First Branch Forecast Podcast

Daniel Schuman, Chris Nehls

Interviews with people with insights into how Congress really operates firstbranchforecast.substack.com

Episodes

  1. 6d ago

    Interview: Cerin Lindgrensavage and Christie Wentworth

    For this episode, I spoke with two experts in appropriations law who have worked in and out of government — Cerin Lindgrensavage of Protect Democracy and Christie Wentworth of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington — about White House attempts to appropriate funds as it sees fit, not as Congress has directed, and the legal and political means available for Congress and civil society to push back. Lindgrensavage is counsel at Protect Democracy and previously worked at the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division and for Senator Barbara Boxer. She also clerked at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. Wentworth is a senior policy counsel at CREW and previously served as an attorney at the Government Accountability Office and as counsel for the House Budget Committee. Chris Nehls: Hi, this is Chris Nehls with the American Governance Institute. I’m here with Cerin Lindgrensavage and of Protect Democracy and Christie Wentworth of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. We’ll do our best to put all of that on the title card of this podcast. We’re here to talk today about appropriations and appropriations law and how when Congress approves appropriations, how does the federal government spend it? And what’s been going on in this administration that’s made it kind of unusual. So, thanks for joining me today. Christie Wentworth: Thanks for having us. Cerin Lindgrensavage: Yeah, happy to be here. Nehls: We have 12 appropriations bills a year, theoretically, that Congress approves. Sometimes, it doesn’t get there and does a continuing resolution, but there’s still the money it gets out to the federal agencies to spend. Well, how does that work after these bills move from the president’s desk to the agencies. Wentworth: A great question to start with. I’m going to take us back a second and just emphasize at the top here, because Cerin and I are both very power of the purse friendly individuals in that Congress does have the power of the purse, which is why they are the ones that are in charge of actually figuring out how much money the federal government has to spend. So that’s based in the Constitution. And as you mentioned, Chris, that usually results in 12 different bills appropriating funds for the federal government, including all three branches. After those funds are appropriated, they go through a process called apportionment at OMB. This is a responsibility that Congress gave to the president back in the day because agencies were blowing through their appropriations. They would enter into contracts, they would promise to spend money, and then they’d say, well, Congress, you know, we already said we’re going to spend this stuff. I know that you only gave us $10 and we spent $100, but we’re obligated now, and you have to give us this money. Congress said to the president, do a better job managing these funds and gave the president the responsibility to say, okay, agencies, you’re going to get 25% of your funding in quarter one for salaries and expenses, and then you’ll get another 25% in quarter two and so on and so forth. So, OMB now has that responsibility pursuant to a delegation from the president and they can apportion funds by time. They can apportion funds by program and they can do it through a combination of those two things. The purpose of that is still to make sure that the agencies aren’t spending funds too quickly so that they have to go back to Congress and ask for a deficiency appropriation. So that is the general framework for apportionments. I will say when I worked at GAO, we spent two and a half days teaching appropriations law principles to folks at agencies, so doing this in 2 to 3 minutes is a challenge. But that’s the apportionment process. I’m going to briefly share some of the components that we see in appropriations acts that agencies have to look for when they’re actually spending the funds. And then, Cerin, I’ll kick it to you to talk a little bit about the Impoundment Control Act and how Congress can act to actually claw back some of that money if it agrees with the president that it should. In the appropriations acts, the three things that agencies are looking for are the purpose, time, and amount of the appropriation: So, what they can spend this on, how much they can spend and how long they have to spend it. And there have always been disagreements between Congress and the executive about what exactly falls into each of these buckets, especially with respect to purpose. But those are the three general things that you’re looking for and that the agencies have to comply with when they’re spending these funds. So Cerin, do you want to talk about the Impoundment Control Act? Lindgrensavage: Sure. One thing of interest to know about the apportionment process