[Congressional Record Volume 169, Number 20 (Tuesday, January 31, 2023)]
[House]
[Pages H557-H560]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




              IMPROVING OUR GOVERNMENT THROUGH LEGISLATION

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 9, 2023, the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Casten) is recognized 
for 60 minutes as the designee of the minority leader.
  Mr. CASTEN. Mr. Speaker, I am here today to introduce three bills to 
make our government work a little better. Before I get to those, I 
would put a question to all of us in this Chamber, the thousands who 
are sitting here tonight in the gallery, folks watching, but those of 
us who have the privilege to have this job.
  Why are we here?
  What is the reason we decided to get into this line of work?
  There is a small number of us who, I don't know, may go on to be 
President or some other office. There is a handful of us who get our 
viral clips on the local news. There is some larger number of us who 
actually get our name on a big bill that makes a difference, and we are 
remembered by our name: The Tafts and Hartleys and Sarbanes and Oxleys.
  The truth is that most of us are going to be about as well-known to 
our successors as our predecessors are to us.
  We are here. We are doing a job. We will be known for the office that 
we held. We will be remembered for the dignity with which we held that 
office but not for who we are as individuals. And that is okay, right?
  One of my favorite pieces of advice I got when I got into this line 
of work was from President Obama, who said, This is not a sprint, this 
is a relay. And your job is to pass the baton to the next person in a 
little bit of a better position than you had it when you picked it up 
on the last leg.
  Now everybody in this body has different policy views, different 
ideas of what a better position in that relay might look like. But I 
submit that we do have some universal goals that we all agree on or 
else we wouldn't be in this line of work.

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  We all want a government that delivers the greatest good for the 
greatest number. We all want a government that upholds our founding 
promise of freedom and equality.
  We all, I think, believe Abraham Lincoln's admonition to us that a 
government of, by, and for the people should not perish from this 
Earth. We all, also, I think agree that on those really hard questions, 
the beauty of the government that our Founders created, it is on the 
hard ones where we disagree the single best way to resolve those 
disputes is through a democratic process.
  It ain't always the best way, but we decided not to have kings. We 
have agreed not to resolve those through wars. We have agreed to 
resolve them through a democratic process.
  I agree with Winston Churchill when he said that democracy is the 
worst form of government, except for all the other ones that have been 
tried, but it is the best one that we have.
  I put those goals out there because I think they are universal. But 
if we are honest with ourselves, I'm not sure we are doing such a good 
job. When we have record wealth inequality, when we have record numbers 
of mass shootings, when we have surging levels of deaths of despair 
from the opioid crisis to suicide, it is hard to say that we are doing 
the greatest good for the greatest number.
  When we have persistent male-female wage gaps, racial wealth gaps, 
steady numbers of Black men getting killed for minor traffic 
violations, it is hard to say we are doing a really good job of 
upholding a promise to freedom and equality.
  When we look at what we do in this building, not just on our end here 
but the north and the south end of the building, do we do what the 
people ask us to do, things that are overwhelmingly popular?
  Campaign finance reform, getting rid of gerrymandering, holding 
ourselves to the same legal and ethical standards that we ask all 
American citizens to be held to.
  We can't get those bills sent to the President's desk. Those things 
are rejected. We don't even get them out of this building. That is a 
question of whether we really are making sure that we have a government 
that is of, by, and for the people.
  I know that you all face the same questions I get when I go home. 
People ask: Why is it that people in this institution are failing to do 
things that are overwhelmingly popular?
  When we see those little polls that say Congress has a 20 percent 
approval rating, that should be a red light that we have to fix things.
  And, of course, the refusal of substantially all of one political 
party, the party of Lincoln, to condemn an attack on the U.S. Capitol 
that sought to overturn a free and fair election is not a commitment to 
preserve and abide by the wisdom of the majority.
  Now, I can get depressing, and I am not trying to depress anyone. It 
can be a cause for hopelessness, but not for us, right? I mean, we got 
into this job to fix things.
  Mr. Speaker, I know you got into this job to fix things, to make 
things better, right? Seeing something that is broke is an opportunity 
to make it better. Maybe it is an opportunity for us to build something 
better and maybe people will remember our names.
  We have to get to work and move the baton forward to do that. If we 
are going to do that, we have to first acknowledge some unpleasant, if 
self-evident, truths.
  First of all, we don't like to say it around here often, but we 
should. Our Founders actually weren't perfect. They weren't Moses. They 
weren't Jesus. They were fallible people just like us.
  One of my favorite descriptions of the Constitutional Convention was 
Benjamin Franklin when he was asked about the process. And he said, 
When you assemble a number of men to have the advantage of their joint 
wisdom--he should have said ``and women'' but it's with the times--when 
you assemble them to get their joint wisdom, you inevitably assemble 
all of their  prejudices, their passions, their errors of opinion, 
their local interests, and their selfish views.

