This week, Jeremi talks to domestic policy specialist and LBJ School professor, Ruth Ellen Wasem. They discuss how Congress could adapt to a changing political climate, and if it truly represents U.S. voters.
Zachary sets up the interview with his poem, “One Man.”
For more than 25 years, Ruth Ellen Wasem was a domestic policy specialist at the U.S. Library of Congress’ Congressional Research Service. She has testified before Congress about asylum policy, legal immigration trends, human rights, and the push-pull forces on unauthorized migration. Wasem earned master’s and doctoral degrees in history at the University of Michigan, largely funded by the Institute for Social Research. Wasem currently is engaged with a group of international scholars who are researching asylum and the rise of the political right, and she presented research papers focused on the U.S. context in Italy and Belgium over the summer of 2017. She is also writing a book about the legislative drive to end race- and nationality-based immigration. From this research, she has written “The Undertow of Reforming Immigration,” for “A Nation of Immigrants Reconsidered: The U.S. in an Age of Restriction, 1924-1965,” (University of Illinois Press, forthcoming 2018). Other recent publications include “The US Visa Waiver Program: Facilitating Travel and Enhancing Security,” (Chatham House, 2017), “Welfare and Public Benefits” in “American Immigration: An Encyclopedia of Political, Social, and Cultural Change,” 2nd Edition, (M.E. Sharpe, 2014), and “Tackling Unemployment: The Legislative Dynamics of the Employment Act of 1946” (Upjohn Institute Press, 2013).
Guests
Ruth Ellen WasemDomestic Policy Specialist and Professor of Public Policy Practice at the University of Texas at Austin
Hosts
Jeremi SuriProfessor of History at the University of Texas at Austin
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Introduction with many voices: This is Democracy- a podcast that explores the interracial, intergenerational, and intersectional unheard voices living in the world’s most influential democracy.
Jeremi Suri: Welcome to This is Democracy. Our episode today will focus on Congress. One of the most discussed institutions with our midterm election, an institution that is vital to our democracy, and an institution going through major changes. We have with us my colleague and friend Ruth Wasem. Ruth is one of the foremost experts on Congress in the United States today in addition to being a great bubbly person, and a wonderful teacher. Ruth spent about 25 years at the congressional research service. She has taught at many places. Now we are fortunate to have her teaching at the LBJ School at UT. Welcome Ruth.
Ruth Wasem: It’s a pleasure to be here this morning.
Jeremi Suri: It’s nice to have you on. Before we talk to Ruth, we have Zachary’s poem. What’s your poem titled today Zachary?
Zachary Suri: One man.
Jeremi Suri: One man. Okay well let’s hear it.
Zachary Suri: My house where I left so many times only to come home again. My house where I stack my books to the height of the ceiling. My house where I cried into my pillow of the Saturday slaughter at the synagogue. My house where I howled with the stereo songs about sandwiches. Does my house have nobody? My school were I smiled having found the answer. My school were I screamed, banged my head against the bathroom stall. My school were I whimpered beneath the desk as the lights went dark drilling, drilling it into me. My school were I yelled across the deck about the state of the Ukraine. Does my school have nobody? My city where I read from the unfurled scroll the day I became a man. My city where I rolled in the grass under the blue skies. My city where I rolled in the library in awe of all the words written. Where I stood for hours among the vinyl stacks. My city torn by the river into two. Strewn across the city by the bombs that came in the mail. Brought to its knees by having too much water. Exhausted can only have one man. Does the high ceiling no cut through the moonlit sky? Why not sleep facing north while on the western wall’s sun burnt figure? Is the taste of a thousand spills, a layer of dust on the couch not the eternal underpinning of these wood floors? Does the canvas of canvas against aluminum not mark those wind filled lunch hours on the deck? Do I not know the feel of the old hand rail under forceful palms launching one into the air? Is the purple rain serenade every 12:06 p.m. not the soul of my school? Does the ground I walk upon not scream against every indifferent footstep? Do I not hear the whisper of the forgotten and every whine of the interstate? Is the voice of Willie Nelson from the record player not the scripture of the asphalt city I tread? Do I not know my city? Do I live somewhere, some when else?
Jeremi Suri: A lot of interesting references there Zachary. What’s the relationship between your poem and Congress?
