Is Congress broken? That is the topic of this episode. My guest is Dr. Jack Pitney, the co-editor 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 co-edited by William Connelly 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.
Kevin Kosar:
Jack, welcome to the program.
John Pitney:
Thank you very much.
Kevin Kosar:
You’ve written a lot of books, edited books, co-authored books. How did this book come to be? Did you just wake up one morning and decide you wanted to do another book on Congress?
John Pitney:
Well, it started with a conversation at the 2014 meeting of the American Political Science Association. Daniel Stid, who’s the Program Director of US Democracy at the Hewlett Foundation, sat down with me and Bill Connelly, who’s my frequent co-author. He wanted to encourage an institutional approach to Congress. It was research that was grounded in the Constitution. And that conversation, in turn, led to a conference at the American Enterprise Institute that you know well in 2015, as well as the involvement of Gary Schmitt, who, of course, is a resident scholar at AEI. The three of us know a lot of people with interest in the field, including my colleague Andy Bush, and we enlisted them to take part in first the conference and then the edited volume. And I have to say as a matter of pride that two of the participants in this were former students of mine, Melanie Marlowe and Kathryn Pearson.
Kevin Kosar:
Now, in what ways is Congress broken? One obvious thing from where I sit is Congress’s process for formulating a budget and funding the government is a disorganized mess, seemingly. But what stood out to you and your contributors to this volume?
John Pitney:
Well, a lot of things, but many of them boil down to just two words: regular order. In my Congress class, I always show the classic cartoon video, I’m Just a Bill. I’ll spare you my singing of the song. I explain that the process does not actually work that way much of the time anymore. Congress skips important steps. Very often, committee consideration, for example. And that means that a lot of serious discussion and deliberation may not take place.
John Pitney:
You mentioned spending as an example. Matt Glassman, our mutual acquaintance who teaches in our Washington program had a fascinating tweet today. He says, and I quote, “I wrote the last appropriations bill that went through regular order as a standalone bill and got signed by POTUS before the start of the fiscal year.” And that was the fiscal 2010 legislative appropriations act, so that tells you how far regular order has gotten out of whack, particularly in the spending process.
John Pitney:
Now, in the book, Peter Hanson of Grinnell has a chapter on how omnibus bills have replaced the old-fashioned appropriations process. As he puts it, “Omnibus legislating prevents rank-and-file members from exercising genuine oversight over the budget.” And so here we are, in the middle of December, no regular appropriations bills have passed at all, and leaders have to scramble to cobble together an agreement on $1.4 trillion in spending. That is not good. That is just not an appropriate way to make decisions over a matter that consequential.
Kevin Kosar:
Yeah, the point about regular order strikes me as key because if you’re not pursuing regular order in budgeting or in legislating, when you’re creating a program or reauthorizing a program, and if you’re not engaging in regular order when you’re overseeing a program, it’s adhocery. Absence of process leads to adhocery.
John Pitney:
Yeah, in my class, I have a legislative simulation, and years ago, sometimes students would make up their own procedures as they went along. And at the end, I would actually say, “Well, that was interesting for a simulation, but it would never work that way in real life.” Nowadays, I have to say, “Well, maybe, yeah.” They make a lot of things up as they go along, and that’s not good.
Kevin Kosar:
Yes, indeed. Process matters on output and quality. Yet for all the problems Congress has, the reader of your book might come away with the impression that, as a whole, maybe Congress is not broken. To unpack how this can be the case, we must first start with the insight in the book that we Americans need to shed some of what are described as our Wilsonian expectations. What do you mean by that, and why do we need to shed them?
John Pitney:
Well, Woodrow Wilson was writing as a political scientist. He describes a model, an idealized version of parliamentary government. Now, if you talked to comparative political scientists, they will roll their eyes and tell you actual parliamentary government is a lot more complicated. But his ideal was that a party would issue a manifesto, and if it gets a majority of seats, it simply passes the bills in that manifesto. He complained about the American party system, and he said, “Neither of the two parties is of one mind of itself, tolerates all differences of creed and vanity within its own ranks. They’re like armies without officers engaged on a campaign, which has no great cause at its back.”
John Pitney:
Now, the opposite for that, the alternative is the Madisonian model, and it embraces bicameralism and the separation of powers. Whereas the Wilsonian model sees Congress as a legislative assembly line and judges it by how many bills it passes, the Madisonian tradition would say that’s the wrong metric. Obviously, Congress has to pass bills. But the bigger question is how carefully the body deliberates in the public interest. And as Daniel Stid points out in his chapter in the book, Madisonian reform, Madisonian approach to this is not about enacting a party manifesto, but about developing congressional capacity for deliberation, negotiation, and compromise, all in the public interest.
Kevin Kosar:
Yeah, so I think it’s fairly common that the public and members of the media, talking heads will criticize Congress because it’s not some sort of rational, orderly entity that is focused on efficiency and productivity. That focus is all about the outputs from that perspective. But the book reminds us is that’s not really what it was designed to be. Rather, it’s a place where a diverse, broad continental society goes to deliberate over the things that are troubling it. This confusion over what Congress is supposed to be goes way back. There’s a chapter in the book by Andrew Bush that points out there were differences between the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists at the Founding about what Congress was supposed to be. Right?
