We're back with another edition of The Federalist or Radio Hour. I'm Emily Kashinsky,
culture editor here at The Federalist. As always, you can email the
show at radio at the Federalist dot com, follow us on Twitter at fdr
LST. Make sure to subscribe wherever you download your podcasts, and to the
premium version of our website as well. I'm joined today by Joe Pastell.
He is a Hillsdale College professor. He's the author of the book Bureaucracy in
America and also the author of a relevant paper to Today's conversation called Congress in
Limbo that was published by the Heritage Foundation. Joe, thank you for joining
us. It's great to be with you. I was reading the New York
Times. I don't know why, but I was over the weekend, and
they had an article doing some interesting finger pointing, basically casting as a very
dark kind of situation or dark reality, the fact that Jim Jordan is threatening,
allegedly according to their sources, to like unleash the rage of voters on
the House of Representatives if you know, he's if they sort of create obstacles
to him getting the speakership. Now, Joe, you have all kinds of
I think helpful perspective on what the speakership battle means all of that. But
I actually thought this was a good place to start because it speaks to our
concept of the House of Representatives. And when you have the Beltway media that
we have, it's sort of ikey that the House of Representatives would do any
like actual representation because what they represent is very sort of icky to the Beltway.
I don't know whether or not you agree with that, but I wanted
to start there and just ask, you know, whether maybe fundamentally also our
concept of the House of Representatives is in some peril at the moment as well.
Yeah, I think, well, I mean to see where the problems
lie in terms of what's going on in the House of Representatives today, it
would take us probably a lot longer than the kind of time we have,
So, you know, there are a lot of different things that are contributing
to what's going on right now, but the idea that the House of Representatives
is the representative of the people, and that's the problem. I think that
way of thinking is exactly part of the reason why we've gotten to the point
that we're at. So to accuse the House of Representatives of being too representative,
I think actually signals that something's gone wrong. And I really think that's
a good place to start thinking about how we got to the place that we're
at. Yeah, so you know, from your perspective again, you wrote
this paper for Heritage called Congress and Limbo. You know again you made a
really good point not long ago about how this could take us forever to kind
of hash out. But the thekin a short version of this is how did
we get to this position right now? Where you know, they went through
fifteen ballots in January. We covered this here a lot fifteen ballots in January.
Kevin McCarthy lasts, you know, longer than some people thought was possible,
especially because they got him down on the motion of a kate, which
was something he really, really, really really didn't want to do. And
here they are speakerless for about a week now. They've got Patrick McHenry as
pro tem. They weren't able to elect Steve Scalise despite nominating him as a
conference he didn't have the floor votes. So all of that, you know,
with all of that context, and by the time this airs, something
may have changed. The bottom line is Republicans had a speaker that was elected
on fifteen ballots that didn't even last a year, and here they are.
What is the kind of condensed version of how we got here? Yeah,
well, I think the first place to start. And this is actually a
bit of a difficulty for probably a lot of our listeners and for me personally.
The more I looked into this is this is a tough thing for us
to swallow. But I think part of the reason why this is a problem
is because of the Constitution itself. And what I mean by that is that
this is famous essay in the Federalist papers, Federalist number ten. Even high
schoolers in America read it today. It's the most famous of all of the
Federalist papers. And there James Madison says, well, we're creating a large
republic that has extended over a large territory. And what that's going to do
is it's going to create so many different interests and so many different factions that
it's going to be really hard for all of these people with different incentives to
get together and work together and solve and promote national solutions to these local problems.
Now, when Madison writes that essay, He's saying, this is a
virtue of the system, that this Congress that we're creating will be so gridlocked
it'll be impossible for a majority tyranny to emerge. Well, of course,
the problem here is that the same mechanism that makes it hard for a majority
tyranny to emerge also makes it hard for a cohesive majority to emerge at all.
And I think that is kind of the starting point for what happened to
the House of Representatives. Right when Madison's writing there four million people really scattered
along the Eastern Seaboard. The range of interests in different opinions there is,
according to Madison, quite vast, but from our point of view today,
is actually very limited. Think about what Madison would say about the number of
interests and the number of factions we have today when we're stretched over a much
larger territory, we have a much higher population, four hundred and thirty five
different members representing four hundred and thirty five different districts, and so anybody who
tries to sort of lead from the top down in this sort of framework is
really asking to take on a challenge, and that I think has been the
problem with the speakers that preceded Kevin McCarthy, John Bahner, and Paul Ryan,
at least on the Republican side, is they had a sort of top
down idea that they represent ended the whole country, and they could tell these
members in these districts how to vote, which tough votes they were going to
have to take, that they're going to have to go back to their constituents
and tell them, hey, I voted to increase the debt limit. I
didn't get many concessions from the Democrats in return. And so I think in
a way, the system's not built to have that kind of national leader just
impose his or her will on the whole system. So, in other words,
the House of Representatives, in short, is supposed to be a collection
of a lot of different people with a lot of different points of view,
and it's going to be really hard for those people to agree on much of
anything. And that can be a real virtue, of course, but it
also can be a challenge because it's hard to get any kind of majority assembled
in the House of Representatives for a long period of time. And really,
I think that's in a nutshell kind of the start of explaining what happened to
Kevin McCarthy. And you know there also obviously was a motion to vacate filed
what one other time that was unsuccessful. So this was not only that this
was the first successful motion of vacate. So it's not just that it was
one of two times that it's happened in American history. It's also that this
was the only one that was successful. What can you tell us about the
history there, Joe, Yeah, So the turning point, I think in
Congress's entire history, at least the House of Representatives entire history, was the
first time that the motion to a kate was brought on the floor of the
House of Representatives, and that's in nineteen ten, and it's brought by Speaker
Joseph Cannon against himself. So those are listeners that have been to Washington,
d c. And toured Capitol Hill might be familiar with the Canon Office Building,
which is a very large house office building on the House side of Capitol
Hill. It's named after Joseph Cannon, who's one of the two greatest czar
speakers of the House of Representatives in American history. The other was Thomas Brackett
Reid of Maine, who was Speaker in the late nineteenth century. Cannon was
speaker in the early twentieth century during the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt and a few
other presidents and Canon and the speakers such as Reading Cannon at this period of
time, say late nineteenth century or early twentieth century, they were called czars.
