EP. 11 — FIXING THE PEOPLE’S HOUSE

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This episode has been updated with additional information.

Weston Wamp: I’m Weston Wamp, and this is Swamp Stories, brought to you by Issue One.

Woman #1: Americans are also not too happy with Congress.

Man #1: A new Gallup poll shows confidence in Congress is at an all time low.

Man #2: Lawmakers get only 10% approval, that is down three points from last year.

Woman #2: 13% of Americans approve of Congress — period.

Weston Wamp: In recent years congressional approval ratings have fallen below used car salesmen. Nickelback even took a turn outpolling Congress.

And this is the result of bitter partisanship. Politics driving policy. Governing one election cycle at a time. The ability to compromise is considered a weakness, instead of a strength. And for all of this, both parties are to blame.

Behind-the-scenes Congress has grown dysfunctional in hundreds of small ways. Many of them are unseen by voters. And no one knows it better than members of Congress themselves — they complain about a chaotic schedule, bad technology, weak committees, the lack of camaraderie and of course, the nonsensical budget process.

Think of Congress like a high performance engine — originally engineered by the greatest minds of their day — the American founding fathers. It’s gotten a few tuneups over two centuries, but it hasn’t had a bit of maintenance in decades. And now, the engine barely works at all.

To many members of Congress the problems that plague Congress are equally real and hopelessly complex. 

Bruce Patton: And that of course is one of the standard indicators of a systemic problem is that the people in the system are unhappy and unhappy with how it's working, but don't know how to change it at least as individual change agents.

Weston Wamp: That’s Bruce Patton, Bruce helped pioneer the teaching of negotiation at Harvard. It’s not an exaggeration to say he’s been party to some of the most intense negotiations in modern world history — including ending apartheid in South Africa, the Iranian hostage crisis, and the Camp David Accords — but none of them could have fully prepared him for deciding to jump into the swamp that is Washington, DC.

This is Episode 11 — Fixing the People’s House.

Weston Wamp: Over the course of ten episodes we’ve exposed some of the swampiest aspects of Washington. And we’ve tried to show you the underbelly of Congress. But this episode is a little different because it's about part of the swamp changing for the better, a truly positive development amid plenty of dysfunction. It’s a story of bipartisan cooperation that is increasingly rare these days.

Bruce Patton: One of the things that I wanted to do if I had more free time was try to apply what we learned about changing systems to what I believe is the most complicated and one of the most dysfunctional organizational systems that we have right now, which is our federal government and particularly Congress, which is not living up to the ideals and the needs that we as the people have and even that members of Congress desperately would like to fulfill.

Weston Wamp: Bruce’s involvement with Congress came after a private citizen, J.B. Lyon, a Boston entrepreneur and Issue One board member, did what entrepreneurs do — he decided to take matters into his own hands and started the Rebuild Congress Initiative, or RCI, — after years of his own frustration with how business in Washington works. 

J.B. Lyon: I was attending an Issue One event where Issue One had pulled together 200 former members of Congress and some governors from the right and left were equally split, and had helped to launch basically a group within Congress of half Republicans, half Democrats and they had about 30 or so members. And I thought all of that combined with where we were politically, that Donald Trump had just been elected and part of his appeal was drain the swamp. And it just felt like, to me, we had the conditions right to do something big.

Bruce Patton: I think dealing with the US Congress and the congressional system is by far the most complicated organizational intervention imaginable. There are more parties involved by far than in a place like South Africa. And while there is a strong shared sense of dissatisfaction. If you compare it to South Africa or the Iranian hostage conflict, there's no strong immediate sense of shared fear. I mean in South Africa, all of the parties wanted to avoid a civil war and they knew that was potentially on the horizon. Iran and the US wanted to avoid a full scale military conflict, they still do. That helps a lot.

Getting people to see the urgency and the need to do things that will be costly or risky for them politically or involve taking a risk because there's some unknowns. That's always a hard thing for politicians to do. And it's harder when the potential downside of non-action is less clear.

Weston Wamp: So RCI decided to go hear directly from members of Congress to see what the members themselves thought was making Congress so dysfunctional and what they thought needed to be fixed.

Weston Wamp: We’ll be right back.

Weston Wamp: Alright, let’s get back to it.

J.B. Lyon: Yeah, part of that process collecting ideas was working with outside groups from the right and left. There were so many different groups involved helping to inform the conversations that the members of Congress were having because there's a whole world of groups that have been working on this for years thinking about how to better improve this institution. It was a mixture of bringing the ideas those groups had, and ideas the members had and mixing them all into that process that Bruce just described.

Weston Wamp: You see, since the dawn of our republic, Congress has had a tool in its toolbox for challenges that don’t fit into the work of a standing committee — or one of the permanent committees in Congress. Betsy Hawkings is one of those who believed action was needed after seeing the decay of the the first branch of government first hand. 

