 Hello, everybody. Welcome and good afternoon. I'm Susan Collins, the Joan and Sanford-Wile Dean here at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. And I'm delighted to have all of you with us here this afternoon for what I'm sure will be a very interesting conversation. I'm proud to welcome our speaker, Congressman John Dingle, who is the longest-serving member of the US Congress. And so welcome to you. Thank you very much. I'd also like to welcome Professor Rick Hall. And I'll be giving some additional introductions momentarily. We're very pleased to have in the audience Deborah Dingle, who is with us. I believe that she is there in the back, welcome. And the mayor of Ann Arbor, John Heath Jett. We're delighted to have you with us here today. As I mentioned, there are longer bios in the program and in the interests of our relatively short time. And the many, many important topics on the agenda, I will give a relatively brief introduction and encourage you to also refer to your programs. Mr. Dingle, of course, is our own representative to the US Congress. And during his 29 terms in office, Michigan has remained his home. He is home every week. And he spends much time at the University of Michigan, as well as throughout the region. And I know that he welcomes the opportunity to talk on a subject that is very close to his heart and so important to him at a school that is named for one of his very close friends, President Ford, a man that he worked with very closely. And I hope that we'll hear a bit more today about that kind of a relationship that Mr. Dingle had with President Ford. A relationship, of course, that was very much forged across the proverbial aisle. And during their years in public service together, they accomplished very much as Michiganders and not as Republicans versus Democrats. That is very central, I believe, to the topic that we are going to be reflecting on this afternoon. As I noted by colleague Rick Hall, who will host today's conversation, is a professor of political science and public policy. His research focuses on American national politics. And he has studied participation and representation in Congress, congressional committees, congressional retirements, campaign finance reform, legislative oversight, and lobbying in Congress. So very well suited to moderate our conversation this afternoon. I would like to note that we will preserve quite a bit of time today for questions from the audience. And I know that many of you wrote questions on cards that our event staff has picked up. And we will select questions, and they will be read by members of our Ford School community, Professor Chuck Shippen and some of our students who will introduce themselves later in our event. We will also be monitoring questions coming in from Twitter. And so for those of you who are watching online, please do send along your questions, and we will incorporate some of them in the Q&A session later on. So again, welcome. We are delighted to have you here with us this afternoon. And with that, I would like to turn the floor over to Professor Rick Hall. Well, I want to start with my own personal welcome to Congressman Dingell. He has no reason to remember this. But my career in political science actually got started hanging around your committee room. I was a doctoral student looking for a dissertation topic in the mid-1980s. And I managed to stop in on a committee markup that was going on in the Energy and Commerce Committee regarding the reauthorization of the Clean Air Act. And I became fascinated with the give and take of committee politics and ended up writing my dissertation on that topic. My first graduate student that I had here, or my first PhD student here, in fact, then got interested in the issue of committee jurisdictions about which you know a lot and have affected over the years. And he went on to write his dissertation on that topic based heavily on the study of the Commerce Committee, won a National Book Award for it, and got his career started. He's now at a lesser policy school in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I'm going to just see if I might start the conversation with this question. And we can open it up to the others in the audience. But I think all of us become disappointed with Congress from time to time. We get, depending on our politics, we're displeased with some legislation they've passed. Things that they do or things that they don't do that we think they should. But is there really anything wrong with Congress as an institution? Congress is an extraordinarily well-designed institution. It has unfortunately been placed in the hands of human beings. And if you will listen to people like Mark Twain, they will make the observation there is no Native American criminal class except those who work in the Congress. And you will hear other criticisms made of the Congress for not working. But we are, after all, human beings. We work for the people. And it's our job to, as best we can, carry out the wishes of the people. I have to say that I am very distressed at the way the Congress is working at this particular time. A good friend of mine, known to many of you in this room, was talking to a Chinese diplomat who made this observation. And I think it's, well, I don't think it's true yet. I think it is a warning. And he said, America is at the terminal phase of historic decline because the political system is unable to make difficult and important