is that it has at some various points in history been abused. And that’s important because it’s the mechanism that OMB and past presidents have used essentially to rob Congress of its power of the purse to steal some of that power for the president, the White House, in this case, the Office of Management and Budget. If you went back and looked at the hearings in 1972 and three over the Nixon era impoundments, what you will find is actually page after page of accounts where they’ve used the apportionment process in some cases to actually affect delay to what they did at the time, called creating a reserve. And there was a provision in law that was a little bit squishy, a little bit of a choose your own adventure for the president and his budget officers to try and say, oh, well, we’re just creating a reserve for this sort of broad purpose. Nehls: So, what was Nixon actually trying to trying to do there? Lindgrensavage: What he was trying to do was actually say, hey, I don’t want to spend these funds. Congress passed the money, but I don’t want to. And he was trying to just essentially assert his power not to spend the funds. As you can imagine, Congress reacted poorly to this assertion of the executive authority. And the law that they passed was both a remaking of the budget process that really put foundationally in place the fiscal years and steps as we know them today, and also what we call the Impoundment Control Act. That passed in 1974 and essentially said, no, we’re, we’re erasing that provision that made you think that you could just hold on to money for whatever purpose you wish to. And now you have three options: you can defer; you can delay spending the money -- but then you have to tell Congress, and Congress has a chance to tell you not to through a resolution they can pass. You can propose a rescission, but that only goes into effect if Congress passes a law rescinding the appropriations that were previously passed in a law. And the third option is you can spend the money. Those are the three options contemplated by the Impoundment Control Act. Here are some things that are not contemplated in the Impoundment Control Act: unjustified delays for programmatic review -- the entire category of programmatic delay invented in the early ‘70s -- none of that is contemplated in the act. The act contemplates those three options: deferral, rescission, spending the money. It also left three different purposes that OMB can use to establish reserves, but they’re narrower. It’s to provide for contingencies to achieve savings or as specifically provided by law. So if you have a law that you can point to that says, okay, you can hold on this money for these purposes, that’s okay, but it has to be specific in the law. It really did ground and narrow OMB’s ability to screw around with money using the apportionment process or any other process because it doesn’t just bind OMB, it also binds folks at the agency level as well. Nehls: Well, we’ve had a couple of rescissions bills, this Congress and, and there have been some in the past. So how has that how has that worked generally since the passage of the Impoundment Control Act as a congressional tool? Lindgrensavage: I would say that your mileage may vary. There’s been some hiccups in the road. I think one of the things that’s happened more recently is that deferrals haven’t been reported in this century. We’re going on our 26th year of the administration not using the deferral provision. If you look at OMB management of funds, there are arguably a bunch of things that probably would or should qualify and be reported as a deferral, but I wouldn’t hold your breath on that happening anytime soon. One of the things that’s happened is but I think that entire third of the sort of statute of the scheme has been rendered inoperable in a really significant way. And for whatever reason, Congress and GAO haven’t come back at OMB or the administrations across Democratic or Republican administrations for not for not adhering to that part of the statute. And the other thing that went awry is that OMB has interpreted the rescissions provision in a way that at least the current OMB has said what gives them the authority to essentially cancel funds unilaterally. And Christie, do you want to walk through the mechanics of how that rescission gone awry can happen? Wentworth: Sure. In the law, it says that funds can be proposed for rescission, and it doesn’t provide a specific time frame for which those funds can be proposed for rescission. What that means is, we talked earlier about how funds have certain time limitations. And some funds might expire at the end of the fiscal year. Some funds might be available for multiple years and some funds might be available forever. They might be no-year funds. For those funds that expire at the end of the fiscal year, you have this problem where under the Impoundment Control Act, while a rescission proposal is pending, the president is authorized to withhold those funds. You can see the practical reason for this, right? If the

