 Thank you so much for joining us today for what is going to be a very important and exciting discussion. My name is Holly Russon-Gillman. I'm a civic innovation fellow here at New America, and this is an exciting panel brought to you by the political reform project, which is run by Mark Schmidt and Lee Drepman over here who have been instrumental in putting this event together. So I'm going to do quick bios on our panelists, and then we'll let them talk and have an exciting discussion, and then we'll open it up for Q&A in a few minutes. So we have a professor, Bruce Keane, who is a professor of the humanities and social sciences at UC Berkeley, Stanford. Sorry. You know, Mark, why don't you continue the introductions? Actually, it's legitimate to be confused. Sorry, one correction, and I get drafted. Well, again, thank you all for being here today. I'm Mark Schmidt. The core of this discussion is Bruce Keane's book, Democracy More or Less, which is a really broad-ranging examination of kind of some of the quandaries and paradoxes of political reform across a whole range of areas. As Holly said, he's a professor at Stanford, formerly the director of the University of California Center at DC. And I think a lot of us know him as kind of the expert on things going on in California, particularly around the initiative process. That's where we very often see his name. To my right, Francis Lee is a political scientist at the University of Maryland and the author of a book on partisanship in the Senate, and really one of the leading political scientists studying Congress. To her right, John Lawrence worked in Congress for a number of years that's cut off here. But a long time for Congressman George Miller and Speaker Pelosi, two of my favorites. And for the last two years, has been teaching at the University of California Center here himself. Perry Bacon Jr. is a political journalist at NBC. He's also a New America Fellow studying some of the implementation of the Affordable Care Act in the States, and previously worked with The Washington Post in Time Magazine. And I think that's it. So what we'd like to do, Bruce, if you want to come up here, and then we'll do the rest of the discussion from the seats. Oh, OK. Well, good morning. And thank you very much to the New America Foundation and to Lee and Mark in particular for organizing this and to the few of the brave and the hearty who have showed up. A bunch of us, or at least three of us, were at the FEC hearing yesterday that was written about this morning in Dana Milbank's column. And what was interesting, of course, the column was about how the public comment section, which happened after we left, became a spectacle of, should we say, unusual views and what he regarded as kind of surprisingly unmeasured and undeliberative conversation and full of eccentric people. And in reality, that actually encapsulate one of the problems, one of the many problems that we have to deal with in contemporary democracy. That is our faith that the public will save us or the public's faith in themselves to actually save us, which comes up in a lot of different contexts. And so the term or the title of the book, Democracy, more or less, is about the fact that you can't give up on the public. You can't give up on the task of trying to encourage better civic education of finding constructive ways to engage the public. But the reality is that all too many times our idealistic notion of what citizenship is has led to a series of mistakes in political reform that we keep repeating over and over again. Now, again, I don't mean to say that there isn't a role for public opinion or there isn't a role for direct democracy or for public comment period or for transparency. Rather, what we're trying to say, I think, what I'm trying to say in the book and what I think a lot of scholars have been trying to say in political science is that there are limits to this and that we need to sort of think very seriously about when to turn on the instruments of public input and when to allow for representative democracy and for pluralism to flourish. So let me just summarize some of the basic themes and then take some examples that relate to issues in Congress, which I think was our orientation here. And then I'll try to do this all within 10 minutes or 15 minutes so that we can hear what other people have to say. The first theme I think in my book is that there have been some notable improvements in political reform. It's silly to say that the system isn't better than it was 100 years ago or 50 years ago or even 30 years ago. But the reality is that the progress in some areas, such as the expansion of the franchise, is offset in some ways by issues that just continually frustrate us. And I think of campaign finance reform or I think of lobbying reform or I think of redistricting formed issues that if you've been around as long as I have, the conversation now isn't that much different from what it was 30 years ago. I mean it takes a slightly different form, but it seems like we're stuck in the mud that we're cycling around. And some of these issues do cycle because of fads, but some of them cycle because we keep making the same damn mistake over and over again. So some aspects of political reform have been disappointing. In some areas we see that the political reform issues are very different from in other areas. So if you're living in California or you're living in states that have strong direct democracy traditions, you can see that change is easy to achieve and therefore the kinds of mistakes and problems that you have are very different from the ones at the federal government level where it's very hard to make changes because the Constitution requires supermajority votes at both the state level and at the congressional level because the politics is just much more visible and the money is much more concentrated. You get down to the state and local level, you see very different issues where we try lots of experiments, some of them lead to problems of excessive democracy. So what I try to say in the book is that it's a mistake to say political reform is one big issue, rather it's three different types of issues and many specific examples within them. There are the problems of too much democracy where we literally try too hard to include the public and a lot of direct democracy problems come out of that. There are issues of too little democracy. Think of the NSA, think of accountability issues, particularly around foreign affairs where we just haven't quite figured out how to get accountability but at the same time preserve the ability of the country to engage in foreign policy in an effective way. And then we have issues of cycles, that is to say where we keep changing our mind and examples I give in the book are between legislative and executive power, we go back and forth as to how we want to balance that off, sometimes depending upon where you are in power. So Democrats, when they're in power, if they control all the branches of government, hate the filibuster but when they're out of power they like the filibuster and it's Republicans too of course. So there isn't just one issue. Populous assumptions tend to fail when citizens don't live up to the expectations that we have for them. What voters want is essentially a fire alarm system of accountability. That is to say they don't want to have to pay attention most of the time and they don't. They don't want to really inform themselves but when they're pissed off they want to be able to pull the fire alarm. And so the problem is we set up lots of fire alarms at the state level. There are lots of elected offices and special district level at the state level. There are initiative measures that either overturn policies or create new policies. In various sorts of way we set up all these accountability mechanisms and in reality voters most of the time don't show up for a lot of these things, right? The turnout in off-year elections, the turnout at all these hearings that we create for environmental laws is minuscule usually captured by special interests. And so the question is why aren't the citizens there? Why are they allowing all the special interests to get there? Well because they've got other things to do with their lives, thank you very much, right? They don't have time to monitor all these things. They just want the fire alarm. They want to be able to pull the fire alarm. And the problem with fire alarm democracy is that if you're not pulling the fire alarm other people who really care will and will pay attention and use these opportunities, these democratic opportunities whether it's public comment period which we saw yesterday or whether it's FOIA laws or whether it's opportunities to vote for everybody from dog catcher to president. These opportunities are not captured by the general public in many instances. They're captured by small segments. And I've become particularly interested, I was telling Francis, in the way environmental laws are implemented at the state level and there is no better example of that or the water problems that John and I have talked about periodically than the capture by interest groups of opportunities that were created in the name of the public. So I argue in there what's missing there is the kind of pluralist understanding that when the public doesn't show up in great numbers interested intermediaries do and we kind of walked away from this about 20 years ago because we didn't really figure out a way to correct these biases in the