[Congressional Record Volume 165, Number 15 (Thursday, January 24, 2019)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E87-E89]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




           RECOGNIZING AN OP-ED WRITTEN BY MR. BILL PASCRELL

                                 ______
                                 

                           HON. JAMIE RASKIN

                              of maryland

                    in the house of representatives

                       Thursday, January 24, 2019

  Mr. RASKIN. Madam Speaker, I rise today to share an excellent op-ed 
written by my colleague Mr. Bill Pascrell, entitled, ``Why is Congress 
so dumb?'' In this lucid essay, Rep. Pascrell discusses the systematic 
demolition of Congress' power to assemble accurate information, conduct 
investigations and develop sound policy. It is an imperative of the 
116th Congress that we rebuild Congressional capacity to govern with 
the information we need. In his piece, which appeared in the Washington 
Post, Mr. Pascrell writes:

       In a year of congressional low lights, the hearings we held 
     with Silicon Valley leaders last fall may have been the 
     lowest. One of my colleagues in the House asked Google CEO 
     Sundar Pichai about the workings of an iPhone--a rival Apple 
     product. Another colleague asked Face book head Mark 
     Zuckerberg, ``If you're not listening to us on the phone, who 
     is?'' One senator was flabbergasted to learn that Facebook 
     makes money from advertising. Over hours of testimony, my 
     fellow members of Congress struggled to grapple with 
     technologies used daily by most Americans and with the 
     functions of the Internet itself. Given an opportunity to 
     expose the most powerful businesses on Earth to sunlight and 
     scrutiny, the hearings did little to answer tough questions 
     about the tech titans' monopolies or the impact of their 
     platforms. It's not because lawmakers are too stupid to 
     understand Facebook. It's because our available resources and 
     our policy staffs, the brains of Congress, have been so 
     depleted that we can't do our jobs properly.
       Americans who bemoan a broken Congress rightly focus on 
     ethical questions and electoral partisanship. But the tech 
     hearings demonstrated that our greatest deficiency may be 
     knowledge, not cooperation. Our founts of independent 
     information have been cut off, our investigatory muscles 
     atrophied, our committees stripped oftheir ability to develop 
     policy, our small staffs overwhelmed by the army of lobbyists 
     who roam Washington. Congress is increasingly unable to 
     comprehend a world growing more socially, economically and 
     technologically multifaceted--and we did this to ourselves. 
     When the 110th Congress opened in 2007, Democrats rode into 
     office on a tide of outrage at the George W. Bush 
     administration and the Republican Congress, which had looked 
     the other way during the Tom DeLay, Jack Abramoff and Duke 
     Cunningham scandals. My colleagues and I focused our energies 
     on exposing corruption. But we missed crucial

