First Branch Podcast

New member orientation begins this week for the House and Senate as the recently-elected members of the 120th Congress arrive in town. It’s a fire hose of information for these people fresh off the campaign trail, but they’re also going to be starting to make decisions that will be relevant to their entire term, not the least about party leadership. We talked to perhaps the person in Washington with the most experience about what these members are going through this week — Jen Daulby, the CEO of the Congressional Management Foundation, a nonprofit that provides managerial guidance to congressional offices. Jen worked as a chief of staff in member offices and for the Committee on House Administration, which organizes what’s happening this week. CMF provides a how-to guide to members for setting up their offices called Setting Course, which is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year. Chris Nehls: Hi, this is Chris Nehls, the American Governance Institute. I’m here today with my colleague Daniel Schuman. And hello. And we’re going to be talking to the CEO of the Congressional Management Foundation. Jen Daulby.Jen Daulby: Great to join you both.Nehls: Thanks for coming on, especially this busy, busy week because the members who just won their elections have had an entire, not even full week to, to sleep and celebrate.Daulby: We gave them four whole days!Nehls: Before they had to show up here in Washington, D.C. and start to learn how to do their new jobs. So, I guess maybe six of them are coming back. So hopefully they’ve learned something before, but everybody else, which is probably going to end up being maybe 105, 110, 115, maybe. I’ve seen some people saying that this might be the largest freshman class since the one that included Richard Nixon and John F Kennedy in 1947.Daulby: Yeah. That’s what we had found, that we’re going to be there. The ‘94 numbers with Gingrich and the revolutionNehls: A huge one. This is kind of nuts. So why don’t you just tell us what’s going to be happening this week as the name of her show up?Daulby: They showed up in town yesterday, Chris. So they started to see all the sights from their hotel down in Navy Yard. I do love it though. We drop them off right in front of the Capitol. They walk up the steps. Their first meeting is on the floor. And I think that’s really symbolic to understand the gravity of it all.To back up, I should say, I had the pleasure of being the staff director for the House Administration Committee, so got to be involved in the new member orientation process, so I’ve now seen it from three perspectives. I was a freshman chief of staff, and then I was staff director for House Administration Committee and then now at CMF, so, it’s interesting. No two orientations are the same and no classes are the same, but we can all agree that it is a chaotic process. And I am thinking of all the members and their staff that I’ve talked to over the last few days and how overwhelming the process is. I call it an onboarding, not an orientation because we haven’t really told you what the job is yet. We just told you where to go to vote, and we’re going to tell you when you get to order your curtains in your carpet.Nehls: Well, put on your CHA hat: what is the institution trying to help them figure out first off, here in this first week?Daulby: I always remind everybody that there are 435 small businesses. That’s a feature, not a bug. Member and office autonomy is really important because if we overreach as an institution, then we’re forgetting that a congressional office in Alaska does not work the same as a congressional office in Manhattan. It’s really important that we provide them with an onboarding process, and we give them guardrails, but they’ve got to be the ones to figure out how many legislative correspondents do I want to hire? What’s the CRM I want to use for managing incoming mail? What is my legislative agenda going to be? How do I want to show up as a member? Am I’m a member that is this a statesman type that I’m very focused on the big picture of America. Am I a member that’s only worried about the district? Am I going to be a member that’s very heavy on policy.And CMF’s book that we published for 40 years, actually, has an entire section of what kind of member that you want to be. But the next few days are really about, let’s make sure you understand the ethics rules. They’re no joke, despite some folks pushing the limits of them this year.You know, there was one member yesterday that said they had to look up how much they get paid. Let’s get you on payroll. Let’s get you signed up for health insurance. Let’s get you a physical office. Let’s make sure that at least you know who to go to for what you know, here’s what the sergeant of arms does. Here’s what the Capitol Police does. Here’s what the clerk does. We have to give you a pin. We have to get your signature. We have to get you a picture that is onboarding versus orientation. And that’s a really important piece.So, the role of the institution is how on January 3rd, can you literally get your keys and you don’t get them before and unlock your office and feel like then you have all of the guardrails and all of the infrastructure in place for you to be a member. And then the second part that CMF talks about, what kind of member do you want to be? That’s up to you. And you’ve got to figure out that orientation piece with partners like CMF and other folks. And the House Administration’s job is to do the onboarding for you.Nehls: Great. And what is tell us a little bit more about Setting Course. This has been a guide -- if folks are not familiar with this, is like the 40th anniversary of the or 40th not edition, but 40th year of publication.Daulby: Yeah, we had to be careful with the. Editions because we’ve not updated it exactly every two years. But, 40 years in publication. And we have worked over the last six months, our team has at CMF to have a more updated version. We tried to break down a little bit more in this version. Some of the travel correspondence is changing rapidly. I call it an AI arms race and trying to give a little bit more insight on AI and particularly AI and correspondence, and just update the references that are always made in a book like that.I’m an attorney by training, so I’ve had brevity instilled in me for a long time. And so, we’ve also tried to really condense it and have it be a document that you don’t feel overwhelmed reading. It does read like a manual, even if you just skim the chapters in the takeaways at the end, you’ll be in a better place than you would without it. And it gives us so much pride to be able to distribute it to new members, which is what we’re doing now. It should be in the Senate as we speak. They’re already the books are already in the House, and we’ve sent a lot to members, and it’s on our website for folks to download for free as well.Nehls: That’s cool. So, everybody can see what if they’re curious how their member is going to be thinking about their own persona. They can see you’re suggesting they need to think about it as well.Daulby: Yes. And I hope that CMF is widely known for folks inside the Beltway. Folks like us who are in the democracy space, and it’s known to a lot of universities. I’m so glad I could provide that free publication for them. A lot of students use it in their intro to poli sci classes if they’re going to shadow a member of Congress for a semester. But we’ve tried to continue to share the story of Setting Course so that if you’re thinking about running, then it’s a good resource to read about what the job is. I mean, it’s really the only job manual that exists, was written by someone who ran for Congress, and didn’t win and thought that there needed to be a manual. And I’m really glad she did, because for 40 years, it has been a really important tool for new chiefs and new members. And I think we’re the only game in town right now that is publishing anything like it.… Get full access to First Branch Forecast at firstbranchforecast.substack.com/subscribe

