What is wrong and right with the House of Representatives? (with Dan Lipinski)

Understanding Congress

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 article for The Atlantic, you state that the House, whether controlled by Democrats or Republicans, now acts as if it were a unicameral legislature in a parliamentary system, rather than acknowledging that it is only one of two legislative chambers in a presidential system. Wow. Say more about that. Why is this happening?

Dan Lipinski:

Well, first of all, it's a shame the listeners can't see video, because I just held up my little Bendable Bill figure, who I did bring to the House floor a few times. The speech that I gave, my wrap-up speech at the end of my time in Congress, I brought Bill out there and I talked about this. The problem that we have right now — you know, Schoolhouse Rock, “I'm Just a Bill,” everyone should see that. It does the basics of how a bill becomes a law. It goes through committee in one chamber, the committee goes to the House floor or the Senate floor, and it has to go over to the other chamber, it passes, and then if it passes that second chamber, it has to go to the president for a signature. Well, it doesn't work quite as smoothly as it shows up in that video now. And it's a shame, because it is supposed to work the way that that video shows. The video shows a legislator having constituents come to him with an idea. And they say, There are ought to be a law. And he says, You're right, there ought to be a law. And he writes up a piece of legislation, and then it goes through the process. And the committee is supposed to — there’s Democrats and Republicans on every committee — they're supposed to debate it, amend it, decide if they want to pass it. Same thing happens on the floor. And it's all portrayed in this video as Democrats and Republicans, both parties, are working on perfecting legislation, deciding if they want to pass it.

Well, unfortunately, right now in the House it is so much controlled by the speaker. Everything — I shouldn't say everything. Every major piece of legislation is controlled out of the speaker's office. And so when I say that the House works like a unicameral parliament, if we had a unicameral parliament, first of all, if we had a parliamentary system, we'd have a prime minister who'd be the executive who was chosen by the members of Parliament. We don't have that. Our country was founded specifically not to be that way. We have a presidential system. The president is chosen separately from the House or the Senate. They do not choose him. We oftentimes have divided government. Divided government is when one party does not control everything. If it’s a unified government, one party controls the House, the Senate, and the presidency. Otherwise, it's a divided government. Over the last 41 years, we have had divided government more than 30 years.

And the Senate filibuster makes it even more difficult. You need 60 votes in the Senate. There's been one year in the past 41 where one party had the majority in the House, had 60 votes in the Senate, and had the presidency. Unfortunately, what the House does, instead of looking at it and saying, Well, in order to get anything done, we need to get the other party on board, at least some members of the other party on board and supportive — instead, what the House does is basically passes legislation only with the votes of members of the majority party. The minority party is completely left out. Now, if a couple members of the minority party want to vote for the legislation when it gets to the House floor, the majority party's happy. But they don't want to rely on — the speaker does not want to rely on votes from the minority party.

So the House passes bills that are crafted by members of its own party, and that usually almost always makes them more extreme than what is mainstream in the country. Maybe it's the middle of that party ideologically, which is either, if the Democrats have the majority, too far to the left, if Republicans have the majority, too far to the right of what mainstream America will support. But the House does this because the speaker’s focused on the next election more than anything else. And trying to pass things out of the House is sort of an ideal for the party. So the House passes these bills and they go to the Senate, and the Senate says, We can't pass that, we cannot get the 60 votes to overcome a filibuster. Even right now with the reconciliation bill, the House passed the bill, the Build Back Better, Biden's agenda. The House passed the bill that, even under reconciliation, where you only need 50 votes in the Senate — and there are 50 Democrats in the Senate — that bill that the House passed cannot pass the Senate. So what usually happens — we'll see what happens with reconciliation. This is what happened with the infrastructure bill. The House passed an infrastructure bill earlier this year. The Senate basically threw that bill in the trash and a bipartisan group of senators got together and said, We have our own infrastructure bill. That's nice you passed yours, but if anything's going to become law, it's going to be ours. This bipartisan group of senators passed the bill in the Senate. It took a few months, the House Democrats finally decided, Okay, we'll swallow that bill because President Biden wants to get this done. And they passed the Senate bill. The House had no input whatsoever in that infrastructure bill.

