Understanding Congress (AEI Podcasts)

“How Congress tricks Americans” — that is the topic of this episode.

My guest is Prof. David Schoenbrod the author of the book, DC Confidential: Inside the Five Tricks of Washington. David is a Trustee Professor at New York Law School, where he teaches and studies environmental law, regulation, and other heady subjects. He also is a senior fellow at the Niskanen Center.

The subject of this episode is, “What are the goals of congressional budgeting?”

My guest is Paul Winfree. He is a distinguished fellow in economic policy and public leadership at the Heritage Foundation. Importantly for today’s discussion, Paul has a great deal of knowledge about congressional budgeting. He has had stints both in the White House and in the Senate, where he worked on budgeting firsthand. Paul also is the author of the book The History (and Future) of the Budget Process in the United States: Budget by Fire (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). So I’m very excited to be here with Paul Winfree.

Kevin Kosar:

Welcome to Understanding Congress, a podcast about the first branch of government. Congress is a notoriously complex institution, and few Americans think well of it, but Congress is essential to our republic. It’s a place where our pluralistic society is supposed to work out its differences and come to agreement about what our laws should be. And that is why we are here: to discuss our national legislature and to think about ways to upgrade it so it can better serve our nation.

I’m your host, Kevin Kosar, and I’m a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank in Washington, DC.

Paul, welcome to the podcast.

Paul Winfree:

Thanks so much, Kevin. Really happy to be speaking with you today.

Kevin Kosar:

My sense is that if we asked Americans, “What are the goals of budget policy?” they likely would say something along the lines of, “It involves the government figuring out what to spend money on—like defense, for example—and how to pay for this spending. Budget balance is the goal of budgeting.” While that's true, what your fine book shows is that our government has had a variety of goals for budgeting over the past two centuries, correct?

Paul Winfree:

That's exactly right. One of the reasons why I wrote this book in the first place was that there's this narrative amongst budget experts in Washington, DC, these days that the budget process is broken. What I wanted to do is start to unwind that and ask both, "Well, why is the budget process broken?” but also, “How did we get to where we are today?" It might be my own bias on how I approach problems, but one of the things that helps me understand current mechanisms is also understanding how we got to those current mechanisms, rather than approaching the current problem sets as if they happened exogenously and were not predetermined by other things that have happened throughout our history.

So, what I do in this book is go back all the way to the very beginning and start with colonial America, and then walk us up to today. What you find throughout our history, in looking at both budget policy but also the formation of economic policy more broadly, is that there were lots of different goals, from debt eradication, to sending signals to European debt markets that we were a viable nation that they should take seriously, to macroeconomic management. The goals today are in some ways different than the goals 250 years ago, but in other ways similar. I think we'll probably talk about that a little bit in the next half hour.

Kevin Kosar:

All right. Well, let's start at the very beginning, which, as a wise person once sang, is a very good place to start. When the founders bargained out the U.S. Constitution, they had objectives for budgeting, didn't they?

Paul Winfree:

That's right. The founding generation was very practical in a sense, and they had to be. They were involved at the beginning of a new country, and like many founders of companies today, they didn't have a lot of time to prove

The topic of this episode is “Why is Congress struggling to manage the nation’s finances?”

My guest is Representative David Schweikert of Arizona. He was first elected to Congress in 2011. Prior to that, he was a businessman, served in Arizona’s state legislature, and as Maricopa County Treasurer.

He is a Republican and holds a seat on the Ways and Means Committee, which writes tax policy. David also is the Vice Chairman of the bicameral Joint Economic Committee (JEC) and co-chairs both the Blockchain and Telehealth caucuses. He is passionate about economics and finance, which makes him an excellent person to ask, “Why is Congress struggling to manage the nation’s finances?”

Kevin Kosar:

Welcome to Understanding Congress, a podcast about the first branch of government. Congress is a notoriously complex institution, and few Americans think well of it. But Congress is essential to our republic. It's a place where our pluralistic society is supposed to work out its differences and come to agreement about what our laws should be.

And that is why we are here: to discuss our national legislature and to think about ways to upgrade it so it can better serve our nation. I'm your host, Kevin Kosar, and I'm a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank in Washington DC.

Dave, welcome to the podcast.

David Schweikert:

Kevin, thank you for having me.

Kevin Kosar:

What is the state of the federal budget? Do we even have one in 2024?

David Schweikert:

That is sort of the magic question. You have one, but it is not the one you want. In many ways, we are operating on the spending authorization from previous years, which has been renewed over and over. In other words, we are funding things that were supposed to have expired and not funding things that we are supposed to be getting ready to do.

It is the absurdity of a dysfunctional Congress. Priorities that go back to when Nancy Pelosi was speaker are still being funded today.

Kevin Kosar:

Why is that?

David Schweikert:

I actually have an overarching theory, and then we can get into the nitty-gritty of some of the chaos. There is a general lack of understanding of the level of financial stress that the US Congress and the entire country are under.

We play this bookkeeping game in the United States of, here is publicly borrowed money, and here is the money we are borrowing internally. On Friday (February 23, 2024), I believe we hit an all-time record of borrowing about $92,000 a second. Now you hit this sort of constant stress where every dime a member of Congress votes on now is on borrowed money: all defense and all non-defense discretionary.

If my math is correct, we are going to borrow almost a trillion dollars of Medicare into mandatory this year. So now, you come back and you get a member who is all excited, saying he is going to cut spending on HHS (Department of Health and Human Services), some other agency, or some part of discretionary, and he is going to save $500 million.

That is a lot of money. But when you are borrowing about $7.5 billion a day, many of the fights we are having are over a few hours’—if not just a couple days’—worth of borrowing. It is a way we can look like we are doing something because we are terrified of getting in front of a camera and telling the American public that 100% of borrowing for the next 30 years will be interest, healthcare costs,...

The topic of today's episode is “Reforming Congress for the 21st Century.” My guest is Representative Derek Kilmer, Congressman of the 6th district of Washington State. He was first elected to Congress in 2012. Before that, Mr. Kilmer served in his home State's legislature, worked for the Economic Development Board for Tacoma Pierce County, and was a consultant for McKinsey & Company. He received his bachelor's degree from Princeton University and earned a doctorate from the University of Oxford in England. Of particular relevance for our conversation today, Representative Kilmer has been the co-chair of the Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress for the past two years. In autumn 2020, this committee released 97 recommendations for updating the legislature, which you can see at modernizecongress.house.gov, and we'll hear more about those recommendations shortly.

The topic of this episode is, "What is the Congressional Review Act?"

My guest is Professor Bridget C. E. Dooling of George Washington University’s Regulatory Studies Center. She has a deep background in regulation. Previously, Bridget worked for the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the Office of Management and Budget. She also has clerked for an administrative law judge and worked in the U.S. Department of Justice.

Kevin Kosar:

Welcome to Understanding Congress, a podcast about the first branch of government. Congress is a notoriously complex institution, and few Americans think well of it, but Congress is essential to our republic. It's a place where our pluralistic society is supposed to work out its differences and come to agreement about what our laws should be. And that is why we are here: to discuss our national legislature and to think about ways to upgrade it so it can better serve our nation.

I'm your host, Kevin Kosar, and I'm a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank in Washington, DC.

It is to Professor Dooling we turn to learn about the Congressional Review Act, a tool for Congress to abolish regulations. Welcome to the show.

Bridget Dooling:

Thank you so much. I'm glad to be here.

Kevin Kosar:

Before we get into the Congressional Review Act, or CRA, let's start with something basic. What are regulations, and why do they matter?

Bridget Dooling:

Regs are great, and studying them is even better. Regulations are everywhere. They shape our world, but not necessarily in obvious ways. Knowing about regulations is like having a decoder ring for why certain things are the way they are. Like, why do you need prescriptions for some things, but you can help yourself to whatever supplements like vitamins that you want? It's because there's a regulatory line there. You can't see it when you're in the drugstore, but it absolutely affects the way you live.

Kevin Kosar:

Yeah. Regulations really, to a degree, I guess they're specifications of laws, particular applications. Is that a fair characterization?

Bridget Dooling:

Yep.

Kevin Kosar:

Now, if listeners want to see these things, these regulations, where should they go? Where can they find a list or collection of regulations?

Bridget Dooling:

Yeah, there's a few ways. One is that you can look at legislation, because that's where Congress tells the agencies what they're allowed or required to do. And then you can also look at what the agencies themselves produce. So for rules that are in the process of being made, there's a website called regulations.gov. That's a great place to start, so if you hear that a rulemaking is coming down the pike, that's a great place to go check its status and see if it's open for public comment, for example. So that's regulations.gov. And for rules that are already on the books, you'd want to look at something called the Code of Federal Regulations, which pulls all that regulatory text into one place so you can read it all in one spot.

Kevin Kosar:

Excellent. Now our listeners know. So let's turn to the Congressional Review Act. Congress enacted it in 1996. Democrats and Republicans alike voted for it. President Bill Clinton signed it into law. In most basic terms, what is...

The topic of this episode is, “What does the House Ways and Means Committee do? And how does it do it?”

The House Ways and Means Committee is the oldest committee of the United States Congress, first established in 1789 and became a standing committee in 1805. It has jurisdiction over raising revenue for the government to spend---taxes, tariffs, and the like. The term “Ways and Means” comes from English Parliamentary practice, wherein there was a committee with authority for finding the ways and means to pay for government actions and policies.

My guest is Tom Reed, a former member of the House of Representatives. He was in Congress from 2010 to 2022 and represented New York’s 29th and 23rd districts. Importantly for this podcast, Mr. Reed served on the House Ways and Means Committee and was deeply involved with its tax reform work.

Click here for the full transcript of the episode.

The topic of this episode is, “What is legislative effectiveness?”

We voters often say that we want our senators and members of Congress to do things, and preferably, the right things. We tend to dislike it when we see people on Capitol Hill who are all talk and no action. And in theory, we should vote out of office those lawmakers who are ineffective.

Let me have a caveat here. To be sure, there are some legislators who have turned noise making into a profitable brand, and they do use it to get reelected again and again. But in my 20 years of watching Capitol Hill, it's my estimate that they comprise a small percentage of the total membership. Most people in Congress are, to varying degrees, trying to get things done. So how, then, are we voters supposed to tell which of these legislators are effective and which are not?

To help me answer that question, I have with me Craig Volden. He is a professor of Public Policy and Politics at the University of Virginia. Dr. Volden is the author of many publications. Critically for this podcast's purpose, he is the founder and co-director of the Center for Effective Lawmaking, which produces scores of legislator effectiveness that you can find at: thelawmakers.org.

Kevin Kosar:

Welcome to Understanding Congress, a podcast about the first branch of government. Congress is a notoriously complex institution, and few Americans think well of it. But Congress is essential to our republic. It's a place where our pluralistic society is supposed to work out its differences and come to agreement about what our laws should be.

And that is why we are here: to discuss our national legislature and to think about ways to upgrade it so it can better serve our nation. I'm your host, Kevin Kosar, and I'm a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank in Washington DC.

Welcome to the program.

Craig Volden:

Thanks so much for having me. It is a delight to join you, Kevin.

Kevin Kosar:

So let's cut straight to the topic of the program. What is legislative effectiveness?

Craig Volden:

This is something that I have been thinking about for a long time working with Professor Alan Wiseman at Vanderbilt University. We wrote a book on the subject about a decade ago called Legislative Effectiveness in the United States Congress: The Lawmakers.

In that book, we defined legislative effectiveness as, “the proven ability to advance a member's agenda items through the legislative process and into law.” So the key elements of “legislative effectiveness”—proven ability, the agenda items of the member, advancing into law—are in there.

Kevin Kosar:

So as the title of the book indicates, it really does focus on the lawmaking function of an elected official.

Craig Volden:

That's right.

And here, Alan and I founded the Center for Effective Lawmaking. And we like to stay in our lane—it is not the “Center for Effective Oversight” or “Center for Effective Communication with Constituents.” The Center is about lawmaking: what it takes to move those bills into law in the Congress and increasingly now in the state legislatures.