Chris Nehls: Hi, this is Chris Nehls with the American Governance Institute. Thanks for joining us again. I’m here with Professor Jason Roberts at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is one of the co-authors of a great new paper that includes some reform recommendations for the House called Renewing the House of Representatives: How a More Participatory Legislative Process Could Benefit Both Members and Leaders.This was put out by Protect Democracy United and R Street. And Professor Roberts provided some of the historical perspective that is in the paper. You can go over to congressionalrenewal.org to download the paper if you’re interested, and I’ll try to remember to put a link in the, the transcript of this podcast if you’re interested in reading it.But, um, figured we’d take some time today to chat with Professor Roberts about the history of House rules and how we got to the situation we’re in where things are pretty locked down and members are very frustrated. That’s certainly been the case in the past in the House. And it’s important to remember as we go into the next Congress that the rules have changed dramatically over time, and Jason knows a lot about that, so we’ll start there.So thanks for joining me.Jason Roberts: It’s a pleasure to be here.Nehls: You crammed a whole lot of, of context into a, a short section, which is very hard to do. And you did it exceedingly well. So, I appreciate that work. And one of the things that you are trying to get across is that there have been these pendulum swings back and forth between really strong leadership control and decentralization in the history of the House, and that these things have been the result of member frustrations and, the need to set agendas by leadership, and the- these two things have kind of been in tension over time.So why don’t we just start there and talk about how that cycle has worked in congressional history, at least going back to the post-bellum period.Roberts: Yeah, that’s exactly right. I mean, immediately post-bellum, the House was very chaotic, didn’t have a lot of order to it at all. And that really changes under the speakership of Thomas Brackett Reed of Maine. He was at his heart a majoritarian, and he really went to the mat to put a series of majoritarian reforms. He got rid of this thing called the disappearing quorum, where the minority party would be present in the chamber and not voting in order to deny the majority the ability to do business. He ends that and really starts the process of using special rules that we think of today, and just really fundamentally made the House a majority rule institution for the first time.That then carried on under one of his successors, Joseph Cannon of Illinois. Cannon was known as a czar, as was Reed, and Cannon took this even further. He appointed the committees. He was chair of the Rules Committee. He really tried to lead the House like a dictator, and eventually that came back to bite him. A group of Republicans allied with some Democratic friends of theirs and stripped him of many of his powers in the early part of the 20th century.And that was really the last time we had as strong of a central leadership control as we have now. We sort of, muddled through something called the king caucus era, where Democrats tried to rule through their caucus and that didn’t work particularly well. Then most of the 20th century, you have a very divided Democratic majority party between their Southern component and their Northern component, and they just weren’t really interested in, in centralizing power in the leadership because they had such diverse interests.And we really don’t see that pick up again then until the 1970s.Nehls: Great. Yeah. So what, what changes came about in the ‘70s then?Roberts: Well, there’s a couple things going on. A little bit before that, you start to see northern, more liberal Democrats come into the party and say, hey, this, this system’s not working for us. The southerners control all the committees because of the seniority system. They control the Rules Committee. We have a majority in the caucus for things we wanna do, and there’s not really an outlet for us to do this.So, they begin to agitate for change, and you see this, some of this happens in the ‘60s. You see the, the expansion of the rules committee to weaken the power of Judge Smith of Virginia. But then it’s really in the 1970s that this takes off, and when they start voting for committee chairs by secret ballot, and that takes away the strong grip of seniority and really starts to get to make sure that the people in leadership in the party are gonna have to be responsive to what a majority of the caucus wants.Nehls: Actually, let, let me just back up, because you have these great graphs in the piece where you talk about the committee era what folks have been calling the textbook Congress in, in political science. And you look at it, and it’s much more productive in terms of passing bills. It’s always a kind of a tricky metric if the number of bills equals productivity. And we can bicker about that another day. But you’ve got a tremendous amount of bills being passed in the, in the ‘40s and ‘50s and ‘60s. And then it kind of reverses itself later on, and the bills get longer and more complicated in other areas. But, they’re pretty short in the committee era.So let’s just talk about how I think I got a little ahead of ourselves. What were some of the strengths of that committee-driven system in terms of what we would think of as a productive Congress or an active Congress?Roberts: Well, the committees had real power. They could report legislation out in their area of expertise. Also, the seniority system really incentivized people to become experts. Once you got on a committee, you could stay there indefinitely. It was up to you to leave or not. There were no term limits like we see today. And so it was predictable that you could move up just by staying around, and if you knew you were gonna be on a committee for the long haul and you were gonna have influence in that area, becoming an expert in that area made a lot of sense.And so members could say, hey, I’m gonna learn a lot about this policy area and try to make a difference here.It also distributed the workload across these committees. Part of the problem today is everything tries to run through the leadership, and there’s just not enough capacity in the leadership to handle the entire policy agenda. When it was more distributed, it was just a, a, a just a more efficient way of, of managing the flow of legislation.Nehls: Right. We always have the, the worry that- in the lack of capacity, you get outside groups or lobbyists basically coming in and, and helping out, providing the kind of auxiliary capacity. Do you think that bears out in terms of the, the current situation?Roberts: Yes. I mean, you, you sometimes hear lobbyists say that it’s hard to go talk to people on the Hill because they don’t know what’s going on. They know more than the people they’re trying to lobby. So there’s just not the incentives today for members to develop that deep expertise that there was in the seniority system.Committee chairs rotate every few years. I can understand the argument for that, but it really disincentivizes the development of long-term expertise.Nehls: Yeah. we’ve talked about this on the podcast before about you have the tension within the liberal and conservative wings of the Democratic Party in the the ‘60s over civil rights and other kinds of economic rights issues. And you end up, with the liberal majority of the Democratic caucus deposing the conservatives and then changing how the speakership is kind of oriented.This is something that you’ve written about before academically: what’s been going on since the mid, the early ‘70s in terms of how the minority’s been able to respond to this regime.Roberts: Yeah, so there’s really two parts of this. There’s what the majority party D… Get full access to First Branch Forecast at firstbranchforecast.substack.com/subscribe

Daniel and I chatted with Catholic University’s Matthew Green, who’s written on party leadership selection among a host of other congressional topics, on what will happen between the election and the start of the 120th Congress. This transcript is AI-generated and has been lightly edited by me. - CNChris Nehls: Hi, this is Chris Nehls of the American Governance Institute here with Daniel Schuman and our guest, Matt Green, a professor at Catholic University of America. We’re going to talk about some of the stuff that’ll be coming up between the election and the next Congress. It’s actually a pretty busy time for members, particularly if the majority flips to figure out who are going to be their leaders in the next Congress and get that all arranged. And Professor Green is one of the experts on that topic. So we’re going to talk about that and some other stuff about the organization in the next Congress. So thanks for coming on.Matt Green: Thanks for having me.Nehls: Sure thing. So let’s just kind of start high level when we have an election and we have an outcome for the midterms, the parties are going to get together ahead of time because they have a lot to do to organize the next Congress, and the first thing on their agenda is usually to pick their next leadership class. Let’s just talk about how that works. And just the mechanics.Green: Sure. There’s this period between the November elections and January when the next Congress officially meets. During that period, the parties – both parties in both the House and Senate have some big decisions to make. So one of them, as you said, is choosing their leaders. We’ll talk more about that in a minute. They do also have the opportunity to revise their own internal rules.So each party has its own internal rules. And that can govern things like how committee assignments are decided within the party. It can determine disciplinary action if a party member is not doing what they’re supposed to do, and so forth, that doesn’t get a whole lot of attention, but