 When studying American government, countless Americans learn in grade school all about how a bill becomes a law. Unfortunately, what they learn has precious little in common with how the United States Congress actually functions. In reality, the lawmaking process is dominated by a tiny number of legislators and positions of leadership, bills are not considered on their merits but by the demands of party politics, and your elected officials don't care what you think. Hello, this is Ryan McMacon and you're listening to Radio Rothbard. For this week's episode of Radio Rothbard, we're doing something a little bit different. I've asked our associate editor and social media guru, Thoe Bishop, to join us to talk a little bit about what he witnessed in his years working in Congress. So welcome, Thoe. Thank you for having me, Ryan. And so you were a staffer, not for a particular member but for a committee. Is that right? Yes. I was a staffer for the Financial Services Committee. I worked for the Republican leadership at the time, came in after the Tea Party wave. The Financial Services Committee is what used to be known as the banking committee. We of course had Ron Paul who did a lot of his Fed oversight work on that committee and was actually subcommittee chairman overlooking the Fed, which is actually kind of interesting because they divided up domestic monetary policy from international monetary policy so that he as chairman could kind of screw up IMF issues because they were really concerned about that. But I worked up there for I think three and a half years. I got to see a lot of the behind the scenes stuff as the Austrian mole for the Ron office and within the larger leadership. Well, I wanted to have you on because my own experience with Congress is very limited. I worked for full time four years at the Colorado State Legislature and for about another three or four years kind of as a liaison between a state division and the legislature and I then realized as I was in graduate school also at the time that what I was in my research about Congress, I'm like, this doesn't sound anything like a state legislature. And so as time went on, I started to find out more and more that there were huge differences between how Congress functions and how state legislators function. State legislatures in many cases, especially the smallest states do function a lot more like this idealized idea of how a bill becomes a law. And so I kind of wanted you on to just basically confirm my suspicions about how Congress works and then compare and contrast a little bit with how the states work. Now, if you're one of our readers and you like my more radical content, you know, please don't write in and say, well, you know, why are you saying good things about state legislatures? They do terrible stuff and all that. Keep in mind, this is all relative. Also, this is just meant to be informative in some cases too, because most people don't know hardly anything about how state legislatures work or even that they exist in many cases. I know from teaching political science for 10 years that my students, oh, they knew Congress existed, but they really had no idea that state legislatures really were a thing or what they did. And so I want to just compare and contrast those a little bit and then in the process learn about just how truly dysfunctional Congress is as a legislature. I mean, it strikes me as being really quite worse than how many other legislatures work. So I've got four topics here and we'll just kind of go through those and talk a little bit about how they relate to, to how bills really work and just give some people insights into how legislation maybe doesn't have to be quite as dysfunctional as it is, at least in theory and maybe in practice in some cases. So the first issue here that I want to talk about was the issue of leadership's control over legislation and how it gets heard if it ever gets a vote on it. And at the state legislature, we had a thing called the gavel amendment, which is short for give a vote to every legislator. And the idea here was that people, members of the legislature, should be able to actually put legislation up for a vote and that they should be able to be guaranteed that it might get a hearing of some sort in a committee. But it turns out that's not how it works in Congress at all. And maybe you can tell us a little bit more about that. No, absolutely not. There's some legislators in particular that could have long lasting careers, just being successful fundraisers and glad-handling people that never get anything done or even tried to at the federal level. But with the committee structure, usually bills will originate in some sort of committee. Sometimes there can be overlapping jurisdiction. For example, I know Ron Paul is out at the Fed bill. There was a big issue that his staff had to deal with because even though that seems like a pretty obvious financial oversight sort of matter, it kept being pushed over to the oversight committee, which did not have quite the same sort of support. And so you have this back and forth, a lot of behind the scenes trading that goes on with leadership to get any of your bills voted on in just the committee standpoint. And then going from committee to the House floor is itself its own issue. For example, one of my old bosses was Jeb Hensseling, who was chairman of the financial services committee for I think six years. And he tried to do some pretty good Fed oversight bills. He was not an Austrian, but he did know who Mises and Hayek wore, at least by name. So I had to give him some credit for