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Philip A. Wallach, "Why Congress" (Oxford UP, 2023)
00:49:37
An interview with Philip A. Wallach
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- [00:00]
A
Hello, everybody. This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form, and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:07]
B
I'm Caleb Zakarin, assistant editor of the New Books Network. Today I'm speaking with Philip Wallach, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. We are discussing his recently published book, why Congress from Oxford University Press. You're going to read one book this year about US politics. I strongly recommend listeners pick up a copy of why Congress. Philip, thank you for joining me today on the New Books Network.
- [01:28]
C
It's great to be with you. Thanks.
- [01:29]
B
Of course, yeah, it's great to speak with you. I've known you for quite some time now, few years, and I feel like I heard the initial germ of this idea for this book a while back, and it's really exciting to see it finally in print. I was wondering if you just before jumping into the book, just tell our listeners a little bit about yourself and your background.
- [01:51]
C
Like you, I'm a graduate of the great College of Social Studies at Wesleyan University, which is an interdisciplinary program that sort of causes us to think about big questions. And I'm very grateful for that. That start to my higher education. And from there I went and got a little bit of a taste of Washington think tanks by working as a research assistant at the American Enterprise Institute after I graduated from college, worked there for a couple of years, and then went and got my PhD in politics from Princeton and have gone back to think tank land ever since then. So that I've, I worked at the Brookings Institution for a number of years. I was at the R Street Institute for a while and now for a few years at the American Enterprise Institute again. So yeah, I'm somebody that studies the policy making process in America kind of writ large and the separation of power system and how it functions in practice. And yeah, I've been able to make a nice career of sort of picking different policies that I, that I try to become a modest expert on while sort of being a generalist in American politics mostly. So for, for those who are more.
- [03:13]
B
Familiar with parliamentary systems, I should note about 50% of our listeners are not based in the United States. So they might be used to different systems of government. I was just wondering if you could explain how the US Congress operates just at a very basic level.
- [03:27]
C
Sure. So the United states constitution, Article 1 gives all legislative power to the Congress. And the Congress is an independently elected bicameral body. Right. It's made up of a House of Representatives and U.S. senate. And the members are all represent geographical districts and they're all elected in, almost all of them are elected in first past the post elections, although there's a little bit of experimentation now with other forms. But they very independent legislators in the United States, they are not, as in parliamentary systems, tightly integrated with the executive branch. So the President is the head of the executive branch, elected totally separately from the members of Congress. Members of Congress have their own, have their own terms. And I think there's a general sense that the US Congress is a more powerful legislature by design and in practice than most legislatures around the world. It really is at the center of American government. And if it doesn't want to do something, that mostly shuts off the possibility of doing it.
- [04:43]
B
So let's start with one of our founding fathers, James Madison. So what did James Madison think about the role and the makeup of Congress?
- [04:51]
C
Right. So like the other founding fathers, Madison envisioned Congress being very powerful. And he actually said that there was some reason to fear that Congress would be, would there would be an impetuous vortex sort of sucking all power into Congress, that it would dominate the system entirely. And so part of what the framers of the US Constitution were doing was trying to create a system with somewhat more balance that wouldn't just be dominated by the legislature as the system under the Articles of Confederation had been. But they still very much envision Congress as the leading branch of government and the way they imagined it would work, would be sort of a balancing out a mixture of all these different factions. Even in the early days of the Republic, America was a very diverse country, geographically diverse, sort of diverse in terms of economic interests, diverse in terms of religious diversity. Right. Mostly different kinds of Protestantism back then, of course, but, but that played an important part in the country's sort of self conception. So Madison envisions all these factions having to conciliate each other, having to work together to figure out what, what the common good means. And in that process, no faction comes to predominate. You sort of avoid the specter of tyranny by any one group by virtue of the diversity of these factions. And you see the sort of the main action playing out in Congress itself. So fluidity of power is sort of central to the Madisonian vision, the idea that, that there's always new chances to build new kinds of coalitions rather than any one group locking itself into power forever. But at the same time, the founders did not really anticipate a robust party system that was not so much on their radar as they were launching, launching Congress. And Madison himself became a leading figure in the House of Representatives in its early years. And in the second Congress actually became basically the founder of what's usually called the Democratic Republican Party. That's the same the party of Thomas Jefferson, but Madison was its leader in Congress. And so it's interesting that Madison, the framer of the Constitution, didn't see a role for parties, but Madison, the practical legislator, actually became sort of the leader of one of our early parties in Congress. And so within his career, I think there's a lot of interesting sort of tensions between the need, the need for this free play of factions and the need to bring to bear some kind of organization so that we don't just get a complete chaos in the legislative chamber.
