public function of committees allows members to publicize issues. It’s really a public-facing function and it can help them to mobilize support for different policy issues that they might be working on.So these four functions—deliberation, education, personal connection, and theater—are core universal functions of committees. And my book then explores under what conditions each of these functions might be most likely in Congress today.  Kevin Kosar:Since you’ve teed up the question nicely, are the committees of today still doing all four of these things: deliberating, education, theater, personal connection? Does it vary? Does the mix—the kind of cocktail of these four functions—change from committee to committee?Maya Kornberg:As I note in the book, there’re certain parameters that lead a hearing or a committee to be more likely to fulfill different functions. Today, after a series of developments over the past several decades, committees are—by and large—less autonomous, less specialized, and less deliberative than they once were as a result of decades of having staff cut and having their power taken away and usurped by party leadership.Still, committees can serve these functions. I note in the book that, in particular, the educational platform of committees can be most likely—and this might seem counterintuitive—the further away you are from a vote or from talking about a specific piece of legislation. I spoke to members who explained that the closer you are to a vote, the more likely you are to descend into partisan tribal warfare.But in terms of what I call agenda-setting and general education about topics—this is really important because these members of Congress still need to be legislating about all of these very specialized topics—committees can still serve this general education function. I tell the story in the book, for example, of the genetic engineering hearing in 2015, which was at the very beginning of genetic engineering science and development of that science in the United States. Members talked about this hearing as one in which—at the very beginning—this policy issue becoming something that they would need to regulate, fund, and legislate about. They were able to learn about this because it had not yet been colored by partisanship in the way that many issues are. I also note in the book that personal connection can still occur, but under specific circumstances. As we know, Congress is becoming increasingly partisan. Frequently, the only time that members have to connect with each other is within the rancorous halls of Congress because many of them don’t live in Washington; whereas before the mid-90s, they did and they had plenty of opportunities to form personal connections. One of the things I talk about in the book are opportunities like field hearings, like congressional delegation trips that committees facilitate that allow members to socialize with each other and form personal connections outside of Congress.So again, these kinds of hearings and committee work might allow for more personal connection than we see in traditional scripted and partisan hearings within the halls of Congress. Similarly, the committee hearings that we see in Congress with all the cameras all teed up might actually be the place for more theater. But when they’re out on the road—with for example, the Agriculture Committee’s Farm Bill Listening Tour, listening to farmers—there might be more space for actual interaction and less theater.So, again, in the book, I explore when each of these is most likely, arguing that they all take place in Congress, but we can learn from when they take place in order to think through what reforms can help facilitate more of these different functions in Congress...

The topic of this episode is: “Partisan polarization: Is it crippling Congress?”My guest is Frances Lee. She is a professor of politics and public affairs at Princeton University and a top scholar on Congress. She is the author and co-author of many articles and books on Congress, and has written for popular publications including the Atlantic magazine and the New York Times. Most recently she and James Curry published, The Limits of Party: Congress and Lawmaking in a Polarized Era (Chicago 2020), which analyzes and addresses the subject of this episode—polarization in our national legislature.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, D.C.Professor Lee, welcome to the podcast.Frances E. Lee:Thank you, Kevin. It's great to be here.Kevin Kosar:Let's start by ensuring that we all are on the same page: you, I, and listeners alike. When we speak of Congress, what do we mean by the term partisan polarization?Frances E. Lee:Partisan polarization has multiple meanings and I think that's probably why you began with this question.A layman's or a dictionary definition of polarization means division into two sharply contrasting groups. Congress is clearly polarized in this sense. Congress sees much more partisan conflict. Conflict in Congress breaks down more reliably on partisan lines than it did throughout most of the 20th century. We routinely see votes that pit 90% or more Democrats against 90% or more Republicans, a partisan divide that's more deep and predictable than we used to see.However, by partisan polarization, political scientists often mean something more technical. In its most rigorous form, the concept of polarization is grounded in spatial theory. It rests on a theorized choice space in which policy preferences are ranged on an underlying continuum from left to right. In this sense, parties become more polarized as the preferences of members become more distinctly bimodal, and as the two parties’ modes move farther apart from one another.It's far from clear that parties are polarized in this second sense. The problem is that the issues at stake in congressional politics are diverse. On some issues, the congressional parties have moved closer together and on some issues, they've moved farther apart. There's little doubt that the post-Trump parties in Congress are farther apart on immigration than they were. There's a growing partisan divide opening up on transgender issues. Clearly, the parties are farther apart today on issues relating to the COVID pandemic than they were in March 2020.But on other issues, the parties have moved closer together. Republicans and Democrats differ less on trade policy today than they did in the past, with the Republican Party having moved more toward a more protectionist stance under Trump. The budget deficit and government spending became less partisan during the Trump years as both parties came together around an unprecedented response to the COVID pandemic. Trump presided over a significant reform of criminal justice policy. It was bipartisan. Republicans and Democrats in Congress have worked together on foreign policy a lot over the past decade from sanctions on Russia to the huge Ukraine aid package under Biden. There's reporting in the lead-up to the congressional elections of 2022 that the Republican Party has given up on the issue of Obamacare repeal.So have the parties moved farther apart or are they closer together? I have no idea how to characterize the parties in an absolute sense. It depends on what issue you're talking about. I'm not sure how you go about averaging across all the diverse issues on the congressional agenda to say that the parties are farther apart ideologically than they used to be. I think it's clear that Republicans and Democrats are more partisan in their voting behavior, but what that means in terms of ideology is contested.Kevin Kosar:It sounds like one temptation we have is to associate stark differences in voting behavior with the legislators themselves believing very different things rather than the possibility that some are simply voting strategically, voting with their crowd, or for other reasons—perhaps getting through the primaries or something. Is that right?Frances E. Lee:That's right, absolutely. Of course, nothing produces more reliable partisan voting than questions of procedure—who's going to control the floor agenda? The majority party supports its leadership in controlling the floor and the minority party contests it, and that continually produces party line voting. But what does that mean in terms of the party's larger ideological agendas? It's not clear. It's this contest for power over the agenda.There’s also positioning related to elections. Elections are zero-sum, so you can cast votes with an eye toward the stance that you want to portray your party as having on an issue, rather than expecting those votes to have any effect on public policy.Kevin Kosar:Right. We shouldn't confuse symbolic action in some cases with the essence of the matter and assume that people have lost negotiating space that may actually exist.I feel like those of us who pay attention to Congress have read so many articles—of one sort or another—which say we are a way more polarized Congress or a way more polarized nation than ever before, or at least in...

The topic of this episode is, “What are the Duties of the Speaker of the House of Representatives?”My guest is Paul Ryan. Paul Ryan was the 54th Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. In office from October 2015 to January 2019, he was the youngest Speaker in nearly 150 years.Prior to becoming Speaker of the House, Paul served as the Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. He also served as Chairman of the House Budget Committee from 2011-2015. In 2012, he was selected to serve as Governor Mitt Romney’s Vice-Presidential nominee. Paul was first elected to Congress at age 28 and represented Wisconsin’s First District for two decades. 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.Speaker Ryan, welcome to the podcast.Paul Ryan:Kevin, good to be with you. Thanks for having me.Kevin Kosar:Article 1 of the US Constitution states, "The House of Representatives shall choose their Speaker and other officers." How does the House pick a Speaker these days?Paul Ryan:The way it works is the majority party in their conference—we call the Republican body the Conference, the Democrats call theirs the Caucus—will have a vote as to whom they nominate for Speaker. That's a plurality vote—the person who gets the most votes wins. Kevin McCarthy won that, which means he is to be presented to the full House on January 3rd when a new session is sworn in and he has to get—or she, in Nancy [Pelosi]'s case—has to get 218 votes. The Democratic Caucus will also vote on who they nominate to be the Speaker. If [Pelosi] stays, they'll probably nominate her. If not, I don't know, Hakeem Jeffries or somebody like that.A candidate must win a majority vote—218 votes—on the House floor when the new session is sworn in. Then that person is sworn in by the Dean of the House—the longest serving member—and that Speaker becomes the newly-installed Speaker for that new session of Congress. Then that person swears in all of Congress. That's how it gets started.Kevin Kosar:The Constitution says the House shall have a Speaker, but it doesn’t provide a full job description. In the earliest days of the Republic, the Speaker’s duty was to preside over the chamber—to be the guy who runs the meeting. Times sure have changed. What are the duties and responsibilities of the Speaker today?Paul Ryan:Yeah, they're endless and infinite in some ways. It is not like it was in the old days. It's a bigger Congress—there are more states than they envisioned and the government does so many more things than it used to do in the first Congresses.You're basically the chief executive officer of the legislative branch. You oversee the entire legislative branch, so technically you have something like 12,500 employees. In a way, you’re like the mayor of the legislative branch, overseeing the legislative council, the law enforcement agency, the power plant, the janitors, etc. And you have deputies that run all of that—whom you appoint—such as the Architect of the Capital, the Sergeant of Arms. So, there's an administrative side of being Speaker of the House that most people aren't familiar with. But you're also the head of the legislative branch. As far as the work of legislating in the House itself, you basically control the flow of legislation. You oversee your party's selection of memberships of committees and chairmanships of committees, and through your leadership team, you determine who does where, when, and how, more or less. That is, you determine what bills get scheduled to the floor. You work with the committee chairmen to make sure that they get their bills to the floor. You set the floor schedule and through the rules committee—which is controlled by the Speaker—you determine the way in which debate occurs: Are there amendments to be made, and in what order? What kind of a rule? Is it an open rule, where any amendment can be made in order, or is it a structured rule, where only certain kinds of amendments can be made in order? And by controlling the debate, you can control the outcome of that debate by virtue of the changes you allow or do not allow to happen to the legislation.It's basically like an air traffic controller where you're doing the ground control, which is the committees—what are they doing and when are they doing that. And you're also doing air traffic control—what bills go to the floor, what bills get passed, etc.You also have to negotiate with the Senate when they have legislation. In that case, you appoint the negotiators in conference committees to negotiate the reconciliation of legislation with the Senate, but sometimes that bubbles up to you and you become the primary negotiator with the Senate. Then you work on getting the White House lined up to pass something. So you operate negotiations—House to Senate, Congress to the presidency—and how the House curates and builds its legislation. That's the legislative side of it.In the modern era, you’re a political person as well, because you're the head of your party for your body—for the House Republicans in my case or House Democrats in Pelosi's case—and you're probably also the top fundraiser for the party. So when you're not in the Capital legislating and managing the legislative process or the legislative branch, you're out fundraising for your party to make sure that members have the resources that run their campaigns. So it's three things: a political job, a managerial ministerial job, and then it's a legislative job.  Kevin Kosar:And I guess implicit in what you are describing is that, presumably as a Speaker, you have to spend a lot of your time bargaining amongst the factions within the party because there's always intra-party disagreement.Paul Ryan:Every day. I like to have a known schedule. I like to have a method for my week, so we would start the beginning of the week with a conference with all of our members.Every morning would include a meeting with my leadership team to see what the day's going to look like, what the week looks like, and what the long term looks like. On Wednesdays, I would have lunch with the various heads of the various factions in the House Republican conference. So I stayed very close with the leaders of all the various factions—the Tuesday Group, the Study Committee, the Freedom Caucus, and people in between. And I'd rotate various people in so that I had constant lines of communication with the various factions in our conference and in between those as well because there's a big diaspora of different types of views and temperaments within just the House Republican Conference. So the key for me was constant communication.Early on, we would craft a jointly assembled agenda where we all collaborated and worked on creating an agenda that we believed in, which we usually assembled in our retreats or different processes. Then we would go effectuate and execute our agenda, and while we were effectuating our agenda, maintained constant communication to make sure everyone was playing the role and getting constant feedback and input from people. And it's a consensus-driven process that you had to dry. It is not a dictatorial role. People think the Speaker just dictates. Not at all. You have to forge and bring consensus to get people to unify on a common cause so that you can pass legislation because not everything's going to be bipartisan. Some of it's going to be partisan—e.g., tax reform. So that's the day-to-day thing you do, and you have to manage all of these coalitions.Kevin Kosar:Before television became common in the United States, Speakers of the House were relatively unknown to 99% of America. That too has changed. Is communicating with the public, to be the voice of the majority of the House, also consume a lot of time?Paul Ryan:Yeah. You do two press conferences each week as Speaker of the House, one at the beginning and end of the week. So it's just open for the press to shoot at you and ask you questions. But then you have a lot of strategic communication in between, which is pretty much TV, radio, and print—but mostly a lot of TV—interviews. I think that’s part of the reason I got the job of Speaker—I actually didn't look for the job, it found me.I don't know if you know the story well, but John Boehner left because the Freedom Caucus was going to invoke this motion to vacate, and he left to spare the members of that vote. The next guy in line—who is now the next guy in line, Kevin McCarthy—at that time didn't have the votes to get it. So the consensus came to me to do it. I was the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee at the time.I think one of the reasons I became the consensus candidate that all the factions in Congress agreed to me was partly because I was a policy guy and a policy maker, and they agreed with the policies that I had been pushing through the budget and ways means...