that. Really bad on foreign policy, neither here nor there. But in order to get that sort of legislation to the full floor to get voted on by a Paul Ryan-led House, it was always a major uphill battle. So a lot of times, even if you get a really good member of Congress who may even fight his way and manage to get into a committee leadership role, in order to actually get that even voted on at all in the full House is uphill battle. And then, of course, getting the Senate on the other side to work with you is another battle entirely as well. So it's not as simple as, oh, you know, John Smith goes to Washington. I mean, it's a lot. This is where fundraising becomes such a major part of the game in D.C. because if you're not fundraising for the major parties, you're never going to get the committee spots that you want and you're never going to get a committee leadership role. And so again, you have the best ideas in the world, but if they don't get a vote, they don't matter. Well, and this, of course, puts a lot more power in the hands then of party leaders. And it can be really useful then in coordinating political agendas for the legislature. So whoever's in charge of the party can say these are the issues we want to be talked about in the news or with, you know, in Congress anywhere. Basically, we want to concentrate on this stuff. And it seems that they can then control what gets talked about. And also, I think it shoves to the side intra-party conflict so that, you know, we're not going to expose rifts within the party by simply not bringing up these contentious things for a vote. And that was actually the motivation then for bringing up the gavel amendment in Colorado, which is now a constitutional amendment. The idea was to really decentralize power within the legislature. And we can now break the power, essentially, of what was then the Republican majority to really decide everything that gets heard. And so it really did change the way things were done. Now, the state, of course, the legislature still has these kill committees, right, where you stack a committee with people in safe seats and who are particularly loyal to the party leadership. And then you can kill a lot of bills that way. But the bills still get heard in committee. And so then you can still make an issue, still make hay of this bill, because then you'll get a party line vote. The Republicans voting down this bill that maybe many of the voters think is a great idea. And that sort of thing. Whereas all that stuff would have been just in the shadows before. And in some cases, in some other states, it's even more decentralized than this. I was reading in this great article that governing just had. And I didn't even know about this article before I started researching this. But this just came out earlier this month, talking about how the states have tried to do this with requiring votes on bills and so on. And it turns out in New Hampshire, every bill gets heard on the floor, which is just astounding. And I guess they mean the way it was phrased, they had to mean the committee of the whole. So just everybody gets to vote on every bill. Now, of course, Congress still, oh, we'd never be able to manage that. But of course, the state legislature, they then might limit the number of bills you can introduce, procession and that sort of thing. But it's just, this is totally alien territory from what I can see between, from Congress's point of view, this idea that any schmo from any district can just write a bill, put it up there. And then there actually has to be a recorded vote on it, either at the committee or in some cases, apparently, even at the floor level. And so then your positions, your party positions are constantly being recorded and constantly showing riffs within the party. I mean, in your experience, did you see certain pieces of legislation that might have run with more decent leadership? But they were just, it was just the sort of thing you're like, I'll never get, I'll never get to run because it just, it doesn't fit with what the Republican Party wants right now. No, absolutely. I mean, with the financial services committee, not everything we did was, I was a fully on board with, but there was some pretty decent pieces of legislation that came out that never got a vote from Republican leadership on the full committee or on the full house, particularly when Eric Cantor was there. He was, he quashed a lot of stuff like the XM Bank was something that he protected a lot where there was actually a lot of pushback against from status quo Republicans, which was actually kind of surprising. And I think that actually gets to one of the differences that actually exist in Congress between the Republican Party and the Democratic Party because you have term limits in committee leadership. And so what this meant is that you had a lot of kind of newer blood kind of circulate through committees on the Republican side, whereas Democrats, and you have people that have been in committee positions for decades. And so I think that even though, you know, we can say this now from like 2019, you know, the Tea Party was largely a dud, right? But for a couple of years there, you had a lot of heartburn caused to John Boehner and Eric Cantor and those sort of people because you had a lot of more Tea Party aligned leadership at the committee level that kind of pushed them a little bit. I mean, this is when you started having the debt ceiling become a major issue, right? And of course, that's the benefit of being and, you know, not having the White House, right? You kind of get to be a little bit