- [08:02]
B
You compare Madison's views to Woodrow Wilson's views on the roles of parties. So what do you see as Woodrow Wilson's main views on the problem of weak political parties? Just how did he conceive of Congress compared to Madison?
- [08:18]
C
Yeah, so Woodrow Wilson is, let's say three or four generations removed from the founders of the country. And he comes of age in an era after the Civil War when he feels like US federal politics are very corrupt and he feels like we have these two parties slugging it out basically over the spoils, all these federal government jobs without much principle involved. And so he, as a dissertation for his PhD at Johns Hopkins University, writes what becomes the book Congressional Government. And that's one of the bestselling books of political science ever, ever written. And he has. He lays out a pretty powerful critique of a sense that if we have too much of a muddle in Congress, we end up with nobody taking responsibility for anything. And the American people really left without any mechanism of. Of holding office holders to account. And so he outlines a case for sort of simplicity imposed by parties. He wants to see responsible party government is sort of what becomes the phrase associated with it. But what he wants is that Americans are given a very clear choice at elections. Two parties with well differentiated platforms such that you sort of know what you're voting for. And then once the party is elected, they go ahead and implement that platform. They shouldn't have too much trouble, sort of. That's his vision of how democracy ought to work. The party wins the election and gets to implement its program. And we should also give a lot of attention to efficient administration as part of Wilson's vision. So it's very much opposed to Madison's way of thinking, where it's good to have kind of a healthy mixture and sort of shifting alliances on a regular basis. Wilson says, no, that's all too confusing. That destroys responsibility. Instead, we need very clear lines. We need the voters to have this ability to render clear judgments and have that be sort of the directional force in government.
- [10:40]
B
How did you end up coming to Madison and Wilson as these kind of paradigms do they just. Are there other thinkers or theorists of Congress or. Or do they stand out more just because of the way in which they kind of exist on opposite ends of the spectrum?
- [10:56]
C
Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, I think, of course, Wilson's book, Congressional Government sort of does demand. If you're doing sort of a big history think about Congress kind of demands that you engage with that book because it was such a giant academic success in its own right. And of course, because Wilson became such an important figure in the history of American politics as a practical politician. And I think there's legislatures. Representative legislatures are so much a part of the fabric of American society that you don't always get people explicitly theorizing about the Congress. In some ways, Wilson feels compelled to do a lot of explicit theorizing because he wants to offer a fairly radical critique of and would like to see a radical departure from the system as it has been up until that point. You get a lot of people who sort of appreciate things about the way American politics should work, but they don't tend to explicitly theorize about the legislature or representative government. All that much. But Madison and his contributions to the Federalist paper are probably the best exception to that. Madison is really a great thinker about what it is that makes societies hold together. And I think his. His thinking about Congress influenced me a lot in understanding why Congress is the place where doing this work of politics is supposed to bring the country together, hold the country together, rather than having people feel like they're just going off in different directions. It's that dialogue and that deliberation in Congress that really does the work of mending fraying ties when that's a problem and just of sort of knitting the country into a unified whole. And I think that perspective is very underappreciated today. I think people think of Congress as a place of enmity, partisan enmity today, and there's plenty of good reason for that. And they've lost track of the potential of this institution, which is at the heart of our constitutional system. And so that I've gotten passionate about sort of the need to rehabilitate.