The subject of this episode is, “Are elections fueling polarization in the House of Representatives?”Polarization in Congress is a well-documented fact of life. This is particularly true on high salience issues, such as immigration and abortion. Yet the tendency of legislators to reflexively oppose policy ideas offered by the other party has bled into other, more prosaic issues. For example, in late 2021 an infrastructure bill became a bone of political contention. Republicans who voted for it were denounced by their colleagues. Nevermind the fact that the legislation might actually do good for these legislators’ constituents.Why are there so many hard left and hard right members of our national legislature? To help us think through this issue, my guest is Andrew B. Hall, a political scientist at Stanford University. Dr. Hall has published many articles on elections and representation and is the author of Who Wants to Run?: How the Devaluing of Political Office Drives Polarization (Chicago, 2019).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.Andy, welcome to the podcast.Andrew Hall:Excited to be here. Thank you.Kevin Kosar:If I had a dollar given to me every time somebody said, “Congress is polarized because Americans are polarized,” I'd have enough bucks to take a really good vacation. The idea that America has become the land of red states and blue states, with right wing rural folks and left wing city folks, has become pretty popular. You see references to it in the press all the time. So that prompts the question—we have a polarized Congress: are voters the reason we have a polarized Congress?Andrew Hall:It's a very reasonable question. I don't think it has nothing to do with it. I do think it's true that some Americans have become quite polarized. Obviously, we see it play out with things like the rural-urban divide that you're talking about. But I think that there's a really important fallacy that a lot of people don't always think through when they think about Congress polarizing, which is that there's absolutely no guarantee that any change or non-change in people's opinions, will map into what congressional candidates or members of Congress say or do, because there's this intermediate step which is really important—who actually decides to stand up and run for Congress? If the people who decide to run are just systematically different from what the voters at large want, then unfortunately, what people want or what they think or how they think or how polarized they are may not have any reflection in what options they're actually presented to vote on.So—to get back to your question itself—I think it's of course true that people are polarizing to some degree. I think it's vastly overstated. And when you look into evidence on most salient policy issues, it turns out that there's a large chunk of Americans caught in the middle, who find both parties unpopular, and who don't like the positions being espoused by lots of salient political officials on either side. But the people who actually run for Congress are polarizing super dramatically, so the voters are not being given a lot of opportunities to vote for the types of people they would prefer, who might actually be more moderate.Kevin Kosar:Well, if this is not a bottom up phenomenon, if it's not the case that the average American has a really intense view one way or another on all sorts of issues, like updating the Electoral Count Act of 1887—on which we had a party-line vote in the House the other week. If that's not the issue, a polarized public driving everything, then is this about the political parties? Are the political parties simply recruiting candidates who are on the extreme left or extreme right?Andrew Hall:I don't think that aren't part of the story. I think parties are driven by the kinds of people who are willing to spend a lot of time on party-related activities. And those people are not going to be very representative of the public at large. They're going to be particularly passionate people, who might have more extreme views, and so they may want to go out and recruit candidates who fit their viewpoints. That certainly could be part of it. The thing I always like to emphasize though is that the word “party” carries a lot of connotations that don't make sense in the US system. The parties in the US are extremely weak. They don't really have a lot of carrots or sticks to offer people who are running or who have decided to run. For example, one of the most important things—that not everyone knows—is that anyone can run for office and say they're a Republican or a Democrat. The parties are feckless to define what it even means to be a member of the party because of this completely open system that we have.If you look to parliamentary systems in Europe, the party can actually define who's on the ballot and even—in some places—order them or kick someone off if they're not reflective of what the party wants. That's just not how our system works. So when we think about the parties running candidates in the US, they just don't have that much to offer. They can beg people to run for them and they can certainly link them up with resources that help them run—such as campaign finance or other types of advising—and that definitely makes a difference, so I don't want to say they do nothing. But at the end of the day, they both struggle to convince people to run, because it's not a very appealing job.They're also powerless to prevent people from running, which is—of course—most famously what we saw with Donald Trump, who was in no way a Republican, and who the Republican Party at large did not want to run in 2016. And yet look what happened. But more generally, they're not that powerful at determining who runs. So, if we want to explain the set of people who do run, especially for Congress—which is a lower salient office compared to president—we need to look to other explanations besides just party recruitment.Kevin Kosar:If the parties are not these powerful entities that can screen out people, at least not in the US context, what about the primaries: this process by which you have a low turnout election, often in the summertime, where if you're a Democratic voter you get a ballot and it lists only Democrats. And if you're a Republican voter, you get a ballot that lists only Republicans. And if you're an Independent or something else, you either can't vote or you have to declare yourself for one party or another, which is frequently the case. Is this creating a self-selection process? Are primaries driving extremism in Congress and, therefore, polarization?Andrew Hall:I definitely think primaries are part of the story, and the reason I think they're part of the story is that I think there's a general phenomenon in American politics across a wide range of contexts where more extreme people care more and are more willing to show up, do stuff, and speak loudly. If we look across the entire system—whether it's showing up at local city council meetings, tweeting relentlessly about your political views, or voting in a primary—we've created a system where, at almost every phase of every important part of the process, these small groups of people with extreme views are massively empowered relative to the rest of us, which I think is hugely problematic. I think primaries are a good example of this, where the set of people who turn out is a very, very small slice of the electorate. The turnout rates are remarkably small and it seems like they do have very different views, on average, from the rest of us. That can create and complicate incentives. One thing it does—which is related to what I think is going on—is it might give a more moderate candidate pause in thinking whether to run for office or not because they might not look forward to having to survive a bruising primary against someone who might be more naturally popular with this small primary electorate.On the other hand, if I had to rank order the different parts of the system that are giving advantages to more extreme people, I wouldn't rank primaries as high as conventional wisdom might suggest. That's because primaries are really complicated, and there's a lot going on in primaries that's not ideological. If we look across the country, we can find lots of cases where, in fact, the more extreme person—the more culture wars-type person, whether on the left or the right—isn't actually the one who succeeds in the

The topic of this episode is, “Are members of the House of Representatives legislating in the dark?”My guest is James Curry. He's an Associate Professor and the Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Political Science at the University of Utah. Professor Curry studies how contemporary legislative processes and institutions affect legislative politics, with a particular focus on the role of parties and leaders in the US Congress. Importantly for this episode, Jim is the author of the book Legislating in the Dark: Information and Power in the House of Representatives (Chicago University Press, 2015). So who better to help us understand the relationship between information and power in Congress?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.Welcome to the podcast.James Curry:Thanks for having me.Kevin Kosar:Power in the House of Representatives: it flows from various factors. For example, being in a power position like the Speakership, or take another example, being a great fundraiser. These things can bring power, but these aren't the only factors. Possessing information also conveys power. How so?James Curry:So what I've found in my research is that knowledge or the possession of useful information empowers members of Congress for at least two reasons.First, Congress needs to be able to write laws that achieve the ends that they want to achieve. Congress obviously has staff to help with this process, but it also helps members of Congress to know the ins and outs of policy and the political dynamics at play. It helps the members to know these things themselves. And if, as a member of Congress, you have this kind of knowledge, you're more likely to be looped into the process of developing a bill. If you're recognized as an expert in a policy space, you're also more likely to end up with a seat on a relevant committee that oversees these policies. So altogether, knowledge, expertise, and information can get you—as a member of a Congress—a seat at the table shaping policies early in the process.Second, Congress also needs to be able to build coalitions to pass the things that it has written. Again, knowledge and expertise are going to be necessary and are going to empower those who have it. Most members of Congress don't have the time to become deeply informed and knowledgeable about more than a couple of policy areas. In other words, lawmakers tend to specialize—following certain policies really closely, working in those policy areas over and over again, but remaining relatively uninformed about most everything else. However, they still need to vote on everything else, which means they need to learn enough about what's happening on these other bills in these other policy areas so that they can vote the way that they think they should vote. So, what most members do is they turn to their colleagues who are seen as knowledgeable, who have information, who are seen as experts, and follow their lead on what they should do on these bills.So combined, this means that lawmakers who have knowledge, information, and expertise about a policy are going to—first—be more involved in developing relevant legislation and are—second—going to be able to sway the votes of their colleagues to support that legislation. On a grand scale, this means that lawmakers with more knowledge and information are going to have more power. And, as it turns out, these are often the same people who hold other institutional power positions like party leaders and committee chairs. These folks are typically not only well versed in a subset of policy issues, but they also have large staffs at their disposals to provide them with additional expertise. This enables their involvement in policy-making at high levels and gives them greater sway over their colleagues’ votes in trying to get them to support or oppose whatever is being considered on the floor that day.Kevin Kosar:That makes perfect sense, and it comports with something I was looking at not too long ago—House rules—and it was impressive to me just how complex the rules of the chamber are. And upon seeing them, it brought to mind the old quip from John Dingell, who was in Congress for a very long time—a powerful member from Michigan—who said that "If you write the bill, but let me write the rules, I'll screw you every time." By virtue of knowledge of procedure, he could get things done and get them done to his liking that other people could not.Now, 50 years ago, Congress beefed up its core of legislative branch support agencies. This was a direct response to the “imperial presidency,” where presidents had tons of agencies to draw upon, tons of experts to draw upon, and the presidency was being viewed by Congress as having gotten too big for its britches—it was pushing the First Branch around. So Congress did a whole lot of stuff 50 years ago, including creating the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and turning the Legislative Reference Service into the Congressional Research Service (CRS)—a full-blown think tank—amongst other actions. Yet here we are 50 years later and—by your assessment—these entities have not been enough. Why is that?James Curry:I guess the important questions are for whom are they not enough and for what are they not enough, because these are really important entities for Congress. They provide the institution as a whole with a ton of expertise, with a lot of resources at its disposal that it can and does use to learn about policies, dig into details, develop ideas, and figure out where they're going to go in the long term. I think they also helped Congress push back against an executive branch that is just rife with knowledge, expertise, and resources.However, what CRS and the CBO cannot do is help lawmakers in the moment when they have to decide on whether or not to support a bill. CRS and the CBO are not built to provide each member with rapid responses to specific questions about a bill that's on the floor in that moment. Often, CRS cannot finish studying a proposal and its implications before it passes. Ideally, CBO provides a fiscal score to a bill before it's considered, but that doesn't always happen either, depending on the speed at which the lawmaking process is going. So, these resources are important, but they can't help bridge the gap between what the rank and file know about what's going on and what party leaders know about what's going on. It doesn't change that gap that exists between the lawmakers who are in the know, who have plenty of resources and expertise at their disposal—including CBO and CRS when it's developing legislation—and what the rest of the membership knows when it's now asked to decide whether or not to support or oppose this thing.Kevin Kosar:It sounds like part of what's happened is that there has been a loss of what we call regular order by which a bill gets introduced and goes to committee and maybe subcommittee, then follows a deliberate process, and then eventually gets put on the calendar. Frequently what we see today is something that looks a lot different—what Barbara Sinclair called Unorthodox Lawmaking. And one feature that you flag in your book is the omnibus bill as contributing to this information and power asymmetry situation.James Curry:Yeah, we’ve recently seen more and more laws being passed in these large, thousands of pages-long omnibus bills that start out as something that's focused on maybe one specific major policy debate, but get expanded to include—and have attached to it—all sorts of other things that Congress has been working on. The challenge for a typical member of Congress is getting this massive bill—usually not long before it's going to be voted on in its final form—and having to figure out what to do. Beyond this, these omnibus bills are more often getting negotiated behind the scenes—negotiations among top party leaders and maybe some top committee chairs who are brought into the fold—in which they figure out what can and can't be done, what is going to be included, and what's going to be excluded from this bill so that leaders on both sides of the aisle can agree to pass this thing.But then it's brought back to the rank and file and presented to them by leaders who were the only people in the rooms where the negotiations were happening. They're the only people who can say with any credibility, “Oh, well, this is the only deal we could get, this is the best deal we...