decisions timely and to carry them out in a tough-minded way. I think that is perhaps as good a warning as we can get about what we have to do in the United States. The Constitution is one of the most extraordinary documents that's been written, I think, since the 10 Commandments. But it is in the hands of human administrators. And very truthfully, it needs to be looked at very carefully. Be looked at very carefully. For example, we should be trying to conduct it as the founding fathers wanted it done, but to do so in conformity with the needs and the realities of the time in which we live. But it ought also to be addressed understanding that when the political elections are over, it is then time for us to buckle down and to see to it that we work together to do the things that have to be done to make the country work. Compromise, conciliation, cooperation, and all of those things are absolutely necessary to making the system work. And I think that it is in that the Congress is broken down. But I will tell you that in good part, the Congress is broken down for the additional reason that we think this is what the people want. And that the people appear to be divided by 50-50. And that we have made in many of our parts commitments that we're going to do certain things when we get to Washington. And those things are viewed as a sacred commitment, which very frankly, we must honor whether or not we find that it was wise or foolish to make that kind of commitment. For the reasons that I make very few political commitments as I travel about my district, because I believe that that is not a good thing. Politicians who have been successful have found it necessary to explain to people we cannot do this for the very good reason that situations changed or I'm finding things are different. There's a great story that they tell about my great hero, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was one time forced to call in his press man, Steve Hurley and say, Steve, they're saying that I promise to balance the budget in Philadelphia. What am I gonna do? And Steve thought for a minute and he said, Mr. President, deny you were ever in Philadelphia. I'm not advocating that that be the course your government take, but we do have to recognize that when we get down there, we have a much more important responsibility than thinking about the past election or the coming election. So if right now the approval ratings the US Congress are hovering around 10% reflecting the fact that most people aren't pleased by its performance, but do you suggest that a lot of that owes to the fact that members are being too responsive to their constituents? I think some of that is true. Perhaps too responsive to some of the wrong constituents or perhaps not realizing the fact that their responsibility to those constituents is more broad than just carrying out some commitment made while we were learning their business. We've got a situation in Michigan Terminons. Speaker's got two years experience. I'm not convinced that a member of Congress with two years experience would know where all the restrooms were. And the Congress has prudently set up a seniority system that says, okay, you've got to learn a little bit about your business before you're going to run the place. And so it's obvious that some extraordinary people can come down there and with two years experience can do a splendid job, some of them can. But the biggest criticism I suspect I have is first of the Congress, but second I have a bigger criticism and that is the people and the media. Because the Congress off times gets itself confused and thinks it works for the media. And that leads to some serious consequences. Campaigns are costing an unbelievable sum of money. Members are influenced by that. But then members are also, quite frankly, spending a huge amount of time contemplating the next campaign. And I think really they ought to sit down and say, look what my dad told me and that is son, the best politics is the best public service. If you do what is best for the country, the people are gonna put you back in your job. If you don't, they won't and they shouldn't. And I remember I used to call him up every once in a while when I was back practicing law and he was still serving in the Congress. I'd say, dad, so-and-so is getting ready to run against you. Better get home, do some campaigning, raise some money, get around. Dad's saying to me, son, don't worry. He says, I take care of my people in the time between elections and elections they always look after me. And that's a great rule to follow but I don't think a lot of my colleagues have the comfort in it that frankly they should. Thank you. Okay, we'll now turn to some of the questions the audience has submitted. Ruth? Looks like Ruth has as much trouble with these darn things as I do. Hi, Mr. Dangle, thank you for being here. My name is Ruth Brown. I'm a dual master's student in public policy and public health. The first question from the audience that I'd like to ask you is whether you think that there's any way that elected officials will become, as in old times, colleagues across the aisle rather than enemies disguised as adversaries? Well, I wrote two lengthy op-eds and I made a number of speeches on this. I remember the Congress when members had huge differences but great friendships that went across the aisle. That still exists amongst some of the older members and it's possible it could be done. Fred Upton, my