Kevin Kosar:

So you mentioned there was a book about a decade ago. In my intro of you, I mentioned the website, thelawmakers.org.

When did that launch, and what was the...

The topic of this special episode of the Understanding Congress podcast is a recent book by Michael Johnson and Jerome Climer. The book is titled, Fixing Congress: Restoring Power to the People (Morgan James Publishing, 2024). Mr. Johnson and Mr. Climer each have spent more than four decades in Washington, DC and have had stints working inside Congress.

Today, I have with me one of the authors, Michael Johnson, who, I should add, is not to be confused with current House Speaker Mike Johnson.

He has a long resume—he has spent about a half century in or around government, with stints in the White House, Congress, and private sector. Mike also coauthored a book with Mark Strand, Surviving Inside Congress (Congressional Institute, Inc., 2017), which we previously discussed on this podcast.

The subject of this episode is, “What is a conference committee and why are they so rare today?”

My guest is Josh Ryan. He is an associate professor of political science at Utah State University. Josh studies Congress, the president, state legislatures and executives, as well as electoral institutions. Importantly for the purpose of this episode of Understanding Congress, Josh is the author of the book The Congressional Endgame: Interchamber Bargaining and Compromise (University of Chicago Press, 2018). This book examines conference committees and the other ways the two chambers of Congress come to an agreement—or not—on legislation.

Kevin Kosar:

Welcome to Understanding Congress, a podcast about the first branch of government. Congress is a notoriously complex institution, and few Americans think well of it, but Congress is essential to our republic. It’s a place where our pluralistic society is supposed to work out its differences and come to agreement about what our laws should be. And that is why we are here: to discuss our national legislature and to think about ways to upgrade it so it can better serve our nation.

I’m your host, Kevin Kosar, and I’m a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank in Washington, DC.

Josh, welcome to the podcast.

Josh Ryan:

Thanks so much for having me.

Kevin Kosar:

Let's start very simply, Schoolhouse Rock! style. What is a conference committee?

Josh Ryan:

We think of Congress as one branch of government, and Congress is actually two different institutions. The House and the Senate are separated from each other. They have almost no control over what the other chamber does. They have their own legislators, obviously. They have their own procedures, their own norms, their own committees, their own ways of doing things. And when they write a bill, even if the House and the Senate generally agree on the parameters of the bill and what's going to be in the bill, because of all these differences, they usually write two different versions of a bill. So we can think of the House as developing some version of a bill to address some policy problem. Typically the Senate takes up legislation after the House, but not always. Senators are their own people and they like to do their own thing, and they typically change the House bill in some way. So even though the House and the Senate are supposed to kind of be working together, if the bill is anything more interesting or substantive than some trivial piece of legislation, we're going to end up with two different versions of the bill.

The Constitution requires that Congress can only send one version of the bill to the president, so the House and the Senate have to have some way of resolving their differences, of agreeing on the exact same language for a given bill. Historically, one of the main ways that they've come to an agreement is by using a conference committee. This is a temporary committee, so it's different than the standing committees in Congress, like the Agriculture Committee or the Armed Services Committee, which exist and are more or less permanent. The conference committee is ad hoc. It's created just to address the differences between the House and the Senate on a particular bill.

The House and the Senate will each designate conferees. These are individuals usually who serve on the standing committees which dealt with the bill. And those people will go to a conference where they sit down and they try to hash out the differences between the House and the Senate version. Once they've done that, the conference committee sends the bill back to both chambers, and both the House and the Senate then have to vote on the bill again....

The topic of this episode is, “What is congressional capacity, and why does it matter?”

As regular listeners know, almost inevitably I have a guest on my show. But this episode, you get just me. The reason is simple: I have been working on congressional capacity for years, and I would like to share my thoughts and hear your feedback.

Kevin Kosar:

Welcome to Understanding Congress, a podcast about the first branch of government. Congress is a notoriously complex institution and few Americans think well of it, but Congress is essential to our republic. It’s a place where our pluralistic society is supposed to work out its differences and come to agreement about what our laws should be, and that is why we are here to discuss our national legislature and to think about ways to upgrade it so it can better serve our nation. I’m your host, Kevin Kosar, and I’m a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank in Washington D.C.

It is probably not news to you that the American public is not pleased with Congress. According to Gallup, fewer than 8 in 10 Americans approve of the job Congress is doing.

For sure, part of the dourness is not really about Congress. People are annoyed because what media they see on Congress focuses heavily on conflict and crazy behavior by legislators. The news rarely covers instances of Congress doing good things.

That said, it is still fair to say that Congress is not doing well. Most obviously, it has failed to tackle some of the biggest problems facing the nation, like immigration, and often sits back and lets the executive branch and courts wade into these issues. Which is not how our system is supposed to work.

So what is wrong with Congress?

Many scholars, media, and members of the public diagnose the ills of Congress think in terms of the Three P’s: People, parties, and polarization.

It’s Kevin McCarthy’s fault; it’s Chuck Schumer’s fault. If we had better people, we would have a better Congress.

Others point to the parties. The Democrats are out-of-touch liberals. The Republicans are proto-authoritarians. The Democrats and Republicans have sorted into ideologically conformist enterprises. Gone are the days when we had liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats.

Still others emphasize polarization as the cause for Congress’ failures. We are a nation of red and blue voters and states, so Congress itself is polarized. Gridlock and fighting is the result of Americans being grossly in disagreement with one another.

There is some truth to all these contentions. But these explanations have their own shortcomings.

Critically, the Three P’s ignore an important unit of analysis: the institution itself.

The U.S. Congress is an organization—a firm. Like any firm—a business firm, a school, or a music band, Congress’ performance is greatly affected by its capacity. It can only do as much as it is capable of doing.

In the congressional context, capacity can be defined as “the human and physical infrastructure Congress needs to resolve public problems through legislating, budgeting, holding hearings, and conducting oversight.”  Some specific aspects of congressional capacity are its funding, its processes for executing tasks (e.g., how bills go to the floor), its technology for completing its work, how it internally organizes itself, its leadership structure, and its people.

So that is the framework I and my coeditors and coauthors adopted. And this lens for looking at Congress has proven illuminating. What you see is an institution that has experienced escalating demands upon it...

The subject of today’s episode is, “What does the House rules committee do?”

My guest is Don Wolfensberger. He is a fellow at the Bipartisan Policy Center, and a scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center. He served as a staff member in the U.S. House of Representatives for 28 years and was the director of the Rules Committee. Don is the author of two books: Changing Cultures in Congress: From Fair Play to Power Plays, and Congress and the People: Deliberative Democracy on Trial.

The topic of this episode is, “What does the U.S. Government Accountability Office do?”

To answer that question we have Gene Dodaro. He is the eighth Comptroller General of the United States—that means he is the head of the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO). He has held that position since December 2010. Prior to becoming the top dog at this government watchdog agency, Gene held other executive positions at GAO, including Chief Operating Officer. Remarkably, Gene has spent a half of a century at the agency. So, with all that experience I can think of nobody better to ask the question, “What does the Government Accountability Office do?”

Kevin Kosar:

Welcome to Understanding Congress, a podcast about the first branch of government. Congress is a notoriously complex institution and few Americans think well of it, but Congress is essential to our republic. It's a place where our pluralistic society is supposed to work out its differences and come to agreement about what our laws should be, and that is why we are here to discuss our national legislature and to think about ways to upgrade it so it can better serve our nation. I'm your host, Kevin Kosar, and I'm a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank in Washington DC.

Gene, welcome to the program.

Gene Dodaro:

It's a pleasure to be with you, Kevin.

Kevin Kosar:

Let's start at the very beginning. GAO was created a century ago. Why

Gene Dodaro:

GAO was created in 1921—right after World War I. The government had created a large debt during that time in order to promulgate the war, and there was concern about having a better, more disciplined way to handle the federal government's budget process. In the same legislation in which we were created, the Bureau of the Budget—which is now known as the Office of Management Budget (OMB) in the executive office of the President—was also created, and the very first requirement was put in place for the President to submit a budget annually to the Congress. Then GAO was placed in the legislative branch in order to provide a check and balance on the receipts and expenditures of federal funds and the proper application of those funds to meet the intent of the appropriation legislation for the Congress. So it was an arrangement put in place to provide more fiscal discipline to the federal government's budget process and execution.

Kevin Kosar:

At that time, GAO had a different name, which to some degree reflected its more limited mission at the time. What was it called back then?

Gene Dodaro:

It was the General Accounting Office. That's what it was when I first joined GAO in 1973. But at that time even, we were doing more than accounting, but that was our original name—the General Accounting Office.

Kevin Kosar:

It seems that...

The topic of this episode is, “How can the House of Representatives better prepare new members?”

My guest is Rep. Stephanie Bice, a Republican who has represented Oklahoma’s fifth congressional district for the past four years. She previously served in the Oklahoma state legislature from from 2014 to 2020. Prior to that, she worked in business for her family’s technology company and her own marketing firm.

I first met Rep. Bice perhaps eight years ago. I was studying alcohol policy reform and she was deep in the process of helping rewrite some of Oklahoma’s outdated alcoholic beverage laws.

Rep. Bice, I should add, sits on the House Appropriations Committee and the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology. And most relevant for this podcast, she also is on the Committee on House Administration, which has jurisdiction over many matters including the onboarding of new members of Congress.

This topic of this special episode of the Understanding Congress podcast is a recent book by a former Hill staffer. It is titled Fire Alarm: The Investigation of the U.S. House Select Committee on Benghazi (Lexington Books, 2023)

The author is Bradley F. Podliska is an Assistant Professor of Military and Security Studies at the U.S. Air Force Air Command and Staff College in Montgomery, Alabama.

Brad is a retired U.S. Air Force Reserve intelligence officer with the rank of lieutenant colonel. He was deployed to Iraq in 2008 and also worked as an intelligence analyst for the Department of Defense.

Dr. Podliska is a former investigator for the U.S. House of Representatives Select Committee on Benghazi. He is the author of two books, and that latter experience working on the Hill formed the basis for his book, Fire Alarm: The Investigation of the U.S. House Select Committee on Benghazi.

Kevin Kosar:

Welcome to Understanding Congress, a podcast about the first branch of government. Congress is a notoriously complex institution, and few Americans think well of it. But Congress is essential to our republic. It is a place where our pluralistic society is supposed to work out its differences and come to agreement about what our laws should be.

And that is why we are here: to discuss our national legislature and to think about ways to upgrade it so it can better serve our nation. I am your host, Kevin Kosar, and I’m a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank in Washington DC.

Professor Podliska, welcome to the podcast.

Bradley Podliska:

Thank you, Kevin, for having me. I appreciate being here.

Kevin Kosar:

You were an investigator for the House of Representatives. I introduced you as a professor, but you had on-the-ground experience inside Congress as an investigator for the House of Representatives. For audience members who have never heard of that position, what do House investigators do? And how did you get to that position?

Bradley Podliska:

Investigators are another term for subject matter experts, usually based on their executive branch experience. The role of an investigator is to interview witnesses, request documents, analyze those documents and then provide new information back to the members for the committee so they can conduct their investigation. Now with that said, the titles when it comes to the Benghazi Committee were completely and totally arbitrary. Attorneys had “counsel” in their title and if you were a non-attorney, you either had the title of investigator, professional staff member, or advisor, but we all did the same work. So we were all analyzing documents, we were all interviewing witnesses, and then we were reporting the results to the committee members.

In my particular case, I spent 17 years in the intelligence community and the Defense Department, and I knew someone that had known the Republican staff director of the Benghazi committee for over two decades. So I submitted a resume and I was hired soon thereafter, and this is a point I actually make in my book Fire Alarm, which is that you're basically hired on perceived party loyalty. I refer to this as a non-compensatory dimension. In other words, merit is a secondary condition. You might be the best person for a job, but if you are not perceived as a partisan, you are not going to be hired in the first place. This is done is through those personal connections that I talked about. I am not aware of any staff member that was hired on the Benghazi committee that either did not have prior Capitol Hill experience or did not know somebody on the committee itself.

