[House Hearing, 117 Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
BUILDING A MORE CIVIL AND COLLABORATIVE
CULTURE IN CONGRESS
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HEARING
BEFORE THE
SELECT COMMITTEE ON THE
MODERNIZATION OF CONGRESS
OF THE
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED SEVENTEENTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
__________
JUNE 17, 2021
__________
Serial No. 117-07
__________
Printed for the use of the Select Committee on the Modernization of
Congress
[GRAPHIC NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Available via http://govinfo.gov
__________
U.S. GOVERNMENT PUBLISHING OFFICE
48-593 WASHINGTON : 2022
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SELECT COMMITTEE ON THE MODERNIZATION OF CONGRESS
DEREK KILMER, Washington, Chair
ZOE LOFGREN, California WILLIAM TIMMONS, South Carolina,
EMANUEL CLEAVER, Missouri Vice Chair
ED PERLMUTTER, Colorado BOB LATTA, Ohio
DEAN PHILLIPS, Minnesota RODNEY DAVIS, Illinois
NIKEMA WILLIAMS, Georgia DAVE JOYCE, Ohio
GUY RESCHENTHALER, Pennsylvania
BETH VAN DUYNE, Texas
COMMITTEE STAFF
Yuri Beckelman, Staff Director
Derek Harley, Republican Staff Director
C O N T E N T S
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Opening Statements
Page
Chairman Derek Kilmer
Oral Statement............................................. 1
Vice Chairman William Timmons
Oral Statement 3
Witnesses
Mr. Yuval Levin, Director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional
Studies, American Enterprise Institute
Oral Statement............................................. 4
Written Statement.......................................... 7
Ms. Molly Reynolds, Senior Fellow, Governance Studies, Brookings
Oral Statement............................................. 17
Written Statement.......................................... 20
Discussion....................................................... 25
BUILDING A MORE CIVIL AND COLLABORATIVE CULTURE IN CONGRESS
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THURSDAY, JUNE 17, 2021
House of Representatives,
Select Committee on the
Modernization of Congress,
Washington, DC.
The committee met, pursuant to call, at 9:05 a.m., in Room
2167, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Derek Kilmer
[chairman of the committee] presiding.
Present: Representatives Kilmer, Perlmutter, Phillips,
Williams of Georgia, Timmons, Van Duyne, and Joyce.
The Chairman. The committee will come to order.
Without objection, the chair is authorized to declare a
recess of the committee at any time.
I now recognize myself for 5 minutes for an opening
statement.
So the view from the chair's seat looks a little different
today, and that is by design. Committee hearings should elicit
thoughtful and productive discussion about the issues of the
day, and yet most hearings are structured to do just the
opposite. Members sit in rows divided by party with the senior
Members literally sitting above their junior colleagues. We
look at each other in profile, or, even worse, we are staring
at the back of each other's heads, which I have two concerns
about. One, it is not the best way to have dialogue. And, two,
I am thinning in the back.
And I know you smell what I am cooking.
Witnesses who are there to share their expertise are often
seated below us or even though they know more than we do on
many of these issues, and a lot of interesting exchanges get
cut short because the 5-minute rule, and there is no real flow
to the discussion because Members are running back and forth
between multiple hearings. Then they jump from one topic to
another and then back again.
So, instead of generating interesting debate and good
ideas, hearings too often promote political posturing and sound
bites for social media. That is definitely not what the Framers
intended. Woodrow Wilson once famously noted that ``Congress in
session is Congress on public exhibition whilst Congress in its
committee rooms is Congress at work.'' Unfortunately, this
hasn't been the case for quite some time.
So the Select Committee is trying something different
today. Earlier this year we adopted committee rules to give us
the flexibility to experiment with how we structure our
hearings, and our goal is to encourage thoughtful discussion
and a civil exchange of ideas and opinions. Committee members
agreed that the ability to look right at each other when
speaking and when listening matters. So does the ability to
extend a meaningful exchange with a witness or a colleague.
These two simple guideposts provided the framework for our
hearing today. And given the topic of today's hearing,
``Building a More Civil and Collaborative Congressional
Culture,'' this approach makes good sense.
So, in accordance with clause 2(j) of House rule XI, we
will allow 1 hour of extended questioning per witness, and,
without objection, these 2 hours will not be strictly
segregated between witnesses, which will allow up to 2 hours of
back-and-forth exchanges between members and witnesses.
Vice Chair Timmons and I will manage the time to ensure
that every member has equal opportunity to participate. Any
member who wishes to speak should signal their request to me or
Vice Chair Timmons. You can just wave or gesture or----
Mr. Perlmutter. Gesture.
The Chairman. Bird noise.
Additionally, members who wish to claim their individual 5
minutes to question each witness pursuant to clause 2(j) of
rule XI will be permitted to do so following the 2 hours of
extended questioning. Okay. That is the formal stuff.
This committee's mission is to make Congress work better
for the American people, and one way we do that is to practice
what we preach. It is one thing to call for a more civil and
collaborative process, but it is another to actually do it. In
trying out new approaches, this committee is modeling what is
possible. We understand that what we are doing today may be
difficult to pull off in some House committees, but
subcommittees can provide a good venue for experimentation.
Simple agreement between a chair and a ranking member can open
the door to new approaches that inspire genuine participation
in the legislative process.
Modernization doesn't happen without experimentation.
Institutions evolve through a process of trial and error. And
if we don't try new things, we risk stagnation. We owe the
American people a strong legislative branch that is capable of
continuing upholding its Article I responsibilities. We also
owe the American people a Congress that is capable of engaging
in constructive conflict. The goal in airing conflict shouldn't
be simply to highlight difference. The goal should be to
establish clear positions of meaningful discussions, test
different compromises, and ultimately find a way forward.
I am consistently struck that Congress as an institution
has some unique cultural challenges. It is the first
organization in which I have worked where there is not a widely
embraced mission or a set of goals. Indeed, Congress often
feels like 435 independent contractors, all loosely affiliated
with one of two general contractors, that appear to be in a
high-stakes competition for market share.
The incentives, as one of our witnesses today points out in
his book, which I read on my airplane flight, are often not to
build or fix the institution but rather to bash it. Much of
what vexes the institution is not failures and rules and
procedures but the breakdown of norms or, for lack of a better
phrase, corporate culture.
And, finally, there is a recognition that polarization in
Congress is often reflective of disagreement we see in American
society.
So, today, we are joined by two experts who are going to
help us understand the various factors and trends over the past
several decades that have contributed to the high levels of
polarization we see in both society and Congress today. They
will also get us thinking about how Members perceive their
roles within Congress and strategies we might consider for
normalizing civil and collaborative behavior. I am looking
forward to their testimony and conversation.
And I would like now to invite Vice Chair Timmons to share
some opening remarks as well.
Mr. Timmons. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
And I want to thank both of our witnesses for taking the
time to come today. We really do appreciate it, and we look
forward to this conversation.
I think that this is possibly the most important work this
committee will do. We are doing a lot of important work. But
making Congress more civil, more collaborative is probably what
I believe to be the most important thing that we can do because
there is no collaboration. There is no civility. It is
remarkable that this is where we are, but it is a symptom of
where we are as a country, and we got to work on the country,
but we really got to lead in Congress.
So I spent a lot of time in the first--in the 116th
Congress on the calendar and the schedule because I think that
spending more time together, not--I call it pinballing all over
the Capitol complex--and building relationships is the
beginning of the conversation because we are not having policy-
based discussions. We are using talking points. You never have
to defend your ideas in front of your colleagues, and you are
on Twitter, spouting off mean things, and that gets clicks, and
then you go on television and say even meaner things. And guess
what? We are not going to fix immigration that way. We are not
going to fix our debt. We are not going to fix healthcare. We
have to have policy-based conversations from a place of mutual
respect and hear people's ideas and find common ground to move
forward, and that is what we need. That is what the American
people deserve.
So I think that, without fixing the process, giving people
opportunities to get to know one another and spend time
together, we are never going to be able to have these
conversations. And so I just really appreciate you-all taking
the time, and I am looking forward to it.
I do want to point out that this week is possibly the best
example of what is wrong with this place. We had votes at 6:30
on Monday. We are leaving in 2 or 3 hours. Today is Thursday.
So we didn't do anything on Monday or today except for this
hearing, which is wonderful, and we had 2 days of which, you
know, three members of this committee serve on four committees,
and I don't know their committee schedule but I can promise you
that they were double-booked multiple times. We had floor votes
yesterday for, oh, my goodness, seven 20-minute votes. It was
probably one of the most inefficient experiences I have had up
here, which says a lot.
So just finding opportunities to make this place better 10
minutes at a time, you know, a day at a time, that is how we
are going to begin this process of building relationships to
have policy-based conversations. So I look forward to this
dialogue, and I really appreciate the different in this format
because I think it will facilitate a better discussion.
So, with that, Mr. Chairman, thank you.
And I yield back.
The Chairman. Thank you.
I am going to invite each witness to give 5 minutes of oral
testimony. And following testimony, and, without objection, I
am going to grant the witnesses an additional 5 minutes to
respond to or follow up on points of interest in each other's
testimony. Witnesses are reminded that your written statements
will be made part of the record.