way stakeholder democracy works or intermediary democracy works or indeed party democracy works. And that I think is part of the agenda that we have to look at as we move forward. And lastly in terms of general points and then I'll just give four examples and quit. And that is that I've sat on charter commissions and state constitutional commissions and there's a tendency for us eggheads and by definition if you're here you're an egghead to think of rational consistency as what you want in political reform. And the reality is that we have to go back to the fact that the system that we set up right from the start is not built on consistency of any one principle such as populism or power to the people but rather on complementarity between interest groups parties and intermediaries between public opinion and between neutral expertise. And you have advocates in the legal profession that think the court should be doing everything because they're the neutral referee and you get people that aren't very democratic that don't want to have the public involved at all and you've got people that want to be super democratic but really the reform task is how to blend these things in complementary ways and to be honest it's never finished. It's a case of adaptive mitigation that is to say every time we fix something it'll get unfixed and you've got to fix it again. So that's just what we need to realize. So let me just talk about four examples of where this bites us in the butt when it comes to the Congress. Number one is the primary system. The primary system was supposed to bring in voters and allow them to democratize the party choice process and as the Democratic Party learned very early when they after the McGovern campaign and party activists tend to prefer purity and every study in political science shows that the people that show up at conventions the people that show up at caucuses and the people that show up at low turnout elections are generally more ideological than the people that show up in general elections or the people that don't show up at all. So that's a problem. So when you go about trying to think well I'll have an open primary or I'll have a top two primary if the people don't show up it doesn't matter what the mechanism is. And so we're discovering in California despite all the tinkering that we do with that if you don't change the turnout you don't really change the outcome. If it's mainly the people that care and are more ideological there it doesn't matter what rule you're going to have. You might determine which of those groups is going to win but you're not going to moderate the process. So if you think about Boehner's problem right now or you think of the Tea Party and no doubt the time will come again when the Democratic Party has to deal with the struggle you see that the notion that somehow the process would be representative and it would be democratized really again it's captured by the purists. Or if you think of in campaign finance reform the cult of the individual donor which is the central premise of so much political reform. Well first of all one of the things we're discovering now with an increasing number of papers is that the individual donors are actually more partisan than the institutional donors in many instances. And so it's not clear that if your problem is over partisanship that you really want to be encouraging small donors. But that aside the reality is that most people don't either have the means or the motivation to give money. The reality is that far fewer of them give money than even bother to vote and far fewer Americans vote than in many other democracies. So the cult of the small individual donors I think is at the source and I'd have to explain this a little bit further of our problems with respect to campaign finance reform and the rise of independent expenditures. Thirdly basically the undesigned nature of lobbying which fills the expertise gap for Congress. Too many times we're trying the hope is to sort of regulate or control or diminish the role of lobbyists rather than recognize that lobbyists have an important role, intermediary role and we have to figure out how to balance that off against the potential for unequal influence and corruption and part of it is not accepting the fact that we really have to realize that lobbyists have a critical role in the system and we should be designing it to be more fair not to hope that it will go away. And then lastly let me just finish the new democratic opportunities fallacy. That is that if we create all these public comment periods for regulations that somehow bureaucracies will do a better job being responsive to people. Well guess what? First of all people that are trained to be in bureaucracies don't really have political skills. They don't know how to balance off competing goals. Their job is to implement some law that Congress has given them. So what if you create four or five environmental laws, you give them to different agencies and you don't give a priority over those different agents, you know over those different goals, you leave it to the local jurisdictions and the agents, the agencies officials to figure out how to balance flood control with Endangered Species Act, with conservation laws, with recreation use. You know they don't know how to do it and there's no prioritization. So again when we create these public opportunities for comment and for participation, we assume the general public would be there and rarely do they show up. So I will stop there because I think my point is simply that we've made some mistakes over and over again and it's time to really think in a more creative way of approaching reform so that we don't keep making the same mistakes over and over again. Thank you. Thank you Bruce. I'll start the conversation and I think we'll be brief in our comments. I found this fascinating. I'm somebody who holds almost all of those fallacies and still holds them strongly. Some of you were here last week. We were talking about small donors and some of the other issues. But I found this book as well as some other things that have been written over the last few years that kind of challenge a lot of the kind of truisms of political reform to be extremely important and I think it should inform everyone's thinking. And there's a lot in here that's really valuable. And I hope as we go on, you know, as we go a little further, Bruce, you'll talk a little bit about kind of where you see the solution and what you call your neo-pluralist approach. Because to me I like it. I feel like what's missing is a recognition of just how far off we are. You know, it's not like you can say, get rid of those illusions of political reform and let the system go because we're not in a good place and we're not in a place where I think I think what's striking to me is there's so, fire alarms are not, there's so little of the feedback that one expects to see in a political process right now. So for example, you talk about a little bit in the book and others in your kind of school of thought often talk about well if we brought back earmarks that would be great because then, you know, members of Congress would be able to, the Speaker and others, the Appropriations Committee would have a greater hold on members and because members wanted to deliver stuff to their district and getting rid of those was a mistake. Well I look at it and I think, well the interesting thing is these members of Congress didn't want the earmark. They said we don't need that. You know, you had members of Congress saying we're not going to help constituents if they have problems with the ACA. They can call the White House, we're not helping. You know, to see members of Congressional offices, I mean, it's probably as people who've worked on the Hill, a Congressional office saying we're not doing constituent service doesn't happen. You have governors able to say we're rejecting billion dollar infrastructure projects and there's no electoral consequences to doing that. So, you know, you get to the point where there's, I think, between money and identity politics and a bunch of other things going on. There's a big shift in our politics just to get to the kind of pluralist approach where yeah, you accept some trade, or you accept that there's earmarks, you accept that local interests prevail over some idealized version of the national public interest. You know, you could accept that just to get there is a political reform project. So, I think that in a way, I look at this, I hope it can be seen as not just a critique of the fallacies of political reform, some of which I'm going to hold on to, but as a little bit of a more realistic agenda for what reform should look like and do. And I agree, it's not, the agenda shouldn't be that we imagine, you know, this idyllic world where every citizen is spending, you know, five hours a day reading about the issues that are important to them and setting their priorities. That's not somewhere where we're going to get, but I think we have further to go from where we are than I think some of what some of your book suggests anyway. What's that? I'm turning to you. I appreciate the chance to be here to participate in this discussion of Bruce Cain's important new book. To say what I most appreciate about the book is its wisdom. This is not the first quality that usually comes to mind when you read the political reform genre that tends towards over-claiming and oversimplification. From the outset, the book recognizes the difficult