Season 3, Episode 17 | Congress Underrated: Representation, Gridlock, and What We Miss

Is Congress the most underrated institution in American government? Widely criticized for gridlock, partisanship, and dysfunction, it’s often seen as the weakest branch. But what if that frustration reflects a misunderstanding of what Congress is designed to do?

In this episode of This Constitution, Matthew Brogdon sits down with Princeton professor Frances E. Lee, author of A Case for Congress, to challenge the narrative that Congress is broken. They begin by rethinking “gridlock.” While fewer individual laws are passed today, modern legislation is far more expansive, often bundling multiple policies into single bills. By that measure, Congress is doing more, not less.

They then delve into what really holds Congress back. It’s not just partisan opposition, it’s internal division. Narrow majorities and cross-pressured members make sweeping agendas difficult, even when one party holds power and procedural barriers like the filibuster are removed.

Lee also reframes Congress as one of the most representative institutions in government. Its partisan makeup closely tracks the national electorate, and its members are deeply rooted in the communities they serve. 

Tune in to challenge what you think you know about Congress and discover why the institution we trust the least may be working more as intended than we realize.

In This Episode

• (00:38) Why Congress is underrated
• (01:45) Is Congress really gridlocked?
• (03:53) Congress as an obstacle to parties
• (05:12) Unified vs. divided government
• (08:27) Role of cross-pressured members
• (09:39) The filibuster’s real impact
• (10:25) Budget-reconciliation process
• (11:54) Filibuster as a scapegoat
• (13:01) Congress as a mirror of America
• (15:03) Diversity and local ties in Congress
• (18:20) Geographical representation & pluralism
• (19:51) Bipartisanship in lawmaking
• (22:32) Voice votes and consensus
• (24:46) Why Congress is unpopular
• (26:39) When parties enact big agendas
• (29:15) Quality of rushed legislation
• (31:04) Improving Congress: institutional patriotism

Notable Quotes

• (00:54) “The ratings for Congress have been low for a long time. It's really nothing new.”— Frances Lee
• (03:25) “The contemporary Congress actually passes substantially more legislation than the Congress of the middle 20th century.” — Frances Lee
• (11:45) “What the filibuster does for a majority party is that it often allows them to hide their divisions behind the other party.” — Frances Lee
• (13:15) “It’s credibly representative in partisan terms that the parties are getting the share of seats in the House and the Senate that reflects the party’s strength in the national electorate.” — Frances Lee
• (23:28) “It will surprise you if you take a look back, how many matters go through without any dissent.” — Frances Lee
• (26:28) “Checking and balancing, when neither party really has the confidence of the American people, is that something we would say is dysfunctional? I tend to think it’s not dysfunctional.” — Frances Lee
• (32:32) “I would like to see Congress operate in a more pluralistic way; I think it works better when the committees are able to work through the legislative issues, rather than have it all happen behind the scenes in leadership offices.” — Frances Lee
• (33:27) “I do think members of Congress feel a sense of personal honor that they've been selected as representatives, but I think they also need to feel a sense of pride in the institution of which they're part” — Frances Lee

Transcript

Intro:

[00:00:00 - 00:00:17]

We the people do ordain and establish this Constitution.

Matthew Brogdon: 

[00:00:17 - 00:00:37]

Welcome to This Constitution, I'm Matthew Brogdon and today I am excited to have on the podcast Frances Lee from Princeton. She is a Congress scholar, has a forthcoming book, A Case for Congress, and we're going to talk about why Congress might be underrated. Welcome to the podcast, Frances.

Frances Lee:

[00:00:37 - 00:00:38]

Thank you, Matthew.

Matthew Brogdon: 

[00:00:38 - 00:00:53]

Well, Congress is in the doldrums. I mean, it'd be hard for Congress's ratings to get any lower if people down on one institution in our form of government, it's got to be them. So what's the case that we're underestimating Congress?

Frances Lee:

[00:00:53 - 00:01:45]

Well, the ratings for Congress have been low for a long time. It's really nothing new. What I wanted to investigate for this book was what's the argument for having a Congress at all, given the disdain in which it's held? And sort of to look at what one might say for Congress's contributions to American government, to try to look at it from that vantage point, which I think has really gotten missed, that instead the discourse has been that both expert as well as political figures, it's been that Congress is dysfunctional. And so I wanted to consider, well, what functions does it perform, what functions do we want it to perform and to what extent is it performing those to consider it in an open minded way rather than to just look to the problems and to see what that can yield.