Zachary Suri: Well, my poem talks about how unique like the places I see every day are. And my city and my school and my house, and it asks the question “Do we have nobody to represent this?”, and I don’t see that it’s represented in Congress or in other legislative bodies.
Jeremi Suri: The unique features of our city, you don’t see them represented?
Zachary Suri: Yes, yeah.
Jeremi Suri: Well, I think that’s the best spot to turn to Ruth. Ruth, why do so many American’s feel that Congress doesn’t represent them?
Ruth Wasem: Well, let’s begin with the poem. Because, it said in Austin, Texas, and Austin, Texas is a classic example of a community that has a definite identity, and in fact, many communities within it that have identity. And yet it has been hacksawed into a variety of different congressional districts so that the people of Austin do not have a voice in any congressional district. So it’s a very real thing that you’re experiencing Zachary. And it has to do with how our congressional districts are currently apportioned. And it raises important issues about representational government and small r Republican forms of government. When we have congressional districts that are carved up in such a way – and generally they were carved up to maximize incumbency. Now, when some states – when they were controlled by a particular party, one of the parties was much wiser, cleverer, smarter, whatever you want to say, in carving up their jurisdictions so that their candidates, or candidates representing their political philosophy would be more likely to be represented.
Jeremi Suri: Is this a new phenomenon?
Ruth Wasem: Well, gerrymandering was named after Elbridge Gerry from New York State, I think he was.
Jeremi Suri: I think he’s from Massachusetts.
Ruth Wasem: Massachusetts from the early federal period. So it’s not new, but we’ve gotten so intelligent in our use of data and our – the ability to analyze it using computers and all sorts of different things very quickly and efficiently, that it’s not like back in the day when somebody had stacks of paper and election returns and they were trying to draw a map in pencil. Now you can just do it in an instant. And you can come up with algorithms to draw the districts. And so.
Jeremi Suri: Why does Congress do this? I mean people are taught in schools that Congress is legislative, policy making body, that’s designed to represent the people. Why is there such an emphasis on this, and has that emphasis grown in the last 20 to thirty years? Is it just the new technology? Or is it just a greater emphasis on being reelected at all costs?
Ruth Wasem: Well it is interesting, and I don’t know the answer to that, on the whys. I’m sure different people had different motivations. I know in some states there was a desire by both parties to preserve incumbents. They got together. And it didn’t benefit Democrats or Republicans, it benefited incumbency.
Jeremi Suri: A kind of collusion.
Ruth Wasem: Well, I would not have used that word, but yes, I suppose it’s apt. And so there is that bias towards incumbency, and we see it regardless of whether the districts are stacked. Incumbency has always been a benefit – you know something that helps someone get elected. And that’s because they have name recognition, they’ve developed relationships with their constituents, they have powerful friends in lobbying interests. There’s a whole host of ways that this thing works. But how does this play out in terms of the deliberative process of Congress, and has it changed the way things function? And I think that you can see that in places – you know if you look at the difference between districts that are highly competitive, and there are fewer and fewer now, um, those individuals who arguably – and you can look at election returns over time, and we’ve done that and studied it. Looking at districts that are highly competitive, their members are not any less partisan than the ones that aren’t.
Jeremi Suri: Interesting.
Ruth Wasem: Because when you’re, when you’re guaranteed reelection, if the district has been cut to serve you, you can do pretty much what you want to do. So there is an incredible amount of power on the individual member. So I was surprised to see, at least how in the historic — in the data over time that I looked at, competitive seats, that I realized “Well maybe the people in the competitive seats needed their party more, and they ran at a way that reflected, in order to show the distinction between their opponent.”
Jeremi Suri: Although it would seem this year that many, and thankfully there are more competitive districts this year than there were in the last election cycle at least. It would seem that people running in competitive districts now have to appeal to a lot of voters who are neither extreme Republicans nor extreme Democrats.
Ruth Wasem: Yes. Because of the rise in the people who claim they’re independent. They are pulling away from party ID’s, and it’s been an interesting phenomenon because in – there was a time not too many years ago that people who identified as independents leaned conservative. Now, it appears that people who identify as independents are more likely to lean progressive.
Jeremi Suri: Right, right.
