 Good evening, welcome. My name is Lyndon K. Boozer and on behalf of the LBJ Foundation, we're pleased to present a conversation with House Democratic Majority Whip James E. Clyburn, the third most powerful Democrat in the U.S. House of Representatives. Like former President Johnson, Congressman Clyburn understood very early the value of education. His very first job out of college was as a teacher in Charleston, South Carolina. He has devoted his entire life to equality, justice, civil rights and opportunity. I urge you to read his memoirs, Blessed Experiences, Genuinely Southern, Proudly Black. At just 20 years old, he helped plan and participate in a march protesting the segregated lunch counters in Orangeburg, South Carolina. That led to other protests in the state capital of Columbia, South Carolina, for which he was thrown in jail. Of course, that's where he met his beloved Miss Emily. They were married almost six decades. Mr. Clyburn was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1992 and quickly rose up the leadership ladder serving as Vice Chair and Chair of the House Democratic Caucus. He was also Chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus and Assistant Democratic Leader. For the second time, he now serves as a House Democratic Whip, or the chief vote counter in the House, another commonality he shares with the late, great LBJ. We are deeply grateful for his long commitment to public service and liberty and justice for all. This evening's conversation will be moderated by LBJ President and CEO Mark Uptekrove. Thanks for joining us, and thanks to our programming sponsors, the Moody Foundation and San David's Healthcare. And now, without further ado, we present to you the House Democratic Majority Whip, James E. Clyburn, and Mark Uptekrove. Congressman James Clyburn, welcome. We are honored to have you with us. Thank you very much for having me. When you came to Congress nearly three decades ago, as Bill Clinton was taking office, what are the changes that you have seen in Congress since you took office in 1993? Well, the changes have been, let's just say, great. When I came, it was the 103rd Congress. My class in 1992, that election, it was the largest class since World War II. But Congress tended to work. We worked of different parties, but we got along well. We had, we socialized with each other across part of the lines. In fact, when I first came up here, I was the only member of the Congress on Black Caucus. There was a golfer. And most of the time, I was on the golf course with Republican colleagues. But after 1994, Newt Gendricks became the speaker. In the 1994 election, you may recall, it was very, very caustic. And things have not been the same since. And today, members, they have to speak to each other. It's gotten so now, members have taken the call in each other's names on the floor. The quorum is gone. The ability to find common ground is very, very difficult anymore. And I think a lot of that could be attributed to social media and extent to which things have been weaponized via social media. The absence of the truth is pretty pervasive. And these things have caused a tremendous deterioration in the Congress. It seems, Congressman, that those divisions have become more pronounced since Newt Gingrich ushered in this new era. Do you see it getting better or worse over the next 10 years? I think it's going to get better. I do believe that we are seeing some signs now that people are wiser up to what's going on via the Internet. People are beginning to look behind these sound bites and asking questions. And I notice just in the last several days, people's attitudes seem to be getting a little better. And that is on both sides of the aisle, I think. There are many who maintain, Congressman, that your endorsement of Joe Biden last year not only led to him getting the Democratic presidential nomination, but ultimately winning the presidency. And some go further and say that that endorsement saved the Democratic Party and perhaps even saved our Republic. What led to your endorsement of Joe Biden? Well, a several years ago, long before I came to Congress, I started having this fist ride. Now, fist ride may sound like just a thing that people do in campaigns, but I started having the fist ride simply because I noticed that on the night before our State Democratic Convention, a lot of people came to Columbia for their State Convention and didn't have anything to do on the night before, especially when there was a big fundraiser always taking place the night before. And a lot of the people that we depended upon to do grassroots work, turn out the vote, could not afford to be going to that big fundraiser. So I started having the fist ride from there. And it grew and grew and grew. Well, in 2019, the fist ride was the biggest we had ever had. Had over 20 candidates who were running for the presidency in attendance. And the fire department cut the attendees off at 7,500. So I got home that night and I said to my wife, who was suffering with diabetes and did not feel up to coming to the fist ride, I told her how successful it was. And then I said to her, I said, you know, we're going to have a tough time this year trying to get a nominee because with 20-some-odd people running, many of them are close friends of ours, it's going to be tough. She said to me, I don't care how many people are running, I don't care how close we are in friendship with any of them. We've got to have Joe Biden as a nominee in order to be successful. She felt that very strongly. And so just before the South Carolina debate, I attended a funeral along my longtime accountant. And at that funeral, I encountered a lady who I had never met before. And she asked me who I was going to vote for in the primary, which will be coming up about 10 days later. And I told her that I was going to vote for Joe Biden. She said to me, she needed to hear that. And the community needed to hear from me. And so that's what made me do the