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.
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 Cash, welcome to the podcast.
Jordan Cash:
Thank you for having me.
Kevin Kosar:
Before we talk about the book, let’s talk about your scholarly interests. On your faculty page I see a lot of articles, including ones on executive power, drones, the Speaker of the House, 19th century whiggery, and African American Constitutionalism in the Founding of Liberia. That’s a lot of topics! Is there a golden thread that runs through them, or are these just subjects that caught your interest?
Jordan Cash:
When you list them like that, it does sound a bit scattershot. But generally my focus is on American institutions and political thought, really examining how the ideas that underlie our institutions and underlie our constitutional system shape the behavior of political actors and shape the development of our institutions themselves.
With all those articles, I’m usually examining the institution itself, how it’s developing, how certain ideas are shaping the behavior of office holders or the ideas themselves, trying to understand those underlying ideas that are shaping our institutions and shaping the behavior of political actors.
So I think there’s something of a golden thread to it, even though it is pretty diverse. I think that’s the general idea, how theory meets practice and particularly how American political thought and constitutional theory meets the actual practice of our politics.
Kevin Kosar:
Your co-editor is Kevin J. Burns. How do you two know one another, and what sparked the collaboration that produced this book?
Jordan Cash:
Kevin is an old friend. We met in graduate school at Baylor University where we both got our PhDs.
And really what happened for this collaboration is Kevin and I both did most of our dissertation work on the presidency—Kevin did some stuff on the Supreme Court as well. And so then when we got out of Baylor, ended up at our next institutions teaching Congress, Supreme Court and these sorts of things, and we thought, there’s a lot of material for people who want to teach a historically or original source-driven class on the presidency. Of course, with the Supreme Court, constitutional law cases present themselves very easily there.
But there really aren’t a lot of resources for doing the same with Congress. There’s a lot of more quantitative stuff on Congress, if you wanna take it from that perspective. But we thought for us, who focus on political thought and political development, if you wanted to really delve into the original sources, show the historical development of the institution, there just wasn’t a lot there.
So we’re talking about how somebody should do this sort of thing and were mentioning it to our mutual dissertation advisor, David K. Nichols, and he just goes, well, why don’t you two do it? I thought, that’s a good idea. We should just go ahead and do it. So that’s what we did, on his recommendation. We thought, well, if nobody else will do it, we will. And that’s really how the book came to be.
Kevin Kosar:
Obviously, there is a lot of congressional history. Thousands of members have toiled under the great dome, tens of thousands of laws have been passed, and so forth. You and Professor Burns chose to make this a book of speeches and debates. How did you figure out what to include? Where do you even start?
Jordan Cash:
That was a very difficult project, but ultimately we came down to thinking about it like a class. What would we teach? What would we focus on, if you’re teaching a class on Congress? What would be most helpful to somebody teaching Congress?
And we thought the main thing we wanted to focus on were selections that emphasize the internal structure of Congress. Why does Congress behave the way it does? Why do we have two houses? How is it developed? How have they developed differently?
We also wanted members really reflecting on their own role as legislators. What are they doing? Why are they doing it? How are they adjusting to different circumstances? What are the theories driving them, and how do those come up in political debates? Then also members reflecting on Congress’s role in the constitutional system. Maybe they’re defending Congress against the president, maybe they’re joining the president in some kind of initiative, or they’re pushing back on the courts.
So we really tried to take what one might almost say is an institutionally partisan perspective, like what do members of Congress think of themselves and how do they see their role in the broader constitutional system? And looking at how that then reflects on the way Congress functions and behaves, with the idea being that a reader who goes through our book will then have that better idea of the perspective of the legislature.
Like I said, there are a lot of collections of presidential speeches. We kind of know where the president’s coming from. A lot of Supreme Court cases you can go through. But to see the legislative perspective and have it actually debated is something that I think isn’t really out there.
And one thing too I’ll mention for readers—and this is something I think is kind of underrated—is when you read a congressional debate, you actually get all the different sides and you can see how the different threads of arguments. So a reader going through will hopefully be able to see and understand the very different sides of these debates, but perhaps even identify with various lines of argumentation and see the weaknesses in their position or the strengths in the opposing side’s position.