- [13:14]
B
How did Congress behave during World War II, especially in relation to FDR's expansion of the U.S. government and the United States transformation into a war economy.
- [13:23]
C
Most people, when they think about World War II, don't have any thoughts about Congress at all. It's just sort of not on people's radar. And Congress did not micromanage the war effort. They let the generals figure out how to win the war. And that's much to their credit, I'd say. But they nevertheless played a very vital role in, in helping the country stay united and, and figure out how to share the very severe burdens of the war. So the burden of taxation especially went way up, but a lot of problems caused by rap, but inflation and rationing as well. And when you get problems like that, people become intensely concerned about fairness. They don't want to be getting the short end of the stick. If everyone's asked to bear sacrifice and somehow people feel like what's being asked is somehow equitable, then we can accept it. And, you know, I think the American people showed that they could really do amazing things in restructuring the American economy to, to generate this huge material advantage in the war, not just for ourselves, but for our allies. And so chapter two of my book tells the story of, of, of sort of how Congress's efforts on this front really helped keep the country together. And Congress is closer to the people than the President. A lot of times President Roosevelt would be pushing for sort of more, more, more. And Congress was the one that had to say, sometimes hold on we know what the people can bear. We don't need to throw so many billions of dollars more new taxes on them right now. We're actually willing to take a stand on this. And so you have some dramatic moments where Congress actually overrides FDR's veto, especially after 1942 midterms, when conservatives did quite well in that election. You see Congress putting up quite a lot of resistance to some of FDR's more ambitious plans to sort of use the war as an opportunity to restructure American society. There was a sense that Congress was safeguarding American liberties, making sure that we were fighting the war to save our. To save our way of life and on our way of organizing our politics and society as opposed to becoming the enemy we were, we were fighting against. And so I think Congress rendered really great service to the American people during the war. It's a shame that it's mostly been forgotten. So the book tries to bring it back to people's attention.
- [16:01]
B
So, moving on to another historical era, looked, examining Congress, could you talk a little bit about Congress's role during the civil rights era of the 1960s? You know, what role did Congress play in the civil rights achievement? So much focus has, of course, just been given to Lyndon Johnson's role. And how is the Southern coalition ultimately defeated in this period?
- [16:23]
C
Yeah, so people think of Congress as slowing down civil rights as. Because Southern conservatives all, all of whom were part of the Democratic Party at that point, of course, but because they had so much institutional power in Congress, by virtue of their holding many chairmanships, and by virtue of just having, you know, complete dominance over the south, they were able to block the progress of civil rights even as it was gaining majority support in the country at large. And there's definitely a good bit of truth to that. When, when we already had majorities in favor, Southerners were still able to. To slow things down. When, when Lyndon Johnson was the majority leader in the Senate, he got sort of the first breakthrough in the form of the Civil Rights act of 1957. But it was a, it was a pretty modest bill. There's sense that by having, by compromising with most of the Southerners and getting them to, to drop their opposition to the bill, that they, they mostly gave up most of what was of great importance in that bill. So as you get into the early 1960s, sure, building outside in the country and you have President Kennedy get elected saying that he's a big supporter of civil rights, but actually, once he gets into office, he's. He's not that interested. He realizes that this is going to be really painful. It's going to strain his own party by putting him at odds with these Southern conservative Democrats. And he doesn't really push that hard. And so the first thing that Congress does of great importance, that people don't appreciate with civil rights is that it becomes a forum for really robust partisan competition to push civil rights forward. So a lot of liberal Republicans at that time become champions of aggressive efforts to legislate on civil rights. That creates pressure for liberal Democrats to get on board or to move their own legislation. Eventually creates a lot of pressure for President Kennedy and his administration to do the same. So I think there was just this virtuous competition that played out in Congress, and that was a big help. Now, another thing the chapter goes into in my book about the Civil Rights Movement act is they had to break the filibuster in the Senate. Back then, that meant getting 67 votes, and it meant for overcoming this very strong tradition against invoking cloture, cloture being how you