That is what has happened so often over the last 10 years. Major legislation that becomes law has almost always come out of the Senate, and usually the House has no input whatsoever. So basically, the Senate has become the only house of Congress when it comes to passing major legislation, making laws on major issues. Otherwise, what happens more often is just gridlock. The House and Senate, even when controlled by same party, can't agree. There's a lot of issues that are left to side, immigration being one of the most obvious ones. That's not even being talked about right now, when we have Democrats controlling the House very narrowly, controlling the Senate, and have the White House.

Kevin Kosar:

It's a very peculiar thing that leadership in the House operates under this premise that if they just pass things on party line votes, that somehow this will work out well for them in the next election. I would think that for the most part, what we've seen over the past 30 years is that this is not going to create a lasting majority, because partisan control of the House has pinballed back and forth at a rate that's just unprecedented, since at least the late 19th century. There's not much stability. Voters are not rewarding majorities in the House for this behavior. So this is not working. This doesn't make a whole lot of sense. It prompts the question, all right, what can members of the House do to fix the chamber?

Dan Lipinski:

Well, first of all, it seems that what the strategy has become for both parties is, all right, when we don't have the control of both houses of Congress and the White House, we're just going to work to try to get control of all three branches, both houses, and then get exactly what we want done, get that done. The rest of the time we're going to play defense. And there has been talk this year amongst Democrats that, well, this is our opportunity. We're probably going to lose the House anyway, so let's pass everything we can and try to get as much as we possibly can into law right now, before we lose the majority in the House and then we as Democrats can't get anything done. I think there are some members of Congress, many members of Congress, who feel that way.

There is almost a sense that when there's divided government, nothing gets done and nothing's going to get done, which is really foreign to the way that I always thought about it. I always thought after the election — Every two years there's a federal election and you get all 435 House seats, you get a third of the Senate, every four years it's the presidential election. And people would come to DC after the election and say, Okay, who has majority in the House? Who has the majority in the Senate? Who's the president? What party? And they'd say, Okay, what can we work on over the next year and a half? What can we work on together to try to make things better in this country? And then we'll spend six months campaigning and try to do the best we can for our party in the next election.

Now, every two years after the federal election, everyone comes to DC, takes a look around, sees who has the majority where, who has the White House, and each side says, Well, what can we do in the next election? What can we do in the next two years to get control of everything, or maybe more control of everything? Maybe you have unitary government and say, Well, how can we get even more members, so we don't have to deal with — How do we overcome the filibuster? How do we get enough senators to overcome the filibuster? It's all about the next election, so we can do as a party what we want to do. What we need is members of Congress who come in and say, We are there to get things done. Members of Congress who will do what I said used to be the way things work: Accept this is where we are right now. This is who's in the House, who's in the Senate, who has the control, who's in the White House. And what can we work on together? There has to be an attitude change, that everything is not partisan. Right now everything — more and more I saw over my 16 years in Congress, more issues became partisan that had never been considered partisan before. So we need that.

And in the House, you need to change the rules. Members have given up, a lot of the House has given up a lot of their power to their party leaders, mostly for the speaker. The speaker has some majority rules in the House. That means a speaker controls the legislation to a large extent that gets to the House floor. But even the minority party has given up power to their party leader who says, Okay, you need to let me make the decision so that we can win the next election and get into the majority. And the only way we can do this is working together, and the only way we can work together is if you give me the power.

Kevin Kosar:

I think there are a lot of us who feel that the reforms of the early seventies, which evolved even further over the eighties and nineties, that took away power from committee chairs and slid more of it to the speaker's office — while they were understandable at their time, the long term effect has been to create a lot of negative incentives, as you know all too well. Doing honest oversight, crafting bipartisan legislation within committee, is a lot of work. And the question is, why bother doing all that work if it's not going to go anywhere? If you can’t actually change the law to make programs work better, or make a new law to tackle new problems, it kind of undercuts those incentives.