The topic of this episode is, “Who was the meanest man in Congress?”My guest is Timothy J. McNulty, who taught journalism at Northwestern University and spent more than thirty years at the Chicago Tribune. During his years as a journalist, Tim was a national and foreign correspondent, and also an editor. He logged untold hours paying attention to Congress and its many characters. And importantly for the purposes of this episode of the podcast, he is the coauthor of a terrific book, The Meanest Man in Congress: Jack Brooks and the Making of an American Century (NewSouth Books, 2019).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.Welcome to the podcast.Timothy McNulty:Thanks very much for having me.Kevin Kosar:Thank you for being here. Jack Brooks served in Congress from 1952 to 1994. He was called a number of names: the snake killer, the executioner, and the meanest man in Congress. Why?Timothy McNulty:Well, each one had a very set reason in Congress. “The snake killer” was him using an old Texas term when he went after President Ford's early budget. He said to reporters then, “Well, the best time to kill a snake is when it's young.” So that's what Ford did. “The executioner” is what Nixon told some of his aides, because Brooks had been really a driving force in the Judiciary Committee. Peter Rodino was the head of it, but he was taking it very slow, and Brooks wanted to speed things up. So that's what bothered Nixon. And then “the meanest man” was something that Brooks had a great deal of pride in, because his questioning on the Government Affairs Subcommittee struck fear into a lot of bureaucrats and corporate leaders who were called to testify, because he didn't blanch at any kind of power or anything else, whether it was Marine Corps generals or heads of General Motors or government department heads. He just went after them. So he got that “meanest man” title and wore it proudly.Kevin Kosar:Yes, yes. Brooks himself, as you detail in your book, was a Marine, and he was in World War II. He saw many intense things and he endured a lot, both in his upbringing and before he got to Congress. But the listener might be wondering: if Brooks was so mean, how come voters reelected him every two years for four decades?Timothy McNulty:Well, of course, he looked after his district. No matter what other public pronouncements or other publicity he got, he was never that interested in being anything other than a congressman. And people recognized that. He of course brought home a lot of government money, especially for infrastructure down in Southeast Texas. But he also had his staff be very aware of constituent concerns, whether it was someone who's a mother who wanted her son to be able to come home because of an operation that she was having— He took care of things and made sure that his staff answered every letter, every message. And that's why I think— He also was a populist. This is in a very different era that you alluded to: a populist, a Democrat, in Texas! That was something that was seen as a great achievement: to be that strong and to have both conservative ideas and also very advanced or progressive ideas. He also was able to kind of meld his constituency. It was business leaders, but it was also union leaders. That was important in Southeast Texas, there on the border with Louisiana. So [he had a] fairly unique ability to get together members of the community, no matter what their title or station.Kevin Kosar:Yes. You mentioned his knowledge of his district. One of the particularly interesting aspects of his district is that it was in Texas, but it had a significant number of Black citizens in it.Timothy McNulty:Yeah.Kevin Kosar:And Brooks, unlike so many other Southern representatives, was progressive on racial issues and had a big role in pushing forward civil rights acts. Is that right?Timothy McNulty:That's the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and others. He was very definite about that. He made sure that the Black citizens in his district were equally represented, and he refused to sign on to any pronouncements from other Southern Democrats who were for segregation. He was one of the few that refused to sign those kind of pronouncements. His district was one that encompassed everything from a town where Blacks were not welcome after dark to union leaders in Louisiana and in Southeast Texas and Beaumont, where they were in charge of a lot of the companies and the unions. So he was able to kind of meld all these different groups together by their self-interest.Kevin Kosar:Yes, yes. It's a remarkable thing, considering how intense the backlash towards desegregation was, to be able to keep that balance and fend off any primary challengers who might go after him. That was quite something.Timothy McNulty:He learned a lot in the Marines. He learned a lot in his first decade as a congressman. He was also in the Texas state legislature. Sam Rayburn was a mentor, and Rayburn talked about [how] the first ten years in Congress, you're kind of learning how things work. Then after that you become effective. And Brooks paid attention to his mentor. He also was a friend on the Senate side of Lyndon Johnson, and Johnson also as president. They were very close. So he kind of put together things from his life, both in the Marines and the state legislature, and then in his early days in Congress, to become very effective. And it was also, by the way, across the aisle. It wasn't as if they were saying, “I'm only going to work on Democratic issues.” He had strong friends on both sides. For instance, Bob Dole one time was meeting with the Democratic leaders in the Senate and the House. And they made an agreement—which is the art of compromise that Congress is lacking now—but they made an agreement, and Dole had told the Democratic leaders that he wanted it in writing. And they asked, “Well, you want a letter from Brooks?” And Dole said, “No, I don't need it from Brooks. His word is good.” So that's the way he was considered on the Hill.Kevin Kosar:Yeah. That gets to an interesting insight that your book offers on how to be an effective politician. One thing, certainly, that Brooks had was doggedness. The book relates the story of how he wanted, back when he was a state legislator, a community college to become a full-blown university. He had to fight and fight and bargain, and the bill died at least one time, if not more. And he kept at it until he got it done. Another thing that he seemed to really get was that, yes, politics is about principles, but it is about people, trust, and wants. In his career in the military, you describe how Brooks positioned himself as a guy who was able to procure things that were wanted—like boots or whiskey or socks—and was able to build support amongst those he served with. Is that right?Timothy McNulty:Absolutely. He learned that you appeal to people on what they need. So whether it was—as you said, one time, he traded things that another unit might have needed for fifty pairs of boots that his company needed. Or, a shipment of whiskey came in on a ship, not identified as whiskey, but he was able to figure out how to get that on land and on the islands in the South Pacific, and made good use of it. And it wasn't for himself. He was doing it and learning how to manage things for people's own self-interests. Part of his appeal was that it wasn’t like he was eager to make money or to get higher office. He was able to just say, “Here's what we need,” and figure out how to negotiate it. And the idea of compromise, he recognized—I think what Sam Rayburn and Lyndon Johnson also realized—that in order to be effective, you have to be willing to compromise.Kevin Kosar:That's right. Speaking of Rayburn, who was speaker of the House for a very long time, and Lyndon Johnson, who became majority leader in the Senate before vice president and president: Brooks spent time with them, which had the advantage of not only conferring some of their power upon him—the fact that these two fellow Texans would listen to Brooks about certain things—but also he learned process. That's another key aspect of being an effective legislator: figuring out how the wheels turn on Capitol Hill. Is that right?Timothy McNulty:Absolutely. He realized that when he was— For instance, there was a sign, as simple a thing as a sign on a reservoir in Texas, and he wanted it named after Rayburn with Rayburn's full name. And

The topic of this episode is, “What role should Congress have in foreign affairs?” My guest is Alissa Ardito, the author of the book Machiavelli and the Modern State: The Prince, the Discourses on Livy, and the Extended Territorial Republic (Cambridge University Press, 2015). She has had a rich and varied career in governance, and she has thought deeply about legislatures and policymaking. Dr. Ardito has served as a general counsel at the Congressional Budget Office, and as an attorney advisor with the Administrative Conference of the United States. She received a Ph.D. in political science from Yale University, a J.D. from the University of Virginia School of Law, and a B.A. from the University of Virginia—all of which makes her wise in the ways of statecraft.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.Welcome to the podcast.Alissa Ardito:Thank you, Kevin. It's great to be here.Kevin Kosar:Let's start our inquiry with the Constitution, the foundation for our system of national self-governance. What constitutional powers does Congress have over foreign affairs?Alissa Ardito:Well, actually, if you look at the text of the Constitution, Congress has quite a lot of power over foreign affairs. The issue is that they are littered in various different parts of Section 8 and Section 10 of Article 1. I'll just mention a few. Actually, the first is Clause 1 of Section [8], tax and spend—the “Power To lay and collect Taxes…pay the Debts, and provide for the common Defence.” Congress also has the power to regulate commerce with foreign nations; establish uniform rule of naturalization; define and punish piracies on the high seas; the great war power of Section 8, Clause 11, “To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water.” And then it even moves in, arguably, to everything about raise and support armies, provide and maintain a navy, regulate and call forth the militia.And then you get into—I think [it’s] fascinating—I would argue that Section 9, Clause 7, “No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law,” also constitutes a foreign affairs power. Then you get into all the limitations in Section 10 on states. The real concern was at the time of the Framing that they were exercising foreign relations independently. And then you can even move into Article 2 and the powers in the Senate, the treaty power and advise and consent on nominations as well. So, taken together, that's actually a pretty robust set of powers.Kevin Kosar:Yes, and these powers were, as you alluded to, scraped away from executive authority and scraped away from state authority and centered in the first branch: Congress. Now, Congress's authorities, we should probably also mention, go beyond those explicitly enumerated in the Constitution. Obviously there are a whole number of statutes that assign powers to Congress over foreign affairs, such as the War Powers Resolution, but additional legislative powers exist beyond that. For example, senators and members of the House can use their positions to raise the salience of issues, such as when Congress allows leaders of foreign nations to address it, or when legislators engage in legislative diplomacy and make trips abroad to meet with heads of state. There seems to be so much that Congress can do in foreign affairs. Is that right?Alissa Ardito:Yes, there actually is a lot that Congress can do. Even the statutes that allocate powers to Congress—they're implementing those broader textual powers in very specific ways to effectuate them. Even the War Powers Resolution, depending on one's views—one could argue it's unconstitutional, but I think the consensus is that they are. But, moving along, Congress has informal powers it can use. Again, it can pass resolutions—Senator Graham did one about the sale of certain jets to Ukraine. It can use ceremonial functions such as hosting dignitaries. Also, holding hearings are specific ways in which, through exercising oversight, Congress can be influential and can raise the salience of certain issues.And I think, not to take too much of a contemporary example, but the various funding bills Congress has passed on a bipartisan basis on aid to Ukraine are examples of—I mean, it's a formal power in that it's grounded in the Constitution and the Appropriations Clause, but it also acts in a way to give Congress more influence as well as authority than you might otherwise think. It's not following in the wake of the president. It's actually taking the lead in many ways more recently, which is unusual.Kevin Kosar:Yes. I think there's often a habit to try to allow the executive to be the sole voice of policy in international affairs, but there is absolutely nothing to stop any single member of Congress or an entire political party to simply assert themselves on an issue. If you're a foreign head of state and you realize the president's saying one thing and members of Congress are saying another, that has impact. That has effect. Now, let me move on to the next question. I want to go back to the Constitution. When the Founders bargained it out, they took away many traditional executive authorities over foreign policy from our executive and assigned it to Congress. Examples include the ability to independently raise funds, as you mentioned, and to make treaties. Why did they do this? This was in such distinction to the old practices of Europe, for example.Alissa Ardito:That's such a great question. They did this for a couple reasons. One way to think about it is, it looks as though they're pulling powers away from an executive. But you actually had examples of monarchs who, by accident of history, exercised what we think of as executive authority, but there's a historical background and then there's a functional reason. Many powers kings exercised based on prerogative were sometimes also legislative in nature. So, it gets really confusing because we're layering old ideas about mixed government, which go back to Polybius and ancient Rome, which divides the institutions of government based on class—are they representing the few, the many, [or] the one? Then around the time of the English Civil War, you get this functional separation—that it's not, “Who in society's being represented in this body?,” it's, “What's that institution doing?”The fulcrum of this really is the framing of the Constitution, because they're heirs of both these ways of thinking. But back to initial ideas—they found that they had the benefit of, as Jack Rakove often points out, 10 years or more dealing with state constitutions. And the state constitutions really exemplified pulling away any authority from the executive. They were really focused on legislative government and disempowering the executive. They found that these constitutions didn't work. So they realized, no, we've got to reallocate things yet again and move back to giving our executives some power, but not too much. They decide to split it, which is the great innovation. It's starting from almost a tabula rasa and saying, “How can we allocate this power more effectively?”What I find fascinating is, throughout the long summer, the Senate really was going to be the preserve of a lot of the foreign affairs powers, and was actually going to have the authority to negotiate treaties, as well as have a say in ratifying them. It was only towards the very end that they pulled some of that out and gave it to the executive, and then kept some in the Senate. Because we're so inured to thinking of—by nature and by, as Harvey Mansfield has said, the informal powers the president gets for a variety of reasons—we always think of it as pulling away. But in some ways, in the Framing, we got a pulling away of powers from the legislature in Congress over to the president, as a reaction against what they thought was some short-term thinking in the state constitutions.More to what you were speaking to, some of the key—not just powers bestowed on Congress as well as the power to declare war and the Senate treaties—but also fundamental in the British experience were the Mutiny Acts that evolved after the Bill of Rights and the Acts of Settlement. But this was before the Act of Settlement. This was [1689], where Parliament every year starts to vote on the military and supplies to the military to prevent the king from supporting and maintaining a standing army during peacetime. So, the idea that the legislature—the will of the people—have a say in how much an army or military is funded, as well as other aspects of military governance—you can't have martial law during peace time, for example. These are bits and pieces of the British experience that are very influential when it comes to shaping these broad contours of powers between two institutions that they're thinking of.Kevin Kosar:Yeah. You mentioned the British experience. I'm reminded of the fact that in the Declaration of Independence, we have lines that reference bad American colonist experiences involving military imposed against them. They were supposed to be part of the empire, yet the executive is using military force against them. So, there's complaints about, the...

