B (2:23)

Well, look, I think that one way to think about how things have changed is that we have come to think a little bit less in institutional terms about the American system, where the role defines the task and therefore the role shapes the person. We've seen that happen to our president, some both parties. We've seen that happen here in Congress, some where some members do don't think as legislators, but kind of think like performers who are standing on top of this institution and shouting.

A (2:51)

I never see that.

B (2:52)

Shocking. I know. You can't even imagine what that would be like in your colleagues.

A (2:56)

I tell people all the time like, sorry to interrupt, but I tell people all the time like, look, ask yourself a question to the voters. Ask yourself a question. Are they fighting for you or are they fighting for your attention? Right. There's a difference.

B (3:07)

Exactly right. And I think that's exactly what's happened in a lot of our politics, public institutions. I would say, though, one other thing that's really changed since the 1990s, when I first got interested in politics as a young guy, is that we are in a 50, 50 moment in our two party politics in a very unusual way. We've been in that 50, 50 moment now for an entire generation, really since the beginning of the 21st century. It's very hard for the House and Senate to function that way when majorities are so tiny. It's very hard to think about presidential power that way. We've just been through the third presidential election in a row where power has gone back and forth between the parties. That's only happened one other time in American history, at the end of the 19th century. I think that's an underappreciated fact about how challenging our politics now has become, that it's very, very hard for people in power to know what the public wants when every election is 50, 50. And I think it's been no small part of the challenge that our systems face. I hope we're breaking out of it, but we're not yet broken out of it.

A (4:09)

Yeah, that's a great point. It's not getting any better. The recent census and the redistricting that occurred really made it impossible for you to ever see a large swing in the House again. We would see in a big election year, usually two years after somebody gets elected president, a huge swing, 60 votes to the other side. You're not going to see that anymore because.

B (4:31)

That's right. Part of the problem that creates is that every vote matters in a very strange way. I mean, when I worked up here, I ended up almost ultimately working for Newt Gingrich in the last two years of his speakership. And Newt had a majority of about 35. And so there were always seven or eight members who would just vote no on everything. You name some courthouse for a judge in Kansas and they vote no. And you think, what are you doing voting no. But it didn't matter. Now every vote matters. And the guy who's just here to vote no on everything, doesn't want to bargain and negotiate for his constituents, holds everything in his hands. And it becomes very, very difficult for leadership and for members in general to move legislation when you can only think in terms of party line voting. And when party line voting is as tight and difficult as it is, it's not exactly the fault of the members. I mean, in that sense, I don't think that it's about members thinking the wrong way about their jobs. The system has put them here in a place where the house is 50 50, and the house has never been functional at 50 50.

A (5:27)

Yeah. And we're obviously gonna run into those problems very soon, and we're gonna rely entirely on Trump's ability to influence that. And that's an advantage for Repub. Better than nothing we haven't had in the last two years. Last two years have been very difficult because the incentives just weren't there to play along.

B (5:46)

Right.

A (5:47)

And, and, and it was. It's very easy because it's, and this is inherent within the conservative culture to be a contrarian and to just, to vote no makes you somehow more popular instead of, instead of gaining some wins. And so that incentive structure was there. With Trump in the White House, there's, there's actual leadership and a leader with some influence, some, some hitting power. So I'm a little bit more optimistic about our ability to. But our majority is actually tighter.

B (6:14)

Exactly. It's even harder. Every single vote's going to matter. But I agree with you. It matters that there is a direction and that there's a cost for, you know, for just voting no and everything. But it's going to be an enormous challenge and it's going to mean a lot of negotiating and bringing people along.

A (6:29)

Yeah, that's the thing. I mean, like, as it stands now, if Trump wants to primary you, you're probably going to lose. I mean, is that true in two years? I don't know.

B (6:37)

Right.

A (6:37)

But he's got an immense amount of power right now. And I would actually call, I would call that a good thing because we need to be unified. But going back to institutions and More, I guess, taking a step back on the more philosophical approach to things. I mean, talk about what you mean by institutions being formative and like. Which institutions are you talking about specifically? We've got schools, We've got every. There's a variety of things we might call institutions.

B (7:01)

Yeah, you know, institution is a very broad term, and one of these kind of dry terms that we use without thinking about. In a sense, an institution is just a group of people organized around a common purpose. And that common purpose gives each of those people a role in relation to one another and in relation to the purpose. So you have a family. There's a mother and a father. There are children, there are grandparents, there are aunts and uncles. And they each have a role to play in advancing that common purpose of raising the next generation and shaping them up to be good men and women. You think about a school, there's a principal, there are teachers, there are parents, there are students. The importance of the institution is that it gives people a role in relation to that purpose. And that means that in moments of decision, when they're facing something challenging, they can say to themselves, what role do I have here? What's required of me so that we can achieve what we're doing together? It's enormously important in shaping us. And that's how institutions are formative. They're formative in those moments of decision when if I'm driving down the highway and somebody cuts me off and I want to yell at them, and I think, well, the kids are sitting in the back. I'm not going to do that this time. That's an example of being formed by an institution, but in a bigger way. That happens when you have a real responsibility. When you're a member of Congress and you have to think about your constituents, you have to think about the larger institution, the system that depends on you. When you're a president and you have to make a decision that takes into account the kind of responsibility you have to an entire country, that's a way for an institution to shape you into a certain kind of person, into a certain type of human being. We see that in the military. We see that in the professions. We see that in strong institutions that have the capacity to shape and define the people in them. But a lot of our institutions have grown weaker in our time and in the 21st century. You find a lot of people who have responsibility and who should be recognizing their roles instead, acting as independent agents and thinking of the institution as just a way to elevate them, to give them A bigger following to give them more prominence. And so a university president just becomes a political activist or just a pass through, really.

A (9:06)

I mean, just, just somebody who will be the right word. A delegate. If you think of the trustee versus delegate mindset that we use in Congress.

B (9:14)

That's right.

A (9:14)

I tell people I'm a trustee and I'm not a delegate, not a robot.

B (9:17)

Right. You're here to use your judgment.