break a. Now, that was a huge burden. But in some ways, it was a blessing in disguise for the movement because it caused them to actually figure out how to persuade a much broader coalition than they already had. I mean, they. There probably was bare majority support for it. But in the. In the first few years of the 1960s, the civil rights movement started to target all kinds of Americans. They basically decided that they needed to enlist everyone who wasn't sort of a backward Southern conservative on these issues. And they did that largely through going to the churches, just an amazingly ecumenical effort that brought in all kinds of people and eventually got Midwestern Republicans, people who were very conservative but decided that they wanted, that they felt strongly about these issues, that they, they were willing to give their support, even though they didn't have so many constituents of their own clamoring for them, really. But eventually they. They built this broad coalition that left the Southerners feeling very isolated. And then the last important part of the dynamic is that the Southerners were allowed to make, to mount their defense. They were sort of given a chance to use every procedural tactic in the book. Lyndon Johnson, once he became president, sort of just wanted to strong arm them, wanted to roll over them. And a majority leader in the Senate at the time, Mike Mansfield of Montana, who's a really fascinating figure for those who don't know about him, he said, no, we're going to let them have their say. We're going to have an orderly process. And at the end of it, we're going to take a vote whether the Southerners like it or not. But we're going to, we're going to really keep things dignified and let them have their say. We're not going to try to belittle them in the process. And that's what happened. I mean, through the. Through 1964, there was this very, very long filibuster, months long filibuster in the Senate where the Southerners mounted their critique of. Of the law. But at the end, at the end of the day, they, they took a vote on cloture. And as everyone knew, this huge coalition that had been built was going to. Was going to triumph. And I think sometimes people think, oh, well, the result is all that matters. The process doesn't matter that much. If the process slowed things down. That's just to the discredit of the process. But it's really important to understand it's not just about getting a law on the books. It's about being able to enforce it. It's about keeping the law on the books, even when political winds shift. And so what you see with the Civil Rights act of 1964, which causes desegregation, one of the most ambitious social re engineerings of the 20th century, what you see is that the Southerners accept this result as legitimate, even though they believe it's a terrible mistake. They go home and tell their constituents, hey, this is the law of the land. We can't say that our colleagues abused us. We just have to live with this and keep making the case for why we should get rid of this law. But we have to live with it. And to a remarkable degree, the law was able to be rolled out without a lot of violent resistance. It certainly wasn't zero. And it was slower in sort of more remote areas of the south than. Than in other places. But it does happen, and there's really never a push to reverse it. Right. We hear so much about sort of white backlash as a driver of American politics, and that does show up in various ways, but it never shows up as a serious political movement to reverse desegregation. So that's really a remarkable accomplishment. And my book makes the argument it's because of that process in Congress that allowed all the members to keep their dignity, that allowed the people of the south to feel like their trusted representatives really had had their say. And that was such a valuable thing that allowed us to navigate this change. And, you know, to the extent that we just want to villainize these Southern conservatives and say, oh, well, they were they were racists. And that's the end of all we can say about them. They were horrible people. You know, they should be remembered as infamous villains. I think people have a hard time appreciating the story because the truth is, yeah, they, they were racists, no doubt about it. And they held a lot of views that from our perspective today just seem abhorrent, but they were not. They were complicated people and they, they were American patriots in many ways. And they did not want to blow the country up of even over this issue that they felt was so important. They wanted to be continuing to cooperate and make America work even after they lost on this issue. So that's a great accomplishment to be able to have a political system that gets people to buy into it for the long term, even when they lose on some of the things that are most important to them because they believe in the system's continued willingness to work with them on other things that matter.
- [24:22]
B
Yeah, that's an interesting point, I think, especially just comparing it with today where there's such a sense that if any party gets its way that the other party will view it as them imposing this will on them. That is not non consensual and just the sense that you can't get anything done.