Matthew Brogdon: 

[00:01:45 - 00:02:20]

So people think of Congress as being gridlocked, beset by maybe we could say an irrational partisanship. They see it as being rife with influences other than constituencies and the public. That's quite an indictment of the institution. Feels like a tall order to answer. So maybe we could think about the question whether Congress is gridlocked. I mean, we think of Congress as being unable to act. I hear this from people all the time. Congress is doing nothing.

Frances Lee:

[00:02:20 - 00:04:53] 

Yes, I think that that's the right approach, is to take each of these claims individually and to look at the evidence for and against it. And so with regard to the question of Congressional gridlock, it's certainly the case that Congress today passes fewer laws than the congresses of the 20th century. In fact, it's a very striking graphic one that probably seen reproduced in the newspapers or political magazines that show political over time since the middle of the 20th century, the steady decline, it's almost like a linear decline in the number of laws passed by Congress. However, what that fails to take into account is that the laws that the contemporary Congress passes are vastly longer than the congresses of the 20th century. That they contain more titles. In fact, what they're effectively doing is rolling together many individual pieces of legislation into one vehicle. A lot of these vehicles are put together in leadership offices. But if we look at the total number of pages of legislation that gets enacted over a Congress, the contemporary Congress actually passes substantially more legislation than the Congress of the middle 20th century. It's been high since the 1980s. And in fact, two recent Congresses, the Congress of 2019, 2020 during the COVID crisis and the first two years under Joe Biden, 2021, 2022, set a new record for the total amount of legislation enacted as gauged by pages. And so that really complicates the view for me of the claim that Congress is gridlocked. I think what, Instead, if we look at Congress's role in the American political system, what we see is that parties continually find Congress to be an obstacle to their policy goals. It's just very hard to get your ideas through the Congress, through a bicameral institution with many roadblocks and veto players, that it's just hard to get it to move. And so it's an obstacle for parties. So the parties can't achieve what they want to do. But it doesn't mean that Congress as an institution isn't achieving a lot in terms of legislative enactments. It's just that it's a source of frustration for the parties. And so parties drive a lot of our discourse, and so they continually criticizing the Congress. But I don't think that's the only lens through which we should look at the institution's performance.

Matthew Brogdon: 

[00:04:53 - 00:05:46]

So you call Congress an obstacle to parties. And so political parties get very frustrated with them. And I guess by political parties, we mean both the folks out in the public who are identifying with those parties and thinking, boy, I put Democrats in office and I expect them to pass some Democratic policies as well as office holders, the folks who are actually participating in the institution. But if we look at the institution just intuitively, it seems like, well, we have party control of Congress, and don't we have occasions when a party has had control? We do get unified government occasionally. Not as often these days as we once did. We do get unified control. Right now we have it. We've got Republicans in both houses of Congress. We've got a president, Republican president, White House. In what way does Congress pose an impediment to political parties, even when they win elections?

Frances Lee:

[00:05:46 - 00:05:54]

Even when they win. Even when they have unified control, which, it is worth underscoring, is unusual in contemporary polarized politics.

Matthew Brogdon: 

[00:05:54 - 00:05:56] 

Just how unusual, I mean, is that,

Frances Lee:

[00:05:56 - 00:08:27]