A (9:20)

So I tell you how I'm going to use my judgment when I'm running for election. I tell you what sort of ideas I have and how I think through things and, and you entrust me with that vote because we've earned way more stuff than you think and nobody has time to look it over.

B (9:33)

So you entrust that, that distinction is really fundamental in my mind to the conservative worldview. It actually comes from Edmund Burke and it was a way for him to talk to his own voters and say, there are gonna be times when you don't agree with me, but if you trust my judgment, you should recognize that that's why you've sent me here. It's what I'm here to do. Now, we don't often tell the end of that story, which is Burke actually lost the next election after making that famous speech. And so there's a price to pay for using your own judgment. But I think it's a responsibility that's required of people in public office and it's important to recognize that that's part of what the role demands of you.

A (10:08)

Yeah, I get a little frustrated sometimes. I'll see colleagues say one thing behind closed doors, but, you know, say something different publicly. And it's just, it's a severe lack of leadership. I mean, right. It's what are you doing here? What's the point if you're not going?

B (10:24)

That's the thing. You know, nobody has to be here. Nobody's forcing them to be here. If they've made that choice, they have to be willing to the courage to take the hard choices as well as the easy ones. And I do.

A (10:34)

It's not always fun telling people things they don't necessarily want to hear, but it's the truth. And there's some issues that are complicated. We could name a thousand of them. And there's a lot of false narratives out there about a number of issues. And I've noticed that sometimes trying to correct those things or engage in a little bit of nuance, it can make people a little bit upset.

A (10:56)

Now how is that? Those are broader issues. Has that changed a lot in your almost 30 years of looking at Congress.

B (11:03)

I think there are ways that the potential for having that outside audience, which wasn't as easy to do even a generation ago, has distorted some people's understanding of what their role is inside an institution. So if you can always use social media and reach directly to a large external audience, you're just less incentivized to work with your colleagues, to work on the committee work, to do the kind of legislative work that's a little more boring and less exciting. And instead members can just use the fact that they got elected here to become celebrities. And people do that at the expense of their. There's some people who do it to advance their legislative work, and I think that's part of being a member of Congress. There's always been a certain amount of grandstanding that comes to being politician guilty.

A (11:44)

Of using the social media and using it.

B (11:46)

But. Well, the question is, what are you using it for?

A (11:47)

I would like to think that I am using it for the right things. Right. And unfortunately, I think I opened the door for people doing it maybe for the wrong things.

B (11:54)

Well, yeah, I mean, I think the question is, are you using it to advance your work as a legislator? And oftentimes now we see in all kinds of parts of our politics and our political culture, people instead just use it to build their own personal celebrity. And that's changed because it's just much easier to do. The nature of media is different, technology is different.

A (12:14)

Have you thought about. People always talk about reforms to the institution, the system, and I'm always weary of that. Like, you know, it could be gerrymandering or it's term limits and you know, whatever. I, I always say that it's, it's, it's really the underlying, there's underlying cultural problems that are, that are really at the foundation of our, of our issues that we're talking about. You know, one of them, I think you kind of briefly mentioned it, which is just lack of voter participation.

B (12:44)

Yes.

A (12:44)

You know, and a lot of the.

B (12:46)

Regular people out there, especially in primaries where nobody turns out.

A (12:49)

Especially in primaries. I mean, 14% is maybe that's my district much where everybody else's is, but it's very, very low. So you have the people who are extremely passionate on each side.

B (13:02)

Exactly.

A (13:03)

The only ones choosing.

B (13:05)

In essence, we start every election cycle by asking the craziest people in America what they want. I'm not going to call them.

B (13:14)

I vote in primaries. I'm crazy too. But, you know, we're not allowing a representative segment of the Public to have it say at the outset. And by the time you have a broader electorate, the choices they face have already been decided by a narrower.

A (13:28)

We are allowing them to. They refuse to participate. You know, and there's no excuse for that. It's, it's the message I give often. Like, you guys got to vote, right? I mean, it's, it's. You just do. I don't know what else to tell you. So that's a, that's an issue. It's a cultural issue.

A (13:42)

No amounts of different redistricting or turbulence is going to fix that. But is there some creative ways that one might reform our institution?

B (13:53)

I think there are. And I think it makes sense to begin where James Madison began, which is with the assumption that incentives shape behavior and that behavior then shapes institutional culture. And so the question is Congress is always going to be full of ambitious men and women. That's just who runs for office, that's who succeeds. The question is what is their ambition directed to? What is the definition of success? And in part, that is up to the shape of the institution. And so I think getting members more invested in their legislative work is something that could be helped by some reforms. I think, for example, about allowing committee work to matter more, allowing committees to fire with real bullets. For example, letting the authorizing committees control some floor time, as a lot of state legislatures do now. So that if a bill gets through committee or if it gets through committee with some number of votes from the minority party too, it gets floor time whether the leaders want it to or not. Or breaking the barrier between authorization and appropriation, which is not some written in stone. Congress for most of the 19th century did not have an appropriations committee and the authorizers were able to appropriate on authorization bills. This is a. It's a mundane kind of technical thing. You have to explain to people what you're even talking about. But the change would be dramatic because members would feel like the work they're doing every day matters rather than just kind of passing time until the leadership decides what's actually going to get voted on at the end of the year.

A (15:17)

I've thought about that too. Like maybe there should be an appropriations subcommittee within each authorizing.

B (15:23)

Exactly.

A (15:24)

The only place that there's truly an authorizing and appropriations role is the Intel Committee.

B (15:28)

Right. And that is a more functional domain than most of the rest of Congress.

A (15:32)

Oh, it absolutely is. I'm on it. And it's. I love being on it because you actually do real work and it's all hidden. So there's no grandstanding.

B (15:41)

Well, that too. I think there are ways in which putting cameras in committee rooms. I think C SPAN on the floor is great. Nobody's ever been persuaded of anything on the House floor anyway. But committee work is where a lot of negotiating can happen. And having cameras in every committee setting is not a great idea. You have to have some spaces for members to actually talk to each other so that there can be some back and forth.