that can be pretty significant.So there’s the writing, the rules, possibly rewriting or revising the party’s rules and then choosing leaders. So each party in each chamber has a set of leaders. So in the Senate, for example, each party has a floor leader. Majority is a majority leader, minority has a minority leader. They also have their whips in the House. Similar situation with one important difference I’ll talk about in a second.And so the parties first meet internally to decide who that leader is going to be. That selection is usually pro forma because most leaders are incumbents and no one challenges them or whoever’s running, just no one else wants the job for whatever reason. And so it’s by acclamation. But occasionally these races can be contested within the party. And so there’s a lot of politicking that goes on.And then you have this vote, and we can talk more about the mechanics of the vote, if you like. And the big difference here is the House versus the Senate, because in the Senate, each party picks their leader and the majority party has a majority leader, and then you win by majority, vote in both parties in each chamber and then the Senate. That’s the majority leader. So Chuck Schumer, who’s the Senate majority leader, was chosen by Democrats. And then that’s the last vote.But in the House, you also have this speaker of the House position, which is subject to a vote by the full House on the House floor. So when each party is choosing their top leader, they’re also choosing their nominee for speaker. And then that nominee is formally nominated on the House floor on the first day that the House meets. And then you have an election again, this usually up until about ten years ago, where everyone votes with their party and whoever has more seats, that’s going to be the speaker. But as we saw with Kevin McCarthy, we learned that’s not always the case. And it can get quite complicated. But that is the one big difference in terms of leadership selection, I’d say that really stands out is that the House chooses its speaker. So you have this vote on the full House for the top leader, whereas the Senate, you don’t have that election take place.Nehls: Great, great. Daniel. Go ahead.Daniel Schuman: I was going to say that sometimes, as we saw, it’s a point of leverage, but we also saw it’s not just about picking who gets to be speaker, right? It’s also about what the speaker can do. And sometimes whether they can continue on. We saw with Speaker Pelosi when she was getting ready to run for her 97th term as speaker. Sorry, her, I think her third term as speaker. The sorry humor doesn’t always translate well.Nehls: They’re laughing at home. Don’t worry.Schuman: Yeah. I hope so. The conservative Democrats tried to put in place term limits for her saying that if you wanted to return, I think you need a three quarters vote. Can you talk about the pressure that may or may not be exerted around trying to either control who gets to serve in that role or to influence the direction of the caucus or the conference during the upcoming two years as they’re figuring out who gets to ascend or to retain these lofty positions.Green: Certainly. Until recent years, this election for speaker, in particular in the House again, was pretty much pro forma. You had, particularly the Democrats, who had a leadership ladder. So if there was a vacancy, whoever’s next up like the majority leader would become the nominee for speaker, the whip would become majority leader, etc.. So there weren’t a lot of attempts to kind of use this vote as leverage occasionally behind the scenes. There’d be some talk about, well, tip O’Neill, who was speaker in the 1970s and 80s some conservative Democrats would say, we’re not so sure about you, but it was pretty much squelched because the norm was you vote for your nominee on the floor, and there wasn’t really an alternative candidate that wasn’t really the opportunity to try to exert influence these elections.Now, that started to change after the 1994 election, especially Newt Gingrich. Republicans got the majority and Republicans, after the 1996 election who were unhappy with Gingrich, threatened to oust him altogether in what’s called a what’s colloquially known as a motion to vacate, but is really a privileged, privileged resolution to vacate. That kind of opened a door for these elections, for speaker to no longer be considered automatic and that you have to vote with your party. And when that door was opened, it was an opportunity for factions within each party or just disgruntled individual members to say, well, I’m not necessarily going to vote for our party’s nominee for speaker on the floor unless I get what I want.So as you mentioned with Pelosi, after the 2018 midterm elections, she was the minority leader. She’d been speaker before. It seemed like that’s going to be the next speaker. But she had a lot of Democrats who had either wanted some leverage or they had promised on the campaign trail not to vote for Pelosi. Because if one thing is true about congressional politics, it’s as soon as you become a leader, you become unpopular. And so there was a series of meetings with Pelosi. Now, what she did do, and yes, some of them were saying, we want term limits, we want changes to the rules, etc. so she basically built a paper that I wrote with Doug Harris at Loyola Maryland, how Pelosi did this. So she met with these individual factions and basically cobbled together a majority that would vote for her on the floor for speaker. And some of it was sort of individual side deals. Okay, I’ll put you on the subcommittee or I’ll give you this special trip or something like that. Nothing really huge about changing the rules. There was talk about getting her out, like suggesting that she just this would be her last term. She would not commit to that, but she sort of implied that she, her, she wouldn’t be there forever. She found a way to kind o… Get full access to First Branch Forecast at firstbranchforecast.substack.com/subscribe

For this episode, Daniel and I discussed the little-known but important set of rules that govern how Democrats and Republicans how to operate as caucuses within the House of Representatives. These rules determine how members are selected to committees, how leadership has to treat legislation, various punishments for misconduct and falling out of line, and a host of other things the parties need to decide on to work as a single unit. The Democrats keep theirs secret.The caucuses typically revisit caucus rules at the start of every Congress. With the House majority potentially flipping in November, adopting caucus rules will be important for how the Democratic caucus decides how to share power and what potential the rank and file will have to impact the chamber. Members arriving in Washington after the election, we explain, should be thinking not only about the rules that govern the House, but govern themselves as party members. Chris Nehls: Hi, this is Chris Nehls with the American Governance Institute. Welcome to another episode of the First Branch Podcast. This time around, we decided to keep it local. I was thinking of a conversation to have with someone about caucus rules, and it turned out that the person that probably knows the most about them is Daniel Schuman, who is nearby and easy to contact. So here we are. We’re going to have a conversation about What the caucus rules are, how they relate to the chamber rules in the house and why you should care about them. So thank you, Daniel, for taking the time.Daniel Schuman: Thank you for having me on my show. Nehls: It’s the nightmare scenario. Two of us talking to each other.At least it’s two of us because it could be even worse, right? That’s just be one.Schuman: That’s true. It could be just be one. There’s a word for that. It’s called radio. Nehls: Yeah, monologues are probably not the thing that we need to be promoting. But yeah. So each Congress, the parties get together and write their own rules in the House. And they’re usually held close. And by hook or crook, you’ve been able to get a copy usually of what took you some time. But why don’t you talk about what these things are and why the caucuses go through this process.Schuman: Thank you for the question. As regular listeners of this podcast know, there are lots of different rules that relate to the legislative branch. Of course, there’s rules that come from the Constitution, the House of Representatives every two years, usually, but not always on the first day of the new Congress will adopt rules that governs its operations.But in the 20th century, the congressional parties took on some new and different roles, and some of the authority or some of the mechanisms for governing the operations of members in the chamber happened in the caucus rules and not in the chamber rules. And this often flies below the radar, but it really controls a lot of how things work.Nehls: And just to clarify, the caucuses, it’s basically everybody that’s of a party in the House. It’s not the specific caucuses, we’re talking