endorsement the way I did. Because as I left that church, several other people expressed similar things to me, that the community was waiting to hear from me. And so I made the endorsement. And it was as emotional as I was. Because by this time, my wife had passed away. And the endorsement itself just took on a different meaning. And it was a bit emotional. And South Carolinians in the country felt the emotions of the moment. And that's why I did it. And that's the way. And I guess it turned out okay. I would say so, Congressman. But there are many of them who follow politics who knew that that would be a seminal moment, that it would be a game changer. Did you know the weight that your endorsement would have when you gave it to Joe Biden? No, I really didn't. I thought that I might have some influence. When I saw the exit polls, and over 50% of the people said that my endorsement carried a whole lot of weight with them. And a lot of people were just saying they were really waiting to hear from me. So what was said to me in that church yard seemed to have been pretty pervasive throughout the state. And the way people responded to it. No, I didn't expect that. I was hoping to have some influence, but I had no idea of the weight. What were you feeling, Congressman, when Joe Biden was announced as the winner of the 2020 election on November 7th of last year? Well, when he was finally determined, when they finally made it official, I was out on the golf course. And I got this phone call, well, you know, being majority well. We have a security detail. And one of the, one of the security people came out to the golf, out to the green. I was playing pretty good and approaching the 15th hole. And I saw this look, he says, they just declared Joe Biden the winner. So it's great. He says, but they need you back at your house. And I said, okay, I'll be there as soon as I finished this round, man, I'm running the money. Because now I'm told to bring you now. So I had to leave the golf course while I was ahead. And on the way home, I started having feelings that Emily had set me on the right course again. Hmm. Congressman, when you make an endorsement like that, that carries that kind of weight and changes things the way it did. How did Joe Biden respond? Did you get a coffee mug or a t-shirt or something? How did he express his gratitude to you for making that endorsement? Well, we talked the night of the election. Now, on November 3rd, I was waiting on the returns. And as you recall, the returns were slow coming in. And of course, I'm looking at the totals. And I was sweating it. And the phone rang that night. I just around 10, 11 o'clock. And it was Joe. And he thanked me and he was pretty positive. Well, I wasn't positive. I accepted this thanks. And I started expressing some relevance about what might happen. But he was pretty certain that he was where he needed to be. And so I gathered from that that they were looking behind the numbers. I was only seeing what the TV people were reporting. They were getting numbers from the folks they had out there. So we had a pretty upbeat conversation. But when I hung up, I was still not convinced. Now, this is Tuesday night. It was, I think it was a Saturday when they declared him and so I was on eggshells up until that point. I want to go from what must have been a great moment of elation to a moment of tragedy, which is the capital siege that happened two months after Joe Biden was declared the winner in the presidential election. What were you feeling when the capital was under siege on January 6? Well, as you know, we were meeting to make official the Electoral College. And that's always in a joint session. And I had an assigned seat on the man's floor. There were only 11 people on our side of the aisle, 11 members seated on the floor. Because we were social distancing and we were doing everything that the attendant of physicians told us to do. But I know it's on the other side of the aisle. The Republicans were not adhering to that. And I said to someone, I said, you know, these guys are not really cooperating with the attendant physician. NASA is going to have a tough time here today. Nancy Pelosi was residing. But I settled down and the vote started. And a lot of us were talking to Nancy about whether or not she should preside. Because people just had a feeling of just unease. But she insisted that she was going to. But then, not long after the voting started, I looked up and Nancy was being escorted off of the podium. Now, that was a bit unusual. But as I looked at her, just beyond her was a head of my security detail beckoning the meeting to come over. And I went over to her and she said, we got to get out of here. The building has been breached. And they took me down a security's room to get out of the building. In fact, there were staircases I didn't know that were really there. And we went to this undisclosed location. Now, all of this time, I never felt a real fear. I don't know why. But I didn't. I just missed the fire drill. It was not until I got to this undisclosed location and saw the television and the accounts that I realized how serious it was. I didn't feel that in the building. So I never got a chance to feel the way so many people who were trapped up in the bathroom there because some members were up in the bathroom there because, as I said, we were social justices and so they were all over the place. And when I saw that and I saw the TV accounts of what was going on is when I really realized what real danger we were in. What were members of your staff experiencing at that time? Well, in front of me, I got a call from a staff member who told me at the time that they were all in my office with the furniture at the door and that people were on this floor. I thought they're kind of strange because in Stature Hall, I have an office that opens on the Stature Hall. In fact, that's the only office where you see my name and title above the door. And inside that office, if I'll all