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     opportunities to reform the institution of Congress. As my 
     party assumes a new majority in the House, we confront 
     similar circumstances and have a second chance to begin the 
     hard work of nursing our chamber back to strength.
       Our decay as an institution began in 1995, when 
     conservatives, led by then-Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), 
     carried out a full-scale war on government. Gingrich began by 
     slashing the congressional workforce by one-third. He aimed 
     particular ire at Congress's brain, firing 1 of every 3 
     staffers at the Government Accountability Office, the 
     Congressional Research Service and the Congressional Budget 
     Office. He defunded the Office of Technology Assessment, a 
     tech-focused think tank. Social scientists have called those 
     moves Congress's self-lobotomy, and the cuts remain largely 
     unreversed.
       Gingrich's actions didn't stop with Congress's mind: He 
     went for its arms and legs, too, as he dismantled the 
     committee system, taking power from chairmen and shifting it 
     to leadership. His successors as speaker have entrenched this 
     practice. While there was a 35 percent decline in committee 
     staffing from 1994 to 2014, funding over that period for 
     leadership staff rose 89 percent.
       This imbalance has defanged many of our committees, as 
     bills originating in leadership offices and K Street suites 
     are forced through without analysis or alteration. Very 
     often, lawmakers never even see important legislation until 
     right before we vote on it. During the debate over the 
     Republicans' 2017 tax package, hours before the floor vote, 
     then-Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) tweeted a lobbying firm's 
     summary of GOP amendments to the bill before she and her 
     colleagues had had a chance to read the legislation. A 
     similar process played out during the Republicans' other 
     signature effort of the last Congress, the failed repeal of 
     the Affordable Care Act. Their bill would have remade one-
     sixth ofthe U.S. economy, but it was not subject to hearings 
     and was introduced just a few hours before being voted on in 
     the dead of night. This is what happens when legislation is 
     no longer grown organically through hearings and debate.
       Congress does not have the resources to counter the growth 
     of corporate lobbying. Between 1980 and 2006, the number of 
     organizations in Washington with lobbying arms more than 
     doubled, and lobbying expenditures between 1983 and 2013 
     ballooned from $200 million to $3.2 billion. A stunning 2015 
     study found that corporations now devote more resources to 
     lobby Congress than Congress spends to fund itself. During 
     the 2017 fight over the tax legislation, the watchdog group 
     Public Citizen found that there were more than 6,200 
     registered tax lobbyists, vs. 130 aides on the Senate Finance 
     Committee and the Joint Committee on Taxation, a staggering 
     ratio approaching 50-to-1 disfavoring the American people. In 
     2016 in the House, there were just 1,300 aides on all 
     committees combined, a number that includes clerical and 
     communications workers. Our expert policy staffs are dwarfed 
     by the lobbying class.
       The practical impact of this disparity is impossible to 
     overstate as lobbyists flood our offices with information on 
     issues and legislation--information on which many lawmakers 
     have become reliant. Just a few weeks ago, at the end of the 
     session, I witnessed the biennial tradition of departing 
     members of Congress relinquishing their suites to the 
     incoming class. As lawmakers emptied their desks and 
     cabinets, the office hallways were clogged with dumpsters 
     overflowing with reports, white papers, massaged data and 
     other materials, a perfect illustration of the proliferating 
     junk dropped off by lobbyists.
       Congress remade its committees in the 1970s to challenge 
     Richard Nixon's presidency and move power to rank-and-file 
     lawmakers. Many segregationist chairmen were ousted and 
     replaced by reformers, and committees and subcommittees were 
     given flexibility to study issues under their purview. It's 
     no accident that some of the most significant legislation and 
     oversight by Congress--Title IX; the Clean Water Act; the 
     Watergate, Pike and Church hearings--came from this period. 
     Congress had strengthened its pillars, hired smart people and 
     accessed the best information available.
       Following the reforms of the 1970s, the House held some 
     6,000 hearings per year. But eventually, the number of House 
     hearings fell--from a tick above 4,000 in 1994 to barely more 
     than 2,000 in 2014. On the tax-writing Ways and Means 
     Committee, of which I am a member, oversight hearings are 
     virtually nonexistent, as is developing legislation. We had 
     no hearings in 2017 on the bill that would dramatically 
     rewrite our tax code. And in the last Congress, we didn't 
     haul in any administration officials for a single public 
     hearing on the renegotiation ofthe North American Free Trade 
     Agreement. Assessing this state of affairs in a 2017 report, 
     the Congressional Management Foundation noted that committees 
     ``have been meeting less often than at almost any other time 
     in recent history.'' This neglect has become the norm. 
     Instead, leadership, lobbyists and the White House decide how 
     to solve policy problems.
       Indeed, Congress has allowed the White House to dominate 
     policymaking. Trade is a perfect illustration. Despite our 
     current president's braggadocio, most Americans would be 
     surprised to learn ultimate trade power rests with Congress. 
     But over and over we've willingly, even eagerly, handed off 
     that responsibility given to us by Article I, Section 8 of 
     the Constitution. President Trump's power to renegotiate 
     NAFTA was granted by Congress, as was his power to issue 
     tariffs, allowed under the Trade Expansion Act of 1962. I 
     disagreed with the decision in 2015 to give President Barack 
     Obama--a member of my own party--fast track power to advance 
     the Trans-Pacific Partnership. During that debate, I sat 