  2. Jul 23

    Interview: James Wallner

    Daniel interviewed the Foundation for American Innovation fellow James Wallner about how Senate Republicans appoint members to committees. The process is governed by Rule 24 of the Senate standing rules and Rule 5 of the Republican Conference rules, with appointments made through a "Committee on Committees" led by the Republican leader. The discussion covered how committee assignments work at the start of each Congress. They also examined a specific example involving Lindsey Graham's absence from the Budget Committee and Appropriations Committee, where his sister needed to be appointed to replace him. They also discussed how Democrats could potentially use procedural tactics to gain control of committees like Appropriations during this transition period. James noted that while procedural hardball is possible, party leaders typically resist such actions because they prioritize party unity and election strategy over immediate legislative action. The transcript below has been edited for length and clarity Daniel Schuman: I’m here today with James Wallner, and we’re going to talk about how Senate Republicans appoint members of committees. James, thank you for joining me. How do Senate Republicans appoint people to their committees? James Wallner: So there’s a magical, storied mountain, at the top of which are a group of people in robes. They got some chicken bones and there’s a smoldering cauldron. And they just do some chants. And then the smoke rises. And then it’s this person shall be on the committee. No, it’s not far off of that, to be honest with you. It is a very interesting process and it is a very insular and closed process. It’s hard to get a peek into. Right. There’s two kinds of governing authorities here. One is the standing rules of the Senate. Rule 24 governs the appointment of committees. The way this works is that the Senate shall approve a resolution, and that resolution will name the chairman of each committee or a committee, and it will also include the members on that committee. So if we work backwards, you have a committee and it’s got a chairman and members. The way they get there is that the Senate takes action on the Senate floor. They approve a resolution that says, like the Energy Committee. And at the top there’s a chairman, and then there’s the Republican and Democratic members of the Energy Committee underneath that. And once the Senate approves that, those members are now on that committee. The Democratic and Republican parties have different internal party rules that govern that process, and the Republican rules are written down. You can find them online. And rule five of the Senate Republican Conference really spells out that appointment process, where the party, in essence, is making a recommendation to the full Senate, saying, these are the members that we want on these committees. Schuman: The Senate, unlike the House, considers itself a continuing body. So its committees continue on from Congress to Congress. So for the Senate, you have the committee, and then you’re just moving people around from chair to ranking member or moving people on the committee and off the committee. Is that right? Is that what the organizing resolution does? Wallner: Yeah, more or less. Look, the Senate is a continuing body in the sense that only one third of its members are up for election at any given time. Now, in practice, committees in the organizing resolution are going to be populated at the beginning of each Congress. But the reality of the situation is, if you’re on a committee, you’re going to keep that committee for the most part. And the parties have their own rules. They don’t have to follow the seniority process. But for the most part, once you get a committee assignment, not always and not on every committee, but once you get a committee assignment, that’s your committee moving forward. The Republican conference rules spell this out. Rule five says, except as otherwise provided by this rule, once selected and confirmed, no member of any committee shall be deprived of his assignment or his rank on a committee, except by the conference. It just makes a lot of sense that they, in essence, retain their committee seats. Schuman: Let’s talk about what happens at the change of the Congress. How does the Senate put people onto these committees? What needs to be done specifically to make that happen or to move people around if they’re changing committees? The example that I want to get to is Senator Graham passed on July 12th, and his sister was sworn in on the 14th. He was the chair of the Budget Committee. He was a member of other committees, including the Appropriations Committee. So both of those committees now have vacancies. And she’s a new senator, but she doesn’t have any committee assignments. And this has implications for the way the Senate operates. Let’s just start with it’s the start of a new Congress. Wallner: This gets back to how do you populate those committee rosters on either side in either party before you make that recommendation to the full Senate? For all intents and purposes, the Senate is going to approve that, although you can filibuster the resolution. One of my favorite white whales was to filibuster the organizing resolution that populates the committees, but then also divide it. And this is getting farther afield. But you can divide that resolution by that. You can say you can force votes on each individual member, if you want, of each committee, and you can also amend it. Right. And so you can move people around, you can do all kinds of stuff you could do. But working back from that, the Republican conference has what they call, and this is all spelled out in rule five of the conference rules, the process they use to populate their committees or recommend to the full Senate. The Republicans that want to serve on those committees are governed by what they call a committee on committees. And the Committee on Committees has a chairman. The Committee on Committees is, for all intents and purposes, one person working with the Secretary for in this case, the majority, the top kind of floor staffer for the Republican Party. And they basically, within the confines of the conference rules, are going to make these lists, and they’re going to solicit input from the rank and file members. Conference rules say you can retain certain committees over others. They’re going to work within that. Members will come and say, hey, I really want this spot or that spot. And going by seniority, they’ll work through the conference and basically putting people on these different committees. The other thing that makes this a little bit more complicated is that you have what they call committees, and then you’ve got B committees, right? And so the Republicans many years ago decided, I think it started the in 108th Congress maybe, but they said that every Republican senator is going to be given A committee slots in order of seniority. And so your A committees are like your Energy or your Environmental and Public Works committees, Appropriations, like all of those committees. And each committee is going to be given two slots on two different committees in order of seniority, working down the list. Remember, you retain your committee seat, so you’re really just taking the vacancies that happen. And then they’re allowed to retain one B committee. What’s interesting here is that the Republican Party has empowered the Republican leader to basically name half the A committee spots in all of the B committee spots without going through the order of seniority. And so you have this kind of convoluted process. So in this case, Lindsey Graham’s committees, they’re going to the A committee slots are going to be filled by the leader because there’s only one. Right. If you had two the leader would offer one fill one. And then the kind of committee on committee would work through the seniority process to fill the other one. But in this case, that’s not happening. So it’s just the leader. And then for the budget committee, which is a B committee, the leader is going to make that appointment as well. Schuman: You said they follow seniority, but when I was looking at the Republican conference rules, it says that you don’t always have to follow seniority, that there have been instances, I think with foreign, foreign, I can’t remember if it’s foreign relations with foreign affairs, but it was with Lugar became chair of that committee instead of Helms. So they don’t have to do the appointments necessarily by seniority. Wallner: But that’s regarding the top spot, right? Yeah. And that’s a slightly different process, right. So once you populate a committee, those committee members, according to the conference rules are going to meet and they’re going to select one of them to be the chairman. And the conference rules explicitly say that they don’t have to be governed by seniority. And conference rules also say, and I found it here, effective in the 108th Congress, all Republican Conference members shall be offered two A committee slots in order of seniority. There’s something similar with Warner as well. ‘I think the most recent is when Jim DeMint was still serving in the Senate. He wanted a slot on the Finance Committee. And McConnell at the time, who’s not best buds with DeMint. They don’t always get along. And there was a vacancy on the Finance Committee, but there was only one. And so McConnell got to name the Republican senator to sit on the Finance Committee. Jim DeMint made it very clear and known that he wanted that spot. And the conservative movement was really agitating for DeMint to get that spot. It put McConnell in an awkward position, because he’s trying to show people that he is a conservative and he doesn’t hate conservatives. But now he’s got to name his nemesis to this committee. Right. Because he

