 Hi, guys. Hi, Linda. Welcome and welcome, everyone. Carol, our president isn't here today. So I'm Beth Wood. I'm the chair of the program committee for Chippellee and I'm the host for our guest Linda Fowler today. So I'd like to welcome everyone. Just a quick reminder that if our members have not yet returned their feedback forms for the first four fall speakers, today is the last call. So please do send that in today. If you haven't already. Also, our speakers really enjoy receiving your questions and you can submit those at any time during the lecture or during the Q&A. Just hit the Q&A button on the bottom of your screen and enter and submit your question. Our thanks to CCTV for providing our technical services for our fall lectures as an in-kind donation. They are a community access media center and they rely on the support of their viewers and as such, any donations from community members would be greatly appreciated. And our thanks to Jordan from C2TV who's making all the technical magic happen today. Our speaker today is Linda Fowler. She earned her BA from Smith College, her MA and PhD from the University of Rochester. She is the political, she was in the beginning of her career as a professor of political science at Syracuse University. She then moved on to Dartmouth where she was professor of government or is professor of government and the Frank J. Regan chair in policy studies emeritus. She also served as director of the Nelson A. Rockefeller Center for Social Sciences at Dartmouth. She received awards for teaching at both Syracuse and Dartmouth and also received a Gubinheim Fellowship. Dr. Fowler's special interest is the US Congress about which she's written three books and numerous articles. Her most recent research analyzes the combined the continued decline of congressional oversight of foreign affairs during the Obama and Trump administrations. She's a frequent commentator on American politics on various media outlets. And in fact, you may have heard her earlier today on Vermont Public Radio forcing her in print or on digital format earlier this week in BT Digger. Her topic today is probably timely quite often but couldn't be more timely right at this moment. The dysfunctional Congress, how it got this way and why it matters. So a very warm welcome to Linda Fowler. Well, it's a pleasure to be here. I haven't spoken before this group before. And so it's nice to always try for a new audience. And I know for my years of doing shows on BPR that Vermonters are very well informed generally and quite interested in politics. So I'm looking forward to this afternoon, particularly the Q and A. It's an interesting topic. It used to be the case when I went to cocktail parties or receptions where I was meeting people for the first time and they would say, what do you do? And I would say, I was a professor and then they would say, oh, what do you study? And I would say the U.S. Congress. And that was always a conversation stopper and because people, you could just see what was happening in their brains. Well, how does a reasonable nice-looking person like this end up with the U.S. Congress? And I actually started working on Capitol Hill shortly after I graduated from college for a short time before I went and got my PhD. When Beth and I were talking about what my topic might be which was last spring, I said, how about the dysfunctional Congress? It's always true up to a certain point. And so we won't have to worry about whether events change too much to make my title irrelevant. But certainly there are a lot of questions about whether this is the worst of times for Congress. The news that comes out of Washington is of unremitting conflict, unremitting polarization, constant battles with the White House and a picture of widespread malaise and dysfunction. Even the members don't seem to like it and their record retirements in the Republican Party from the Senate this year that sort of back that up. But for a little context, I think it's important to remember that Americans perpetually give Congress low marks and have since the very founding. Famous humorists at the beginning of the 20th century, Will Rogers used to say that we have the best Congress money can buy. Mark Twain used to say, our Congress is the only native criminal class that we have in this country. So even when it's functioning well, the approval ratings are low and they're always lower than the president even when the president is very low. And so the reason for that of course is that the institution is open to scrutiny from the press and from the public. You can access your member through town meetings. You can write him letters. He has to write you back. And it's a much more public and transparent institution than certainly the Supreme Court but also then the White House where public appearances are heavily orchestrated. So that makes it towards more visible than is the case with the other institutions. It's also a job that is involved resolving conflict when Madison was writing one of his federalist papers. He said, this is the place where people are gonna bring their diverse points of view and where they're going to refine and enlarge the public view. But people fight a lot before they get to that enlarge public view. And so we shouldn't expect that Congress is going to be all kumbaya and that it well earns the reputation for making sausage when it makes legislation. The members also traditionally run for Congress by trashing it. The idea is I'm different. I work for my constituents. I'm responsive to your