Kevin Kosar:

And that...

The topic of this episode is, “What do congressional committees do?”

My guest is Dr. Maya Kornberg. She is a political scientist in the Elections and Government Program at the Brennan Center. Dr. Kornberg leads the center’s work related to information and disinformation in politics, Congress, and money in politics. Maya also is the author of Inside Congressional Committees: Function and Dysfunction in the Legislative Process (Columbia University Press, 2023.) All of that makes her the perfect person to answer the question, “What do congressional committees do?”

Kevin Kosar:

Welcome to Understanding Congress, a podcast about the first branch of government. Congress is a notoriously complex institution and few Americans think well of it, but Congress is essential to our republic. It’s a place where our pluralistic society is supposed to work out its differences and come to agreement about what our laws should be, and that is why we are here to discuss our national legislature and to think about ways to upgrade it so it can better serve our nation. I’m your host, Kevin Kosar, and I’m a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank in Washington, D.C.

Dr. Kornberg, welcome to the podcast.

Maya Kornberg:

Thank you so much for having me. I’m excited to be here.

Kevin Kosar:

Since its earliest days—more than two centuries ago—each chamber of Congress has had committees and used them for lawmaking, oversight, etc. Why committees?

Maya Kornberg:

As you noted, committees have been essential institutions in Congress since its inception. One of the reasons for this is that Congress is a big organization with an enormous number of issues to handle. So committees act as sub-organizations that can help Congress perform specific duties. Congress delegates work through its committees, so they also serve as indicators of how Congress is apportioning responsibility and resources. And in terms of power within the chambers, committees help to decentralize power, and encourage and give space to more legislators from both parties to be active participants in the policymaking process.

Kevin Kosar:

You note in the book that committees have four core functions: deliberation, education, theater, and personal connection. What do you mean by these terms?

Maya Kornberg:

These are the core functions that legislative scholars have identified as key roles of committees in legislatures, generally.

First and foremost, scholars identify committees as a deliberative forum within Congress. Woodrow Wilson once wrote that “The House both deliberates and legislates in small sections. It delegates its legislative and deliberative functions to stand in committees.” And what does deliberation mean? As you and your co-authors touch on in Congress Overwhelmed, deliberation is really about weighing the different aspects of a question and reasoning through the different causes and consequences. This is a crucial part of any policy formulation, and something that committees handle in Congress.

Traditionally, committees are where research is brought in and technical learning takes place, and that’s what I mean by education. Congress is a body in which many lawmakers have to legislate on specialized topics that they don’t have any training in. Committees give them the space to learn—they are a place where lawmakers gather information and educate themselves about specific policy areas.  

Committees are also one of the major bipartisan institutions in an increasingly partisan Congress, so they form a space for members of Congress to...

The topic of this episode is, “Does the Senate still work?”

To answer that question, we have Martin Gold, a partner with Capital Council, LLC, a government relations firm in Washington, DC. Marty spent many years in the US Senate working for individual senators, committees, and a majority leader. He also is the author of the book, Senate Procedure and Practice (Rowman and Littlefield, 2018), which explains how the Chamber operates.

So, Marty has both an inside view of the Senate and he has a long view of it, which is why I wanted to have him on the program to answer the question, “Does the Senate still work?”

Kevin Kosar:

Welcome to Understanding Congress, a podcast about the first branch of government. Congress is a notoriously complex institution and few Americans think well of it, but Congress is essential to our Republic. It’s a place where our pluralistic society is supposed to work out its differences and come to agreement about what our laws should be. And that is why we are here to discuss our national legislature and to think about ways to upgrade it so it can better serve our nation.

I'm your host Kevin Kosar and I'm a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank in Washington, DC.

Welcome to the program.

Martin Gold:

Thank you for having me, Kevin.

Kevin Kosar:

The subject of this episode is, “Does the Senate still work?” So it occurs to me that—to answer that question—it might be helpful if I first asked you, “What does a working Senate look like?”

Martin Gold:

A working Senate is a Senate that is mindful of its constitutional responsibilities, which it has many. Some powers are expressly stated in the Constitution and are unicameral powers, like the power over nominations, the power over treaties, or the power to run impeachment trials. And then a number of other powers that are obviously exercised on a bicameral basis.

But I think if you go beyond the text of the Constitution itself and consider the constitutional purpose of the Senate, its purpose is to slow things down and be a more deliberate body. James Madison talked about, in the Federalist Papers, the Senate being a necessary fence against the passions of the House of Representatives. The rules and the precedents of the House and the mechanisms of the House allow it to move very quickly when the majority party wants to move quickly and the minority has very little, if anything, to say about it and it can push things through on a fairly instantaneous basis. It's a legislative juggernaut.

The purpose of the Senate is to be the necessary fence against that, to slow things down, and to create a more deliberative process. And when you get beyond the stated powers of the Senate and the Constitution and look also to the purpose of why we have a bicameral legislature, I think the Senate, in fact, does serve that function quite well. It doesn’t serve it in exactly the same way as it may have served it years ago. Senates do change, not only on the basis of the people who are serving in the body but also on the national mood of the country. When people talk about polarization in the Senate. It has to be remembered that the Senate is a political institution and that the polarization in the Senate reflects the polarization of the American people. If the Senate were really out of step with the American people, query how many of those senators would remain senators as the public thought that somehow or other they really weren’t being appropriately represented in the place. So how the Senate...

The topic of this episode is, “How does media affect our perceptions of Congress?’

As listeners no doubt know, Americans are down on Congress. Public approval of Congress has averaged about 20 percent over the past 20 years, according to Gallup. Certainly, the people on Capitol Hill are partly to blame. We have legislators who behave as if they are on a reality television show and who spend a lot of time starting fights on social media. Congress also has hurt its reputation by failing to address major public policy issues, like immigration and the soaring national debt. And then there are the occasional scandals that disgust the average American.

Yet, Americans’ dour opinion of Congress also is fueled by media coverage.

To talk more about this I have with me Rob Oldham, who is a Ph.D. candidate in politics at Princeton University. This year he will be an American Political Science Association Congressional Fellow, and will be spending a lot of time on Capitol Hill. His published papers investigate the relationship between supermajority rules and bipartisan policymaking. His dissertation considers congressional policymaking in response to crises during the era of polarization.

And importantly and especially relevant for this podcast is that Rob is the coauthor (along with James M. Curry and Frances Lee) of a fascinating, recent article titled, “On the Congress Beat: How the Structure of News Shapes Coverage of Congressional Action.” This article was recently published by Political Science Quarterly.

The topic of today’s episode is, “Are earmarks good or bad?”

My guest is Zachary Courser, a visiting assistant professor of government at Claremont McKenna College. He is the co-director of the Policy Lab at Claremont McKenna College, and the co-editor of the volume, Parchment Barriers: Political Polarization and the Limits of Constitutional Order. Zach also is the author of articles on conservatism and populism, and he is the coauthor of an American Enterprise Institute report titled, “Restoring the power of the purse: Earmarks and re-empowering legislators to deliver local benefits.”

The topic of this episode is, “What is the lost history of Congress’s Offices of Legislative Counsel?”

My guest is Beau Baumann, a doctoral candidate in law at Yale University. He studies the intersection of administrative law and legislation. He has published articles in a number of law journals and previously worked as an attorney for the US Department of Justice and clerked for a federal district court. He is the author of a really interesting, new article titled, “Resurrecting the Trinity of Legislative Constitutionalism.” In it he describes some of the lost history of Congress’s offices of legislative counsel (OLC).

Click here for the full transcript of the episode.

The topic of this episode is, “What does a member of the House of Representatives do all day?”

It is not easy for the average voter to imagine how a member of Congress spends each day. We see images of them standing in the ornate chamber, talking with voters, and there’s no shortage of videos of them delivering speeches or denunciations of presidents or the other party. Some polling data indicates that many voters think legislators have cushy, part-time jobs and have legion staff doting upon them.

But is life in Congress really like that?

My guest is Derek Kilmer, who has written a chapter on this subject for Casey Burgat’s new edited volume, We Hold These "Truths": How to Spot the Myths that are Holding America Back (Authors Equity, 2025).

And who better to talk about this topic than Derek Kilmer. He is a former member of Congress. He represented Washington state’s 6th district from 2013 to 2025. Mr. Kilmer served on the House of Representatives’ Appropriations Committee, which helps decide where federal spending goes. Listeners may also remember that Mr. Kilmer also co-led the House’s Modernization Committee, and he previously was on this podcast to explain the various things that were being done to make Congress work better.

Click here to read the full transcript.

As listeners know, every two years the House of Representatives is reborn. After the November election each party convenes in Washington, DC. They discuss and debate how they will run their parties, and what their legislative priorities will be. And if they are members of the majority party, they will discuss and decide what the rules of the House should be. Then when they open the new Congress in January one of the first things they will do is to vote along party lines on a new rules package.

A group of scholars and former House members recently released Revitalizing the House (Hoover Institution/Sunwater Institute), a report calling for the House to revise its rules. You can find that report on UnderstandingCongress.org.

To discuss why the House should change its rules I have with me one of the authors, Dr. Philip Wallach. He is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He is a colleague and a friend. At AEI he studies America’s separation of powers, with a focus on regulatory policy issues and the relationship between Congress and the administrative state. His latest book is Why Congress (Oxford University Press).

Click here for the full transcript of the episode.

The topic of this episode is, “Who was the meanest man in Congress?”

My guest is Timothy J. McNulty, who taught journalism at Northwestern University and spent more than thirty years at the Chicago Tribune. During his years as a journalist, Tim was a national and foreign correspondent, and also an editor. He logged untold hours paying attention to Congress and its many characters. And importantly for the purposes of this episode of the podcast, he is the coauthor of a terrific book, The Meanest Man in Congress: Jack Brooks and the Making of an American Century (NewSouth Books, 2019).

Kevin Kosar:

Welcome to Understanding Congress, a podcast about the first branch of government. Congress is a notoriously complex institution, and few Americans think well of it, but Congress is essential to our republic. It’s a place where our pluralistic society is supposed to work out its differences and come to agreement about what our laws should be. And that is why we are here: to discuss our national legislature and to think about ways to upgrade it so it can better serve our nation.

I’m your host, Kevin Kosar, and I’m a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank in Washington, DC.

Welcome to the podcast.

Timothy McNulty:

Thanks very much for having me.

Kevin Kosar:

Thank you for being here.

Jack Brooks served in Congress from 1952 to 1994. He was called a number of names: the snake killer, the executioner, and the meanest man in Congress. Why?

Timothy McNulty:

Well, each one had a very set reason in Congress. “The snake killer” was him using an old Texas term when he went after President Ford's early budget. He said to reporters then, “Well, the best time to kill a snake is when it's young.” So that's what Ford did. “The executioner” is what Nixon told some of his aides, because Brooks had been really a driving force in the Judiciary Committee. Peter Rodino was the head of it, but he was taking it very slow, and Brooks wanted to speed things up. So that's what bothered Nixon. And then “the meanest man” was something that Brooks had a great deal of pride in, because his questioning on the Government Affairs Subcommittee struck fear into a lot of bureaucrats and corporate leaders who were called to testify, because he didn't blanch at any kind of power or anything else, whether it was Marine Corps generals or heads of General Motors or government department heads. He just went after them. So he got that “meanest man” title and wore it proudly.

Kevin Kosar:

Yes, yes. Brooks himself, as you detail in your book, was a Marine, and he was in World War II. He saw many intense things and he endured a lot, both in his upbringing and before he got to Congress. But the listener might be wondering: if Brooks was so mean, how come voters reelected him every two years for four decades?

Timothy McNulty:

Well, of course, he looked after his district. No matter what other public pronouncements or other publicity he got, he was never that interested in being anything other than a congressman. And people recognized that. He of course brought home a lot of government money, especially for infrastructure down in Southeast Texas. But he also had his staff be very aware of constituent concerns, whether it was someone who's a mother who wanted her son to be able to come home because of an operation that she was having— He took care of things and made sure that his staff answered every...