colleague from Michigan and I have just moved forward to pipeline safety bill that was signed by partisan. In the last Congress, my good friend, the Joe Barton, the former chairman of the committee and I moved forward a pharmaceutical, rather a food safety bill. It's a remarkable piece of work by partisan but it also has the support of the industry. This is possible. When I was the chairman of a little sub-committee on merchant marine fisheries, I had three Republican colleagues and the three of us would sit down and we wrote some of the great conservation legislation of the 70s, including endangered species and national environmental policy act and things like that. And one of them, I used to get on him, his name was Tom Pelly. I'd say, Tom, let me do something for you because he'd been such a wonderful cooper with me and Tom would look at me and say, John, he'd say, I would much rather have my people ask why there is no statue to me than why there is. And he took me years to check it out. It was Tato the Elder that had this to say. And there still are people like that but the taxpayers, the voters, the media have got to tell the Congress, Congress, you work for us. We expect that you will work this way and that we will not have the kind of hostile, disruptive behavior that we're seeing which has prevented the country from getting a budget from addressing major political and substantive questions and which leaves us in a position where the Chinese are giving us the kind of warning which they did. Mr. Dingle, thank you for taking our questions. I'm Caroline Francis and I'm also a master's student here at the Ford School. This question comes from the audience. How do you resolve the situation when the interests of your constituents conflict with the interests of the nation as a whole? My dad taught me that you go home and tell the people what you did and why. And they will pretty generally understand. There's a book, or rather a letter, that I keep on my desk from an English parliamentarian who represented one of the boroughs in England. And I refer to it from time to time. And he said something which I think tells a member of Congress what he ought to do. He said, I owe the people I serve the duty of the greatest truth, the greatest decency, the greatest fidelity, and the greatest effort. But he made it plain that he was elected to make the decisions as the representative of those people and then go home and explain what he had done with the pretty good expectation that people would understand and be supportive. Now, as an addendum to this, I'll tell you that very few, on very, very few occasions, have I run into a situation where I felt that my personal conscience was different than what I thought the people wanted. And that's made public service pretty easy for me. And so I just go home and say, fellas, this is what I did and this is why. And I hope maybe you'll give me another two years. This question also comes from the audience. You were an early advocate of healthcare reform, ultimately championed by President Obama and passed into law in 2010. Do you agree with the Obama administration's implementation of the law that requires employers to cover birth control as part of their insurance policy, even if they are opposed to this provision? We ran into a big fuss over this because some church groups were of the view that the administration, by its interpretation of the statute, was imposing burdens on them, which conflicted with their rights under the Constitution for freedom of religion. The original version, I think, went too far. But basically what it said was that the government is not going to require this kind of action by employers if they are church groups. But they did not extend it to the broader world of groups that might be affiliated with the church. There was a great deal of distress expressed. By the people on this, so the administration took it back and redid it and they said, we will not make even those kinds of groups provide that kind of service, but rather we will make the insurance companies provide this. And so they said, and that is now being reviewed in the court of public opinion. It is my view that this goes about the right direction in addressing the requirements of law, which say that women have to have the right to contraceptive services. And it does indeed mimic what 28 states have done with regard to this particular point. So I am content. I'm going to hear more of the discussion in the public arena. And perhaps maybe there will be some additional changes, but I don't think so. Thank you. I have another question about healthcare from the audience. Given that the passage of the Affordable Care Act and the aging of the baby boom generation will add a lot of people into the healthcare system and into Medicare specifically, what do you think we need to do to address the shortages that have been identified in hospitals, physicians and nurses to make sure that people access good quality care? I'm sorry, could you give me the last couple of paragraphs again, please? And I'm very sorry. Do you think we need to take action to increase the supply of healthcare facilities, physicians and nurses to make sure that everybody can access good quality healthcare as the baby boom generation ages into Medicare and health reform opens up access to healthcare to more people? Absolutely. The Affordable Care Act is going to make it plain that we have a lot of shortages in terms of healthcare