And our first witness today is Yuval Levin. Dr. Levin is
the director of Social, Cultural and Constitutional Studies at
the American Enterprise Institute and also holds the Beth and
Ravenel Curry Chair in Public Policy. He is the founding and
current editor of National Affairs, as well as the senior
editor of The New Atlantis and a contributing editor to the
National Review. Dr. Levin served as a member of the White
House domestic policy staff under President George W. Bush. He
was also executive director of the President's Council on
Bioethics and a congressional staffer at the Member, committee,
and leadership levels. He is the author of several books on
political theory and public policy, most recently, ``A Time to
Build: From Family and Community to Congress and the Campus,
How a Recommitting to Our Institutions Can Revive the American
Dream.''
Dr. Levin, you are now recognized.
STATEMENTS OF YUVAL LEVIN, DIRECTOR OF SOCIAL, CULTURAL, AND
CONSTITUTIONAL STUDIES, AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE; AND
MOLLY REYNOLDS, SENIOR FELLOW, GOVERNANCE STUDIES, BROOKINGS
INSTITUTION.
STATEMENT OF YUVAL LEVIN
Mr. Levin. Chair Kilmer, Vice Chair Timmons, thank you very
much. Members of the committee, thank you for the opportunity
to testify today. It is an honor to be able to contribute
something to the enormously important work that you are doing
and to think with you a little bit about how to improve the
culture of the Congress.
In my written remarks, I offer some reflections on the
sources of today's cultural distempers and on how what is
happening in this institution is related to some broader trends
in our society. I am happy to discuss that, of course, in our
conversation. In these brief opening remarks I thought that I
would draw just one part of that testimony which focuses on a
few key principles for reform, some crucial points to remember,
maybe pitfalls to avoid as you consider ways of improving the
culture of the institution.
I would start by saying that it is important to remember
that prescription is not diagnosis in reverse when we think
about how to fix institutions. There are reasons why Congress
is the way it is, good and bad. But those reasons don't offer
us a map for improving things. You can't go backwards and try
to play that movie in reverse and think you will solve
problems. So that understanding how we got here can help us to
understand some of the constraints that reformers face in
trying to fix things but doesn't offer us a map of where to go
next.
Secondly, I would really urge you to avoid the lure of
selective nostalgia when thinking about Congress. The problems
with the contemporary Congress is not that it isn't like it
used to be. It is that in some ways it isn't what it needs to
be today, and it is important to think about the difference
between those. It is easy to approach the kind of work that you
are doing in this committee by trying to think back to some
golden age when Congress supposedly worked and everybody
supposedly got along. I would just say it is very unlikely that
whatever golden age you have in mind was actually as golden as
you might remember or as people might say, and it is important
to see that change has to happen going forward and not going
backward.
Your committee very wisely describes itself as devoted to
modernization of Congress. Modernization involves adapting to
changing circumstances. And that is the right attitude to
maintain, even if there are lessons we can learn from the past.
Third, I would really urge you to focus on incentives when
thinking about the culture. Members of this institution behave
the way you do for reasons, for serious reasons. You are all
intelligent men and women, ambitious men and women, and you are
trying to succeed and to achieve something for your
constituents and for your country. And so, when culture breaks
down, there are reasons that have to do with incentives with
the kinds of pressures you face. And if we want to think about
how to change the culture, it is important to think about how
to change incentives.
Some of the strongest incentives that Members face are
obviously electoral incentives, which aren't so easy for
Congress itself to change, but there are also incentives
created by the nature of legislative work itself, by the nature
of the schedule, the nature of the structure of the
institution, which can be very powerful, which shape behavior
as much as they shape work, and it is important to think about
change in terms of altering incentives.
Fourth and related to that, I would say that reforming the
culture of Congress requires reforming the work of Congress. It
is worth thinking about things like how to encourage Members to
spend more time together, how to encourage Members to take
retreats together or have dinner together. That matters, but I
would say that ultimately what matters more is the work of the
institution. The cultural change of the work encourages a
different kind of culture, and just spending time together is
not really a way to get at the core of the culture of the
institution. You have to think about how Congress works and,
therefore, how its Members work.
And, fifth and finally, I would urge you to think
explicitly about how you understand the purpose of the
Congress. Reforms of the institution including reforms focused
on improving its culture have to take for granted some idea of
the purpose of Congress' work, but there is a rather deep
disagreement about that purpose that I think is implicit now in
a lot of the thinking that surrounds congressional reform and
that sometimes leaves some of the that work incoherent. Simply
put, I would say reformers have to ask yourselves whether the
purpose of the Congress is maybe like the purpose of the
European Parliament, to enable the majority party to achieve
its objectives while it is in office until the public throws it
out, or whether the purpose of the Congress is to enable or
even compel accommodation across lines of difference in
American society, to bring people together across differences.
Those goals are not mutually exclusive, obviously, but
particularly in an era of closely divided parties, they can
really point in different directions.
That latter purpose, enabling accommodation, bargaining,
compromise, dealmaking is plainly, I think, implicit in the
constitutional design of the legislative branch. The U.S.
Congress really isn't like a European Parliament. It is
intended to work across lines of difference, and I think the
distinction between the two is especially important when
thinking about the culture of the institution. A culture of
implacable partisan polarization is not necessarily an obstacle
to the functioning of a purely majoritarian legislature like a
European Parliament, but it is absolutely an obstacle to the
cause of a more accommodationist, compromise-driven model of
legislative work.
In essence, I think reformers need to decide if the goal of
reform is to make cross-partisan engagement less necessary or
more likely. That you are concerned about that kind of question
and that you are concerned about the culture of the institution
suggests to me that you are--that you take that kind of cross-
partisan engagement to be an essential goal of congressional
reform, and that is certainly my own view, too. I think we have
to wrestle with that question of what ultimately is the purpose
of the institution. How do we expect it to solve problems
before we can get to particular reforms?
My written testimony does suggest a few categories of
particular reforms that could be especially useful, I think, in
moving the culture of Congress in a particular direction, and I
am happy to get into those but I thought that starting with
these general principles might be a way into a broader
conversation. And in any case, I now stand in your way of
hearing from Molly Reynolds, who is truly one of the great
Congress experts and knowledgeable in a way that I couldn't
hope to be. So I am going to get out of her way and let her
inform you.
Thank you very much.
[The statement of Mr. Levin follows:]
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The Chairman. Thank you, Dr. Levin.
Our second witness is Molly Reynolds. Dr. Reynolds is a
senior fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings
Institution. She studies Congress with an emphasis on how
congressional rules and procedures affect domestic policy
outcomes. Dr. Reynolds is the author of, ``Exceptions to the
Rule: The Politics of Filibuster Limitations in the U.S.
Senate,'' which explores the creation, use, and consequences of
the budget reconciliation process and other procedures that
prevent filibusters in the U.S. Senate. Her current research
projects include work on oversight in the House of
Representatives, congressional reform, and the congressional
budget process. She also supervises the maintenance of ``Vital
Statistics on Congress,'' Brookings' long-running resource on
the first branch of government.
Dr. Reynolds, welcome back to our committee. You are now
recognized.
STATEMENT OF MOLLY REYNOLDS
Ms. Reynolds. Thank you. Thank you, Chair Kilmer, Vice
Chair Timmons, members of the committee, and staff. Again, my
name is Molly Reynolds. I am a senior fellow in the Governance
Studies program at the Brookings Institution, and I am so
appreciative of the opportunity to be back to today testify on
how Congress might improve its culture.
With my time this morning, I want to----
Mr. Perlmutter. Is your mike on?
Ms. Reynolds. Is that better?
Mr. Perlmutter. That is better.
Ms. Reynolds. Okay. With my time this morning, I want to
build on two of the principles that Yuval laid out in his
testimony that prescription is not diagnosis in reverse and the
necessity of avoiding the lure of selective nostalgia. And I
will draw today on my own research and that of other political
scientists, and I want to offer some observations on why these
principles are so important.
To begin, a review of a few familiar but useful trends in
American politics may be helpful. Voters today are better
sorted into the two parties along both ideological lines and
social identities. Research also suggests this increasing
homogeneity has led votes to see partisanship as a stronger
component of their social identity, which, in turn, leads them
to see themselves as more different from and to dislike Members
of the other party.
Second, on the issue of polarization in Congress, while any
single approach will have drawbacks, the measure most often
used by political scientists indicates that polarization in
Congress was relatively low between the 1930s and the 1970s but
grew to record levels by the 2000s. The period of increasing
polarization since the 1970s has been asymmetric to the extent
that it has been more associated with the movement of
Republican legislatures to the right than with Democratic
Members to the left. To the extent that Democrats have moved in
a more liberal direction, it has been driven by demographic
change in the Caucus as additional female Representatives and
Representatives of color have been elected as Democrats.
Indeed, the House has nine times as many women, four and a half
times as many African Americans, nine times as many Latinos and
Latinas, and seven and a half times as many Asian Americans
today as it did in 1971. To be clear, a more diverse House of
Representatives which better reflects the diversity of the
country is a good thing for our democracy. But a more diverse
Chamber cannot and should not operate under the same
institutional culture than its less diverse predecessors did.
The changing demographics are not the only reason why we
cannot divorce a conversation about the changing culture of
Congress from one about racial politics in the United States.