The subject of this episode is, “What are the goals of congressional budgeting?”My guest is Paul Winfree. He is a distinguished fellow in economic policy and public leadership at the Heritage Foundation. Importantly for today’s discussion, Paul has a great deal of knowledge about congressional budgeting. He has had stints both in the White House and in the Senate, where he worked on budgeting firsthand. Paul also is the author of the book The History (and Future) of the Budget Process in the United States: Budget by Fire (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). So I’m very excited to be here with Paul Winfree.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.Paul, welcome to the podcast.Paul Winfree:Thanks so much, Kevin. Really happy to be speaking with you today.Kevin Kosar:My sense is that if we asked Americans, “What are the goals of budget policy?” they likely would say something along the lines of, “It involves the government figuring out what to spend money on—like defense, for example—and how to pay for this spending. Budget balance is the goal of budgeting.” While that's true, what your fine book shows is that our government has had a variety of goals for budgeting over the past two centuries, correct?Paul Winfree:That's exactly right. One of the reasons why I wrote this book in the first place was that there's this narrative amongst budget experts in Washington, DC, these days that the budget process is broken. What I wanted to do is start to unwind that and ask both, "Well, why is the budget process broken?” but also, “How did we get to where we are today?" It might be my own bias on how I approach problems, but one of the things that helps me understand current mechanisms is also understanding how we got to those current mechanisms, rather than approaching the current problem sets as if they happened exogenously and were not predetermined by other things that have happened throughout our history.So, what I do in this book is go back all the way to the very beginning and start with colonial America, and then walk us up to today. What you find throughout our history, in looking at both budget policy but also the formation of economic policy more broadly, is that there were lots of different goals, from debt eradication, to sending signals to European debt markets that we were a viable nation that they should take seriously, to macroeconomic management. The goals today are in some ways different than the goals 250 years ago, but in other ways similar. I think we'll probably talk about that a little bit in the next half hour.Kevin Kosar:All right. Well, let's start at the very beginning, which, as a wise person once sang, is a very good place to start. When the founders bargained out the U.S. Constitution, they had objectives for budgeting, didn't they?Paul Winfree:That's right. The founding generation was very practical in a sense, and they had to be. They were involved at the beginning of a new country, and like many founders of companies today, they didn't have a lot of time to prove to the world that their model was viable. Therefore, they tried some things such as the Articles of Confederation, which permitted the federal government to borrow money. But since the Articles didn't provide Congress with the power to raise revenue, they would apportion the cost of loans to the states based on their property values. This implicitly gave the states a veto over the terms of the loan agreements. Therefore, as a practical matter, you had officers of the federal government who had very limited power in negotiating the terms of these loans in Europe on behalf of the states, during a period when it took a typical mail ship one month to cross the Atlantic. Often, the state legislatures would have actually adjourned for the season by the time that the details of these agreements came back home for ratification. It's no wonder that James Madison wrote his friend Edmund Randolph saying that this created a bit of a struggle. These first trials, though, were a reaction to the world that they had been attached to. This is partially a level of the perceived tyranny of the British crown. The press at the time had done a really good job fostering such sentiment. It was also partially a derivative of colonial governing bodies, cultures, and practical issues like physical distance and poor internal infrastructure that had fostered this decentralized mindset. But they had a serious problem, ultimately, with securing credit and managing debt payments. And to get other nations to take the newly created United States seriously, which was a prerequisite to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and all of that, they needed to get their finances in order. So they changed things up rather quickly. As Alexander Hamilton famously wrote, "Debt…was the price of liberty,” and more important than any natural resource in maintaining the nation's security. Interestingly, and contrary to what you may hear from many protectionists today, Hamilton, the practical treasury secretary, preferred relatively modest and flat tariffs so as not to spook international markets and get into trading wars for this very reason. But there was another goal that I talk about less in my book that I've become very persuaded by, primarily by the work of a guy at the University of Maryland named John Wallis, among others: that the avoidance of public corruption was also important for the founding, and also subsequent generations. This is because new Americans had witnessed instances where Parliament had provided special benefits to their political coalition, such as limiting market access through protected economic status in exchange for political support. This systemic corruption was in a sense intolerable, and would ultimately influence many of the budgeting reforms over our history. I think that this is something that may not make Americans different, but it is a characteristic of Americans. That is, for the entire existence of our country, there has generally been this populist intolerance to public corruption in a way that you don't see in other places such as China or Russia today. Public corruption seems to challenge the cultural notions of fairness and threaten virtues that are important to Americans, like liberty and freedom. This is also something that they would have learned from Adam Smith, who wrote about this very issue in particular in The Wealth of Nations, first published in 1776, that we know influenced the founding generation.Kevin Kosar:When I think about our Constitution, you won't find a section that says, "Here is the budget process and here are the objectives." Yet built into there, it seems to me, there's at least one objective, which is that the executive should not have independent authority to raise revenue, because the bad old kings of Europe did that and often started wars. I guess a second thing that's in there is the idea of revenue-raising—it should be done by the people in the government closest to the people. Therefore, revenue bills are supposed to start in the House, right?Paul Winfree:That's right. That was something that was learned and ultimately borrowed from the way that Parliament is structured in the British government. One of the issues that came about during the English Civil War was the king, King Charles at the time, was unilaterally executing his power as the monarch to raise taxes based on this threat of war. Ultimately, that upset people, led in part to the English Civil War. So when they went to go about putting things back together again during the Glorious Revolution, they made sure that essentially two things happened. The first thing that happened is that the Parliament had unilateral control over raising and lowering revenues—controlling revenues. The second thing is that they put that power with the House of Commons. That was adopted by the British colonists when they came to America, and ultimately was probably considered a truth when they went to go put together the Constitution. Of course this is the way we go about doing things. Kevin, I'm no expert in British history, and especially British parliamentary history. But one of the other interesting things that seems to be an American institution is this one of advice and consent, which actually also has to do with budgeting powers. One of the things that you saw within the colonial governments was this issue where oftentimes the governor, who was a royal appointee, would want to do something. And the local legislatures, made up of...

The subject of this episode is, “What is a conference committee and why are they so rare today?”My guest is Josh Ryan. He is an associate professor of political science at Utah State University. Josh studies Congress, the president, state legislatures and executives, as well as electoral institutions. Importantly for the purpose of this episode of Understanding Congress, Josh is the author of the book The Congressional Endgame: Interchamber Bargaining and Compromise (University of Chicago Press, 2018). This book examines conference committees and the other ways the two chambers of Congress come to an agreement—or not—on legislation.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.Josh, welcome to the podcast.Josh Ryan:Thanks so much for having me.Kevin Kosar:Let's start very simply, Schoolhouse Rock! style. What is a conference committee?Josh Ryan:We think of Congress as one branch of government, and Congress is actually two different institutions. The House and the Senate are separated from each other. They have almost no control over what the other chamber does. They have their own legislators, obviously. They have their own procedures, their own norms, their own committees, their own ways of doing things. And when they write a bill, even if the House and the Senate generally agree on the parameters of the bill and what's going to be in the bill, because of all these differences, they usually write two different versions of a bill. So we can think of the House as developing some version of a bill to address some policy problem. Typically the Senate takes up legislation after the House, but not always. Senators are their own people and they like to do their own thing, and they typically change the House bill in some way. So even though the House and the Senate are supposed to kind of be working together, if the bill is anything more interesting or substantive than some trivial piece of legislation, we're going to end up with two different versions of the bill. The Constitution requires that Congress can only send one version of the bill to the president, so the House and the Senate have to have some way of resolving their differences, of agreeing on the exact same language for a given bill. Historically, one of the main ways that they've come to an agreement is by using a conference committee. This is a temporary committee, so it's different than the standing committees in Congress, like the Agriculture Committee or the Armed Services Committee, which exist and are more or less permanent. The conference committee is ad hoc. It's created just to address the differences between the House and the Senate on a particular bill. The House and the Senate will each designate conferees. These are individuals usually who serve on the standing committees which dealt with the bill. And those people will go to a conference where they sit down and they try to hash out the differences between the House and the Senate version. Once they've done that, the conference committee sends the bill back to both chambers, and both the House and the Senate then have to vote on the bill again. But importantly, they can't make changes to the bill at that point, and the House and the Senate have the exact same version of the bill, exactly the same words, etc. At that point, if they both approve the bill, the bill goes to the president.Kevin Kosar:Now, if I could just ask as a brief follow-up: one of the things you note in your book is that if you look to the Constitution to see what a conference committee is, how it's defined, and who's to be on it, you're not going to find it there. There's an element whenever it comes to a conference committee of kind of an adhocracy, where they are reinventing the wheel each time they put one of these together. Is that right?Josh Ryan:That's exactly right. And this is a little bit unusual. Many states use joint committees, that is, committees that are shared between the two chambers, but Congress doesn't work that way, and it really hasn't historically. The House and the Senate have found conference committees to be pretty effective, though. Almost all bills that end up in conference are eventually approved by the chambers and sent to the president. Something like 95 percent of bills that make it to conference end up going to the president's desk. So despite the fact that, as you said, it's ad hoc—every time they do it, it feels like they're reinventing the wheel—it actually works pretty well. And I think the House and the Senate believe it to be an efficient and good way of resolving their differences.Kevin Kosar:Perhaps the lack of constitutional prescription detail just creates the flexibility that you really need, ultimately, to get the right people in the room together and to have the flexibility to work things out. So, conference committee, that's one way to deal with the issue of the House and the Senate both trying to legislate on the same subject, but ending up with two bills that are not identical. What are the other ways for the president to receive one piece of legislation rather than two pieces of paper?Josh Ryan:The most common alternative to conferencing, which the chambers are using more and more frequently nowadays, is what we refer to as amendment trading. Some people call it ping-ponging. You can think of the analogy of a ball bouncing back and forth across the table. The idea here is, rather than creating a committee, when they use amendment trading or ping-ponging, the House and the Senate simply amend the bill in some way and send it back to the other chamber. They amend the bill, hopefully moving it closer to the other chamber's version. The bill gets sent back to the other chamber again. They may amend the bill, moving it again closer to the other chamber's version. And they can do this a number of times, typically no more than three (though there are some exceptions to that). The idea is that they sequentially amend the bill to get it to a place where they can both approve it without changing it. So that's the main alternative to conferencing.One of the things that people forget is [that] there is an alternative to avoid this entire process, which is, simply agree to accept the other chamber's bill without changing it. We actually see this, and I argue in my book that it's becoming more frequent because it offers a way out. If the Senate knows it's going to have difficulty getting to conference or getting agreement in conference or navigating the amendment trading process, they may just take the bill as is from the House. And the same is true with the House. This has happened a couple of times in the last few years, and it's a way of short-circuiting the process. The chamber that does this may not get everything they want, but it's probably going to be easier when they choose to do this. It's going to be easier for them than having to negotiate the bill again after going through the difficulty of passing it the first time.Kevin Kosar:I'm glad you mentioned that, because recently there was an interesting example of that, where the two chambers were grappling with the debt limit and the fact that the country was about to cross it. And if I recall, the way that played out was that the Senate ultimately passed a bill, and then the House voted upon a rule. That rule had a number of provisions, one of which said that the Senate bill on raising the debt limit shall be deemed as approved. The House just basically recognized that they didn't want to have to put their members out there voting on this, but they also didn't want to play amendment ping-pong, apparently. That's the way they got it done, and that's how the bill went to Biden's desk.Josh Ryan:Yeah, that's a really good example of how this works. Usually, in this whole process, it's the Senate that's the problem, at least recently. The Senate has a harder time doing all of these things. The leadership doesn't have as much control over procedures, as much control over the membership. We've had more narrow majorities, arguably, in the Senate than in the House. So typically, when it comes to post-passage bargaining, resolution conferencing, amendment trading, it's the Senate that's the fly in the ointment. Often, just as you said, the House has been put in the position of, we have to take the Senate bill or we're not going to get anything, because it can't go back to that chamber. We'll never get agreement.Kevin Kosar:Right. And just for listeners’ purposes, why is it that the Senate tends to be the fly in the ointment?Josh Ryan:Well, in the Senate it's just harder to get things done. The majority party doesn't have the same power that they do in the House. We're seeing a really good example of this today, which is, in the House today, even with the very narrow majority the Democrats have, they've mostly been able to do what they want. Not entirely, but they've been pretty effective. It hasn't been a situation in which the party is...

