FIXING CONGRESS PT. 3: Senate no longer “the saucer that cools the tea,” so what reforms are needed?
- Rachel Lewis Hillburn
- 3 days ago
- 8 min read
Welcome to Fixing Congress Part 3 with Rachel Lewis Hilburn. Listen or read the first two parts of this interview at FIXING CONGRESS PT. 1: Compromise, collegiality, and the shift to vitriol and FIXING CONGRESS PT. 2: Political power and the media.
Transcript: People get discouraged from making the effort to vote for a number of reasons – but one of the recurring themes is some version of “my vote doesn’t really matter.”
Political efficacy, the belief that you have the ability to influence the way government functions, can weaken in states where districts are heavily gerrymandered.
The feeling that you have any influence can evaporate when you receive a form letter from your Congressional representative instead of a personalized reply.
Wealthy donors funneling money through opaque entities like super PACs and 501(c)4s can help decide elections with their outsized resources.
In this Enconversation, Michael Johnson, co-author of Fixing Congress: Restoring Power to the People, explains some of his ideas for reform to Rachel Lewis Hilburn. As we’ve already explored in earlier segments, and as Michael Johnson lays out in the book, some of the most consequential legislation in American history occurs as a result of bipartisan work.
Here’s that part of our conversation.
Rachel Lewis Hilburn: One of the reforms you propose is expanding the size of the House, which hasn't been done since 1913. Can you just talk a little bit about how that could change what members of the House deal with, how they deal with their constituents?
Michael Johnson: Yeah, I had trouble really warming up to that idea and because there are very strong pros and cons underlying it. But my co-author, Jerry Climer has been very strong and very firm about that, and he kind of convinced me it ought to be in the book as one of the major transformational changes.
What it boils down to is that members of Congress today represent about 760,000 people. Now, if you even think about how difficult it is for them to communicate on a one-to-one level or even community to community level with that kind of constituency, it's just impossible. And going back, I hate to go back to the media, but the fact is you can only communicate with that number of people through the media.
In the early 19th century, members of Congress used to go into the drugstore and the restaurant at home and be able to communicate. I don't know that there's been a member of Congress, particularly a senator, who has been in every county in their district. Certainly there are a large percentage of people that have never met their congressman. So that's the idea behind expanding the House. Not to a huge extent.
You can't go back to those days where you represented just 200,000, but you can cut that number in half by increasing the size of the House. And then what you have to do, parallel to that, is change a lot of the procedures and the manner in which members of Congress participate in the process. You have more coalition-building within the House that way; that takes away some of the influence of the political parties, which I also think is necessary.
RLH: You say it connects members more closely to their districts.
MJ: That's exactly right. Also, a byproduct of that is that members of Congress have less dependence upon extravagant amounts of money in order to buy access to the media and communicate with so many people.
When I was in Congress, when I was on the press side, I used to put together a newsletter with what's going on in Congress, and it was fairly balanced. It was pro-Bob Michel obviously, but it was balanced.
And today…newsletters are like an ad, brochure, something from the local landscaper. “This is absolutely great. This is marvelous. We do this tremendously well, blah, blah.”
It's just purely promotion and it doesn't really educate the consuming public at all. So many of those ways of communicating now as you know – just pure boilerplate and there's nothing personalized about them.
RLH: 1913 was a big year in Washington, D.C.
MJ: It sure was.
RLH: Because before 1913, senators also got their jobs in a different way. They were not directly elected by their constituents. And you are suggesting that we should go back to having them appointed by state legislatures, which really gave me pause when I was reading that at first, but you make an interesting case for it. What is the case for that?
MJ: Well, it is simply that the country was founded on a federalist system where there were shared powers and shared responsibilities between the states and the federal government, and that the states were really the source of political power back then, and a lot of good legislation, a lot of good ideas came out of the states and went up to the federal government.
Now the stream is flowing just in the opposite direction, and the federal government dominates, very much, what happens within the states. And the whole idea of going back to appointed senators is to give them a grounding in their own state rather than make them national figures and subject to the same kind of pressures that members of Congress have – to be communicating and doing business.
The Senate has grown to be more like the House in a lot of respects. It isn't the “saucer that cools the tea” as Washington described it, so it would be healthy for the nation to get back to that. There are innumerable problems with that when the state legislators used to elect their senators or appoint them, sometimes they just refused to do so. A state would be without a senator for a couple years or something. But there's also a lot of good common sense in that whole structure. It should be talked about much more.