Betsy Wright Hawkings: I worked on the Hill for 25 years. In that time, I was chief of staff to four members.

Weston Wamp: After leaving the Hill, Betsy led the governance portfolio at the Democracy Fund, where she was seeing different efforts pushing in the same direction.

Betsy Wright Hawkings: Congress has historically, every 20-25 years, at least for the last century, established a select committee to look at how it operates and how it could operate better. After I left the Hill, and I was building the portfolio of Democracy Fund, I was also still in touch with a number of friends who were former chiefs, former staff directors, former members of Congress who were now on the outside. The Congressional Institute had a group that got together from time to time and actually made recommendations on ways that Congress could and should work better. And that regular coffee meeting turned into a series of recommendations at the end of 2014 that somehow found its way across my desk. I said “Hey why don’t you guys just come and use the offices at Democracy Fund to get together for coffee.” So there was a group that came in February of 2015, again former leadership staff and members, who were just concerned about the way the institution was not working particularly well. 

Weston Wamp: By 2016, the dysfunction in Congress was reaching a boiling point. The Republican Speaker of the House had voluntarily resigned and his successor Paul Ryan was having all kinds of trouble managing the House Republicans. And there were growing grumbles about the congressional leaders in both parties in both the House and the Senate.  

Longtime congressional experts Norm Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute and Tom Mann of the Brookings Institution had by then written a few books about the broken politics in Washington, and groups from the left and right were increasingly concerned about how Congress was failing to function.

It was in that atmosphere that the group Betsy referenced, the Republican-leaning Congressional Institute group led by Mark Strand, and R Street’s Legislative Capacity Working Group led by Kevin Kosar, started putting out the idea of a select committee. Such a committee would give members the opportunity to raise their concerns, create buy-in for reform, and have the opportunity to be heard. Those conversations, which grew to include the Bipartisan Policy Center, resulted in the introduction of a bill by Democrat Dan Lipinski and Republican Darin LaHood, both from Illinois, to create such a select committee. To gain more traction for the idea, the Congressional Institute hosted member and staff retreats to get the idea socialized.

At the same time and independent of the conversations being led by the Congressional Institute, a similar idea was percolating among good government groups. In early 2016, several veteran congress watchers joined together on a letter to the joint congressional leadership urging the creation of a joint select committee to address congressional dysfunction. Joining Ornstein and Mann — the folks who literally wrote the book on congressional dysfunction — were Kevin Kosar along with Lee Drutman of the New America Foundation and Meredith McGehee, then with the Campaign Legal Center and now with Issue One.

By the fall of 2018, with an assist from Betsy, the interest in fixing Congress had intensified and grown with more than 20 groups and congressional experts convening regularly to talk about how to get Congress to act on its own dysfunctions. By the time RCI — which is a project of Issue One — began doing one-on-one meetings, and convening groups of members, the demand inside and outside of Congress for reform had grown into a roar, especially among rank and file members of the House. 

Several efforts ended up being, let’s say, spiritual forerunners of the Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress. By the fall of 2018, RCI — which is a project of Issue One — had also been doing one-on-one meetings, and convening groups of members, and that process helped bring these different efforts together. It was a sort of spark.

J.B. Lyon: We visited and met with probably around in the first year, 60 plus offices and members of Congress, some portion of that between members and staff. We ended up working with the members and with the group we had worked with and having I guess a couple dozen members from the far right, to the far left. People like Mark Meadows to Hakeem Jeffries all signing on and saying, "These ideas about empowering the institution, empowering the individual, empowering committees, restoring regular order, and ultimately launching a committee," which turned out to be the select committee, "To help fix this place is a good idea." And so those members signed on and what we experienced was that it just seemed to make sense to everybody.

Weston Wamp: In early 2019, the provision to create a bipartisan Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress in the House of Representatives was finally introduced. The vote passed — 418 to 12. And that was thanks to the leadership of both Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy. 

Rep. Derek Kilmer: I remember exactly where I was, it was after the new year 2019, I got a call from the Speaker of the House saying, "Hey, we're going to create this committee in the rules package, how would you feel about hearing it?”

Weston Wamp: After the 2018 election put Democrats in charge of the House again, and Washington Congressman Derek Kilmer was among those that hoped it might be a moment when Congress could finally take a good look at itself in the mirror. Speaker Pelosi recognized his reputation for pursuing bipartisan reform and named him the chair of the Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress.

Now throughout history select committees have been used for everything from the Missouri Compromise to uncovering the Watergate scandal.

The stakes are always high when a select committee is formed. But this select committee was designed to be different — in part because it’s a truly bipartisan process. Six Republicans, six Democrats. One freshman member from each party. And, it takes 8 votes required to move anything forward. 

Weston Wamp: Georgia Republican Tom Graves was appointed by Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy to be the Republican vice chair of the select committee. 