trade-offs involved in reform efforts, the irreducible fact of competing goods. Two other highlights of the book. It gives us a framework for thinking about the big picture of political reform. It's very easy to get lost in the weeds of the details of institutional reform proposals. The areas of campaign finance and redistricting and legislative procedure and ethics reforms. These are extremely complex issue areas. What the book gives us is some useful ways to classify various reforms and think theoretically about what we're trying to achieve with them. The same time the book is also impressive for its range, it's difficult for any analyst to develop expertise in any one of those issue areas, but Bruce Kane is clearly conversant with them all. The goal in the book is to tread a path between too much democracy and too little democracy. That's why the title of the book is Democracy More or Less. He differentiates his approach to neopolarism from the populist tradition and from the apolitical tradition. So the populist tradition, things like term limits, more elections, initiative referenda, and the apolitical tradition that wants to empower expert agencies or the courts or use nonpartisan elections. As someone who studies American institutions and spends much of my time reading about and writing about the Congress, it's probably not surprising that I'm very sympathetic with this book's outlook. The emphasis on the importance and the unavoidability of mediating institutions strikes me as the right place to begin in thinking about American democracy. But rather than comment on the specific reform agenda laid out in the book, I'd like to talk just a little bit about the politics of political reform more generally. And it seems to me that the biggest hurdle that a neopolarist reform agenda faces is public skepticism. Public trust in government, as well as in just about any mediating institution, one can find data on right now is extremely low. After 2010, trust in government overall has been plumbing record depths in the history of public opinion polling. The same is true of approval of Congress's institution, which, according to the most recent Gallup poll, stands at 16%. It hasn't exceeded 30% since 2007. Public attitudes towards both major political parties are also very poor by historical standards. According to Pew Research Center polls, a majority of the American public hasn't had a favorable attitude towards the Republican Party since 2004 when it was at 52%. The Republican Party currently stands at 41% approval. Attitudes towards the Democratic Party are only somewhat better, 46%. This is a far cry from the 60% approval ratings that the party used to routinely get in the 1990s. Americans' confidence in the news media also stands at or tied with record lows in Gallup polling. Public views of labor unions since 2010 stand at historic lows. Huge shares of Americans, 75% or more, believe that interest groups have too much influence. The bottom line is that any reformer arguing for the importance of mediating institutions in such an environment ends the tremendous headwinds of public mistrust. It's probably not surprising that pluralism as a school of thought had its heyday in the 1950s and 1960s when trust in all these institutions was much higher than it is today. Instead, this environment of public mistrust offers an advantage to the reform traditions that Bruce Cain wants to steer us away from. Public skepticism of political institutions is most advantageous for those arguing for populist-style reforms. But research by political scientists Hibbing and Tice Morris also shows that Americans are frequently more comfortable with and trusting of apolitical and technocratic decision makers than they are of political and representative institutions. Second point I want to make, reflecting on the politics of political reform, is that you have to acknowledge that there are very few voters or groups who really care about these issues primarily because of their desire to adhere to good democratic principles. For example, nobody offers a principled defense of the fact that the residents of Washington D.C. have no voting representation in Congress. But even as indefensible as the practice is in principle, the only people who care about this issue are the people who are disadvantaged by it, and only some of them do. Democratic principles only cut limited amounts of ice outside of law schools, political science faculties, and reform advocacy organizations. It often seems that the institutional reform arena is one of endless opportunism. On the question of congressional procedure, it often seems that the two parties simply exchange their talking points when the majority changes hands. The former minority party in the House transitions from denouncing the heavy-handed tactics of the majority to using them in itself, watching the debate over the so-called nuclear option in the Senate over judicial nominations. One was struck by the speed with which Democrats moved from defending the unique traditions of the Senate when they were fighting the judicial nominations of George W. Bush to overturning them almost entirely when confirming Obama's nominations. The Republican Party, for its part, went from excoriating Democrats for going nuclear to accepting these new rules and considering perhaps expanding them to supreme court nominations. It's probably safe to say that major political reforms are generally not adopted on the basis of the strength of the arguments in favor of them. Strong arguments help, but they are almost never decisive. When they happen, political reforms are usually adopted because they become common carriers for a diverse group of actors who are all persuaded for a variety of reasons that the reforms will help them achieve their goals. For example, Congress's reform era of the 1970s, a period that strengthened central party leaders, weakened congressional committee chairs, and opened up Congress to much greater transparency. Only happened because of an array of different interests and individuals coalesced around these institutional reforms as a way to advance their own widely varying goals. The reform coalition got underway because of a frustration with progress on civil rights. This included legislators like Hubert Humphrey, Eugene McCarthy, Richard Bowling, as well as labor groups, the NAACP, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, and the Americans for Democratic Action. Liberals were the first to get on the reform bandwagon. Their primary target were those Southern committee chairs who'd seemingly had a lock on the process, and they believed that those reforms would help them advance their policy goals. Over time, they were joined by newer reformers, including interest groups like Common Cause and public interest groups more generally, legislators like Gary Hart and Tim Worth, who sought congressional reform less to advance those traditional liberal goals than to reduce corruption through congressional performance and transparency and accountability. But those reforms would probably never have happened, simply on the basis of the actors who cared primarily about those performance values or any abstract principles of democracy. Critical and decisive energy coalesced around those reforms because they were seen as vital for achieving immediate, tangible goals. That energy is strikingly absent in the contemporary Congress for an institution in which morale is as low as it is on both sides of the aisle. It's notable how little reform there is underway. There's nothing like the engagement with institutional reform issues that one saw in the Congress of the 1970s or even in the mid-1990s. So as we consider the various proposals in Cain's reform agenda, or any other reformers for that matter, the key question always is, who will see these reforms as being in their political interests? And who will see these reforms as being adverse to their interests? And as we contemplate the answer to that question, we immediately run up against the problem of party polarization. With two such evenly matched political parties at the national level, reform proposals will always be scrutinized for any whiff of partisan advantage. In a two-party system, anything that advantages one party disadvantages the other. This will be a major obstacle in political reform as it is across the range of policy issues that come before the Congress. The current environment is pretty unfavorable to political reform. If anything, the hurdles in this area, because institutional reforms are always cut so close to partisan interests, the hurdles in this area are even higher than on most political issues. Thank you, Francis. Before we turn to John, I just want to flag, you know, before we get done, let's put a definition on the term too much democracy. I'd say what we really mean by that, John. Thank you. I'm struck by discussion of reform that in what Francis is mentioning is the cyclical nature of it. Back over 100 years ago, George Washington Plunkett, who I think was a mythical figure, but in any event, referred to reform as something like a flower that looks beautiful in the morning and then sort of withers later in the day. And I think that as I look back at a career of almost 40 years in Congress and now having had an opportunity to step back and regard some of that experience from a more detached point of view, I have both the... I retain the strong faith in the congressional system, which I think is shared by a decreasing number of my