 Hi, everyone, this is Carol Hinkle, President of Triple E. I want to welcome everyone of you to this lecture on this very snowy day. Isn't this a good day to be inside watching a lecture? A couple of things I wanted to mention. When you sign on this year to Zoom webinar, there is a change. You want to make sure you put your first and last name please and your email in case it asks for that. And if you do it the first time you do it, you should from then on not have to repeat that process. Are we hoping? Also, I wanted to let you know that if you do miss one of our lectures for some reason and or want to look at it again, look at the email that Glenn has sent out to you with the link. And it'll show you at the bottom how you can watch it online or on TV, starting the following Thursday. I've done it. In fact, I watched Linda's lecture last year, last semester that way, and it was perfect. So do that. We want you to ask questions during the lecture or during the Q&A period. You can do it anytime. And you just go on your computer down at the bottom, touch it, and you'll see a Q&A button will come up. Type in your question and push send. And if you have an iPad like I do, it's at the top. So that should help and we really encourage you to do that. So now I'd like to introduce Beth Wood, who is our program chair and she's going to introduce Linda to us. Thank you, Beth. Thanks Carol. And welcome everybody to our first lecture of 2022. And I just want to reiterate what Carol said that our speakers really do look forward to your question. So please do submit them anytime during the lecture or during the Q&A and at about 2.45, we will start reading the questions to the speaker and she will reply. I'm very pleased to welcome back today's speaker, Linda Fowler. Linda spoke to us last semester and she received such excellent reviews that we asked her back in the semester and I was thrilled that she was able to accept and we're all thrilled to be here in this snowy day when nobody has to drive anywhere to make this happen. So that's great. Linda earned her BA from Smith College, her MA and PhD from the University of Rochester and she became a professor of political science at Syracuse University. She moved on to Dartmouth where she became a professor of government and now holds also the Frank J. Reagan Chair in Policy Studies, America. Linda also served as the director of the Rockefeller Center for Social Sciences at Dartmouth. Linda has received rewards for teaching at both Syracuse and Dartmouth as well as a Guggenheim Fellowship. She serves as a commentator on American politics on various media outlets including Vermont Public Radio and BT Digger. Her special research area and area of interest is the US Congress. She's written three books and numerous articles about the subject and this will be her focus today. Very pleased to welcome back Linda Fowler. Well, hello, I'm very glad I didn't have to drive to wherever you convene when it isn't COVID. So this is one good thing that's come out of the pandemic. I'm pleased to be back and also talking about the Congress which is an institution I've studied for about 45 years and which left me breathless last January 6th when I realized I didn't understand nearly as much of it as about it as I thought I did. So I've been giving a lot of thought to the whole question of the dysfunctionality of the legislature. And that's what I talked to you more generally about last fall, but this time I turned my attention to the Senate which is an institution that I started looking at more closely when I wrote a book on congressional oversight of foreign policy. Probably we'll be sharing, I'm trying a new technique to try to make Zoom a little less static and it may or may not work. But while I'm introducing myself, just caution you that mostly you're going to see pictures and slides and when I'm actually talking to you I'll try to let you see my face, whether it works or not, we'll see. But basically when you think about the Senate there are a lot of ways that people have characterized it. US senators themselves like to refer to their institution as quote the world's greatest deliberative body unquote and they view it as a place where the great issues of the day fund resolution. Outside observers have often referred to it as quote the world's most exclusive club. Members of the House, however, disdainfully dismissed the Senate as a group of egotistical show horses who preen in front of the cameras while the lower body does the hard work of legislating. Many political scientists regard the Senate as the most undemocratic feature of the US constitution, working majority rule, promoting unequal treatment of citizens and elevating sectional interests over national ones. And yet they also recognize how often the Senate has played a major role. This is particularly true in the area of foreign policy. In short, the Senate has witnessed many shining moments and depressing defeats at various times in its history as different characteristics become dominant. So I'm going to just share my screen right now with you. This wing over here is the Senate wing, the far wing is the house. And I thought I would share with you a bunch of just different eras in Senate history to remind you of what a prominent role it has played in our politics. So if you look, first of all, this is an old painting, it's actually I think of Philadelphia, but it captures the sense of immediacy and intensity and chaos that was characteristic of the early Senate. And I picked this picture, even though it's not completely accurate because here's George Washington standing up before a group of his colleagues. And in this case, Washington in his first term as president