- [24:40]
C
So going back to the Madisonian vs. Wilsonian frames for thinking about things, the brilliance of the Madisonian vision in my view is that it creates a lot of room for positive sum deal making for this belief that not everything we do is just one, one team winning at the expense of the other. I think the Wilsonian view of politics is very zero sum. And yeah, the political process ought to be a thing that helps us stay together as a country to generate some amount of ongoing goodwill. And that's a huge positive sum thing for our country that we need to value. Yeah, to the extent that we see politics becoming merely sort of a zero sum, you know, mutual character assassination and all that, I mean, we really have lost something very profound.
- [25:37]
B
So, you know, moving on from the 60s and the 1970s, you know, there's obviously Watergate and then the Watergate babies and there's a lot of changes in Congress. Reforms, fragmentations, you know, what occurred in the 70s and what changes occurred, happened with Congress.
- [25:53]
C
So the 1970s were a time of remarkable transformation for Congress. You had sort of ascendant urban liberals who continued to feel frustrated with the power of Southern conservatives even, even after they won their big victories on civil rights and other Great Society legislation. And they wanted to shake the place up. They wanted to do Away with the seniority principle that let these Southerners hold their chairmanships forever. And they wanted to sort of restructure the place to be more amenable to the concerns of mid level seniority people. Them essentially. And so they did. They radically expanded congressional staff in the House of Representatives. Subcommittees became sort of the central node of activity, which allowed a lot of people to have their own little fiefdoms. And it sort of became a buzzing hub of activity. And Congress did a lot of legislating in the 1970s, especially early on during the Nixon years, actually. But as the decade wears on, you start to get a sense that these changes, for all the energy they've generated, sort of create too much chaos, a sense of cacophony. And during the presidency of Jimmy Carter, in the last four years of the decade, you have huge Democratic majorities in both, both chambers of Congress, but they're not really able to push through some of the central elements of his agenda in anything like recognizable form. The big bill back then that got the most attention was energy legislation, which they do eventually pass an energy law, but it doesn't look anything like Carter's plan. And so there was a sense that Congress had reformed itself, yes, but kind of left itself adrift in need of sort of better internal organization if it was going to be able to pursue coherent agendas. And so that leads into sort of the next period directly, which is in the 1980s, from the 1980s onward, start to see a trend toward centralized power in both chambers, especially first in the House, where you give the majority party's leaders a great deal of power to structure the agenda, and you sort of see the role of independent committees recede to some degree. There's more and more a sense the committee chairman work for the speaker, sort of serve at the Speaker's pleasure, rather than existing as independent sources of power on their own. And so that really changes, changes the kind of place Congress is. And it does not happen all at once. But yeah, from the mid-1980s onward, we see this push towards centralization.
- [28:54]
B
So the Democrats held Congress from 1955 until the 1994 Gingrich Republican Revolution in Congress. You know, can you talk about Gingrich and this, this shift, what impact this kind of had on how just the Democrats controlling for so long, how Republicans started to view Congress as a potential vehicle for them to achieve their ends?