about the entire body of Democrats or Republicans.Schuman: Yeah, so of course, everything is lingo and Democrats and Republicans can’t even agree on what to call their thing. So the Democrats have a Democratic caucus... C-A-U-C-U-S, if you’re hearing me otherwise, that’s not what I’m saying. For Republicans, they have a conference. And basically, this means that the people that are affiliated with those parties that the party recognizes as being members of that party. You don’t have to be a member of the Democratic caucus or the Republican conference, but since one of the things that these rules govern as it relates to the operations of the chamber is who gets to sit on committees, in the modern era, if you’re not a member of the caucus or the conference, then you don’t get a committee assignment, which is no bueno if you’re actually trying to do stuff. So even if you’re an independent, you probably have to say I’m affiliating with someone.So the Constitution says that you need to have a clerk of the House. The chamber rules talk about the election methods. But then if the Democrats have a majority, they actually have a process by which they pick the people who would serve in those roles. They decided among themselves.And then they turn around and they’re like, all right, hey, everybody, we’re going to vote. It’s called the fait accompli. Who’s ready? And that’s how it works for a lot of things. So when you wonder, like, how do Republicans pick Who’s going to serve on what committee or be the committee chair? Their party rules govern that.So, they have term limits for committee chairs, which Democrats don’t have. That is not a function of the chamber rules, although it could be. It is a function of their party rules.Nehls: So, let’s dig in a little bit. You mentioned committees. First off, let’s just start with who gets to determine what these caucus rules are? Does the caucus all get together and have a big Caucus conference and throw out a whole bunch of ideas and then they write them up or how do they? I’m pretty sure that’s not how that happens. How do they do that? Schuman: That is not how that happens. Maybe at times. So, the party became more relevant, certainly on the Democratic side, when there was a significant effort to overthrow the Democratic committee chairs. Back in the days of old, if once you were on a committee, you got to stay on the committee by virtue of a seniority, not by virtue of being appointed. Not by virtue of election process where you could not be appointed, right? That basically always happened. And you ended up with a whole bunch of very conservative Democrats running both the policy committees and also the rules committee, having significant control there. And that was against the interest of the majority of the party.Nehls: And we’re talking about the 50s and 60s.Schuman: Yeah, that’s right. So they got together, they formed a working group called the Democratic Study Group. And they got together and they tried to revise these systems. In 1961, they expanded expanded the Rules Committee. And in later on, like early 1970s, they moved the locus of power away from the committee chairs that were very powerful — so powerful that they would make you come in for a vote and you wouldn’t know what you were voting on, right? They were just extraordinarily powerful to move that power to the party — So they create a mechanism by which people will get reappointed as their party’s leader on the committee or members of the committee, but also mechanisms by which you could not return necessarily in that role. And while they give a lot of deference to seniority, they don’t always defer to seniority. And just if you’re a Democratic member of a committee and they really don’t like you or a Republican member of a committee, they will kick you off. They will find ways to punish you and the party will vote to punish you. And then they bring it to the fore and the floor vote reifies that. One weird thing is the detente between the parties, right? The Democrats will generally defer to the Republican choices for who’s on a committee and vice versa. So, if the Republicans decide to punish someone, the Democrats will be like, cool, and let it happen and vice versa. So there’s a lot of power that is asserted through this mechanism. The writing of the rules, which was your question — See, I remembered it. So in theory, the party members can propose changes in the rules at any time. They have regular caucus meetings. They don’t usually have a quorum at those meetings. Those meetings are also not public, by the way, just for fun. So you can propose rules changes. The Democrats have a committee on caucus rules. I think the Republicans have something similar that is usually chaired by a person who is the right arm of the Speaker, whose job it is to protect the Speaker’s prerogatives, not necessarily to reflect the interests of the membe… Get full access to First Branch Forecast at firstbranchforecast.substack.com/subscribe

For this episode, I spoke with two experts in appropriations law who have worked in and out of government — Cerin Lindgrensavage of Protect Democracy and Christie Wentworth of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington — about White House attempts to appropriate funds as it sees fit, not as Congress has directed, and the legal and political means available for Congress and civil society to push back. Lindgrensavage is counsel at Protect Democracy and previously worked at the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division and for Senator Barbara Boxer. She also clerked at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.Wentworth is a senior policy counsel at CREW and previously served as an attorney at the Government Accountability Office and as counsel for the House Budget Committee. Chris Nehls: Hi, this is Chris Nehls with the American Governance Institute. I’m here with Cerin Lindgrensavage and of Protect Democracy and Christie Wentworth of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. We’ll do our best to put all of that on the title card of this podcast. We’re here to talk today about appropriations and appropriations law and how when Congress approves appropriations, how does the federal government spend it? And what’s been going on in this administration that’s made it kind of unusual. So, thanks for joining me today.Christie Wentworth: Thanks for having us.Cerin Lindgrensavage: Yeah, happy to be here.Nehls: We have 12 appropriations bills a year, theoretically, that Congress approves. Sometimes, it doesn’t get there and does a continuing resolution, but there’s still the money it gets out to the federal agencies to spend. Well, how does that work after these bills move from the president’s desk to the agencies.Wentworth: A great question to start with. I’m going to take us back a second and just emphasize at the top here, because Cerin and I are both very power of the purse friendly individuals in that Congress does have the power of the purse, which is why they are the ones that are in charge of actually figuring out how much money the federal government has to spend. So that’s based in the Constitution. And as you mentioned, Chris, that usually results in 12 different bills appropriating funds for the federal government, including all three branches.After those funds are appropriated, they go through a process called apportionment at OMB. This is a responsibility that Congress gave to the president back in the day because agencies were blowing through their appropriations. They would enter into contracts, they would promise to spend money, and then they’d say, well, Congress, you know, we already said we’re going to spend this stuff. I know that you only gave us $10 and we spent $100, but we’re obligated now, and you have to give us this money. Congress said to the president, do a better job managing these funds and gave the president the responsibility to say, okay, agencies, you’re going to get 25% of your funding in quarter one for salaries and expenses, and then you’ll get another 25% in quarter two and so on and so forth. So, OMB now has that responsibility pursuant to a delegation from the president and they can apportion funds by time. They can apportion funds by program and they can do it through a combination of those two things. The purpose of that is still to make sure that the agencies aren’t spending funds too quickly so that they have to go back to Congress and ask for a deficiency appropriation. So that is the general framework for apportionments.I will say when I worked at GAO, we spent two and a half days teaching appropriations law principles to folks at agencies, so doing this in 2 to 3 minutes is a challenge. But that’s the apportionment process.I’m going to briefly share some of the components that we see in appropriations acts that agencies have to look for when they’re actually spending the funds. And then, Cerin, I’ll kick it to you to talk a little bit about the Impoundment Control Act and how Congress can act to actually claw back some of that money