believed that the Senate should be given, playing the role of giving the president advice and consent. And the first investigation in which Washington sought advice and consent was after a stinging defeat in the Indian wars. And he went to the senators to talk to them about it and why the US had been, the soldiers had been massacred. And when he came back, he wrote in his diary that the senators had been extremely rude and disrespectful. And he quote, was damned if he'd ever go there again. And no president ever has gone to test to give, engage and give and take with senators or anybody else other than the state of the union message in which of course they have the floor to themselves. Other times that I think you might find interesting, this is a number of senators have been famous orators. Henry Clay of course was a southerner from South Carolina, was noted for his oratorical skill in trying and an ability to make compromises. This is a cartoon of him tangling with Andrew Jackson and Jackson's in the 1830s as Jackson was opposing the national bank. And so you have Clay engaging in some dentistry where he's basically trying to stop Jackson from saying anything. Daniel Webster Dartmouth, one of Dartmouth's most favorite alum was noted for his rhetoric. And one of the most famous things of his was during the war of 1812 when he basically admonished his fellow colleagues that politics stops at the water's edge. It's also the case that if you look many investigations or featured senators, this one is the Truman committee which investigated profiteering in World War II. This committee did an amazing job of uncovering hundreds of millions of dollars of fraud in the procurement process. And it elevated Truman who before that was an obscure senator from the chosen by the political machine in St. Louis before that he'd been a haberdasher. And this made his career and gave him a national reputation such that Franklin Roosevelt chosen for vice president in the 1944 election. Another important investigation were the Fulbright hearings. You see Senator Fulbright on the left talking to a senator from Oregon who was a prominent opponent and the only person who voted against the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. And on the right is John Kerry who was testifying after returning from Vietnam and famously made the remark to the senators how can you ask someone to be the last man dying for a hopeless cause? He of course went on to become a senator himself and a presidential candidate. It's also the case that when you look at the Senate there have been some fairly nefarious categories. This is Joe McCarthy, a senator from Wisconsin who seized on anti-communism and plowed through Hollywood and the state department and the defense department and finally met his comeuppance when a man named Welch who was an attorney representing the Department of Defense basically looked in the eye in front of the television cameras after McCarthy had said there were hundreds of thousands of traders in the U.S. Army. And mind you, this was less than a decade after the U.S. had triumphed in World War II. So it was pretty shocking claim that McCarthy was making and Welch looked him in the eye and said, have you no shame Senator McCarthy? Have you no shame? And that was sort of the beginning of the end of Senator McCarthy who died later in disgrace having lost his bid, having won his bid for reelection but basically having no further role in American politics. This is a group of senators during the civil rights debate of 1960 where they held the floor for 120 hours. They have cuts and they're taking their ease while one of their number was holding the floor. And in those days of filibuster, you actually had to stand on the floor and talk and there were no bathroom breaks. So what you had to do was to sort of tag team with other people who shared your cause. These guys actually look like they're having a pretty good time. And these are the Keating Five who were implicated in the savings and loan scandals of the 1980s when so many savings and loan banks failed. Alan Cranston, Dennis DeCancini, John Klenn, John McCain, Don Regal. So a couple of American heroes John Glenn and John McCain particularly who were caught, they were lobbied by Keating of a wealthy developer in Arizona who basically had defrauded the government and banks of lots of money. And all of them were investigated by the Senate Ethics Committee, but only McCain was reprimanded. And perhaps this, the impeachment trial, please note that I wasn't able to find any shining moments for the Senate in contemporary times. And this trial, which could have been so important, basically turned out to be a bit of a farce because the senators, many of whom didn't take it seriously. That said, I hope you now have the point that there are many consequential moments in American politics that have to do with the Senate. So in this talk, we're gonna talk about the many ways in which the Senate is failing the country and why that matters. We'll turn to the Senate's place in the Constitution and its many anti-democratic features. We'll then consider how informal norms and structures evolved that enabled the Senate to function more effectively as long as the members adhered to these norms and structures. We'll then consider why the norms have failed and illustrate these problems with the filibuster before drawing conclusions about the consequences of America's Senate being so problematic today. If you think about the, wait a minute, if you think about the background of the Senate and now I'm going to stop sharing my screen and come back to me, I hope you can all see me. In most democracies, the so-called upper chamber, for