this was going on, was Cedric Richmond. And nobody ever disturbed that door. Nobody knocked on the door. Nobody attempted to come in there. What they're all in, what some people refer to as my hideaway office, a part of the building, that people don't frequent unless they've got business. But that's where they were. And that's when I began to feel something untoward was taking place. Why would they not disturb the office on Stature Hall where so many of them were? They were taking pictures of each other next to the statues and I got statues on either side of that door. And Cedric Richmond told me later, nobody ever even knocked on the door. So I felt then that something really untoward was taking place. And so I began to get a different feel about what was going on. You were sequestered in a secret location with congressional leaders, including Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell, the house speaker and Mitch McConnell, the majority leader. And you said of that experience, there were interactions between both leaders. And I got to say this, some of my friends will be upset with me, but Mitch McConnell was great. And we worked together not just to make that visit good, but to put in place getting back to the Capitol to ensure a peaceful transfer of power. Do you think that experience in any way, Congressman, led to healing the divisions that had become so pronounced during the Trump? Well, I don't know if it will. I was sharing what I saw, what I felt. And we were huddled together, getting each other's opinions about what we should do. And it was very cooperative. And it's a sign of what can happen. Now, whether or not it will happen, I guess we'll see in the next few days, because we're going to be tested on these voting rights and civil rights stuff that we've got to deal with here in this Congress in the very near future. And whether or not we are going to see this ancient relic called the filibuster allow that to stop us from doing what's needed to protect the voting rights of citizens. Mr. McConnell holds a secret to that. And so we'll see with this surplus cooperation between the two parties and the leadership on that day. And we came back to the floor, the Senate got back around eight, the House around nine. And by early morning, the next morning we completed our work. And the effective, though maybe not too efficient, transfer of power had taken place. I want to get back to that in a moment, the notion of the filibuster as an obstacle to voting rights. But since that, you've been on Capitol Hill for, as I mentioned, nearly three decades now. Since the siege, does it feel the same, Congressman, or is there a different feeling that you have given the fact that that citadel of democracy, the capital of the United States was violated on January 6th? This seemingly impregnable place was broken into by these marauders. So does it feel different? Do you feel more vulnerable than you once did? Oh, yes. I'm not faithful or anything, but I do feel that there are some things, some cleansing that need to take place. There are people getting elected to this body now. Now they have very lower guards for the institution. There are people who are getting elected, who think their job is to tear down the institution. And I just think that puts us all at great risk. I see behind you, Congressman, a bust of Lyndon Johnson. That is the award that we gave you several years ago, the highest award from the LBJ Foundation, our Liberty and Justice for All Award, which was rightfully given to you. But Joe Biden invoked Lyndon Johnson last week when he said, for too long, it's been the folks at the top. Well, you know what trickled at him, but you've known it for a long time. But this is the first time we've been able to, since the Johnson administration, to begin to change the paradigm. So he has very lofty ambitions to change our American society in the same manner that Lyndon Johnson did with the great society. But Lyndon Johnson had Republicans rallying around to the cause. We wouldn't have civil rights, as you know, Congressman, without Northern Republicans rallying around the laws that Lyndon Johnson had proposed around civil rights, including voting rights. Is the Congress too divided for there to be a paradigm change during the Biden administration? Well, there's no question about the Congress being divided. You know that bust of Lyndon Johnson, that next to it is the bust of Third Industrial. And that might also foretell something for Biden. We expect for Joe Biden when he gets the opportunity to put the first African American moment on the Supreme Court. So that would be a good thing, I think. I don't think it's too divided. It is divided. No question about that. But there has to be a similar moment. It usually is. And it could very well be a similar moment taking place very soon that will tell the world, much as the speech that Mr. McConnell gave after the 6th of January. That was an incredible speech. Talking about how the antics of the outgoing president violated everything that this country stands for. That, to me, was a similar moment in the last rare long. But I think we can have a similar moment as it relates to legislation going forward. We lost your dear friend John Lewis last year. John Lewis is a great proponent of voting rights in this country, Congressman. And there is a bill in his name to ensure that voting, we have voting rights in this country going forward. But you have said of the filibuster, there's no way under the sun that in 2021 that we are going to allow the filibuster to be used to deny voting rights. That just ain't going to happen. That would be catastrophic. So how do you defeat the filibuster? I don't know if you have to defeat it. I think what you have to do is a combination of what President Biden is talking about and what I, along with some of our progressive members of the caucus are talking about. Number one, what has made the filibuster so lethal in recent days is you don't have