    Interview: James Wallner

  3. Jun 18

    Interview: U.S. Capitol Police Chief Michael Sullivan

    Daniel Schuman: June 30th marks one year on the job. How are things going? Chief Michael Sullivan: Terrific. This is an incredible organization with an incredible mission, much different than other jobs that I’ve had in major municipal cities. Really focusing on what we do here, which is protecting members, protecting this place, and protecting the legislative process. And that protective mission-- while policing is certainly part of that mission -- security and the protection piece is something that is much stronger than any other place. I would say it’s flip-flopped. I had protective missions in other places; however, it was a small piece of my portfolio. I would argue that protection piece of this place and the members is a much larger piece of the portfolio here at the United States Capitol Police. Schuman: The legislative branch has tremendous security needs and of course you can’t do everything, you can’t focus on everything. Is there something that you’re focusing on right now? Sullivan: There’s a lot of things that I’m focusing on right now. I met with a lot of folks over the last year right after my entry, hearing members’ concerns about safety, the concerning emails, phone calls, and threats that were coming to them directly. And, I can tell you there was deep concern across the entire membership that I talked to directly and had those one-on-ones on how we’re handling those. Being able to have those conversations really made me understand that difference in that policing mission versus what I would call a protection or security mission. It was helpful in instructing some of the areas I needed to make sure that I assessed and focused and did the best we can with the resources that we currently have. That’s been part of what I’ve looked at. I’ve also looked at, making sure -- because this agency made incredible strides since January 6th -- making sure that we have systems in place that embed that progress, that we don’t backslide. We have to make sure that we are always prepared, and a day like that, if it ever comes, that we’re there to meet that day and meet that purpose. I truly believe that we are today, but we’re going to kick the tires and if we’re failing in any way, we’re going to fix it. Schuman: Can I just stay on this for a second? In prior years, with some of your predecessors, there were questions around are you focusing on training, because training was a big issue, particularly [on January 6th] Are you focusing on communications? Are you focusing on particular aspects of member security? There’s a million things that someone in your role, of course, needs to be paying attention to, and you had spoken about the security mission. You gave us a good top level, but is there a particular thing that you’re trying right now to address? Sullivan: I can tell you as the chief of a major organization, I have to focus on all those things at once. Training is a huge issue. Making sure that we have leadership training, embedded in this organization. We have people up in Boston right now at the Senior Management Institute, which is an executive leadership school. I’ll be up there speaking to them and that entire cohort this Friday. That’s incredibly important to me. We’re investing in that. This is a very busy time of year, but we found time to send our senior folks there to get that training. Then we look at how do we embed the training, because it’s different here, right? Every place else I’ve been there’s been a state post that requires and mandates so much training. We don’t have that here, and making sure that we get our folks the training that they need, whether it’s around their critical needs like just something as simple as... and it’s not simple, but screening at the doors. We can’t just ask people to do that without giving them the training. We focused on improving policy, improving training. One of the things that I’ve learned over my time ... When I came up in this profession, you’d make a policy change, sometimes a significant policy change, and it would come across to you at roll call, you would sign for it, and after you signed for it, you were responsible for it. That was the impetus of your training of this many times a very important policy. We need to train our folks and if we make a significant consequential policy change, it needs to be followed up with training. What that training looks like can be many different things depending on what the policy changes are. But policy changes, are great, but they’re only great if they’re actually embedded in the culture, followed up on, and then our people are trained to be able to be held accountable to them. Chris Nehls: I want to go back to … you mentioned the threats that members have been experiencing, staff have been experiencing. We’ve seen the reporting and the information out from the department is there’s 15,000, almost 15,000 of these threats last year. This is up, almost double from just five, six years ago; but it’s hard for us to understand what that all means in terms of context. First, how do you define a threat? Sullivan: When we talk about that 15,000-number, we talk about threat cases. Okay. These are concerning cases. Some of them have a criminal nexus. Some of them, I would say the majority of them, do not -- it’s First Amendment protected speech. But I can tell you, as the executive over this organization, if we did not capture something that is a concerning statement and causes a member’s offices concern, and then that person comes up on the radar again, we don’t see that escalation, that would be a bad thing. So, it’s incredibly important for us to make sure that we do our due diligence on each of these concerning statements, threats that are risen to us, because if an office is reaching out to us and has concerns about it, we should have concerns about it. When I talk about that 15,000, those are 15,000 cases that are threats agents are working and have to manage. Certainly, First Amendment protected activity, that investigation is much different than a full-blown threat investigation where we don’t have somebody identified, where we have to go out and get legal service to be able to identify that person and then we have to engage with the US attorney, whether it’s here locally or somewhere out in the United States, to be able to facilitate a prosecution. As you talk about these cases, we all want to look at prosecution as the bottom line. That’s a tool that we have in the tool belt. It’s certainly something that we want to use when it’s appropriate, but our mission is to keep these members safe. Sometimes keeping members safe means getting them engaged with family that they’re not engaged with right now because of some issue, mental health, so all of a sudden, this person that has been a consistent issue because of some other challenges that they have in their life. Maybe the prosecution isn’t necessarily the right way to go. Many times, if we can do those interventions, we solved a problem and we kept a member safe in the long run, maybe safer than prosecution. With that said, we don’t hesitate to prosecute. We can’t stand for people to make, blatant, outright threats, to our members and to this place and to the people that work here. We’re focused on that and focused on keeping people safe. Nehls: Could you give us a little bit of a sense of how you filter through... It seems like such an enormous amount of work that goes into investigating, as you said, investigating 15,000. How do you manage or filter through what sounds like it might be somebody just calling up randomly who’s mad and yelling at an intern versus things that go higher in a threat matrix? Can you just talk through how the department, works that through? Sullivan: We stood up a protective intelligence operations center. It’s an operation center, so it manages all those operations that are outside the NCR [National Capitol Region] that are going on with members, making sure that we’re focused on and understanding what that looks like. In addition to doing that, the concern is with 15,000 cases coming in 18 different places, we needed one central collection point. So that one central collection point is our Protective Intelligence Operation Centers. It allows us to triage and then assign the cases. It makes sure that they all have that one entry point so we don’t miss something, which is always the fear that you have, that you miss that one string that you could have pulled. There are assessments that go on during that process. There has to be communication with the offices because if you’ve given this to us, the follow-up that we have to have -- which has been one of the most challenging, just to be quite frank, one of the most challenging pieces that we’ve had because of the sheer volume -- making sure that we get back and keep members’ offices or other victims apprised of where we are, what we’ve been able to find, whether we’re waiting on maybe potentially legal process or a conversation of this doesn’t meet the level for a criminal prosecution: This is First Amendment protected activity. This is why sometimes that doesn’t feel good. I’ve had threats personally against me that didn’t rise to the level of something, but threatened my family. It doesn’t feel good, and I can tell you that it doesn’t feel good to members, but being able to have those discussions are incredibly important. We have talented and very skilled investigative agents look at this, but we also have PhD-level doctors that are skilled and experts in this that take a look to understand this person’s entire picture, to help us look for different mitigation techniques. So being able to filter it all to one place. This is difficult. While I’m not going to share the number of threat officers I have, I’ve expanded that. It’s expanded significa