We must also consider the consequences of the realignment of
southern White voters from the Democratic Party to the
Republican Party. As political scientist Frances Lee, who this
panel heard from in the 116th Congress, has argued, one
consequence of the long, postwar dominance of the Democratic
Party in Congress is that it shaped Members' expectations about
the outcome of the next election. Members of the both parties
believed that Democrats would hold the majority during this
period. Beginning in the 1980s, both parties began to see the
majority as winnable. And Members' behavior changed
accordingly. When party control is seen to hang in the balance,
Members see more value in a style of partisanship that
disincentivizes cooperation.
Charting a course for change also requires being honest
about elements of previous Congresses that may have encouraged
a collaborative culture but to which we cannot return for other
good reasons. Here I would point to the example of calls for
Members to move their families to Washington. The notion that
the culture of Congress has changed for the worse because
Members and their families do not socialize with each other is
widely held. The shift away from relocating one's family is
often attributed to changing expectations in the 1980s and
1990s, whereby Members should avoid being seen to have ``gone
Washington.'' Viewing time spent in Washington as something to
be avoided is detrimental to the health of the institution, and
we should work to change the understanding of it.
But even if this framing is harmful, that does not mean
that the push to roll back one of its consequences in calling
for more Members to relocate to Washington is automatically the
right thing to do. We lack comprehensive data on the
occupations of congressional spouses, either historically or
today, but it is fair to suspect that many more Members today
come from dual-career families, and if we care about continuing
to diversify the range of perspectives which lawmakers bring to
Washington, we do not want to create systematic barriers to
individuals with caregiving responsibilities from serving in
Congress.
Finally, I will urge you, especially as you think about
improving the norms of interpersonal behavior that facilitates
what are distinct from legislative behavior, to consider what a
culture of civility is in service of. Civility and good
interpersonal behavior more generally can encourage
collaboration and other productive methods of doing legislative
work.
But calls for civility also have a long history of serving
as a means of attempting to suppress marginalized groups. The
norms that persist are the ones that Members believe will serve
them well. That can also mean they help preserve the existing
status quo. Building new norms requires convincing Members
inclusively that they will help them accomplish their goals.
And, with that, I might yield back to Yuval to begin a
conversation about proposed reforms that might advance the goal
of a more civil and collaborative culture.
[The statement of Ms. Reynolds follows:]
[GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
The Chairman. I would like to ask both witnesses whether
they have any additional points or comments that they want to
make, having heard one another, before we move on to member
dialogue and questions.
Mr. Levin. Well, thank you. I appreciate that, and I
appreciate the opportunity to respond to Molly's very
thoughtful remarks.
I think, as she suggested at the end, that it might be
worth our spending this brief period thinking about specific
ideas for change that might build out from some of the points
we have made and some of the points we each make in our
testimony. And I would do that by stressing the point I
suggested, which is that changing culture means changing work
especially. And it is important to think not only in terms of
how we can get Members to cooperate more, to get to know each
other more, all of which matters. It is important that we think
in terms of categories like budget reform.
The budget has always been at the core of the culture of
this institution from the very beginning. It is at the essence
of what Congress does. The power of the purse shapes the
ambition that members come here with and the nature of the work
they do, and Congress has moved to change the nature of the
budget process very often in response to what are in effect
challenges to its culture or rather to its ability to work
effectively.
The budget process that you work with today, which comes
from the middle of the 1970s, is not well-suited to the needs
that Congress has now. I think that is true both in terms of
the needs that involve spending Federal money but as well as
the need to work together across party lines in an institution
that is divided and that has been closely divided now for a
generation.
This budget process comes from a time when one party had
held control for 20 years and expected to hold control for
forever and did for another 20 years after that but that has
not been the case now for quite a while and a budget process
that is suited to a Congress where each party thinks it might
gain control next time I think would look rather different than
the kind of consolidated process you have now which, if you
think about it, assumes an enormous amount of coordination
capacity which now is very difficult in Congress. I think it is
very important to think in terms of budget reform if you want
to change the culture, the nature of the institution.
Secondly, I would urge you to think, as this committee has
in very constructive ways, about ways of re-empowering the
committees of the House, the committees of the Congress. That
is important both for advancing the work of the institution but
also for allowing Members to see how they can matter, even if
they don't happen to be the Speaker or the majority leader or
even a committee chair, and allowing Members to see how their
time is spent in ways that translate into meaningful work they
can show their constituents and they can point to in explaining
how they are improving the country.
Committees are enormously important in that way, and I
would distinguish strengthening the committees from
strengthening individual Members. That is, it is not just about
decentralization. It is about that middle level where Members
work together and engage with each other over concrete,
substantive policy issues. I think that is enormously important
if we want to think about changing the culture.
And, finally, I would just point to one idea that is in my
testimony which I think has--can be a sensitive issue in
Congress but has to do with the question of transparency. There
are a lot of ways in which the increased transparency in this
institution has done an enormous amount of good. A public
institution needs to be transparent, but there also need to be
forums in which Members can work together in private. A lot of
the work of Congress is bargaining and negotiation. Bargaining
and negotiation are not well-served by absolute transparency.
So that, while it is very important to that Members be
answerable for the decisions they make, that they are
ultimately responsible for their votes and for proposals and
ideas, there has to be some room for negotiation.
That fact is now dealt with by Members working with each
other outside the structure of the Congress, creating little
groups where they meet and talk about what a bill could
include. Well, that is what a committee is supposed to be, and
the reason that that doesn't happen in the committees is,
frankly, that it is very hard to do that on television or
livestreamed to your most engaged constituents. There has to be
some room for some engagement with one another before Members
step out in front of cameras and do the part of their work that
is ultimately public. I know that is easier for me to say than
it is for to you say, but I think it is very important to think
about as you ask yourselves how to improve the culture of the
institution.
Ms. Reynolds. Thank you.
So, to start, I will sort of endorse many of the ideas that
Yuval offered in his remarks there. And then I will say that
generally I think what is important for improving legislative
behavior is creating more opportunities for Members to have
efficacy in the legislative process. I would encourage you to
think about more ways to provide Members opportunities to claim
credit for legislative wins, even when those wins don't involve
the passage of a bill on which you were the lead sponsor.
So this would include things like formatting committee
reports in such a way that make clear which provisions were
added as the result of Member requests at the drafting stage or
as a result of specific Member amendments, providing a clear
accounting of which standalone bills are incorporated into
large omnibus packages. That would help acknowledge the hard
work of the Members in the committees that went into those
individual components. Another approach would be to involve
sort of formally designating what you might think of as a lead
bill coauthor, so a kind of additional category between sort of
the formal sponsor of a bill and the cosponsors to signal in
some formal way that someone else had made major contributions
to the origins of a bill.
The last thing I will say is that I--while I think these
reforms and the kinds that Yuval mentioned are important, there
are limits to what you can change by changing your rules and
procedure about the culture of the institution. I say that not
to discourage you from doing this hard work, because it is
incredibly important, but just to acknowledge--if anything, to
make it more important that you do the best work you can but to
acknowledge that there are lots of things outside these four
walls that shape your culture as well.
Thank you.
The Chairman. Thank you. I appreciate--oh, sorry.
Thank you. I appreciate both your testimony. Until the end
of the hearing, this will be the last formal thing I say.
I now recognize myself and Vice Chair Timmons to begin 2
hours of extended questioning of both witnesses. Any member who
wishes to speak should signal their request to me or to Vice
Chair Timmons.
So, prior to the hearing, Vice Chair Timmons and I had a
little bit after discussion around just some of the things that
got teed up in the testimony. Both in your written testimony
mentioned committee empowerment, Member empowerment. There was
discussion of budget and appropriations reform. I know Vice
Chair Timmons wants to hit on the issue of time and schedule
and how that impacts things. So we have a few threads to pull,
and, as we mentioned at the start of this hearing, our intent
is to have this be a little bit more free-flowing so that,
rather than being a regimented 5 minutes per person, that if we
are hitting on a topic you want to ask a question about, let us
know and you can ask the question. That is part of the idea
here.
So, maybe just to kick us off, I want to get a better sense
from you of what committee empowerment looks like and that, you
know, if I airdropped you onto this committee, other than
running, screaming for the door, what would you do? What would
you recommend to better empower committees?
I know--and, Dr. Levin, in your book you actually reference
the fact that, you know, some of what we see now in terms of
centralization of power was due to reforms in prior
generations.
So what do we unwind? What do we change? What does
committee empowerment look like?
Mr. Levin. Well, thank you very much, Chair Kilmer, for the
question.
I would start by stressing that point, which is that a lot
of the problems we face now were solutions to problems that
Members faced in a prior generation, and that is just natural.
That is how institutions evolve. It doesn't even mean they were
wrong to do what they did. A lot of the centralization of power
that happened in Congress began in the 1970s in response to
excessively powerful committee chairs and a sense among younger
members that some committee chairs, especially southern
Democrats, were standing in the way of important reforms that a
lot of Members felt that they had been elected to advance. And
they worked to take away some of the power of those committee
chairs, and the way they could do that is as young Members was
to move that power to leadership and to empower their party
leaders to take away some of the authority that committee
chairs had, and that began a process of centralization.
I think there is another wave of that that came in the
1990s when Republicans took control of Congress for the first
time in decades. And, frankly, they didn't have much experience
of running the institution through the committee system. They
had been elected thanks to work of a Speaker and majority
leader, and they gave that Speaker and majority leader a lot of
power, which ended up centralizing power away from the
committees in ways that did advance some important agenda items
but that have left us in a situation now where I think a lot of
Members feel like their time on just a normal week in Congress
is not devoted to enough work that is really going to
ultimately matter and result in legislation, result in
something they can show their constituents.