I mean, it's about a third of the time we have unified control. So the bulk of the time, the overwhelming majority of the time, we have divided government. So under those conditions, of course, you have to navigate quite an obstacle course to get legislation done because you're going to have to have sign off from both parties. So basically it's a kind of coalition government that operates most of the time in our polarized politics. It's very frustrating, a lot of conflict. But even in those Congresses where you have unified party control, you routinely see that party that ostensibly has all the reins of government fail to legislate on its top agenda priorities. That is often because they cannot agree internally on those priorities. That happened with Joe Biden, even though they passed a great deal of legislation in the 117th Congress, 21/22, nevertheless, they failed to pass Biden's big domestic agenda package, the big reconciliation enactment that was known by the term build back better. Eventually, after great effort, finally got it through the House. Never happened in the Senate, and it didn't happen in the Senate because there were moderate Senate Republicans, especially Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin, who rebelled. So we can see that that happened with that recent episodes of unified government. If we look back to Trump's first term where he had unified control in 2017, 2018, they spent the first nine months trying to repeal and replace Obamacare, and that again due to defections within the Republican Party, especially on that decisive late night vote where Senator John McCain famously came in and gave thumbs down. And in fact, if we can go back, every single Congress with unified control had one really gigantic failure just like that. Go back to President Clinton, Clinton healthcare reform, I mean, that was not a low level priority. It was the signal priority. Couldn't do it. So remember that in our highly competitive contemporary politics, parties, when they win majorities, their majorities are narrow and they usually rest on a few swing voters, swing representatives of swing constituencies who are cross-pressured and who resist leadership and who give them fits. And so even under those conditions, that would seem to be like most well suited to a majority party producing a lot of major legislation, they often come up short.

Matthew Brogdon: 

[00:08:27 - 00:08:50]

So cross-pressured members, here we're dealing with folks who have managed to win in their state, but maybe even have a their state may be typically Republican, but they're Democratic. So they're facing a lot of constituents from the other party that are pushing at the one direction and then party leadership, their party affiliation in Congress pushing the other.

Frances Lee:

[00:08:50 - 00:09:19]

And they put the brakes on and we always have a critical block of those members. Even though there are so many districts and states that are strongly tilted towards one party or the other, you know, the so called deep red and deep blue constituencies, there are many of those. Nevertheless, there's not enough for a party just to rely on their, you know, their hardcore in order to legislate. They have to win over these swing members and they can't always do it.

Matthew Brogdon: 

[00:09:19 - 00:10:06]

If you were to ask the ordinary American what's getting in the way of Congress and say, you've got unified government, one party's in control of Congress and the presidency, he said, what in the world's getting in the way of them passing their agenda? Most people instinctively would reach for the filibuster in the Senate. They'd say, oh, well, you know, you have to have 60 votes in the Senate. You have three fifths, not just a majority. And like you mentioned, we rarely have these supermajorities anymore, our margins. If somebody's got 55 votes in the Senate, we regard that as a quite large majority now. So can we chalk it up to the filibuster? I mean, that's what we usually think of being in the way of these things. If we just got rid of the filibuster, would this go away?

Frances Lee:

[00:10:06 - 00:10:25]

I think the filibuster is important and the filibuster is an obstacle, but I think that its importance tends to get exaggerated. We can see this on the occasions when parties really are capable of going in alone using the budget reconciliation process where the filibuster doesn't apply.

Matthew Brogdon: 

[00:10:25 - 00:10:29]

Okay, and what's that's a budget reconciliation. What's happening in that scenario?

Frances Lee:

[00:10:29 - 00:12:18]

Okay, so they're using the Budget act, the processes laid out in the Budget act of 1974, to first pass a budget resolution and then to pass what's called a reconciliation enactment that will then bring policy into accord with the budget resolution. There's some special fast tracked procedures associated with that process, and that doesn't permit a filibuster. And so this is how a lot of important, very partisan enactments have gotten done. So the one big beautiful bill that passed this year, that was a reconciliation enactment, the Trump tax cuts from 2017, a reconciliation enactment, the Inflation Reduction act under Biden. So we can list a number of very significant enactments that have taken that pathway. But notice that when Congress has recourse to that process, you suddenly see all kinds of in fighting inside the majority party, all of those were nail biters. Like the one big beautiful bill they had to stay in session, like breaking all previous records for how long. They stayed in session on repeated occasions this spring in order to pass it because there were holds out, because there was resistance. Suddenly you see all this infighting. What the filibuster does for a majority party is that it often allows them to hide their divisions behind the other party. They say, oh, we're not doing this highly controversial thing that our base really wants us to do because the other party is blocking us. The filibuster could be reformed. They could get rid of it. They don't want to. I think that tells us something very important about the filibuster's role, that they don't really want to be forced to have to operate all the time like they have to when they're considering reconciliation enactments.

Matthew Brogdon: 

[00:12:18 - 00:12:22]

Because then that highlights all the internal divisions in the party.