- [29:17]
C
Yeah, the short answer is that Republicans lost faith in the institution of Congress over this long stretch in which they were out of power. And because they had Republicans in The White House and Nixon and Ford and Reagan, they started to think more and more about how they could empower the President to make conservative things happen. And they got more and more frustrated with Congress as a place that they felt existed to hound the executive branch and give it troubles, rather than acting as a constructive partner with. And Newt Gingrich rose to prominence over the course of the 1980s as the bearer of this message, as somebody who said Congress is corrupt, Congress is totally for the benefit of Democrats. It more and more just sees Republicans as some sort of alien visitors who have, have no real role in legislating. And we as Republicans should not play along. We should do everything we can to blow up the status quo and get ourselves in the majority, and then everything will be different. And especially Gingrich takes a very big scalp when he helped hound speaker of the House Jim Wright out of Congress in the 1980s. He sort of frames Wright as a tyrant who's running roughshod over, over all kinds of institutional norms and, and shutting Republicans out. And yeah, his solution is just don't play nice. Maximize conflict. Give the voters a clear choice. Gingrich is very much a Wilsonian in his thinking about Congress. He wants a mandate from the American people. And so finally, in the 1994 midterms, he frames up this thing called the Contract With America, and Republicans lay out this very clear agenda of what they would do if they won control of the House. And they do. They win just a huge wave election, take control of the House and the Senate, and are finally in control of Congress. But what I argue is that they're not very well positioned to take advantage of that power that they had acquired because they didn't really think like legislators. And especially Gingrich, who imagines himself, you know, as this world historical figure, kind of wanted to think of himself as a shadow president almost. People saw Bill Clinton as a big joke at that point. They thought he had only won in 1992 because of Ross Perot's influence on that election. And they thought that he was a dead duck. And so they very much think that they're just going to. They have, have this mandate from the American people. They're going to sweep in and make everything, make everything new, get rid of the Great Society, shake things up. And they just don't have a realistic model of how, of how Congress works. And they especially, remarkably, don't even figure out really a way to work well with the Republicans who control the Senate. They don't coordinate well at all, even across Capitol Hill. And they sort of don't realize the limitations on their power. They don't realize the extent to which, now that they're a healthy sized majority, their coalition is actually diverse. Not all of the folks who are voting to make Gingrich speaker are so enthusiastic about cutting back environmental protection or, or making big cuts to Medicaid, for example. So you have, they sort of have a reality check, which is a painful process for them. And eventually they do, they do come to a place where they can make some useful compromises with the Democrats, with Bill Clinton. I think there's some good legislating that gets done in that period. But you don't sort of see a fundamental shift away from this mandate view. I think that even though Gingrich doesn't last so long, only four years as speaker, his sort of view of take the questions to the American people and then bring the agenda to Congress, that becomes the dominant mode into the 21st century. Nancy Pelosi is somebody who takes up his model of centralized leadership and runs with it. And so you've, you see Congress more and more become a place where the leaders are thinking about how to tee up the next election. They're thinking about how to make the other party look as bad as possible so that the voters will give them the power to implement their whole agenda finally without having to worry too much about that backward other side. And you know, this just keeps not happening. We don't have a dominant party emerge in the 21st century. We have sort of a knife edge contest that keeps flipping one way and the other. And so we're kind of stuck in this mode where each party is, is framing an agenda to try to make the other look as bad as possible, rather than embracing that sort of more positive sum view of what politics can be about.
- [34:36]
B
In chapter seven, you offer a case study looking at the long running debate around immigration, border control. Obviously on both sides of the aisle there's been a desire for, on the one hand, well, prior to Trump, obviously there was more willingness on both sides for some sort of a compromise. But why is it that Congress has so consistently failed to reach any sort of compromise on this issue? And it's basically been the provenance for the most part of the executive branch to deal with, with these issues.
- [35:11]
C
Right. So we had a really big immigration reform law in 1986, usually called Simpson Mazzoli. And I think a lot of, a lot of what's played out in recent years has to remember what happened with that law, because in the end that law was framed as a compromise between people who wanted to secure the border and people who wanted to, you know, give a path to citizenship and an amnesty for people who had gotten into the country illegally. And the folks who were interested in that deal for the border security part just felt completely burned. They felt like they had, they had been had. And so there's a very deep distrust with the process among folks who are concerned about sort of the ease with which people can get into this country and live in this country without, without legal status. And that distrust has made it so that they are willing to sink, to sink legislative attempts to bring some order to this system. That's become increasingly chaotic over the years. And unfortunately, we haven't found a way around that. We've sort of not found ways of figuring out whether there is any way we can earn their trust back. And if not, we haven't seen the kind of push that we had with civil rights, right, where we build this giant, overwhelming bipartisan coalition to move ahead even against the wishes of a minority. And my friend, what I argue is that we just aren't, we haven't let the process play itself out enough. We're not trying enough different ways of building coalition. We're too ready to sort of fire some shots and maybe take some votes and call it a day and then let the President sort things out when we haven't passed any laws. And so that's why we get sort of the, this strange adventure of, of the dreamers, right? These people who were brought to the United States as, as young people and you know, have this sort of quasi regularized status that's completely an invention of Democratic presidents that's been fiercely contested all along by Republican politicians. That's not a good place for those folks to be in. I mean, it may well be better than nothing, but really we ought to be taking the need to do something about these issues and figuring out a way to build a compromise coalition on them. And we're just not. We haven't done the work, in my view.