The topic of this episode is, “Delegates to the House of Representatives: who are they and what do they do?”

My guest is Elliot Mamet. He is a Postdoctoral Research Associate and Lecturer at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs. Previously, he served as an American Political Science Association Congressional Fellow. Elliot holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Duke University.

Also important to note is that Dr. Mamet spent time working in the office of Washington, D.C. delegate, Eleanor Holmes Norton. All of which makes him a great person to ask the question, "Delegates to the House of Representatives: who are they and what do they do?"

Kevin Kosar:

Welcome to Understanding Congress, a podcast about the first branch of government. Congress is a notoriously complex institution and few Americans think well of it, but Congress is essential to our republic. It’s a place where our pluralistic society is supposed to work out its differences and come to agreement about what our laws should be, and that is why we are here to discuss our national legislature and to think about ways to upgrade it so it can better serve our nation. I’m your host, Kevin Kosar, and I’m a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank in Washington D.C.

Welcome to the podcast.

Elliot Mamet:

Thank you, Kevin. It's great to be here.

Kevin Kosar:

Let's start with a really simple question. Listeners are all too familiar with the fact that the House typically has 435 members. But they also have delegates. How many delegates are there to the House of Representatives?

Elliot Mamet:

Currently, there are five delegates to the House of Representatives. They serve from Washington, D.C., Guam, American Samoa, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and the Northern Mariana Islands. There's also a Resident Commissioner—a non-voting member—from Puerto Rico. So there're six total non-voting members in the House.

Kevin Kosar:

Representatives in the House come from districts these days. Where and who do these delegates and non-voting members represent? And is represent even the correct term for what their role is?

Elliot Mamet:

The non-voting members of Congress represent Americans who live outside the several states. Throughout their entire history, they've represented people who don't live in states—whether that's in the federal enclave of the District of Columbia or in territories either on the path to statehood or not on the path to statehood. Today, they represent 4 million Americans. Of that group, 3.5 million live in the United States territories—those people are 98% racial and ethnic minorities—and the remainder are the residents of the District of Columbia who are majority black or Hispanic. So the delegates represent overwhelmingly non-white constituents, and they represent a group of Americans who lack the same citizen rights and lack political equality to those people living in the several states.

Kevin Kosar:

Now, on this program, there's been a number of episodes where I and a guest have talked about earlier Congresses—the Congresses at the founding, early 20th century, etc.—and non-voting representatives just didn't come up in the conversation. Are they a recent development, or have they always been with us?

Elliot Mamet:

Great question. The non-voting representative has been a feature since the earliest Congresses. The institution dates back at least to 1784 when a committee chaired by Thomas Jefferson suggested that territories prior to becoming a state would be able to send a delegate to Congress with the

The topic of today's episode is, "Do we need a Congress?" My guest is my friend and colleague, Dr. Philip Wallach. He is a resident scholar here at AEI where he studies America's separation of powers system. And he focuses on regulatory power issues and the relationship between Congress and the administrative state. Before joining AEI, Phil was a senior fellow in governance studies at both the R Street Institute and the Brookings Institution. Phil also has served as a fellow with the House Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress. He is the author of the book To The Edge: Legality, Legitimacy, and the Response to the 2008 Financial Crisis. I have him on this episode because he wrote a terrific article for National Affairs titled "Congress Indispensable."

The topic of this episode is, “Are members of the House of Representatives legislating in the dark?”

My guest is James Curry. He's an Associate Professor and the Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Political Science at the University of Utah. Professor Curry studies how contemporary legislative processes and institutions affect legislative politics, with a particular focus on the role of parties and leaders in the US Congress. Importantly for this episode, Jim is the author of the book Legislating in the Dark: Information and Power in the House of Representatives (Chicago University Press, 2015). So who better to help us understand the relationship between information and power in Congress?

Kevin Kosar:

Welcome to Understanding Congress, a podcast about the first branch of government. Congress is a notoriously complex institution and few Americans think well of it, but Congress is essential to our Republic. It's a place where our pluralistic society is supposed to work out its differences and come to agreement about what our laws should be. And that is why we are here to discuss our national legislature and to think about ways to upgrade it so it can better serve our nation.

I'm your host, Kevin Kosar. And I'm a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank in Washington, DC.

Welcome to the podcast.

James Curry:

Thanks for having me.

Kevin Kosar:

Power in the House of Representatives: it flows from various factors. For example, being in a power position like the Speakership, or take another example, being a great fundraiser. These things can bring power, but these aren't the only factors. Possessing information also conveys power. How so?

James Curry:

So what I've found in my research is that knowledge or the possession of useful information empowers members of Congress for at least two reasons.

First, Congress needs to be able to write laws that achieve the ends that they want to achieve. Congress obviously has staff to help with this process, but it also helps members of Congress to know the ins and outs of policy and the political dynamics at play. It helps the members to know these things themselves. And if, as a member of Congress, you have this kind of knowledge, you're more likely to be looped into the process of developing a bill. If you're recognized as an expert in a policy space, you're also more likely to end up with a seat on a relevant committee that oversees these policies. So altogether, knowledge, expertise, and information can get you—as a member of a Congress—a seat at the table shaping policies early in the process.

Second, Congress also needs to be able to build coalitions to pass the things that it has written. Again, knowledge and expertise are going to be necessary and are going to empower those who have it. Most members of Congress don't have the time to become deeply informed and knowledgeable about more than a couple of policy areas. In other words, lawmakers tend to specialize—following certain policies really closely, working in those policy areas over and over again, but remaining relatively uninformed about most everything else. However, they still need to vote on everything else, which means they need to learn enough about what's happening on these other bills in these other policy areas so that they can vote the way that they think they should vote. So, what most members do is they turn to their colleagues who are seen as knowledgeable, who have information, who are seen as experts, and follow their lead on what they should do on these bills.

So combined, this means that lawmakers who have...

The topic of this episode is, What is the State of the Union Address, and Why Does Congress Host It?

Once per year, the President of the United States comes to the U.S. Capitol to deliver a speech known as the State of the Union Address. Usually this happens in late January or early February, but it has occurred as late as March 1.

Both members of the House of Representatives and Senators assemble for this speech, along with nearly all members of the president’s cabinet. Justices of the Supreme Court also are there, as are some other individuals. In modern times it has become quite a spectacle—with television cameras beaming the event to millions of homes.

To discuss this grand affair, I have with me Matt Glassman. He is a senior fellow at the Government Affairs Institute, where he studies Congress. Prior to joining the Institute, Matt worked with me at the Congressional  Research Service for ten years. There he wrote about congressional operations, separation of powers, appropriations, judicial administration, agency design, and congressional history.

Kevin Kosar:

Welcome to Understanding Congress, a podcast about the first branch of government. Congress is a notoriously complex institution and few Americans think well of it, but Congress is essential to our republic. It’s a place where our pluralistic society is supposed to work out its differences and come to agreement about what our laws should be, and that is why we are here to discuss our national legislature and to think about ways to upgrade it so it can better serve our nation. I’m your host, Kevin Kosar, and I’m a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank in Washington D.C.

Matt, welcome to the podcast.

Matt Glassman:

Thanks for having me.

Kevin Kosar:

Let’s start with the why. Why does Congress host a state of the union address? Does the U.S. Constitution require it?

Matt Glassman:

The Constitution doesn't require, per se, the State of the Union Address as we know it now, but Article 2, Section 3 does sort of contemplate the idea of a State of the Union message. It says the president “shall from time to time give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union, and recommend to their Consideration such Measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient.”

So this idea of the president reporting back to Congress on what's going on in the administration and what he would like to see happen in the legislature is contemplated in the Constitution. So, yes, it is there. It's not required to happen every year; it says from time to time. That's been interpreted as annually, but we don't have a State of the Union message every year.

Sometimes presidents don't do it in their last year in office. Sometimes presidents don't do it right after they're inaugurated—they just deliver a different message to Congress. But the idea is rooted in the Constitution and in Anglo-American tradition. It was very traditional for the monarchy to go speak to Parliament as it opened in English history as well.

Kevin Kosar:

So it's discretionary, which means Congress could—if it chooses—refuse to hold a State of the Union address. One could imagine— in these high partisanship times—a House with a Democratic majority that might have refused to allow President Trump

The topic of this episode is, "what is Congress' role in a contingent presidential election?"

Two centuries ago, America had a contingent presidential election. No candidate got a majority of votes, and thus it fell to Congress to decide who got to be president. Might the United States have another contingent election? Certainly it is possible. Four of the past six presidential elections have been very close. In 2020, had 44,000 voters in Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin picked Trump instead of Biden we would have had a tied election, with each candidate receiving 269 electoral votes.

So what is Congress’s role in a contingent election? How does that work? To answer these questions I have with me my colleague, Dr. John Fortier. He is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he studies Congress and elections, election administration, election demographics, voting, and more. John is the coauthor of the books After the People Vote: A Guide to the Electoral College (AEI Press, 2020) and Absentee and Early Voting: Trends, Promises, and Perils (AEI Press, 2006). John also hosts The Voting Booth podcast.

Kevin Kosar:

Welcome to Understanding Congress, a podcast about the first branch of government. Congress is a notoriously complex institution, and few Americans think well of it. But Congress is essential to our republic. It is a place where our pluralistic society is supposed to work out its differences and come to agreement about what our laws should be.

And that is why we are here: to discuss our national legislature and to think about ways to upgrade it so it can better serve our nation. I am your host, Kevin Kosar, and I’m a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank in Washington DC.

John, welcome to the podcast.

John Fortier:

Thank you, Kevin. Pleasure to be here.

Kevin Kosar:

Let's start with a simple question. Why must a presidential candidate get 270 electoral votes in order to become the president?

John Fortier:

There's a short answer and a long answer. The short answer is that 270 is a majority of the electors that are possible to be cast.

The longer answer is that there was a debate in the Constitutional Convention about how to elect the president, but it came sort of late in the process. And I would say the first thing that they needed to decide is what did Congress look like? And there were all sorts of debates and back and forth before a compromise was reached where essentially the House of Representatives was one that represented the people more broadly. The states would have a number of House representatives based on their population and the Senate would be equal in the states.

Now when coming to the Electoral College—figuring out how to elect the president—there were two big principles. One, they had decided at this point that they wanted the president to be elected separately from the Congress. Not like a parliamentary system, not something coming out of the Congress. And secondly, that they were going to reflect that compromise in Congress.

And so, the real number of 270, or the larger number of electors that are available, are basically all of the states have two electors for the senators that they

The topic of today’s episode is, “Can Congress budget?”

My guest is Dr. Allen Schick. He is professor emeritus at the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland. He previously has held positions at the Congressional Research Service, the Urban Institute, the Brookings Institution, and the American Enterprise Institute. Dr. Schick published three volumes with AEI press, which you can download and read, and many other books with distinguished presses.

His books include, Congress and Money: Spending, Taxing, and Budgeting (1980), Making Economic Policy in Congress (1984), The Capacity to Budget (1990) and The Federal Budget: Politics, Policy, Process (1995).

Dr. Schick is the dean of budget policy, and we are very fortunate to have him on the program.

The topic of this episode is, “What is wrong and right with the House of Representatives?”

My guest is Dan Lipinski, who is uniquely positioned to answer this question. He was a member of Congress, and represented Illinois’ third district from 2005 to 2021. He also is a political scientist — he got his doctorate from Duke University in 1998. And if that is not enough, Dan is a former congressional staffer and a socially conservative Democrat. You don’t find many of those anymore. You can see Dan’s recent writings on his website, DanLipinski.com, which includes an essay for The Atlantic titled “The House of Representatives is failing American democracy.”

Kevin Kosar:

Welcome to Understanding Congress, a podcast about the first branch of government. Congress is a notoriously complex institution, and few Americans think well of it, but Congress is essential to our republic. It’s a place where our pluralistic society is supposed to work out its differences and come to agreement about what our laws should be. And that is why we are here: to discuss our national legislature and to think about ways to upgrade it so it can better serve our nation.