That’s something you don’t really get with a presidential speech where it’s just one person saying it. You kind of get it with Supreme Court cases, but even then it’s more majority opinion, dissenting opinion, or a concurrent opinion. With a debate, it has that ebb and flow of an actual conversation of these members delving into it, coming to compromises, finding other avenues, and that’s something I think that’s important for us as we think about American politics. Where’s that push and pull of an actual debate and what does deliberation really look like? And I think we see that when we actually start breaking down these debates.
Kevin Kosar:
You mentioned that you thought that you were filling in a hole in the study of Congress by using debates. Part of the reason, it seems, is that you’re somebody who believes ideas matter, particularly ideas surrounding the Constitution, the structure of government, and what Congress is supposed to do in that structure.
But there also seems to be an attempt here to remind people that politics is about persuasion, that pluralism is a brute fact. We don’t all share the same opinions. Some of us are very hostile to certain things. Others of us simply don’t care about the topic and don’t want to engage in it. And that being a reality, if you wanna get collective action, you’re gonna have to persuade others.
Is that what you’re up to?
Jordan Cash:
I think to a certain degree, and I think it’s important to remember, when we think about our Congress and how the Constitution sets up the Congress, it sets it up as the deliberative branch. Congress is not meant to be energetic like the president or have this kind of disconnected judgment like the court. It’s meant to—as you say—be pluralistic, to throw all these people together representing a wide range of interests, a wide range of constituencies, even having two houses with different term lengths and different constituency sizes. It’s designed to be actually quite messy and designed to force compromise and getting all these interests together. It’s the fundamental point of Congress.
So I don’t think we can have a clear view of what Congress does if we ignore that or we don’t really take full account of the deliberative action and how deliberation meshes with a representative’s duty to represent and be responsive to their constituents, but also the different perspectives that you see from all these different members. There are real intangibles that come through in a debate in a way that simply looking at the final vote doesn’t quite reflect.
Certainly the quantitative research is very important. It’s very useful. But there’s something I think missing if we don’t take into account the theoretical and developmental story of Congress and how these members are actually debating these issues.
Kevin Kosar:
When I speak about Congress to students or the Kiwanis Club or one of those types of audiences, I tell them that Congress is a remarkable institution. You take 535 people from all over the country, put them together under a big shiny dome, and you tell them cooperate. And if you think about our own day-to-day lives of trying to cooperate, whether it’s in a faculty meeting, deciding with your family what you’re going to eat for dinner or working with your neighbors on something, it is not an automatic process.
So when you think about trying to do that on the scale of 535 people representing, hundreds of millions of people, it’s hard to comprehend .
Jordan Cash:
Absolutely, and I usually tell my students—a lot of my students also study political theory—when we look at Congress, here we can see not only how theory meets practice, but how practice puts limits on theory. You can go into Congress with a clear idea of what the best kind of government is going to be and all the laws you wanna pass. That’s great, but chances are you’re going to get stopped by somebody and you have got to figure out how do you—somebody with sincere beliefs and convictions—face somebody with pretty much the exact opposite sincere beliefs and convictions. Then you’ve got—as you said—533 other people in addition to you two that you have to figure out with.
So I think looking at the debates too can be a lesson—especially for students who might be interested in public affairs—in this is what politics looks like. Sometimes it’s mundane. Sometimes it isn’t as exciting, but if you wanna get things done, this is how it actually works. This is how the sausage gets made, so to speak.
Kevin Kosar:
One of the great challenges of writing history or, frankly, of producing any book, is figuring out how to divide it up. You divided this book into chronological sections: the Founding Era, the Antebellum Era, all the way up to the present Era of Polarization. How did you come up with the scheme, and did you consider dividing it up another way, say, debates on executive power over foreign matters, and debates over war or the management of the economy?