John Pitney:
Yeah, that’s right. And Andy writes that it’s the old conflict that political scientists would recognize as a difference between the trustee model of representation and the instructed delegate. The Anti-Federalists were more in line with the instructed delegate model. They thought that members of Congress should simply represent the opinion of their constituents. The Federalists had a different view. They thought that members of Congress should exercise their judgment in the sense that Edmund Burke described. As Madison put it, the idea was to refine and enlarge the public views by passing them through a medium of a chosen body of citizens whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country. I think that’s a proper Madisonian view. It isn’t necessarily a view that gets lots of applause at rallies, but I think it is a proper understanding of how the Founders designed our system and what they intended it to do.
Kevin Kosar:
Yeah, the Founders certainly did not anticipate or desire a Congress made up of red shirts and blue shirts who would just clobber each other again and again and adopt ideological platforms. I want to go back to something you mentioned with the chapter by Daniel Stid in the volume, which tells a tale of two separate American political science committees in the 1940s who had two different frameworks for thinking about Congress and what it should be. It’s a great chapter. Why is it a great chapter? What does it tell us about what we think about Congress today?
John Pitney:
Well, first it tells us about a time when people in Congress actually paid attention to the American Political Science Association. That would strike people as unusual today. But there were two different committees with two very, very different approaches to this. He describes them wonderfully. In 1945, the Committee on Congress proposed strengthening congressional capacity, the capacity specifically to act as an independent institution, an independent branch of government. The ideas in the report included strengthening staff capacity, rationalizing the committee system, positioning Congress for better oversight of the executive.
John Pitney:
Then came a much, much more famous committee report, the Committee on Political Parties, and its report, familiar to us and people who study parties, is toward a more responsible two-party system. The idea there was to strengthen political parties, to bring them closer to the Wilsonian model. And the congressional leader in our time who most explicitly pushed this model was Newt Gingrich, who repeatedly called himself the most professorial political leader since Woodrow Wilson, and he embraced the Wilsonian model way back in 1980. He organized Governing Team Day, which was basically the model 1.0 of what would become 14 years later the Contract With America. He quoted from the responsible party literature, and as a result of this project, members of Congress met with Reagan on the Capitol steps and pledged themselves to pass an agenda. Nothing much came of this. He tweaked it for the Contract With America, but that was the animating idea, so it was the ongoing influence of the second of the two reports.
Kevin Kosar:
Amazing. The connection between Woodrow Wilson, 1940s APSA committee, and Newt Gingrich. Few would have made that connection, but there it is for you. Don Wolfensberger spent many, many years on Capitol Hill as a staffer and was at the Wilson Center and also affiliated with the Bipartisan Policy Center. He has a great chapter in there that carries a wonderful quote from John Boehner. As John Boehner was ascending to the speakership, Boehner lamented that the House of Representatives had become a place where most members behaved like voters, not legislators. What was Boehner getting at with that point?
John Pitney:
Well, he was making the point that Congress’s job is to craft legislation, not simply vote on it. That’s the key. Members of Congress have to be actively involved in the content of legislation, and what Don writes about is the committee level and the floor. And I have to say, Don, I’m in absolute awe of his knowledge of congressional procedure. There are very few people in the history of America who’ve known more about procedure than he does. And too often, members devote their staff resources these days toward communications rather than policy. You’ve got staffers producing tweets instead of real legislative analysis. And as you wrote years ago, members increasingly want the Congressional Research Service to provide basically material for sound bites rather than serious explanations of the issues. And so that’s the distinction between lawmakers as voters, simply somebody who registers aye or nay in the roll call vote and sends a message to the voters, and legislators, who really get into the guts of policy and the wording and content of legislation.
Kevin Kosar:
Yeah, and then this brings up the issue of process and participation, which is a recurring theme. And there’s a chapter by Daniel Palazzolo, which points out there are reasons to believe that Congress is becoming less deliberative, that members are not, as you just noted, engaging in the process of working on legislation or studying up on government programs. It’s concerning. What can be done to increase deliberation in Congress when it feels like the incentives are just in the opposite direction?
John Pitney:
Yeah, and his work on Congress is marvelous, particularly his book on deliberation and floor debate, and he spends a lot of time talking about the actual quality of floor debate. Why does floor debate matter? Well, number one, it enlightens members about the merits of public policy. If you’re not, say, a member of the education and labor committee, you might not follow the details of, say, Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. Well, if you pay attention to floor debate, you might learn something about it. It can also educate the media and the public about the great issues of the day, and this is the ideal. Of course, C-SPAN viewers get a very different picture. Far too often, you get members getting up, reciting talking points prepared for them by staffers, and then leaving the chamber without listening to what anybody else has said, and this is troubling for members.