countrymen. But I also have a skepticism about the effectiveness and durability of reform. I kind of look at political reform like the new iPhone. It's going to correct the pre-existing problems with the earlier model, but it very often brings with it complications of its own. Many of which, as Bruce and others write about, are the unintended consequences of well-intentioned action, which seems to be a fairly reliable characteristic of life in Congress, born out of both a certain myopia and... but also out of the inability to see around corners and the necessity of legislating through compromise, which prevents some of the clear-cut decision-making that might avoid some of those inadvertent consequences. Bruce mentioned the... and I think, Francis, as well, the desire to put decision-making into the hands of bureaucrats, the non-politicized people in the process, and of course, people familiar with how Congress operates know that on purpose, because it's unable to make some of those decisive kinds of clear decisions, and so it throws these decisions over to an agency which is then empowered to implement what is sometimes vague and contradictory mandates from the Congress. So it's not quite as unanticipated as one might think, but given the difficulties of legislating even in good times, it's sort of an invariable part of the legislative process. In the period of time that I worked in Congress, I think there really were three major periods of reform. I arrived in Washington in early 1975 and that was the Watergate class, which I'm currently writing about. That actually... class actually arrived not only to implement a series of reforms themselves, but on the heels of a good number of reforms that had been effectuated by the preceding Congress or two, including such changes as campaign finance reform, but also the empowerment of subcommittees and some checks on some of the arbitrary powers of committee chairs. And what the class of 1974 is probably best known for the democratization of the institution further by weakening to some extent the reliance on automatic seniority, which had overt political motivations because it didn't destroy the seniority system as a whole. It very selectively took out key senior people who were obstructive of political ends as Francis mentioned, but many other senior people remained in place and just as obstinate and some extent autocratic as they had previously been. The class also put a heavy emphasis on transparency, this notion that government works best in the sunshine. And what we, of course, have found is a few things. One of the examples of transparency, which became enacted in Congress in the House in 1979 was the use of television, but also the earlier efforts to open up the committee deliberative process. People don't remember that as late as the 1960s most committee meetings were closed. Many committees did not produce reports. The floor was closed. There were no recorded votes in the committee of the whole, where most of the substantive legislative work took place. And so if you lost a vote in the committee of the whole, you weren't even able to bring it up for a vote and recorded vote in the House of Representatives. One of the reasons is not only that so much people grew over the war in Vietnam. Because people would bring up bills and amendments if they could in the committee of the whole lose them and then be precluded from even bringing them up for a public debate in the House of Representatives. And so this notion was the more sunshine that shines into the process the better. But there were many people including Speaker of the House Rayburn, who we're very reluctant to and warned about the downsides of transparency and particularly about television on the floor that it might produce a generation of performers rather than a generation of legislators. Fortunately that hasn't happened and really diminished the legislative process. But the other piece that's occurred is that I think transparency to some extent provides a false sense of security about the operations of the political system. We used to have conference committees where House and Senate would come together and cut deals. Those were closed too of course. Then when the public came in and you had to operate under transparent rules what really happened is that the deal simply got cut in less obvious places. And so one can be left with a series of rules but one can reasonably question whether or not it opened the process or not and whether or not it accomplished the goal which was simultaneously not simply public review and press review but also making the political system work better. I think the second period of reform occurred under the Republicans in 1995 where there were changes made really significant changes to some of the methods of selecting a chairman. There was obviously significant change in terms of even more so than under Speaker Wright the accumulation of power in the leadership. There were other reforms that were less consequential that the Gingrich leadership effectuated. And then I would argue not surprisingly that we had another important series of reforms in the Pelosi era where we passed the honest leadership open government reforms having to do with the revolving door we changed travel rules we required earmarks to be made far more transparent so that you couldn't simply airdrop them into conference bills or into the floor. And I guess the point I would make about all of these periods of reform as well as earlier years such as the progressive years they all appear in an era of crisis. They don't appear as Francis alluded to because the congress or the public for that matter arrived at some consensus about the need for politics to operate in a more effective, more efficient, more responsive and representative way but because of the sense that there was a significant breakdown in governance. I think the other thing that's interesting is that all three of these periods occurred during periods of government. And we had a Republican president and Democratic Congress in the 1970s. We had the reverse in the 1990s and we had a Republican president and a Democratic congress in the 2007-2009 period when most of the Pelosi era of reforms, the so called 6406 reforms were implemented. And I think that's worth noting because it may illustrate that reform works best when there is some collaborative sense possible in governance as opposed to the more heady but more difficult effort to balance when you have political power so heavily accumulated in one hand. And I'll close just by saying because I think we'll get on to some other issues in the discussion. I put a heavy emphasis on this issue of civic education. I really have some huge skepticism about empowerment of the public at a point where the public is so grievously uninformed about basic political values and basic political goals. And we all know the famous story of the people demonstrating against the Affordable Care Act with the sign keep the government off out of Medicare. But that's really illustrative of and I don't say this in an arrogant sort of a way but to some extent the political issues that we contend with today are extraordinarily complicated. And the other piece of it that makes them so complicated is that we have empowered through a series of political and economic and statutory and judicial decisions many many more political players who are well financed and politically interested and engaged not always in the constructive ways. And the pluralist approach which envisions multiple players almost the Madisonian idea of factions constantly battling with each other and coming together is admirable. I have questions about how it works in an era where power is very disseminated which is good but it's also captured by special interests and well financed and partisan interests which do not necessarily share the commonality of objectives that one might seek when you're trying to reach reform that enable both reform both in terms of congressional operations and in terms of the society on a broader basis. I guess I would say first Bruce's book I help you all if you haven't read you really should. It challenged a lot of my assumptions. I'm probably the person here who's been the least time reading political science. They've been the first place as a kind of working journalist and that's probably unfortunate but Bruce challenged a lot of my assumptions and I think the first thing I wanted to say was I think that a lot of the assumptions that we have about small donors being very good, lobbyists being bad, primaries being challenging, public comment and more public accountability being good, those assumptions are all embedded in much and I would say almost 100% of the media coverage about how politics is consumed to the point where the president of the United States regularly assumes complaints about primaries and gets I would argue political science wrong himself because he's consuming the same amount of political data we are and that we're producing in the media and so I think the first reform that maybe you can't have out of this is people like me can start really you know thinking about these assumptions and thinking our assumptions wrong and covering politics in a better way. In the same way that I think there's a lot of data, there's a lot of research now about how primaries work and they show that if you, it's much better to follow the presidential primary process. If you follow who gets endorsed the most that's a much more useful metric than what the polls