more of the troublemaker role. Whereas, you know, from the left, the progressives in the house, the AOCs and those sort of people, even from our standpoint, right, you know, most of the status quo Democrats are still pretty far left. You know, the frustration you have with a lot of the left activists is that the Democrats and Congress are really moderate Republicans. You know, the greatest threat to the world because, you know, they're the ones not acting fast enough on climate change, for example. Well, that has to do, in a great deal of effect, there's a major generational divide within the committee leadership process on the Democrats entirely. So again, not only do you have a lot of differences in how these sort of things are functioned, you know, from state to state, but even within Congress itself, you have a little bit of different organization based on party, which I think was kind of interesting to see play out. But some of the games they play on bills, I mean, are just, it's really interesting to see. I mean, in one case, I know we talked about this off Mike, you had Congressman Ben Quayle, who was the big establishment choice. He was, I think, the first or second year term Congressman who got distributed in against a guy named David Schweikert, who's still in Congress and pretty good. He's on the blockchain caucus. Not a libertarian, but interesting. And in order to benefit Quayle and punish Schweikert, they gave a bill that Schweikert got through the committee to Quayle on the House floor so that he could have a legislative accomplishment that not only did he not deserve, but was literally his opponents. But Barney Frank, actually, who was very entertaining for all of his other sins, you know, made a big spectacle of how just absurd the whole thing played out. I mean, it was really just a great example of how really dirty these sort of games on bills can be when you have leadership punching down. Well, we should probably move on to the second topic here then, which is the issue of the single subject rule. Now, this is something that's long annoyed me. And it does relate a little bit to what we just talked about in terms of bills being heard. Now, you know, a lot of political scientists that have looked at Congress have tried to look at what percentage of proposed legislation actually gets passed and so on. It's a pretty small number in Congress, 5%. Many states have much higher percentages. But of course, I don't think that's a very good metric. And I know some libertarians who get a little too simplistic on these things say, oh, well, if they're not passing much legislation, that's good, right? Well, it kind of depends on what's in the legislation. In Congress, yeah, they don't pass many bills, but what they have are these gigantic omnibus bills, which cover everything under the sun, and they got all these writers on them. You got some bill about farming or something, and then there's a writer about having to do with abolishing free speech or something for purposes of national security or whatever, very deep in those pages. And no one has time to read them. You don't know what the bills are even really about. Now, state legislatures, on the other hand, have this single subject rule. And that's really limits these bills, depending on what's in the title in most cases. The title of the bill will say, this bill is about X. And then if there's text in there that doesn't have anything to do with that, then courts can invalidate the legislation. Or in the case of Colorado Committee Chairman often will just simply say, this bill can't proceed because this amendment or this section has nothing to do with the bill, with the bill title, and so on. And it seems to me that omnibus bills are pretty dangerous thing, given that it seems to me that most members aren't reading these things. I don't know, maybe you can tell us a little bit more about that. Absolutely not. In fact, even in the committee side where you don't have nearly as many, usually the bills are fairly simple or a lot simpler usually at the committee level and kind of bundled together later. I mean, you'll have members that show up to vote on amendments and they have no idea what they're voting on. They literally have a staffer posted on the side of the wall and they either, it's like a gladiator game, thumbs up or thumbs down and they just do whatever their staffer says. So, I mean, it's, yeah, they have no idea what's in these bills. You have to pass the bill to figure out what's in it and it creates just a monstrosity. And I always thought, from when we do get a libertarian legislator, we can never seem to make the process kind of work on our side either. We can't slide in. It's a shame that with Trump's big tax bill, we could have just slid in, oh, we're going to eliminate taxes on gold, silver and cryptocurrency and create, basically work in Ron Paul's competing currency bill with him. This must pass a complicated Republican tax bill. It never really works on our side. So, yeah, it's just the amount of stuff that you can slide in that has no relationship at all to the title or general theme of the bill. It's a good way of making things grow. Well, and this would seem to increase the power of the leadership also, right? Well, we're not going to let many bills pass, but here's a bill that we kind of like. But we're only going to let amendments and writers add it in that back up what we already want. And you can't then drum up support for some separate thing saying like, you know, not to, I don't even know about federal legislation, but let's just say doing something