  4. Jun 11

    Interview: Soren Dayton and James Wallner

    Daniel and I recorded this conversation with Soren Dayton, the Director of American Governance at the Foundation for American Innovation, and James Wallner, non-resident fellow at FAI, about their paper “Rebuilding Congress from Within, How Factions Facilitate Deliberation and Lawmaking.” It posits a view we share that too much of what goes on in Congress now is directed by leadership, to the detriment of the deliberation and negotiation between members that the institution is designed for. Factions, they argue, are one of the few tools currently available to rank-and-file members to restore collective decision-making and fix Congress. We had a wide-ranging conversation about the history of factions, how they operate, and why members of Congress, the philanthropic community, and the public should embrace energetic debate rather than the false goal of finding bipartisan, politically moderate policy solutions. Daniel Schuman: We are here today with Soren Dayton and James Wallner with the Foundation for American Innovation. And we’re here to talk about their new paper, Rebuilding Congress from Within How Factions Facilitate Deliberation and Lawmaking. Thank you both for joining us. James Wallner: Thanks for having us. And can I just say off the top real quick? I really wanted to name it something different. I mean, Soren was like, let’s just go with that. It’s a good name. I was thinking more like, you know, Kong versus Godzilla, you know, rise of the factions or something, spicy to get people in. But, you know, we went with Soren’s title. Schuman: That’s fair. I mean, you could have done the facts on factions, but that would also be kind of a pedestrian approach. Wallner: Or factions of life. Schuman: Oh yeah. You take the good, you take the bad, that kind of thing. Wallner: There’s so many options. Good thing we’re going to have a never ending series of factions papers after this just for the titles. Schuman: Your paper argues that Congress is dysfunctional because the members are not organized to deliberate and legislate in the present environment. James? What do you mean by that? Wallner: Well, I want to take a step back. I think it’s important to maintain a clear focus on agency in this, as you and I have talked about in all of our writings and conversations around town and over the years. It’s important to maintain focus on agency when we say Congress isn’t organized. I think the way to rephrase that, if I’m teaching one of my writing classes and colleges, where it’s active voice, active voice, active voice. And it is that lawmakers are not organizing themselves to facilitate their own participation in the process and to enhance their own ability to deliberate and to impact outcomes. There’s lots of different ways that Congress can organize themselves, but one way is through these things called factions congressional caucuses, intraparty caucuses -- people call them different things -- but they’re in essence, factions, sub-party kind of units. Sometimes they can be cross-party -- not so much in this day and age. We zero in on these in particular, because if you are an opponent of the status quo – and most of the reform throughout Congress’s history has been driven by opponents of the status quo, the outliers, if you will – you’re not going to be able to rely on existing kinds of legislative organization, right? So, congressional committees and the political in the party structure in the House and Senate, because those are set up by winners of the status quo, they’re set up by the people who are the reason why the status quo is the status quo, and so they’re going to be less inclined to kind of rock the boat. They’re not very friendly to the skunks at the garden party or the ants at the picnic. Factions really become important in that scenario. And then when you look at Congress today and the dysfunction that we see in Congress today, and the bipartisan frustration from the far left to the far right, that all seem to be echoing the same sentiment. It’s just astonishing to me that they are not using this tool to the degree that it has been used in the past and that it could be used to enhance their own stated goals. Schuman: So would it be fair to say that Congress is organized, but it’s organized by leadership and it’s not organized by the members? Or is that too much of an overstatement? Wallner: I wrote a piece a long time ago. There was an open letter in the Washington Post and it was by all these former members and it was like, Congress is broken, the Senate is broken. And then they went through and they’re like, it’s not leadership’s fault. Then they’re like, it’s not the committee’s fault. They’re like, it’s not the rank and file fault. I’m like, well, whose fault is it? Is it some guy from Scooby Doo? Earl down the street? You know, he pulls off his mask or some invisible ghost? No, the Senate is