show for example. There's a book called The Party to Size that describes this in some amount of detail and I would say that you can see a lot of journalists now are thinking about how do I cover the process not through which polls in February the year before are almost valueless, like have no predictive value. On the other hand like if you keep track of like who the endorsers are, if you followed last week Mitt Romney was leading in the polls and decided not to run. That was not an accident. If you in the news media you would be confused by that well the polls show he's ahead. If you read political science research you would know that oh everyone who used to support him is supporting Jim Bush. He caught the hand and he's out now and there's an assumption there that I think is useful that we in the press should to some extent look more carefully at what does the data show and not have these assumptions about political reform because in the press our views are almost always that more accountability and more things happening in public are good and in fact those things are maybe not the case. The second thing I wanted to add as an example of that is I would argue that I've been working on this project for a while here at New America about basically the idea that every state needs to have a New York Times or a Texas Tribune or a ProPublica. Some kind of really strong newspaper that is less focused on hits and more focused on to some extent covering government and civics very carefully. The way the New York Times does for the country on some level he has something like that in each state. Bruce's book definitely made me challenge that assumption and think about that more carefully is the answer to most of our problems they have more public accountability and more public discussion and might depend on how those papers are constructed because you could argue newspapers could be a good meeting institution and maybe that can work but I would argue that I'm thinking about that assumption more as we look at the fact that things happening in public we journalists love things happening in public it's not clear that they actually help the process or help the governance process but to counter that point a little bit I guess one and to make the last point I wanted to make is that one example of I would argue sort of the bill that was done in the way or legislation was done in the way Bruce I think is talking about was something called Common Core where it wasn't like something Obama proposed in Congress and it wasn't part of our congressional process it was really written by experts produced by experts and the education people in the education field think Common Core is a pretty good idea the problem is in an hour it was written in a way that was I thought was pretty smart it was not written like Obamacare it was written by the experts and it was done by states and it's bipartisan and you're now seeing the political process kill Common Core so again you have to look at so my assumptions again are in general I think the way Common Core was written was a smart way to do it but again I'm not sure what reforms we can address to kind of get beyond our problems of sort of what I call hyper-polarization Bruce do you want to comment on let me just throw a few comments first of all there's always and I saw this first at a Hewlett meeting we had about a year and a half ago where we brought a bunch of political scientists together and there was an older group of political scientists which was about three quarters of the crowd and a quarter that were younger and there's no question that a lot of the older political scientists thought that we were in a worse place than we had been 40 or 50 years ago now of course that's not completely true we are in a better place in certain but I think it's important and you mentioned this business about earmarks first of all that's not a proposal in my book I did make the observation that it's hard to tell a difference between corruption and parochial legislation and earmarking that's all on a continuum and the honest answer is in politics and particularly a pluralist system like this it operates on a system of legalized rights basically that's how it operates you're basically trading goods all the time it's just we define that the good has to be beyond the good for a given individual that we regard as completely and obviously corrupt so if I have a bill that is only benefitting Francis that's the narrower it gets the more likely it is corrupt the one that benefits everybody in the room is obvious but then all along the continuum there are these difficult choices you make as to what legalized bribery you're going to allow in the legislative process in order to motivate people to vote for them and I know both of you guys know about that because you've been in Congress but that wasn't one of my I have lots of proposals in my book that have nothing to do with earmarking I have proposals about election administration which is an area where I say to be honest we have too little democracy we have partisan election officials which is ridiculous no other democracy does that I have proposals about disclosure my proposal of semi-disclosure that really we in political science don't believe the identity of donors really matters to voters but what matters is what are the interests are so why don't we treat disclosure like census data and say this person is supported largely by insurance companies this person by the trial lawyers that's all voters need to know why when we take something that doesn't obviously corrupt do we have to reveal the identity why do we treat small donations any differently than we do the vote particularly in an era when privacy can be so violated by the internet and by what we've seen in various instances related to our propositions in California you know I have but the thing that I you know particularly for talking about Congress we need to spend more time thinking about how do we incentivize negotiation in this highly polarized period and you know again take world I know very well redistricting you know we've opened it up to the public comment period and so you know we've got these commissions now that take thousands of comments well first of all they get overwhelmed they don't know what to do with all the comments secondly what's the comments the comments keep repeating themselves over and over again because there's no incentive to the people out there in the public to actually form coalitions and negotiate and so we should be thinking about well how do you negotiate that well New Jersey has a commission system which does that and it should be adopted by the other commission so there's you know I talk about that I mean I talk about how we have to worry about making sure that there's balance in the lobbying that there's just isn't one side that's lobbying and there've been various proposals by Heather Gurkin and others about how public interest lobbying or you know tax credits for groups that need it I don't know there've been a lot of different proposals about that I talk about store above votes I have a lot of exotic suggestions in here which cannot cannot be discussed or implemented at the national level they have to be tested and tried at the local level and the reason I wrote the book that goes all away from the local and national is there's a continuum there and everybody here is focused on national obviously but a lot of work can be done at the state and local level to experiment okay I don't have a lot of objections or problems with anything that Francis or John say I mean you know the reality is that I think we have very common views you know and so I think the question that Francis raises and it's sort of implied also in John's you know a tale about previous reforms is you know how how do you get them to overcome the in order to pass the reforms you have to overcome the processes that you're trying to reform is the simplest way to put it okay and I think both actually offered the answer which is you develop and this comes from Kingdon's work on streams of policy but can apply to political form that's a little academic footnote for Francis and that is that what you do is people like us formulate ideas hopefully you find pilot projects out there in the states they sit in the drawer and then the next time there's a huge stinking a crisis and the actors have to act and they have to compromise is when you insert those ideas into the process and that's how reform always happens you know you wouldn't have had the reforms that brought John to Congress if you hadn't had Watergate right if you hadn't had the milk producers and others you know secretly putting money in there so you need the stink in order to have the cleanup and that's just the way democracy works yeah yeah it's not clear that he was trying to reform the problem but he he understood what opportunity was it's not clear that he understood what to do with the opportunity but we'll leave that aside okay and then you know I think on the media I think that's part of what needs to be thought about and fixed and obviously you're working on that and that's I think that's very important I think that's part of the intermediaries that have to be looked at the changes in the media are some of the most dramatic things that I've witnessed in my life you know the rise of local TV and TV reporting as an important instrument and now increasingly being supplemented or supplanted by the internet and social media and the decline of credible reporting