professionals. Nurses are something where we have a tremendous shortage. I got a call right after 911. And the first call was from the auto companies and they said, Dingo, we're shutting plants because we can't get goods across the river to meet the requirements of our just-in-time policies. And I got a call from the hospitals. And I said, Dingo, we're shutting down hospitals and closing down operating rooms. I said, why didn't they have a common sense of going to do that? They said, because we have 3,000 nurses that we import into the Detroit area every day from Canada. Now the simple fact is we don't have enough nurses. And a lot of the nurses are not going to producing new nurses but being all administrators and things of that kind. So we have a terrible, terrible shortage here. We also have a terrible shortage of other healthcare professionals. We've got a huge shortage, for example, of family care doctors. And if you go through, I'd wager almost anybody in this room can come up and say, well, we've got this shortage. And we do. Now we happen to have enough hospitals, I think, and it's been state policy that we hold down hospital construction but either even finding that there is need for hospitals. We've got a lot of other needs. For example, one of the terrible problems we're going to have is going to deal with record-keeping, protecting privacy, seeing to it that the records reach the point where they can save us money instead of costing us money by constant duplication and things of that kind. Yes, these are all things that we are going to have to address. And they're going to be very severe and substantial problems. And I'm hopeful we can stop fighting around about this legislation and getting down to the serious business of seeing to it that it needs to be administered so it'll benefit every American. We have an audience question on a different topic for you. Oil prices, gasoline prices are projected to approach $5 a gallon by Memorial Day. Is it possible that current environmental restrictions on drilling oil have contributed to this problem? Also, how do you think this price increase will affect unemployed Americans who are facing a weak and slow economic recovery? Well, when I was a puppy in the Congress, we tried to control oil prices. And by golly, we succeeded for about three, four years. Then we found the whole thing was creating a new criminal class and it wasn't working. And one guy that I caught in investigation I ran had actually contrived to steal about $11 billion. We made him give it back, but we didn't catch everybody who was busy doing these things. So the end result of the whole business was that we phased out control on energy prices. In the case of oil and gas, we did it about the right time. On electricity, we did it about the wrong way and we wound up creating a fine mess with Enron and other scoundrels who went out and killed a fat hog at the public expense. Now, having said these things, oil prices are really in the hands of OPEC. We lost control of our oil prices when we began importing more oil than we produced. So we are largely victims of whatever world oil prices want to be and whatever all of the people in the speculative part of that business want those prices to be. And the pressures there are up and not down. Prices come down very slowly, but if you watch, boy, it doesn't take anything to make them go up and very fast. Now, having said these things, we are going to try to see to it that we bring on alternative sources. But one of the reasons that OPEC was created was to see to it that not only did they balance out the market, but they did something else. And that was, they saw to it by golly that alternative fuels didn't replace petroleum. They had been exquisitely successful in that particular. Oil prices could hit $5, they could not. I remember one time I was asked when I was a puppy back in the 70s, were they gonna hit a dollar? I said, yeah, I can't tell you when. And frankly, a dollar gas looks pretty good today. So everybody here would agree. But having said that, I hope that we can do the things that we need to to see to it that we bring on supply. We have wise policies for conservation, including a sensible program for regulating oil use and other things that affect prices, including automobile fuel efficiency on which we have just finally achieved an agreement that does what I wanted for years. And that just gives us a single standard of fuel efficiency for automobiles. This is a more political question from the audience. Of the four main candidates still running for the Republican nomination for president, who do you feel would be the easiest to work with as a Democratic congressman? Ooh boy. I've been able to work more or less with every president that we have had since I went to Congress. And that includes my Republican friends. I was able to work with Nixon, which is gonna come as a tremendous surprise to a lot of people. I was able to work very closely with Jerry Ford, who is a personal friend and a really great president. I was able to work with both of the Bushes. Oh, I had some very profound differences with the second Bush. I haven't heard anybody running for president on the Republican ticket that has been telling me that they particularly wanna cooperate with Democrats like me. And on issues like budget, public expenditures, things of that kind, I'm hearing remarks that indicate it's gonna be very difficult for me to work. Now, I can work and