Rep. Derek Kilmer: We had a number of conversations even in 2018 before the election, and frankly that's when a lot of the conversation about reform was really picking up. We would have discussions with members and oftentime the focus was on rules changes, Democrats and Republicans talking about, "Okay, if we were to do some rules updates to have a more inclusive process, to have a more transparent process, what would that look like?"

And as members would have these conversations, inevitably things would come up where we would say, "Well that's not really a rules thing, but it is a thing worth looking at. And we'd say "Let's just put that in a bucket of issues to be dealt with later." And that bucket just kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger.

Weston Wamp: The select committee’s task was huge, and it was initially only given one short year to do it. And its mandate was broad — modernize a 200+ year old institution. With a meager budget, but a huge supporting cast they begin their work in 2019. The pile of issues to solve was huge. The technology congress uses is antiquated, its hiring practices a total mess. And quietly, certainly behind closed doors, most members loathe how rare bipartisanship has become.

Rep. Derek Kilmer: And I give the vice chair of the committee, Tom Graves, a lot of credit. We've really treated this as a partnership where our focus is just on solving problems to make Congress function better on behalf of the American people. And it means we've done some things a bit differently.

Usually when you have a committee, the committee gets its funding and the first thing that happens is you divide by two and Democrats get their half of the money and Republicans get their half of the money. One of the things Tom and I agreed to very early on was, let's not do that. Let's not divide our resources and stick half of our staff in blue jerseys and half of our staff in red jerseys and have them duke it out. Why don't we just hire staff together and have them all put on jerseys that say, "Let's go fix Congress." 

Weston Wamp: South Carolina Congressman William Timmons was picked to be the freshman Republican. 

Rep. William Timmons: Everything that we're talking about really isn't partisan. It's process reforms. We may not agree on how to fix social security, but we agree that there is a dysfunction at its core in Congress and a lot of that is process driven.

Weston Wamp: Having served in the State Senate in South Carolina, Timmons was blown away by the inefficiencies of the Congress.

Rep. William Timmons: We pinball around when we're here. On any given day I probably have 20 to 30 meetings that I'm supposed to be at. A lot of them are overlapping. I have committee hearings. I have subcommittee hearings. It's just very challenging to get anything done when you're just running around all the time. And so I think that's partially driven because we're not here that much. Last year we were here 67 full days. This year we're going to be here 57, nope, 54 full days. We just got to be here more. And what that will do is it will give us more time to work on legislation, to work on building relationships. And I hope it will fix part of the dysfunction.

Weston Wamp: Talk to anyone affiliated with the select committee and there’s a common theme. It’s a bipartisan committee that has not only found a way to agree on some major changes to how Congress works, many of the members, even from opposing parties, actually like each other.

Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon: Will Timmons, he has been a rock star with respect to really digging into what we can do to change our schedule, both so we can be more productive and so that we can better serve our constituents. He has dug into the issue and developed some really compelling arguments for why we need to change things.

Weston Wamp: That was freshman Pennsylvania Democrat Mary Gay Scanlon heaping praise on her fellow select committee member William Timmons. Timmons and Scanlon have little in common, other than being attorneys. Timmons is a conservative small business owner and former prosecutor. Scanlon made a name for herself as a liberal public interest attorney. But both of them have found areas of passion working on the select committee.

Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon: I was doing pro bono work through that corporate law firm and organizing public interest matters. I was part of the management team for the law firm, so I had a lot of exposure and actually served on the diversity committee for the firm, so was very involved with diversifying the workforce. You know, the challenges of having five generations in the workspace at once. How do you make sure that you're staying abreast of current workforce trends, that kind of thing. So I was very interested in serving on the committee to address personnel and staffing issues on the Hill.

Weston Wamp: Issues like staffing draw the ire of Republicans and Democrats alike.

Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon: I have brilliant staffers here, but they tend to be very young because people can't stay on the Hill that long. If they want to buy a car, buy a house, get married, the pay really is low for what these folks can get in the private sector.

Weston Wamp: By private sector, she means K Street, where all the big lobbying shops are located. And more and more, K Street is able to poach the best Hill staffers because the difference in pay is enormous.

Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon: So you end up with very smart individuals working on the Hill, but they lack life experience. How is one of my staffers going to realistically assess economic impact if they haven't had a mortgage, if they can't afford to buy a car, if they're really struggling with student loans?

Weston Wamp: And a lot of staff members are aware of this themselves. As J.B. told me from some of the meetings that he had had with staff on the Hill. 

J.B. Lyon: One moment that I'll never forget, a staff member followed us out of a meeting with a member. You know this was really early, I didn't know how things at all worked on the Hill. And we were standing outside, there were four of us on the team, and he looked at us and was almost in tears and he said, "You've got to help us. This is impossible conditions to do work in. I have a good understanding of about two of the 17 policy areas I'm responsible for. The congressman calls me on the way to make votes saying, ‘What should I do?’ And I don't know. And I ended up having to rely on lobbyists from the outside and have to just trust them and their judgment because they’re ok’d by some other group to advise my member on what to do, and it just feels terrible. I don't want to operate like that and this is not the way it should be run."