The topic of this episode is, “What is the relationship between lobbyists and Congress?”My guest is Timothy LaPira. He is a professor of political science at James Madison University and a faculty affiliate at the Center for Effective Lawmaking at the University of Virginia. Tim, I should add, is the lead editor of our volume Congress Overwhelmed: The Decline of Congressional Capacity and Prospects for Reform (University of Chicago Press, 2020). But even more relevant to the subject of this podcast episode is that Professor LaPira coauthored the book Revolving Door Lobbying: Public Service, Private Influence, and the Unequal Representation of Interests. This makes him an especially apt person to answer the question for us, “What is the relationship between lobbyists and Congress?”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.Tim, welcome to the podcast.Timothy LaPira:Thank you for having me. Glad to be here.Kevin Kosar:Let's start very simply, with the definition of a lobbyist. Now, under the First Amendment, anyone can petition the government for a redress of grievances, as the Constitution says. So plenty of people do talk to Congress, and the executive branch and judiciary, for that matter. In fact, in my job at a think tank, I am often asked to comment on bills or testify before Congress by congressional staff or even legislators who approach me. But I'm not a lobbyist. So what makes a lobbyist a lobbyist?Timothy LaPira:This is a great question. It's one that's often misunderstood. There's many definitions of what a lobbyist is, but I tend to think of—there's two ways to think about this. First, the more comprehensive, academic version of thinking about a lobbyist. It could go by the name of policy advocate, government relations professional, policy strategist, or something along those lines. These are people who make money to represent other people's interests. Those interests are typically going to be collected in organizations, but it's not just representing those interests in speaking. It's representing those interests in the policymaking process. There has to be a connection between the private sector and the government. So that's a very broad definition. There is, further, a statutory definition, primarily through the Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995, which has been updated a number of times. In that law, there's a three-test definition of what a lobbyist is. First, they have to earn money. There's a minimum amount of money that's frankly not all that much given the size of the lobbying industry. It's about $5,000 a month. Second, they have to contact more than one government official. The purpose of this in the law, of course, is not to simply capture everyone, as you suggested. They might want to call up their member of Congress and say, "Vote for the bill,” or “Vote against a nominee," or what have you. The third point of the definition is most critical and frankly controversial: the lobbyist must spend more than 20 percent of her time on lobbying services in a given three-month reporting period. Now, Senator Levin, when he originally wrote this law—the intent here was that he was hearing from a lot of CEOs from major corporations who said [that] frequently CEOs are picking up the phone and calling senators. It's a necessary part of their job, but they don't consider themselves lobbyists. And they're not, in many respects. So the idea was to try to capture, who are the day-to-day, routine, professional lobbyists? And this 20 percent definition was sort of picked out of thin air. If we think about it, one full day in a five-day week is 20 percent of your time. This was intended to not capture everybody in a given organization. The problem with that, as we'll see, is that a lobbyist could define the fact that they're spending 19 percent of their time on lobbying services and therefore not be a lobbyist, which is, frankly, pretty disingenuous.Kevin Kosar:Well, we have this category called lobbyists, but why do we have lobbyists? And are they helpful to Congress in any way, or are they just the bane of the legislative process?Timothy LaPira:That's a good question. I often pose this to my students to think about it this way. Are lobbyists good or bad for democracy? The answer is yes. It partly depends on what your perspective is. I don't like lobbyists who are taking on positions that I disagree with or oppose. I do like advocates who are speaking on my behalf and representing my own interests. But the real answer to your question here is that every person has a set of political interests by nature. We all have jobs, pay taxes, use roads, are protected with the common defense, and whatnot. We all have an idiosyncratic set of interests. And what lobbyists are doing—I would say we all have interests that deserve a voice. That's the First Amendment part. And what lobbyists are doing is acting on our behalf to be our voice because we're busy with our day jobs, and we're busy raising kids and doing the shopping. We don't have time every day to walk up to Capitol Hill and communicate what our interests are. So lobbyists act as our agents and as our representatives, much like a lawyer might act on our behalf in court. Lobbyists have highly specialized expertise as well. These are typically not just random people off the street who people would be willing to pay to represent their interests. They have technical policy knowledge. They have experience in and around decision-making venues like Congress or the White House. And they also have really dense professional networks, typically in and around the government, where they can pick up the phone and call somebody, and they'll call them back, or they know who to call with a particular question or who to communicate an interest to. So, in that sense, they're serving citizens as our representatives and our voice, and they're able to speak much better than we are, even on behalf of our own interests, because they know the backgrounds and they know who to talk to. On Congress's side, or more generally in the government, including the executive, they're also useful because of their expertise. Members of Congress, in particular—the universe of problems that Congress could be asked to resolve is everything. Meaning that any given member of Congress can't possibly highly specialize the way that a lobbyist might. That means members of Congress are human, and they have some blind spots. They have some spaces where they don't know the ins and outs of a given problem or a solution or a proposed law. So it's useful to rely on experts, and those experts are often lobbyists—as well as think tank scholars and other folks in industry or in a social organization, what have you. So they are providing a good service to government.Now, that's not to say that they're providing that service for free or without any prejudice. They are representing a particular perspective and a highly specialized interest in a fight that might be—All policy conflicts are, after all, conflicts. They are disagreements among several people or groups of people who see differently. So they're going to represent their own perspective. What that means is oftentimes there are some perspectives that are better represented than others. So when it comes to “Are lobbyists good or bad for democracy?” they're good because they do provide that service, but they're not always good because they're not always representing interests equally.Kevin Kosar:That's excellent, excellent. Thank you. Now, let's talk about money. That word came up a short time ago. One of the common claims about lobbyists is that they buy legislators' votes. They say, "Hey, take this position, and we'll give a whole bunch of money to your campaign." Do legislators get bought? Is that a typical thing that happens in Washington, DC, or are lobbyists mostly giving money to legislators who already have positions that coincide or are the same as what the lobbyists want?Timothy LaPira:Yeah, this is a great question. It's also I think largely [mis]understood, in particular how we discuss the role of lobbyists and organized interests in the media, and frankly, the very politicians we're talking about as well. Lobbyists don't walk around the Capitol with bags of cash to hand out. That's not how it works, both literally or figuratively. Lobbyists are often going to be making campaign donations themselves and working with campaign strategists. They'll be offering advice to their clients and those who they represent about who might be best to give money to. The number one category of legislator or politician, by far, and it's not even close, it is to give money to...