if it agrees with the president that it should. In the appropriations acts, the three things that agencies are looking for are the purpose, time, and amount of the appropriation: So, what they can spend this on, how much they can spend and how long they have to spend it. And there have always been disagreements between Congress and the executive about what exactly falls into each of these buckets, especially with respect to purpose. But those are the three general things that you’re looking for and that the agencies have to comply with when they’re spending these funds. So Cerin, do you want to talk about the Impoundment Control Act?Lindgrensavage: Sure. One thing of interest to know about the apportionment process is that it has at some various points in history been abused. And that’s important because it’s the mechanism that OMB and past presidents have used essentially to rob Congress of its power of the purse to steal some of that power for the president, the White House, in this case, the Office of Management and Budget. If you went back and looked at the hearings in 1972 and three over the Nixon era impoundments, what you will find is actually page after page of accounts where they’ve used the apportionment process in some cases to actually affect delay to what they did at the time, called creating a reserve. And there was a provision in law that was a little bit squishy, a little bit of a choose your own adventure for the president and his budget officers to try and say, oh, well, we’re just creating a reserve for this sort of broad purpose.Nehls: So, what was Nixon actually trying to trying to do there?Lindgrensavage: What he was trying to do was actually say, hey, I don’t want to spend these funds. Congress passed the money, but I don’t want to. And he was trying to just essentially assert his power not to spend the funds.As you can imagine, Congress reacted poorly to this assertion of the executive authority. And the law that they passed was both a remaking of the budget process that really put foundationally in place the fiscal years and steps as we know them today, and also what we call the Impoundment Control Act. That passed in 1974 and essentially said, no, we’re, we’re erasing that provision that made you think that you could just hold on to money for whatever purpose you wish to. And now you have three options: you can defer; you can delay spending the money -- but then you have to tell Congress, and Congress has a chance to tell you not to through a resolution they can pass. You can propose a rescission, but that only goes into effect if Congress passes a law rescinding the appropriations that were previously passed in a law. And the third option is you can spend the money. Those are the three options contemplated by the Impoundment Control Act.Here are some things that are not contemplated in the Impoundment Control Act: unjustified delays for programmatic review -- the entire category of programmatic delay invented in the early ‘70s -- none of that is contemplated in the act. The act contemplates those three options: deferral, rescission, spending the money. It also left three different purposes that OMB can use to establish reserves, but they’re narrower. It’s to provide for contingencies to achieve savings or as specifically provided by law. So if you have a law that you can point to that says, okay, you can hold on this money for these purposes, that’s okay, but it has to be specific in the law. It really did ground and narrow OMB’s ability to screw around with money using the apportionment process or any other process because it doesn’t just bind OMB, it also binds folks at the agency level as well.Nehls: Well, we’ve had a couple of rescissions bills, this Congress and, and there have been some in the past. So how has that how has that worked generally since the passage of the Impoundment Control Act as a congressional to… Get full access to First Branch Forecast at firstbranchforecast.substack.com/subscribe

Daniel interviewed the Foundation for American Innovation fellow James Wallner about how Senate Republicans appoint members to committees. The process is governed by Rule 24 of the Senate standing rules and Rule 5 of the Republican Conference rules, with appointments made through a "Committee on Committees" led by the Republican leader. The discussion covered how committee assignments work at the start of each Congress. They also examined a specific example involving Lindsey Graham's absence from the Budget Committee and Appropriations Committee, where his sister needed to be appointed to replace him. They also discussed how Democrats could potentially use procedural tactics to gain control of committees like Appropriations during this transition period. James noted that while procedural hardball is possible, party leaders typically resist such actions because they prioritize party unity and election strategy over immediate legislative action.The transcript below has been edited for length and clarityDaniel Schuman: I’m here today with James Wallner, and we’re going to talk about how Senate Republicans appoint members of committees. James, thank you for joining me. How do Senate Republicans appoint people to their committees?James Wallner: So there’s a magical, storied mountain, at the top of which are a group of people in robes. They got some chicken bones and there’s a smoldering cauldron. And they just do some chants. And then the smoke rises. And then it’s this person shall be on the committee.No, it’s not far off of that, to be honest with you. It is a very interesting process and it is a very insular and closed process. It’s hard to get a peek into. Right. There’s two kinds of governing authorities here. One is the standing rules of the Senate. Rule 24 governs the appointment of committees. The way this works is that the Senate shall approve a resolution, and that resolution will name the chairman of each committee or a committee, and it will also include the members on that committee.So if we work backwards, you have a committee and it’s got a chairman and members. The way they get there is that the Senate takes action on the Senate floor. They approve a resolution that says, like the Energy Committee. And at the top there’s a chairman, and then there’s the Republican and Democratic members of the Energy Committee underneath that. And once the Senate approves that, those members are now on that committee.The Democratic and Republican parties have different internal party rules that govern that process, and the Republican rules are written down. You can find them online. And rule five of the Senate Republican Conference really spells out that appointment process, where the party, in essence, is making a recommendation to the full Senate, saying, these are the members that we want on these committees.Schuman: The Senate, unlike the House, considers itself a continuing body. So its committees continue on from Congress to Congress. So for the Senate, you have the committee, and then you’re just moving people around from chair to ranking member or moving people on the committee and off the committee. Is that right? Is that what the organizing resolution does?Wallner: Yeah, more or less. Look, the Senate is a continuing body in the sense that only one third of its members are up for election at any given time. Now, in practice, committees in the organizing resolution are going to be populated at the beginning of each Congress. But the reality of the situation is, if you’re on a committee, you’re going to keep that committee for the most part. And the parties have their own rules. They don’t have to follow the seniority process. But for the most part, once you get a committee assignment, not always and not on every committee, but once you get a committee assignment, that’s your committee moving forward.The Republican conference rules spell this out. Rule five says, except as otherwise provided by this rule, once selected and confirmed, no member of any committee shall be deprived of his assignment or his rank on a committee, except by the conference. It just makes a lot of sense that they, in essence, retain their committee seats.Schuman: Let’s talk about what happens at the change of the Congress. How does the Senate put people onto these committees? What needs to be done specifically to make that happen or to move people around if they’re changing committees? The example that I want to get to is Senator Graham passed on July 12th, and his sister was sworn in on the 14th. He was the chair of the Budget Committee. He was a member of other committees, including the Appropriations Committee. So both of those committees now have vacancies. And she’s a new senator, but she doesn’t have any committee assignments. And this has implications for the way the Senate operates. Let’s just start with it’s the start of a new Congress.Wallner: This gets back to how do you populate those committee rosters on either side in either party before you make that recommendation to the full Senate? For all intents and purposes, the Senate is