  He was talking about the Constitutional Convention.
  It sounds an awful lot like he is talking about all the people we 
work with every day, right? We all have our errors of opinion and our 
selfish views, and that is okay. Trust our Founders that they were not 
perfect and they were just as flawed as we all are.
  The second thing we have to acknowledge is that our Founders didn't 
actually think the Constitution was perfect. It is not this immutable 
stones' path on the mountain.
  This is Thomas Jefferson in September 1789, after the Constitution 
was ratified. He wrote to James Madison: Every Constitution--this is a 
little crazy, I'll warn you.
  Every Constitution, every law should naturally expire at the end of 
19 years. It might be that every form of government is so perfectly 
contrived that the will of the majority--will of the majority--could 
always be obtained fairly, but this is true of no form.
  I am not suggesting that all our laws expire in 19 years, but these 
are the people who wrote the Constitution saying, I'm not sure this 
thing is really good for more than 19 years or so, that if we are going 
to make sure that we fulfill the will of the majority, we might have to 
prune it.
  Okay. That is fine.
  The third thing, and this is the one that I think is most important 
for us here today, is that our Founders did not understand democracy 
nearly as well as we do.
  They were an amazing group of people. They did an amazing thing, but 
we have 233 years of wisdom that they did not have. We learned 
something with that time over the course. Think about the fact that our 
Founders designed the Constitution with the idea that they would not be 
political parties. They called them factions but they couldn't 
contemplate of a world where you could have a functioning democracy and 
political parties.
  Well, I think we have proved you can do that.
  They didn't have standing armies. They didn't have income taxes. They 
couldn't contemplate of a country where women had the right to vote. 
They couldn't contemplate a country where they didn't have the ability 
to hold slaves and not only not allow them to vote but do a whole bunch 
of other things to suppress their freedom and their equality. They 
kicked that problem down the road.
  Again, these things sound familiar, right? We have been there.
  Now, they were wise enough to plan for those surprises--they made the 
Constitution amendable--but we know things they didn't know. We are 
governing in a different environment still under those tools. If we 
acknowledge they were no perfect than we are, we acknowledge that we 
have a responsibility to move this baton forward, then I think we can 
be honest about what we can do and not be constrained by our own 
ambition.
  Because what is clear, the answer to that question, ``why is it that 
we can't do things that the majority of the American people want?'' is 
in large part because while our Founders paid lipservice to democracy, 
they said in that letter that Jefferson wrote to Madison, that it is 
important that a government do the will of the majority.
  At core, they didn't really trust the will of the majority. They 
created the electoral college because they didn't trust that people 
could be trusted with the vote. The direct elections of Presidents were 
going to be a problem.
  You go and you read the stuff they wrote. They said some populous 
could just stir up the passions of some uninformed rube in the rural 
areas.
  These are almost direct quotes.
  They didn't trust that people in a fully democratic society could 
elect a President so they created the electoral college. They created 
the Senate expressly to frustrate the will of the majority.
  Now, I say ``they,'' it wasn't a universal view, but there was no way 
that we were going to have these United States, to get all those 
colonies to agree unless there was some way to prevent the will of the 
majority from causing laws to go forward.
  So we created the Senate. You could argue that we created the Senate 
to preserve slavery, and it did that for, I don't know, a couple dozen 
years. But it massively overrepresented the low population States in 
order to make sure that we could actually get people

[[Page H559]]

to agree to join in these United States. That is what they did.