Ruth Wasem: And that makes a difference. But at the end of the day, turn out is still quite important.
Jeremi Suri: Yes.
Ruth Wasem: And knowing for members – let’s get back to – you prefaced this question with there are more competitive seats. And one of the reasons, is we have a lot of retirees. A lot of people in Congress are opting out, unprecedented probably. Well, I don’t want to say unprecedented because I haven’t checked, but –
Jeremi Suri: Very rare.
Ruth Wasem: Yes, in modern times it’s highly unusual to have this many number of people retirees.
Jeremi Suri: I think more than 30 Republican incumbents are retiring and not running for reelection
Ruth Wasem: Yes, yes. And so that creates potential.
Jeremi Suri: Sure.
Ruth Wasem: For new people to enter the scene, even within the party, new voices. And it’s made it a lot more exciting. The interesting thing for us to see – in two weeks – oh, no in one week, but we’ll probably not know, even the next day, on some of these races, how they came out, because they’re going to be close. But um, did turnout increase? And that’s something we can look at.
Jeremi Suri: Right.
Ruth Wasem: That’s something we can see. Did these competitive seats gen up interest?
Jeremi Suri: Right.
Ruth Wasem: Among voters.
Jeremi Suri: Right.
Ruth Wasem: And that’ll be very easy to measure.
Jeremi Suri: Yes.
Ruth Wasem: And will that – and this is where it gets even more interesting to me, what will that do for the political legislative process?
Jeremi Suri: Right. And let’s talk about that for a second. Uh, before we talk about where we’re going with the legislative process, where I know you have a lot of insights. Let’s just step back. For the last 20 to 30 years, as someone who follows the day to day in Congress more closely than anyone else I know, Ruth, how has that changed? How have the committee structures changed? Why does Congress look the way it does today, in its operations?
Ruth Wasem: Well beyond what we just talked about, about the apportionment, there was a lot of changes that occurred 20 years ago in the 90’s. Newt Gingrich did a major reorganization
Jeremi Suri: Speaker of the House.
Ruth Wasem: Yes, of – he was the minority leader of the Republicans, and when they were in the minority he was quite the bomb thrower and colorful figure and set up a contract with America that they ran on in 1994, and won. And suddenly a party that had not been in power in a long time was thrust in power. They changed their whole style away from the style of Bob Mitchell of Illinois, who was a Midwestern Republican and always interested in governing and being a player and worked with the Democrats, because he wanted to have influence and an impact, to someone who had not worked with the Democrats, who’d offered a very clear distinction. Gingrich reorganized everything, and one of the things he did was he learned an important lesson from the failure of healthcare and the Clinton’s in the previous Congress, in that the committee chairs were too powerful. So he reorganized in such a way that the committee chairs rotated. They didn’t become – they couldn’t become these fiefdoms –
Jeremi Suri: Interesting.
Ruth Wasem: in the same way that they had for so many years. And to be a committee chair, you had more of a direct relationship with the Speaker.
Jeremi Suri: So that increased the power of the Speaker of the House?
Ruth Wasem: It definitely increased the power of the Speaker, and then going forward, you really saw Speaker Pelosi, Nancy Pelosi when she was Speaker, also using, drawing on that, to be a powerful Speaker who had people in the committee positions who were going to care out the priorities of the party.
Jeremi Suri: I see.
Ruth Wasem: So the independence of the committee chairs was a big change. Another really important change that’s happened over the last 20 years, and I can’t overestimate enough how technology and the way constituents can communicate to their members. I remember, you know with emails. I remember when I first started working, they complained about the faxes coming, that’s F-A-X, by the way.
Jeremi Suri: I think a lot of our listeners don’t even know what a fax machine is.
Ruth Wasem: They don’t. Look it up, you can google it. But before, when people had to sit down, write a letter, put a stamp on it, all -. The whole way the public communicated, the public communicated, the constituents communicated, changed. That meant congressional offices had to change.
Jeremi Suri: Yes.