A (16:03)

Yeah. I mean, on the appropriations conversation, you know, we always talk about the need to pass. We got to pass 12 bills, just like we're supposed to. Just do it in regular order. Let's point out, you know, that's, that's, that's not written in stone. That's written, that was just written by some congressman in the 1970s.

B (16:18)

It's worse than that.

A (16:19)

I mean, it's not, it's not in the Constitution.

B (16:21)

Created that budget process in 1974.

A (16:23)

Yeah.

B (16:24)

They're 20 years into.

A (16:25)

Another good point.

B (16:26)

Democratic Congress. They was built for them, and it is not well suited to the contemporary Congress. There's absolutely an argument for rethinking the budget process. Congress has to think. You know, I always like the story of when Dwight Eisenhower was president of Columbia and they were going to repave the campus, and so they showed him a map of where they're going to put all the, all the paths, and he said, well, why don't we let students walk on the grass for a year and then see where they're walking and pave there? I think there's a way for Congress to think about. I'm not even sure if that story is true, by the way, but it's too good to check. Congress should think that way. Right. How are we actually working what is working? And let's build structures around that so that the contemporary Congress can pass budgets to force yourself into this shape that was thought up 50 years ago that we just now consider to be the sacrosanct budget process. Doesn't make sense. You don't have to work that way.

A (17:17)

Yeah. And people are like, you better not vote for an omnibus. That. I explained it. It will always end up as an omnibus because you have to, you have to make trades, you have to negotiate different sections of the budget, and it'll always end up that way, I'm sorry to tell you. And so, you know, we can, we can bang our heads against the wall trying to defend the system that a bunch of Democrats in the 1970s built, but it doesn't, you know, it's, it's not even Obvious why these particular committees have the jurisdiction that.

B (17:46)

Why 12, why not 10? Why not 20?

A (17:48)

Yeah. You know, there's other talk about, you know, you look at healthcare, for instance, as just as a subject and it, it crisscrosses across three different committees.

B (17:58)

Right.

A (17:58)

In energy and commerce we have a health subcommittee. So does ways and Means, and so does an education workforce. So it's, it becomes impossible to do true healthcare reform in a, in a meaningful way. One of the reasons I keep telling the speaker that he needs to authorize a select committee on the cartels is because I banged my head against the wall for a year with no staff. They gave us nothing except a, you know, a name that we're the cartel task force. So it's just me and a couple other members, but mostly may just researching the issue. We come up with some pretty decent pieces of legislation, but some that need to be fleshed out more because we need staff to do it. But even with those, that series of ideas cuts across nine different committees, right. There's. There's no way it's going to happen. And so you either care about this issue or you don't. And you know, some might say you need a select committee on health care.

B (18:50)

Right.

A (18:50)

Or just a permanent committee on health care, or just rethink the way we do all these committees in the first place because there's just such broad jurisdiction across the board now that's.

B (18:58)

Some of them are strangely narrow. And then you have, you know, energy and commerce. Well, what's that? That's the whole economy.

A (19:04)

It's a lot of things.

B (19:05)

It really, I think would make sense for Congress to think what is our work now? And how do we need to structure our staff and our committee system around it? And those kinds of changes can matter by allowing members to do work that feels like it's real. It feels like it will result in something in the real world. They can help them be more invested in their actual legislative work rather than again, just use this place as a platform for social media performance, which members do, because they're not wrong to think that the way they're asked to spend their time is largely now a waste.

A (19:37)

Of time, extremely difficult to pass any kind of legislation. You generally look to must pass vehicles. I mean, a lot of us are looking at reconciliation as a must ban. But that's limited in what you can do with reconciliation. There's, there's some priorities that I have that I'll try and get into that. But there's a lot of good ideas that would largely be agreed upon that are just. It's not. Somehow, it's not possible to get them. Get them through.

B (19:59)

Right.

A (20:00)

Even if even our suspension bills that are largely agreed upon and we vote them out of here all the time, you know, it's not obvious that the Senate will ever take them up because they have a totally different process, one that is much slower. So they've got to bundle all those suspension bills if they really want them passed. There's. There's. Every once in a while, there's some unique wins, usually when the Senate votes on something unanimously and then we can make it happen. And then this happened recently with, With a. With a bill on permitting reform for. Specifically for chip makers. Not. We would love permitting reform for everybody, but, you know, Senator Cruz finally comes to our Texas delegation, tells us, you know, if you guys can get this on suspension, it'll become law. It's already passed the Senate, and that's a rare thing. And this is a real bill, not a post office renaming, but something real. And we took that to Scalise and Johnson and we actually did it. So there's. Every once in a while, there's some kind of highlight.

B (20:52)

Congress can work, but the trick is learn from those, how it should work all the time, and ask yourself, how could this happen more often? I think for a lot of members, the real trick is to see that the rules can be changed, that they're here to facilitate their work, not to stand in the way of it, and that it's up to them what those rules are.

A (21:09)

Yeah. What. Your recent book on the. On the Constitution. What is. What is the. What is the message there and how does that.

B (21:15)

The essence of that book is really that we, We. We need to see the American Constitution as a framework for making it possible for our diverse, divided country to be more unified. You know, a lot of people now complain about the breakdown of cohesion, unity in America, blame the Constitution, look to it as one of the reasons why we're divided, especially people on the left. And I think they're. They're not just actually exactly wrong. The Constitution was created to help a diverse country be more unified by forcing competing factions in our society to deal with each other, to negotiate with each other. The American Constitution is really different from a lot of other democracies around the world in that it doesn't empower the winner of an election to have all the power of government until they lose their mandate. It gives them a part in a process. And the process is always a negotiating process, so that it always says, broaden your majority before you can act, Find a way to build a coalition, to build some consensus. That's what's frustrating about the Constitution. You can win an election and still be stuck in a room with people who you are, who never go away. But it's also what's very valuable in a divided time like this, where the public is divided. We are at 50, 50. It's not as though there's some big majority out there that's not getting what it wants. We have to build that majority. And to build that majority requires coalition building, which is really, I think, the lost art of American government. And the way to regain it is by returning to the Constitution and learning from its structure how we ought to work our politics.