do work with Republican colleagues in the House and Senate. And as a lot of bipartisan legislation goes through with my name and some other of my colleagues, Republicans and Democrats on it. And I intend to try and keep that. And I wanna try and work with Republican presidents if we get one, and I certainly hope to heaven we don't. But, and I'm gonna do everything, see to it that that does not happen. But we will have to see, and we'll have to see whether they are willing to repudiate some of the things that they're saying. Because one of the funny things about when you watch the Republicans running for president, they run like the very devil to get to the far right. And as soon as the nomination is at end, they start running like nobody's business to the center. And sometimes they're even able to make the case that by going they are in the center. But it'll be interesting to see. I think the most facile fellow in this particular is my good friend, Mr. Rodney, who has a position for almost every occasion. In the time that you've served in Congress, how has the rule of interest groups changed in the legislative process? Do you think that the legislative process benefits from interest group advocacy on balance? I work for the people of the 15th district. And I work for the people of Michigan and the people of the United States. Every member of Congress does the same thing. And I have always believed that the best legislation includes the input of everybody from the far right to the far left. I've always begun when I was drafting legislation to start with the center and then to move out. And I remember the Clean Air Act has been mentioned. I remember I got tremendous compliments one time for doing it on the floor in 13 hours. And I said, oh, thank you very much, really appreciate it. It only took me 13 years to do this in 13 hours. And the fact of the matter is that everybody is entitled to be heard. This is their country. The Congress works for them. And it's our duty to hear them and for me to bring in every member of Congress, I can when I'm handling legislation so that they will have a say for their people. And I believe that better legislation results from that process than the more exclusive things where you see them keeping members out of it. I particularly dislike the practices that have grown up in the Congress lately where they exclude committees or members from both parties and they write the legislation in the speaker's office. The Republicans do it and we've begun to do it. And I think it's absolutely wrong because the way good legislation has been worked out has been over 200 years of history in this country where we took advantage of almost 1,000 years of wisdom in the British Parliament. And we had an inclusive process of legislating. And it was called a regular order. And by the Great Horn Spoon it worked. Social security was written, Medicare was written, tax laws were written, wars were fought. And there was cooperation and goodwill inside the Congress when it happened. But I don't see that now. And that is where the public has got to get in and say, Dingle, you and your colleagues got to stop that nonsense. And there's got to be more cooperation, more conciliation, more coordination in running the business as a government. And you ought to be telling the speakers that this is one of your attitude. Kind of, Glenn, do you think lobbyists help that or hurt that problem? I have a rule on lobbyists. Anybody who wants to see me can do it. That includes lobbyists and anybody else. And it's my view that everybody is some kind of a specialist. Everybody's got a concern that they're entitled to have heard. Now, lobbyists have, I think, gone too far. I remember one time the chairman of the committee had bushel baskets full of what he called green mail, brought in supposedly from constituents. So I ran down and grabbed a bunch of stuff because I just wanted to see what it was. And so we had a grand Donnie Brook in the committee, went on for hours. And they actually took one of my friends, Bobby Rush, off there when I locked him up for violating the rules of the house. Bobby's a tough fellow and they didn't scare him and it didn't work. But I looked up and here I have a letter from a guy by the name of Jerry Welch. Now, Jerry's a great friend of mine. He was president of Mineral Community College. I don't think Jerry mind me telling him, but so I called him up and I said, Jerry, why the hell are you sending me this letter? I happen to know it's something that you don't happen to agree in. He said, absolutely, John, I didn't write that. I was on a motorcycle trip in Europe when that thing was sent to you. So that kind of practice is going too far. I have a rule that if I'll listen to any lobbyist because I learned from them. If they lie to me, they don't get through the door again. That's their last visit with me. But if they will shoot and tell me the truth, I find that the ability, rather than it is really valuable to the country, if we will see that everybody, including lobbyists, have a right to be heard and their concerns evaluated properly in the process of writing legislation. You're talking about the speech of lobbyists and the public and this is a question from the audience about speech from politicians. The question is, I hear arguments and statements made as facts by politicians that would never stand up to academic scrutiny. Do you think that politicians who make such statements are