Frances Lee:

[00:12:22 - 00:12:22]

Yes.

Matthew Brogdon: 

[00:12:22 - 00:12:28] 

So you can kind of scapegoat the filibuster and say, oh, if. But, you know, but for all those

Frances Lee:

[00:12:28 - 00:12:30]

Bad guys on the other side.

Matthew Brogdon: 

[00:12:30 - 00:12:40]

The minority party getting in the way, if we could just get five Republicans to vote for this, we could do it. It's usually the story. And the truth is there's five Democrats who don't like it too.

Frances Lee:

[00:12:40 - 00:12:44]

That's right. And maybe even more right.

Matthew Brogdon: 

[00:12:44 - 00:13:15]

Yeah, that's a fascinating reflection. So let's go back to the sort of positive case for Congress. You've argued that Congress in fact does represent the American people in a particular way and in an apt way, even though we're very frustrated with it, that Congress really is a mirror of the American people. Maybe help us understand that. How is Congress representing us? Well, in the sense of representing accurately what is going on in our political order.

Frances Lee:

[00:13:15 - 00:13:54]

Well, it's credibly representative in partisan terms that the parties are getting the share of seats in the House and the Senate that reflects the party's strength in the national electorate. And you can see that in the correspondence between the outcome of presidential elections and the share of the vote that the candidates receive nationally. And then that corresponds quite closely with the share of seats that they get in the House and the Senate. So we have something reasonably approximate to proportional representation in the US Congress  in our polarized era, it's not built in, it's not guaranteed, but just, in fact, that is how elections have been coming out.

Matthew Brogdon: 

[00:13:54 - 00:14:05]

So if we said let's take the presidential election and whatever share of the vote you get in the presidential election, you get that percentage of the seats in Congress, and what you're saying is that that pretty much happens.

Frances Lee:

[00:14:05 - 00:14:06]

It pretty much happens.

Matthew Brogdon: 

[00:14:06 - 00:14:34]

I mean, not as a matter of design because of course congressional elections are governed by states and states apportion House districts. States decide, they gerrymander, they draw the lines, they decide how the districts are drawn and who's in which districts. And somehow though, in the aggregate that just adds up to the proportion of the population that does in fact support Democrats and Republicans.

Frances Lee:

[00:14:34 - 00:14:35]

So it's striking. It's, you know.

Matthew Brogdon: 

[00:14:35 - 00:14:38]

So where's the formula? I mean, how is it?

Frances Lee:

[00:14:38 - 00:15:27]

There is no formula with this, but it is just how it has been working. And it's something we could say about the contemporary polarized Congress is that it's credibly representative in partisan terms. And of course parties matter more than anything else in terms of structuring how people view the world if they're interested in politics and also how people vote once they're in office that parties. You'd point to that as the most important consideration. And it so happens that it reflects the country pretty well. And if we're going to look at the Congress in demographic terms, it's more representative than it ever has never previously been in terms of race and gender. It's actually more diverse in occupational terms than it used to be.. So more different types of people serve in the Congress. It's more attractive in that way.

Matthew Brogdon: 

[00:15:27 - 00:15:29]

More not just lawyers anymore.

Frances Lee:

[00:15:29 - 00:16:45]

Not at all. That's the old stereotype that was true of the 20th century Congress. Congress today is actually much better. More different types of occupations reflected in members backgrounds. Congress is representative in that most members serving in Congress have longstanding personal ties with the constituencies that they represent. Most members who serve in Congress come from were born in the district that they represent. They were born in the state that they represent. They went to high school and to college in the state they represent. Members of Congress are less geographically mobile than other high income professionals. They are more like the average person. Most people don't move across the country for their jobs. Most people live near their families. Well, members of Congress are actually more like the typical person in that regard, which I think is also an attractive feature of the institution that we tend to neglect. And it's a set of ties between members and their constituents that are meaningful to people that you're actually from here, you know, the businesses that are here, the people who are here, and people like that. And that's one of the reasons why members of Congress remain quite popular even if the institution itself is not.