example, the House of Lords in the UK is severely constrained in the influence inside the legislative branch and with respect to the executive branch. In other words, upper chambers in most democracies have maybe an advisory role, maybe a consenting role about something, some upper chambers act as sort of a Supreme Court, for example, because most democracies don't have one. But the US is unusual because the Senate has so much formal power inside the Constitution. The Senate has had its moments of greatness. It's also had its share of pettiness, corruption, and paranoia. But what we see in the 21st century is that the reputation and the power of the Senate has waned considerably in the 21st century. There are no giants in the Senate today, few policy innovators, and little in the way of legislative accomplishment. So let's talk about the Constitution and why the Senate is, the Senate is a very paradoxical institution because it can both be a facilitator of democracy and a great obstructor, and the obstructing powers are written into the Constitution. We have a Senate because of what was called the great compromise. In my view, calling it the great compromise is a little bit like putting lipstick on a pig because basically it was the price for getting small states like Connecticut and Delaware to ratify the Constitution. And it wasn't just that these states wanted a Senate with equal representation for themselves. They also threatened that if the framers in Philadelphia didn't give them equal representation in an upper chamber, they were going to sign treaties with the British government. The slave states, many of which were quite populist at the time, especially Virginia, they went along with the Senate and actually embraced it as well because they saw it as a means of protecting slavery. And in fact, they turned out to be correct because slavery was a predominant issue throughout the, up until the Civil War. And it was Southern senators were able to so effectively protect it from changing norms and changing opinion in the Northern states. The anti-federalists, however, were a group of small D Democrats and they were against anything that put obstacles between individual citizens and their public officials. So they didn't like the Senate because the constituencies were so large as Senator represented a whole state. They didn't like the fact that elections were infrequent and that senators wouldn't have to go back to their state legislatures for approval very long. They didn't like the whole fact that state senators were indirectly elected by state by state legislatures. They saw the Senate as basically weakening the power of the states in some ways by making treaties, approving treaties that would be binding on the states. They lost that argument. And so we have a Senate with equal representation for all states. Washington tried to put a good face on it and he often referred to the Senate as quote the saucer that cools the Republican tea. So back in the day when people were drinking tea they would pour some of it into their saucer and sip it from the saucer when it was too hot. And so the idea was that this small body with long terms and a more diverse constituency of a statewide nature would slow down any of the unimpassioned majority that might come to dominate the House. So when you look at the Senate though what you see is a lot of anti-democratic features. The indirect election until 1913 when we had to amend the constitution to provide direct election, lengthy six year terms which influenced staggered elections. So only a third of the Senate is elected at any one time. And again, this was to prevent a popular mood from seizing hold of the national government. The main thing that's most controversial today is equal representation of all states, the great compromise. If you look today, citizens in Wyoming have 70 times greater representation in the Senate than citizens in California. And this distortion keeps growing. In today's Senate for example where you have 50 Democrats and 50 Republicans Democrats represent 41 and a half million more citizens than Republicans do. If you look just at the 41 Senate votes that are needed to sustain a filibuster the number gets even more distorted. The Senate advises and consents to treaties and approves executive branch nominations and judicial appointments. It is a useful check on our only nationally elected official but it also means that when presidents come into office they have to contend with the fact that senators might interfere with the appointment of their cabinets or their appointment of ambassadors. We have that right now with one senator putting hold on nominations for ambassadorships because he doesn't like a particular policy of a president Biden. What this means for example is that we do not have an ambassador in the Ukraine where there's a crisis brewing with Russia. Many democracies have an upper chamber as I noted but the US is one of the few that makes the upper chamber a co-equal branch when it comes to legislating. Bills have to pass both houses. When there are different versions which is usually the case there's a conference committee that reconciles them and then they have to repass a new bill. This is extraordinary. Most legislatures don't do this. And what it does is create multiple veto points to thwart the majority, to protect inequality and to promote sexualism and regionalism in our government. When you have multiple veto points like this it weakens Congress with respect to the president and it also weakens the Congress with respect to the Supreme Court. When the Senate can't function, Congress can't function and basically then the other two branches feel free to pursue their