I’m your host, Kevin Kosar, and I’m a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank in Washington, DC.

Sir, welcome to the program.

Dan Lipinski:

It's good to be with you, Kevin.

Kevin Kosar:

Let's start this conversation on a positive note. You served in the House of Representatives for 16 years. What accomplishments are you most proud of?

Dan Lipinski:

Well, if I had to pick out one bill most proud of — I actually was able to pass about 17 bills in my 16 years in Congress — but the one that I spent the most time on, maybe the longest lasting impact, is the American Manufacturing Competitiveness Act. The requirement of that bill is every four years, the administration needs to create a strategy to promote American manufacturing. We could do a whole podcast on just what it took through five years to get this bill passed. We finally changed it to go to a different committee. In the end, after we spent five years working very hard, first it got attached to one bill, which we strategized to do, and then that bill unexpectedly got attached to an omnibus bill at the end of the year. After five long years of working on it, I was actually shocked when I saw it show up in an omnibus bill. Like I said, we could do a whole podcast on that and the strategy, and all the pitfalls, and what it took to get it through the House and finally get it through the Senate, get the president on board. It took a long time. But the first one was done in the second year of President Trump, and the second one now needs to be done early next year by the Biden Administration. So it's a plan to promote American manufacturing, kind of like the Quadrennial Defense Review, which the Department of Defense every four years needs to look at the defense department and put out a plan for the next four years.

Kevin Kosar:

So, you're a legislator who got things done. But as you just mentioned, it sure wasn't easy, and it sure didn't follow the script that many of us learned in Schoolhouse Rock all those years ago about how a bill becomes a law. This gets us to my next question. Let's talk about what's wrong with the House of Representatives — why it's so hard to get things done. In an

“Is Congress Broken?” — that is the topic of this episode. My guest is Dr. Jack Pitney, the coeditor of the book, Is Congress Broken? The Virtues and Defects of Partisanship and Gridlock. Jack is the Roy P. Crocker Professor of Politics at Claremont McKenna College, where he teaches American politics and government.

This book, which was coedited by William Connelley and Gary Schmitt, is a marvelous collection of essays written by top scholars. All of the chapters, I should note, are accessible to the lay reader. One need not be a political scientist or academic to enjoy this book, and come away with a  greater understanding of the First Branch.

The topic of this episode is, “Can term limits fix Congress?”

Many Americans, including possibly you, dear listener, look at Congress and think, “These people stink. They spend decades in Congress and are out of touch with the American people and pay too much attention to special interests.” This widespread feeling unsurprisingly leads to nearly 90 percent of Americans telling pollsters they favor term limits for legislators.

So would term limits be a helpful reform? To help us think through this question I have with me Dr. Casey Burgat, a professor at George Washington University. He is the editor of a new volume, We Hold These Truths: How to Spot the Myths That are Holding America Back (Authors Equity, 2025). It's a fun book, and has contributions from a lot of smart people. The book also includes a chapter that Casey authored on this very topic of term limits for Congress. So who better for us to have on the program?

Click here for the full transcript of the episode.

The topic of this episode is, “Should we expand the membership of the House of Representatives?”

My guest is Yuval Levin, who is the director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute. Dr. Levin is the founder and editor of the journal National Affairs, a senior editor at The New Atlantis, a contributing editor at National Review, and a contributing opinion writer at the New York Times. And, particularly germane to the subject of today's discussion, Yuval recently coauthored a report on the topic of expanding the membership of the House of Representatives. You'll find a link to that report in the program notes.

Kevin Kosar:

Welcome to Understanding Congress, a podcast about the first branch of government. Congress is a notoriously complex institution, and few Americans think well of it, but Congress is essential to our republic. It’s a place where our pluralistic society is supposed to work out its differences and come to agreement about what our laws should be. And that is why we are here: to discuss our national legislature and to think about ways to upgrade it so it can better serve our nation.

I’m your host, Kevin Kosar, and I’m a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank in Washington, DC.

Yuval, welcome to the podcast.

Yuval Levin:

Thank you very much for having me.

Kevin Kosar:

The founders set the number of senators at two per state, but they did not set a constitutional cap on the number of legislators in the House. Why is that?

Yuval Levin:

Well, the nature of the Congress came out of a very complicated set of compromises at the Constitutional Convention. If you look at James Madison's notes on the convention, well over half of the debate was actually about this question of how representation should work. And ultimately, in some obvious ways, the large states wanted to be represented by population, the small states wanted each state to have equal membership, and the decision was made, “Let's do both.” So the two houses do have intentionally very, very different forms of representation: for the states and for the people. The House of Representatives is meant to represent the public. And so each member represents roughly the same number of people. State delegations are based on the size of their populations. The difference between the two houses in that sense is very intentional, and intended to create these kind of overlapping majorities that include both forms of representation.

Kevin Kosar:

All right, so the Senate is supposed to represent the states; the House, the people. Now, we have 435 members in the House, and we've had 435 for a long time. When was that number set?

Yuval Levin:

The House of Representatives at first grew after every census. From the very beginning, from the 1790 census all the way through the 19th century, with a single exception after 1840 for complicated reasons, the House grew as the population grew. That continued to happen until after the 1910 census, at which point there was the beginning of a normal debate in the House about how much should we grow and in what way this time. That debate fell apart, and the House ultimately at that...

The topic of this episode is: “What are the job descriptions of representatives and Senators?”

To answer that question, we have Dr. Casey Burgat. He's the director of the Legislative Affairs program at the Graduate School of Political Management at George Washington University. Dr. Burgat also has had stints at the Congressional Research Service, and he worked with me back when I was at the R Street Institute. Recently, he and Professor Charlie Hunt authored the book, Congress Explained: Representation and Lawmaking in the First Branch. Casey has been studying Congress and how it operates for years, which makes him a great person to ask the question, what are the job descriptions of representatives and Senators?

Kevin Kosar:

Welcome to Understanding Congress, a podcast about the first branch of government. Congress is a notoriously complex institution, and few Americans think well of it, but Congress is essential to our republic. It’s a place where our pluralistic society is supposed to work out its differences and come to agreement about what our laws should be, and that is why we are here to discuss our national legislature and to think about ways to upgrade it so it can better serve our nation. I’m your host, Kevin Kosar, and I’m a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank in Washington, DC.

Dr. Casey Burgat, welcome to the program.

Casey Burgat:

Thanks for having me.

Kevin Kosar:

It's not unusual for Americans to grumble about Congress and to complain that these elected officials are not doing their jobs. But last I checked, there're no official job descriptions for the positions of representative and Senator. So in thinking about what these guys are supposed to be doing, I think we should probably start with the US Constitution. It certainly has some clues.

Casey Burgat:

Yes. Always, always start with the Constitution. It takes us back to the Founding. It sets the framework for how we're supposed to think about a lot of these institutional questions. This is one of them.

The Constitution does provide at least some clues, but definitely not as many as we assume are in there—especially in regards to the actual duties of Senators and representatives. It does give eligibility requirements of who can serve: you have to be 25 years old to be in the House, 30 in the Senate, seven years a citizen, etc. But after that, it gets surprisingly and oftentimes frustratingly sparse in terms of what individuals are supposed to do once they're elected. We have to look more broadly and deduce our expectations of job descriptions.

We can take some hints about what the individual members are supposed to do based on what the Constitution says that Congress as an institution—and the individual chambers—are tasked with. So Congress-wide, all legislative powers are granted to Congress. It's right there at the top—Article I, Section 1—no debate about it: Congress is the legislative branch. Then, they itemized what other powers Congress is supposed to have: to declare war, coin money, and—Kevin, I know this is for you—establish post offices, etc. We know that they're supposed to do that. Then each of the chambers has its separate roles: the

The topic of this episode is, “What is the relationship between lobbyists and Congress?”

My guest is Timothy LaPira. He is a professor of political science at James Madison University and a faculty affiliate at the Center for Effective Lawmaking at the University of Virginia. Tim, I should add, is the lead editor of our volume Congress Overwhelmed: The Decline of Congressional Capacity and Prospects for Reform (University of Chicago Press, 2020). But even more relevant to the subject of this podcast episode is that Professor LaPira coauthored the book Revolving Door Lobbying: Public Service, Private Influence, and the Unequal Representation of Interests. This makes him an especially apt person to answer the question for us, “What is the relationship between lobbyists and Congress?”

Kevin Kosar:

Welcome to Understanding Congress, a podcast about the first branch of government. Congress is a notoriously complex institution, and few Americans think well of it, but Congress is essential to our republic. It’s a place where our pluralistic society is supposed to work out its differences and come to agreement about what our laws should be. And that is why we are here: to discuss our national legislature and to think about ways to upgrade it so it can better serve our nation.

I’m your host, Kevin Kosar, and I’m a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank in Washington, DC.

Tim, welcome to the podcast.

Timothy LaPira:

Thank you for having me. Glad to be here.

Kevin Kosar:

Let's start very simply, with the definition of a lobbyist. Now, under the First Amendment, anyone can petition the government for a redress of grievances, as the Constitution says. So plenty of people do talk to Congress, and the executive branch and judiciary, for that matter. In fact, in my job at a think tank, I am often asked to comment on bills or testify before Congress by congressional staff or even legislators who approach me. But I'm not a lobbyist. So what makes a lobbyist a lobbyist?

Timothy LaPira:

This is a great question. It's one that's often misunderstood. There's many definitions of what a lobbyist is, but I tend to think of—there's two ways to think about this. First, the more comprehensive, academic version of thinking about a lobbyist. It could go by the name of policy advocate, government relations professional, policy strategist, or something along those lines. These are people who make money to represent other people's interests. Those interests are typically going to be collected in organizations, but it's not just representing those interests in speaking. It's representing those interests in the policymaking process. There has to be a connection between the private sector and the government. So that's a very broad definition.

There is, further, a statutory definition, primarily through the Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995, which has been updated a number of times. In that law, there's a three-test definition of what a lobbyist is. First, they have to earn money. There's a minimum amount of money that's frankly not all that much given the size of the lobbying industry. It's about $5,000 a month. Second, they have to contact more than one government official. The purpose of this in the law, of course, is not to simply capture everyone, as you suggested. They might want to call up their member of Congress and say, "Vote for the bill,” or “Vote against a nominee," or what have you. The third point of the definition is most critical and...

The subject of this episode is, “Are elections fueling polarization in the House of Representatives?”

Polarization in Congress is a well-documented fact of life. This is particularly true on high salience issues, such as immigration and abortion. Yet the tendency of legislators to reflexively oppose policy ideas offered by the other party has bled into other, more prosaic issues. For example, in late 2021 an infrastructure bill became a bone of political contention. Republicans who voted for it were denounced by their colleagues. Nevermind the fact that the legislation might actually do good for these legislators’ constituents.

Why are there so many hard left and hard right members of our national legislature? To help us think through this issue, my guest is Andrew B. Hall, a political scientist at Stanford University. Dr. Hall has published many articles on elections and representation and is the author of Who Wants to Run?: How the Devaluing of Political Office Drives Polarization (Chicago, 2019).

Kevin Kosar:

Welcome to Understanding Congress, a podcast about the first branch of government. Congress is a notoriously complex institution and few Americans think well of it, but Congress is essential to our Republic. It’s a place where our pluralistic society is supposed to work out its differences and come to agreement about what our laws should be. And that is why we are here to discuss our national legislature and to think about ways to upgrade it so it can better serve our nation.

I'm your host, Kevin Kosar, and I'm a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank in Washington DC.

Andy, welcome to the podcast.

Andrew Hall:

Excited to be here. Thank you.

Kevin Kosar:

If I had a dollar given to me every time somebody said, “Congress is polarized because Americans are polarized,” I'd have enough bucks to take a really good vacation. The idea that America has become the land of red states and blue states, with right wing rural folks and left wing city folks, has become pretty popular. You see references to it in the press all the time. So that prompts the question—we have a polarized Congress: are voters the reason we have a polarized Congress?