dysfunctional, the House is dysfunctional because the members of the House and Senate make it dysfunctional. They make it dysfunctional when they defer to their leaders, when they empower their leaders to run things certain ways. They make it dysfunctional when they continue to acquiesce in that environment. Look, I’m not pretending like there’s not a cost to this, a social cost or political cost, etc.. Of course there is. But I think it’s important to keep really focused on the main point, which is that the members themselves are the ones who are in charge, and they’re the ones who are responsible for the House and the Senate operating the way the House and Senate operate. And they have many, many tools at their disposal to change things. If they don’t like how they are operating or try to change things, they are not victims. They talk about themselves in the third person all the time. If you think about how Congress talks like the bill was passed, I’m like, no, you passed it or your colleagues passed it over your objections. The bill wasn’t passed when we just woke up. Oh my God, did you see that the bill was passed? No, you did this. And so I think it’s important to keep that focus, laser focus on that. This paper, I think, gets into one of those key tools that I think is a kind of a foundational tool. And Soren, I know, shares this thought that allows them to facilitate their own organization, their own cooperation, and then use other tools at their disposal much more effectively. Schuman: Perfect. So let me pick up on that and turn to Soren. You guys are talking about factions. Are there examples of factions in Congress now? What do they look like? What and what do you mean by faction? Soren Dayton: So I think in the House there’s two things. There’s two caucuses that look something like what we have thought of historically as a faction. They are the Freedom Caucus and the Progressive Caucus. The Republican study committee is almost just an information machine. They’re not actually a coordination machine. To go back to the Progressive Caucus and the Freedom Caucus, they both have things like rules about how they should vote together. They have membership requirements. They have regular meetings where it is expected of the members that they will coordinate on activities. And, I think it’s very helpful to read the books of someone like Ruth Bloch Rubin, who goes into a key element of successful factions is that internal rule making process, that internal coordination process that binds people, that requires them to act in certain ways. There are other things, like I think the New Dems and the Republican Study Committee are these huge monstrosities that are essentially a branding vehicle in some cases, or the Republican Study Committee, if you’re a Republican member or a Republican staffer, you want to be in the study committee because it is the only source of information other than leadership. And this is history James knows better than me: the Freedom Caucus got frustrated with the status quo the RSC had been and broke off to be not just the right wing in a sort of substantive policy version, but also more adversarial to leadership and more revolutionary on process. And in some ways, the Progressive Caucus I think is less adversarial with leadership than the Freedom Caucus through a variety of ways, partially. It’s hard to do when it’s that big, and so many of its members are committee chairs and things like that. But at times you’ve seen the Squad be a little Freedom Caucus-like in its sort of adversarialness to leadership, but it’s not organized. I think you have a slightly different set of entities in the caucus in the Democratic Party: the Black Caucus, the Hispanic Caucus and the APIA -- I’m probably getting the letters wrong -- caucus. There’s affiliated C3s and C4s. There’s staff pipelines, but those are actually really concrete problems they have. But so going back to the Progressive Caucus and the Freedom Caucus for a second, there is a sense of shared subjectivity that I don’t see in the bigger ones, right. These are people that have a certain ideological location within the party, and they have a theory of the need to change the party in a certain way. And I think most of the other things that are factions or that purport to be factions are just sort of people. They’re in a space not with the theory of change about how the parties should change in their direction, or they should leverage their power within the parties, even though they sometimes do leverage their power. Schuman: Can I push you on that just a touch? Dayton: Yeah, absolutely. That’s what we’re here for. Schuman: looking at the affinity caucuses, like the CBC: the CBC, from where I sit, except on a handful of issues, does not necessarily have a policy agenda that it shares, but it does have a procedural agenda that the members share about how the committees are going to function. It’s going to be more ba