ignorant of the facts or are merely being less than fully honest? Who, boy, could you explain that last part a little bit better? I think the question is asking what the motives are. So when politicians who are in office or campaigning make a statement that's not factual, is it because they aren't aware of the facts or because maybe they're manipulating the facts to their advantage? Just like folks in business or academics or wherever it might happen to be, we all deal with all kinds of folk. Some of them are just plain out, not liars or scoundrels. Most of them pretty decent folk. And most of them are honestly trying to tell you the truth. Some of them will view the truth as being something they heard on some broadcaster or read in some kind of piece of paper or heard in a church somewhere. Every once in a while those folks are right and every once in a while they're wrong. So one of my jobs is to always try to weigh out who is saying this, what do they mean, what are their interests, what is it they want, what are the facts. And I've got a lot of tools that are made available to me. I've got the Library of Congress and the Congressional Reference Service and the Auditor General of the United States who we harness up and have him evaluate things both as a bean counter and an auditing that way and by performance auditing. And it's been a process that first of all, I learned from some very smart people. But it's also been a process that has worked for me very well. And it's bottomed in good part on what wise men who served in the Congress, men wiser than me before me said was the way that things should be done to best determine what the facts are. And I'll tell you the hardest problem I have in the Congress is evaluating the facts and finding out what is right and best to do. Once those questions have been resolved, it becomes very easy. We have one or two policy questions for you. Again, now from the audience. In your law and service as a congressman, the world's views on gay rights and gay marriage have changed dramatically. Can you discuss the evolution of your thoughts on this and whether or not you support Nancy Pelosi's call for putting full marriage equality on the Democratic platform this year? Well, way back, it was my view that this was a matter that should be tended to at the state level. And it's still pretty much my view that that should be done. Very frankly, I have found over the years that there are a lot of other questions that come into play on how we should address the question of gay marriage. And that there are a lot of important rights like visitation, adoption of children, of states, inheritance, medical questions, who is going to sign off on the patient and so generally I have come to the conclusion that federal law where needed should address these questions and should do so by at least permitting there to be if not gay marriage, at least to permit there to be a right to have a respective and respectable social compact between two persons, which would give them the rights that persons who have marriage created and consummated in a church would have. I've not come out yet in favor of gay marriage. I've said that a social contract should be respected. And I have to say I have not gone further than those matters, although I will tell you that I'm sort of walking proof as a fellow lives, he will learn and his viewpoints will change as he continues to serve and address these decisions and try and learn the facts. And I'm like about everybody else. I'm just like Mary Heafshaw or Tony Darizynski here or the others who were in public office. I learn as I go along because I'm attending a great school, which requires me to learn as I go about my business of serving the people. This question is also from the audience and is particularly relevant as the decline in the manufacturing sector has led to people seeking work in other sectors. The question is, we need student loan forgiveness for older or senior students who have to borrow to change careers and maintain employment. Do you have any thoughts on the possibility of loan forgiveness for older students? Give me the question again, please. And with my apologies, go ahead. We need student loan forgiveness for older, more senior students who have to borrow money to change careers and maintain employment by returning to school. Do you have any thoughts on the possibility of loan forgiveness for those students? Well, I've always been supportive. Well, let me try and see the picture of my overall philosophy here. I've always supported federal aid to education. I've always supported Pell grants and I've supported student loans. And I'm busily supported at this time saying to it that we can have the amount of interest charged on student loans. I have not only the University of Michigan in the district but I've got a bunch of community colleges in Eastern Michigan. These schools do handle very frequently more senior students who are going back to get education and to improve their education. I believe there that the federal government should provide loans and other assistance for those students so that they could upgrade their skills and their educational qualifications so that they can provide what we need in the way of a skilled workforce because one of the absolute critical concerns that this country has is to seeing to it that our workforce is sufficiently skilled and capable that we can compete with other countries who are absolutely ruthless