Jordan Cash:
It’s a good question. We did talk about organizing it topically. In fact, we talked about so much—and thought that it is such a good idea—that we have a topical table of contents in the back of the book. So if say a reader or even a teacher who’s going over Congress wants to say, I really just wanna do Congress in foreign policy, they can go to that topical table of contents and they know these five selections cover Congress in foreign policy over the course of 200 years or so. Or if they wanna do just Congress and the presidency, they can do that.
So we did try to accommodate for that. But when we tried to think of, well, if you’re just picking out the book and you know nothing about Congress, maybe it would be easy to just go chronologically and to see that slow integral development, and it certainly covers a lot of topics, but then you can kind of see how these things interrelate and progress over time. So that’s the main reason we did it chronologically, so you can really see that development.
But then there is the opportunity to take these out topics. For example, when I teach Congress—I’m teaching a Congress class right now—and I tend to teach it topically, and that’s exactly what I do. I go back to the topical table of contents, I pick out the ones that I need for a particular day and just assign those particular readings to my students. And I think that works out pretty well. Professor Burns, on the other hand, I know he teaches his chronologically and he just goes page one all the way to the end. So hopefully this book can help teachers who are doing either one or then just readers who want to do it either way. It’s possible to do so.
Kevin Kosar:
Were there things that you had to leave on the proverbial cutting room floor that still pain you, or did you get everything in and now you’re comfortable with it?
Jordan Cash:
No, we didn’t get everything in. There are still things, even when I teach my Congress class, I’m like, this should have gotten in so I’m gonna teach it anyway—just make up a separate reading or something.
I will say we got the vast majority of things we wanted, we got in the book. But there are a few things that didn’t make it. And in fact, Kevin and I have a list of things that if we’re lucky enough to get a second edition, we to change and alter.
Some big exclusions that we had to make were, we decided early on that for a book like this to keep it really focused on congressional debates, we cut the Federalist Papers on Congress. We don’t have any Anti-Federalists papers on Congress. No Supreme Court cases that might deal with congressional power. We just figured that a lot of those things can be found elsewhere. You can buy copies of the Federalist Papers, the Anti-Federalists’, Supreme Court cases are easy to find, so we decided to try to make sure that we had material that you really couldn’t find at least very easily anywhere else, and to make this really the book for studying Congress.
But even then, there are a few debates that if we’re lucky enough to get a second edition, I’ll be going to bat for seeing what we can get. Things like the debate over the Iraq War or the line item veto in the 1990s. Even some stuff from the early Congress—there’s a debate over asking Alexander Hamilton for a report from the Secretary of the Treasury. That’s something that we had to leave on the cutting room floor.
I think there are alterations we can make as well. Right now we have a section on the impeachment articles for Justice Samuel Chase from 1804, which is very useful and I think very good at seeing how Congress is thinking about impeachment, especially judicial impeachment. But in the future maybe we would change it to focus more on the trial of Chase rather than the articles.
So there are a few ideas that we’re poking around with and things that we had to cut. But for the most part I’m pretty happy with the result. And, teaching it right now, I think it’s doing quite well.
Kevin Kosar:
Do you have a favorite section or chapter of the book?
Jordan Cash:
I will say I have a particular fondness for the early stuff. As you mentioned, the book begins in 1774. It doesn’t begin in 1776. There’s a Congress before those United States. We begin with John Adams diary entries on the Continental Congress. I was glad we found that and could begin really at the beginning. So I was very proud of that.
The overlapping debates with the first Congress over instructing representatives, the removal power, the Judiciary Act of 1789. I really liked the first Congress, so that’s always fun for me and just to see how they’re dealing with all these things to set up the Constitution and the government all at the same time. And so to see all these figures just kind of recur is fun for me, although I will say I think my absolute favorite and the ones that I keep going back to and that I think readers don’t know much about—but should know a lot about—are actually two back to back selections towards the middle of the book.
One is Thomas Bracket Reed imposing Reed’s Rules in 1890. So this is where Speaker Reed got rid of what’s called the disappearing quorum, where you could have members in the House, but then they wouldn’t speak up for roll call and so there wouldn’t be a quorum and Speaker Reed just starts counting them that they’re present. And so you have what’s probably my favorite line in the book, where a congressman from Kentucky stands up after Reed said that he was present. And the congressman from Kentucky says, I object to being named present. And Reed just goes, the chair has made a statement of fact that the gentleman from Kentucky is present. Does he deny it? And of course he can’t because he’s physically there. So that’s probably my favorite line in the entire book. It gets to how the House becomes a majoritarian institution and it’s an extremely important shift.