Ruth Wasem: And they shifted away. Members used to have higher – there were policy areas they were particularly concerned with, they’d hire someone on their staff who had expertise in that. So not just committee staffs, who are supposed to be staff by experts in that topic that the committee has jurisdiction over, but individual members often populated their offices with people who had policy expertise. Well, once you started being inundated with constituent stuff, and having your ability to stay in office hinge on your relationship with constituents, members shifted their staff around, put a lot more people in case work. And case workloads hit the roof. I mean the amount of work that came in through case work, they had to. So they shifted away from kind of seasoned policy staff to people that were just cranking out responses to a flood –
Jeremi Suri: Wow.
Ruth Wasem: of constituent inquiries. And it changed the nature of our congressional office. They had to set up management systems. The kind of person – the title they used to call the AA, the administrative assistant, which was really more of a senior policy person, that job you know. Suddenly it was more of an office manager, and some offices called them office managers, because the whole workload and nature of a congressional office shifted.
Jeremi Suri: What about the relationship among members of Congress? It’s often said Ruth, that in Lyndon B – in Lyndon Johnson’s time, for example right, that members of Congress spent a lot of time together, you know having brunch at Lady Bird’s table on Sunday morning, and things of that sort. Has that changed?
Ruth Wasem: Dramatically. And I’ll use that example of Dan Lungren who was a Congressman from California.
Jeremi Suri: Okay.
Ruth Wasem: He had been a Reagan Republican, elected to Congress in the 80’s and was considered a Reagan Republican, conservative for his time. And um, he lived in a group house with another Republican member and two Democratic members, and that was not uncommon. People – members, you know their family members usually stayed back in the districts, and so they would have – just rent a room in a house.
Jeremi Suri: Sure.
Ruth Wasem: And it was not uncommon to see socializing across party lines. So Lungren, he had been in the 90’s, I believe it was the 90’s, he left to run for office in California. He was attorney general of California, he was there for a while. Well, in the early 2000’s, he came back, he ran again for Congress, and he served a couple of terms, and I remember him commenting on how different it was.
Jeremi Suri: Right, right.
Ruth Wasem: How the civility, the kind of just informal relationships and friendships and time spent together that the milieu had totally changed.
Jeremi Suri: Yeah, and why did that happen?
Ruth Wasem: Well, a couple of things. One was that they moved the work week around.
Jeremi Suri: Okay.
Ruth Wasem: And they wanted a family friendly work week so that members could go home. So they started the work week on Tuesdays through Thursdays, all the votes would happen Tuesdays through Thursdays, and that’s when all the committee business would occur.
Jeremi Suri: Right, so they have more time to raise money.
Ruth Wasem: So they would go back home to be with their families, you know I mean its family friendly, and so the members, they really work hard.
Jeremi Suri: Sure, of course, it’s a tough job.
Ruth Wasem: I mean all day long, breakfast meetings, all day. The rules committee always met at night, almost always. And it was very hard. Well, they didn’t socialize with each other anymore.
Jeremi Suri: Right.
Ruth Wasem: So a lot of the places, and other – you still see, and one of the reasons the senate was seen as staying more congenial was senators usually moved their families, because they’re on six-year terms. So you’d see a lot more bipartisan friendships, relationships across families and stuff with the senators because they were there all the time, and developed these relationships in a way that the house members came — some of them even sleep in their offices.
Jeremi Suri: Yeah, Senator Ben Sasse does that, I believe.
Ruth Wasem: Does he do that too? Yeah, interesting. A former LBJ colleague. So you don’t have the same collegiality that you used to have. Politics has also gotten ugly. I’m not going to say that there hasn’t been a change in – people keep pushing the envelope in saying things, and getting away with it. Whereas before you would have been sanctioned on the floor, for certain things.
Jeremi Suri: Sure, censure was a big deal before, right?
Ruth Wasem: It was a very big deal, and so those – now, we all know there was a time when someone took his cane and caned another person, 150 years ago, or longer ago.
Jeremi Suri: I believe it was the Civil War, the caning of Charles Sumner.
Ruth Wasem: But that was rare, and that’s why we remember it. We haven’t gotten to caning yet, thank God. I must confess, I grew more and more concerned with the demeanor –
Jeremi Suri: Yes, yes.
Ruth Wasem: And the ways members treated each other. It – it’s a concern of mine, that civility, because you’re doing the people’s business.