in their competition with the United States. Now that's a pretty general answer but it tends to show what I think of at each stage of the learning process. You mentioned Michigan's term limits before but one of our audience members wants to know if you see any place for term limits of any length perhaps longer and could they fix any of what you think is wrong with Congress these days. Well, I have term limits, my term limits two years and at the end of that two years I go hand in hand with the people I serve and I say here fellas is what I have done and this is why I think you should elect me and I know of no instance where we ought to take away from the American people the right to select the guy they want to serve them. The fellow they think is gonna be the best public servant to look after them, to run government for them in the way they think it should best be done and so I just have to say I think the whole idea of term limits is silly as long as you've got a perfectly good election process that lets the people have a decent say. Now, we do have some major problems. First of all we're spending money like a drunken sailor on election. First election I ran in I spent $19,000 and I thought my God this is awful. Well, since that time I've found that that's not enough to get really in a tough race elected to be dog catcher. Now I happen to have taken a look at what happens on presidential elections. Few years ago we spent for the entire presidential election Republican and Democrat and others $500 million. This is a God awful scandal. And then I found last presidential election Obama spent $750 million. Now I find that because of the Citizens United case and other things we're gonna be spending billions. Nobody knows how many billions we're going to be spending. And that is something which will corrupt our institutions of government, destroy the faith of the American people in their government and make them think that they are served with a bunch of people who are for sale. I deeply resent it because I will tell you this, I am not for sale and I don't ever intend to be. But I don't want anybody to have a reason to think that and I think that this does corrupt the system. It does deny people faith and confidence in the system. And I think it's got to be controlled. And one of the things I'm working on now is to try and come up with what will be a constitutionally satisfactory mechanism to repeal or set aside the decision that the Supreme Court made in that absolutely outrageous decision of Citizens United. Interparty acrimony seems to dominate press accounts of most issues before Congress. Is this true in your experience now and can you compare your experience now to previous terms or previous administrations? Well, the Congress has changed since I came. We didn't have television in the house when I was first elected. We didn't have electronic voting. We had very different ethics laws. I now hire a lawyer for a very substantial sum of money out of campaign funds to file all the reports that I have to file to stay on the right side of the law. And I also have him tell me what I can do. And that's a hot phone line because I'm calling him all the time to say, what can I do about this? And what should I do? How do I stay on the right side of the law here? So all of these things has changed. I told you about how it was when I was starting out. I used to work with my Republican colleagues. And I saw great friendships that would be across the aisle. Members of Congress would go off with each other. Their kids would date each other. They'd get married across party lines and it was a whole different climate internally. And one of the funny stories I know is there were two guys, neither one of which I had much use for. One of them was Vito Marcantonio. He was either a communist or he was cheating him out of dues. And the other one was a white racist from Mississippi by the name of John Rankin. If you looked at the congressional record, you'd find they hated each other. And they'd get in the well and they'd have these terrible, terrible, knock down, drag out fights. And when the fight was over, they'd put their arms around each other and walk off the floor. And so a very interesting sequel to this is that the Democrats and the Republicans got tired of having this rascal. In New York, so they formed a fusion ticket and they went in and they beat him and he was out. Two years later, Rankin lost. Why? There was a symbiotic relationship there. Those two needed each other. They were friends. They were great actors. They put on a good show and it kept getting reelected. Those kinds of things are not things necessarily to be proud of, but they do show that there is a need for us to work across the aisle and that the public will be best served when we do so. Thank you very much, Congressman. We really appreciate you coming and visiting with us here at the Ford School. We have to conclude the proceedings. Yes, unfortunately, we are out of time. I do want to say that while this will conclude the formal piece of our program, we will have an informal reception just outside of our auditorium and I hope that you will stay and join us for that. I'd like to thank our audience for their questions, our question posers. I'd like to thank Rick Hall for moderating our panel and a very special thank you to our guests. Please join me in thanking Congressman Dingle. Thank you, Rick. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.