libertarian, like deregulating some industry where you might add that might actually stand alone, be really popular, but they're not going to let that pass. And then maybe they'll add some horrible writer to it. It just seems like a totally unmanageable process from the legislator standpoint. It just seems that the leadership then can do whatever they want with your legislation. And it would seem the single subject rule would actually protect you from that just as a legislator from having a bunch of other people pile stuff in there. Oh, absolutely. And so here we are again, right? Whereas you're just a regular legislator trying to do something, trying to make some some difference. And not only do you have not control over whether your bill gets heard ever, but now you don't even have control over what's in your bill. Once you once that starts to go through the legislative process, now I've looked at some of these issues here as to the research done on single subjects and some political scientists have complained that, well, it's too hard to define what single subject means. And so you really shouldn't have it and log rolling is probably a good thing. Maybe I don't know. I don't really know. It strikes me as creating far too much temptation to basically making legislation a sort of thing where you're functioning in the shadows, where you're burying bits and pieces in there that most people don't know about and can't read. And back to the issue of, well, they should be passing less legislation. I mean, if Congress in 2001 passed a single piece of legislation, and that piece of legislation was the Patriot Act, well, that's just horrible. That's just the worst thing imaginable. So, oh, well, they only passed one bill that year. Yeah, except it was one of the worst pieces of legislation ever passed. And so, yeah, looking at numbers, I just, I don't really care how many pieces of legislation are being passed when you've got 1,000 page bills that nobody knows what's in there. And of course, there's that famous line, I guess it was from Pelosi. Does she really say this, that we have to pass the bill to see what's in it when she was talking about Obamacare? Yes, exactly. So, I mean, that sort of thing exists. But of course, I remember back in the day when I was writing amendments to the legislative stuff, you had like three page bills that in many cases might make a significant difference to policy in some way. And so, the legislators had actually read them. If it was under 20 pages, the legislator probably actually read it. Yeah, the budget bill was 300 pages and so on. But that was rare to have a bill anywhere approaching that length. That was just the budget bill because it would go through each department and what was to be allocated and so on. But yeah, this idea yet again, this idea about what you learn in grade school, about how a bill becomes a law, it's really, what you're really passing is big, thick books of legislation that nobody knows what's in there. And nobody's really debating. I mean, there's just tons of stuff in there because I think that's what people imagine that you've got this bill and then people kind of go through it line from line. And it's like a city council meeting where you're kind of debating little pieces of it and stuff. Does that ever happen? Not really that I saw. For everyone, everyone comes in there with talking points because most of the Congress has no idea. Some of the dumbest people I've ever met were sitting members of Congress. It's just incredible to watch. Unfortunately, some of their staffers are pretty smart and are really good at getting things out there. And of course, one of the major ways that congressional legislation has changed, now I'd be interested to get your thoughts on this. We had not discussed this prior, but is pork barrel spending. That was one of the big changes that John Boehner came in with the Tea Party. It was a big populist thing. And there's some people, for example, I know many of them libertarians argued that pork barrel spending is a good thing because it allows for Congress to dictate where funding goes rather than leaving that to the discretion of the executive branch and the agencies and all that sort of stuff. But I know one thing. I actually looked at the number of bills that were passed. And again, as we mentioned before, bills, the activity of Congress is itself a good measurement one way or another. But it was interesting seeing how, and of course, part of this has to do with just the general political environment we saw 2008 generally. But the number of bills that passed went down dramatically. And part because you could no longer use these sort of appropriation writers to bribe members of Congress who had no interest. The people that really don't care at all about legislating except for bringing back the bacon back home so that they can get a road named after them or get pat on the back by some big donors. Now that's a little bit more difficult to do. They work it around in different ways. They actually use commemorative coin bills as a way of kind of rewarding people back home, which I think is interesting. Just an homage makes a big deal about that. But that's one way that the federal process has changed a lot in the last decade. Well, speaking of bringing home the bacon, that brings us to our next point, which is as a regular member of the public, do you ever see your legislator? Do they ever see you? Do they care? I think there's this idea that, oh, you call your legislator, you ask for a certain bill, and then they consider it. Or they take in the public's ideas about