The topic of this episode is, “What does the Congressional Budget Office do?”My guest is Professor Philip Joyce. He is the senior associate dean at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy, where he also is a professor of public policy. There, Philip Joyce teaches and researches public budgeting, performance measurement, and intergovernmental relations. He's the author of many publications — far too many to recite, but I will mention one that is germane to today's podcast. Phil is the author of the book The Congressional Budget Office: Honest Numbers, Power, and Policymaking (2011), which makes him an ideal guest to answer the question, “What does the Congressional Budget Office do?”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.Professor Joyce, welcome to the podcast.Philip Joyce:It's great to be with you.Kevin Kosar:Let's start simply. The Congressional Budget Office, AKA, “CBO.” When did Congress create it and why?Philip Joyce:CBO was created in 1974. You have to sort of go back in time if you can. Well, probably a lot of people can't go back that far in time that are listening to this podcast, but I can. As you recall, in 1974, at least early 1974, Richard Nixon was president. There was something that became referred to as the imperial presidency, and it essentially involved President Nixon being viewed at least by many people in the Congress as overstepping his bounds, doing things like withholding funds that the Congress had appropriated. So the Congress was trying to reassert its role in the budget process. And it did this by passing something called the Congressional Budget and Empowerment Control Act of 1974, which did basically three things. It created the budget committees; it created the budget resolution, which is the blueprint that the Congress establishes for the budget; and it created CBO. Why did it create CBO? It created CBO in particular to provide the Congress with its own source of information on the budget and the economy. And why did it need to do that? Because the alternative was to rely on the Office of Management and Budget, which was attached to the president — and not just any president, but Richard Nixon. So the idea that the Congress was going to reassert its role in budgeting, but have to rely on Richard Nixon's OMB for information, just didn't make a lot of sense to a lot of people in the Congress. The other thing I think it's important to note up front is that according to the law, this was all to be done on a nonpartisan basis, which means that CBO doesn't work for the party in control of the Congress. It works for the Congress as a whole, and tries very hard to make sure that it is responsive to both political parties.Kevin Kosar:Yes, I should elaborate a touch further for listeners who are not familiar with this period of time, the early ’70s. After being pushed around and eclipsed by a burgeoning executive branch, one that often didn't play straight and sometimes transcended the law in its activities, Congress decided to reassert itself. It took the Legislative Reference Service and beefed it up into the Congressional Research Service. They created the Office of Technology Assessment. It wrote a new law on budgeting, and of course it created Congressional Budget Office, all as part of a means for it to reassert itself as the first branch.Now, you started to mention the nature of the agency as nonpartisan, which leads to the next question: The people who work at CBO, are they civil servants or political appointees, or do you have some of both?Philip Joyce:Well, this is really an interesting question, because they are not technically civil servants. In fact, this makes them different from many of the employees of the Government Accountability Office, who are actually federal civil servants. The way I describe CBO staff is that CBO staff are to the CBO director as congressional staff are to a member of Congress or a congressional committee. That is, the director of CBO is actually appointed by the Congress. The director of CBO has the power to hire and fire all CBO staff. So, theoretically, a new director of CBO could come in and wipe out the whole place and start over. Now, nobody has ever done that, because it's not in their interest to do that, because you'd be losing a lot of institutional knowledge. But the fact is, they are not technically civil servants. They have their own personnel system. But they very much behave as nonpartisan civil servants would behave. So I would say in that sense, you can think of them as being the equivalent of civil servants, but they're not technically civil servants. Now, in terms of where they come from, it depends on where you look in CBO. I think there is an impression that CBO must be chock-full of economists, and that there's nobody else but economists in CBO. But that's not really true. It depends on where you look in CBO. The directors of CBO — there have been 10 of them — have almost exclusively been economists. Many of the people in CBO's policy divisions — these are divisions that are organized around long-term economic and budget issues — are PhD economists. But on the other hand, the Budget Analysis Division (and we'll talk more I think in a little while about what they do), which is the largest in CBO and the main division supporting the annual budget process — that's mostly made up of staff who have master's degrees in fields like public policy or public administration, or sometimes are people that have significant experience in the executive branch and then move to CBO.Kevin Kosar:Just to paint a contrast for our listeners, when you think about the individuals who staff, say, an individual member of the House of Representatives' personal office, those are folks who frequently get their jobs because they are members of the political party, and they are individuals who've worked on that member's campaign or perhaps worked in other congressional offices — frequently for a member of the same party. So their skillsets are much more in the political realm. CBO, that's not the basis for hiring people there, whether you are good at politics, right?Philip Joyce:Yeah, that's right. Well, not only that, it's probably a detriment if you're really good at politics. Or, I would say, to put it differently, if you have a sort of strong political bent — CBO is not the place to go if you're a policy advocate, because you're not really there to advocate policy. You're really there to think objectively about what the effects of policy are. As you know, I wrote a book on CBO, and one of the interesting things that I found was that early on, when Alice Rivlin, who was the first director, who is a giant of public service, was setting the place up — and I think the way the place behaves today is very much still in her image — they had to make a decision early on: Were they going to accept references from members of Congress for CBO staff? Were they going to accept members of Congress basically saying, There's this great guy in my district or this great woman in my district, I think you should hire them? They decided that they were not going to refuse to accept those, but they also were not going to be driven by them. They wanted to communicate very clearly to the Congress that they got to decide who worked at CBO based on merit and qualifications, not based on whether they happen to be attached to some important member of Congress or not.Kevin Kosar:Yeah. I think that was a really prescient, smart insight by Alice Rivlin, because ultimately CBO is funded by Congress. And if the impression spreads in Congress that it's basically a tool of the majority, well, that pretty much throws into doubt anything that CBO publishes, and invites retribution. And I should add as little footnote, in the early 1990s, there was an accusation leveled at the Government Accountability Office, the General Accounting Office, that it was too close to the majority. The majority had long been Democrats. And when Republicans took the majority in 1994, GAO suffered a 25% budget cut. So, again, that was a very smart, foresighted move by Alice Rivlin.Now, let’s get down to the nitty gritty. How does CBO interface with Congress and the budget process? What is its role or roles?Philip Joyce:Well, there are three main things I would point to. The first is that twice a year, CBO does a baseline economic and budget forecast. And what is that? It's a projection of what would...

The topic of this episode is, “Should we expand the membership of the House of Representatives?” My guest is Yuval Levin, who is the director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute. Dr. Levin is the founder and editor of the journal National Affairs, a senior editor at The New Atlantis, a contributing editor at National Review, and a contributing opinion writer at the New York Times. And, particularly germane to the subject of today's discussion, Yuval recently coauthored a report on the topic of expanding the membership of the House of Representatives. You'll find a link to that report in the program notes.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.Yuval, welcome to the podcast.Yuval Levin:Thank you very much for having me.Kevin Kosar:The founders set the number of senators at two per state, but they did not set a constitutional cap on the number of legislators in the House. Why is that?Yuval Levin:Well, the nature of the Congress came out of a very complicated set of compromises at the Constitutional Convention. If you look at James Madison's notes on the convention, well over half of the debate was actually about this question of how representation should work. And ultimately, in some obvious ways, the large states wanted to be represented by population, the small states wanted each state to have equal membership, and the decision was made, “Let's do both.” So the two houses do have intentionally very, very different forms of representation: for the states and for the people. The House of Representatives is meant to represent the public. And so each member represents roughly the same number of people. State delegations are based on the size of their populations. The difference between the two houses in that sense is very intentional, and intended to create these kind of overlapping majorities that include both forms of representation.Kevin Kosar:All right, so the Senate is supposed to represent the states; the House, the people. Now, we have 435 members in the House, and we've had 435 for a long time. When was that number set?Yuval Levin:The House of Representatives at first grew after every census. From the very beginning, from the 1790 census all the way through the 19th century, with a single exception after 1840 for complicated reasons, the House grew as the population grew. That continued to happen until after the 1910 census, at which point there was the beginning of a normal debate in the House about how much should we grow and in what way this time. That debate fell apart, and the House ultimately at that point simply didn't act. And the size of the House remained as it was after 1910. Then afterward, after the 1920 census, the House actually actively decided to no longer grow after every census and passed a law that set a cap at 435, which was the size it had reached.For most of the 19th century, the House of Representatives grew by a formula that allowed states to avoid losing seats. So as the population grew, new seats were distributed in such a way that states with larger populations could grow, but no state would lose seats. That formula worked for political reasons, it made mathematical sense, and that's how things were growing until 1910. And we've been stuck at a 1910 level. So that has meant that as the country has grown—the population of the United States is almost three times what it was in 1910—the House of Representatives has not grown. Each member is now left representing about three times as many people as members did a century ago.Kevin Kosar:Yes, in the report that you helped coauthor, I recall seeing that in 1910 the average representative had 210,583 constituents. Today, seeing as there's 330 million plus Americans, there's about 761,000 constituents for each member of the House, which is a colossal number. Which leads to the next question: What would be the benefits of expanding the House?Yuval Levin:That question points to exactly where you just pointed to first and foremost, which is, we've reached a place where each member of the House now represents a massive number of people, about three quarters of a million people. At the beginning of our constitutional system, each member of the House represented just about a little over 30,000 people. That number went to 60,000 pretty quickly and gradually grew over time. But the idea originally—James Madison originally proposed a constitutional amendment that would cap that number at 60,000, so that the House would grow so that no member represented more than 60,000 people. We actually reached that number by 1830, and had that amendment been in place, we would now have several thousand members of the U.S. House, which I have to say, I'm glad we don't. But there's a balance to be struck. At this point, members represent such a vast population that it's very hard for them to be representative in something like the same way that members of the House were intended to be. So that's one very important first reason why an expansion might make sense: It would allow for members to represent a smaller number of people and therefore hopefully to represent them better. At the same time, there are also reasons to think that expanding the House could address some of the challenges that we face now when it comes to the way the House is run and to some of the problems that we find in our political culture. The proposal that we make in the report you mentioned would expand the House all at once by 150 members (which is roughly where we would be now if we had continued following that formula from the 19th century every 10 years since 1910) and then grow the House after that by that formula after every census. That kind of sudden increase by 150 members could provide for a moment of reform in the House, a moment where it seems like things could change and where members might be inclined to think about what other rules should change. How should the budget process change? How should the committee system change? There are a lot of reasons now to try to rethink some of these things. And there are a lot of members who want to, but there's a kind of standing inertia that holds them back from believing that changes like that are even within their power. A shot in the arm that they would get by having 150 new members could provide for a moment of reform, both within the House and in the states, for reforms of how members are elected, for experimenting with things like ranked-choice voting or other things. All of those could be advanced by a reform that gives that kind of shot in the arm.And you know, the reform itself I think of as just constitutional maintenance. It's work that should have been done this whole time that we haven't done and that we should be doing now. And then it could have these other secondary benefits, by encouraging reform-mindedness in general when it comes to how we think about the problems of the House.Kevin Kosar:I should mention to listeners that one of the complaints one hears from representatives in the House is that they feel grossly overscheduled—that they'll be in one committee meeting, but then they have to get up and leave and move to another committee gathering or a subcommittee gathering, or some such like that. Having to wear so many hats at once leads to them being in a position where they're doing everything, but not doing anything particularly well. Having more representatives, arguably, could mean having more committees and perhaps more eyes engaged in oversight. That noted, are there downsides to expanding the House's membership? I imagine a speaker of the House would have some apprehension at this prospect.Yuval Levin:First of all, as a conservative, I have to say, I think there are downsides to any change we make, and we should also expect that there will be downsides that we do not anticipate. That's certainly true when it comes to political reform. When you change the rules, things don't always happen the way you expect. It's hard to know exactly what the results would be, and we should always be aware of that when proposing reforms. There are also some downsides that are pretty predictable. A larger House could be more unwieldy—if you think part of the problem with the House is that it is unwieldy, which, as you say, the speaker of the House at any given time surely thinks. But anyone watching the House have trouble passing a budget or find itself breaking down might think, well, the answer to this can't be just more of

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...