     stupefied as some members of our committee sought to award 
     not only Obama but also future, unknown executives an 
     extended and open-ended authority to make other deals. 
     Congress was prepared to simply abdicate our job.
       Perhaps the most striking instance of political 
     interference I've seen in my career occurred in the Ways and 
     Means Committee in 2014. Then-Chairman Dave Camp (R-Mich.) 
     had toiled for months with Democrats, Republicans and budget 
     experts to craft a comprehensive tax reform bill. I may not 
     have loved the final product, but I respected the process. 
     Republican leadership killed the proposal almost immediately 
     after it was unveiled. The reason? They wanted to deny Obama 
     a legislative accomplishment.
       For decades, nearly every piece of legislation would reach 
     the floor via committee, but beginning in the 1990s, the rate 
     began to drop. In the 113th Congress, approximately 40 
     percent of big-ticket legislation bypassed committees. Before 
     1994, Camp would have informed the speaker of his proposal 
     and brought it to the floor. Now, a chairman has much less 
     power to realize meaningful legislation. Meanwhile, 
     longstanding House rules have essentially blocked the 
     amendment process on the floor, meaning bills can't be 
     modified by members of the wider chamber.
       In addition to committee weakness, House lawmakers 
     collectively employ fewer staffers today than they did in 
     1980. Between 1980 and 2016, when the U.S. population rose by 
     nearly 97 million people and districts grew by 40 percent on 
     average (about 200,000 people per seat), the number of aides 
     in House member offices decreased, to 6,880, and total House 
     staff increased less than 1 percent, to 9,420.
       The first lobe of Congress's brain we can bulk back up is 
     the Congressional Research Service. The CRS provides studies 
     from talented experts spanning law, defense, trade, science, 
     industry and other realms. Some of our greatest oversight 
     triumphs--Watergate, Iran-contra, the Freedom of information 
     Act--were achieved with the CRS's support. Great nations 
     build libraries, and much of the CRS is housed in the Library 
     of Congress's Madison Building.
       But the CRS has become a political target. In 2012, a CRS 
     report finding that tax cuts do not generate revenue enraged 
     my Republican colleagues, who had the report pulled and began 
     browbeating CRS experts. According to figures supplied by the 
     CRS, the next year, the service saw its funding cut by $5 
     million, nearly 5 percent, recovering to previous levels only 
     in 2015. (The CRS did get big funding bumps in recent years.)
       The Congressional Budget Office and the Government 
     Accountability Office, crown jewels of our body that provide 
     nonpartisan budget projections, are similarly ignored or 
     maligned for partisan purposes. Last year, when the CBO 
     debunked claims that the GOP tax plan would create jobs, 
     Republicans savaged the agency instead of improving the law. 
     It reminded one of my colleagues, Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.), 
     of an episode of`The Simpsons'' in which Springfield 
     residents, rescued from a hurtling comet, resolve to raze the 
     town observatory.
       The GAO also furnishes rich information to Congress on 
     virtually any subject. Last year I requested and obtained a 
     study on the live-events ticket market. It was a probing 
     report with fresh data. Former senator Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), 
     one of the most conservative lawmakers of the past 
     generation, praised the GAO, estimating that every dollar of 
     funding for the agency potentially saved Americans $90. 
     Nonetheless, from 1980 to 2015, GAO staffing was cut by one-
     fifth. While I never had the pleasure of collaborating with 
     the Office of Technology Assessment, its reputation is 
     legendary. Like the GAO, it operated as a think tank for 
     Congress, tasked with studying science and technology issues. 
     The OTA was Congress's only agency solely conducting 
     scholarly work on these issues until Gingrich disemboweled 
     it. Today, few members of Congress know it ever existed. The 
     congressional hearings on big tech showcased my colleagues' 
     inability to wrap their heads around basic technologies. But 
     our challenges don't stop at Silicon Valley. Biomedical 
     research, CRISPR, space exploration, artificial intelligence, 
     election security, self-driving cars and, most pressingly, 
     climate change are also on Congress's plate.
       And we are functioning like an abacus seeking to decipher 
     string theory. By one estimate, the federal government spends 
     $94 billion on information technology, while Congress spends 
     $0 on independent assessments of technology issues. We are 
     crying out for help to guide our thinking on these emerging 
     areas. I have backed motions to bring the OTA back to life, 
     and I was heartened last year when the House Appropriations 
     Committee approved funding for a study on the feasibility of 
     a new OTA.
       The creation in the House rules of a Select Committee for 
     the Modernization of Congress in this new I session is a 
     terrific beginning--and a signal that Speaker Nancy Pelosi 
     (D-Calif.) and Rules Committee Chairman Jim McGovern (D-
     Mass.) understand the importance of these issues. Providing 
     capital and staff to the institution should be a major 
     priority in the 116th Congress. The

[[Page E89]]

     budgets we approve fund 445 executive departments, agencies, 
     commissions and other federal bodies. But for every $3,000 
     the United States spends per American on government programs, 
     we allocate only $6 to oversee them.
       After decades of disinvesting in itself, Congress has 
     become captured by outside interests and partisans. Lawmakers 
     should be guided by independent scholars, researchers and 
     policy specialists. We must recognize our difficulties in 
     comprehending an impossibly complex world. Undoing the 
     mindless destruction of 1994 will take a lot of effort, but 
     with investment, we can make Congress work again.

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