interests. I can't get as much done as I was like because it's the other people in the Congress that are preventing me from doing that. That's a time-honored strategy for differentiating yourself from the institution. The invasion of the Capitol, however, on January 6th suggests that the institution is even more dysfunctional and unpopular than usual. One of the things that was so striking was the extent to which a number of people who participated in that riot thought they were saving the government from an enemy, meaning it's elected officials. And that's pretty serious, load of no confidence, I would say. But it's also the case that for contrast, this is not the only time that Congress has been widely perceived as dysfunctional. And that was certainly the case when I got my first job on the Hill in 1969. If you recall, 1964 was the LBJ landslide election and an overwhelmingly Democratic House and Senate were sent to Congress and they quickly enacted Lyndon Johnson's Great Society with Medicare, Medicaid, expansion of programs for the poor, the war on poverty, and a whole bunch of things. And commentators at the time called it the Magnificent 89th Congress. But shortly thereafter, the country fell apart. Cities were burning all over the country students were rioting over the Vietnam War. The country was incredibly divided over that war. Martin Luther King was assassinated, Bobby Kennedy was assassinated. We had the disaster of the 1968 convention in Chicago where the police beat up demonstrators and convention itself nominated Hubert Humphrey over the objections of many, many Democrats who saw him as being complicit in Johnson's escalation and lying about the war. We had the election of Richard Nixon, not by popular vote, but because there was a third party on arch segregationist, excuse me, George Wallace. And so this was the scene, pardon me, in Congress when I got there in the summer of 69. And the first thing that struck me was what a large percentage of the leadership roles in the Congress were held by octogenarians. That's actually fairly true today too. We have a very old Congress, pardon me, comparatively speaking. The other thing that was really striking was one of the oldest and most feeble was John McCormick who was Speaker of the House. And in fact, when I used to take things over to my boss on the floor of the Capitol, if he was sitting in the chair, you could barely see him. He would feebly tap with his gavel on the podium to try to bring the house to order. And there was a oxygen tank and first aid equipment in the house cloakroom in case he keeled over in the process of conducting the nation's business. Every morning when I started my job, my first thing to do was to write condolence letters to the Congressman's constituents and everyone in the state of Maryland where he lived. And some mornings the list was as large for the country, was as large as a very large telephone book. And there was huge effort to try to bring legislation to the floor, to stop funding the war, to end the four, to put some constraints on it. And the party leaders prevented legislation from coming to the floor. They wanted to protect their members from going on record as having supported it. So this was a place of real dysfunction. And at the same time, as bad as it was, I didn't fully appreciate how precarious things were until a night in May of 1970, a big demonstration was planned in Washington, D.C. after to protest the secret bombing by Richard Nixon of Cambodia, which was a neutral nation, but ended up playing, unwillingly playing host to the Viet Cong who used its jungles to get to the south of the country. And it was a huge demonstration and the Capitol was filled with rumors that the weathermen who were a left-wing terrorist group were coming to the Capitol and would wreak havoc. If this sounds familiar to you compared to last January, there were a lot of similar parallels. So that night on Friday night, I left my job at around six o'clock and I went down to the Raven garage and to my shock and dismay, the entire vast space of this underground garage was filled with paratroopers who had been brought up from Georgia, from Fort Vanning to keep order in the city because the government was so much in fear of its citizens. And I just sat in my car, I was crying. I just couldn't believe that the people's house was being taken over by the military because the Congress was afraid of the people. But it turns out the people the next day behaved themselves. There were hundreds of thousands of people of all generations. They ended, a lot of them ended up waiting and swimming in the reflecting pools on the Washington Wall because it was a beautiful spring day. And it ended up being rather anti-climactic and the paratroopers went home. So I felt on January 6th that I had seen something like this of people being so disenchanted with the government that they were starting to take matters into their own hands. There's very serious differences, however, which I'll get to at the end of my talk, that make this crisis seem quite different to me. And so let me just talk first about some of the signs of dysfunction. And while I'm going through my list, maybe Jordan could put the American flag that I gave them in the slide up for you to look at instead of me for a few minutes. So the first kinds of dysfunction, I would say the most visible one to ordinary people is lawmaking. The lack of volume of lawmaking, year after year in the past decade, we've had record numbers of low productivity in terms of