The topic of this episode is, “What differences do women make in Congress?”My guest is Michele Swers, professor of American government at Georgetown University. She studies Congress, congressional elections, and women in politics. She has written a lot of research articles and book chapters, and also is the author of two books on women in Congress. The first one is titled The Difference Women Make: The Policy Impact of Women in Congress. The second book is titled Women in the Club: Gender and Policy Making in the Senate. And, I would be remiss if I did not mention, she is the coauthor of Women and Politics: Paths to Power and Political Influence.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.It is to Professor Swers we now turn to learn about women in Congress. Professor Swers, welcome to the program.Michele Swers: Thank you, Kevin. Thanks so much for having me. I'm a big fan of your podcast.Kevin Kosar: Oh, thanks for saying. Let's start with a really simple question. How many women are in Congress today?Michele Swers: So, right now you have 120 women in the House. Eighty-nine are Democrats, 31 are Republicans. And in the Senate, you have 24 women, 16 Democrats, 8 Republicans. From those numbers, you can tell that there are more women who are Democrat than Republicans. And that's because the number of women really started to increase in 1992, and people called that the Year of the Woman, but it was really the Year of the Democratic Women. It was Democrats who elected more women at that time. They had a pretty good year that year. Even in years where Republicans had good years, like 1994, they elected more women, but not a lot more women.In 2018, Democrats elected another Year of the Woman, but they elected more women of color. So there was a lot of attention to that. And that's when I'm sure your listeners know that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez comes into the picture and Ayanna Pressley and some others. And then in 2020, Republicans did have a very good year. They went from 13 women to 31 in the House of Representatives, and they elected a greater mix of women and minorities. It was a good year from their perspective.But you can tell though that by these numbers, when Democrats are in charge, women have more access to the majority and seats of power. So women are about 40 percent of the Democratic caucus in the House, and that means they have some seniority level. In the House, on the Democratic side, anyway, committee assignments work based on seniority, so you have more women who have access to be chairs. So Rosa DeLauro, head of Appropriations, or Carolyn Maloney as the Oversight chair, Maxine Waters at Financial Services — important committees.On the other hand, for Republicans, women are only about 15 percent of their caucus. They've had a woman in the conference chair position for a very long time — obviously turnover with different women. Most recently, Liz Cheney was pushed out, and Elise Stefanik is now the conference chair. But they don't have as many women with seniority. There are not as many women who will reach those committee chairmanships when Republicans are in charge.Right now you do have Kay Granger at Appropriations. She's the ranking member, so maybe she'll become the chair if Republicans take over in 2022. And Virginia Foxx at Education and Labor, she would need a waiver, so she would like a waiver. And if she doesn't get it, I think Elise Stefanik wants the position. But you don't have that many Republican women with seniority. There's also Cathy McMorris Rodgers, and she could end up becoming chair of Energy and Commerce if things go in the majority. A lot of the women that came in were elected in 2020, and so they're not very senior. It'll be a few years before they could develop into those leadership positions if they stay in Congress.Kevin Kosar: If I can just do a quick follow up on this question — you were highlighting some partisan differences. One thing I observed after the last election was, you had Kevin McCarthy, the head of the House Republicans, on Twitter, bragging about how the GOP had brought women into the party. You’ve studied this stuff for so long. Is this new, the GOP and the House bragging about getting more women, Republican women, into the chamber?Michele Swers: Yes and no. Republicans don't like to play what they call identity politics. They don't want to have policy that is necessarily focused on particular groups. But they do value having diversity in the ranks, because they know that Democrats particularly are going to hit them on this. Democrats have been talking about Republicans as being engaged in a war on women for many years, and it's much easier to push back on that if you have more diverse faces in your caucus. Republicans also recognize that the country is changing, and you have more minorities in the population — more Latinos, particularly, they want to reach out to. And so they do want to elect a more diverse set of members of Congress. And when they do, they are very likely to push them to the front.Where they differ from Democrats, though, is diversity is not as big of a value within the party for elections. On the Democratic side, for a long time, you have an infrastructure of groups like EMILY's List and training organizations which are designed to reach out to women to try to recruit them to run for office and fund them. Republicans don't have that deep bench because it's not something that their donors tend to respond to. So the organizations they have, something called VIEW PAC, Winning For Women. Elise Stefanik really pushed this through her E-PAC, which is her leadership PAC. Those are relatively new, and they don't raise the sums of money that you see being raised by EMILY's List, because their donor base is just not as responsive to those kind of calls.Kevin Kosar: Excellent. Thank you for that. One thing I've come across in the political science literature is that a number of scholars argue, quite persuasively from what I have seen, that women are more effective in Congress. Now, measuring legislative effectiveness is a vexing, complicated thing — we'll put that out there. But, what's your take on the topic?Michele Swers: I'm in agreement with you that it depends on how you're measuring effectiveness and what you mean by effectiveness. I think you can certainly say that there's evidence that women are more active, perhaps more productive. So you have people that look at things like bringing home money to the district and projects to the district. Lazarus and Steigerwalt, in their book Gendered Vulnerability, and Anzia and Berry in their article, they both find that women are more likely to get federal dollars for projects back at home. So if you consider that to be effectiveness, then they're more effective in that way.People who look at bill sponsorship and co-sponsorship, like Craig Volden, Alan Wiseman, Dana Wittmer, and others, do find that women sponsor more bills, they co-sponsor more bills. So they're more active in that way. But there's mixed evidence about how far those bills get. Some of that depends on what are the bills about. So if the bills are about issues like healthcare, those are pretty contentious issues that have a hard time advancing in Congress generally. They find that women, when they're in the minority party, maybe because there's more of a history of consensus building when you're in the minority, that women are passing more of their bills as minority party members. But they don't pass more of their bills as majority party members. This difference gets more stark as we have more polarization in Congress and that consensus-oriented leadership style is less valued.Kevin Kosar: Now, legislative effectiveness is an important topic. But that's not the only thing that matters when we think about legislators in Congress or women in Congress. Your first book, The Difference Women Make, analyzed the House of Representatives. What did you find?Michele Swers: I wrote that book right after — the focus of it was right after that first Year of the Woman, the 1992 elections, when you could have more of an analysis that was more systematic rather than anecdotal interviews. And what I was trying to determine is, there's an assumption in political science that members of Congress, their number one concern is to get reelected. We know that from David Mayhew's <a...

The topic of this episode is, "What is the role of the Senate’s majority leader?"My guest is Dr. James Wallner. He is a senior fellow at the R Street Institute and a lecturer at Clemson University. He is the author of three books on the Senate, including one titled On Parliamentary War: Partisan Conflict and Procedural Change in the U.S. Senate (2017). James has worked in the Senate, and also is a cohost of the Politics in Question podcast. 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.It is to James Wallner that we turn to learn about the role of the majority leader. James, welcome to the program.James Wallner:Thanks for having me.Kevin Kosar:First question. Chuck Schumer is the current majority leader in the Senate. How did he get that job? What's the process? Did all the senators get together and vote for him or some other candidate?James Wallner:Well, that's how it works in the House, where you nominate candidates to be the speaker of the House. Nancy Pelosi is our current speaker. Democrats and Republicans on the floor of the House all cast a vote for the speaker, and the nominee with the most votes becomes the speaker. And so the majority party, in effect, selects the speaker. In the Senate, it's a similar process, but slightly different, because they're not electing a speaker, they're not electing a presiding officer. The majority leader, Chuck Schumer, is merely the floor leader of the party with the most votes — so in this case, the Democrats. And it’s 50–50 right now, split evenly between Democrats and Republicans. The vice president is a Democrat, so assuming that the vice president would cast her vote with the Democrats on a tie vote — under the Constitution, she gets to do that — that means that Chuck Schumer has more votes behind him than the leader of the Republican Party, Mitch McConnell, has behind him. So he is the majority leader, McConnell is the minority leader. The way they're chosen is simply by their party colleagues in secret ballot, in a meeting that usually happens right after the election, typically in December following an election before the new Congress meets.Kevin Kosar:You underlined a point there about the difference between leadership in the House and leadership in the Senate. It sounds, at least ostensibly, that a speaker may make a claim to be the head of the whole of the House, whereas in the Senate, it sounds like the majority leader is just the partisan leader. James Wallner:Absolutely. Look, party leaders in the Senate have institutional tasks, too. They help to schedule legislation. They do a bunch of different things that institutional leaders in the House, like the speaker, also do. And the speaker is also a partisan leader, in the fact that she is selected by her majority party caucus and really works to advance the agenda of the majority party. So they go hand in hand. But there is no Senate leader. I'm reminding myself of Woodrow Wilson, where he says, "There's no leader in the Senate," and that's something that's really frustrating him. And this is what makes the Senate great. Because there's no one that presides over the Senate, who wields lots of power, whom all senators vote for, the institution has a very decentralized set of procedures. The way it makes decisions is very decentralized. And the majority leaders (that weren't in existence prior to the beginning of the 20th century) and the minority leaders, their job, while they do it differently over time, is really then to facilitate the participation of members in the process and also to help to enact their agendas. So there's an institutional component to it, and there's a partisan component to it.Kevin Kosar:Is there anywhere listeners can turn to see a job description for the majority leader?James Wallner:You could just Google it, I'm sure, and you’d get lots of interesting stuff. You'd probably look up something on Senate.gov. You can look at different biographies of different majority leaders in the past. Robert Caro's The Master of the Senate, a book about Lyndon Johnson, is a great example. But I want to underscore something. There is no one way to lead the Senate. That changes, and it changes over time in response to the environment in which the Senate operates, the problems and challenges that the senators have, and the goals that they want to achieve. And so the leadership position is going to look different at different points in time. There is no one way to lead the Senate.Kevin Kosar:And how does one lead the Senate? The first place a person's mind might turn to are powers. We should talk about powers. When you think of leaders, usually leaders have some sort of powers they can use to get other people to obey them. Does a majority leader in the Senate have any powers that are granted to them by the Constitution or Senate rules or something else? The power to give out resources, the power to assign people to committees, power to do whatever it might be? What powers does the Senate majority leader have?James Wallner:Well, the short answer is none. If you think about it, that seems a little strange, because if you open up the newspaper and spend five minutes reading about the Senate, you're going to hear a lot about Mitch McConnell, you're going to hear a lot about Chuck Schumer. You'll hear about some other members as well, but we hear about the leaders. The leaders don't have any powers, certainly when compared to the House. They're not mentioned in the Constitution, like the speaker of the House is. The Senate rules themselves, they mention the majority and minority leaders on several occasions, but not in any real, significant way. And they don't really bestow on the two leaders any significant powers. The reason why they're powerful is because the rank and file members, the lawmakers themselves, defer to the leaders to do a whole host of different types of activities to make the legislative process more orderly. This first starts in the late 1940s, early 1950s, and it gains steam over time. There's something else I really want to underscore though — that the leader has what we call priority of recognition. So everybody's favorite vice president, John Nance Garner, “Cactus Jack,” in 1937 created a precedent. A precedent is simply just what the Senate did in the past. And it looks to its past behavior on occasion to decide how it wants to operate in the present. And so there's a precedent out there where Cactus Jack is sitting there presiding over the Senate, and he just says one day, “Alben Barkley,” (ironically, a leader from Kentucky; we’ve got a current minority leader from Kentucky in Mitch McConnell), but Alben Barkley, he's about to speak, and Cactus Jack says, "You know what, I'm going to recognize the majority leader first, and then the minority leader after him, if more than two senators are seeking recognition at one time." So that's priority of recognition. It's a favor. It's a favor that the chair, the presiding officer, and in this case, the vice president, gives to whomever the floor leader is, whomever the majority leader is. And it's something that the Senate can't force the chair to do. Now, what does the majority leader do with priority of recognition? It doesn't really matter much at the time, but today it's almost everything. Because priority of recognition, coupled with senators’ deference to their leaders to order the chamber for them and order their deliberations and make it more efficient and predictable — and to be quite honest, easy and less hard — the majority leader will use priority of recognition to set the schedule by making motions to proceed to bills. And then, and most importantly, they will use priority of recognition to fill the amendment tree, which is just a fancy way of saying, they will offer a bunch of amendments, one after another, so that no other senators can offer amendments. And this, in effect, shuts the floor down, shuts down a bill, and denies senators the opportunity to amend it. The Rules Committee in the House will do that as a written rule. And you can very clearly see where the power comes from, and you can see when they vote against your amendments why you can't get your amendments. But in the Senate, the leader approximates that by this priority of recognition, in using it to basically do things that other senators cannot do.Kevin Kosar:Earlier, you mentioned that one thing a majority leader does is do stuff that other senators don't necessarily want to do. And one of those things I would think would be the seeking of unanimous consent. What is unanimous consent, and what's the leader's role in getting it?James...