Jeremi Suri: I think it’s a concern of many voters. And I think especially among younger citizens, who want a Congress, as Zachary was referring to, that’s more representative, that actually deals with important legislative issues like healthcare and gun control and things of that sort. Um, this is no longer acceptable. So maybe we can spend our last five or six minutes drawing on your knowledge and your thoughts, Ruth, on where you see this going. I mean what kinds of changes can we expect, if, as is likely, uh, because of retirements, and because of more competitive districts, if we have a whole new class, maybe like in the early 1970’s, a whole new class of members.
Ruth Wasem: Like the Watergate class, yes.
Jeremi Suri: Yes, a whole new class. And the Watergate class certainly changed Congress with oversight over the intelligence agencies and things of that sort.
Ruth Wasem: And with the committee structure.
Jeremi Suri: Correct, so what can we expect from that historical precedent of the 1970’s for 2019, and 20 after this election?
Ruth Wasem: A lot of it will hinge on how they conduct themselves when they come in.
Jeremi Suri: The new members?
Ruth Wasem: The new members. If they come in highly charged, and still in campaign battle mode, if they don’t shift gears into the deliberative process, then we’ll have more of the same. If, once they’re in Congress, they say “okay, I got elected to get things done and in order to get things done, I’ve got to find enough votes.” And it’s how do we learn how to build coalitions, and craft our policy proposals to get votes among our colleagues. So it’s a blending –
Jeremi Suri: Yes, yes.
Ruth Wasem: Of what is good public policy? What is the best course of action on a particular policy problem? And then – in the course I teach on legislative development, my students have to have three options to address the problem, by now, they’ve already done their three options. Then they do “okay how do I get there? What is the strategy?” And many times, after you – you might have one that you think is the best, but you have two more that are doable, that you’re perfectly fine with, and that’s where you build your compromises and coalitions.
Jeremi Suri: Right, right.
Ruth Wasem: So that you might realize that, you know what the classic is – the perfect, is the enemy of the good?
Jeremi Suri: Correct.
Ruth Wasem: That if you just always hold out for the perfect, nothing happens. And it – and you get bitter.
Jeremi Suri: Right.
Ruth Wasem: But if you can get things done – So I always am hopeful.
Jeremi Suri: Good, me too.
Ruth Wasem: So I’m always an optimist, and I’m willing to say that this new crop, because they’re all new, a lot of them will be.
Jeremi Suri: Of course.
Ruth Wasem: That they will be more – they have things they want to see happen. They’re going to try to get things done. It will be difficult, in an environment where there’s such a divide.
Jeremi Suri: Right.
Ruth Wasem: But um –
Jeremi Suri: I do think there will be a big difference, Ruth, with so many more women in Congress. I mean there are more women running now than ever before.
Ruth Wasem: Yes.
Jeremi Suri: On both sides, particularly on the Democratic side, but also on the Republican side. And if you look at the numbers, it’s quite likely we’ll have far more women in Congress, especially in the house.
Ruth Wasem: Yes.
Jeremi Suri: Do you think that’ll make a difference?
Ruth Wasem: I think, you know I’d like to think it would, as a woman, that women are – bring a different kind of temperament and maybe just more willing to try and get things done, to finish things. Um, certainly the demeanor of women is less pugnacious.
Jeremi Suri: Right.
Ruth Wasem: At least in public, I’m not going to say – so I think it’ll make a difference, I think. And we know Congress is growing more and more diverse. The last Congress was the most diverse we’ve had
Jeremi Suri: Right.
Ruth Wasem: We’re starting to have more religions reflected. Um, and so the extent to which – and we’re going to have more women in leadership roles, because we’ve got a group of women that have been around awhile, that are moving up in the leadership ranks.
Jeremi Suri: Right.
Ruth Wasem: And, so yes, I think the presence of women would make a difference – will make a difference, but I wouldn’t look to it as the sole factor.
Jeremi Suri: Absolutely. No, it’s one of many factors, as you’ve pointed out so well. So maybe the last question I can ask you now, and we can of course continue this discussion after the election, when we have more details. But when the new Speaker of the House calls you, whoever that Speaker is, and asks you, “What should be my top priority in terms of structural reform?” What’s the one thing you’d like to see Congress do to make itself more effective going forward, and to make itself more representative. At least to make people feel like they’re more represented in Congress.