own agendas. So things that were not necessarily all bad because over time as the Senate evolved it developed a lot of informal norms and rules and structures that enabled it to operate in a more effective way. The small size and enable members to get to know each other on a personal basis. And this often fostered friendships across party lines that made it easier for the senators to get along and to work with each other. The rules and also empowered individuals to pursue their own agendas. It was easy for senators to amend bills. It was also easy for senators to obstruct bills using the filibuster, but mostly they were restrained in the way they did these things. The big advantage that senators had was their larger visibility because they represented statewide constituencies. They had long terms to establish a reputation in Washington and they frequently had presidential ambitions. Most important however to the power influence of Senate was a very distinctive culture. And it was that culture that earned it the nickname of being the world's most exclusive club. Basically there were norms of reciprocity that senators would go out of their way to accommodate each other unless it was actually something they were against. They had enormous loyalty to the Senate as an institution which frequently rose above party and also above their own narrow state interests. There was a large respect from minority viewpoints because members were always a well aware well if we are harsh on the minority right now when I'm in the majority, I could be in that situation in the future. And so there was a lot of leeway given to people who were not in the majority party. There was a tolerance for mavericks and there was a lot of opportunity for policy entrepreneurship. Particularly important was the influence of individual senators in foreign and defense policy. This was because the Senate had two very important committees armed services and foreign relations that attracted people of real ability and stature and who then used these committees to be a major, major force in foreign and defense policy. And I always, in the book I published in 2015 called Watch Dogs on the Hill, I tell the story of a senator from, oh, now I've lost his name, Banda, any rate, he was a newly elected, newly appointed chair of the Center for Relations Committee in 1947 after the Republicans gained control of the House and Senate. Truman was president and at that time there was a growing concern about changes that were happening in the Soviet Union. And after George Marshall who sent his famous, George Kennan sent his famous long telegram from Moscow, pointing out that the Russians were really planning domination of Europe. It was Senator Banda, whatever his name is, who went to Harry Truman and had a long talk with him and basically said to Truman, you need to go on radio and address the nation and scare the hell out of the American public. Those are his words. And Truman listened to him, did give that address. And at the same time, the senators took the lead in promoting first an aid to Greece and Turkey to try to help them recover after World War II. And that bill eventually evolved into the Marshall Plan which of course was instrumental and reconstructing Europe. The idea today that any senator would have the stature to go to the president and telling what to do and be listened to and then actually have the senators be the key people that carried out the policy that the administration wanted is just something we don't even think about today. And I think that's a real shame. So when you think about the role of the Senate in foreign policy, they have a norm because of the national stature and expertise that these senators developed, they had the capacity to aid the president as happened across party lines with Truman and Senator Vander something or other to aid the president. But they also had the capacity to check the president. And that of course, what Senator Fulbright did to let Lyndon Johnson in those 1966 hearings. Johnson and Fulbright were old friends from the Senate. They were both conservatives, Southern Democrats. Johnson felt enormously betrayed when Fulbright had those widely publicized hearings. And the hearings really changed public sentiment dramatically, turned the public against the war. And of course, ultimately the war became so unpopular that by 1968, Johnson decided not to seek re-election. So the capacity for chairs, particularly in foreign policy to both help the president in rough patches and to call the president to account when he was out of line has been historically very important. In other words, the Senate became a place where the naughtiest problems were tackled through a process of negotiation and bargaining among individual senators. Now, this picture was not always rosy. Witness the slide I just showed you with respect to civil rights where the Senate developed this reputation for obstruction but basically the Senate had the potential was there. And the real problem of course was that things began to change. So I'm now going to stop sharing my screen. I'm going to go back to sharing my screen and hope it works. One of the most important things is that careers have changed. The kinds of careers that senators have before they got to the office. Mostly senators were governors. They were people who had were people of real distinction like John Glenn, for example, the astronaut. They were experienced public figures. They had been in public life. They had made a lot of connections with other people in public life. And that was one reason why they commanded respect and national visibility. Today, the careers of senators before they arrived in the chamber is different. You