bills considered and bills passed. The timeliness of bills is way off. We now see legislation basically pushed to the end of the session almost every year with lots of posturing until we get to November and December and then the House and Senate being called to order Christmas Eve or threatening Christmas Eve sessions. And so any sort of regular order in the legislative process just seems to be lacking. You have a large number of problems that the country thinks are important by political opinion polls. Both Republicans and Democrats see large issues being unaddressed, whether it's climate change or inequality or education or health or any number of things. There are large majorities, not just 50, 50, that favor congressional action. That doesn't mean they agree on the actual particulars of particular bills, but they do want Congress to be paying attention to these things. And one of the things we see instead are these giant omnibus bills and packages at the end of the session where even the members don't know what's in them. They haven't read them. They've been cobbed together by the party leaders meeting with White House officials. And so it's impossible to total lawmakers accountable for how they do their job. The other thing that I think is important is the way Congress handles its most important power, which is the power of the purse, taxation, spending, appropriations, authorizing programs and so forth. This is a tale of missed deadlines using continuing resolutions to fund the government at last year's levels because they can't agree on what the new things should be. That's exactly what they just did last week. Shutdowns, threats of shutdowns where government employees are let go and people are not able to access a national parks or any of the other things that they wanna, threats of default, which is where we've been for the last couple of weeks and a very dysfunctional tax code that everybody agrees except the few people who benefit from it that it should be changed. You see delays in confirmation for the executive branch and federal courts and you see tight votes on approval. Now I happen to believe that judicial appointments, particularly for the Supreme Court ought to be confirmed with larger than 50% majorities but they've become so controversial that members were filibustering them and so the rules were changed but it's now possible for somebody in the court like Brett Kavanaugh to get a lifetime appointment with a fair majority of the votes and that doesn't bode well for the legitimacy of the court over the long run. You see abuse of rules by both parties with filibusters. The filibuster used to be a very rarely used tool and now it's quite commonplace. You see lawmakers putting holds on appointments which means that single person can prevent an appointment a nomination from coming to the vote about half of the 200 Bush Biden nominees right now that are languishing in limbo are unholds from one senator Ted Cruz. You see reconciliation bills which are supposed to be just about budgets being used increasingly for all kinds of policymaking including Obamacare. So it's not just Republicans that are doing this. You see exclusion of the minority party whichever one happens to not be in control of the time from decision-making. Their views are not consulted. They have very little opportunity to amend things. They can't bring their own bills. And so when they get their turn in the majority it's tit for tat. And in a country that requires consensus of both branches of government this kind of behavior is very counterproductive. You see failure of oversight of domestic programs. So so many things that are taking place we now find because of inspectors general and so forth were the subject of no bid procedures terrible waste of money. That was particularly true of Iraq and Afghanistan where billions and billions are simply vanished without a trace. And Congress did very little to find out about that or to do anything about it. And again, that was both parties. And foreign policy is even worse. It's very interesting now that Congress is holding hearings on the end of rather unhappy and of the US occupying troops in Afghanistan. But the fact of the matter is in 1920 when President Trump was negotiating with the Taliban and setting terms that made it impossible for an orderly withdrawal there were no hearings about the treaty at Doha. There was no investigation about what Trump had actually agreed to. And so the country was caught by surprise this spring when the Taliban were saying, okay, you're supposed to be out of here by May one. And if you don't we're going to start attacking American soldiers again. So and putting the current president in a very difficult situation. And that I found in the book I published in 2015 and subsequent research oversight of foreign policy which is a very important responsibility of the Congress which has both the power to declare war to establish military codes of justice to fund military operations and a variety of other things for Congress to abandon its oversight activities and foreign policy has given presidents a very free hand to fight undeclared wars. You've also seen the degradation of the committee system as a key element of policy development. Committees used to be the source of congressional power and one of the reasons that the American Congress was remained important in a time of executive dominance in European legislatures has been let go basically. There's a loss of expertise. There's a loss of continuity. There's a lack of