Ruth Wasem: I think getting rid of the Hastert rule.
Jeremi Suri: Okay, explain.
Ruth Wasem: And that was something that the Republicans put in place, that they would not bring a bill to the floor if it didn’t have a majority of support in their own caucus. So a majority of Republicans had to support something before any bill could come to the floor.
Jeremi Suri: This is why gun control has never come to the floor, right?
Ruth Wasem: A lot of things have never. And this was kind of the – what did in Speaker John Boehner, because sometimes to govern, particularly on appropriations and budgets and military and foreign affairs things, you govern from the middle. And the Hastert rule prevented governing from the middle, once the freedom caucus was large enough, and that’s a conservative group that kind of morphed out of the tea party, that won earlier, that they effectively had a veto over anything that could come to the floor. So Congress did not represent, in its own functioning’s, the majority of its own members, because there were many times when moderate Republicans and moderate Democrats agreed on something that the conservative Republicans and the liberal Democrats wouldn’t have. But we could have gotten a lot of things done without that. And it would have represented the majority.
Jeremi Suri: It’s such a good insight, because one would assume that a majoritarian institution would bring things to a vote where you might have 40% of the minority and 60% of the majority agreeing with it, and have enough to pass, but under this procedure, which is a new procedure, right?
Ruth Wasem: Relatively.
Jeremi Suri: Going back two decades, a little less than two decades now, something can’t come to the floor unless the majority party itself has a majority that supports –
Ruth Wasem: Right, so you’re letting a minority rule.
Jeremi Suri: Correct. And it makes things much more partisan. It’s all about whether the majority party agrees as a whole, rather than building a coalition.
Ruth Wasem: And it means there’s no need to reach across the aisle, whereas before that was part of doing it. And you would often see that play out in committee process.
Jeremi Suri: It penalizes reaching across the aisle, as Speaker Boehner did.
Ruth Wasem: We found that out, yeah.
Jeremi Suri: So that’s a case where clearly a new crop of members of Congress could change things very quickly. Most people don’t realize the rules of Congress operate under the rules Congress makes.
Ruth Wasem: Mhm, at the beginning of every Congress.
Jeremi Suri: So Zachary, to close us out today, what do you think of this? I mean as we get into this wonderful discussion with Ruth about the complexities of Congress and the complexities of elections, um, this departs a lot from the way people are taught in civics about Congress. How do young people think about this, and how can we get them more engaged with these issues?
Zachary Suri: Well, I think young people like myself are not willing to compromise as much on certain beliefs, but I do think that they do expect their representatives to work across the aisle, and I don’t think they – that they’re weary of stagnation when nothing happens. And I do think that it’s – and they do believe, even though they don’t always see it happening, and know it’s not always happening, in the sort of textbook view of how civics works. And you can get a majority of moderates to make legislation.
Jeremi Suri: So do you think that your colleagues and friends, do you think you would be more willing to vote for people who are compromisers, and willing to do this kind of work that Ruth is describing?
Ruth Wasem: Well I think yes, but in certain situations, I don’t think that that’s like the main issue of many voters, of younger voters. I think that they want to have someone who agrees with them, but they don’t want to have someone who’s just going to filibuster and filibuster for their entire six years, or two years.
Jeremi Suri: Right, Right. Well, I think that these comments from Ruth and Zachary make it clear that one of the challenges we all face as citizens is finding people whose values and policy preferences we endorse. But people are also willing by temperament and by skill set to work with those who differ. And Congress doesn’t function when it’s all about ideological rigidity, as it’s become. And Ruth has explained why this has become a structural problem. The structures will be changed when we have people in place, trained by Ruth and others, who know how to actually work across the aisle, while still remaining true to their values. I for one am faithful that that’s exactly where young voters are. I think young voters are problem solvers, and have strong values, but they also want to get things done. So please go out and vote, and please help us get things done. And thank you for joining us in our discussion of this is Democracy.
This podcast is produced by the Liberal Arts Development Studio and the College of Liberal Arts at The University of Texas at Austin. The music in this episode was written and recorded by Harrison Lempke, and you can find his music at harrisonlempke.com. Subscribe and stay tuned for a new episode every Thursday, featuring new perspectives on democracy.