have a lot of former House members most of whom cut their teeth on the highly partisan ideologically polarized politics introduced by Newt Gingrich and the House in 1995. And when they moved on to the Senate they brought those attitudes with them. And you see people, and it was basically it's better to be right than to get something done. The first rule of politics is to do whatever you can to destroy and embarrass your opponent. And that view became more and more prevalent. You have a lot of business people who decided it would be fun to run for the Senate, I guess. And they're often people of real talent and very well-meaning, but they don't know how to get along in a body in which they are one of a hundred. And so very few of them have turned out to be effective and oftentimes they don't last very long. You get celebrities and increasingly you get people who run as outsiders. I should be a senator because I had nothing to do with Washington and national fairs. That would give the framers heart palpitations if they could hear that kind of rhetoric because their idea was that if the Senate was gonna be the saucer that cooled the Republican T it was because you had men of superior experience and knowledge of public affairs who would have the wisdom to do that. And you certainly can't say that about many of the people in the Senate today. I don't wanna imply that everybody in the Senate is a disaster, that's certainly not the case. But the public face of the Senate that we see is not one that commands much in the way of respect. A lot of this came about because of electoral politics. It's primaries now that are primarily choosing senators because many states are homogeneous for one party the other and the competition is happening in the primary. And we all know that participation in primaries is very low. That's not true in Vermont, New Hampshire, but it is true in most of the country. And so the people who tend to get their voters to turn out are the extremists and the ideologues and or the single issue candidates who can attract interest group support and money. Campaign finance, which has become an increasingly disturbing aspect of our politics means that many Senate campaigns are nationalized with interest groups going in and running ads that have nothing to do with people in the state of New Hampshire, for example, where we have a lot of that going on because our Senator Maggie Hasen is viewed as being very vulnerable. So with polarization, what we've seen over time is that the years that were the heyday of the Senate, the Senate with the norms of reciprocity and courtesy and whatever, were the years in which polarization was very low. And those were the years, as you see in this graph, those were the years when Congress actually did things and the Senate did things. And if you look at the blue line, which is a polarization between Democrats and Republicans, that is to say how far apart they are on an ideological scale, you see that for a while the Senate resisted what was the trends that were happening in the Senate. And that's probably because of the six year terms, but increasingly the Senate is as polarized as the House. And therefore the kind of clubby atmosphere has simply disappeared. One of the things that generally has happened is that as senators come from backgrounds where they're not very interested in legislating and have very little experience in legislating, they're not that interested in committee work. And these graphs are from some of my research. And basically the one on the left for defense policy, the one on the right for foreign policy show House and Senate differences in the kinds of committee work. If you look for defense policy, that until basically the 2000s, the Senate was almost as active, or at least often as active as the House in overseeing defense policy. And basically the House, which are the gray diamonds compared to the Senate's little red dots, the House has also shown less interesting committee work, but not as extreme a decline. The same pattern is true with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Senate Foreign Relations Committee used to be the most prestigious committee in the House or the Senate, and the most sought after. And now it's basically just sort of going along and members don't invest very much time in it, or certainly as much as they used to. In addition, you see, and this is the thing that disturbs me so much, the lack of interest in deliberating about war. So these very steep dark gray spikes are combat deaths. And when you look, you can see the Korean War, which is the first spike, and look at the number of hearings that were held in the House and Senate committees when combat deaths went way up. The same thing happened in the Vietnam era and the post-Vietnam era. And then if you look at the little, there's a tiny little nub in 1992 where casualties from the Gulf War and then the Afghanistan War. It's really disturbing to me that America's longest war involving Iraq and Afghanistan compared to past wars prompted so little examination on the part of these defense committees. I think the most important thing we need to think about, though, wait a minute, I don't want you to see that yet. In addition to the decline of committees, what that means is that party leaders have taken over the legislative process in both chambers. They control the agenda what gets talked about and the procedures that determine whether amendments are offered and how much people can talk and so forth. And basically, because the party leaders' agendas are so crowded, the quality of legislating is really deteriorated. And you find a lot of bills passed that have a language that is unclear and