to stand on the floor anymore. The filibuster was something you had to go to the floor and you had to give up a certain amount of your own conveniences to carry out. But what you've done is you don't have to ever be on the floor. You can affect the filibuster virtually that we don't call it that. So President Biden is saying he wants to go back to the, I think he called it the standing filibuster. Now that may be fine when it comes to legislation. But I believe that just as we've done a carve out of the filibuster rules as it relates to the budget that we call reconciliation, which we just used to pass this budget. We're getting ready to use again to pass the budget related infrastructure bill. There ought to be a carve out for civil and voting rights. These are basically constitutional issues. Legislation has to do with maybe someone's favorite program or a proposal. But it's not rooted in the Constitution. Voting rights, civil rights rooted in the Constitution. So what I have been proposing is that there ought to be an exception from filibusters for these constitutional issues just as we've done for the budget. One of the reasons that Donald Trump won the election in 2016 is because rural voters who had voted for Barack Obama eight years before had drifted to the Republican party and were taken by the candidacy of Donald Trump. How does the Democratic party win back rural voters? This is the way we're doing it. But we got to do it in such a way that the age-old adage that I live by, and that is you got to go out and tell the people in rural America what you're going to do for them. And we did that in this past election. And we have done a whole lot of what we said we were going to do with the American Rescue Plan. Now we got to do a big broad infrastructure program. Broadband has got to be a part of it. Rural hospitals got to be a part of it. All that's in the community health care centers. These are rural programs. So if we do a real broad-based infrastructure program the way we've done the so-called Rescue Plan, we will have demonstrated to rural Americans not just by words, but by our deeds. Because I think it's very clear now. I just saw a poll that said 72% of American people support the American Rescue Plan. I've also seen some headlines that say our Republican friends are having some trepidations about how they're going to rescue themselves from having not supported this plan and so many of their constituents are feeling good about it. I saw headlines a couple of days ago saying that rural voters or have warmed up to Democrats and to Biden. So we keep doing this. We get them back. We're having for 2022. We have seen a staggering increase in our deficit in the 20 trillion dollars when Barack Obama left office. It's 27 trillion dollars today. It escalated dramatically in the Trump administration. In January of 2020, well before the pandemic relief package had gone through Congress, Phillips Swacknell, the director of the congressional budget office, said not since World War II has the country seen deficits during times of low unemployment that are so large as those that we project, nor in the long part of the century has it experienced large deficits for as long as we project. So how do we introduce the notion of fiscal responsibility in federal spending? Well, I think that what we're going to do is make sure that these investments we are making that are really deficit spending and we've got to begin to when the economy began to grow, we got to use that growth to pay down debt and to reduce deficit spending. Right now, we cannot be concerned about the deficit or the debt when you're trying to keep people livelihoods and lives afloat. When things are stabilized, then I think you begin to go back to watching the deficit and paying down the debt. Remember Barack Obama came in their office at the beginning of the so-called great recession that hit us in September 2008. So he had to spend time, we were losing about 700,000 jobs a month, and so it stands traditionally. Republicans have driven us into these kinds of situations and the Democrats have been there to clean up the mess. Lyndon Johnson had to do it, Barack Obama had to do Bill Clinton before it had to do it. Now it falls, Joe Biden's plight to have to do it. Do you see during the Biden administration a trend perhaps toward lower deficit spending? I think so. If the economy starts to grow as it looks like it will, yes, absolutely, I see that. In fact, I'm a big advocate for doing a big infrastructure program, pay it for. I don't want to see us paying for this infrastructure program by borrowing money, and we can pay for it. So what we got to do is make sure that everybody that's going to benefit from it, pay into it properly. That's why I've been advocating things like a transaction tax. Look, what we did back in 2009, even in 2008 before 2009, Barack Obama saved the automobile industry. We saved Wall Street, and my whole thing is what did they contribute to that? And so here we are now with the flourishing economy. It's time, and that's why I want to see this transaction tax. One tenth of one percent of the transaction tax will yield around $750 billion. That'll pay us a big hundred change for an infrastructure program. And there's some other things that we can do. For instance, we dropped the corporate tax rate to 21. Nobody ever wanted it at 21. We wanted to see the corporate rate drop, but nobody ever talked about it being below 25. We woke up and the bill came in, the Trump administration dropped it all the way to 21, and that was at a point of diminishing returns. It put an end to the building of affordable housing because he took the corporate rate to a point of diminishing returns. That shouldn't be. And so Biden said, he's going to increase the corporate rate. So let's do it. Let's find the street spot. I think it's somewhere between 25 and 28 that you find the street spot for a corporate rate. And that income coming in, stop paying down the debt, stop