Andrew Hall:

It's a very reasonable question. I don't think it has nothing to do with it. I do think it's true that some Americans have become quite polarized. Obviously, we see it play out with things like the rural-urban divide that you're talking about. But I think that there's a really important fallacy that a lot of people don't always think through when they think about Congress polarizing, which is that there's absolutely no guarantee that any change or non-change in people's opinions, will map into what congressional candidates or members of Congress say or do, because there's this intermediate step which is really important—who actually decides to stand up and run for Congress? If the people who decide to run are just systematically different from what the voters at large want, then unfortunately, what people want or what they think or how they think or how polarized they are may not have any reflection in what options they're actually presented to vote on.

So—to get back to your question itself—I think it's of course true that people are polarizing to some degree. I think it's vastly overstated. And when you look into evidence on most salient policy issues, it turns out...

The topic of this episode is: “Partisan polarization: Is it crippling Congress?”

My guest is Frances Lee. She is a professor of politics and public affairs at Princeton University and a top scholar on Congress. She is the author and co-author of many articles and books on Congress, and has written for popular publications including the Atlantic magazine and the New York Times. Most recently she and James Curry published, The Limits of Party: Congress and Lawmaking in a Polarized Era (Chicago 2020), which analyzes and addresses the subject of this episode—polarization in our national legislature.

Kevin Kosar:

Welcome to Understanding Congress, a podcast about the first branch of government. Congress is a notoriously complex institution and few Americans think well of it, but Congress is essential to our republic. It's a place where our pluralistic society is supposed to work out its differences and come to agreement about what our laws should be, and that is why we are here to discuss our national legislature and to think about ways to upgrade it so it can better serve our nation. I'm your host, Kevin Kosar, and I'm a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank in Washington, D.C.

Professor Lee, welcome to the podcast.

Frances E. Lee:

Thank you, Kevin. It's great to be here.

Kevin Kosar:

Let's start by ensuring that we all are on the same page: you, I, and listeners alike. When we speak of Congress, what do we mean by the term partisan polarization?

Frances E. Lee:

Partisan polarization has multiple meanings and I think that's probably why you began with this question.

A layman's or a dictionary definition of polarization means division into two sharply contrasting groups. Congress is clearly polarized in this sense. Congress sees much more partisan conflict. Conflict in Congress breaks down more reliably on partisan lines than it did throughout most of the 20th century. We routinely see votes that pit 90% or more Democrats against 90% or more Republicans, a partisan divide that's more deep and predictable than we used to see.

However, by partisan polarization, political scientists often mean something more technical. In its most rigorous form, the concept of polarization is grounded in spatial theory. It rests on a theorized choice space in which policy preferences are ranged on an underlying continuum from left to right. In this sense, parties become more polarized as the preferences of members become more distinctly bimodal, and as the two parties’ modes move farther apart from one another.

It's far from clear that parties are polarized in this second sense. The problem is that the issues at stake in congressional politics are diverse. On some issues, the congressional parties have moved closer together and on some issues, they've moved farther apart. There's little doubt that the post-Trump parties in Congress are 

The topic of this episode is, “Does Congress still suffer from Demosclerosis?"

My guest is Jonathan Rauch, the author of the classic book, Demosclerosis: The Silent Killer of American Government (Times Books, 1994). Jonathan is a fellow at the Brookings Institution, and the author of numerous books, including The Constitution of Knowledge (Brookings Institution Press, 2021), and Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought (University of Chicago Press, 2014).

I first read Demosclerosis nearly 30 years ago, when I was a graduate school student. I was rifling offerings outside the Strand Bookstore in Manhattan, and the book’s title grabbed me. Once I cracked it, the writing got me hook, line, and sinker. Rauch had taken social scientific insights to explain the mounting federal government dysfunctionality. Whereas pundits and politicos blamed Washington’s foibles and corruptions on bad people, Rauch showed that the trouble was caused by people within the Beltway rationally pursuing their own interests.

I recently re-read this book and think it is absolutely on to something important about Congress, and I am delighted to have Jonathan here to discuss it.

Show Notes:

- Demosclerosis (National Journal, 1992)

- Mancur Olson

- Government's End: Why Washington Stopped Working (Public Affairs, 1999)

The topic of this episode is, “How can a new staffer survive Congress?”

My guest is Mark Strand, the coauthor of the book, “Surviving Inside Congress.” Mark is the President of the Congressional Institute, a not-for-profit organization that helps Members of Congress better serve their constituents and that helps constituents better understand Congress. Mark has led the institute since 2007, and prior to that spent nearly 20 years working as a staffer for members and committees in the House of Representatives.

The topic of this episode is, “Why is congressional oversight important, and how can it be done well?”

To help us tackle this subject we have Elise Bean. She is the Director of the Washington Office of Wayne State University’s Levin Center. Elise spent 30 years in Congress working as an investigator for Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) and for the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Elise handled investigations, hearings, and legislation on matters involving money laundering, offshore tax abuse, corruption, shell companies, and corporate misconduct. She is also the author of the book, Financial Exposure: Carl Levin's Senate Investigations into Finance and Tax Abuse (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). So who better to have on the show to discuss the topic, “Why is congressional oversight important, and how can it be done well?” 

Kevin Kosar:

Welcome to Understanding Congress, a podcast about the first branch of government. Congress is a notoriously complex institution and few Americans think well of it, but Congress is essential to our republic. It’s a place where our pluralistic society is supposed to work out its differences and come to agreement about what our laws should be, and that is why we are here to discuss our national legislature and to think about ways to upgrade it so it can better serve our nation. I’m your host, Kevin Kosar, and I’m a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank in Washington, D.C.

Welcome to the program.

Elise Bean:

Thank you for inviting me, Kevin.

Kevin Kosar:

All right, let's begin with something very fundamental. What is Congressional oversight, and who in Congress can do it?

Elise Bean:

Well, Congressional oversight is when members of Congress, on a committee or individually, ask questions and try to find out: What are the facts? Is a program working? Is there really an abuse? If you want good government, you need good oversight because things change over time and what worked at one time doesn't work at another. That's what Congressional oversight is.

Kevin Kosar:

Yeah, we should dig into that a little bit. I think often Americans don't like to see politicians fighting amongst themselves, yet the legislative branch, last time I checked the Constitution, says that Congress makes the laws, Congress decides where the money is to be spent, but they're not the ones who actually do the execution of the law. They're not the ones actually spending the money. So does that seem to imply some sort of constitutional obligation to engage in oversight?

Elise Bean:

So the Supreme Court has said that that's exactly true, that if Congress can't do what it's supposed to do under the Constitution, unless it has some facts… I mean, wouldn't it make sense—if you're going to change your program or decide where money's going—that you have informed decision-making based on the facts? In fact, there's a 1946 law that requires all Congressional committees to do oversight within their areas of jurisdiction, and that's because they want you to find out what the facts are before you start to pass laws, give out money, and approve nominations.

Kevin Kosar:

Right. And as you hinted at earlier, when Congress says, "Hey, here's a new program we authorized and here's some new money for it, go out and do...

The topic of this episode is “How do legislators raise money to run for Congress?”

My guest is Weston Wamp, who is the Founder at Millennial Debt Foundation and a Senior Political Strategist at Issue One. He hails from Tennessee, and ran for Congress in 2014. If his last name is familiar to you, that is because he is the son of former member of the House Zach Wamp, a Republican who represented Tennessee's 3rd congressional district from 1995 to 2011. Weston, like his father, knows a thing or two about how fundraising has come to be a major part of getting to Congress and staying there. And I should add that he is the host of the program, “Swamp Stories,” which has examined the effects of fundraising on Congress.

The topic of today's episode is, “How Does the House of Representatives Organize Itself for a New Congress?” My guest is Dr. Matthew Green, an extraordinarily accomplished scholar of the U.S. Congress. He has been a professor of politics at Catholic University in Washington, D.C. since 2005, and he received his doctorate from Yale. Matt has authored or coauthored six books, the most recent of which is Legislative Hardball. The first book-length examination of the tactics and effectiveness of the House Freedom Caucus. Matt is also a regular contributor to “Mischiefs of Factions,” a blog about political parties. And he has written about Congress elections and other topics in the Washington Post, Roll Call, and The Hill.

The topic of this episode is, “What differences do women make in Congress?”

My guest is Michele Swers, professor of American government at Georgetown University. She studies Congress, congressional elections, and women in politics. She has written a lot of research articles and book chapters, and also is the author of two books on women in Congress. The first one is titled The Difference Women Make: The Policy Impact of Women in Congress. The second book is titled Women in the Club: Gender and Policy Making in the Senate. And, I would be remiss if I did not mention, she is the coauthor of Women and Politics: Paths to Power and Political Influence.

Kevin Kosar:

Welcome to Understanding Congress, a podcast about the first branch of government. Congress is a notoriously complex institution, and few Americans think well of it, but Congress is essential to our republic. It’s a place where our pluralistic society is supposed to work out its differences and come to agreement about what our laws should be. And that is why we are here: to discuss our national legislature and to think about ways to upgrade it so it can better serve our nation.

I’m your host, Kevin Kosar, and I’m a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank in Washington, DC.

It is to Professor Swers we now turn to learn about women in Congress. Professor Swers, welcome to the program.

Michele Swers:

Thank you, Kevin. Thanks so much for having me. I'm a big fan of your podcast.

Kevin Kosar:

Oh, thanks for saying. Let's start with a really simple question. How many women are in Congress today?

Michele Swers:

So, right now you have 120 women in the House. Eighty-nine are Democrats, 31 are Republicans. And in the Senate, you have 24 women, 16 Democrats, 8 Republicans. From those numbers, you can tell that there are more women who are Democrat than Republicans. And that's because the number of women really started to increase in 1992, and people called that the Year of the Woman, but it was really the Year of the Democratic Women. It was Democrats who elected more women at that time. They had a pretty good year that year. Even in years where Republicans had good years, like 1994, they elected more women, but not a lot more women.

In 2018, Democrats elected another Year of the Woman, but they elected more women of color. So there was a lot of attention to that. And that's when I'm sure your listeners know that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez comes into the picture and Ayanna Pressley and some others. And then in 2020, Republicans did have a very good year. They went from 13 women to 31 in the House of Representatives, and they elected a greater mix of women and minorities. It was a good year from their perspective.

But you can tell though that by these numbers, when Democrats are in charge, women have more access to the majority and seats of power. So women are about 40 percent of the Democratic caucus in the House, and that means they have some seniority level. In the House, on the Democratic side, anyway, committee assignments work based on seniority, so you have more women who have access to be chairs. So Rosa DeLauro, head of Appropriations, or Carolyn Maloney as the Oversight chair, Maxine Waters at Financial Services — important committees.

On the other hand, for Republicans, women are only about 15 percent of their caucus. They've had a woman in the conference chair position for a very long time — obviously turnover with different women. Most...

The topic of today's episode is, “How does the budget process work and not work?” My guest is Tori Gorman, the Policy Director for The Concord Coalition. It is a non-partisan, grassroots organization dedicated to educating the public about federal budget issues, and their consequences for the future. Tori spent 16 years on Capitol Hill where she held director level positions, advising senior members of the budget, appropriations, and tax writing committees in both the House and the Senate. Prior to her career in the federal legislative branch, she was the economist for the Maryland General Assembly.

The topic of this episode is, “What role should Congress have in foreign affairs?”

My guest is Alissa Ardito, the author of the book Machiavelli and the Modern State: The Prince, the Discourses on Livy, and the Extended Territorial Republic (Cambridge University Press, 2015). She has had a rich and varied career in governance, and she has thought deeply about legislatures and policymaking. Dr. Ardito has served as a general counsel at the Congressional Budget Office, and as an attorney advisor with the Administrative Conference of the United States. She received a Ph.D. in political science from Yale University, a J.D. from the University of Virginia School of Law, and a B.A. from the University of Virginia—all of which makes her wise in the ways of statecraft.