therefore easily litigated once the law has been adopted. That was particularly true for Obamacare. But I think that, and so the party leaders and are now the most visible, they're the ones that the president deals with and everybody else has become sort of an audience for what they're doing. And these are talented people for the most part and to stand around and not have very much say over what's happening, I think is one reason why you see so many of the more capable lawmakers gradually leaving the institution. I think about Rob Portman, I think about Senator Toomey in Pennsylvania, a committed conservative and one who took the business of legislating very seriously. You see the same thing with some key Democrats as well. So in other words, if you look at the Senate today, you're gonna see very few masters of policy or procedure or very few people who have the chops to go toe to toe with a president. This was disturbingly clear during the Trump administration, but it isn't much better with the Biden years. Although the numbers of the 50-50 split has certainly given a few people like the Senator from West Virginia, Joe Manchin, a lot of leverage. So the president, having ignored him initially and his opposition to the build back better legislation, eventually realized he had to reach out to him, but by then I think it was too late. So in a sense, what I see now that senators are performing politics, they're not actually practicing politics. I think it's fair to say that members routinely evaluate the important norms of comedy, reciprocity, bargaining and respect for minority rights that used to grease the wheels in a fundamentally anti-democratic institution. I think the most important thing is the loss of institutional loyalty in favor of hyper-partisanship. One of the things that I expected to happen in the Senate was that eventually the senators would basically get tired of being bullied by President Trump and that they would basically say they're more interested in protecting the reputation of the Senate than they are in furthering the interests of the president. And in the past, that would have happened. We saw quite dramatically in the Watergate years where eventually Republican senators led by minority leader, Howard Baker, Wendell Richard Nixon and said, basically we don't have the votes to protect you and it would be better if you resigned. And but of course something very different happened during Trump's two impeachment trials. One of the things that is probably symptomatic of the problems with the Senate is the prominence of the filibuster. And here I'm going to go back to sharing my, oh, I still am sharing my screen, good. This is Jimmy Stewart and Mr. Smith goes to Washington, film that was very important in 1938 and one that I still show to my students. Jimmy Stewart was asked to fill a vacant seat and he was asked, he discovers partway through the movie because the powers that be in the Senate and interest groups thought he would be a chump and easily manipulated. And when he figures that out, he takes to the Senate floor and he attempts to persuade the country about the wisdom of his position. And he is inundated by a media blitz controlled by his antagonist and finally collapses on the floor in a very dramatic moment. Today, the Senate filibuster we're more likely to see something like this. This happens to be Ted Cruz reading from Dr. Seuss Green Eggs and Ham for 22 hours. He wasn't actually filibustering a bill or even an important principle. He was simply trying to persuade his colleagues that they shouldn't vote for public funding for healthcare. He had no particular bill in mind or anything else. And I think that so we've come to replace our Jimmy Stewart view of the filibuster with basically senators kind of manipulating it for their own particular ends. What is the filibuster? Well, most people are surprised that it's not in the constitution only in that of the constitution allows each chamber to develop its own rules. It was adopted in the very first Senate that senators could speak for as long as they had the energy to hold the floor. And basically that held fire despite or held true until 1917 when rule 22 was passed to allow senators with a two thirds of the majority to vote for cloture that is to shut off debate. Since then, the filibuster has been used sparingly and it was mostly used by Southern senators who felt very intensely about civil rights legislation. And you can be critical if you will but for them, this was a constituency matter of literally of such magnitude for their way of life, they thought that it sort of fit the norm of you only filibuster if it's something of enormous importance to you and your constituents. Eventually, the Democrats were able to invoke cloture and pass the civil rights legislation in 1964 and civil rights legislation in the mid-60s mostly because after Lyndon Johnson's landslide victory a lot of new Democrats came into the Congress. So they had the votes to overturn the filibuster. Beginning with some battles over Supreme Court nominees and this particularly happened when Reagan became president and was confronted with the Democratic Congress that basically Democrats started using the filibuster to obstruct Reagan's agenda. And when there were Democrats in the White House Republicans when they controlled the Senate returned the favor. And so increasingly you had senators using filibusters more and more to accomplish policy goals of obstructing the president. So in 1975, the filibuster was changed that three-fifths of the membership could vote to cut off debate. And then again in 2010 nominations were subject to cloture votes of a simple majority. The thing that's key about this