And then the very next selection is when George Norris, representative from Nebraska, institutes a resolution to strip the speaker of most of his powers, in that case it’s Speaker Joe Cannon. And so these back to back selections, I think show the pinnacle of the speaker’s power and how he’s able to make the House a majoritarian institution, but also how House rules can also strip the speaker of a lot of power. So you almost have the zenith and the nadir of the speakership power in those back-to-back selections, one in 1891 in 1910.
A lot of people just don’t know that these things happen. And yet, they completely reshaped how the House of Representatives acted and so therefore how the rest of Congress acted. So they had a massive impact on American governance. And those are the kind of selections that I really want readers to look at and see this is how Congress got to where it is, this is how Congress has been, and understanding how the internal workings of Congress have these wide ranging effects.
Those would probably be my two favorites. And also looking at the Speaker of the House, which in addition to Congress in general, is a role that I think people should pay more attention to.
Kevin Kosar:
I think a lot of people who even think about the Speaker of the House just imagine that the speaker’s authorities are written in stone, but there’s nothing in the Constitution other than saying “[t]he House of Representatives shall chuse their Speaker…”
And if you look at what happened to Speaker Kevin McCarthy not long ago—where he first had to bargain away some of his powers to get the job, then was removed from the position—this debate of how much power the speaker should have versus the rest of the House is still a very live question.
Jordan Cash:
Absolutely. I like to tell my students that the speaker’s power ebbs and flows, and it really gets this tension of if you centralize power too much in the leadership, is it really a democratic body? But if you decentralize it too much, is it actually an efficient body? And that’s an internal tension actually pointed out by Madison in the Federalist papers, so it’s integral to the study of Congress.
And I will say on Kevin McCarthy, there’s an interesting story regarding the book. So the book had already entered production when McCarthy was ousted and—it might have been the day of when I learned that McCarthy got in the boot—I called Kevin and I said, we have got to get this in the book. We have got to see if we can add something.
Because initially it was gonna be 1774 to 2021, but then I said, this is too big, we can’t leave this out. We can end with a Speaker of the House being kicked out or kicked out of his own position. And so we managed to get that in just under the deadline and added it in but it was a close one.
Kevin Kosar:
Finally, what do you hope the reader of this book learns?
Jordan Cash:
The main thing I hope that a reader of this book gets from it is to understand Congress better, to understand this institution better.
We all know about the opinion polls that say nobody likes Congress, but I think that might be partially because we don’t really understand what it’s for, what it’s supposed to do, and how it got here. So I hope a reader of this book will have a better sense of, what is our Congress meant to do? Why is Congress behaving this way? And hopefully they can have a better understanding of how the Constitution grounds Congress and how Congress develops over time.
In doing so, they can perhaps have a better perspective on what we can expect from Congress, what it’s meant to do, and really just be a more insightful and informed voter when it comes to talking about and voting for members of Congress.
Scholarly speaking, Kevin and I are hoping that this can be a nice entryway for people to have these historical and ideas-focused discussions about Congress and maybe more scholarship will come up that builds on that.
Kevin Kosar:
We have reached the end of the program, so let me conclude by thanking you, Professor Jordan Cash, for chatting with me today about this marvelous book, which I hope gets picked up in both collegiate and high school classrooms.
Jordan Cash:
Thank you very much. Really appreciate it.
Kevin Kosar:
Thank you for listening to Understanding Congress, a podcast of the American Enterprise Institute. This program was produced by Jaehun Lee and hosted by Kevin Kosar. You can subscribe to Understanding Congress via Stitcher, iTunes, Google Podcasts, and TuneIn. We hope you will share this podcast with others and tell us what you think about it by posting your thoughts and questions on Twitter and tagging at AEI. Once again, thank you for listening, and have a great day.
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