A (22:44)

Well, a good civics lesson is always important because, I mean, yeah, once you win an election, like I say, we want to trifecta. So there's, I think, some expectations that are very high about what you can do. Again, it's that constitutional framework that prohibits it or simply a tradition like the Senate filibuster.

B (23:04)

Right.

A (23:04)

What do you think about that?

B (23:05)

Well, look, I think the filibuster is one of the very few mechanisms now that do compel some cross partisan bargaining. And ultimately Congress is here for that purpose. It's here to make sure that we do deal with each other rather than roll over each other. And when you're in the majority, as we are now, that's frustrating. But when you're in the minority, you recognize that that structure means you never lose permanently. And it is very, very important. So I'm a defender of the Senate filibuster. I think it's important as a way of forcing members to work with each other across lines of difference. And more generally, I think we have to see the Constitution. As we were saying before, it's a 50, 50 time. Every new president since Bill Clinton has come into office with a trifecta with his party controlling both houses of Congress. And always in this century, the instinct has been, well, okay, let's just run. Let's do everything we want to do. And every time that has failed, because ultimately a narrow election win is an invitation to bring the other party over to broaden your coalition, make them an offer, make some Democrats become Republicans after you win an election. That used to happen all the time and it doesn't happen much anymore because the parties don't really imagine that they could broaden their coalition. And I think a lot of it is really a failure of imagination. Winning 50% plus one is better than losing, but it's not good enough to really govern. And ultimately you have to think, how do I get to 55 to 60%? That's not unimaginable in modern America. And in order to get there, you really have to think in terms of coalition building, which again, I think is the essential skill for our system.

A (24:34)

It'd be tough because the.

A (24:37)

The far right and the far left have both become further apart, but also more similar in some ways. Sort of an odd observation, but, you know, populism has taken over both. And so that's, that's the art of telling people what they want to hear and, you know, and connecting with their feelings as opposed to telling them truth and facts. That's what populism is, whether it's right or left.

B (24:59)

Yep.

A (25:00)

And, you know, it results in some, some bad policy decisions. Oftentimes, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's like the. Peggy Newton had a great description of it one of our op eds once, which was like, populism is, is, is basically trying to, trying to put a, I'm paraphrasing, but trying to put a, a policy explanation on whatever casual comment you heard at the local diner.

B (25:23)

Right.

A (25:23)

The kind of like, I just thought about this for about five seconds. But yeah, you know, what are we doing? What are we doing there? It's like, well, okay, there's a long history here.

B (25:30)

There's a lot more to it.

A (25:31)

There's a little bit more to it. This isn't, this isn't the, this, this is a complicated society. And again, and we still have this romantic idea too, of sort of citizen legislators. And this is where I think people get caught up in, you know, demanding term limits. And I've learned here that, well, look, on year seven and still learning a lot, you want. You. And a lot of people are, you know, the main groups demand six years only. So the speaker of the House would be in his third term.

B (25:58)

Right.

A (25:58)

That's, that's pretty wild. It's pretty wild amount of inexperience. You would literally be institutionalizing inexperience. And you think you're going to get a better result out of that. I don't see how.

B (26:09)

I think a lot of that comes from the sense that there's nothing to know in politics, that it's not, it's not really another profession, that it's not really a mode of, of public service and public action, but it is. And it's just, you know, for term limits to make sense, you'd have to show me that.

B (26:27)

That the oldest members are the worst members. And it's just not true. I mean, you can point to some examples, but it's not generally true. And I think more than that, it's vital to see that ultimately the purpose served by this institution, by Congress, is to facilitate a kind of bargaining across difference in American life. It's not that you're trying to get to the ideal technocratic solution. There is no ideal technocratic solution. You're trying to get to solutions to public problems that as many Americans as possible see as legitimate as answering to their priorities and concerns, as speaking to what they need. And that just inevitably in a free society requires bargaining. And the work of bargaining is real work. It takes real skill. You have to really learn it and know it. And so I do think that it's important to recognize what role the system plays for us. Populism is important. And I do think that there's a kind of skill to leadership in a populist time, which is to see the kernel of truth at the heart of the public complaint. And often the kernel of truth is that there is some elite in American life that has become disconnected from the priorities of the larger society and needs to be somehow reconnected. The answer is not to destroy the institutions. You need the institutions. But they need to be accountable to what matters to people in their own lives. That's why we have representative institutions. But they become disconnected sometimes. And the challenge is to answer that need in a way that also takes governing seriously. Because populism itself is never going to take governing seriously.

A (27:59)

And that's. That's the ultimate problem. It's like, it's good at identifying a feeling of a problem, but not good at really defining it. Well.

B (28:08)

Right.

A (28:09)

Usually goes way off course. And then the solutions that are required to deal with this off course problem as it's defined is usually. It's usually big government, and it's usually a kind of a wild hammer as opposed to a scalpel approach and whatever gets more clicks.

B (28:26)

Yeah, it's some big, simple, crude slogan. And ultimately that's not how governing works. And so leadership in a time like this really requires a very complicated set of skills to see the reality of the problem, to take people seriously when they make populist complaints, but also to help them take governing seriously and to see what role government can play. It's often a supporting role and not a leading role.

A (28:48)

Yeah, it's like people ask like, why can't you guys balance the budget? And my honest answer, when I talk with constituents, I say well, because you don't want us to, Right? You know what the true answer, you don't want us to because for us to balance the budget, for us to get our. I even balance the budget, but honestly, just, just get our debt to GDP ratio under control, because that would be, that would be good enough. You never actually need to balance the budget to do that. You just need, you just need deficits to, as a percentage of GDP to, To be slightly below.

A (29:17)

Our growth.

B (29:18)

Right.

A (29:18)

That's all you need. And then you've got a glide path. That's success will be successful forever.

B (29:23)

Yep.

A (29:25)

But you, the American people, don't want us to do it. Why? Because it would require us to actually make major reforms to the programs that you hold so dear, which is Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and you'll be mad at us. So. Yeah, I mean, and I talk about this a lot because it's my generation that's get screws here. Okay? I mean, all of this money is, you know, we were like, we don't spend any money on our own people. I'm like, oh, oh, yeah, we do. You know, we're giving all our money to Ukraine. I'm like, not even. The total amount of money we've given to Ukraine, by the way, is, is. Is about equal to what we just now gave in a supplemental to, you know, the, the hurricane hit countries like this, you know, there's a, you see it over, over social media, like, Ukraine gets whatever money this is, and they get nothing. I'm like, yeah, that's just not true. And this is the problem with populism. It's like, it's, it's. Sometimes they're identifying a feeling of problem, but sometimes it's just, it's just lies.