  5. Jun 3

    Rep. Brian Baird

    This transcript has been lightly edited for readability. Daniel Schuman: So, we’re here today with Brian Baird, former member of Congress from 1999 to 2011, and as far as I know, the only clinical psychologist to serve in Congress in modern times. Rep. Brian Baird: Well, actually, Ted Strickland served as well. He was a psychologist as well, but think he had a slightly different degree. Schuman: We’re focusing on member security and the way that members relate to each other. There have been a number of mass attacks on members of Congress in the last handful of years. There was the attack recently at the Hilton Hotel, where, of course, President Trump and his Cabinet were -- but there were also journalists in attendance and many members of Congress. And while the executive branch officials were sort of whisked away, many members of Congress were sort of left to fend for themselves in light of an uncertain environment. And of course, we had the January 6th attack just a handful of years ago, where, again, members of Congress were the subject of a mass attack that presumably could leave significantly different attitudes towards their colleagues or how they felt about the institution. And I’m hoping that you could talk a little bit about how members of Congress view their own safety and how these repeated attacks may have changed the way that members, view and relate to one another. Baird: I’m really glad to have a chance to talk about this. I think it’s a hugely important topic that, I think is worth doing. First of all, is just talk about the security situation. And, sadly, there’s grim news on that front, and every member of Congress needs to understand this, as do their spouses, and families. And it’s not pretty: If someone really wants to kill a member of Congress, it’s not hard to do so. All the security measures that have been proposed -- let’s get more Capitol Police on the Capitol grounds, maybe an individual guard when you’re about your official duties. They may make some difference. Certainly, we need to secure the Capitol and the Congressional Office Buildings. But when you’re going about your daily life as a member of Congress, and as a human being, set aside the member of Congress, you still have to go grocery shopping. You still have to come in and out of your house. If you’re doing, parades or town halls or things like that, you’re in the public, and if a person really wants to hunt you down, they can do it. I don’t say that to be alarmist. But the question is then how do we deal with that? Even just the walk to a vote, if somebody’s hanging out outside the Capitol Grounds and they’re not in that narrow perimeter where you’ve got the magnetometers, just walking up the steps somebody can approach you and shoot you. My experience talking to members of Congress, there is a paradoxical, logical inconsistency. On the one hand, everybody talks about how we have to be more secure, but then they don’t necessarily take the individual precautions or the institutional precautions to deal with that. As you know, one of the things that I firmly believe is we need to take measures to ensure the continuity of representation of members of Congress. The first thing we need to do, not for our individual sakes initially, but for the sake of the representative democracy, is provide mechanisms by which you can replace House members if they die through natural causes, accidents, or assassinations. We’ve done nothing to deal with that since September 11th, which is now almost 25 years ago, and the problems remain the same. Why do I start with that? Because it’s one thing to say somebody just doesn’t like me as a person or as a representative and they want to kill me. That’s a challenge and it’s unpleasant. But it’s another thing to say, “If I kill enough of these guys, I could change the balance of power in the House or Senate.” As I’ve said before, right now you could fit more bullets into the magazine of a single semi-automatic pistol than it would take to change the balance of power in both the House and the Senate. In one pistol, it’d be so easy to do. The first thing I would do is assure representation and secondly, I would reduce the incentive, the political incentive for assassination. If there were a way to replace members of Congress with like-minded temporary replacements who could fill the role until a special election occurred, then you could kill 30 of us and they would be replaced promptly by people who probably vote about the same way, and there’s no political gain, no chaos, no disruption, no breakage of representation. So that’s the first point. The second point though is, okay, if you understand that, why are people not acting? And I think there’s this kind of unconscious, if you will, sense that on the one hand I’m cavalier about it -- “Well, that could happen” -- and then on the other hand, that absolves me from taking responsible measures to correct the situation. You still have to do your job, and your staff have to do their job, and your families have