something, and they're always trying to formulate some new idea, how to make life better. That doesn't seem to be the process to me, especially since it's pretty much, unless you can write a million dollar check, pretty much impossible to get a one-on-one meeting with your legislator in Congress. Now at the state, especially in a smaller state, where the district is very, very small, much, much smaller than a congressional district, and so you actually might be living down the street from your state legislator, and that person's probably not a millionaire. In fact, in a grade-many case, a ton of people who become legislators are retired school teachers, and that sort of thing. And these are pretty middle-class people. That, of course, doesn't make them flawless by any means, but they seem fundamentally different and easier to talk to and access and all of that than a member of Congress. And what did you see in terms of staff? I mean, who has access to a member of Congress, especially senators, which basically seems impossible to get a one-on-one meeting with a senator if you're from a big state, maybe from Vermont? And so what did you see in terms of this interplay between an ordinary citizen and a member of Congress? Well, I think a lot of it kind of depends on the personality of the congressman himself. There are some people that were really big about making sure that would always go out of their way to seek situates rather than lobbyists, especially in the early days. And of course, a lot of it depends on the district itself. We had one member of Congress who, Nan Hayworth, from a moderate district in New York, she won by a very small margin with the Tea Party wave. She was a doctor by trade. And so she won on the issue of Obamacare. Well, so she came to Congress. They wanted to make sure that she kept her seat. She was also a woman, so leadership probably wanted to make sure that she was kind of in a role that could easily fast track her to leadership because that's, especially on the Republican side, they're always looking for faces that can look a little bit more diverse than some of the old white guys. And the problem is that, so they put on a financial services committee, which because it's a banking committee is, especially these days, it's pretty good for contributions. Well, she didn't have the slightest clue on how, on any of these issues. She actually said that the one book on economics she'd ever read in her life was a book that her father recommended, Henry Haslitz Economics and One Lesson. So there's actually a lot of kind of optimism with my friends and Ron staff about her. The problem is that because her concern wasn't constituent about raising money so that she could campaign in two years, she hired some Wall Street guy to run her financial services portfolio because, oh, I'm going to hire an expert to do these things rather than if she just relied on her own common sense. I mean, I think she would have been a much better member on banking issues than the guy that she ended up hiring. So if you're constantly concerned about raising money because you're in every two-year cycle, then the amount of time that you can actually spend it all listening to your constituents, even if you wanted to, becomes very limited. And of course, one of the big aspects is not all congressmen are created equal in terms of how they staff district offices themselves. If you have a really good district staff, then I do think that you can, on little issues like getting, making sure that if you have an issue with social security or you have a passport problem or some of these issues that your average person is forced to interact with the federal bureaucracy, sometimes a good district staff can actually make a world of difference. Actually, my congressman back home, Neil Dunn in Florida, he had a wonderful staff that kind of helped me on a passport issue. But for the most part, the incentive structures in place in Washington, the size of the districts, make it so that your actual local needs are very rarely able, ever able to actually trickle up through your congressman unless you have someone who individually is very motivated by it. Because again, the incentive structure in place is not really there. Well, and I think another issue here is that people, I don't think have the slightest idea about how much people have to spend raising money, how much time they have to spend on that. It's nonstop. Yeah, I don't think there's any sense of how that really has to be, especially if you're from a larger district, your focus for a time. And I guess apparently also, it's not that you just have to raise money for yourself, you're expected to raise money for the party just in general also. Oh yeah, absolutely. And one of the interesting ways is how they're able to bait congressmen. You know, as libertarians, it's very easy to view all congressmen as evil with the exception of Ron Paul. But usually it's a little bit more complex. Most of the people that run for office, at least early on, do so because they're a respected member of the community and they say, oh, well, why shouldn't I represent? I'm a liked enough guy. That's how they get elected. And so we had a member back home, my district's Florida too. So we had Steve Sutherland that became the first Republican elected in that district. And I think, I don't know if it was forever or in a very long time, get part of the Tea Party thing. And for the first two, one and a half terms, he was part of the Tea Party troublemakers. He always voted against, you know, Boehner on big spending issues. He was one of the big