Matthew Brogdon: 

[00:16:45 - 00:17:47]

Well, that is a really important consideration. I mean you and I are sitting having this conversation in Utah, a western state flyover country, and we both hail from the Deep South. In case everybody on the podcast couldn't figure this out, which you come to appreciate, the degree to which this is important in Congress. Whenever you look at our other institutions, the folks who are Supreme Court justices, right. The other principal institutions, they're elite. They go to a few institutions, with the exception of Justice Barrett, you know, they all went to Harvard and Yale. There was at one point, I think someone quipped a number of years ago, that most of America is not represented on the Supreme Court, but all five boroughs of New York are. This was actually true at one point, I think sometime around the mid teens, 2014, 15 somewhere in there, it was an interesting reflection that coastal elite from LA, San Francisco and New York grossly overrepresented. This is probably true in the federal bureaucracy too. The upper reaches of the federal bureaucracy.

Frances Lee:

[00:17:47 - 00:17:51]

In the book, I look at where people who serve in the Cabinet are from.

Matthew Brogdon: 

[00:17:51 - 00:17:51]

Oh, really?

Frances Lee:

[00:17:51 - 00:18:20]

And it's major metros, just as you might expect. And then so it contrasts to the Congress. And I think the Congress is representative in an important way. That's what we want Congress to be. Well, it is. It is that. And you know, again, I think it's just a tendency not to look at what. When Congress is actually doing things that we want it to do, we take it for granted. And we don't consider that in these ways the institution is fulfilling the functions we expect it to.

Matthew Brogdon: 

[00:18:20 - 00:19:51]

Well, and especially when we look at the founders debates over structuring Congress and the decision particularly to have to structure House districts in the way that we did have a sort of geographical representation, which was not inevitable. But it is an interesting thing that in the House, most people don't just come from the state, but most members of the House actually grew up in their district. And that does seem to me to be a sort of a continuation of or being really consonant with the description of the House of Representatives in the Federalist Papers put so much emphasis on the idea that this was not a majoritarian institution where you needed to have some ideological position clearly represented or some national majority, but instead was for the people of a particular place to have a representative in the institution. In fact, we'd use the term pluralistic. Right. Congress is about pluralistic representation, not just majoritarian. And this fact, which is so easy to overlook, I mean, unless you look pretty closely at the picture, you sort of miss this fact that Congress is really functioning in that fashion. So we've got a number of ways in which Congress seems to be representing the American public in a way that our other institutions in the federal government don't. So so far, so good. Is there anything else on the sort of Congress side of the scales for it?

Frances Lee:

[00:19:51 - 00:20:37]

I think of the three central functions of Congress, representation, lawmaking, and executive accountability. And so we can turn to examine the Congress's performance with regard to lawmaking. We've already discussed how the case for gridlock is far from ironclad. So that suggests Congress is performing its lawmaking function. Another important feature of how Congress operates in lawmaking terms is that it forces bipartisan accommodation. It's remarkable how few laws get enacted on the strength of only one party's votes. Very little party line lawmaking, which means that the U.S. code, the statutes that govern us by and large, had bipartisan buy in when they were enacted.

Matthew Brogdon: 

[00:20:37 - 00:20:42]

So just how big? What's the typical majority that passes a law in Congress?

Frances Lee:

[00:20:42 - 00:21:02]

More than 2/3 all the time. Even in unified government, parties will pass one or two party line laws and then that's it. Everything else they'll do, the whole Congress will be bipartisan. That's just typical. And that is not true just of the routine legislation. It's true of the important enactments that happen, Congress to Congress.

Matthew Brogdon: 

[00:21:02 - 00:21:18]

So how do we determine what's an important law? So you're saying even, Even laws that matter, not just renaming the post office. Oh, yes, even laws that matter. Two thirds or more of members of Congress in both houses vote for any law that passes?