Kevin Kosar:

Welcome to Understanding Congress, a podcast about the first branch of government. Congress is a notoriously complex institution, and few Americans think well of it, but Congress is essential to our republic. It’s a place where our pluralistic society is supposed to work out its differences and come to agreement about what our laws should be. And that is why we are here: to discuss our national legislature and to think about ways to upgrade it so it can better serve our nation. I’m your host, Kevin Kosar, and I’m a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank in Washington, DC.

Welcome to the podcast.

Alissa Ardito:

Thank you, Kevin. It's great to be here.

Kevin Kosar:

Let's start our inquiry with the Constitution, the foundation for our system of national self-governance. What constitutional powers does Congress have over foreign affairs?

Alissa Ardito:

Well, actually, if you look at the text of the Constitution, Congress has quite a lot of power over foreign affairs. The issue is that they are littered in various different parts of Section 8 and Section 10 of Article 1. I'll just mention a few. Actually, the first is Clause 1 of Section [8], tax and spend—the “Power To lay and collect Taxes…pay the Debts, and provide for the common Defence.” Congress also has the power to regulate commerce with foreign nations; establish uniform rule of naturalization; define and punish piracies on the high seas; the great war power of Section 8, Clause 11, “To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water.” And then it even moves in, arguably, to everything about raise and support armies, provide and maintain a navy, regulate and call forth the militia.

And then you get into—I think [it’s] fascinating—I would argue that Section 9, Clause 7, “No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law,” also constitutes a foreign affairs power. Then you get into all the limitations in Section 10 on states. The real concern was at the time of the Framing that they were exercising foreign relations independently. And then you can even move into Article 2 and the powers in the Senate, the treaty power and advise and consent on nominations as well. So, taken together, that's actually a pretty robust set of powers.

Kevin Kosar:

Yes, and these powers were, as you alluded to, scraped away from executive authority and scraped away from state authority and centered in the first branch: Congress. Now, Congress's authorities, we should probably also mention, go beyond those explicitly enumerated in the Constitution. Obviously there are a whole number of statutes that assign powers to Congress over foreign affairs, such as the War Powers Resolution, but additional legislative powers exist beyond that. For example, senators and members of the House can use their positions to raise the salience of issues, such as when Congress allows leaders of foreign nations to address it, or when legislators engage in legislative diplomacy and make trips abroad to meet with heads of state. There seems to...

The topic of today's episode is “What is the filibuster?” And does it have a future? My guest is Dr. Molly Reynolds, who is a Senior Fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution. She studies Congress, with a focus on how congressional rules and procedures affect domestic policy outcomes. She also supervises the maintenance of the “Vital Statistics on Congress,” Brookings’ long running resource on the first branch of government. Importantly, for our episode today, Molly is the author of the book Exceptions to the Rule: the Politics of Filibuster Limitations in the US Senate.

The topic of this episode is, “What is the Congressional Research Service, and what does it do?”

The guest of this show is me, Kevin Kosar.  I spent a little over a decade at the Congressional Research Service (CRS) working as a non-partisan analyst and as an acting section research manager. Subsequent to my time at the agency, I was one of the individuals who advocated that Congress make CRS reports available to the public and not just legislators. I’ve also written about CRS and the other legislative branch support agencies, like CBO and GAO.

But it would be weird for me to ask myself questions and then answer them, so I asked my AEI colleague, Jaehun Lee, to serve as my interlocutor.

Kevin Kosar:

Welcome to Understanding Congress, a podcast about the first branch of government. Congress is a notoriously complex institution and few Americans think well of it, but Congress is essential to our Republic. It’s a place where our pluralistic society is supposed to work out its differences and come to agreement about what our laws should be. And that is why we are here to discuss our national legislature and to think about ways to upgrade it so it can better serve our nation.

I’m your host Kevin Kosar and I’m a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank in Washington, DC.

All right, Jaehun, take it away.

Jaehun Lee:

Let's start simple. What is the Congressional Research Service?

Kevin Kosar:

The Congressional Research Service is the rare government agency where its name actually accurately describes what it does. It is a research and reference service for Congress. Congress is its lone client. CRS is an agency in inside the Library of Congress. So it is a federal government agency—not some sort of private sector research outfit—and its job is to support Congress and to do so by providing nonpartisan research, analysis, legal opinions, and just about anything else that Congress may require.

You think about Congress, it's comprised of regular Americans—anybody can run for Congress and anybody can become a congressional staffer. And when those people come to Washington DC, they're suddenly saddled with this immense responsibility of governing: they have to make laws, they have to oversee executive agencies, and they have to respond to lots of constituents. They have to receive interest groups who come through their doors, making demands of them related to policy and spending.

Nobody who enters that position is fully equipped to handle it. We're all amateurs when it comes to governing, and CRS plays a critical role in helping those folks govern. So if you're a brand new legislator and you're trying to figure out, “How do I introduce my first bill? Where do I even get this thing drafted?” You can call up CRS and they'll say, “Okay, here are the steps. Here's how you should reach out to legislative counsel within the chamber who can actually put your ideas into a template and grind it through.” They can help you on these sort of things. They can teach you the basics of legislative procedure: what's a filibuster? How does a congressional budget process work?

They also are a giant resource for facts and nonpartisan—and this is key, nonpartisan—analysis. Everybody in DC in the private sector to one degree or another has an angle, a perspective. Often, especially when you're talking about interest groups or lobbyists, they have specific policy goals and they are going to make arguments to persuade you to pick their policies or to support them. CRS...

The topic of this episode is, “How has Congress evolved as an institution?”

My guest is Eric Schickler, the author of the book, “Disjointed Pluralism: Institutional Innovation and the Development of the U.S. Congress”. It is the 20^th anniversary of this classic text, which won the Richard F. Fenno, Jr. Prize for the best book on legislative politics. Eric is the Jeffrey and Ashley McDermott Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also an Elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. 

The topic of this episode is, “What does the Committee on House Administration do?”

And who better to answer this question than my guest, Representative Rodney Davis. He is the ranking member of the Committee on House Administration, or CHA as it often is called. He has been on the committee since 2014. Rep. Davis currently serving his fifth term in Congress representing the 13th District of Illinois, which covers a 14-county region that includes both urban and rural communities in central and southwestern Illinois.

The topic of this episode is, “What does the Congressional Budget Office do?”

My guest is Professor Philip Joyce. He is the senior associate dean at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy, where he also is a professor of public policy. There, Philip Joyce teaches and researches public budgeting, performance measurement, and intergovernmental relations. He's the author of many publications — far too many to recite, but I will mention one that is germane to today's podcast. Phil is the author of the book The Congressional Budget Office: Honest Numbers, Power, and Policymaking (2011), which makes him an ideal guest to answer the question, “What does the Congressional Budget Office do?”

Kevin Kosar:

Welcome to Understanding Congress, a podcast about the first branch of government. Congress is a notoriously complex institution, and few Americans think well of it, but Congress is essential to our republic. It’s a place where our pluralistic society is supposed to work out its differences and come to agreement about what our laws should be. And that is why we are here: to discuss our national legislature and to think about ways to upgrade it so it can better serve our nation.

I’m your host, Kevin Kosar, and I’m a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank in Washington, DC.

Professor Joyce, welcome to the podcast.

Philip Joyce:

It's great to be with you.

Kevin Kosar:

Let's start simply. The Congressional Budget Office, AKA, “CBO.” When did Congress create it and why?

Philip Joyce:

CBO was created in 1974. You have to sort of go back in time if you can. Well, probably a lot of people can't go back that far in time that are listening to this podcast, but I can. As you recall, in 1974, at least early 1974, Richard Nixon was president. There was something that became referred to as the imperial presidency, and it essentially involved President Nixon being viewed at least by many people in the Congress as overstepping his bounds, doing things like withholding funds that the Congress had appropriated. So the Congress was trying to reassert its role in the budget process. And it did this by passing something called the Congressional Budget and Empowerment Control Act of 1974, which did basically three things. It created the budget committees; it created the budget resolution, which is the blueprint that the Congress establishes for the budget; and it created CBO.

Why did it create CBO? It created CBO in particular to provide the Congress with its own source of information on the budget and the economy. And why did it need to do that? Because the alternative was to rely on the Office of Management and Budget, which was attached to the president — and not just any president, but Richard Nixon. So the idea that the Congress was going to reassert its role in budgeting, but have to rely on Richard Nixon's OMB for information, just didn't make a lot of sense to a lot of people in the Congress.

The other thing I think it's important to note up front is that according to the law, this was all to be done on a nonpartisan basis, which means that CBO doesn't work for the party in control of the Congress. It works for the Congress as a whole, and tries very hard to make sure that it is responsive to both political parties.

Kevin Kosar:

Yes, I should elaborate a touch further for listeners who are not familiar with this period of time, the early ’70s. After being pushed around and eclipsed by a burgeoning executive branch, one that often didn't play straight and...

The topic of this episode is, “How is Congress involved in foreign policy?”

My guest is Jordan Tama, a Provost Associate Professor at American University’s School of International Service. He is the author or editor of five books on foreign policy. They are:

· Polarization and US Foreign Policy: When Politics Crosses the Water’s Edge, co-edited with Gordon M. Friedrichs (Palgrave Macmillan, Forthcoming)

· Bipartisanship and US Foreign Policy: Cooperation in a Polarized Age (Oxford University Press, 2024);

· Rivals for Power: Presidential-Congressional Relations, sixth edition, co-edited with James A. Thurber (Rowman and Littlefield, 2018);

· Terrorism and National Security Reform: How Commissions Can Drive Change During Crises (Cambridge University Press, 2011); and

· A Creative Tension: The Foreign Policy Roles of the President and Congress, co-authored with Lee H. Hamilton (Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2002).

Jordan also has written many papers on foreign policy, so it seems to me he is a great person to have on the podcast to help us understand how Congress is involved in foreign policy.

Kevin Kosar:

Welcome to Understanding Congress, a podcast about the first branch of government. Congress is a notoriously complex institution and few Americans think well of it, but Congress is essential to our republic. It’s a place where our pluralistic society is supposed to work out its differences and come to agreement about what our laws should be, and that is why we are here to discuss our national legislature and to think about ways to upgrade it so it can better serve our nation. I’m your host, Kevin Kosar, and I’m a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank in Washington DC.

Welcome to the podcast.

Jordan Tama:

Thanks so much for having me on, Kevin.

Kevin Kosar:

Some months ago, our listeners heard me chat with Alissa Ardito about the formal powers of Congress in foreign affairs. We talked about things like how the Senate has the authority to approve treaties and to consider nominees to fill high positions in the State Department, the military, and other agencies that are involved in foreign affairs. We also talked about the fact that Congress has the power to declare war and the discretion to fund and create agencies that deal with matters overseas, like the United States Agency for International Development. And we also pondered in a philosophical manner about how we're supposed to have a representative democracy influencing foreign affairs.

But I wanted to bring you in because you're so well prepared, well-studied, and scholarly on the matter of where the rubber hits the road and how the wheels actually turn. So let me start by asking, where should the bewildered citizen first look when trying to understand how Congress is involved in foreign policy?

Jordan Tama:

Congress is involved in foreign policy in a lot of ways, more than most Americans realize. This includes both Congress exercising its formal powers and Congress exercising influence in more informal ways. I'll say a quick word about both of those areas, the formal and informal...

The topic of this episode is, "What is the role of the Senate’s majority leader?"

My guest is Dr. James Wallner. He is a senior fellow at the R Street Institute and a lecturer at Clemson University. He is the author of three books on the Senate, including one titled On Parliamentary War: Partisan Conflict and Procedural Change in the U.S. Senate (2017). James has worked in the Senate, and also is a cohost of the Politics in Question podcast. 

Kevin Kosar:

Welcome to Understanding Congress, a podcast about the first branch of government. Congress is a notoriously complex institution, and few Americans think well of it, but Congress is essential to our republic. It’s a place where our pluralistic society is supposed to work out its differences and come to agreement about what our laws should be. And that is why we are here: to discuss our national legislature and to think about ways to upgrade it so it can better serve our nation.

I'm your host, Kevin Kosar, and I'm a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank in Washington, DC.