Now, I want to follow up. You mentioned the importance of changing the rules. Listeners may recall that every two years, the House of Representatives is kind of reborn. And when it's reborn, it has to readopt rules. And that, as you and others have shown, is an opportunity. I wonder if you could just educate readers a little bit about that?

Dan Lipinski:

Well, the first day that the House is in session every two years after the election, the new Congress comes in and has to adopt rules for how the body's going to operate. Each party caucus also — Democrats call it a caucus in the House, Republicans call it a conference — each party also adopts rules for how their party is going to operate. Now, back in 2018, I was a member of the House Problem Solvers Caucus, which is a bipartisan group of members evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats in the House. In the summer of 2018, we said, There's going to be a new speaker coming in, no matter what. Republicans were in the majority, Paul Ryan was the House speaker, he said he was stepping down. So we knew there was going to be a new speaker, and we thought, this is an opportunity to say, Here, these are rules changes that we want to open up the process, to give committees more power, to give individual members more power to legislate. And so the election comes, Democrats took the majority in the House. So a new speaker has to be elected as they do every two years, but this is someone coming in that wasn't speaker in the last Congress. So Nancy Pelosi's the Democratic nominee. And there was a group of us, eight or nine of us, who said, Okay, we're not going to vote for Nancy Pelosi for speaker unless she agrees to change some of the rules and give more power to the committees and individual members. The problem is, when you have someone who's already a leader (Nancy Pelosi had been speaker; after Democrats lost the majority, she remained as minority leader), there was a real — It's difficult to take power away from a leader, because you fear reprisal. I'll be honest, there was a fear that if anyone went to Nancy Pelosi and said, I'm not going to vote for you unless you change the rules and give up some of your power, that that's going to be held against them. And so we wound up getting a few small rule changes that were made. Nothing near what we had been asking for, nothing near what I had wanted. But we were able to get a few rules changes.

But that's what's going to have to happen. You go back in history, the revolt against Speaker Cannon, and we're talking about a century ago — Members are going to have to say, Well, wait a minute. We want to have more power. We don't want the speaker controlling everything. Unfortunately, there are fewer and fewer members of the House, at least, who know, who remember, who have been there when they actually legislated. There are a lot of people who run for Congress now who have no interest in being a legislator. You see everything that's going on. What gets all the attention? The tweets get a whole lot more attention [than] anything that gets passed. So we need to have legislators, and members who want to be legislators, and members who say, Hey, I'm here to represent my constituents before I represent my party. It's not all about the party. I'm a loyal party member, but my constituents elected me and I'm here to represent them. And that's what Madison, when the Constitution was written — that was the intention. He believed, the framers of the Constitution believed, that was what was necessary to have a good government and a government that people accepted as legitimate. They saw that they had representatives who were actually voicing their constituents’ opinions, not just the party agenda. I think we need to figure out how we're going to get back to that.

Kevin Kosar:

Absolutely, absolutely. Changing the rules of the House is not easy. It takes individual courage, the ability to, as you say, overcome the fear of reprisal. It's an exercise in overcoming a collective action problem. And it also requires legislators who are sufficiently in the know, who can see a possibility beyond the sort of bleak partisan landscape that presently exists.

Dan Lipinski, former legislator and a scholar of Congress. Thank you so much for sharing your wisdom and insights.

Dan Lipinski:

It's good to be with you, Kevin.

Kevin Kosar:

Thank you for listening to Understanding Congress, a podcast of the American Enterprise Institute. This program was produced by Elayne Allen and hosted by Kevin Kosar. You can subscribe to Understanding Congress via Stitcher, iTunes, Google Podcasts, and TuneIn. We hope you will share this...