opportunity for bargaining across parties and with the executive branch in the quiet intimacy of a committee room. And so it's not surprising that with the breakdown of a committee system we're seeing all these last ditch battles where people are dug in. You also see high visibility grandstanding extremists. It used to be the case that members sort of talked laughingly about show horses and work horses. And show horses were kind of the figures of fun senators and House members who couldn't wait to get a microphone in front of their faces and never really did any legislative work. It's now the case that the show horses are the ones who are commanding all the attention on both the left and the right. And they don't actually have very much to contribute to resolving the conflicts and developing the policies that the country so desperately needs. Okay, we can get rid of the flat flag now and put me back on. Thank you. So there are a lot of causes and I could spend probably a day talking about each one of these. So in the time allotted to me I'll just do a quick run through. I think the most important thing is the lack of electoral accountability. It's no secret that turnout and off your congressional elections is about a third of the electorate. And that even in important presidential elections it's been averaging a little over 50%. Now this has improved significantly in 2018 you had a big boost in turnout and again in 2020. But nevertheless is the case that small intense minorities are able to unduly influence the members and they do this primarily through because of the electoral rules and residential patterns. But basically the system has set up that particularly House members and senators to less extent are accountable for the people who voted for them. They're not accountable for the performance of the legislature itself. So all the incentives are to run for Congress by running against it to call attention to themselves in ways that are often irresponsible. And the election rules facilitate that. If I were a benevolent dictator I would abolish primaries and choose a different way of nominating candidates because primaries are low turnout elections 12, 15% of the electorate. And once the candidate has the nominee he or she is going to be elected because the rest of the people didn't vote. And what you see over and over and over again is this gets aggravated by the fact that we have winner take all elections that you can win your election with less than 50% of the vote. In most states, there are a few that have runoffs which means that somebody can get the nomination that's the result of an intense minority, go to the district and if there are more than two candidates in the race they will end up winning the election even if they don't command a majority. Plus you have all the barriers that became so obvious in 2020 when states like Texas tried to make it more difficult for voters and reverse many of the COVID inspired reforms that made voting easier. But a big problem that's come about now is residential sorting, the people living choosing to live in places where people like them already live. And you've always had sorting by income and by race in this country. And now you have sorting by party. And what this does is it makes it much easier for state legislators when they're drawing district lines to gerrymander in favor of their own party. It's easy to find a bunch of like-minded communities and paste them together in some kind of a district with a weird shape. And what that means is that challengers don't wanna run, donors don't wanna fund challengers because they know they can't win and so you have, even though Congress is enjoying record disapproval, most incumbents won their reelection in 2020. And many, many seats are uncontested or have just a token of point about 20% in most years. So when people behave extremely, as we're seeing with somebody like Marjorie Taylor-Green from Georgia, she knows that the only people she has to appeal to are her base, which we bandied that term around a lot these days, but her base is about 15% of the electorate in her district. And the rest of the Republicans go along with it because there isn't an alternative. She won the nomination with less than 50% of the vote and the parties are so polarized now that they're not gonna vote for a Democrat. And basically you have districts all over this country, both represented by Democrats and by Republicans where significant groups of citizens believe and rightly that there's nobody representing them. That's true for Democrats who live in rural districts or from Republicans who live in suburban or urban districts and being part of a permanent minority in your district is very discouraging. And of course it's partly responsible for the low turnout that we see in congressional races. What all this adds up to is a disappearance of liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats and a steady polarization of parties on roll call voting. And here I'm gonna ask Jordan to put a graph up for you. The measure that you'll see in this graph is it's an interesting, quite a sophisticated scaling techniques that calculates the ideological distance between Republicans and Democrats. The red line being Republicans, the blue line being, excuse me, red line being the House I think and the blue line being the Senate. Basically what you see is both House and Senate have been polarizing in roughly the same way although it's not quite as bad in the Senate as it is in the House. Basically a score of one would be