                              {time}  1815

  Today, or when it was founded, the biggest State had 10 times the 
population of the smallest State. Today, it is up to almost 100. So, we 
have massively disenfranchised huge numbers of American people because 
of a structure that was designed to disenfranchise large but not as big 
numbers of American people.
  We kick a bill out of here and can get 50 votes in the Senate with 
people representing 17 percent of the United States population.
  When our voters ask us why we can't get things done that are 
supported by the will of the majority, it is built into our system.
  Finally, our Founders created the Supreme Court with largely no 
checks and balances on the Supreme Court--lifetime appointments, no 
ethics obligations. Goodness knows, we have seen a fair amount of what 
is going on there right now.
  Remember, Marbury v. Madison that significantly expanded the power of 
the Court relative to the legislative branch came after the 
Constitution was signed. This is a different structure than what they 
contemplated, and that effectively gave the Supreme Court not the 
ability to write laws but darn close to it because you get one Supreme 
Court Justice that flips the majority, and all of a sudden, you can say 
that our work here, all the good work we put in, is unconstitutional 
and turn it over with the whim of one vote. That is not majoritarian.
  Mr. Speaker, I ask you to consider for a moment what our country 
would look like just over maybe three decades if the will of the 
majority had prevailed, if we actually lived in a country where we only 
did what the majority of Americans want us to do.
  First off, I would like to introduce you to President Gore, followed 
not too long after by President Hillary Clinton. We would have elected 
our first female President because that was the will of the majority, 
right?
  That would have had a dramatically different Supreme Court, whole 
numbers of decisions. How do we think about the Second Amendment in the 
wake of Heller? It would have been a heck of a lot different with 
different Justices on that Court.
  How we think about campaign finance in the wake of Citizens United 
would have been quite a bit different with different folks on the 
Supreme Court.
  The Dobbs decision--do we believe that women are truly equal in this 
society? That might have been a different decision if we had expressed 
the will of the people.
  By the way, campaign finance reform, a woman's right to choose, 
wanting to not get shot, these are very popular things with the 
majority of the American people, yet we can't deliver that because of 
what happened.
  I am going to give an exception that proves the rule, and this one we 
don't talk about enough here, but as House Members, this one should 
make us furious.
  Last year, this body passed, on a bipartisan basis, the Emmett Till 
Antilynching Act. It made lynching a Federal crime--long overdue.
  It went to the Senate. The Senate passed it, and the President signed 
it. It is a law now. It is now a Federal crime to lynch in America. 
Good for the Senate.
  Do you know when that bill first passed this body? 1922. It took a 
hundred years, a century, for the Senate to acknowledge what the House 
had acknowledged for a hundred years, that lynching is bad. We have to 
fix this place, folks.
  If we don't want to answer that question anymore, when people say, 
``Why can't you do what we want?'' We all know what they tell us, 
right? ``It is because you are corrupt. It is because your donors won't 
let you do this. It is because you are just in it for your ego.''
  Look, there are some of us who suffer from those problems, but if the 
institution needs fixing, we can fix it on our own.
  If any of what I am saying sounds partisan, I mean, I get it. I am 
talking about women's right to choose. I am talking about sensible gun 
control legislation. I am talking about who would have won President. 
All of those things sound kind of partisan. That is only because, in 
this structure, we have gotten to a point where one party in America is 
representing the views of the majority of the American people, and the 
other party derives its power solely from those minoritarian 
institutions.
  In a healthy democracy, we should all be competing for that mythical 
center of the electorate. We shouldn't be sitting there and saying: I 
have a 20-year plan to stack the Court with Justices who will agree 
with me to overturn the will of the American people.
  We shouldn't be sitting there saying: Well, I can control the Senate 
if I just find a couple of Senate seats in a couple of low-population 
States with cheap TV markets.
  We all know it happens, right?
  We will be healthier, both of our parties, if we commit ourselves to 
the idea, as Jefferson said, that if we are not representing the will 
of the majority because no form of government ever consistently does, 
let's fix it so that we do, which brings me to the three bills we 
introduced today.
  The first bill is a constitutional amendment to add 12 national at-
large Senators. It doesn't do anything else to change the Senate. It 
doesn't do anything to frustrate Article V. You can't in any way 
diminish the relative power of the Senate. But imagine what would 
happen if 10 percent of the Senate had an interest in representing the 
will of the American people.
  We would then sit there in this House, the people's House, where we 
represent the will of the American people, with confidence that we had 
people fighting for us over there.
  It would make it that much harder for them to filibuster a good bill 
that comes out of here because why would they filibuster something that 
is supported by the majority of the American people?
  It would also, by adding 12 senators, add 12 more electors 
representing the popular vote. That would reduce the number of 
scenarios where we could have the  popular vote winner lose an election 
to the electoral vote winner. That is the first bill.