To me, it is very important to think about the answer to
that in terms of committee empowerment more than individual
Member empowerment. Congress is plural. It is not an
institution where a single Member can really drive the agenda.
And empowering individual Members, I think, very often just
results in grandstanding because that is what members can do.
They can find a camera and make their name that way.
The committees have a very distinct and unusual role in the
institution because they allow power to flow in ways that
enable groups of Members to work together and represent some of
the diversity of the larger institution that can then result in
legislation that might have a chance of moving. So, to me,
empowering committees really means allowing the everyday work
that Members do in committee to result in legislation. And it
is not nearly enough the case now that that work has any chance
of really resulting in legislation.
One practical idea I would point to is something that a lot
of State legislatures do now. More than 20 State legislatures
allow committees to control some floor time so that there is
once a month in most cases a certain amount of time that
belongs to the committee, to the chair and the ranking member.
Or different legislatures do this differently where, generally
speaking, what happens in that time is that legislative
proposals that have passed the committee, so have some support
that reflects some of the breadth of the larger legislature,
can move to the floor, regardless of whether the party leaders
want that or not. That time belongs to the chair or the
committee.
And that means that the work of the committee, especially
when that work is somewhat consensus-driven, has the support of
a large number, and some State legislatures require that there
be a supermajority on the committee for a bill to meet the
requirement of that time, can actually get to the floor. And
that means that Members don't have to think about whether what
they are doing will satisfy their party leader. They can look
at the around them, around the committee room, and see that
this work can get somewhere, that if we work together and get
to a place where enough of us agree, then the larger
legislature can look at it. That is one idea. There are many
others.
But I think the point of that is to enable the work that is
done in committee to matter. I would describe the problem right
now as a sense that that work really doesn't matter enough and
that what you can do in committee is, you know, badger somebody
in such a way that might get you on your favorite cable news
channel that night rather than thinking about producing
legislation that might actually get somewhere.
Ms. Reynolds. I will just start where Yuval ended, which is
to say that I completely agree with this notion that one of the
challenges in committee--with committees right now is that
there is no--often no reason to believe that the hard work done
in committee will result in legislation that actually comes to
the floor and has a chance of becoming law and Yuval suggested
one way to address that is by giving committees protected floor
time. Sort of a related proposal would be to guarantee each
committee sort of some number of bills that they get to bring
to the floor each session. So I think there are a number of
different ways you can approach that, but fundamentally I think
that that is the central challenge here.
The other thing I would say, going back to some of the
history where Yuval started, is that, when we talk about
empowering committees, we need to be careful to specify what we
mean by that and that what I think we want is committees where
individual Members feel like that is the place where they can
have a say in the legislative process. And one of the sort of
part of how we ended up where we are today is reforms that
disempowered committee chairs because they had sort of
developed little fiefdoms around the institution where even--we
would have said in the middle of the 20th century that
committees were quite powerful but that they were not powerful
in a way that meant that individual Members felt like that was
the avenue through which they could have input into the
legislative process.
And so, as we think about empowering committees, I think we
want to be clear that we want them to be places where real
legislative work is done by all of the participants and not
just, say, the leaders of each individual committee.
The Chairman. I know Vice Chair Timmons wants to get in on
this, and I think Mr. Phillips also wanted to.
Mr. Timmons. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I am actually going to step back a little bit and try to
frame this. I am seeing three kind of areas of focus. Time is
one. And, you know, we have talked about the calendar. In 2019,
we traveled for 70 days, and we were here for 65 full days.
That is crazy. We made a recommendation last Congress about two
weeks on, two weeks off. We can talk more about that, but it is
not just being here more. It is our time here and how we are
efficient with the floor schedule and how we are efficient to
not be in multiple places at once with committees and
subcommittees. So we are working in that area, and I am sure we
are going to talk more about that. So the first is time.
The second is relationship-building opportunities, and we
have talked about a number of different ways that we can do
that, and we are going to go deeper in that category.
And then the third, and I definitely agree one of the most
important, I refer to it as restructuring incentives and, you
know, you have got budget reform, and that is huge. We haven't
passed a budget in decades. I mean, this is crazy. And, you
know, I like the idea of restructuring committees and
empowering Members. And, you know, we have been talking about
that. And, you know, another thing would be maybe expedited
hearings for, you know, we have the discharge petition, which
is useless--it is just a messaging device--and then, you know,
maybe creating a lower threshold for a discharge petition but
making it equal Rs and Ds, so 80 Rs and 80 Ds. And you get a
hearing where--maybe within the committee you get, you know,
maybe 50 percent or 40 percent of the actual committee, but it
has to be equally Rs and Ds; you will get an expedited hearing
or you can force a hearing or just anything we can do to create
an incentive for bipartisanship, because I think that is huge.
So can you-all speak really quick? Do you agree that those
are the three categories we should be focused on: time,
relationship-building opportunities, and then restructuring
incentives? Is that fair, or is there another area that you
think would be important to add to our top three?
Mr. Levin. Well, thank you. I do agree that those are three
important categories. I think I would place the third of those
first.
Mr. Timmons. Sure.
Mr. Levin. And that it is particularly important to think
about the nature and work of the institution.
I would also say one other thing. The way you put things
and the way that I would often put things, too, which says it
is crazy we haven't passed a budget in 30 years--or, you know,
it is really now 7 years--I guess, since there was really an
organized budget process. Maybe it is not that crazy. Maybe the
question is: If this is how Congress works now, what should the
rules be to enable that to be a way to pass legislation? If we
are not going to push our way through the 1974 budget process,
what are we doing? And what would it look like for a Congress
that wants to do that, to establish its rules in a way that
enable that to lead to constructive legislation?
I think it is worth your while as members to think about
how are we working? If what it takes to pass a bill on
infrastructure is to put aside the committee system and get
members together in a private room to talk about
infrastructure, well, maybe that is what the committee system
should be. If we can't seem to get a budget passed in the way
that the budget process requires but there are other ways that
we do spending bills, well, let's think about what the budget
process would look like if it actually enabled Members to do
what the evidence suggests they want to do.
This is your institution. You can change the rules. The
Constitution creates very, very broad frameworks for what your
work has to involve and lets you set the rules within that to a
very great degree. None of these rules is sacred. None of these
things has to be this way. And if ask you yourself, you know,
on that flight where you spend most of your time, you ask you
yourself, why am I spend something much of my time here, the
answer to that can just be, well, maybe I just shouldn't, and
there are ways to change this.
I would think the same way about the budget process, about
the committee system. You really can change the way this works.
I think that is the premise of this committee. It is a premise
that a lot of Members need to internalize and really, before
attacking Congress for failing to do something, think about how
to change Congress so that it could succeed in doing what you
think you were elected to do.
The Chairman. I know Mr. Phillips wants to get in on this.
Mr. Phillips. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I want to continue on the theme of incentives to which you
both refer. The incentives here are perverse, I think it is
fair to say, and I would like to go further upstream. We all
know that Members who come from very safe districts not only
are not rewarded for working together; they are punished. They
are labeled as traitors by their base, whether it is a deep
blue district or a deep red district.
So my question for each of you is: Are there some changes
to our electoral system that might reward candidates on both
sides of the aisle who would come here with the ethos of
working together? Is rank choice voting or independent
redistricting commissions or changes to our primary system? Any
thoughts on how to create an awards system before people come
here to incentivize collaboration?
Ms. Reynolds. So reforms to the electoral process are
certainly beyond my expertise, but I would say that it is
important to think about the sort of biggest incentive
structure possible when you are asking yourselves kind of why
did the incentives that you face shape your behavior in the
ways that you do. So the question is absolutely the right one.
I can't speculate. I don't know if Yuval would like to on sort
of exactly which reforms to the electoral system might change
your incentives and, thus, your behavior in specific ways, but
I do think it is the right question to ask.
Mr. Phillips. Mr. Levin.
Mr. Levin. Well, I would only say that I think it is
important to experiment with changes on that front because that
is the most powerful incentives that a lot of Members face. And
I say ``experiment'' because it is easy to get things wrong in
unexpected ways. I think the incentives that members confront
now have to do a lot of the time with a set of election reforms
that were advanced in the 1970s that created the primary system
we know now that were intended to solve real problems and that
ended up creating I think in some ways bigger problems. That
was not the intention of their designers. They were not meant
to make our system more partisan, but they absolutely have made
our system more partisan.
So I do believe that there is great value in experimenting
particularly with rank choice voting for the House, but I think
it is enormously important that that be experimentation. The
reason I think it is valuable is because this institution is
meant to be representative of the breadth of our society, and
that means it has to represent more finely some of the
distinctions and differences that exist.
I would put it this way. I think one of the strange things
about the contemporary Congress is that there aren't a lot of
intraparty factions. Polarization, on the one hand, means the
parties get more and more different from each other. It also
means the parties get more and more similar internally, and
there are fewer internal differences among Republicans and
Democrats that might allow for some room for some Republicans
to work with some Democrats. The electoral system can help to
change that.