debt ceiling guys, et cetera, et cetera. But then all of a sudden his bills started to change. And I think that a big reason for that is there was a big issue back home. It's a big fishing area. And so the next, I think two years or three years, they were rewriting the federal fishery regulation. And so there was a big issue at the time on cracking down on red snapper fishing in particular because the way that the federal bureaucracy measures red snapper populations doesn't make a lot of sense. There's been a lot of investment in artificial reefs that help populate the population. I think I actually have an article on this on Mises.org. And so, you know, they go to good old Steve Sutherland who just, you know, who may genuinely want to do the best thing for his constituency. He says, oh, hey, Steve. Well, you know, we're going to be writing this major bill coming up in a couple of years. Don't you want to be subcommittee chairman on the process that writes this piece of legislation? It's like, yeah, you could do a big thing to help your community. Well, if you're going to do this, you're going to play in line. And you're going to fund raise for us. You're going to make those calls. You're going to do the votes that we want you to do. And so, you know, they can put you under their thumb in those ways as well because it's a nonstop legislator that has seemingly, you know, that is a willingness to legislate just about anything. You know, if they can get you on one issue that they know is important to your community back home, they can kind of drag you around on voting on all sorts of bad things. And it's very easy to sell yourself as the good guy because, oh, you're going to go back to the, you know, you're bringing back the, you're bringing back home to bacon. It's just another way of just the leadership structure that exists in the current Congress is makes it so easy to pervert even the best-minded of politicians when they get to the swamp. Well, and of course, the bigger the district, the more money you got to raise if you have multiple media markets within your district and so on. Now, of course, if you're just some farmer for some, from some rural state district, pretty much your campaigning consists of like literally driving around the district because the, that community probably doesn't even have its own TV station. And so it's just a totally different situation. And so money just really doesn't enter into it nearly as much except for the ability to do mailings and maybe some radio ads locally and big signs and stuff like that. But we're just not talking about the millions of dollars that you otherwise encounter. So that's why I think it goes to some of the best work that you, some of my favorite work that you've done on the Mises wires is just highlighting how, you know, one of the big changes that we could make to Congress, you know, assuming that we're not going to burn down and insult the land that the capital is on tomorrow, you're just expanding the legislature. So you have smaller districts that are more, you know, that it makes it so much easier to be in contact with the legislator to have more unified districts. And Mark Thornton has done some interesting research in the past that showed the correlation between spending and, you know, number of constituents per representative. I think it's really fascinating. I think that's just one of the most obvious, if you talk to your average person who's not a, you know, black flag waving anarchist yet, you know, this is a sort of common sense sort of thing that kind of can start getting them thinking about the virtues of political decentralization and some of this stuff. Oh yeah, we could do a whole episode on this. I mean, basically, the bigger the district, the less your vote matters. That's for sure. The more money matters, the more they need to fundraise. I mean, you just, you're just irrelevant, really, in a big district. I mean, how much does one voter matter in California to a U.S. senator from California? I mean, you're meaningless. You're nothing. Compare that to the senator from New Hampshire. It's a totally different ballgame. But amazingly, you say that to libertarians are like, wow, that just means more politicians. I guess they think that's clever. But it's not. All it does is what it really means is when you have fewer politicians, it just means that they're vastly more powerful than if you have a larger number on their own. And then some people say, oh, well, you could just never have, you can't have smaller districts because then Congress would have to have 10,000 members. And that you just, that's not impossible. So what they're basically saying is the United States, the given is the United States has to be this gigantic mega-state, and we're going to actually back into that the proper size of Congress. So what needs to change is Congress, not the size of the country. We'll just have a huge country. And if the fact that I don't get any real representation doesn't matter because it's just not practical to have too many legislators. And then you say, well, you could split the U.S. in a smaller piece of like, no, well, that's impossible. Clearly, we just need a totally unrepresentative legislature. So why bother? Why not just have the president beside all policy by himself? Dramatically reduce the number of politicians right there. Right, right. Only one politician. Of course, I mean, that's where we are with conservatives now. They have no problem with Trump just setting unilaterally tariff policy without so much as a debate in Congress. So whatever, apparently, there's