that's sourced with people anybody can be a reporter the over democratization if you like of the process of reporting right and then how do you trust that and how it contributes I think absolutely thinking about the media is an important part of political reform and I think there are lots of serious people like yourself thinking about it but we shouldn't underestimate how important that is the whole picture that we're talking about does somebody want to say a little bit I put this on the table earlier like when you say too much democracy what does that mean or use the phrase also go ahead if you want what I mean by it is it turns out that both too much and too little have the same problem which is they severed democratic accountability so if you have too little transparency and too little participation and there's no way to actually turn people out of us that's the too little democracy problem but it turns out that if you create so many opportunities that the interest groups capture it or in some cases and this is very academic there are a lot of people that want to replace democracy with lottery or they want to replace it with deliberative forums that fortunately doesn't make it into the public discourse but there's a lot of people in our field and philosophers types that do that and we point out to them you can't really have a democracy but there are some people that believe that and also some of the people that believe in neutral expertise believe that too that the courts ought to be making fundamental decisions about institutional design or policy and we're about to have some critical decisions made on the ACA and we'll see how well it works to have a neutral court deciding such policy issues so I think all those things it's a severing of accountability and part of that is you cannot judge democratic procedures without looking at performance there's a tradeoff between the process and the virtues of the process and then the outcome that is whether it works for democratic interests and too many scientists in particular think only of the process and not whether it helps to produce good policy to me that's one of the big important interventions in the whole political reform field is like can we think of it also not just in terms of the perfect form but begin to look at outcomes which is hard you also have to think about what the government actually need to be doing so you wind up with some, it's hard to get away from some values in that anyway I was still interested in that let me give you an example from my own experience I've been on a tangent for some time Bruce and I've talked about this a lot about the initiative process in California and of course the initiative like the referendum or key components of progressive reform of the early 20th century and the idea there was that the legislatures were so corrupt that you should give this much more power directly to the people to effectuate democracy and you know here we are 100 years later in which you find it's easier to buy the initiative process than it is to buy the legislature and you end up and I had this experience I worked for only two members of congress in 38 years both of them were from California and I was constantly dealing with well financed special interest groups that decided that they were going to put on the California ballot legislative ideas in some cases constitutional changes that could never make it out of a subcommittee in either the state legislature or in the house of representatives that they would have some deep pocket who would finance an initiative they would give it a beautiful name that you just wanted to tear up by hearing and put it on the ballot and then come to congressional and other players in the society and say you have to support this because you support clean air or you support clean water or you support ocean protection and my reaction to that would always be that's an idiotic idea I can't support that and they would be indignant because here you had the opportunity to completely bypass the political process and effectuate good public policy at least from their point of view and their funder's point of view and that happens over and over again I think in this notion that you can somehow depoliticize the process George Miller used to say you can't take politics out of politics and I think that's the case the fact of the matter is public policymaking is reconciling different points of view not obliterating different points of view and that's why I mention this notion we get reform ironically in situations where you have divided government where people have to figure out how to make something work as opposed to simply bully your way through and think that you you can achieve these goals by ignoring everyone else I really I subscribe whole-heartedly to Bruce's point here and that is you have to look at the end of the process and that ultimately voters are going to have to be engaged they're going to have to be informed and they're going to have to make judgments and effectively you you can't bypass that process and still have something that you comfortably can call democracy on the subject of too much democracy I was mainly just adopting Cain's terminology but it's more of a California phenomenon than it is a Washington phenomenon but where I see it the issue of too much democracy arising with respect to the congress is with congressional transparency which is I worry that members of congress don't talk to each other anymore that they just talk to the cameras that role-call votes are being set up primarily for the purpose of communicating the constituency, sending messages instead of lawmaking and deliberation and committee isn't deliberation at all anymore you come in you ask your questions for the cameras and then you leave and so that's where I see somewhat an issue with respect to Washington Francis you wouldn't want to it's a choice to do that you wouldn't want a world where role-call votes weren't open as soon as you have a world where role-call votes are open you have that possibility that people do all kinds of the message amendments and things like that they began to arise after the liberalization before a procedure that John talked about but they weren't used for explicitly partisan ends in the way that they are now you had a lot more individualism in the congress of the 70s and the 80s where individual members had their own platforms their own issues they wanted to bring to public attention we were not enmeshed in the same power struggle that we contend with now where two parties are in constant battle for control of national institutions it was a lot more room for entrepreneurship I think that you sometimes saw and it was awful there were plenty of when I worked in the senate you'd have people you had to run to the floor and vote on a Jesse Helm I remember the great Jesse Helms amendment no gay sex parties at the agriculture department okay are you voting for this or again it was awful I mean there are people who will do that I think you're right the interesting change is going from a system that's a lot more fluid and where people like congress Miller really thrived in a very entrepreneurial environment to one that's much more tight in a way it's more tightly party controlled partly because party and ideology are aligned one thing that Francis alluded to I think is key here and that is that politics was different before the era of close political margins and battling for control that change that as much as transparency or many of the other things that we're talking about really changed the nature of politics and the day to day operations of politics I remember back in the 1880s when speaker read instituted a whole series of reforms in the house he said I've sort of come to the conclusion it's better for one party to make the decisions and that's better to be the republican party yeah I mean and so he made a lot of changes that empowered the republican party which incidentally the democrats retained when they took control of congress in 1890 the point being that we went through a long period 40 years where very few people even thought about the issue of contention for control of the process once you get into the point where you're fighting over control as opposed to everybody knowing their place and sort of negotiating where they fit into that place then all these reforms become usable as part of the ongoing constant campaign because just as I had instructions out as Pelosi's chief of staff to every subcommittee we're off the record here right we're off the record every vote that happens in subcommittee every statement that happens in subcommittee immediately gets transmitted to the campaign people to figure out whether there's a political ban I think I need that John it wasn't so in an era where you're fighting for control which is where we have been basically since 1994 and that has to do with the changes of the south there are a lot of political reasons that haven't that's a different era and all the liberalizations the empowerment of special interests the empowerment of PACs that all takes a completely different context when every day there's a battle over who's going to end up in control Bruce and then I want to open it up I mean I think an important point that comes out of that is that particularly in the United States there's a great belief that institutional engineering can solve all problems and I think John's discussion is a very good reminder that there are limits even if you could get all the institutional