filibuster is the public doesn't actually know how many filibusters are being threatened. You don't actually have to be Jimmy Stewart or even Ted Cruz and have a talking filibuster. And Ted Cruz to his credit did stand for 22 hours. I'm not quite sure how he did it. I think he had colleagues who helped him but many people think that if we went back to the talking filibuster where you'd actually have to hold the floor that that might go a long way to reducing the hundreds of times in which members are using it to block legislation. But even reforming, even going back to a talking filibuster which after all had been the norm until the mid-70s was viewed as a threat. To people who thought they might be in the minority in the future and people who are in the minority right now and so that didn't happen. Basically though, when you have this uninterrupted talking every bill starts with a premise that it needs 60 votes and very few things in American politics have 60 votes. The threat of the filibuster gives a single senator like in this case, the senator from West Virginia enormous leverage to extract concessions. It is a wildly undemocratic thing to permit. And what's interesting is that in state legislatures which have Senate, they don't allow unlimited debate. They don't require two thirds majorities or three fifths majorities. They just act like a co-equal branch subject to majority rule. So this is a unique phenomenon in the Senate and it is totally out of control by almost any measure. So to conclude, let's just talk briefly about why the dysfunction of the Senate matters. The Constitution was set up the Congress to be the most powerful branch and when it doesn't work, the government can't function. Presidents get pressured to act to get something done because legislation is stalled. They use executive orders. They abuse the regulatory process. They engage in unilateral war-making. They become secretive. The Supreme Court drops norms of deference to elected officials. It legislates from the bench. One of the reasons why an activist court is a conservative court is the lawmakers know they can get away with it because Congress is stymied particularly because of the filibuster in the Senate. Interest groups increase pressure to circumvent the legislative process to promote their particular agendas and citizens protest. One of the reasons why you had the protests on the left over Black Lives Matter and a variety of other things and protests on the right about too much government control is that citizens feel that their government is out of control. And one of the reasons why it's out of control is that the Congress doesn't work. The Senate is a major contributor to this dysfunction. Qualified people don't wanna stay. Those seeking to replace them are culture warriors rather than potential statesmen and stateswomen. The only lawmakers with national visibility and stature to challenge an imperial president are the leaders of the two parties. But they are under enormous pressure from their own members to either unite behind the president if it's of their party or to undermine him to demonstrate the president's brand if he's in the opposition. With party control of government so closely divided, everything becomes a battle for the next election. And it's no wonder that people feel that democracy doesn't work in this country any longer. So let me stop there and take some questions. I'm gonna stop sharing my screen here and hope that you can all see me. It looks like there are quite a few questions. I start reading them for you Linda. Yes please. Okay, we have a couple related to Peter Welch and I'll combine those. If Peter Welch is elected to the Senate and what areas could he have a role or the most impact and then a related question to that is just one second here. If Peter Welch is elected to the Senate he could reach age 80 during his first term in office. Given the importance of seniority, would it be better for Vermont to elect a younger person who would likely be more able to build more seniority as a senator? Well, let me start first by saying that I certainly don't want to imply that I think Congressman Welch is a culture warrior or one of the people of inferior credentials. He actually is one of the exceptions to the rule I think of somebody who has been a serious legislator while he was in the house has quite a reputation for working across party lines and will probably bring that reputation with him into the Senate if he's elected. The question of age in an institution now where seniority, the influence of seniority depends a lot on the committee system. And as you move the influence over policy out of committee and into the party leader's hands seniority becomes less important because all of the bills in the end are put to get packaged and passed by party leaders. So seniority has been an advantage. Certainly Patrick Leahy used his seniority on appropriations to help Vermont with it's a number of problems financially. But because of this highly polarized institution now I don't think seniority matters as much as it did when Patrick Leahy first ran for the Senate. Interesting, okay. And again, related to something you just mentioned regarding the fact that Peter Welch has reached across the aisle. Do you foresee any glimmers of bipartisanship in the Senate, perhaps in Ukraine, the Supreme Court nominee, other areas? The potential is always there because it still is a small body. And I think what I was expecting was that after Trump left the White House that the senators would get together and decide that they wanted to change their institution so that they weren't completely dominated by the Senate, I mean by the presidency that as individuals