John Pitney:
It’s a problem because debate is the interchange of views. You don’t really have a whole lot of debate in Congress. Debate as is known to people who study collegiate debate, it’s responding to points raised by the other person as an actual exchange. Here, you just have parallel recitation speeches. One thing that was briefly attempted in the 1990s and discontinued was having Oxford-style debates. Newt was actually part of this effort. And you had teams of members debating, just as you would in a collegiate debating society, in great detail, issues before Congress. It was tremendously enlightening. But enlightenment was not the coin of the realm, and that experiment didn’t last for very long. And one of the things that Congress could do if they were interested in public education would be to resume this practice. Whether they will or not, I don’t know.
Kevin Kosar:
Yeah. The irony of C-SPAN cameras coming into the chambers and the fact that, instead of showing how Congress works, how the sausage get made, we instead get performance art, and we don’t see how members interchange views with one another and how they haggle and negotiate and how they speak to the merits of the situation. There’s an irony there. And I will note that at least one of the authors in the book, Jonathan Rauch, in his chapter, he basically said that a huge problem for Congress today is the loss of a deliberative space. He wants to bring back smoke-filled rooms and places where legislators will get together and horse trade and logroll and do all that sort of stuff. Right?
John Pitney:
Yeah. And there are a couple of ways you could do it. A lot of the reforms that Congress should consider are counter-intuitive to general public opinion. One may be reducing transparency, having closed committee meetings. That may strike people as undemocratic. Isn’t that going to increase the power of special interests? On the contrary. A lot of times, the people who are paying the closest attention to committee votes and committee deliberations are lobbyists.
John Pitney:
Another idea that some of the authors have mentioned is simply having members spend more time in Washington, adjusting the congressional schedule to keep members in Washington for long stretches. That way, they can develop the informal relationships that used to be a legislative lubricant. Increasingly, members just spend a few days in DC and head home for the weekend. Again, a lot of the electoral incentives push them in the other direction. They feel pressured to go home, and they fear being attacked by their opponents for becoming swamp creatures.
John Pitney:
Another important element of this, and I have alluded to this, is improving congressional capacity. Melanie Marlowe talks about this in her chapter on congressional oversight. And in addition to Melanie’s chapter, there’s this wonderful new book titled Congress Overwhelmed: The Decline of Congressional Capacity and Prospects for Reform, and it goes into great detail about the decline of congressional capacity. Particularly, we mentioned before, the congressional support agencies, Congressional Research Service, Government Accountability Office, Congressional Budget Office. These entities need to be strengthened, and they need very capable staff who can stay on for long periods of time. These are really, really important reforms that would greatly strengthen Congress’s capacity for deliberation.
Kevin Kosar:
Yeah, I mean, government has grown to gigantism. We have something like 180 executive agencies. The pre-COVID relief budget was somewhere around $4.5 trillion, and the number of regulations and government programs and all that are not quite innumerable, but they are exceedingly difficult to count. And for 535 individuals to roll into DC and try to oversee, say nothing of direct, any of that is a huge challenge. And without sufficient capacity, without sufficient help, it’s no wonder that they’re not doing it so well.
Kevin Kosar:
Let me get to my final question. Congress has reformed itself in the past. In the 1940s, for example, there was a kind of major reform enacted to bring the legislative branch more into parity with the executive branch. In the early ’70s, there were a number of enactments to strengthen Congress vis-a-vis the executive branch. Do you think in our polarized time, in the 21st century, that Congress can reform itself once again?
John Pitney:
Well, I think it’s possible. It’s hard because this is not the kind of thing that you hear about from other people when you’re standing in line at the supermarket, unless, of course, it’s in Washington, DC. Sometimes they talk about those things there. But spending more money on Congress, that isn’t necessarily an applause line, but it’s terribly important. There are reasons for hope. We’ve seen some movement on the modernization of Congress and genuine bipartisanship, not major, dramatic reforms, but talking at least about some marginal moves in the direction of congressional modernization.
John Pitney:
Now, some of the reforms are going to require changes in statutes. Some you can do internally by changes in rules, but some involve statutes, and that means presidential involvement. And here’s a side of the question that hasn’t gotten a great deal of attention but could be very significant in the next couple of years, and that’s this. More than any other president, maybe with the exception of LBJ, Joe Biden is a man of the Hill. He was elected in 1972, served 36 years in the Senate. For eight years as vice president, he was Obama’s main link to Congress. He understands the institution. And so when it comes to legislation, say, to strengthen the Congressional Research Service, that’s something that you would see him not only giving his signature to, but actively seeking because he understands the importance of Congress and the importance of deliberation, so I think that is also a hopeful sign, as well as some green shoots coming out of Capitol Hill.
Kevin Kosar:
Yeah, it’s true. During the 1940s reform, Harry Truman ascended to the presidency. He had been in Congress, and he saw full well that the legislature was not up to the demands of the day. So perhaps history will repeat. Professor Jack Pitney, thank you for talking with us about your book, Is Congress Broken?
John Pitney:
Thank you.
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