Frances Lee:

[00:21:18 - 00:22:36]

Typically almost every law that passes, yes. So if we were to look back at sort of a roundup, like what important stuff happened this Congress? So journalists used to do that at the end of Congresses. They would write up a sort of thumbnail description. I rely for my lists on David Mayhew, who's been collecting these ever since he published his book Divided We Govern in the 1990s. So I use his list. He's kept them updated. He puts them together. It's about a dozen laws. So I mean, there would be some controversy over line drawing, but not a lot. I mean, I think it would be easy to get agreement on. Yeah, these were the most significant laws and, you know, you might include one that I would exclude. But it's not that hard to draw some lines. And when I rely in this analysis on Mayhew, let him make the calls. And what we see is that the patterns on important laws are not different than the patterns on laws generally. That if we look at the size of enacting coalitions on important laws, they are the same size as the enacting coalitions on routine. Everything else, it's very easy to look at the roll call votes that result in all the laws. One little tidbit, one little tricky tidbit is what to do with the significant number of laws that pass on voice votes. So those are obviously very much a matter of consensus.

Matthew Brogdon: 

[00:22:36 - 00:22:38]

Listeners may not be familiar with this concept.

Frances Lee:

[00:22:38 - 00:22:47]

You don't have to have a roll call vote to pass a law. You only have a roll call vote if someone requests it. And so you can pass laws simply on the basis of asking for the yeas and the nays.

Matthew Brogdon: 

[00:22:47 - 00:22:54]

And then the speaker says the yeas have it all those in favor say yea and you get a crowd.

Frances Lee:

[00:22:54 - 00:23:01]

Yes. And so if we were to add those in, there would be even more bipartisanship than what I'm the two thirds.

Matthew Brogdon: 

[00:23:01 - 00:23:12]

I see. Because we'd have to assume that if anybody had, I mean, if anyone in the minority had doubt that there was substantial majority support, they would ask for a roll call vote.

Frances Lee:

[00:23:12 - 00:23:22]

Right. So in the Senate, when they just passed the bill to require the disclosure of all the Epstein files. Passed on a voice vote.

Matthew Brogdon: 

[00:23:22 - 00:23:23]

Of course.

Frances Lee:

[00:23:23 - 00:23:33]

Yeah. So. But you know, the point is that even the polarized Congress, it will surprise you if you take a look back, how many matters go through without any dissent.

Matthew Brogdon: 

[00:23:33 - 00:23:41]

This is fascinating. This is like when people find out that 60% of the Supreme Court's caseload is decided unanimously.

Frances Lee:

[00:23:41 - 00:23:42]

It's exactly like that, actually.

Matthew Brogdon: 

[00:23:42 - 00:23:43]

That sort of thing.

Frances Lee:

[00:23:43 - 00:23:43]

Yes.

Matthew Brogdon: 

[00:23:43 - 00:23:46]

And that's because we pay such close attention.

Frances Lee:

[00:23:46 - 00:23:47]

To the conflict.

Matthew Brogdon: 

[00:23:47 - 00:23:58]

That's right. The places where we're really having a cage match. We're down in the mud trying to fight it out on some of these issues. And that's the thing that makes the papers.

Frances Lee:

[00:23:58 - 00:24:05]

And the front pages gets all the attention. It's quite misleading, really.

Matthew Brogdon: 

[00:24:05 - 00:24:35]

If Congress is doing such a bang up job of representing us, I mean, if really it is a mirror of us in some sense. Right. It's representing us geographically and it's representing us in terms of our partisanship. And even then it's passing almost all of the laws that it passes, it passes with super majorities 2/3 or more. I mean, what you're telling me is that even if we had a constitutional requirement that no bill passes Congress without a 2/3 majority, most bills would still pass.

Frances Lee:

[00:24:35 - 00:24:36]

Yes.

Matthew Brogdon: 

[00:24:36 - 00:24:39]

Our laws wouldn't look that different. There would be a few that would pass.

Frances Lee:

[00:24:39 - 00:24:46]

In most Congresses, you have so much support from the minority party that if only the minority party was voting, it still would have passed.

Matthew Brogdon: 

[00:24:46 - 00:25:02]

That's fascinating. That is absolutely fascinating. So why then are we so disenchanted with Congress? Why such animosity? You even hear members of Congress say the most derogatory things about the institution.