using it to do the pay for infrastructure. And who knows? It may be time for us to look at a VAT, a value added tax. It's time for us, I think, to do an infrastructure bank, amortize some of the big spending we do on bridges and roads out of an infrastructure bank. That's the way we pay for homes. We pay the markers out, 15, 20, 25-year markers. You can do that with an infrastructure bank. So I think we can do this. We just got to get outside of our comfort zones to do it. You described the events that we saw last summer, the racial injustice that we saw last summer as an inflection point. And as you put it, for those of us who were activists in the 1960s, we today are living with much of what we thought was behind us. So how do we once and for all put racial equity on our agenda and ensure that there is equality for all Americans? Well, I know that you do it once and for all. I'm a great proponent of the pendulum on the clock notion of how our society works. I often say that things in our society move like a pendulum on the clock. It goes right for a while, then it goes back left for a while, and then it goes back to the right again. That's the way it's always been. So I don't know that you will solve these problems once and for all. I think that what you have to do is recognize a certain fundamental rights or not ever be violated. And you have various notions dealt with from left to right, but not constitutional principles. You don't ever ought to be a bargain in a way or filibustering people's constitutional rights and their basic civil rights as citizens. These things ought to be out the table. And then we'll deal with all these other notions that may be a favorite project here or something on the other side. But the only way for us to really have some modicum of success with racial issues is to take them out of the legislative back and forth. You ought not be legislating people's fundamental rights. Whoever may be the president, it ought to be beyond their president's notion to determine, well, now that I've got the right to vote. Well, Congressman, going back to those days when you were an activist in the 1960s fighting for civil rights, if you had had a crystal ball then and you could look forward to 2021 and see where we are as a society, would you have achieved as much in the way of civil rights or would you be disappointed that we haven't achieved enough? Well, I thought with the election of Barack Obama that we had really taken the road less traveled, I guess. But I knew almost immediately. I felt immediately. I didn't know about the meaning that Mitch McConnell and others were having on the night of the inauguration just six blocks from the Capitol plotting to make his life miserable as president. But I felt within days when Mitch McConnell said that his number one goal was to make Barack Obama a one-term president. And I knew what would go into trying to make sure that happened. Of course, he failed in the effort. But the fact that he went through the process, it started to tear away at the foundations that held this country together for such a long time. And so I began to feel almost immediately that the progress I thought we had made was just a fleeting moment. I had no idea we would continue to go to where we are now to result in a full year presidency of what we just had. I don't know if I thought it would get that bad. But I always thought that the pendulum would go back another direction. It went left with the Barack Obama's election. I had no idea where to go as far right as it did under Donald Trump. As you look forward to the challenges that we face during the course of the next four years with Joe Biden in the White House, what is your greatest concern, Congressman? My greatest concern right now is whether or not we'll do what is necessary to make this country's greatness accessible and affordable for everybody. It's one thing to have access to health care. It's something else to be able to afford health care. And that's just an example. And what I'm talking about, there's so much money in our health care system. And we've got a great health care system. But everybody can't afford the health care system that we have. So the question then becomes how do you make it affordable for everybody? That, to me, is what keeps me awake and I'm making sure that the greatness of our country is made accessible and affordable to all of its citizens. What do you most hope to achieve before the midterms of next year? Well, I want to see a massive infrastructure program. And I want to see 100% build-out of accessible and affordable broadband for everybody. I'm one of those people who believe that broadband can be to the 21st century, whether that electricity was in the 20th century. And so it's one thing. Electricity was around for a long time. And I've been telling people, especially in Black History Month, if we just look, we said electricity was just great. And we looked back at how we got there. It wasn't just Thomas Edison that we talked about. It was Louis Lattimer as well. Thomas Edison was a white guy. It was the light bulb, but it was Louis Lattimer, the black guy that had the filament. And it's not until that filament and light bulb came together that we were able to illuminate the world. A black guy and a white guy worked together to illuminate the world. And I think that's the notion that I'm traveling with today, that we got to get outside of our comfort zones in so many areas that we recognize the individual work that exists in each and every one of us and take advantage of that. That is the only thing that's going to move this agenda forward. And I think that it's what's going to be required for us to continue this trek towards a more perfect union. Well, Congressman Jay Fibron, I thank you not only for your time today, but for all the light that you have brought to our world as a civil rights leader and as a leader in Congress. Thank you so much, Congressman. Well, thank you very much for having me.