choices as right as you wanted there's still a lot of forces that are contributing to the contemporary situation that are just outside the control of institutions you know if you want to know why there's polarization in America there are many different causes some of them are in the sociology of America the rising inequality or the effects of dealing with lots of demographic change or the social sorting or the party sorting there are lots of different things that are going on and your ability to sort of regulate the temperature or politics through various kinds of institutional tweaks is limited I mean but on the margin it can make a difference you can make things worse or you can make them better we have a lot of really cool people in the room who have Ryan and introduce yourself one question I have is I have listened to the arguments about whether or not transparency is making Congress a more difficult place to work is you know what is it about transparency that prevents the building of relationships because those building of relationships was never happening on camera there are still back rooms and committees I still see members of Congress talking to each other in the halls and I think there is a willingness issue I'm not really sure what that is and it could be access for control but I can't see the connection of transparency and lack of willingness to build relationships that's a sincere I want to make sure I understand that point and the other question is how are we defining performance of Congress I look at John Lawrence and I think I would love it if Congress could deal with say the Westlands Water District in California water subsidies which seems like such a great example of an incredibly narrow constituency controlling a huge amount of federal money that is not in the interest of California and the other 49 states and yet nobody thinks it will ever actually be solved and maybe that's a high bar for performance of Congress but kind of what is what is the standard for performance of Congress is it taking action taking good action as defined by what so on the point about how transparency can sometimes get in the way I wouldn't so much claim that it gets in the way of building relationships but it doesn't make negotiating easier it can make it more difficult when you take positions in public it's hard to back down from them or to accept less than what you staked out and of course the deliberative process involves that and to the extent that this is all in public and you're not engaging just with your congressional compatriots but you're engaging with the public in large there's a tendency to use that platform for sort of gotcha purposes where you're really not engaging on the issues as people who are well informed about the issues understand them you're exploiting an opportunity that will play well for the galleries and so those are the two concerns that I have with how transparency can make it harder to do deals I mean you're absolutely right there's still loads of other opportunities for members to get to know each other assuming that they are around in Washington but it's the problem of do you have a space where you can talk things through where you're just engaging one another and not with a broader audience at the same time well what you're suggesting then is that that committee meetings just be for show then the deal has to be done somewhere else I mean I guess there's an effect but I'm also I mean and some of those side deals you see in a weird committee hearing after somebody does a posturing speech somebody's like oh wait I didn't know that one thing and then you don't see the rest of the conversation and but you know so I would just answer your question that's sort of a perfect example I mean I've been involved in the writing of three major water policy reform that did pass Congress that provided all sorts of changes in the operations of this one particular water district in California which gets hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies every year not only to grow things we don't need but to create this gigantic environmental disaster in the Central Valley and here's the perfect example what happens to those laws when they get enacted they go to the bureaucratic process which is not nearly as transparent where there is no democratic accountability and under democratic and republic administrations including this administration you don't get the outcome which Congress clearly provided the opportunity to do so the degree of transparency becomes an issue there as well as well as political accountability I want to give very briefly into this how do we judge how the government works question I think this is a really important question I've been thinking about a lot is I mean part of it is I think is in my industry we have half the people who believe in Obama half of them don't and so our tendency to often say this policy works sort of but its caveats is this we might I feel like we should the two a sense of balance we might say the ACA is working pretty well Obama's ISIS policy is not working very well it might that's balanced too because we're evaluating the policy instead of saying both of them are working half well and I wonder if I think voters are often confused about how to evaluate which policies work in part because the people they sort of hired to tell them the policies are working don't always tell them aren't always forthright about saying what's working was not well it's also I mean I think you know when you think about we tend to ask like our institutions working and policies also are kind of a space that's a kind of institution of their own right so I'm struck by it seems to me like one of the biggest phenomena is that there used to be a set of questions that had you know conservatives and liberals had different answers to them but they agreed there was a question to answer and and so there's room there so to me though you know like education used to take that form I think no child left behind is one of the last which is now almost 15 years old one of the last great examples where you know there are a lot of problems with it but that's the nature of the thing right that there should be a lot of problems with it one of the last moments where you had that kind of agreement on the problem disagreement about how to solve it and some of the I always think like some of the deficit some of the you know the obsession with the with the deficit stuff over the last few years part of it was like okay that's the last space we all traditionally everyone can agree the deficit's a problem we'll get that space and now that's gone as and that's you know I mean in some ways good riddance as an economic matter but you know I think that's what people are looking for there's health too became and this is what you've written about a lot Perry we've gone that far it's hard to find right I mean institutions and issues match together and if you don't have some issues on which you can create the zone I mean I was you know a couple days ago I was watching the my old boss Senator Bradley and Senator Packwood were testifying at the finance committee about tax reform 25 years you know more than 25 years ago now it's fast names they were all like well they tell great stories and then they were all like well you know you can't do that in a world where you know where all the members of one party want nothing to do with anything that increases revenues and all the members of the other party do there's no there's none of the zone that those that those folks found in 1986 and there are very few issues I mean there was a hope that immigration could be that kind of issue not seeing it you know there's transportation where something needs to happen but it's running up against the same problem that you're pointing to on revenue or Social Security disability where both parties seem to see there's a problem there's a few things there might be more I'll do it anyway I'll have the mic I'm John Starzak I'm a retired patent examiner and when you're talking more democracy less I think the founding fathers warned against where we are at and what they were against was universal suffrage they knew that the mob would be led by demagogues flimflammed and the only solution to all these problems is a limited suffrage and the way I think is perhaps a fair voting test I mean you've got people now who still believe Zodam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction those people have no business voting you need to and that's what the founding fathers warned against and we've gone down that road if we get those people off and meet them press that would be an achievement in itself Hi I'm Richard Skinner I've been thinking more and more not so much about how do we reduce polarization but how do we learn to live with it and how do we learn how to build a government that functions well with two evenly balanced highly ideological highly polarized parties and that's not that different from the situation that you find in Europe where Europe you've long had strong political parties and rigid party line voting and I've also been thinking about sort of the problem of the dominance of lobbying and particularly the dominance of lobbying that is skewed very much to one side that happens to have the resources and looking at the European example where you have strongly polarized parties strong civil service and a lot of the decisions that are made here by elected politicians are made by career civil servants and then it also appears