B (30:15)

Yeah.

A (30:16)

You know, and, and, and it's very. And I, we spend a lot of our time as trying to be honest legislators just debunking lies. I had to do it yesterday because this is. What was her freaking name? Laura Logan. Laura Logan. Just like randomly claiming, why is Dan Crenshaw trying to kill President Trump's FTO designation on cartels? And I'm like, how stupid do you have to be to say something like that? I'm the one who started the conversation about using the military against the cartels. I'm the one who introduced the AUMF against cartels two years ago. I'm the one who leads the cartel task force. How stupid do you have to be? Why?

B (30:55)

Because they're looking for every incentive to do it. Exactly. There's every Incentive to.

B (31:01)

Start that kind of mess rather than to talk about the real problems. And I agree. I think if you look at what actually makes up federal spending, almost anything we could talk about that isn't. Medicare is not worth your time if your concern is long term spending path. Even Social Security, which is a huge spending item, is basically on a trajectory that by itself could be sustainable. Medicare is not. And Medicare, ultimately the path of growth there has to change, but it's impossible to talk to voters about it. And people have tried and paid a price. And so people watch that and think, well, I'm not gonna do that. And here we are.

A (31:38)

It'll only work if it's bipartisan, because if we, if we try to suck it up and do something and President Trump doesn't want to. He's already said he doesn't want to.

B (31:45)

Yeah.

A (31:46)

If we try to suck it up and do it, Democrats will. Yes, we'll do what they did to George Bush. I mean, you were there, you were politics in that time.

B (31:53)

He did try.

A (31:54)

Yeah, yeah, that. And if that plan had gone through, I'm pretty familiar with that plan because Marty Feldstein, I think designed.

B (32:01)

Yes.

A (32:02)

My economics professor in Harvard. So I learned a lot about Social Security reform. And if that had worked, if that, if that had passed, we would, we would have way more money for our retirement because it would have a personal retirement accounts associated with it. It would. Which I assume would be in line with the market in some form or fashion.

B (32:20)

Right.

A (32:20)

We'd have so much money and it would be on a glide path to like in a much better situation.

B (32:25)

And we just, Democrats said they were.

A (32:27)

Throwing grain off a cliff.

B (32:28)

I worked for President Bush at that time as a domestic policy staffer at the White House. And the fact is, his effort to use his political capital to get that done in the second term got nowhere in a Republican Congress. It was 2006. He tried to get Speaker Hastert at that time to take this up. And Hastert said to him, I know you just got reelected and you don't ever have to run again, but my members do. And it wasn't crazy. He wasn't wrong. But as you say, if we had been able to do it then, or.

A (32:58)

Even if you would have saved the country.

A (33:01)

It would save my generation. It really makes me, I'm mad about this.

B (33:04)

Even if Simpson Bowles, which was a much less ambitious set of reforms, had been adopted in 2011, when Barack Obama created that commission and then refused to accept its recommendations, if he had accepted those and pushed those In Congress.

B (33:20)

Our fiscal house would be in dramatically better shape now than it is.

A (33:24)

We've got another commission. All right. We created it under the Fiscal Responsibility act, which also, by the way, is an example of negotiating properly Republicans with a tiny majority. That's. It should go down in history that way. I'm sure it will. But you know, we got permitting reform. It was, it was back when the debt ceiling was being negotiated with Biden and we had five votes and McCarthy did a good job just. Yeah, four months out. These are clear things we want and we're being very clear about it and they're easy to explain. Like there's key elements in how you do this. Right. And we got pretty much all of them. Democrats got nothing. And you know, the key among them was the permitting reform. Not all the permitting reform, but a good amount and a trillion and a half dollars less spending. It was good. There was a way, there's a way to do it. And then in that also was another debt commission which will come up with the same ideas.

B (34:08)

Right. The last ones are will.

A (34:11)

It's political will.

B (34:12)

Yeah.

A (34:13)

And yeah, I guess too many people need this job. And I'm like, I mean, don't you want to look at yourself in 10 years and say you did the right thing as opposed to like whatever it takes to keep.

B (34:23)

And you know, the question is, would vot really ultimately punish you if it works out or not? I don't know that it's that obvious. It's easy for me to say I don't have to run every two years, but I think a lot of Americans would like to see these problems taken up. And if you can do it in a way that really doesn't reduce current benefits for anybody who's now getting benefits.

A (34:40)

You can't do that. And you have to make that really clear to voters. Not cutting your benefits immediately.

B (34:44)

Right.

A (34:44)

But like I would view it, I hate viewing this debate as a negotiation between the left and the right. It should be a negotiation between a younger generation, older generation. That's, that's the lens we should look at this through. And so both sides have to give something.

B (35:00)

Yeah.

A (35:01)

So I should, I retire later probably. You know, we live longer. But the other side has to give something too.

B (35:10)

Right.

A (35:10)

And maybe it's, maybe it's less COLA increases, Whatever, whatever the math. There's a math equation there to work something out, but there has to be level headed people and then not a lot of outside groups just spewing lies. I mean, look, you know, here's another thing that The CR that was so. Came so contentious. Right. Elon Musk came out against it and it just died right there in the, in the vine. But people should know that one of the things. Maybe, maybe it was bad. I don't, you know, we never got a chance to really debate it.

B (35:39)

Right.

A (35:39)

Because it died so quickly. But one of the things in there was PBM or form, which is a bipartisan effort to. To make their fee structures more. More transparent. Now, for everyone who doesn't know what the hell I'm talking about, pharmacy benefit managers are a major player in healthcare and they're. And we think they're making too much money and stealing yours. That's okay. That's the long and short. And so we want to know where the money is going. So forcing a transparency in how those transactions happen is a bipartisan bill that passed out of our committee.