The topic of this episode is, "What is the Congressional Review Act?"My guest is Professor Bridget C. E. Dooling of George Washington University’s Regulatory Studies Center. She has a deep background in regulation. Previously, Bridget worked for the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the Office of Management and Budget. She also has clerked for an administrative law judge and worked in the U.S. Department of Justice.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. It is to Professor Dooling we turn to learn about the Congressional Review Act, a tool for Congress to abolish regulations. Welcome to the show.Bridget Dooling:Thank you so much. I'm glad to be here.Kevin Kosar:Before we get into the Congressional Review Act, or CRA, let's start with something basic. What are regulations, and why do they matter?Bridget Dooling:Regs are great, and studying them is even better. Regulations are everywhere. They shape our world, but not necessarily in obvious ways. Knowing about regulations is like having a decoder ring for why certain things are the way they are. Like, why do you need prescriptions for some things, but you can help yourself to whatever supplements like vitamins that you want? It's because there's a regulatory line there. You can't see it when you're in the drugstore, but it absolutely affects the way you live.Kevin Kosar:Yeah. Regulations really, to a degree, I guess they're specifications of laws, particular applications. Is that a fair characterization?Bridget Dooling:Yep.Kevin Kosar:Now, if listeners want to see these things, these regulations, where should they go? Where can they find a list or collection of regulations?Bridget Dooling:Yeah, there's a few ways. One is that you can look at legislation, because that's where Congress tells the agencies what they're allowed or required to do. And then you can also look at what the agencies themselves produce. So for rules that are in the process of being made, there's a website called regulations.gov. That's a great place to start, so if you hear that a rulemaking is coming down the pike, that's a great place to go check its status and see if it's open for public comment, for example. So that's regulations.gov. And for rules that are already on the books, you'd want to look at something called the Code of Federal Regulations, which pulls all that regulatory text into one place so you can read it all in one spot.Kevin Kosar:Excellent. Now our listeners know. So let's turn to the Congressional Review Act. Congress enacted it in 1996. Democrats and Republicans alike voted for it. President Bill Clinton signed it into law. In most basic terms, what is the CRA?Bridget Dooling:The Congressional Review Act allows Congress to disapprove federal agency rules using fast track procedures, during a special window of time following the rule's issuance. And perhaps the most important of these special fast-track procedures is that resolutions of disapproval can't be filibustered. And if it's enacted, this disapproval resolution effectively wipes the relevant rule from the books and the regulations revert back to whatever existed previously. Now, if an agency was to set about going back and undoing its own rule, that could take years. Congress can move much faster than a regulatory agency can by using the CRA to basically short circuit that rule.To be enacted, however, both chambers of Congress must pass the resolution and the president needs to sign it. And because a president's unlikely, very unlikely to sign a resolution disapproving a rule that was issued during his or her own administration, or that of a president from the same party, the Congressional Review Act is especially salient following a presidential election in which the incumbent or same party nominee loses. If that happens, and if both chambers in Congress are aligned with the incoming president, the potential for enacted resolutions of disapproval increases dramatically.Kevin Kosar:So let's pause for a moment. What we're talking about is a legislature passing a law to wipe out a regulation. The listener might say, Okay, well, why do we need the Congressional Review Act to do that? Couldn't have Congress just done this without creating an act to create an act?Bridget Dooling:Yeah, you're exactly right. Congress could always pass regular legislation to overturn an agency's rule, or another way they could handle it is by placing riders on an agency's appropriation in a way that could prohibit an agency from working on a particular rule. In either case though, that would require a filibuster-proof margin. And that's why the CRA offers an enticing procedural option for lawmakers interested in undoing an agency's rule. And you mentioned earlier that the CRA was enacted in 1996. I really think it's helpful to think about when the CRA was enacted to understand its context, which was part of the Contract with America Act. Around that time, legislators were looking to reclaim some power from the executive branch, and the CRA was just one of the ways that it did so. This was also in the aftermath of INS v. Chadha, which was the decision that struck down the use of legislative vetoes on logic that this violated presidential presentment requirements. So in the CRA you see Congress coming up with a method that allows them to check the executive branch, but only if the president agrees or if they have the votes to overcome a veto.Kevin Kosar:Yes, yes, that's right. In your initial answer, you mentioned that fast track provision, and that's so key. Especially to anybody who's watching Congress in recent years, the struggles to get legislation enacted, the threats of filibusters and holds and other such things — the CRA, therefore, is a quicker way to get done what otherwise might be done through a standard statute. Now I want to drill down for a sec. You referenced an interesting dynamic about when the CRA tends to get used. If you have a new president coming in from a different party, and perhaps if Congress is also different, is that the sort of time when we see the CRA get used?Bridget Dooling:Yeah. So I mentioned before that the CRA is most salient following a presidential election in which the incumbent or same party nominee loses, and when the new president is in alignment with both chambers of Congress. This has happened a few times since the CRA was enacted. One of the times was at the start of the George W. Bush Administration. And at that time, Congress used the Congressional Review Act to disapprove a workplace safety role on ergonomics that had been issued late in the Clinton Administration. The next real opportunity to disapprove regs with the stars aligning in the way we described was at the start of the Obama Administration. The Congress didn't turn to the CRA then. This helped create some speculation that the CRA was a tool that Democrats just weren't interested in using — perhaps because once a rule is disapproved an agency can't go back and do it again until Congress lets them. In the Trump Administration, Congress really leaned into the CRA. They disapproved 16 rules, which was a historic number given the way that the CRA had been used in the past. And then at the start of the Biden Administration, the stars were aligned to use the CRA, but the question was, would Democrats use it? And ultimately they did. They disapproved three rules under the Congressional Review Act, somewhat complicating the earlier narrative that the CRA just wasn't a tool that Democrats like to take advantage of.Kevin Kosar:The CRA was little used for so many years. And then some of us told Congress some years back, “Psst, hey, the Congressional Review Act exists, you should use it.” You've got a long scope look at the history of this act. On the whole, does it strike you as particularly effective?Bridget Dooling:So that's probably going to depend on who you ask, right? Because it depends on what you're trying to achieve with something like the Congressional Review Act. To the extent that its goals were to pull some authority back to Congress, to oversee the executive in a more assertive way, the CRA clearly has allowed legislators to do that. And they have taken advantage of those tools now in three administrations to disapprove rules. I think we've tended to only think about the CRA — to the...

The topic of this episode is, “How has Congress evolved as an institution?”My guest is Eric Schickler, the author of the book, “Disjointed Pluralism: Institutional Innovation and the Development of the U.S. Congress”. It is the 20th anniversary of this classic text, which won the Richard F. Fenno, Jr. Prize for the best book on legislative politics. Eric is the Jeffrey and Ashley McDermott Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also an Elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

The topic of this episode is “How do legislators raise money to run for Congress?”My guest is Weston Wamp, who is the Founder at Millennial Debt Foundation and a Senior Political Strategist at Issue One. He hails from Tennessee, and ran for Congress in 2014. If his last name is familiar to you, that is because he is the son of former member of the House Zach Wamp, a Republican who represented Tennessee's 3rd congressional district from 1995 to 2011. Weston, like his father, knows a thing or two about how fundraising has come to be a major part of getting to Congress and staying there. And I should add that he is the host of the program, “Swamp Stories,” which has examined the effects of fundraising on Congress.

The topic of this episode is, “How can a new staffer survive Congress?”My guest is Mark Strand, the coauthor of the book, “Surviving Inside Congress.” Mark is the President of the Congressional Institute, a not-for-profit organization that helps Members of Congress better serve their constituents and that helps constituents better understand Congress. Mark has led the institute since 2007, and prior to that spent nearly 20 years working as a staffer for members and committees in the House of Representatives.

The topic of this episode is, “What does the Committee on House Administration do?”And who better to answer this question than my guest, Representative Rodney Davis. He is the ranking member of the Committee on House Administration, or CHA as it often is called. He has been on the committee since 2014. Rep. Davis currently serving his fifth term in Congress representing the 13th District of Illinois, which covers a 14-county region that includes both urban and rural communities in central and southwestern Illinois.

The topic of today’s episode is, “Are earmarks good or bad?”My guest is Zachary Courser, a visiting assistant professor of government at Claremont McKenna College. He is the co-director of the Policy Lab at Claremont McKenna College, and the co-editor of the volume, Parchment Barriers: Political Polarization and the Limits of Constitutional Order. Zach also is the author of articles on conservatism and populism, and he is the coauthor of an American Enterprise Institute report titled, “Restoring the power of the purse: Earmarks and re-empowering legislators to deliver local benefits.”

The topic of today’s episode is, “Can Congress budget?” My guest is Dr. Allen Schick. He is professor emeritus at the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland. He previously has held positions at the Congressional Research Service, the Urban Institute, the Brookings Institution, and the American Enterprise Institute. Dr. Schick published three volumes with AEI press, which you can download and read, and many other books with distinguished presses.His books include, Congress and Money: Spending, Taxing, and Budgeting (1980), Making Economic Policy in Congress (1984), The Capacity to Budget (1990) and The Federal Budget: Politics, Policy, Process (1995).Dr. Schick is the dean of budget policy, and we are very fortunate to have him on the program.

The topic of today’s episode is, “How does Congress fund itself?” My guest is Daniel Schuman. He is the Policy Director at Demand Progress, a grassroots, nonpartisan organization with over 1.5 million affiliated activists fighting for the rights and freedoms needed for a modern democracy. Daniel has spent many years studying our national legislature, working to reform it, and advocating to better fund it. He also is the editor of the First Branch Forecast, an extraordinarily informative newsletter that you can read and subscribe to at no cost at https://firstbranchforecast.com/.

The subject of today’s episode is, “What does the House rules committee do?”My guest is Don Wolfensberger. He is a fellow at the Bipartisan Policy Center, and a scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center. He served as a staff member in the U.S. House of Representatives for 28 years and was the director of the Rules Committee. Don is the author of two books: Changing Cultures in Congress: From Fair Play to Power Plays, and Congress and the People: Deliberative Democracy on Trial.

“How Congress tricks Americans” — that is the topic of this episode.My guest is Prof. David Schoenbrod the author of the book, DC Confidential: Inside the Five Tricks of Washington. David is a Trustee Professor at New York Law School, where he teaches and studies environmental law, regulation, and other heady subjects. He also is a senior fellow at the Niskanen Center.

“Is Congress Broken?” — that is the topic of this episode. My guest is Dr. Jack Pitney, the coeditor of the book, Is Congress Broken? The Virtues and Defects of Partisanship and Gridlock. Jack is the Roy P. Crocker Professor of Politics at Claremont McKenna College, where he teaches American politics and government.This book, which was coedited by William Connelley and Gary Schmitt, is a marvelous collection of essays written by top scholars. All of the chapters, I should note, are accessible to the lay reader. One need not be a political scientist or academic to enjoy this book, and come away with a  greater understanding of the First Branch.

The topic of today's episode is, “How does the budget process work and not work?” My guest is Tori Gorman, the Policy Director for The Concord Coalition. It is a non-partisan, grassroots organization dedicated to educating the public about federal budget issues, and their consequences for the future. Tori spent 16 years on Capitol Hill where she held director level positions, advising senior members of the budget, appropriations, and tax writing committees in both the House and the Senate. Prior to her career in the federal legislative branch, she was the economist for the Maryland General Assembly.

The topic of today's episode is “What is the filibuster?” And does it have a future? My guest is Dr. Molly Reynolds, who is a Senior Fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution. She studies Congress, with a focus on how congressional rules and procedures affect domestic policy outcomes. She also supervises the maintenance of the “Vital Statistics on Congress,” Brookings’ long running resource on the first branch of government. Importantly, for our episode today, Molly is the author of the book Exceptions to the Rule: the Politics of Filibuster Limitations in the US Senate.

The topic of today's episode is, “How Does the House of Representatives Organize Itself for a New Congress?” My guest is Dr. Matthew Green, an extraordinarily accomplished scholar of the U.S. Congress. He has been a professor of politics at Catholic University in Washington, D.C. since 2005, and he received his doctorate from Yale. Matt has authored or coauthored six books, the most recent of which is Legislative Hardball. The first book-length examination of the tactics and effectiveness of the House Freedom Caucus. Matt is also a regular contributor to “Mischiefs of Factions,” a blog about political parties. And he has written about Congress elections and other topics in the Washington Post, Roll Call, and The Hill.

The topic of today's episode is “Reforming Congress for the 21st Century.” My guest is Representative Derek Kilmer, Congressman of the 6th district of Washington State. He was first elected to Congress in 2012. Before that, Mr. Kilmer served in his home State's legislature, worked for the Economic Development Board for Tacoma Pierce County, and was a consultant for McKinsey & Company. He received his bachelor's degree from Princeton University and earned a doctorate from the University of Oxford in England. Of particular relevance for our conversation today, Representative Kilmer has been the co-chair of the Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress for the past two years. In autumn 2020, this committee released 97 recommendations for updating the legislature, which you can see at modernizecongress.house.gov, and we'll hear more about those recommendations shortly.

The topic of today's episode is, "Do we need a Congress?" My guest is my friend and colleague, Dr. Philip Wallach. He is a resident scholar here at AEI where he studies America's separation of powers system. And he focuses on regulatory power issues and the relationship between Congress and the administrative state. Before joining AEI, Phil was a senior fellow in governance studies at both the R Street Institute and the Brookings Institution. Phil also has served as a fellow with the House Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress. He is the author of the book To The Edge: Legality, Legitimacy, and the Response to the 2008 Financial Crisis. I have him on this episode because he wrote a terrific article for National Affairs titled "Congress Indispensable."