And there is some experimentation happening in Alaska next
year. It is being considered in a variety of places, as you
know. I think that is very constructive in that it is important
when we face an element of our system that we think is failing
us that we ask ourselves how can we change it and that we try
to do that and see what happens. And so I am encouraged by
those experiments, but we shouldn't assume we know how they
will go because these kind of things have a way of surprising
us.
Mr. Phillips. Thank you.
The Chairman. I think Mr. Perlmutter wants to get in on
this.
Mr. Perlmutter. Yeah, just more I want to respond to Dean,
and I will just use Colorado as an example. We went to allow
all unaffiliated voters to vote in the primary, and they get a
Democratic ballot. They get a Republican ballot. They can
choose one ballot and move forward. And I was opposed it to. I
said, ``No, you got to be a member of the party. You know, you
are working hard.'' So we did this 2 years ago.
And, as an example, John Hickenlooper, a former governor,
sort of a moderate-centrist kind of guy, dealmaker was running
against Andrew Romanoff, our speaker, who is a darling of the
left. And based on what we saw from sort of party kinds of
things, Andrew was going to clean his clock, and John ended up
clobbering him because the unaffiliated voters in this
instance--and moderate Democrats--just said, you know, ``No,
this is our guy.''
And so that did moderate kind of the extremes in that
instance, and I was opposed to us going to this thing, and I
was wrong, you know.
The Chairman. And I think we have got a couple more
questions around incentives before we shift gears.
I have one on incentives, and I know Vice Chair Timmons
does, too, but so one example of where the incentives have
broken down is on the floor. You know, I came out of a State
legislature where every bill was taken up under an open rule,
and in 8 years in the Washington State legislature, I can count
maybe five or six times where people used that to make
political hay, but, by and large, the incentive was or at least
the norm was don't be a jerk, in part because you don't know
when you are going to be in the minority and you don't want
people to be a jerk to you. And yet we see a lot of the
activity in our Nation's Capitol certainly much more focused on
making political statements than on trying to make law.
So how would we change the incentives on that? How--you
know, I think this gets into this issue of Member empowerment,
too. People want to have a sense of efficacy, but it is this
tricky dynamic. I shared with Dr. Reynolds, you know, when I
was 10 years old, my parents gave me the opportunity to have
free rein over the pantry and to use the stove, and I quickly
gained, like, 70 pounds, right. It was very empowering, but I
abused it, right. And, you know, and then I lost the keys to
the pantry, right, so which is why we have closed rules now. It
is, you know, we have taken away the keys to the pantry. So
what do we do?
Ms. Reynolds. So I will say that I think one of the biggest
challenges here is convincing Members that any opening up of
the amendment process would be a durable, persistent change and
that one of the things that we have seen when both parties in
both Chambers have made steps down the road to a more open
amendment process is that that happens. The first time Members
are confronted with the open pantry, to use your metaphor, Mr.
Kilmer, they sort of go all in. And then the only response to
kind of manage that chaos is to tamp down on the process in
some way and then say, ``Look, we gave you a chance, and you
all failed us.''
And so I think this isn't a sort of concrete proposal
except to say that their getting from sort of A to Z on a more
open floor process would be messy and there would have to just
some willingness to kind of push through that sort of
interregnum, that middle period, before there was a new, kind
of equilibrium of more open debate.
Mr. Levin. I very much agree with that.
I would add only that I think it also requires Members to
have a tolerance for the unpredictable. You know, we complain
about centralization of power and Members certainly complain
about it but part of the reason it happens is the party leaders
protect Members from votes they don't want to take and from
votes they don't want to answer for at election time. And,
obviously, open rules can be used by one party to force Members
of the other party to take exactly those kind of votes.
I think part of what it would take to think in terms of
empowering Members is building up a greater tolerance for
expressing views on questions that are put on the table by the
other party where you may not want to tell your voters that
that is your view on this question, but you don't really get to
just not express an opinion when you run for Congress. So there
are other things you can do in life but, you know, if you chose
this one, you have to be willing to vote on hard questions.
And I think that it is a mistake to think that the rules
are all closed because the leaders want all the power. Part of
the reason is Members don't want to be exposed. And in calling
for more open rules, which I think would be very helpful in a
lot of ways, there has to be some openness to the chaos that
results. I mean, that chaos is a process of negotiation and
bargaining. Sometimes it is just politics, too. And, you know,
I think Members have to kind of know what they are in for and
what they are asking for and, as Molly said, not be shocked the
first time that this is abused and say, ``Well, we got to go
back to what we are doing before so we don't face this
threat.''
Ms. Reynolds. And If I could just add one thing, the one
sort of perverse part of this is that one of the consequences
of having more restrictive rules and fewer amendment votes is
that then there are fewer votes overall. And so the ones that
you do take get more attention than they would if you were
voting on lots and lots of things. And so, you know, yes, you
are forced to take one vote over here that you didn't
necessarily want to have to take on the record on something.
But in a world where that is part of a much bigger set of
votes, a much richer voting record, the consequence of any one
vote may not be as high as they are in this more restrictive
environment.
The Chairman. Mr. Timmons.
Mr. Timmons. Before I get to my question, I am going to
start with addressing this issue. I was in the State senate for
2 years before I came to Congress and every time we were in
session--there were 46 of us. We sat in the room and anybody
could stand up and ask anything, propose an amendment, and we
only had two instances in the entire 2 years where someone
abused that process. And I think part of it is because when you
take the well and you say something ridiculous and you propose
an idea that is ridiculous, you see the faces of your
colleagues, and you see, one, you are going to--you have
intentionally done this to make half of them mad. And the other
half, your party, is looking at you like, ``You are really
doing this? Like you don't--this is not appropriate.''
And so I think, in large part, we are going to have to do
some self-policing, and, you know, if we do go down this more
open route, the fringe are always going to try to take
advantage of it, and it is going to be hard to police the other
side, but we got to police our own side. We got to keep people
moving in the right direction because creating problems is not
going to solve these huge challenges facing this country.
So, to my question, all these changes that we are
discussing involve decentralization of power, you know. Whether
it is not being here, when you here, you are pinballing around,
that centralizes power to leadership; when, you know, the
committee structure currently centralize power to leadership.
The incentives currently end up with four people making all the
decisions in Congress, and you get a bill that is 5,000 pages
long, and 6 hours later you are expected to vote on it.
So, you know, all of these changes do decentralize power.
So my question is this, and I am going to give you my thoughts
on it and then I want yours. The fact that this committee
exists indicates a willingness for change. The fact that we
have been extended one year and then now a full Congress
indicates a willingness to consider changes. The dysfunction is
so severe that even leadership, I believe, is open to making
some legitimate structural changes. Could you talk a little bit
about your thoughts on the challenges with decentralization of
power in regards to leadership?
Ms. Reynolds. Sure. So I would begin actually with a point
related to something that Yuval said in response to the last
question, which is that one of the reasons that power is
centralized in the way that it is, is because it is challenging
for, in some situations, for individual committees to come to
agreement on what a proposal should look like. And when an
individual committee cannot do it, it gets sort of run up to
the leadership and that there are situations in which leaders
are the ones who have sort of the power to say this is what the
deal is going to be. I am not saying that is true in all of the
cases, but I think this is--these are all sorts of pieces of
the same puzzle.
So, in order for some power to flow away from the
leadership, you need some kind of somewhere else for it to go,
and you need, I think, we would both say, one place for it to
go would be to committees, and there you need committees to
have the tools and resources they need to be able to do the
work and feel like, if they do the hard work of getting to a
proposal on which they agree, that that proposal is actually
going to go somewhere.
And so I think that that--I think, as is the case with many
things in Congress, I think sometimes we blame the
centralization of power in the hands of party leaders for more
of Congress' pathologies than it is necessarily the sort of
chief cause of, and, in some cases, it is the response to other
challenges that Congress faces. It is what Congress sort of how
Congress has evolved to deal with other challenges.
Mr. Levin. I very much agree with that, and I think it is
important to see it. I mean, I would say the centralization
that happened in the late 1990s, I was a staffer in the
nineties on the Budget Committee, and then I worked for Speaker
Gingrich in his final 2 years, and I would say that a lot of
that centralization happened because Republicans had gotten
elected on a very ambitious agenda of institutional reform, and
none of the committees knew how to do that. They came in
realizing they had promised to do things that they just weren't
equipped to do, and so they felt like the only way to do this
is to put all the power in the Speaker's Office and let this
move.
I think that that over time created a culture in the House
that left Members without much experience of a more
decentralized House and so without a sense that they could
really do it so that, while it is easy to complain when it
feels like you have no power, it isn't, I think, simply obvious
what a decentralized House would look like as matter of moving
a legislative agenda now.
One other point I would make is that there is also--there
is a way in which decentralization should be attractive to
leaders now. Obviously, nobody wants to give up power, but the
power that is now centralized in the leaders, in both party
leaders in both Houses, is excessive in their own view. We had
a strange situation in two Congresses ago now where the Speaker
resigned, retired, whatever you want to say, and everybody
looked around and said, ``Who wants to be Speaker,'' and nobody
wanted to. And, you know, someone literally got forced to be
Speaker, more or less.
I think the reason for that is that the job has become
very, very challenging as a matter of managing a coalition that
looks to you to keep it from becoming unruly. I think it is
just an unreasonable expectation to have of the Speaker, that
Speakers know that, and that there is some appeal to allowing
more of the work of the institution to happen through the
committees where the Speaker can say this is working its way
through the House. Speakers say that now, but it isn't really
true, and I think in some ways their quality of life would also
be improved by it being more true.