going to approve that, although you can filibuster the resolution.One of my favorite white whales was to filibuster the organizing resolution that populates the committees, but then also divide it. And this is getting farther afield. But you can divide that resolution by that. You can say you can force votes on each individual member, if you want, of each committee, and you can also amend it. Right. And so you can move people around, you can do all kinds of stuff you could do.But working back from that, the Republican conference has what they call, and this is all spelled out in rule five of the conference rules, the process they use to populate their committees or recommend to the full Senate. The Republicans that want to serve on those committees are governed by what they call a committee on committees. And the Committee on Committees has a chairman. The Committee on Committees is, for all intents and purposes, one person working with the Secretary for in this case, the majority, the top kind of floor staffer for the Republican Party. And they basically, within the confines of the conference rules, are going to make these lists, and they’re going to solicit input from the rank and file members. Conference rules say you can retain certain committees over others. They’re going to work within that. Members will come and say, hey, I really want this spot or that spot. And going by seniority, they’ll work through the conference and basically putting people on these different committees.The other thing that makes this a little bit more complicated is that you have what they call committees, and then you’ve got B committees, right? And so the Republicans many years ago decided, I think it started the in 108th Congress maybe, but they said that every Republican senator is going to be given A committee slots in order of seniority. And so your A committees are like your Energy or your Environmental and Public Works committees, Appropriations, like all of those committees. And each committee is going to be given two slots on two different committees in order of seniority, working down the list. Remember, you retain your committee seat, so you’re really just taking the vacancies that happen. And then they’re allowed to retain one B committee.What’s interesting here is that the Republican Party has empowered the Republican leader to basically name half the A committee spots in all of the B committee spots without going through the order of seniority. And so you have this kind of convoluted process. So in this case, Lindsey Graham’s committees, they’re going to the A committee slots are going to be filled by the leader because there’s only one. Right. If you had two the leader would offer one fill one. And then the kind of committee on committee would work through the seniority process to fill the other one. But in this case, that’s not happenin… Get full access to First Branch Forecast at firstbranchforecast.substack.com/subscribe

Daniel Schuman: June 30th marks one year on the job. How are things going?Chief Michael Sullivan: Terrific. This is an incredible organization with an incredible mission, much different than other jobs that I’ve had in major municipal cities. Really focusing on what we do here, which is protecting members, protecting this place, and protecting the legislative process.And that protective mission-- while policing is certainly part of that mission -- security and the protection piece is something that is much stronger than any other place. I would say it’s flip-flopped. I had protective missions in other places; however, it was a small piece of my portfolio. I would argue that protection piece of this place and the members is a much larger piece of the portfolio here at the United States Capitol Police.Schuman: The legislative branch has tremendous security needs and of course you can’t do everything, you can’t focus on everything. Is there something that you’re focusing on right now?Sullivan: There’s a lot of things that I’m focusing on right now. I met with a lot of folks over the last year right after my entry, hearing members’ concerns about safety, the concerning emails, phone calls, and threats that were coming to them directly. And, I can tell you there was deep concern across the entire membership that I talked to directly and had those one-on-ones on how we’re handling those. Being able to have those conversations really made me understand that difference in that policing mission versus what I would call a protection or security mission. It was helpful in instructing some of the areas I needed to make sure that I assessed and focused and did the best we can with the resources that we currently have. That’s been part of what I’ve looked at.I’ve also looked at, making sure -- because this agency made incredible strides since January 6th -- making sure that we have systems in place that embed that progress, that we don’t backslide. We have to make sure that we are always prepared, and a day like that, if it ever comes, that we’re there to meet that day and meet that purpose. I truly believe that we are today, but we’re going to kick the tires and if we’re failing in any way, we’re going to fix it.Schuman: Can I just stay on this for a second? In prior years, with some of your predecessors, there were questions around are you focusing on training, because training was a big issue, particularly [on January 6th] Are you focusing on communications? Are you focusing on particular aspects of member security? There’s a million things that someone in your role, of course, needs to be paying attention to, and you had spoken about the security mission. You gave us a good top level, but is there a particular thing that you’re trying right now to address?Sullivan: I can tell you as the chief of a major organization, I have to focus on all those things at once. Training is a huge issue. Making sure that we have leadership training, embedded in this organization.We have people up in Boston right now at the Senior Management Institute, which is an executive leadership school. I’ll be up there speaking to them and that entire cohort this Friday. That’s incredibly important to me. We’re investing in that. This is a very busy time of year, but we found time to send our senior folks there to get that training.Then we look at how do we embed the training, because it’s different here, right? Every place else I’ve been there’s been a state post that requires and mandates so much training. We don’t have that here, and making sure that we get our folks the training that they need, whether it’s around their critical needs like just something as simple as... and it’s not simple, but screening at the doors. We can’t just ask people to do that without giving them the training.We focused on improving policy, improving training. One of the things that I’ve learned over my time ... When I came up in this profession, you’d make a policy change, sometimes a significant policy change, and it would come across to you at roll call, you would sign for it, and after you signed for it, you were responsible for it. That was the impetus of your training of this many times a very important policy. We need to train our folks and if we make a significant consequential policy change, it needs to be followed up with training.What that training looks like can be many different things depending on what the policy changes are. But policy changes, are great, but they’re only great if they’re actually embedded in the culture, followed up on, and then our people are trained to be able to be held accountable to them.Chris Nehls: I want to go back to … you mentioned the threats that members have been experiencing, staff have been experiencing. We’ve seen the reporting and the information out from the department is there’s 15,000, almost 15,000 of these threats last year. This is up, almost double from just five, six years ago; but it’s hard for us to understand what that all means in terms of context. First, how do you define a threat?Sullivan: When we talk about that 15,000-number, we talk about threat cases. Okay. These are concerning cases. Some of them have a criminal nexus. Some of them, I would say the majority of them, do not -- it’s First Amendment protected speech. But I can tell you, as the executive over this organization, if we did not capture something that is a concerning statement and causes a member’s offices concern, and then that person comes up on the radar again, we don’t see that escalation, that would be a bad thing. So, it’s incredibly important for us to make sure that we do our due diligence on each of these concerning statements, threats that are risen to us, because if an office is reaching out to us and has concerns about it, we should have concerns about it.When I talk about that 15,000, those are 15,000 cases that are threats agents are working and have to manage. Certainly, First Amendment protected activity, that investigation is much different than a full-blown threat investigation where we don’t have somebody identified, where we have to go out and