- [37:44]
B
The final part of the book deals with the future of Congress. And just to sort of use your phrasing, where does Congress go from here? You paint a few different pictures, but what are your expectations for the near term?
- [38:00]
C
Yeah, so I think in some ways it seems like current trends just can't go on forever, in part because a lot of the members themselves are not happy with the way Congress operates today. Now that said, I've been thinking that for a few years at this point, and things keep going on more or less in the same vein. And so maybe they can go on for a while longer. And so my vision of sort of things just going on as they are right now and maybe getting a little bit worse year by year leads to a scenario that I call decrepitude, where we really take more and more for granted the idea that the executive branch is going to find ways of working around Congress and, and judiciary is going to accept those as legitimate. And unfortunately, that just leaves us with a system where we place even more overwhelming emphasis on these quadrennial presidential elections that are supposed to somehow decide everything. And my argument is that that's really bad for the country. Those elections can't bear that weight without huge strain to the fabric, the social fabric of the country. And I really fear for us if, if we keep on this current trajectory because, you know, we, I think an awful lot of people do have the sense that the country is kind of splitting apart, heading toward, toward really ugly times. And Congress ought to be a countervailing pressure instead of an accelerant and all that. But it certainly, if it doesn't, if it doesn't do anything very differently, it, it can just make things worse. The second scenario I have is called Rubber Stamp. And this idea is, well, if we're so unhappy with Congress's contributions, maybe we ought to make some ambitious constitutional reforms that, that pretty clearly formally subordinate it to the executive branch and, and just sort of say, okay, well, Congress is going to be a place where people chatter and have, have a chance to have their say, but it's not going to be a place for serious policy making. The grownups over in the executive branch are going to, are going to do that and they're going to be allowed to set the agenda more. And I think there's an awful lot of smart folks who, who want American politics to work better and who want to reform it, who think that basically what reform means is getting Congress to pipe down. And I think that's understandable, but totally misguided. I think that if we, if we do that, we will end up with a system that's, that's very susceptible to tyranny by the president. You know, that's maybe a dramatic way of putting it, but, but I think, I think that in our system at least, the, the sort of very idea of political freedom and, and an important influence for minorities finds, finds its outlet in Congress. And to the extent that we just minimize Congress and turn it into a shell of itself, we really are giving up on some important part of our tradition of Political freedom through representation. The last scenario is called revival, and I do hope that that's the one that we somehow manage to go down. It's not so easy to get there because we really need an awful lot of people to start acting differently when acting differently is hard. And sort of keeping on comfortable partisan lines is the path of least resistance for a lot of people today. So I sort of think that we need some shock to the system that causes people to believe that doing something, doing some kind of legislating is much more important than sticking to partisan loyalties. I'm not sure what that shock would be. In the book, I play out a scenario where we get an immigration crisis sort of 10 times worse than the one we have today. And maybe that would really shake things up, but maybe not. Maybe we just find the sort of our partisan enmities reinforced even more. Right. That's the crazy thing with COVID 19 was that it seemed like this huge shock to the system, and yet the system sort of assimilated it and people fell back to comfortable partisan lines very quickly. So I don't know what it will take. Maybe a war with Russia or China is the other thing that I thought about writing as a scenario. And it's sort of too awful to want to wish for anything like that, certainly. But I do sometimes have a sense that in order to get Congress going again, for it to be a place of fluid coalition building and, and all that, that, that we do need some kind of external shock. At the end of the book, you.