to live with the unpleasantness that you could be harmed or they could be harmed even worse. But that doesn’t mean you do nothing. So, step one is take care of the institutional continuity and then remove the political incentive for harming. Step two then is what are the practical measures that you can take to protect yourself and your family and your staff and the constituents? Really we began to see a dramatic turnaround in threats to members, just the general attitude, back in the early rise of the Tea Party and in the days of the assault weapons ban votes and some other controversies, and Obamacare. We went from having town halls -- I had, by the way, more than 350 town halls when I was in office, I think more than almost anybody I know, and they were usually very informal affairs. We’d meet at a fire station in a rural town or at a library or a high school auditorium or something. Anybody’d show up. There were no magnetometers. There were no crazy crowds. People respected one another. Yes, they sometimes criticized me. It’s their right. I have to honor that right, but there were not massive crowds of people pushing one another to try to get in. Back in that era, believe it or not, there were actually websites created dedicated to telling people how to disrupt town halls. You could log online and search that, and a website would come up that would say, “Get there early. Try to occupy all the spaces. Scatter your supporters around the room. If the member tries to speak, interrupt them. Shout them down. Don’t let there be a rational conversation. Call them liar. Insult...” These were strategic publicized mechanisms for creating a dangerous and threatening environment and disrupting legitimate and essential dialogue between members of Congress and their constituents. It’s only gotten worse. To give you a sense of how significant it was at the time, during the Obamacare, debates and public discussion, the crowds were so large, we actually held one town hall in an outdoor rock amphitheater and we had 3,500 people in attendance. It was totally different, and there were some pretty hostile folks there. So one of the things that has happened now is members of Congress are getting oftentimes plainclothes police officers at their town halls, and they’re getting more security. We actually had town halls in my era of Obamacare where ambulances were parked at the back of the stage in case I got shot. That’s a true story. So, we have to take those kinds of precautions. But somewhere along the line, and this is step three, we’ve got to restore the civility of dialogue and have members of Congress, and the President of the United States and his appointees or designees, stop demonizing people on the other side and stop endorsing hatred. When you have a president of the United States, as we have in the case of Trump, essentially, endorsing people being bullied or beaten up from the podium, when he’s saying things like that, that creates that environment. There’s also a potential hypocrisy here and duplicity that people can say, “Well, if you criticize the president for making those remarks, then you yourself are somehow inciting violence against the president,” that’s duplicitous. I mean, the fact is if you have people who are knowingly and willfully inciting violence through their rhetoric, and condoning violence and you point that out, you are not equal in culpability. So, the first step is to acknowledge the threat, try to reduce the threat through safety mechanisms. By the way, there’s a whole list of things members of Congress can and should do to secure their offices, to make sure that they know who’s coming in, when they’re coming in, that there is an exit strategy. Every member of Congress should do a safety audit with themselves, their staff, and their families. There should be code words that are used if we need to evacuate. There should be designated routes for evacuation. There should be precautions for your family members to take if they see anything coming. There should be ways in which you can contact them if there’s an emergency, et cetera. And every member of Congress should make sure their local law enforcement, at all levels, sheriff, police, state patrol, they all know where the member of Congress lives. They should all have a photo of the member of Congress. I hate to say it, but it’s true, especially members of Congress of color, because there may be a default assumption that the members of Congress are going to be white, or if somebody’s not white, they’re not a member of Congress. They need to really say, “this is who I am. This is what my family looks like. Here’s where we live. If you get a call from 417 North Rogers Street, by God, get there fast. And when you get there, this is what the good guys look like.” There s

    Rep. Brian Baird

  6. Jan 16

    Interview: Comptroller General Gene Dodaro

    Interview: Comptroller General Gene Dodaro Get full access to First Branch Forecast at firstbranchforecast.substack.com/subscribe

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