perfect polarization. And if you look at where things stand when this graph was done based on the last Congress, they're very close to 0.9. So this is a minus one, a zero to one scale and being at 0.9 means the legislature is almost completely polarized by party. And what that means of course, because the electorate gets cued by their lawmakers to think that the other party is the demon. If somebody is dissatisfied with his or her representative, they're gonna have to travel an awful long way ideologically to bring themselves to vote for a Democrat. And that's partly why we have so much egregious behavior that is not gonna be punished by the electorate in either party. And the last time, if you look at the left hand side of this graph, the last time the country was almost this polarized in the Congress was at the end of the 19th century. And if you remember that was the start of the Jim Crow era. It was a period of intense industrialization, large amounts of immigration and a political system that was very, very corrupt. And you see something quite similar happening now. Interestingly, the 50s, which were a period of low polarization and also a period of very low income inequality have caused many people to say that the two are related, that the more polarization there is, the higher the income equality turns out to be. That seems right now to be more correlation than causation, but nevertheless, the two do go in concert. Okay, Jordan, we can be done with that one. I think one of the things that is less visible to people, not me, who observe Congress pretty closely is how the rhetoric since the 1990s with Newt Gingrich, the refusal to move to Washington, the claiming credit for being an outsider, the refusal to have anything to do with one's colleagues. Many lawmakers now, particularly on the Republican side, live in their offices. So they're there for the minimum time Tuesday to Thursday when the Congress is in session. That means they're not likely to be interacting socially with other members and their families. They're not likely to meet each other at a soccer game for their children. The only place they might bump into each other is the gym. And it means that there's no personal connection softening the ideological divisions in the Congress. And the voters seem to think that's a good thing. I happen to think it's a really bad thing because these members have to work together and there's very little glue that binds them other than a shared frustration that they can't get done what they went to Washington to do. So this glorification of amateurism and outsider status has led to high levels of retirement over the last couple of decades and a high level of junior members. These junior members don't know what they're doing. Congress is a very complicated place. And I remember all of my years of experience with my government introduction to American politics I always had a mock legislature and a mock Senate and the students had to figure out how to pass a bill that I gave them a very simple stripped down bill. And what they quickly realized is not knowing anything was a huge disadvantage. And so they tended to follow somebody who acted like he or she knew what was going on. And it was very disorderly. And when we debriefed afterwards they always said I had no idea how difficult doing a lawmaking job is. And of course they had no constituent service. They had no fundraisers. They had no lobbyists or any of the rest of that for the game. And so high levels of junior members are the feature of contemporary Congress. And so you have a lot of people who don't know what's going on. And so they're easily land by the party leaders but they're also easily influenced by lobbyists because they don't know enough to know when lobbyists are feeding them baloney and when what they're hearing from lobbyists is actually a good thing. I'm sorry about that. At any rate what this means I think is, confirms an observation that James Madison made centuries ago. And he basically said the more amateurs you have in the legislature the more likely they will be susceptible to demagogues. And that's exactly what we've seen with these recent Congresses. Moving on it's hard to see why this happened. It's a lot of things. You can't point to any one thing. And so you can't basically say, well, if we pass this reform or something it will be different. It really requires understanding how all of these things the electoral rules, the residential sorting into like-minded communities and the whole set of things come together. But what it does mean is that there's been a breakdown of norms. So in the past political parties would gerrymander but they wouldn't go too far because they thought maybe the next time in the next decade they would be targeted for gerrymandering. But those kinds of sense of reciprocity or oh, if we behave too badly it'll come back to bite us. That seems to be gone. The consequences of congressional dysfunction are quite serious in my view. Congress was intended by the framers to be the most powerful branch. They're all even Hamilton who was a little dubious about the legislature recognized that in a democracy the legislature had to be the superior branch. And if you look in the constitution you'll see all the major powers except commander-in-chief are assigned to the Congress. So when you have this three branch system of Congress, Supreme Court and president and the most, the linchpin, the most important branch is not functioning. This is pretty serious stuff for democracy. When it works poorly, we