Frances Lee:

[00:25:02 - 00:26:24]

The conflict between the parties is fierce. It is polarized, it is contentious. It's also very difficult to enact legislation. And lots of ideas that members have that members believe are really good ideas do not get through the process. So they continually find themselves frustrated. They are forced to make concessions to get anything done. So they have many grievances about how the process works from their own vantage point, the parties most of all, because it's so difficult to legislate on matters where your party wants it and the other party does not. Those are the most difficult matters on which Congress is asked to act. And of course, people who are partisan care greatly about those matters, and those are usually gridlocked. So that's where the gridlock is. It's not on everything Congress does, but it's on the things that the parties care about greatly. And that's so they have legitimate frustrations. But I think we have to ask, as American citizens or scholars of the institution, to ask, is that really a bad thing, considering that both parties are pretty unpopular? I mean, that's just a fact. They are, nationally speaking. Most of the time, both parties are below 50% approval. Presidents are usually below 50% approval in our polarized era.

Matthew Brogdon: 

[00:26:24 - 00:26:27]

And our presidents routinely win office without a majority.

Frances Lee:

[00:26:27 - 00:26:39]

That's right. So checking and balancing, when neither party really has the confidence of the American people, is that something we would say is dysfunctional? You know, I tend to think it's not dysfunctional.

Matthew Brogdon: 

[00:26:39 - 00:26:54]

Okay. When was the last time Americans voted for a party and put a party in office with the kind of margin of victory that allowed them to govern according to their party platform? You know, sort of follow their druthers.

Frances Lee:

[00:26:54 - 00:27:43]

Well, Democrats had a Pretty Big majority after 08. They had 60 votes in the Senate briefly. You know, the wish list that they got done in 09.10 was fairly significant, which included Obamacare, the Affordable Care act, and Dodd Frank, not to mention, you know, stimulus package. So, you know, they were able to get a lot of things they wanted. So that, I would say is significant. One of the little tidbits that your listeners might find interesting is that they tend to criticize the Senate for having a Republican tilt. In other words, there are more Republican states than Republicans win as a share of the national vote. It's true. But Republicans have not had a 60 vote Senate in modern history at all. That's right. But Democrats briefly did. And so it's kind of ironic considering

Matthew Brogdon: 

[00:27:43 - 00:27:46]

That by modern history we're talking about since. Since the New Deal, since.

Frances Lee:

[00:27:46 - 00:27:48]

Yeah, since 20th century society.

Matthew Brogdon: 

[00:27:48 - 00:27:48]

Okay.

Frances Lee:

[00:27:48 - 00:29:15]

Yeah. I mean Republicans were the minority party after the Great Depression for 50 years. The Newt Gingrich is said to have brought them out of the wilderness like Moses. So it is a certain irony that although it's true, if you're looking just at the normal vote, there are more Republican leaning states than Democratic leaning states. Nevertheless, Republicans have never had that 60 vote Senate in the modern era. So anyway, just a little point that's worth keeping in mind as people find themselves frustrated by the institution. I often hear Democrats complaining about how the playing field may be tilted against them. They seem to make that argument more often. And you can make a case for it yet if we just look at how elections have in fact come out, they don't seem to be particularly burdened. But that was a little bit of a detour. You were asking about when parties have really been able to deliver on a big party agenda. So 09. 10. And then of course we could talk about the Great Society. So clearly a great deal happened then. We go back to 100 days of the New Deal. I think if we were to look back, we wouldn't necessarily regard those episodes as the high water mark of good policy making, high quality policy, that there's a rushed quality to legislation when parties truly have the reins of power.

Matthew Brogdon: 

[00:29:15 - 00:31:04]

I think that's the surprising thing about the New Deal. We think of Franklin Roosevelt as enacting his platform, but the Supreme Court by wide margins declares a lot of it unconstitutional. Some of it's not terribly popular and most of the New Deal legislation that sticks. The National Labor Relations Act is still with us. The Social Security, some of the other important enactments actually have to be passed after Roosevelt loses a lot of his partisan advantage in the midterms. They actually suffer some pretty big losses in Congress, some big vote swings in the 1930s because the electorate's not thrilled with the first hundred days. It turns out they got out over their skis and enacted some things that both the court and the public have a lot of reservations about. And bearing out your point, the legislation that sticks around and that has a real effect seems to be the legislation that was forged in a much more compromise oriented, pluralistic legislative process where we had to talk to each other, and a longer one too. The idea that you were going to remake the American economy in 100 days is a wild idea. Well, this is a very different perspective on Congress. I don't know if you mind at the end of the episode a couple of maybe rapid fire questions about a couple of things to do with Congress. One would be notable changes that you think would be useful in the institution. I know you're the kind of person that is deeply well acquainted with the way that Congress works. Much of the way Congress works is governed by procedures that the public, outside of something like the filibuster doesn't understand well. What would be alterations in the way that Congress operates or in its structure, even mundane things that you think would improve the institution?