get legal service to be able to identify that person and then we have to engage with the US attorney, whether it’s here locally or somewhere out in the United States, to be able to facilitate a prosecution.As you talk about these cases, we all want to look at prosecution as the bottom line. That’s a tool that we have in the tool belt. It’s certainly something that we want to use when it’s appropriate, but our mission is to keep these members safe. Sometimes keeping members safe means getting them engaged with family that they’re not engaged with right now because of some issue, mental health, so all of a sudden, this person that has been a consistent issue because of some other challenges that they have in their life. Maybe the prosecution isn’t necessarily the right way to go. Many times, if we can do those interventions, we solved a problem and we kept a member safe in the long run, maybe safer than prosecution.With that said, we don’t hesitate to prosecute. We can’t stand for people to make, blatant, outright threats, to our members and to this place and to the people that work here. We’re focused on that and focused on keeping people safe.Nehls: Could you give us a little bit of a sense of how you filter through... It seems like such an enormous amount of work that goes into investigating, as you said, investigating 15,000. How do you manage or filter through what sounds like it might be somebody just calling up randomly who’s mad and yelling at an intern versus things that go higher in a threat matrix? Can you just talk through how the department, works that through?Sullivan: We stood up a protective intelligence operations center. It’s an operation center, so it manages all those operations that are outside the NCR [National Capitol Region] that are going on with members, making sure that we’re focused on and unde… Get full access to First Branch Forecast at firstbranchforecast.substack.com/subscribe

Daniel and I recorded this conversation with Soren Dayton, the Director of American Governance at the Foundation for American Innovation, and James Wallner, non-resident fellow at FAI, about their paper “Rebuilding Congress from Within, How Factions Facilitate Deliberation and Lawmaking.” It posits a view we share that too much of what goes on in Congress now is directed by leadership, to the detriment of the deliberation and negotiation between members that the institution is designed for. Factions, they argue, are one of the few tools currently available to rank-and-file members to restore collective decision-making and fix Congress. We had a wide-ranging conversation about the history of factions, how they operate, and why members of Congress, the philanthropic community, and the public should embrace energetic debate rather than the false goal of finding bipartisan, politically moderate policy solutions.Daniel Schuman: We are here today with Soren Dayton and James Wallner with the Foundation for American Innovation. And we’re here to talk about their new paper, Rebuilding Congress from Within How Factions Facilitate Deliberation and Lawmaking. Thank you both for joining us.James Wallner: Thanks for having us. And can I just say off the top real quick? I really wanted to name it something different. I mean, Soren was like, let’s just go with that. It’s a good name. I was thinking more like, you know, Kong versus Godzilla, you know, rise of the factions or something, spicy to get people in. But, you know, we went with Soren’s title.Schuman: That’s fair. I mean, you could have done the facts on factions, but that would also be kind of a pedestrian approach.Wallner: Or factions of life.Schuman: Oh yeah. You take the good, you take the bad, that kind of thing.Wallner: There’s so many options. Good thing we’re going to have a never ending series of factions papers after this just for the titles.Schuman: Your paper argues that Congress is dysfunctional because the members are not organized to deliberate and legislate in the present environment. James? What do you mean by that?Wallner: Well, I want to take a step back. I think it’s important to maintain a clear focus on agency in this, as you and I have talked about in all of our writings and conversations around town and over the years. It’s important to maintain focus on agency when we say Congress isn’t organized. I think the way to rephrase that, if I’m teaching one of my writing classes and colleges, where it’s active voice, active voice, active voice. And it is that lawmakers are not organizing themselves to facilitate their own participation in the process and to enhance their own ability to deliberate and to impact outcomes. There’s lots of different ways that Congress can organize themselves, but one way is through these things called factions congressional caucuses, intraparty caucuses -- people call them different things -- but they’re in essence, factions, sub-party kind of units. Sometimes they can be cross-party -- not so much in this day and age.We zero in on these in particular, because if you are an opponent of the status quo – and most of the reform throughout Congress’s history has been driven by opponents of the status quo, the outliers, if you will – you’re not going to be able to rely on existing kinds of legislative organization, right? So, congressional committees and the political in the party structure in the House and Senate, because those are set up by winners of the status quo, they’re set up by the people who are the reason why the status quo is the status quo, and so they’re going to be less inclined to kind of rock the boat. They’re not very friendly to the skunks at the garden party or the ants at the picnic. Factions really become important in that scenario.And then when you look at Congress today and the dysfunction that we see in Congress today, and the bipartisan frustration from the far left to the far right, that all seem to be echoing the same sentiment. It’s just astonishing to me that they are not using this tool to the degree that it has been used in the past and that it could be used to enhance their own stated goals.Schuman: So would it be fair to say that Congress is organized, but it’s organized by leadership and it’s not organized by the members? Or is that too much of an overstatement?Wallner: I wrote a piece a long time ago. There was an open letter in the Washington Post and it was by all these former members and it was like, Congress is broken, the Senate is broken. And then they went through and they’re like, it’s not leadership’s fault. Then they’re like, it’s not the committee’s fault. They’re like, it’s not the rank and file fault. I’m like, well, whose fault is it? Is it some guy from Scooby Doo? Earl down the street? You know, he pulls off his mask or some invisible ghost? No, the Senate is dysfunctional, the House is dysfunctional because the members of the House and Senate make it dysfunctional. They make it dysfunctional when they defer to their leaders, when they empower their leaders to run things certain ways. They make it dysfunctional when they continue to acquiesce in that environment. Look, I’m not pretending like there’s not a cost to this, a social cost or political cost, etc.. Of course there is. But I think it’s important to keep really focused on the main point, which is that the members themselves are the ones who are in charge, and they’re the ones who are responsible for the House and the Senate operating the way the House and Senate operate.And they have many, many tools at their disposal to change things. If they don’t like how they are operating or try to change things, they are not victims. They talk about themselves in the third person all the time. If you think about how Congress talks like the bill was passed, I’m like, no, you passed it or your colleagues passed it over your objections. The bill wasn’t passed when we just woke up. Oh my God, did you see that the bill was passed? No, you did this. And so I think it’s important to keep that focus, laser focus on that.This paper, I think, gets into one of those key tools that I think is a kind of a foundational tool. And Soren, I know, shares this thought that allows them to facilitate their own organization, their own cooperation, and then use other tools at their disposal much more effectively.Schuman: Perfect. So let me pick up on that and turn to Soren. You guys are talking about factions. Are there examples of factions in Congress now? What do they look like? What and what do you mean by faction?Soren Dayton: So I think in the House there’s two things. There’s two caucuses that look something like what we have thought of historically as a faction. They are the Freedom Caucus and the Progressive Caucus. The Republican study committee is almost just an information machine. They’re not actually a coordination machine.To go back to the Progressive Caucus and the Freedom Caucus, they both have things like rules about how they should vote together. They have membership requirements. They have regular meetings where it is expected of the members that they will coordinate on activities. And, I think it’s very helpful to read the books of someone like Ruth Bloch Rubin, who goes into a key element of successful factions is that internal rule making process, that internal coordination process that binds people, that requires them to act in certain ways. There are other things, like I think the New Dems and the Republican Study Committee are these huge monstrosities that are essentially a branding vehicle in some cases, or the Republican Study Committee, if you’re a Republican member or a Republican staffer, you want to be in the study committee because it is the only source of information other than leadership.And this is history James knows better than me: the Freedom Caucus got frustrated with the status quo the RSC had been and broke off to be not just the right wing in a… Get full access to First Branch Forecast at firstbranchforecast.substack.com/subscribe