way too much democracy going on. And we just need one guy, one elected dictator who can make all the decisions with Twitter. So democracy problem solved. Yeah. So all right. So this takes us, well, one last issue we should note is the fact that part of the reason that your legislators are not accessible in Congress is the fact that sessions are now year round. I mean, they're just never, they don't have time to be back in their districts. And they're there all the time in Washington. The calendar is, I mean, sometimes it's, you have like a week, you know, one week during the month that you, you know, you're able to get back. Sometimes I'm depending on the schedule, be less than that. Of course, they always make sure to give themselves a big break during campaign season. Yeah. So, so like, I mean, they make sure there's plenty of time to get back home and fundraise when, you know, when elections are on the line, but for the most part, I mean, yeah, it's, it's a, it's a very, you know, you have to be in DC constantly. And, yeah, it's, there's very little, even if you want, and you have a lot of congressmen that, you know, as soon as they can get out of the city, they do for a variety of reasons. And, you know, again, those are usually the better ones. But of course, you often have politicians that end up basically moving full time in DC, you know, come out, oh, he hasn't visited his, his listed address and, you know, 15 years, how, you know, that's, that can happen too. If you really start to enjoying DC life, which I mean, they do have a lot of very DC brunch is I think one of the best in the country. So they do have that going for them. And of course, the smaller states are nothing like this with their legislatures. In some states, I think five or six of them, the largest of which being Texas, their legislature meets only once every two years. And so your legislators around all the time, in that case. And in 1988, I know that Colorado reduced its session from, I think, 150 days, 220. And part of the reason being that some people were resigning because they were just, they needed to get back to their districts to work their real jobs and things like that. And so that, well, we'll just make the session shorter. This was actually the party in power wanted to make the session a shorter thing so they could actually do less. I mean, you imagine that happening in Congress. And this is, this is the benefit of like, you see it play out the other side. I mean, your article recently on Baltimore, I talked about, you know, the price, the salaries that the city council was getting them, and they meet all the time. And, you know, you could see just even on a non-federal level, I mean, the very real dangers of having just a nonstop, highly paid, you know, don't need another job sort of legislature. You know, it's not just Washington where you have these issues. It can even happen on a city level. Whereas in Florida, I think it's like, give or take two months. And even that's not the full, full week. And I think the legislative pays like $30,000 a year, you know, you're not getting rich off of it. I mean, the incentives at place to be busy bodies and to find new ways to fiddle around with the legislative code and create more laws is certainly reduced. Right. And so just your whole interaction then between the legislative body and the constituents. It's just, it's totally different when those people actually have to live at home some of the time. And that of course then limits the amount of legislation, the amount of jockeying, all of that sort of stuff. And that's just another big difference here there that I think most people are unaware of. And this takes us down to our last issue here, which is the fact that a lot of these legislators are limited in how long they're there, and that they come and go fairly often, whether there's even term limits or not. I mean, there's constantly churn even in Congress with new freshmen coming in and so on. There is nonetheless this professional class that's there all the time, year after year for decades usually, and these institutions that are there permanently. It's this class of lobbyists and bureaucrats who are there all the time. And they end up being the ones who really tell the elected officials what's up and how things work. And maybe you can tell us a little bit more about that. Absolutely. This was my big eye-opening experience when I came to DC because again, most your average committee staff are policy staff. I was a deputy communications guy, so I didn't have, I wasn't having a lot of influence on policy. But I mean, if you are a senior policy staffer on a committee, you have significantly more power on legislation than a freshman congressman. You have to really put in some time several election cycles before you have near the amount of influence, partly because of all the reasons that we just discussed. And so again, I know this was a big issue on my committee because you had certain policy staffers whose vision on the proper role of government in these areas was much broader than the sitting leadership. It was ridiculous. I mean, we had a housing staffer who was a very nice guy and no personal, I still didn't him at all, but he was a big fan of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. I mean, it came out like there was emails where like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac lobbyists would say, oh, if you have to go talk to Republicans for legislative reasons, go talk to this guy because he doesn't share the same biases that everyone else on the committee does. And so they