to me that in recent years we've really seen a diminishment of a lot of the sources of non-partisan expertise and that could be anything from CRS to the less ideological committee staff on the helm in favor of both polarized parties and of self-interested lobbying and I'm wondering whether we should be thinking about trying to empower these sources of non-partisan expertise and here I'm not thinking about the courts I'm thinking much more about the bureaucracy Thank you very much about that I think one of the problems with that is that is that there is I think a significant political ideology these days which is designed to demean the notion of government I don't think this is sort of an inadvertent side side show I think that part of and you certainly see it articulated most in the part of the Tea Party but I think it goes beyond that and there's a healthy skepticism on the left as well that really drives down the notion of the legitimacy of government itself and so when you when people complain that Congress isn't legislating it's not being successful it's a certain portion of Congress that's exactly what they went through with the intention of doing they don't have any problem with an ineffectual Congress or an ineffectual bureaucracy the less public esteem there is for the institution of government the better so that's why when I hear suggestions like let's put more into the bureaucracy or maybe we should use government to do this to fund more in the way of bipartisan or non-partisan activities that runs up against a diminished public willingness to accord that kind of power to government and I see that as having distinct political objectives but nevertheless I think that when you look at people somebody somebody mentioned 16% approval of Congress is actually better than I thought it was but I always tell my class is that 20% of Americans think that aliens walk among us disguised as humans it gives you some idea where esteem for Congress and for the institution of government in general stand yeah so I mean figuring out the balance between neutral expertise and you know accountability democratic accountability is one of the fundamental challenges for any democracy and the reality is that I think there are some areas where we clearly do have to worry about diminishing the expertise I actually think a lot of state legislatures and you know making sure the CBO and various other agencies that provide neutral expertise are still respected by both parties it's really going to be problematic if we can't agree on the numbers when we're doing budgets for example ok so there's clearly a role for this but one of the problems you have is that Congress does throw things to the bureaucracy that are still undefined and therefore critical and so if we were to try to define it as completely neutral and value free then you got a real problem in terms of what happens when the bureaucracy has to make political decisions all the way down and I see this in spades as I said in environmental laws and the implementation of environmental laws where we basically have five or six great things we all want to do with no prioritization and then we tell the agencies to go and try to approve permits for stormwater when stormwater impacts flood control, recreation water quality water supply etc and the bureaucrats don't know well you know stakeholders are claiming they want to restore the wetlands here and they want to make sure the animals here are taken care of and oh yeah and then all these people that are at the end of the river are going to get flooded out if we don't do something and so I think we're stuck with this blending process it's been there right from the start it doesn't go away we're not going to have a system that has no neutral expertise we've already discovered that that sucks and we can have a system in which there's too much of the expertise we can't move to the European commission because then you have a democratic deficit you have a bunch of people making decisions and people not vested in those decisions they're thinking they're accountable so we're stuck we're stuck making trade-offs and trade-offs are uncomfortable and trade-offs are problematic and the system that we have was devised for a period at least a lot of our rules had a period from World War 2 to about the 1960s where we benefited from the fact that there was more bipartisanship because of the war because there was more consensus because there was less inequality because of immigration and so we didn't have to deal with so many different cultural challenges which is a good thing but still problematic not easy to do and now we're in a period where the institutions some of the informal institutions that we had in that period like the use of the filibuster they have a different meaning in this new setting and so the question is a democracy a lot of our institutions that were designed for the good times do they work on the bad times but the filibuster was a disaster in the bad times the filibuster was no I understand that but there are times when the filibuster seems sensible because you're asking people to actually make compromise but if they don't make the damn compromises then it doesn't seem sensible I mean this is a system that's very our political system is very diffuse lots of veto points checks and balances normally require super majorities to do anything and when you've got two evenly matched political parties neither party has sufficient power most of the time to do anything and so I do wonder whether this system can work with two strongly ideological political parties that are evenly matched is it feasible we can point to periods in US history that were like this the 19th century was like this a lot of the time with two strong alternatives but the government didn't do very much back then I mean they could spend a great deal of time in deadlock which they did and so can modern government function under these conditions I think it's an open question I would just one corollary to that is I think you can make an argument we would do better if we had stronger political parties in the sense that parties are an institution that force diverse groups to figure out ways of working together and what you have at this point is a lot of the power has been diffused out to non-political special interests ideologically driven well entrenched organizations that intimidate the people in the political process now it's true that the parties themselves have become more ideologically stratified but the fact of the matter is that and you know we're in a period where this may not be immediately the case but it's a short term period in any event the battle for control is the battle for the middle I mean there's 30 or 40 seats at most that we're fighting over and you're going to win political power by having some appeal to that middle group and if the political parties are not an institution that can have the internal discipline to force political decision making instead we've you know we've shuffled that off to ideologically driven media and PACs and special interest organizations in deep pockets it's much harder to find consensus I think we should wrap up the panel let's get one more question but not somebody else like Jacob in the back and then we can wrap up Jacob Harold with GuideStar my question is about the business community what is it going to take to get the business community engaged in this set of questions there's no doubt that a lot of individual businesses gain advantage from the asymmetries and inconsistencies and inefficiencies we've talked about but in general an effective political system is good for the economy which is good for business so how can we engage the business community and in particular are there any lessons to be learned from the governance crises in California and the way the business community at least seemed to start to engage in those processes in California and is there a way to take that to the national stage well actually I mean the business community has been a leader of political reform in California the changes in the budget process we had a basically required a two-thirds vote to pass a budget and that just led to enormous amount of dysfunction they they were the ones that pushed the idea of a constitutional convention but then when they realized as Dana Milbank did yesterday that the people that were going to show up the convention were not unlike the people that showed up yesterday at the FEC hearing they immediately pulled back on that so yes I think business has played a role in California in pulling back on some of the reforms and pushing for this new initiative system I don't know whether John's been paying attention to this but the initiatives now go to the legislature for 30 day comment to try to get more of an interaction which is something business community and scientists have been pushing to try to get the dynamic back between representative government and direct democracy I think you're right I think the business community has to be engaged they have to be the ones that push for this they don't like instability in the political system and they I think will be a critical constituency to engage if you're going to make changes anyone else have any final thoughts on this none of you I just want to thank everybody for coming I think it's a fascinating beginning of a discussion that I think needs to involve a pretty wide circle really thinking about some very basic so I appreciate the book and I appreciate all of you being here