This transcript has been lightly edited for readability.Daniel Schuman: So, we’re here today with Brian Baird, former member of Congress from 1999 to 2011, and as far as I know, the only clinical psychologist to serve in Congress in modern times.Rep. Brian Baird: Well, actually, Ted Strickland served as well. He was a psychologist as well, but think he had a slightly different degree.Schuman: We’re focusing on member security and the way that members relate to each other. There have been a number of mass attacks on members of Congress in the last handful of years. There was the attack recently at the Hilton Hotel, where, of course, President Trump and his Cabinet were -- but there were also journalists in attendance and many members of Congress. And while the executive branch officials were sort of whisked away, many members of Congress were sort of left to fend for themselves in light of an uncertain environment.And of course, we had the January 6th attack just a handful of years ago, where, again, members of Congress were the subject of a mass attack that presumably could leave significantly different attitudes towards their colleagues or how they felt about the institution.And I’m hoping that you could talk a little bit about how members of Congress view their own safety and how these repeated attacks may have changed the way that members, view and relate to one another.Baird: I’m really glad to have a chance to talk about this. I think it’s a hugely important topic that, I think is worth doing.First of all, is just talk about the security situation. And, sadly, there’s grim news on that front, and every member of Congress needs to understand this, as do their spouses, and families. And it’s not pretty: If someone really wants to kill a member of Congress, it’s not hard to do so. All the security measures that have been proposed -- let’s get more Capitol Police on the Capitol grounds, maybe an individual guard when you’re about your official duties. They may make some difference. Certainly, we need to secure the Capitol and the Congressional Office Buildings. But when you’re going about your daily life as a member of Congress, and as a human being, set aside the member of Congress, you still have to go grocery shopping. You still have to come in and out of your house. If you’re doing, parades or town halls or things like that, you’re in the public, and if a person really wants to hunt you down, they can do it.I don’t say that to be alarmist. But the question is then how do we deal with that? Even just the walk to a vote, if somebody’s hanging out outside the Capitol Grounds and they’re not in that narrow perimeter where you’ve got the magnetometers, just walking up the steps somebody can approach you and shoot you.My experience talking to members of Congress, there is a paradoxical, logical inconsistency. On the one hand, everybody talks about how we have to be more secure, but then they don’t necessarily take the individual precautions or the institutional precautions to deal with that.As you know, one of the things that I firmly believe is we need to take measures to ensure the continuity of representation of members of Congress. The first thing we need to do, not for our individual sakes initially, but for the sake of the representative democracy, is provide mechanisms by which you can replace House members if they die through natural causes, accidents, or assassinations. We’ve done nothing to deal with that since September 11th, which is now almost 25 years ago, and the problems remain the same.Why do I start with that? Because it’s one thing to say somebody just doesn’t like me as a person or as a representative and they want to kill me. That’s a challenge and it’s unpleasant. But it’s another thing to say, “If I kill enough of these guys, I could change the balance of power in the House or Senate.”As I’ve said before, right now you could fit more bullets into the magazine of a single semi-automatic pistol than it would take to change the balance of power in both the House and the Senate. In one pistol, it’d be so easy to do. The first thing I would do is assure representation and secondly, I would reduce the incentive, the political incentive for assassination. If there were a way to replace members of Congress with like-minded temporary replacements who could fill the role until a special election occurred, then you could kill 30 of us and they would be replaced promptly by people who probably vote about the same way, and there’s no political gain, no chaos, no disruption, no breakage of representation.So that’s the first point. The second point though is, okay, if you understand that, why are people not acting? And I think there’s this kind of unconscious, if you will, sense that on the one hand I’m cavalier about it -- “Well, that could happen” -- and then on the other hand, that absolves me from taking responsible measures to correct the situation.You still have to do your job, and your staff have to do their job, and your families have to live with the unpleasantness that you could be harmed or they could be harmed even worse. But that doesn’t mean you do nothing. So, step one is take care of the institutional continuity and then remove the political incentive for harming. Step two then is what are the practical measures that you can take to protect yourself and your family and your staff and the constituents?Really we began to see a dramatic turnaround in threats to members, just the general attitude, back in the early rise of the Tea Party and in the days of the assault weapons ban votes and some other controversies, and Obamacare.We went from having town halls -- I had, by the way, more than 350 town halls when I was in office, I think more than almost anybody I know, and they were usually very informal affairs. We’d meet at a fire station in a rural town or at a library or a high school auditorium or something. Anybody’d show up. There were no magnetometers. There were no crazy crowds. People respected one another. Yes, they sometimes criticized me. It’s their right. I have to honor that right, but there were not massive crowds of people pushing one another to try to get in.Back in that era, believe it or not, there were actually websites created dedicated to telling people how to disrupt town halls. You could log online and search that, and a website would come up that would say, “Get there early. Try to occupy all the spaces. Scatter your supporters around the room. If the member tries to speak, interrupt them. Shout them down. Don’t let there be a rational conversation. Call them liar. Insult...” These were strategic publicized mechanisms for creating a dangerous and threatening environment and disrupting legitimate and essential dialogue between members of Congress and their constituents. It’s only gotten worse.To give you a sense of how significant it was at the time, during the Obamacare, debates and public discussion, the crowds were so large, we actually held one town hall in an outdoor rock amphitheater and we had 3,500 people in attendance. It was totally different, and there were some pretty hostile folks there. So one of the things that has happened now is members of Congress are getting oftentimes plainclothes police officers at their town halls, and they’re getting more security. We actually had town halls in my era of Obamacare where ambulances were parked at the back of the stage in case I got shot. That’s a true story. So, we have to take those kinds of precautions.But somewhere along the line, and this is step three, we’ve got to restore the civility of dialogue and have members of Congress, and the President of the United States and his appointees or designees, stop demonizing people on the other side and stop endorsing hatred. When you have a president of the United States, as we have in the case of Trump, essentially, endorsing people being bullied or beaten up from the podium, when he’s saying things like th… Get full access to First Branch Forecast at firstbranchforecast.substack.com/subscribe

Interview: Comptroller General Gene Dodaro Get full access to First Branch Forecast at firstbranchforecast.substack.com/subscribe