  The second one is to expand this House, and in the next Census, 2030, 
say let's go out and look at the smallest State in the Union and say 
the size of that State is going to set the size of a congressional 
district because if we are the House of Representatives, we should make 
sure that all of us represent as close as we can the same number of 
people.
  The House hasn't grown since 1911. The population of the United 
States has grown three and a half times since 1911.
  All of us in this room, on average--your mileage may vary--represent 
737,000, 740,000 people. In 1911, we represented 200,000 people.
  Imagine how much different our jobs would be if we had 200,000 
constituents to represent, to go talk to, to understand, to make sure 
that we reflected their views. We would be better. We would be more 
representative.
  There are only two countries in the world with parliamentary 
democracies that represent more people than we do: India and 
Afghanistan. We are the crazy outlier, right?
  Let's expand the House and make us more representative. If we did 
that based on the last Census, that would add something like 130 seats 
to this House.
  Again, it would add further electors. It would make us more diverse. 
It would bring in a new group of people. It would make us better, make 
us more representative.
  The third, because I know there are a lot of constitutional 
originalists in the room, is to restore the Supreme Court to its 
Article III responsibilities.
  If my colleagues haven't read it in a while, I encourage them to go 
read Article III of the Constitution that lays out the scope of the 
Supreme Court. It says that they are responsible for matters of 
admiralty law, maritime law, matters relating to ambassadors, disputes 
between the States, and in such appellate jurisdictions the Congress 
may see fit to provide from time to time.
  If we have a Court that is consistently not fulfilling the will of 
the American people, if we have a Court that is consistently 
encroaching on our power here in this Chamber, overturning our 
judgments and what we do, it is in our power to perhaps see fit from 
time to time to reduce their appellate jurisdiction.

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  So, what we have said is: Let's reduce their appellate jurisdiction 
to the circuit courts, and let's depoliticize judge selection 
processes. If the courts are going to say that a law that we passed is 
unconstitutional, we will select from a pool of circuit court judges, 
appellate court judges, at random, and it will take at least 70 percent 
of them to overturn a bill that we pass out of here.
  It takes two-thirds for us to overturn a veto, right? Let's hold them 
to the same standard. Let's not make this political. Let's get enough 
people involved in the pool that you can't politicize this. Do it for 
the good of making this place work.
  Also, it would eliminate the shadow docket. Why do we allow ourselves 
to continue to live in a world where the Supreme Court can just decide 
to rule on something and not even explain it? How do you work as a 
lawyer if you don't know that? Let's get rid of the shadow docket.
  I am not perfect. You aren't perfect, Mr. Speaker. None of us in this 
room are perfect. Our Founders weren't perfect, but we are perfectible, 
and we have a job that affords us the opportunity and the 
responsibility to make our government a little bit better, a little bit 
more responsive, a little bit more democratic to move the baton 
forward.
  I would submit that that is just an amazing privilege. I am grateful 
to have it. I am grateful to serve with all of my colleagues.
  I hope I can get the support of this body and my colleagues to 
redouble our commitments to make our government better, to make sure 
that we honor Jefferson's promise to tune it and tweak it if it is not 
carrying out the majority will, and to pass that baton forward to 
whoever follows us up to be in a little better position than we had 
ourselves.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

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