would just talk to their buddy who's been there for 20 years and they'll get things done. And there's completely background, even that the desires of the chair sometimes. And for example, the guy that was the big head, I mean, I don't know if he's still there, but who was the big policy staffer for monetary policy had no idea, of course, anything about monetary theory at all. He was there because he understood the legislative process for those commemorative coin bills that I mentioned earlier. And so simply knowing the details of how to properly pass a ceremonial coin kept him in a position of outstanding power at a good paying salary over a guiding policy on the Federal Reserve and the House Financial Services Committee for a very long time. I mean, it's, they are the ones that really have so much power. And we were talking about being isolated from your district back home. I mean, these are the sort of people that they never leave DC, right? If Congress is an in session, I mean, they're, you know, they're still in DC. They're hanging out with DC people doing DC things, talking about DC subjects, eating DC brunch. And, you know, they only, you know, they'll make a visit family or go party with some old, you know, fraternity brothers. But for the most part, they are totally isolated to DC culture. And you hear Republican staffers on the congressional side talk about DC voters. I mean, it's, you know, deplorable. I mean, it might be one of the nicer things they would say. And again, just, it feeds into that isolation of DC action relative to, you know, dare I say, your real America outside of it. Now, just to get a sense of scale, if you're a, do you know, well, you weren't on the Senate side, but what is the size of a Senate like staff? If you come in as a Senator, how many people work for you directly? And how many people on the House side? Well, on the, on the House side, I think you usually had maybe 10 to 12 staffers. Do you have, you know, you'd have your chief of staff, you have a few senior legislative aides. You have a few lower level legislative staffers and then one or two staff assistants. Some have very big press. It kind of also depends on your priorities as a congressman, right? If Justin Amash, for example, for a very long time had no press person, you know, he handled his press. He, you know, he would send out tweets, you know, he had no, no one dedicated to that at all. So he'd have a scheduler that would help manage things. Senate staff is usually broader. You have more issues on your plate, you know, simply because there's fewer members. So it's probably lower 20s. And the difference in office culture would change dramatically. I mean, if you went to Ron's office, you know, it was a bunch of, of, you know, libertarian nerds talking about Rothbard with, you know, in the gold standard, whereas you went to Rand Paul's office and the culture was just very different. I mean, there was nice people on both sides. I'm not trying to, you know, diminish it, but you could see very much a difference in office culture and ideology there. And I think one of the biggest issues that you have is that, you know, for example, I, this was an issue with Justin Amash is that you end up, you know, you get elected to Congress like, oh, I represent the people back home. So you end up hiring a bunch of people from your district. Whereas if you want to be, you know, a very ideological congressman, then you need to have people that you can lie to think like you do. And that's the biggest issue. And one of the things that always kind of drove me crazy, and even Ron was guilty at times, is that like, you know, you always make a big deal about how much money that you save with your office. Like Rand Paul likes going out there with a big fake check. And it's like, oh, I saved taxpayers, you know, $120,000 this year by having a small office budget. The problem is that money doesn't go back to the treasury. It goes into the leadership fund generally. And so then like, you know, you have, Mitch McConnell has more money to buy furniture or, you know, whatever, you know, turtle food, whatever Mitch McConnell spends money on. Whereas like if I were in that position, I'd just be loading up full of low level staff assistants that are like hardcore libertarians, because like the easiest way to get it, the only way to get a job on the Hill usually is doing either campaign work or being already on the Hill, which leads to a big issue where like the only people that can afford that on like an intern salary are very affluent people. So you don't have even kind of, you know, average people working on the staff side that ends up being in part of this power structure. But like, you know, if you simply had like a libertarian office that was really dedicated just creating like policy experts that could be within Congress and then flood like normie political offices, I think you did have a very outsized impact for your one little vote. But that's kind of my own little, little pet, pet issue there. But like staffers drive so many things. Again, as a single member of Congress, you have all these other obligations. I mean, your ability to really know what's being voted on, that know any of these issues is very limited. And then, you know, they committee staffs are just so dependent upon them. Well, that's going to have to do it for this rare long form version of Radio Rothbard. Next time we'll be back with the usual shorter format, although every now and then we may do some longer episodes like this one. For now, thank you for listening to Radio Rothbard. Have a wonderful day.