B (36:06)

Yeah.

A (36:07)

You know, and could have. Could have passed out of the House floor. It was included in that bill and it was negotiated and ready to go. Turns out PBMs are spending millions and they were hiring influencers. The people on. On Twitter and Instagram of big accounts, right wing and left wing, hiring them to take down that bill.

B (36:26)

Yeah.

A (36:27)

And they're not taking it down by saying. By defending PBMs, they're taking it down by saying other things like look at that, look at that 40% pay increase they're getting total lie and then blaming me for it, which is a whole other crazy, ridiculous situation. And then. But it's just, it's. It's, you know, the America we. We need to take politics seriously. And I think too many people don't, especially when they're on. We're on there on Twitter because it is a serious profession. And y. And you can't treat it like it's a WWF match, but it often is.

A (36:58)

So you talk about the, the balance between individualism and collectivism. I think it's kind of an interesting conversation to talk about too, because. Well, I don't know, maybe I'll just leave that jumping off point and let's see what you mean by that.

B (37:13)

Yeah, I mean, you know, I think that the. There's a tendency in our, in our left right politics to think that those are the two options. That some kind of radical individualism where we understand ourselves to be thoroughly independent and some kind of collectivism where we take communists. Yeah. Where we socialize all responsibility as if those are the two options. And in fact those two things are more or less the same thing. They're the two ends of the spectrum. But they end up as a practical matter being the two connected radicalisms in American politics. The reality is we're interdependent, we're a society, we need each other. And the question is, how can we form the rising generation in such a way as to be capable of upholding their responsibility both for independence and for the obligations they have to other people? To my mind, part of what it is to be a conservative is to recognize that we live embedded in a social order, that we live in a society so we're not radically individualistic. But also to recognize that the independent minded citizen is the greatest achievement of that society. A person who can take ownership of his or her own fate and say that they are responsible as members of.

A (38:26)

Our society is the key word.

B (38:27)

Yeah, that's the hardest thing to achieve. And that's not achieved by radical individualism or collective. That's achieved by recognizing that we're shaped by family, we're shaped by community, we're shaped by citizenship in a society. And I think that means taking all those institutions seriously.

A (38:43)

Yeah, I think that makes sense because your radical individualism would be the outlaw, you know, just sort of taking advantage of the order of society.

A (38:52)

And profiting off of it. Right.

B (38:54)

Someone has to sustain that order and see that as their responsibility.

A (38:58)

But an ultimate collectivist is just, frankly just being lazy and waiting for someone to save them.

B (39:03)

Yeah, Those are both forms of an absence of responsibility. And I think responsibility is really the key word that describes small R. Republican citizenship. That's what it's about. It's about taking responsibility, saying, this is ours.

A (39:19)

You talk about. You study a lot of important thinkers in the past.

A (39:25)

Where do you think this one comes from? Is it Alex de Tocqueville? Is it like, who. America is unique in this sense?

B (39:32)

Yeah. And I think it is American. You know, it's funny, the word responsibility. It actually used to be the case that the Oxford English Dictionary said the word responsibility first came into English in James Madison's Notes on the Constitution. They since found an earlier version which was very inconvenient for me. But it's still a rare word. Before the American founding, it was used a lot by the generation that wrote the Constitution to describe the peculiar kind of obligations that you have as an American citizen in a society that isn't governed by a king that does take responsibility for itself, but that has very high expectations of citizens for that reason.

A (40:08)

Well, is it a John Adams quote? The Constitution is built for a good and moral people. It's wholly inadequate for any other that's right. Like it won't work if you're just a bunch of bastards. Like, you've got to.

B (40:20)

It's not just a machine that we can, you know, that works on its own. It does require us to take some responsibility for its functioning. Absolutely.

A (40:28)

And what does that look like in today's age? I mean, if you're talking to a bunch of high school kids and you want to talk to them about civic duty, what does it look like?

B (40:37)

To me, it looks like looking at public problems and saying, these are our problems. What are we going to do about them? Rather than looking at public problems and saying, who's going to show up and fix this? And just being disappointed with other people for not fixing your problems. A lot of that has to happen at the local level. You have to see a problem and say, well, we're going to get together and do something about it. But to the extent that it has to be national, some problems do. It really means taking ownership. And as a citizen, as someone participating in politics, whether you run for office or you're just a reliable voter, you have to see the problem as your own. I think the essential word for being a Republican citizen is the word we. The first word of the Constitution. We, the people of the United States, we say we and not they both. In terms of what this country can achieve. Right. We went to the moon. I didn't go to the moon, but I get to take pride in the fact. The fact that we did and the fact that we have these problems and we have these challenges. That means that at some level, it's up to me to play some part and make some and be willing to make some concession in order to get things to a better place.

A (41:42)

Yeah. That's why I always ask people, okay, you're mad. Did you vote? Did you vote in the primary? Yeah. You could start a group. It's sort of the American way. You see a problem, you start a group, you fix it. But we've taken too much away from that local authority.

B (41:56)

Yeah. I think we've lost that knack. You know, Tocqueville makes this joke in a letter to his father. He says, if you get three Americans together, they'll elect a treasurer. It's kind of true, but it's not as true as it used to be. I do think that we have lost the knack for taking on problems ourselves this way. And now if you get three Americans together, they'll complain about the president. And so I. I do think that.

A (42:17)

There'S room for no idea who Represents them at the local level. I mean, the vast majority just don't. They're mad at me, but.

B (42:24)

Right.

A (42:24)

You know, they're like, congressman, fix this, fix that. Like, not a dictator.

B (42:27)

Right. And also not a city councilman. Right. A lot of these things really belong at that level.

A (42:31)

I get. I get a vote on legislation that's passed at the national level.

B (42:35)

Right.

A (42:36)

You know, we can influence things. We try and we do. But this is, you know, the. This is a civics education would be much more helpful if everyone had that. I mean, and it's tough to give back that local empowerment because a lot of it's been taken away because of. Really because of. There's a lot of reliance on government grants. Yes, you can. You can say, hey, you're empowered. But then the local governments are going to have to raise taxes to pay for those things themselves, thus making people.