The argument for decentralization needs to look like that
as made to them because they have got to be persuaded that it
makes sense for them to give up some power which is never
obvious or easy.
Ms. Reynolds. I would also say that it just, from purely a,
like, legislative throughput standpoint, the more--the less
powers in the hands of party leaders, the more work can be
done. If--right now, often the sort of MO is you have to get,
you know, the leaders to sign off on the agreement, and it is
just matter of workflow. There is only so much that can go
through four people.
And so, as you kind of think about decentralizing,
devolving some of that power, it also just opens up the
possibility to do more work when there isn't the one potential
bottleneck in the process.
The Chairman. I am--I want to call on Mr. Joyce, but can I
quickly ask: Your recommendation about giving the committees
floor time, isn't that in the rules now, like Calendar
Wednesday, or--I mean, isn't that basically in the rules, and
we waive them?
Ms. Reynolds. There are probably ways you can use the
existing rules to try and do that. I think the bigger challenge
is just convincing committees that they will actually get the
opportunity to do that. And there are other ways--you know, I
don't want the--sort of the time is one piece of it. I think
thinking about it in kind of units of legislative proposals
might be another one, the idea that, you know, each committee
gets the ability to bring a package of some size to the floor,
and that is protected, is another way, I think, to approach
that.
The Chairman. Okay. Mr. Joyce.
Mr. Joyce. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
In my limited time here--I have been here since 2013, and I
have certainly seen the ideas flow from Speaker's Office
leadership to the floor, and then we are stuck voting at them,
and then you have people who make a habit out of going out and
saying nobody could have read this bill.
Now, being on appropriations, we have--Derek, we work on
these bills for long periods of time. Unfortunately we know the
things that are in your omnibus and things like that.
Would it make more sense--and I wasn't here for the ACA,
but certainly for the AHCA--to have, say, like that, a
healthcare month, so all the committees of jurisdiction would
have those hearings. That is all that would be taking place in
the institution, and having, you know, believe it or not,
learned witnesses coming in and talk about, you know, like, in
Cleveland area, we had two fine institutions, Cleveland Clinic
and UH.
When you talk to the people there, they have great ideas on
how to bring the cost of healthcare down. But having experts
from throughout the country, because obviously the city of
Cleveland is going to be different than some urban area or
rural area, you know, but to have those people come in and
testify, whether it is E&C, whether it is Ways and Means, and
that is all the news media would have to focus on for that
month, would be the issue.
And so the American people, I believe they are bright
enough to, when presented with, you know, here is the problems,
here are the costs, these are the potential resolutions, reach
out to your Congressman or reach out to your Senators and let
them know where you stand, that we would input throughout
instead of having people running against the institution and
against the bill to the detriment of the American people.
Does that sound like something that would work?
Mr. Levin. Well, I think there is--that that is certainly
one way to think about how to focus the attention of Members on
their substantive work rather than on participating in the
larger kind of theater of cultural war politics, which is what
you do when you don't have other ways of using your time
constructively, frankly. It doesn't seem like the rest of what
is available to you would be of any purpose, and so at least
this is something voters do care about.
I think one thing I would say about that, there is value in
the committees of the Congress--and Molly just got to this,
too--working in parallel on different issues. Congress can work
on a lot of different things at the same time when it isn't the
case that one person has to approve everything that gets done.
And so there is a kind of advantage to parallel processing
where different committees can focus on different areas at
different times. And Members don't have to think that their job
is to focus the attention of the public on this issue in an
intense way right now so that we can get something done, but,
rather, see their everyday work as working on a variety of
important public policy issues that move on the schedule that
the system allows for.
But I agree with you that Members have to take account of
the reality we are living in, and that reality means that there
are times when significant legislation can only really move
when there is public pressure within that theatre of our
politics. And there has to be ways of using the committee
system and not just the platforms that are available to leaders
to make that kind of change happen. So you have to be creative
about how to do it.
Ms. Reynolds. I mean, I will just add one note on this and
Yuval's point about parallel processing, which is that is part
of the reason Congress has committees in the first place. So,
if we look at the history of the development of the committee
system over time, the reason Congress created committees to
handle specific jurisdictions of work was so that it could
process more and more complicated issues in parallel at the
same time rather than having the whole Congress have to sort of
take up every and do the work on every issue and to create kind
of durable groups of Members who could specialize in particular
areas.
So I think, in that sense, allowing for that kind of
parallel processing goes back to the very origins of why we
have committees.
Mr. Joyce. But healthcare is one-sixth of our economy. You
know, it is something that needs to be dealt with.
Ms. Reynolds. Absolutely.
Mr. Joyce. Infrastructure, ever since I have been here,
nothing has more bipartisan support and the less get done than
infrastructure, and here we are talking about it yet again. And
one 17-hour markup in a committee does not make a bill. I mean,
it takes more to figure out what the needs are for our country
because they are different in all 50 of the States. I just am
trying to think of a way that people have input and work
through these things and work together in concert versus us
against them.
The Chairman. I know we have been talking about Member
empowerment, and I know that Ms. Van Duyne wants to ask about
freshman empowerment, too, and new Member--how new Members are
on-boarded, so go ahead.
Ms. Van Duyne. Thank you.
Well, look, I sit in a seat where all of you have been as a
freshman. We have that in common. My freshman orientation might
have been a lot different than all of yours, you know, coming
in during COVID and having everything separated, wearing masks,
not really getting to know other Members, new Members.
I am interested in finding out a couple of things. Many
things, but two questions.
From your perspective, freshman orientation was very
different this time and seemed like we were very separated,
Republicans, Democrats. The reason for that was we didn't have
enough room, right, to have everybody together.
Events that we would normally have that are much more
informal were not available to us. But we are still learning.
And, when we are going into committee hearings, when we are
going into meetings, we understand completely the seniority
perspective and how, you know, freshmen have--being a freshman
is tough. Being a freshman in minority is even tougher, but,
you know, working our way through that.
But, when we are in these sessions where the cameras are
on, a lot of people are talking into the cameras. They are only
there to talk to the cameras. Everything seems to be so overly
formal that, where you need to have conversations, we don't.
Even in committees, there is very little conversation. There is
no back and forth. You have your--this is a much different
committee than most, but normally the chairman--you have 5
minutes. You ask questions of the witness. You don't talk to
each other, and that is it.
So a couple of things. One, freshman orientation, what
things do you think we should really address in freshman
orientation to get that kind of camaraderie from the get-go?
And, two, in committee hearings or in committees in
general, how do you set up an informal way where we are--you
know, you don't lose it to the floor where you have people
bantering back and forth, but you can at least have
conversations where this compromise or discussions take place
and not just speech giving?
Mr. Levin. I think it is a wonderful set of questions.
I would say a couple things. One thing I would stress in
terms of orienting new Members is helping Members understand
the history of the institution and especially helping Members
see that Congress hasn't always worked the same way, that, at
different times, if you encountered the House of
Representatives, you would find a very different kind of
institution, very different kind of budget process, a very
different kind of committee system, very different sorts of
relationships across party lines.
And I think the reason it is important to see that is that
it is very easy to come into just an existing structure where
things are going a certain way and think, ``Well, I have got to
sort of find my place here and figure out, you know, how do I
find the CNN camera and stand there and complain about
Congress''?
There really are other ways for this institution to work,
and it is up to the Members so that reform is possible. And, if
there is something in particular that stands in the way of
enabling the kind of work you want to be doing, that something
could change. And it is entirely possible that there are other
Members who agree that it should change. I think that is very
important and just helping Members see that this is up to them
and that it could be different.
And, to your second question, I would get back to the
question of cameras everywhere. There should be cameras in some
places in Congress. There needs to be transparency. The work
can't be done in ways that don't allow Members to be
accountable to their voters. But there also needs to be room
for Members to talk to each other, to bargain, to negotiate, to
raise ideas that don't end up going anywhere, to raise
suggestions and someone says to you why that is not a good
idea, and then you can actually say, ``Yeah, okay, that is not
a good idea.''
You can't do that in public. You just can't do it. And I
think a lot of Members now feel like, in order to actually
advance anything, they have got to be part of some group that
meets outside the normal process. That should lead you to think
about how to change the normal process so that it enables that
kind of work to be done and be the appropriate and proper work
of the Congress.
So I love C-SPAN. I am a C-SPAN junky, but there are rooms
in which there shouldn't be cameras. And I think that has to
be--that idea has to be kind of socialized in this institution.
Ms. Reynolds. And I would--on the topic of committees, I
would encourage more committees to experiment the way that we
are today, as we speak, with different formats and particularly
the sort of notion of drawing out one issue until Members who
have questions or who want to sort of speak on that issue have
had a chance to do so. I think that that certainly, from the
perspective of a witness, a couple--an hour or so into this
hearing, I have found that effective.
And so, just in general, being willing to try more
different ways and getting out of the 5 minutes for a Member of
the majority, 5 minutes for a Member of the minority, in order
of seniority, who is present in the room--out of that box is a
place that I would encourage folks to think of.
And, you know, one of the advantages of having
subcommittees of full committees is that is another venue for
experimentation, so--and particularly since they are usually
much smaller than the full committee. So, if a subcommittee is
having a hearing, that would be a great place to start
experimenting with some different formats.