- [42:45]
B
You have something that I found very interesting and something that you don't normally see in these sorts of university press books, but you have an open letter to America's legislators. So I, you know, I, I, I think to, to end the interview, it might be interesting for listeners to hear or, you know, if there just so happens to be legislators listening to this interview right now, they've made it to the end. Congrats. You know, what, what is your plea to them? You know, how should they think about their role as representative of America in Congress?
- [43:16]
C
So the, the plea appeals to their sense of ambition. Right. Madison sees our separation of powers working thanks to ambition, counteracting ambition. And we have an awful lot of talented people in Congress today who, whose ambitions are frustrated, who feel like their jobs have been reduced to fundraising, plus showing up to vote how the leader tells them. And that's not a particularly glamorous job. And it's not even, I mean, it's not that important of a job in the end. So my My hope is that there are some ambitious folks out there who are ambitious not just in the sense of wanting to advance themselves, but in the sense of wanting to win glory for doing good things for their country. It's a totally respectable impulse. And that they, that they can think about what's happening to their institution and find some energy to reorient it on behalf of, on behalf of doing work for the American people. I think that's the, that's the key part of the plea is to say if you, if you go quietly as your institution becomes this hollowed out place, the American people really lose your, your concerns, your substantive concerns that brought you to want to become a legislator in the first place. Go, go unserved. And we really need you to step up and to think of yourself as a legislator and have that mean something more than just being a partisan warrior. And I realize that's, that's a tall order. I'm asking them to do something that's not easy. But that's the plea. That's the plea that if they want to read the book and think about how Congress can be a place that really does help the country hold together through difficult times, they need to be the engine for that. I do expect it's got to be member driven to some extent. I don't expect huge grassroots movement to come in and lobby for different internal organization of Congress. That's just not something that's going to be on people's radar. What is going to be on people's radar is pushing for policies that they need, that people feel like are really needed, and that the executive branch isn't serving all by itself. So I want people, I want legislators to channel those energies on substantive policy points and feel like going to work on behalf of those causes is more important than just pulling the lever the way the leader wants every time.
- [45:50]
B
No, I think that that's very well said. And, you know, hopefully, you know, it feels like we need, we need to change quickly because, you know, obviously, as the most recent speaker confirmation, as that dragged out for several days, it was, it was, you know, kind of a bit of an embarrassment.
- [46:07]
C
Well, I think that that fight was maybe, you know, part of the beginnings of change. I think it's totally healthy for factions within the Republican Party to say we wish that this chamber wasn't so dominated by the Speaker. So I actually took heart from a lot of what some of the dissidents were saying in that January 2023 speakership fight. But it remains to be seen whether they can actually transform the institution and whether they want to do the work of coalition building, which is really at the heart of what Congress is all about, or whether they have just rather sort of created the spectacle that won't really change anything.
- [46:50]
B
Yeah, we'll certainly see it. You know, it looks like, you know, Senator Sanders and Senator Hawley have found themselves as potential allies.
- [47:00]
C
Yeah. Strange Bedfellows is what politics is all about, or what it should be about. And that's my favorite part of politics. Yeah, that's my favorite. That's my.
- [47:09]
B
You know, when you see. When you see an unusual, you know, an unusual pairing, then I'm like, you know, there is. There's still hope.
- [47:16]
C
Hope yet.
- [47:17]
B
Well, Philip, thank you so much for being a guest on the New Books Network. The book is why Congress from Oxford University Press. I recommend people check it out. And, Philip, is there any other place for your writing that people can go and find you?
- [47:31]
C
Sure. I'm. I'm a reluctant tweeter. FilipWallach 1L in Philip, 2L's in Wallach. And you can find more of my work at the American Enterprise Institute's website.