B (43:03)

I think it's important to see American federalism is not layered government. It's parallel governments. Right. So it's not as though the federal government is at the top and then below it are the state governments. They each govern directly, but they govern with respect to different subjects. And so education, for example, should be entirely the purview of state and local governments, not shared in the way that it is now. What happens in that sharing is the federal government has the leverage of massive amounts of money, and therefore everybody else ends up doing whatever they say. There's too hard to say local responsibility.

A (43:36)

They expand Medicaid because it's too hard to say no to the money.

A (43:41)

They don't raise taxes like they need to, to pay for infrastructure because they're hoping for grant money instead. And oftentimes there's a mix of both. And look, there's some argument, I guess we end up with grant money oftentimes because it's. It's something Republicans can kind of agree with, as opposed to taking on, like, an entirely new program that would build it from the government itself.

B (44:01)

We think we're supporting localism that way, but the fact is, you're robbing local governments of the muscle memory that's involved in actually doing what they need to do on their own. And these kind of mixings, you know, Medicaid's the best example of this, where nobody's responsible for Medicaid when things go wrong. The feds say it's a state program, the states say it's a federal program. They're both kind of right, and it just can't work that way.

A (44:24)

Yeah, they are. And in the Department of Education, that's always a, it's a favorite for Republicans to say that, let's just get rid of it. And Democrat, you hate education. It's like, well, ask your local schools how much they deal with the Department of Education. It's basically zero, except for the regulations that are forced upon them on special ed specifically. This is what I hear from teachers.

B (44:45)

Yeah.

A (44:45)

You know, and, but are there a lot of grants that come from the Department of Education? Yeah. Could it be vastly reduced? Reduced. Vastly reduced, yes. I'm not sure what its budget is, but it's probably too much. There's probably too many bureaucrats there. It's not like we're anti education, but, you know, it's not, it's not making people smarter. You know, our founders were pretty well read and it didn't have Google. Like how I just. How is it possible? I mean, I just don't understand it. But yet. And yet they did.

B (45:15)

Yeah.

A (45:16)

So then what else does it, how else would you describe conservatism? I like to describe it sometimes as a way of, like a way of approaching a problem. You know, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a formative philosophy. Right. It's a process oriented philosophy as opposed to liberalism, which is sort of just. You come up with a conclusion that you want and you sort of demand it.

B (45:39)

Yeah, I think of it, maybe it's formative in an even deeper way. For me, conservatism starts with an assumption about what the human person really is. And it's an assumption that starts for me, at least from Judaism and from Christianity. The human person is fallen, is broken, is imperfect, is in need of formation before he can be capable of freedom. But the human person is capable of freedom with that formation. And that means we need to preserve, conserve value, the institutions that form us to be capable of freedom, family first of all, but also religion and education and work and politics. The reason to conserve those institutions, to worry about them, is that they're essential for forming us to reach our potential. And that means that what we need from politics is the preservation of those formative institutions, rather than. I think the left often begins from a sense that the UN person is already born free, but is just oppressed everywhere by various kinds of institutions that exist only to serve the powerful. So what you need from politics is liberation. I think the dispute between a politics of liberation and a politics of conservation is really the left right divide. And to my mind, the difference between them is very profound. It's really about Whether ultimately the human person needs help to be free, needs to be shaped in order to be capable of it, or should, or should.

A (47:00)

Be challenged with freedom, which is ultimately how you, how you, how you improve. Speaking of institutions, obviously there's a. We talked about getting rid of the Department of Education. There's been plenty of writings, probably from plenty of places, like where you work at aei, on how to make government more efficient. You know, and so it was. We have DOGE now, the Department of Government Efficiency, led by Elon Musk. I mean, my, my Elon's pretty smart guy, and I guess if anybody could, like, look at a system and perhaps make it better, it might be him, but he'd have to really study it. You know, it takes some time to really understand what you're looking at. And I think there's a bit of a romanticism about it, a bit businessman coming in and fixing government. And what I might point out is that there's a tension and there's, there's a reason businesses work efficiently, and it's because there's a, There's a common, there's a, there's a common mission, which is profit. And so you can sort of do away with the, the, the opinions of people, the, the, especially the political biases of people, because the, the.

B (48:04)

Prof.

A (48:04)

The mission is profit, and you can empower people that therefore to, to, to do things more efficiently. Okay, you have, you were empowered to make that decision. Just make it happen. Go make the deal. You can't do that ever in a bureaucracy. Yeah, because people do have political biases in any bureaucracy. And the mission of the bureaucracy is never profit driven. It's, it's, it's, it's doing good for the people. And who's to say what is good for the people? Well, that's a subjective opinion. And different people with different political persuasions have different ideas about what's, quote, unquote, good for the people. And so to control for that, you've got to wrap them in red tape. You've got to make them inefficient. You've got to say, well, you have to follow this formula. You gotta, you know, you gotta check all these dot your I's, cross your T's in a way that you just don't have to do in business. You can't empower people. And so it's inefficient, which causes waste. But also, you, you, if you did empower too many people, what are you gonna get? Well, you're gonna get what we might call the deep state, like an extreme version of the deep state. So that's a tension that exists, and I'm not sure everyone realizes that when we talk about.

B (49:13)

I think it's a tremendous challenge, and in a sense, runs even deeper than that.