get gridlock or institutional conflicts that end up in crisis. There's no reason why any of the things that Trump was impeached for should have led to impeachment. There in earlier times there would have been ways where the Congress punished the president for behavior that was unseemly or unethical by withholding things, by making things inconvenient, by embarrassing hearings and so forth. But as things have gotten, as Congress has gotten so weak, when something really bad happens they end up going to the most extreme solution. And of course that hasn't worked very well for them. It is also the case that when you have gridlock, people turn more and more to the executive branch, to the White House. They want something to be done. So Obama was the target of this or the beneficiary, you might say. But Congress worked hard in 2013 to come up with a bipartisan immigration reform bill that addressed the dreamers, that addressed past the citizenship, that sent some people back and in the end they couldn't get it done. And so there was enormous pressure on Obama to do something. And he chose the most limited option, which was the dreamers program where if people registered with the government if they'd been born here and so forth, they could remain legally even though there was no path for citizenship or anything else for them. And they were subject to an executive order, which when the presidency changes hands would make them very vulnerable. So, but when Congress is powerless and gridlocked, the president is often pushed to do things that are outside of the purview or in the case of Trump, when he didn't get all the funding for his wall that he wanted, he just started reallocating funds in the defense budget to pay for it, which was totally unconstitutional. And yet Congress really wasn't able to do anything to stop him other than say, you can't do that. You're not supposed to do that. So, and what you see then is an array of unconstitutional claims of executive privilege and power by presidents in both parties. George Bush, George W. Bush was a big offender in this case, but it's interesting that Obama was viewed by many Republicans as a tyrant when they weren't saying he was too weak. And so you get a lot of misunderstanding about what the true constitutional role of the president is. And so presidents are refusing to testify or send their cabinet people to hearings. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee, for example, used to be the most important committee in the whole Congress. And for a year and a half, Mike Pompeo, the Secretary of State, never found it interesting or he was never available to meet with the senators in a formal hearing to talk about national security and foreign affairs. That's shocking. It should be shocking to all of us that a Secretary of State would refuse to schedule anything. There are refusals to keep Congress informed about things that they've passed statutes demanding information such as weapons sales and other kinds of major foreign policy actions. There've been constant violations of budget appropriations decisions. These kinds of things have happened under previous presidents for the last, probably 25 years. They reached alarming levels under Trump, but the presidents were all there because Congress, when it's not working, is not able to prevent this kind of thing from happening. And in the gridlocked Congress of the, during the Trump years, it was pretty clear that they weren't going to do anything to stop him. You also see the consequences of congressional dysfunction, however, in the Supreme Court, which has gotten quite aggressive in overturning its own precedents and on doing legislative laws secure in the knowledge that the Congress can't muster a majority. And lastly, and the most important to me as a student of American politics is the disaffection of the public. The number of Republicans right now who say they don't believe in democracy is about 50%. Large numbers, but not anywhere near that size among Democrats say the same thing. The public sees the other party as the enemy and hell bent on destroying the country. And that's a consequence of a Congress that can't do its job. I think when I think about remedies, I was expecting remedies. I thought that the 2020 election would bring about a surge of Democrats into the Congress as happened in 1974 after the Watergate scandal. And those members made, they were bent on reform. They were elected on reform and larger numbers of them came into the Congress and they passed budget reform, foreign policy reforms. They exposed wrongdoing by the CIA and set up proper procedures for behavior by various by government officials. It was a very, very productive effort in the mid 1970s to reform Congress. And I was expecting that that would happen because I always assumed that members would get tired of being pushed around by a president and tired of being irrelevant and simply being cattle to show up to vote on a legislation that they hadn't read and didn't have much say about. So that didn't happen. The president lost badly in the overall vote totals but the defeat of incumbent Republicans that would have created the basis for reform didn't happen. And so you have such a closely divided Congress now that reform is almost impossible, particularly since one of the things that needs reforming is the filibuster. And I'm not talking about abolition, I'm actually talking about going back to the way the filibuster used to operate, which is if you wanted to filibuster, you actually did do it. And