It is to James Wallner that we turn to learn about the role of the majority leader. James, welcome to the program.

James Wallner:

Thanks for having me.

Kevin Kosar:

First question. Chuck Schumer is the current majority leader in the Senate. How did he get that job? What's the process? Did all the senators get together and vote for him or some other candidate?

James Wallner:

Well, that's how it works in the House, where you nominate candidates to be the speaker of the House. Nancy Pelosi is our current speaker. Democrats and Republicans on the floor of the House all cast a vote for the speaker, and the nominee with the most votes becomes the speaker. And so the majority party, in effect, selects the speaker. In the Senate, it's a similar process, but slightly different, because they're not electing a speaker, they're not electing a presiding officer. The majority leader, Chuck Schumer, is merely the floor leader of the party with the most votes — so in this case, the Democrats. And it’s 50–50 right now, split evenly between Democrats and Republicans. The vice president is a Democrat, so assuming that the vice president would cast her vote with the Democrats on a tie vote — under the Constitution, she gets to do that — that means that Chuck Schumer has more votes behind him than the leader of the Republican Party, Mitch McConnell, has behind him. So he is the majority leader, McConnell is the minority leader. The way they're chosen is simply by their party colleagues in secret ballot, in a meeting that usually happens right after the election, typically in December following an election before the new Congress meets.

Kevin Kosar:

You underlined a point there about the difference between leadership in the House and leadership in the Senate. It sounds, at least ostensibly, that a speaker may make a claim to be the head of the whole of the House, whereas in the Senate, it sounds like the majority leader is just the partisan leader.

James Wallner:

Absolutely. Look, party leaders in the Senate have institutional tasks, too. They help to schedule legislation. They do a bunch of different things that institutional leaders in the House, like the speaker, also do. And the speaker is also a partisan leader, in the fact that she is selected by her majority party caucus and really works to advance the agenda of the majority party. So they go hand in hand. But there is no Senate leader. I'm reminding myself of Woodrow Wilson, where he says, "There's no...

The topic of today’s episode is, “How does Congress fund itself?”

My guest is Daniel Schuman. He is the Policy Director at Demand Progress, a grassroots, nonpartisan organization with over 1.5 million affiliated activists fighting for the rights and freedoms needed for a modern democracy. Daniel has spent many years studying our national legislature, working to reform it, and advocating to better fund it. He also is the editor of the First Branch Forecast, an extraordinarily informative newsletter that you can read and subscribe to at no cost at https://firstbranchforecast.com/. 

The topic of this episode is, “What are the Duties of the Speaker of the House of Representatives?”

My guest is Paul Ryan. Paul Ryan was the 54th Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. In office from October 2015 to January 2019, he was the youngest Speaker in nearly 150 years.

Prior to becoming Speaker of the House, Paul served as the Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. He also served as Chairman of the House Budget Committee from 2011-2015. In 2012, he was selected to serve as Governor Mitt Romney’s Vice-Presidential nominee. Paul was first elected to Congress at age 28 and represented Wisconsin’s First District for two decades.

Kevin Kosar:

Welcome to Understanding Congress, a podcast about the first branch of government. Congress is a notoriously complex institution and few Americans think well of it, but Congress is essential to our republic. It's a place where our pluralistic society is supposed to work out its differences and come to agreement about what our laws should be, and that is why we are here to discuss our national legislature and to think about ways to upgrade it so it can better serve our nation. I'm your host, Kevin Kosar, and I'm a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a think-tank in Washington DC.

Speaker Ryan, welcome to the podcast.

Paul Ryan:

Kevin, good to be with you. Thanks for having me.

Kevin Kosar:

Article 1 of the US Constitution states, "The House of Representatives shall choose their Speaker and other officers." How does the House pick a Speaker these days?

Paul Ryan:

The way it works is the majority party in their conference—we call the Republican body the Conference, the Democrats call theirs the Caucus—will have a vote as to whom they nominate for Speaker. That's a plurality vote—the person who gets the most votes wins. Kevin McCarthy won that, which means he is to be presented to the full House on January 3rd when a new session is sworn in and he has to get—or she, in Nancy [Pelosi]'s case—has to get 218 votes. The Democratic Caucus will also vote on who they nominate to be the Speaker. If [Pelosi] stays, they'll probably nominate her. If not, I don't know, Hakeem Jeffries or somebody like that.

A candidate must win a majority vote—218 votes—on the House floor when the new session is sworn in. Then that person is sworn in by the Dean of the House—the longest serving member—and that Speaker becomes the newly-installed Speaker for that new session of Congress. Then that person swears in all of Congress. That's how it gets started.

Kevin Kosar:

The Constitution says the House shall have a Speaker, but it doesn’t provide a full job description. In the earliest days of the Republic, the Speaker’s duty was to preside over the chamber—to be the guy who runs the meeting. Times sure have changed. What are the duties and responsibilities of the Speaker today?

Paul Ryan:

Yeah, they're endless and infinite in some ways. It is not like it was in the old days. It's a bigger Congress—there are more states than they envisioned and the government does so many more things than it used to do in the first Congresses.

You're basically the chief executive officer of the legislative branch. You oversee the entire legislative branch, so technically you have something like 12,500 employees. In a way, you’re like the mayor of the legislative branch, overseeing the legislative council, the law enforcement agency, the power plant, the janitors, etc. And you have deputies that run all of that—whom you appoint—such as the...

The topic of this episode is: "What is the congressional debt limit?"

To answer that question we are once again speaking with Philip Wallach. He was the very first guest on this podcast, where we pondered why we need a Congress. Phil is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and the author of the book, Why Congress, which was published by Oxford University Press in 2023. Phil also has written previously about the debt limit, which makes him the right person to ask: What is the congressional debt limit?

Kevin Kosar:

Welcome to Understanding Congress, a podcast about the first branch of government. Congress is a notoriously complex institution, and few Americans think well of it, but Congress is essential to our republic. It's a place where our pluralistic society is supposed to work out its differences and come to agreement about what our laws should be, and that is why we are here to discuss our national legislature and to think about ways to upgrade it so it can better serve our nation. I'm your host, Kevin Kosar, and I'm a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank in Washington, DC.

Phil, welcome back to the program.

Phil Wallach:

Thanks for having me back.

Kevin Kosar:

Let's start by getting clear on what we're talking about. There are deficits and there is debt. How do these two things differ?

Phil Wallach:

It's a stocks versus flow kind of thing. Each year, we have spending and revenue—in almost all years in recent memory, we have more spending than revenue. That creates a deficit. So the accumulation of all of the past deficits is the debt. So the debt is our total of all the spending we've done minus the revenue we've taken in, and it is now officially north of $30 trillion.

Kevin Kosar:

So when the Treasury needs to issue more debt, it's got to sell bonds—basically, these IOUs that say, "Please give us money that we can spend now, and we'll pay you back later." Is that essentially what's happening when we're taking on more debt?

Phil Wallach:

Yeah. A bond is a legally obligating instrument, and debt put out by the United States government is considered the lowest-risk kind of debt instrument in the world. So the government is not just saying, "If we feel in a good mood, we'll pay you back,” but, “we are legally obligated to pay you back with interest." That's very valuable to investors. And of course, United States bonds form the gold standard of collateral used not only in this country but around the world in the global financial system.

Kevin Kosar:

So this leads us to an important point, which is that an executive agency called the US Treasury that is issuing debt, but it doesn't do it simply at the behest of the President. The President can't say, "Well, let's just issue as much debt as we want on this day of the week or during this year." We have a law that limits the amount of debt; that is, our legislature has a role here.

We keep finding ourselves—with some frequency—in a situation where Congress will run these yearly deficits where they're spending more than the revenue coming in, and the debt grows and grows. Then, when we hit this legally mandated limit, Congress has to vote to pass a new law so that the limit is set higher so that more debt can be issued.

So let's just turn back the clock. This practice of setting a debt limit by law: why do we have it, and when did Congress first start doing it?

Phil Wallach:

Okay, so go back to the...

The topic of this episode is, “Can Congress access classified information?”

My guest is Daniel Schuman. He is the Policy Director at Demand Progress, a grassroots, nonpartisan organization that has worked to improve the legislative branch and to make government more transparent to the public. Daniel also is the editor of the First Branch Forecast, an extraordinarily informative newsletter that you can read and subscribe to at no cost at https://firstbranchforecast.com/.

We last spoke with Daniel on episode 8 of this podcast, where he enlightened us on the process by which Congress funds itself. This time around, we will dig into the subject of Congress and classified information.

Kevin Kosar:

Welcome to Understanding Congress, a podcast about the first branch of government. Congress is a notoriously complex institution and few Americans think well of it, but Congress is essential to our republic. It’s a place where our pluralistic society is supposed to work out its differences and come to agreement about what our laws should be, and that is why we are here to discuss our national legislature and to think about ways to upgrade it so it can better serve our nation. I’m your host, Kevin Kosar, and I’m a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank in Washington DC.

Daniel, welcome to the podcast.

Daniel Schuman:

Thanks so much for having me.

Kevin Kosar:

I suppose we should start by defining our subject matter: classified information. Pardon the vanity here, but I'm going to refer to a report I wrote some years ago for the Congressional Research Service, where I defined classified information as "information or material designated and clearly marked or clearly represented, pursuant to the provisions of a statute or Executive order (or a regulation or order issued pursuant to a statute or Executive order), as requiring a specific degree of protection against unauthorized disclosure for reasons of national security (50 U.S.C. 426(1))." How's that for clarity?

Now, let's make this a little more clear. Classified information, put really simply, is government information that only certain people in the executive branch can see. Is that roughly correct?

Daniel Schuman:

Yeah, it's roughly right. There are folks inside the legislative and judicial branches who have a right to have access as well. And as your excellent report actually indicated, there're two major ways in which you get classification. One is by statutory authority, which is what we did largely for atomic information. Then there's everything else, which was just sort of made up by the President through executive order. But as a general rule, 99.9%—or something pretty close to that—people with access to classified information are people inside the executive branch.

Kevin Kosar:

Okay, so a listener might be hearing this and saying, “Wait a minute, isn’t this inherently problematic for representative government? We, the people, elect the people who are supposed to make the laws and the people who make the laws are supposed to oversee the executive branch, which executes the laws. But if stuff's classified and the public can't see it and people in Congress generally can't see it, do we lose accountability? What do you think?

Daniel Schuman:

We absolutely do. There're two concepts worth separating. One is whether you have the technical right to see certain information, and the other is whether you actually have the means to see it.

Members of Congress and...

The topic of this episode is a new book on Senator Mitch McConnell, a Republican who served as his party’s chamber leader for the better part of two decades.

The book was written by Associated Press reporter Michael Tackett, and its title is The Price of Power: How Mitch McConnell Mastered the Senate, Changed America, and Lost His Party. It was published by Simon & Schuster in November of 2024.

It is a fine book, and I certainly enjoyed reading it. I learned a lot about Senator McConnell. For example, who knew that he dated a lot when he was a single guy? Who knew that he had a role in transforming Kentucky from a Democrat-controlled state to one with a vibrant Republican party? And who knew that Senator McConnell recruited a Rep. Tom Cotton of Arkansas to run for the Senate?

Capacious as this book is, I could have read one twice its size. Mitch McConnell is fascinating figure, and a historic one.

So let’s get to it—the story of Mitch McConnell.

Read the full transcript here.

The topic of this episode is, “What has become of the United States Senate and can it be revived?”

The Senate did not have a good year in 2024. The chamber did not pass a budget resolution, nor did the Senate enact any of the dozen annual spending bills. Its year-end calendar of business listed dozens of pages of bills on matters large and small awaiting votes. Lots of floor time was spent on presidential nominations rather than on debating policy or amending legislation and voting on it.

To help us get a better sense of what’s not going well in the Senate and what might be done to improve its functioning I have with me Professor Anthony J. Madonna. Tony is a professor at the University of Georgia. He is the author of many scholarly articles on Congress, and most recently published a piece for Political Research Quarterly titled, “Interbranch Warfare: Senate Amending Process and Restrictive House Rules.”