they could see that their power had become very much diminished and that they would see reason, personal incentives to try to restore their institution for their own benefit as well as the benefit of the country. So there are some glimmers that maybe that's happening. The most important ones being bipartisan legislation on foreign affairs to end the emergency declaration on the war on terror, which has been used very expansively by presidents to go adventuring all over the Middle East. And there have been some other signs as well. In many ways, when Madison wrote about our constitutional system, he said, and I quote, sloppily, the interest of the man should be joined with the interest of the institution. And therefore each institution will have the incentive to be jealous of its own prerogatives and its own powers. And that will create a dynamic of checks and balance. So checks and balances was really all about the ambition of individual politicians to protect their institution. And what happened when the senators lost loyalty to their institution in favor of loyalty to their party and loyalty to their president, that whole Madisonian logic fell apart. And I keep hoping that the members are gonna realize that that they can't be powerful individually unless they do something to make the institution work more effectively. Okay. In view of the polarization of the Senate, do you foresee some senators leaving their party to become an independent like Angus King or even changing parties like Jim Jeffers did a few years ago? Well, Jim Jeffers was the last moderate. Before that, we've always had a few Democrats who were more conservative than a few Republicans and a few Republicans who were more liberal than the most conservative Democrats. So you had Jake Javits and Jim Jeffers who were Republicans who were more liberal than many Southern Democrats and Rice Versa. All of those people have disappeared. And the problem is getting on the ballot as an independent. So the ballot access process is really rigged to favor the two major parties. And you can have somebody like Angus King who had developed a reputation of being a very effective governor in Maine, being able to get on the ballot and hold his seat as an independent. You had the unusual situation of Bernie Sanders being an independent as well. This tends to be happened in small states where it's easier for individuals to sort of build an independent coalition. Lisa Murkowski was another one who won her reclaim to her seat as an independent. But for people in a large state, it's really, really difficult. So I don't think that there's a lot of that. What I think really needs to happen is that more centrist Republicans need to run in Republican primaries and more centrist Democrats need to run in Democratic primaries and try to pull lawmakers in both parties closer to the center and therefore closer to each other. And if that were to happen, it would be a lot easier for them to work together and engage and give and take. Okay. Do you believe that President Biden still sees himself to some degree as a senator? And if so, is this a plus or minus? I right now, I think it's a minus because the Senate he served in doesn't exist anymore. And most of the people he knew on the Republican party have gone. There's been a lot of turnover in the Senate. And the few that are left in the Democratic party that he knew probably would have worked closely with him anyway, he didn't need to know them personally. And I think he was convinced that if the old Senate were asked to reconvene itself and work on compromise, that that was still possible. And I think he's learned a very hard lesson. Okay. Regarding the role of Joe Manchin, are there ways that in the future that the roadblocks that we've arrived at could possibly, because of his involvement, could possibly be circumvented? Well, one of the things that was presented to Manchin in cinema was going back to a talking filibuster, and which would have made, we would still have the filibuster, but it would be used less frequently. I think you have to remember that just because all of the attention has focused on a Manchin in cinema, we should also be looking at Republican senators from places like Pennsylvania, where the Build Back Better bill is enormously popular. And because Manchin in cinema had taken all the heat, Senator Toomey has gotten a free ride. So has Senator Portman in Ohio, both Republicans, both serious lawmakers, but basically they haven't had to engage because everybody's been focused on the filibuster and on these two obstructionist Democrats. But it is one aspect of the Senate that individual members can become disproportionately important. My own view is that the Democrats should be very careful with Manchin in cinema. They probably can't win West Virginia with any other Democrat but Manchin. And so they ought to be careful about the way they talk to him and treat him and the same with cinema because they probably would lose the seat and the majority if they are too harsh. So that's a dilemma. And it's tough when you look at Manchin. Trump carried his state by more than 20%. If he's representing his constituents, which is his responsibility, he has to look hard at that number because there are an awful lot of people who voted for a very different vision of the country. But so that's the dilemma that senators and House members always have. Right. Well, thank you. I think that's unfortunately all the time we have, but there's certainly a lot to think about and be concerned about as the time goes on. Thank you, Linda. My pleasure. Take care now. Well, thank you so much, Linda. We really enjoyed that and see you all again next week. Thank you. Bye-bye.