Weston Wamp: From the beginning, the select committee has been supported by a passionate cohort of groups — among them the Bipartisan Policy Center, R Street, Democracy Fund Voice, the Congressional Management Foundation, Demand Progress, and RCI and Issue One. Groups with a variety of different interests that found the select committee to be a place where problems might be able to actually be addressed. 

Erin Hustings is with the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials, or NALEO, a group that promotes Latino involvement in public service. Hers was one of countless organizations that saw in the select committee a place where things could change in Washington for the better. 

Erin Hustings: The NALEO Educational Fund has been working for a couple of years to make Congress look more like the rest of the country.

Our primary reason for doing that is because we know that things work better, not only in the corporate world, I think that's accepted wisdom at this point, but also in the legislative world, just like in the nonprofit world. I think in any context that you can name the perspective that having a group of people from different backgrounds brings, produces a better end result.

So the select committee came about at a time when we were already thinking critically about how Congress functions, how it performs its most basic work of putting together a workforce that carries out its mission. And it was gratifying that that resonated so quickly and easily with the select committee.

Weston Wamp: The Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress was preceded by one that was set up by Speaker Paul Ryan to fix Congress’ miserable budget process. Chairman Kilmer was the lead democrat on that committee. It failed to agree on recommendations. And you can tell this committee is cautiously optimistic that it may be able to tackle the elephant in the room that others haven’t.

Rep. Derek Kilmer: The American people are rightfully frustrated by the fact that in recent years you've seen government shutdowns and you saw sequestration, and you see a lot of just unpredictability with regard to the budget and appropriations process. That is certainly bad for taxpayers when you have these continuing resolutions, when you have government shutdowns it's bad for tax payers. It's certainly bad for federal agencies. But we've even seen it be bad for private industry as well.

I would say the area where there's a massive opportunity to have a real impact is looking at the budget and appropriations process.

Rep. William Timmons: I do think that the biggest work that we're going to do is going to be this year. The most important work will be this year. I think that's going to be process reform surrounding budget.

There was a joint committee that came very close to making recommendations last Congress and it fell short on a non-related procedural matter. So if we can restart that process reform, go to the two-year budget and get back to regular order, I think that can help some of our spending challenges. And then the calendar and the schedule and floor votes, those are three parts of the same conversation.

Weston Wamp: To conservatives like Timmons and I, and plenty of other members as well, the prospect of improving the congressional budget process is as important as anything the select committee could hope to pull off.

And what can’t be overstated enough is just how differently things have turned out this time around for this select committee. And that’s because of how it’s worked. 

So far, the select committee has agreed unanimously on 45 recommendations to improve Congress such as making new member orientation more bipartisan to overhauling Congress’ IT department, increasing constituent outreach to citizens, and making Congress more transparent. Some of its proposals are small, but significant — like letting members of Congress digitally add their name as a co-sponsor to a bill.

In November of 2019, the House voted to extend the committee’s work through the end of the 116th Congress.

And, in March of 2020, the House passed a resolution to adopt nearly 30 of their recommendations. 

As you’ve heard, members of the committee are optimistic. They think they might find common ground to fix some of the swampiest aspects of the way Congress does business. 

 Rep. Derek Kilmer: There are going to be areas where Democrats and Republicans disagree, and there are consequences of elections and inevitably majorities will try to advance their priorities. But I think where the American people get justifiably frustrated is when Congress can't even move forward on the things where you see Democrats and Republicans agree with each other. And I think there are some just practical procedural and operational changes that have been recommended by the select committee that could hopefully make some positive change in that regard.

Weston Wamp: On the next episode, we’re going to take a deep dive back into the swamp to take a look at how antiquated lobbying laws have created a shadow industry on Capitol Hill. And we’re going to give you a look behind the scenes at how the sausage is made. In this case, how another duo of Republican and Democrat freshmen congressmen have teamed up together to introduce legislation that could clean up lobbying as we know it.

Thanks for listening to Swamp Stories, presented by Issue One, the country's leading political reform organization that unites Republicans, Democrats, and independents to fix our broken political system. Please subscribe to the podcast and share it with your friends. Even better? Rate and review it on iTunes to help us reach more listeners. You can find out more at swampstories.org. I'm your host, Weston Wamp. A special thank you to executive producer, Ethan Rome, producers Evan Ottenfeld and Sydney Richards, and editor Parker Tant from ParkerPodcasting.com. Swamp Stories was recorded in Tennessee, edited in Texas, and can be found wherever you listen to podcasts.

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