that would greatly decrease the kind of irresponsible wielding of the filibuster that we have now. The other thing that I thought might happen was after January 6th that lawmakers having run for their lives quite literally would come back in January and create a mechanism for electoral reform that would rule out the possibility that might happen again. And they haven't done that either. So the framers of the constitution made an assumption. They assume that the interests of the branch and the interests of the lawmakers would be the same. They didn't really count on the extraordinary party loyalty that we see in Congress these days. And that in fact, the party is more important than the institution that they have sworn to defend. And I don't see that happening anytime soon unless the public does something it's so far been unwilling to do, which is to demand that its legislature do its job. So I'll stop there and take your questions. Well, thank you, Linda. You've given us a lot of historical perspective and we have quite a few questions here for you. Good. What do you think about term limits for Congress? Would this reduce polarization and partisanship or make it worse or have no effect? I'm against it. And actually when the term limits movement came to fruition in the mid 1990s, I actually was called to testify in front of the House Judiciary Committee, subcommittee on the constitution. And I quoted James Madison to the lawmakers, the quote in part that when you have lots of new members you're much more susceptible to demagoguery. But Madison and Hamilton were very concerned about amateurism in government. They wanted members to be what Madison called masters of the public business. People who understood public problems who'd spent the time getting to know each other so that they knew what other parts of the country thought. And they believed that that needed time. They didn't think that everybody had to be a master of the public business, but they wanted to make sure that there were plenty. And in many ways of elections worked the way they were supposed to, we would have plenty of turnover and we wouldn't need term limits. But the people proposed term limits I think as a substitute for the kind of sub electoral reforms that I outlined earlier in my talk. Okay, another question. As you observe, surveys show that the Americans generally hold Congress in low self-esteem. However, people tend to give much more favorable ratings when asked how they feel about their own members of Congress. What are the implications of this paradox? That paradox is actually attributed to my professor and friend and mentor, Richard Fenno. And he framed it as people run for Congress by running against it. And it's the problem of individual accountability versus collective accountability that I referenced earlier. And it has been a chronic problem for Congress since the Republic began. But what it means is that if you're not responsible for the whole institution, it means that you're playing to a very narrow audience. And I think the framers thought you would solve that problem. They didn't think it wouldn't happen that if you had enough masters of the public business who put the interest of the institution ahead of their own, that we'd be able to deal with it. And so the real problem is there are very, very few people of stature in the Congress these days. People who have national reputations and credibility that can sort of create the collective responsibility while the individual members are just looking out for themselves. Okay. How has the loss of the Fair Doctrine, Fairness Doctrine impacted our democracy? It's fair. That's a wonderful question too. I think at the time the Fairness Doctrine was abandoned during the Reagan years and it quickly gave rise to talk radio. Rush Limbaugh conservatives were much more effective at exploiting that change in regulations. And I think right now, it's become so important because of social media and because one of the national networks has basically decided to become an arm of the Republican Party. That's Fox News. I know many Republicans will say, well, that's because all the other networks became arms of the Democratic Party. But the fact of the matter is, it means that unless you're bound by professional responsibility, which I think most reporters still are, that you can run on TV, the kinds of conspiracy theories that we've seen about the election or about COVID or any number of things, pizza gate and so forth, where you don't have to give the other side a chance to rebut. And that's what we've lost is the conspiracy stuff is out there and there's very little defense going on against it. Andrew Yang has launched a third party. What do you see as the impact of that, if any? Oh, well, because of the winner take all elections, third parties can be spoilers and can lead to the election of Richard Nixon with less than 50% of the vote, the election of Bill Clinton with less than 50% of the vote and the election of Ronald Reagan who was aided by a third party candidacy of a moderate Republican. So in general, third parties never win but they do play a role in as spoiler. And that was probably why Al Gore didn't win the presidency in 2000 because Ralph Nader got enough votes in New Hampshire that the Electoral College, its Electoral College votes went to Bush. And so then we had the whole thing with Florida and the Chad's but that would never have happened if Ralph Nader hadn't gotten 7,000 votes in New Hampshire. So the real question is Andrew Yang is, he sees