Frances Lee:

[00:31:04 - 00:31:41]

I think rather than procedural fixes, I think what would help Congress a lot is if Congress could recover some of its institutional patriotism, if members could be proud to be members of Congress before they think of themselves as Republicans and Democrats, to recognize the value of. Of what they do and of what function that this institution performs in American governments, to sort of recover some of that sense of institutional dignity. Like I would like to say. I didn't say it sounds, I think, fanciful, considering where we're at.

Matthew Brogdon: 

[00:31:41 - 00:31:41]

Right.

Frances Lee:

[00:31:41 - 00:32:15]

But I think that Congress would work better if members of Congress took their role more seriously and took more pride in it and pride in the institution and in Republican government. So now I'm not sure how to get it back. I think they used to have a lot more of it. You look at, you know, debates, congressional debates, 19th century. They used to be very proud to be members of Congress. You know, the greatest deliberative body is a reference to the way they used to talk about the Senate. You know, maybe that was a little much, but it's better than now.

Matthew Brogdon: 

[00:32:15 - 00:32:15]

Right.

Frances Lee:

[00:32:15 - 00:32:56]

Where. So I think the problem with procedure is that it comes with a lot of unanticipated consequences. In many cases where there have been procedural reforms, it's had effects that they were not expecting. So I always fear to tread in making recommendations about. I would like to see Congress operate in a more pluralistic way. I think it works better when the committees are able to work through the legislative issues rather than have it all happen behind the scenes in leadership offices. So. So I could push in that direction, but I think the first step would be members of Congress sort of taking pride in what they do.

Matthew Brogdon: 

[00:32:56 - 00:33:27]

That seems constructive. It is hard to imagine, but you would think it is an odd thing to think. I would imagine for someone who's not from this country to look at a member of Congress and think you're a U.S. senator. Are you proud of being a U.S. senator? And you would expect them to say, yes, of course I'm a U.S. senator. I mean, who wouldn't be proud of being a Supreme Court justice? Justice? It's an odd thing to think. Or being the Secretary of Defense. I mean, which Secretary of defense would sort of walk out in public and say this, you know, denigrate the office?

Frances Lee:

[00:33:27 - 00:33:43]

I do think members of Congress feel a sense of personal honor that they've been selected as representatives, but I think they also need to feel a sense of pride in the institution in which they're part. And I think that's where we see. That's where I think they see. We see them falling down on that.

Matthew Brogdon: 

[00:33:43 - 00:34:52]

Oh, that's right. It kind of corresponds. We often talk about the way that constituents look at Congress, that you love your congressman and you hate Congress, but from the other side, members of Congress can look at their office. I represent my constituency as being an honorable thing without seeing the broader institution as something that is an honor to be a part of or that's deserving of. Of their attachment. Patriotism. That's an interesting thought. Well, Francis, thank you so much for joining us and talking through this. I know that one of our great priorities, the center for Constitutional Studies, with the podcast, is not just to acquaint people with the way our government works and the sort of inheritance of laws and constitutional forms that we have, but to cultivate an appreciation for those. And with Congress, that's a tall order because people don't feel attached to the institution, they don't feel proud of it. And hopefully Congress can earn and we can cultivate some confidence in the institution. So thank you for being on the podcast. It's been great to speak with you.

Frances Lee:

[00:34:52 - 00:34:56]

Thank you for having me.

Outro:

[00:34:56 - 00:35:43]

The Constitution is more than parchment under glass at the National Archives. It's a blueprint for American self government that shapes every part of our civic life, from the rights we cherish to the laws we live under. We explore the ongoing battle over the meaning and relevance of America's founding document. This Constitution will equip you to engage the most pressing political questions of our time. Join us every two weeks as we hash out constitutional questions together. This podcast is ordained and established by the Center for Constitutional Studies at Utah Valley University, the home of Utah's Civic Thought and Leadership Initiative.