B (49:19)

What public institutions do is act on behalf of the public. And that means that they have, first of all, the obligation to produce not efficiency, but legitimacy. They have to show the public that they're acting on behalf of the public. And often, in fact, what happens in populist moments in particular, is a sense among the public that the institutions and elites are not working on behalf of the public. And in those moments in particular, it's important to have transparency, to have accountability. And another word for all that is red tape. That's just part of what it is. Now, obviously, red tape can get out of control, it can be needless, it can be pointlessly bureaucratic. But the reasons for it is that the institution is accountable to the public, not just to customers who only care about the outcome, but to the public, which cares about work on its behalf being done in a legitimate way. So that I really worry about the notion that you can apply the logic of business to public institutions in a democracy, they're inherently necessarily different. And in fact, in some ways, the idea of the doge. And look, I have a lot of respect for Elon Musk, and he's tremendously capable and has built things in the real world. He's not just a guy who talks. He's actually created real things, and we should take that seriously. But the notion that you'll embed people in government departments without accountability, give them real power, and expect that they'll be trusted by the larger public, I think is a failure to come to terms with the populist moment we're living in. And I worry that Elon Musk is setting himself up to be the focal point of every conspiracy for the next 30 years. Whatever happens that people don't like, they'll say, oh, the doge. And, you know, the idea that you can exercise power in a way that's not accountable, that's not quite part of any of the branches of our government, that's not quite answerable to elected officials, I don't think that's a way to make positive change here. So there are definitely ways to improve the efficiency of our government, and I wish them well in doing it. I think it's necessary work. But there has to be some taking account of the need for accountability and transparency and legitimacy in that kind of work. And so far, I worry that they run a real risk of fueling more conspiracies rather than addressing the problems we have.

A (51:37)

Possibly. Yeah. We don't really know what they're going to do. One of Trump's first executive orders seems along these lines, which is what I would have suggested. And I. I don't think it came from Doge, but I think it came from people who've been working in government a long time, which is. Make it easier to fire federal employees. That's the number one thing. And if you haven't studied that problem, don't talk to me about government efficiency because you know nothing.

B (51:59)

Because to that question, who decides what's good for the public? The answer is elected officials decide. That's why we have elections. And so the executive branch has to be accountable to the president. That's the elected official.

A (52:11)

Yeah. No, it should be. The president wants somebody fired. That shouldn't be hard to do. And yet it is. Now, that might require law changes from Congress, you know, if we're able to get that through. Great. But, you know, I point out to be able. Look, all the good ideas on government efficiency have been had. The. The think tanks have written about them, there's legislation about them. The reason they're not and exist. They don't exist yet is because politically, we haven't been able to get them through. We don't have super majorities. Yeah, it is. It. It is what it is. I doubt we're going to see new ideas on how to do it. You might, you know, might give more. One thing I like about Elon is, you know, these old ideas will at least have his platform.

B (52:49)

Yeah.

A (52:49)

And a lot of people think they're new ideas, but they're not. Which is fine.

B (52:53)

Yeah.

A (52:53)

But maybe there'll be more oomph behind them and more ability to get them done. Maybe. But again, our Constitution does prevent that.

B (53:01)

Kind of, and with good reason, easy change. I'm hopeful for him, but I. There are reasons to worry about the way that they're approaching this at this point.

A (53:10)

You wrote a book called the Great Debate, Burke versus Payne, and we'll kind of get into that a little bit. I'm not sure everybody knows what that great debate's about and how it affected our history.

B (53:18)

Yeah. This gets back to what we were talking about before. The core left, right. Difference is what that book is about. It tries to think about where left and right, as we think about them came from. They came from the age of revolutions, the moment at the end of the 18th century where we see the American Revolution and the French Revolution, two very different kinds of approaches to change emerge in that moment. And you find the politics of Britain and of America being transformed from an argument about whether the king or Parliament should govern to an argument about whether change should be radical transformation or gradual evolution.

A (53:54)

Let's talk about real quick, let's go back a little bit, like, who are these guys?

B (53:57)

Yeah. So they both lived in that moment at the end of the 18th century. Edmund Burke is an Irish born English politician and statesman. Thomas Paine, we know Tom Paine, he wrote Common Sense in the Crisis. He was an Englishman who came to America in the 1770s and became one of the great thinkers and writers of our own revolution. The disagreement between them, they agreed about America, they were both supporters of the American Revolution, they disagreed about the French Revolution. And the fact that they agreed about America and disagreed about France makes their dispute. And they argued with each other. They wrote to and about each other a lot. Makes that debate really an interesting way to look at what to my mind, is the first, the earliest form of the left right debate as we can recognize it. And you see a lot of the characteristics of that debate that we think of as modern 21st century kind of differences emerge way back then. A dispute about whether the purpose of politics is to liberate the individual or whether the purpose of politics is to help the individual be formed through an exposure to tradition. A dispute about whether it's possible for knowledge to be centralized and wielded by government, or whether, as Burke says, knowledge is always social. Knowledge is possessed by people with experience and it's not possible to apply it technically in a centralized way. A lot of these debates that come to be debates about the role of government, about capitalism, are really present there before a lot of our modern challenges emerge. And they're ultimately arguments about the nature of the human person.

A (55:30)

You would argue Burke is on the conservative side of this.

B (55:33)

How does Paine.

A (55:33)

More on the.

B (55:33)

Burke is really a father of conservatism and Paine. I chose Paine to make life difficult on myself. Paine's not a progressive exactly. He's a liberal. And the argument is really between a kind of conservative and a liberal. And what you find in Paine is that his more radical approach to politics very quickly becomes statist, even in his own thinking in the early 19th century. And points in directions that ultimately do point toward progressivism in America.

A (55:59)

Yeah, more control over the individual. More this idea that, yeah, the individual can be formed into some kind of perfection. Human nature can be perfected. And so he looked at the front. You're saying he looked at the French Revolution.

B (56:10)

He thought the French Revolution was. Yeah, it was an example of how.

A (56:13)

He could live later, as it turned out, not so well.

B (56:15)

He didn't. He should have. He was himself imprisoned. He was in France for much of the revolution. Found himself in prison at the end of it, and yet he was still a defender of the original promise of the French Revolution, even after that.

A (56:28)

Yeah, maybe the idea of it, but not so much how it turns out. But that's kind of the point. That's kind of the point is like the ideas don't match reality and they never do. They're.

B (56:35)

There's a reason for that.

A (56:36)

Idealistic. They're utopianistic.

B (56:38)

The problem really is the ideas. Yeah.

A (56:41)

Well, that's interesting. That'd be another good one to read. We'll leave it there as I have to go to a meeting to talk about reconciliation and legislation. We actually are doing some work these days.

B (56:51)

Yeah.

A (56:52)

It's great to see you and thank you so much for. For being on and we'll have you again.

B (56:56)

Thank you so much for this great conversation. I appreciate it.

A (56:58)

I appreciate you.