himself as kind of a tech person who's not an ideologue, who's a problem solver but I think the chances are that he would be more problematic for the Democrats but you also have somebody in Utah whose name is escaping me right now who ran as a third party candidate for the presidency in 2000 and who is now running for the Senate. And at the Senate level you could end up with some interesting things. We have several independents right now in the Senate who are caucusing with Democrats and I think his name is McMillan or McMillan. He could end up caucusing with the Republicans. And so we've always had third parties, they end up changing the discourse to some extent as the parties try to bring them in but in the end there's a lot more sound and fury than there is real change. The exception would be the Republicans in 1860 where they displace the weak party. And there are a lot of people who fantasize about that that a third party Republican oriented, conservatively oriented party would be the end of the Republican party is the party of Trump but I think that's a fantasy right now. When has approval of our Congress been highest and why? Well, that's an interesting paradox. I knew for months, you guys just ask good questions. Typically the approval of the president and the Congress go in tandem. Presidents is always higher but Congress does best when it's working constructively with the White House. And so divided government usually means low approval for Congress. Interesting. It sounds like our Congress is much older than those in other countries. Why is this? Do they have turn limits or are there other factors? They have higher turnout. They don't have, they don't nominate their candidates through primaries. And comments have enormous advantages in primaries because they have name recognition. They have the capacity to raise as much money as they need typically. And so they're really not subject to general election competition in these safe districts that have resulted from the residential sorting and gerrymandering. So they can just Chuck Grassley of Senator from Iowa who's 88 years old is just announced that he's going to seek re-election for another six year term. And a lot of people think he might pull it off. So in that case, who do you blame? Do you blame the politician for not seeing that his time has come? Or do you blame the electorate for just voting on the basis of name recognition? And we have several people asking, and I'll try to sort of collapse these into one question. Do you see any solutions that are possible coming down the road or on the horizon? And are there steps that the citizenry could take to start to turn the situation around? Well, in the end, some people would say right now we have the democracy we deserve. And because the society were quite polarized by income, by race, by religion and by any number of things. And some people say that if the American public really wanted Congress to solve problems and not be so divisive, they would stop voting for lawmakers who's only claim to fame is divisiveness. But so far, divisiveness has not been something that's been held against lawmakers and nor has a lack of consistency. But in the end, I think that means that citizens in their communities have to talk to each other and figure out that there's a lot more agreement than we are being led to believe by our leaders and by the media and by all the Russian bots and North Korean bots that are posting stuff on social media. One of the things we think about South Carolina, for example, is a very conservative red state and nobody, we would never agree with anybody in South Carolina if we grew up in Vermont. But Hillary Clinton got 45% of the vote in South Carolina. Joe Biden got 48% of the vote in Texas. There's more commonality than we understand and I think it's gonna be up to us to find it and to insist on candidates that will express that and will work for common solutions. I was very heartened by the creation of the Common Sense Coalition in Congress. That's mostly Democrats who are coming from pretty conservative Republican areas and Republicans coming from more liberal Democratic areas. But it's 60 people from both parties and they were the ones that crafted the COVID Relief Bill and they were the ones that came together to produce the physical infrastructure bill. And they were driven by the sense that their constituents want some pragmatic problem solving and we just have to be more interested in meeting the challenges that face us unless interested in the cultural divide. I thought many people thought, not just me, that the crisis of the COVID virus was gonna be that kind of challenge that would force people to get over this, my way or the highway situation. And in a funny way it has, I mean, there's huge consensus about people should wear masks, they should get vaccinated and so forth. But the small minority of people who don't think that way are commanding a disproportionate amount of the public space. And it's hard when that happens for lawmakers to figure out where they really should be going. So somehow I think we have to find ways of filling the public space with more constructive ideas instead of leaving a vacuum that gets filled by craziness. Well, you've given us ended here with a big challenge and a lot for us to think about. So thank you so much, Linda, for joining us today and for sharing your experience and expertise with us. And thank you for the good questions. Okay, have a good week everyone. Goodbye, Linda, thank you. Bye, Bess, thank you.