RLH: But then I can also look at states that suffer from congressional maps that were created with a great deal of gerrymandering. And there are some states, of course, that have undertaken a nonpartisan process for redistricting, but the state that I'm in, North Carolina, is not one of those states. It's come up for discussion over and over again, but it never really gets very far.
And both Democrats and Republicans are guilty of egregious gerrymandering. So what do you then say to someone in one of those states who doesn't feel represented by their state legislature, because of this process that is, again, extremely partisan? So then this would be another degree of disenfranchising those folks.
MJ: Yeah, very, very good point. Gerrymandering has really put a damper on the idea of democratic self-rule. You're in a situation today where there are dozens of congressional districts where the member doesn't think about winning elections from the district, from the voters of the district. He or she is only worried about a small segment of the population that controls the vote in the primary.
So all they’ve got to do is get nominated or re-nominated in a primary, and their general election is pretty much secured. That's a majority of districts in this country, and much of that is the impact of gerrymandering, of creating districts that are of partisan complexion. The courts have helped in a number of respects, and open primaries, and the changes in how supposedly the apolitical commissions that create districts in some states have helped. There are problems with that too, but gerrymandering is another one of those fundamental transformational changes that need to be made.
RLH: Yes, another reform, quickly, that you bring up – campaign fundraising - changing how that's structured and perhaps even throwing in term limits and restructuring the length of terms.
First of all, having been an insider, help us understand what it's like, what a day is like when a congressman or a senator is engaged in campaign fundraising. And of course for members of Congress, it seems like it's just an endless cycle at this point since the terms are so much shorter than a senatorial term. But what does that mean for that member?
MJ: Oh, it's just outrageous. A member of Congress, because the partisan politics can't take place in a congressional office, they have to go down the street and make phone calls to raise money at one of the partisan entities in both parties, both houses, and they spend so much time sitting at that phone with the call sheets, to people who have contributed before. The science is such now that you can really pinpoint who are more likely targets of fundraising than not. I mean right down to the local address in a local community, and they spend an awful lot of time talking to people across the nation that they are raising money from, more so Senators than House members. But the time consumed in that is just outrageous and takes them away from legislating and the shell game that goes on with campaign fundraising.
Now you see it, now you don't, is it fundraising? Is it partisan or is it a mix of your congressional responsibilities and the partisan system? There are a lot of ethics laws on the books that help control that, but as a lobbyist, I couldn't buy a hamburger for a member of Congress at a lunch, but as a fundraiser, I could go to a luncheon with that same congressman, hand him a check for a thousand dollars, and that was perfectly appropriate.
I mean, come on. That doesn't make any sense at all. So there's so much that needs to be done with campaign finance. And going back to the whole idea of gerrymandering and making representatives more responsible to their states in a constituency is the whole idea that if fundraising costs less, not as much of it is required, then that's going to change the whole dynamic there.
RLH: And also there's been so much exploration of PACs and Super PACs, but can you just briefly lay out the difference between a PAC and a Super PAC and how they wind up taking away power from the people?
MJ: Yeah. Super PACs are a scourge on the system because they don't have the same kind of transparency that a member of Congress's PAC – political action committee – has, where the donors have to be disclosed, how much, what the donor does for a living and those kinds of things. Super PACs are entirely different, and they're usually created by very, very wealthy individuals who supposedly don't contribute directly to a member of Congress, but they accomplish in the same way by criticizing the opponent and setting out positions on issues that are obviously described by the member that they're favoring.
And then you have Leadership PACs that are now created by members of the leadership who have the ability to raise a hell of a lot of money that they then give to their colleagues that they want to make sure get reelected or fund new candidates who have a hard time getting funds. …
Nancy Pelosi was just tremendous at that. She was a great fundraiser; so was Newt Gingrich. Mike Johnson, I think, has raised seven or $8 million in his leadership PAC. So they, again, have distorted the system and made members of Congress less dependent on their constituents for the source of their money.
RLH: When you talk about this, it's so obvious that there are conflicts of interest here, and it's certainly not what the founding fathers had in mind when they wrote about the way this democratic republic should be governed. And yet each time these reforms get mentioned, they get a little airtime and then they go somewhere to die.
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So the responsibility, says Michael Johnson, author of Fixing Congress: Restoring Power to the People, goes back to the people.
In our next Enconversation, we’ll dig into specific ways you can make change. Thanks for watching. For Encore, I’m Rachel Lewis Hilburn.