The Chairman. Go ahead, Mr. Perlmutter, and then Mr.
Timmons.
Mr. Perlmutter. Yeah. I am just thinking of sort of the
physical----
The Chairman. You have to put your mike on.
Mr. Perlmutter. Just in this room, so, you know, Democrats
on one side. Republicans on the other side. We each have our
own anteroom, and, you know, there is no real--if we just had
one anteroom where we all got to come in and we are visiting
and it is not in front of the camera, you might get some--a
little more socialization. But, I mean, the physical premises
and the premises upon which the physical premises are designed
is to separate us.
So what do you think about that? I mean, I would like--and
there is nothing that stops us, and I often will go over to the
Republican side if I want to get a deal done on something, but
it really--the layout of the place is designed for separation.
Ms. Reynolds. I think that is a very important point, and I
will just underline something you yourself just said. Nothing
is stopping you. This is a point that Yuval has made several
times, is that, if there are changes that you want to see made,
you are the people to make those changes. And maybe that starts
with breaking down the norms of only gathering with other
Members of your party before a committee hearing.
But you are absolutely right that the sort of evolution of
the Congress and its physical space means that there--we--you
are sort of physically separated in many situations. But I
would--I would just encourage you to be the change.
Mr. Perlmutter. Okay. Thanks.
The Chairman. The primary difference in the anterooms is
which cable news channel the TV is turned to, and one has,
like, Whole Foods sandwiches, and the other Chick-fil-A, but,
other than that, it is--Vice Chair Timmons.
Mr. Timmons. Thank you.
I want to talk about committee structure. You know--and I
am going to clarify this. Remove partisanship from this because
I think, if the tables were turned, it wouldn't be any
different. I want to clarify that.
So, right now, there is 25 Ds and 18 Rs on Ways and Means;
33 Ds, 26 Rs on Approps. I can keep going down. HASC is
actually the only one that is close. It is 31-28; T&I, 26-31.
Financial Services is 30-24. So there was a huge kind of tussle
over the number of Members on each committee at the beginning
of the year.
And my understanding is that it is entirely at Speaker's
discretion. And there is historical precedent, and it is argued
over, but it is kind of Wild West; you don't really know what
is going to happen. Everybody has got ideas, but, until the
Speaker's Office actually says, ``This is how we are going to
do it''--well, and there was negotiation after that because
they go back and forth.
Is there any--one, given a slim majority, you would think
that the committees would be more similar to that. And, again,
I am--if Republicans were in the opposite situation, it would
be the exact same.
So is there any thought to maybe an algorithm that dictates
it as opposed to just kind of saying, ``We are going to figure
this out, and you are going to deal with it,'' to the other
side?
Any thoughts on that?
Mr. Levin. Well, I think that, in a sense, it is a matter
of prioritizing that. I would probably urge you against
replacing bargaining with an algorithm. I don't think that is
the way to--and certainly to take on the culture of this
institution. I would say that this kind of decision has to be
made by what you describe as a tussle, by a bargaining process.
I think it makes sense that, if a majority is exceptionally
large, that it has an exceptionally large majority in the key
committees, a very tight majority should allow for closer votes
in those committees and so closer party alignment in those
committees. But I think it makes sense for that to be worked
out in a negotiating process at the beginning of each Congress.
I mean, ultimately, this institution is an arena for
bargaining. It is an arena for dealmaking, for accommodation,
for dealing with each other. And I think it is very important,
over and over and at every layer of the institution, to see it
that way because Congress is the only place in our political
system where people with differing views, representing
different elements of our society, actually deal with each
other, literally deal with each other.
That is why legislation can allow for durable solutions to
public problems because people are heard, because views are
moderated in order to get through the process. That kind of
bargaining process is really what this institution is for.
I think that is how legislation should move and how
internal decisions ought to be made, too.
Mr. Timmons. Conversely--again, I am very clear to say
that, if the tables were reversed, it would be the exact same.
So, next Congress, if the tables do turn and there is a very
slim majority, I would say it would be inappropriate for there
to be a seven-seat difference on Ways and Means if it was a
six-seat majority. So, like, do you think that is a good idea?
Mr. Levin. Yeah, and I think that ought to be a fight
between the two party leaderships, between the membership, too.
Mr. Timmons. The response is going to be, ``We are going to
do what you all did.'' And that is not good, so we have got to
break the cycle of that, and--I don't know. Okay.
Mr. Levin. Yeah. I agree with that, but here is a Member
saying so, right? And that is the only way it can happen.
Mr. Timmons. Sophomore.
Ms. Reynolds. Yeah. I will just say that I agree with
everything Yuval said, but I would also point out that some of
this is driven by the demands of who wants to be on the
committee. So, you know, when--among the sort of things that go
into the tussle are what do--you know, some committees are more
attractive than others, and one of the things that has to be
balanced is who wants to be on which committee.
And it just--it is--at the end of the day, it is a--it is a
political question. I don't mean that in a pejorative way. I
mean that in an everything-you-do-is-politics way. And so I
agree with Yuval.
The Chairman. Go ahead, Mr. Joyce.
Mr. Joyce. I was thinking about this a little more. The
idea of obviously wanting sunshine laws to be adhered to and
transparency, I am not sure if--I can't recall it ever
happening before. You might know. We go on a retreat, and the
Democrats go on a retreat. But would it make more sense if,
like, we had a bipartisan infrastructure committee retreat, or,
you know--because, you know, I know, on Appropriations, many
other Members on different committees don't really understand
how we operate. But we understand how we operate, and we can
have the discussions on the things that are taking place.
Has that existed before, or do you think it would be
worthwhile?
Ms. Reynolds. I don't know if it has existed before. I--Mr.
Kilmer, you can correct me. I seem to remember this being an
idea that you all just--ideas of this kind were ones that you
discussed in the last Congress.
The Chairman. Yeah. In the last----
Mr. Joyce. I wasn't here.
The Chairman. That is all right. You know, in the last
Congress, we both talked about having the institution have a
bipartisan retreat, in part to--acknowledging that there are
going to be differences in goals, but that, you know, there may
be relationship building and at least some alignment on some of
these big-ticket issues that we say, ``Hey, what do we want to
try to get done?''
And then similarly within committees. I mean, part of the
reason our committee did a bipartisan retreat is we recommended
that other committees should do a bipartisan retreat. So----
Mr. Joyce. Ours was by Zoom.
The Chairman. Yeah. Ours was by Zoom, unfortunately, this
time around.
I want to--so, Dr. Reynolds, in your written testimony--and
you spoke to this a bit--I am trying to remember how you worded
it. We are looking at legislative behavior and interpersonal
behavior, right? And, actually, next week's hearing, we are
going to kind of dive into these issues around interpersonal
behavior.
But I feel like it is, to some degree, one of the big
challenges, you know, are the working part of this, right, is
hamstrung sometimes by the inability to get past the
interpersonal.
Are there levers you would pull on that front? I mean,
obviously, we are going to dive into that issue more next week,
but if you have guidance for us. I think sometimes the work is
stymied by--I mean, we have Members who don't want to be in a
room with each other, right?
And I think sometimes we have this notion that trying to
work together is somehow taking--leaving your ideology at the
door. I don't think that is what it means, right? Like, people
come here to represent their values, but sometimes we can't
even move forward on things on which we agree.
So thoughts on levers that this committee might look to
recommend to get at some of these interpersonal issues, whether
it be bipartisan retreats or other stuff we haven't thought of?
Mr. Levin. Well, I think that those kinds of ideas are one
way to do that, which is they both allow Members to get to know
each other and allow them to talk substantively without being
on display, which I think makes an important difference. I
would say that some of this is also a function of allowing
changes in the structure of the work to gradually change
Members' sense of what happens in this institution.
A number of you have been talking about experiences in
State legislatures, saying, well, people just didn't abuse--
they just didn't abuse the open rules. And I think part of the
reason for that is a sense that, after a while, the culture of
the institution changes around the structure of the work.
If you made some of the kinds of changes to structure that
we are talking about, I think early on, the first result of
that would look pretty ugly. It would be people using those new
venues to grandstand. But, over time, as it became apparent
that there isn't any camera here, so why are you talking to me
like I am a cable news viewer? It would just become--people
would, through experience, come to approach each other a little
bit differently.
It is hard because, you know, it is not--this isn't a
kindergarten class, and you can't just tell people to behave,
right? Everybody here is an adult who is--has achieved a lot in
his or her life, and who is very ambitious, who worked hard to
get here, and deserves to be here. And so there is no one who
can really tell anybody else to behave.
I think the only way to change behavior is to build a
culture around forms of work that encourage people to take
themselves and others seriously. And, you know, that is not a
simple thing.
Ms. Reynolds. Yeah, I would agree with that.
And I would also just say that, at the end of the day, it
is important to ask yourselves as, you know, people who come to
work in a workplace, how do you establish the norms for what is
acceptable conduct, and who do you look to to enforce those
norms against one another?
And, you know, Yuval and I can give you suggestions, but,
at the end of the day, this is the place where you do your
work, which is fundamentally what people send you to Washington
to do. And so it is about--some of it is just about, you know,
what do you consider acceptable behavior, and how do you set
that for yourselves in the same way that would happen if you
were in the, you know, diversity of jobs and workplaces that
you had before you came to Congress?
One challenge that I think the reform community and folks
who kind of think about the work you in Congress face is
drawing lines between what makes Congress unique as an
institution and as a workplace, and what doesn't? And I think
this is an area where there is a lot to be learned from sort
of, how do we build a good workplace?
And I am eager to watch the folks that you bring for the
second hearing on this topic because I think they will have
some constructive thoughts on this as well. But I think, again,
I would just remind you that, at the end of the day, you are
all coming to work in a place, and there are--and it is up to
you to determine how to enforce good standards of behavior with
your colleagues.
The Chairman. Yeah. I will say I have sitting on the desk
in my office a framed version of the rotary four-way test: Is
it the truth? Is it fair to all concerns? Will it build
goodwill and better friendships? And will it be beneficial to
all concerned?
And I am reminded on a daily basis how often we violate
that in this place, right, and that it is a problem, right? It
does not engender goodwill or the ability to be productive.
I want to make sure, if other Members have threads they
want to pull before we--I know votes will be called soon.
Go ahead, Vice Chair Timmons.
Mr. Timmons. We talked about budget reform earlier. We made
a number of recommendations last Congress. I think there were
seven of them, annual fiscal state of the Nation, biennial
budget resolution, a number of other changes. And we used the
joint select committee that was ultimately unsuccessful, and we
kind of built on what they started.
Any additional recommendations that you think we could make
in that area that we have not?
Mr. Levin. Well, one idea I get at in my written testimony
as illustrative of a kind of change that might affect culture--
and I am cognizant of saying this with an appropriator in front
of me--is to think--sorry--two appropriators--is to think about
the distinction Congress draws between authorization and
appropriation as an open question because if what we are asking
is, how do we make the work of the committees matter more, then
surely anybody who has had the experience of seeing an
authorizing committee at work can recognize that much of what
happens in their work doesn't seem like it is going to make a
difference, while the appropriators are firing real bullets and
spending money on programs.
There are ways of thinking about combining authorization
and appropriation, maybe just in some areas of Congress' work
and maybe in general, that I think could really change the way
we think about what the budget process is for and what Members
do with their time.
The distinction between authorization and appropriation is
longstanding in Congress. It has been done since the 1830s, and
it was done actually with this notion of parallel processing in
mind. It became difficult for Congress to spend necessary funds
because there were debates about broader kinds of legislative
questions. And so the House and then the Senate decided to just
put spending on its own path, on its own track so that
necessary things could be done while these other debates were
happening.
But I think we are at a point now where, if the question is
how do you get Members to become interested in channeling their
ambition through the work of the committees they are in,
breaking that barrier between authorization and appropriation
is a question to think about. It is not a new idea. There was a
proposal like this in the 1980s that Senator Kassebaum and
Senator Inouye proposed that got pretty far in the process.
Obviously, appropriators tend not to like it.
But I think that would be a dramatic way to change the
budget process----
Mr. Perlmutter. I like this.
Mr. Levin. Yeah.
Mr. Perlmutter. I like this one. Okay.
Mr. Levin. It would be a way to help the work of the
committees matter.
Mr. Perlmutter. I will take you guys out and do it, right?
David Joyce and Van Duyne and I can take care of all of it.
Mr. Timmons. We could get 10 votes. We might get 10 votes.
We are not getting 12, though.
Ms. Reynolds. Before you get too excited, Mr. Perlmutter, I
would--my advice here would be to--actually to go back to
something Mr. Joyce said earlier about--you sort of made a
passing reference to the degree to which you as an
appropriator, Mr. Kilmer as an appropriator, you actually are
very well read into the details of what is in the bills that
you have worked on.
And I would encourage that as a sort of starting place for
any reforms, that much of what--to the extent the
appropriations process continues to work, it is because you and
your colleagues do the hard work of digging into those details.
And even if what we ultimately end up with is one big omnibus
vote on the floor, having done the sort of deliberative work in
the early stages is not to be lost.
And, in fact, that is sort of, I think, what we should
protect, and that would be--that is less of a specific
recommendation, but more of a principle for thinking about
additional budget and appropriations reforms.
Mr. Perlmutter. Do not pay the appropriators compliments
like that, please, ever. You want to make this place work,
okay? Can I----
The Chairman. Go ahead.
Mr. Perlmutter. I do have something----
The Chairman. You have to turn on your mike.
Mr. Perlmutter [continuing]. To follow up on this subject a
little bit, and it is sort of this chicken and egg. The
structure of the place and the type of work we do can add to
collaboration and working together.
But Beth and I were just talking about the women's softball
team, and William and I play golf against each other, and David
and I play baseball against each other. And I--in a context,
that isn't legislative but is like normal, you know, not so
much baseball or anything else, but sports or outside of this
place, relationships can be developed, especially the women's
team. It is bipartisan and bicameral. So it develops
relationships not just here, but over across the way.
And, you know, you still have the whole electoral thing,
you know, I am Democrat and a Republican, but in--at least in
that instance, relationships are developed that go beyond sort
of, okay, you know, what is in the budget today, or, you know,
just pure work.
And I think that makes a big difference. And the codels and
in those kinds of things, all of a sudden, you have got a
relationship on a different level that allows you to have the
conversation, even in a setting where you are divided like this
room.
What is your reaction to that?
Ms. Reynolds. So I think building relationships among
Members is important. It feels a little--I feel a little out of
place saying as to what I believe is Seersucker Thursday in the
Senate, which is one of that Chamber's greatest examples of
this. But I don't want to oversell the importance of those
opportunities to build relationships.
This gets back to something I said in both my written and
oral testimony, which is that we have to ask ourselves kind of,
what are the interpersonal relationships in service of? And
they can be helpful, but, at the end of the day, what matters
is the degree to which you can use them to do good legislative
work and making sure that we are not sort of romanticizing or
being overly nostalgic about a world where Members, you know,
because they lived here with their families, had dinner
together--that is important, but it is--I don't want to
oversell it as a solution to the challenges that you face.
Mr. Levin. I agree with that. But it is, I think, as you
say, a chicken-and-egg issue, that it does matter that Members,
when they are in a professional setting in a committee, know
one another and can't just use another Member as a prop, but
have to think, ``Well, that is somebody I am going to see on
Thursday at the baseball game,'' or ``that is somebody whose
family I know.''
That obviously does make a difference. But I just think it
is easy to overstate the degree to which change can work in
that direction. I think that, ultimately, if you really want to
change the culture of the institution so that it can be a more
effective legislature, the kinds of changes that involve
actually structuring the work to enable cross-partisan
bargaining and accommodation are going to matter more, not to
the exclusion of it just mattering that you see each other as
human beings, but ultimately you have to work together as
legislators.
Mr. Perlmutter. But, coming back to the chicken and the
egg, say William----
The Chairman. Turn on your mike.
Mr. Perlmutter. If I have got an idea that I need some help
with and I think that he might be interested in it or at least
I am not afraid to approach him or I know that I can approach
him to help me shape this thing, so----
Mr. Levin. Yeah.
Mr. Perlmutter [continuing]. I mean, our business is a
people's business. It is a people business. It isn't just a
legislative business. It is a people business, and these
relationships are key.
I agree with you guys, though. You have got to still feel
like, even if you work together, can you get something done?
Can you have a real product that benefits America in some
fashion or another?
So thank you for being here today.
The Chairman. Any other questions?
I think that buzzer was the sound of votes being called. So
I actually have one more quick one. I hope--well, maybe quick
one. Both of you made references to State legislatures as
models, right, the notion of having coauthors listed that might
be cross-partisan, the notion of having a budget process that
actually looks like what you are actually doing, the idea of
providing floor control to the committees at times. You know,
these were all recommendations you made to foster better
culture and collaboration that we can learn from State
legislatures.
Any other lessons from State legislatures that we should be
looking at, that we should be, you know----
Mr. Levin. I would just say I think it makes sense for this
committee to think in a formal way about learning from State
legislatures, inviting Members who offer ideas that come from
their State, maybe from their own experience, for those who
were State legislators. There are a lot of ways in which the
State legislatures are built on the model of Congress, but
there are also a lot of ways in which, because they have had to
solve various problems along the way, they have innovated the
legislative process in ways that Congress could learn from.
And I think that is the case in many State legislatures.
There has been a lot of innovation in State legislatures in
this century in the past 20 years, and, you know, they are
living in the same culture that you are. They are living in the
same political culture and the same country, and so surely
there are a lot of ways to learn.
The Chairman. Terrific.
Okay. I want to thank our witnesses for their testimony and
for gamely participating in our first roundtable hearing. I
would also like to thank our committee members for their
participation and willing to try something different.
Without objection--I also want to thank the folks who are
recording the proceedings and the folks from C-SPAN. Thank you
for being here. I think we are on C-SPAN 8 today. Thank you. De
ocho?
Without objection, all members will have 5 legislative days
within which to submit additional written questions for the
witnesses to the chair, which will be forwarded to the
witnesses for their response. I ask our witnesses to please
respond as promptly as you are able.
Without objection, all members will have 5 legislative days
within which to submit extraneous materials to the chair for
inclusion in the record.
I also want to thank our committee staff for putting
together a great hearing with two terrific experts. Thank you
very much.
And, with that, we are adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 10:39 p.m., the committee was adjourned.]
[all]