They ruled with an iron fist, and really they had these three powers
that basically gave them total control of the House of Representatives. First, they
had this right of recognition. They could decide who to call on if a
person rose to offer an amendment or resolution or anything like that. So you
really couldn't get to speak on the House of Representatives on the floor of the
House unless this speaker called on you. Second, they had power over this
thing called the Rules Committee, which for listeners who aren't familiar, this is
really important committee in the House of Representatives that decides which bills go to the
floor. You really can't get any bill voted on in the House unless you
go through the Rules Committee. If it's a bill, it's not going to
be just carried by voice vote. And so the speaker controlled the Rules Committee,
so he controlled every bill that reached the floor. And then third,
the speaker got to name all the committees and the committee chairs. So if
you wanted to be on a committee like agriculture, because you were from a
state or a district where agricultural interests were the dominant interests, you needed the
Speaker to put you on that committee. So imagine you're a first term member
of the House of Representatives. You can't pass a bill on the floor of
the House without the speaker's permission. You can't get on a committee you want
to get on without the speaker's permission. You can't speak on the floor without
the speaker's permission. So basically, these speakers Canon and Read and these others.
At this time they had very strong powers. Again, they were called
stars and the progressives in the Republican Party. Canon was a Republican. The
progressives in the Republican Party revolted against Canon in nineteen ten and they stripped him
of his power over the Rules Committee. And they did this because Canon was
a conservative. Theodore Roosevelt was a progressive president who wanted progressive legislation, and
so they had worked for years to try to get their progressive bills through the
House of Representatives. Finally, in this dramatic Saint Patrick's Day revolt. They
get the power back from Canon, and as soon as Canon does that,
he loses this power. He introduces the motion to vacate on himself, and
he says, well, look, if you Republicans are going to vote with
the Democrats to take my power away, I can no longer lead the House.
And therefore it's time for you Republican progressives to join with your Democratic colleagues
and elect a new speaker, because clearly the Republicans don't have a majority that's
cohesive enough to govern on the floor. In many ways, actually this kind
of resembles the situation that the Republicans were in a week or two ago with
McCarthy, that there were a few Republicans voting with the vast majority or all,
in the case of McCarthy, all of the Democrats to take out the
speaker. And so Canon said, the logical extension of what the Progressive Republicans
did was to get rid of me as speaker, and so he introduces the
motion to vacate against himself, and ironically, the Progressive Republicans immediately vote to
sustain him as a speaker. So they basically tried to have it both ways.
They wanted him to be speaker, but they wanted to be the ones
that held all the power. And so that was really I think the turning
point in Congress's history where we moved from a system where there were much stronger
parties in the House of Representatives to a system that we have today where party
leaders are relatively weak. I can't help but notice the timing there also sort
of coincides with the punting of a lot of congressional duties to the administrative state.
And actually, you wrote a book about bureaucracy in America, so this
is probably a great question for you, Joe. How much of the sort
of erosion here did or has And this is not a leading question, I'm
genuinely curious, gone hand in hand with a lot of punting of those kind
of congressional duties to the executive branch. Yeah, that's my core thesis is
that when the Progressives took out party leadership in the House of Representatives, they
knew that this would mean Congress would have to start delegating power over to the
bureaucracy. Because what the parties had done in Congress was they had made it
possible for a majority to rule. Remember, we were just talking about Federalist
ten. The basic idea of Federalist ten is we want to make it really
hard for a majority to govern in Congress. While the party solved the problem
by giving party leaders a lot of power and then letting those party leaders set
a majority agenda and get a majority agenda through the Congress, by taking out
the ability of party leaders to set a majority agenda in Congress, they paralyzed
Congress, and the Progressive is new By paralyzing Congress, this will ensure Congress
will pass off its powers to the bureaucracy, which has none of the gridlock,
none of the checks and balances that the other institutions have, and we
can get laws passed very easily through an administrative agency. We can create dozens
of them. We can create an administrative agency for food and drug regulation,
for trade regulation, for railroad regulation, and we can have them all basically
be legislatures over their own areas of expertise, and Congress will turn into less
of a legislative body and more of an oversight body. Woodrow Wilson is expressly
interested in doing this. He writes this at the end of a book called
congressional government. He says Congress is spending too much of its time writing laws,
which, of course, when my students read this at Hillsdale they sort
of laugh, like, of course, that's what Congress does. That's what
the point of the Constitutions Particle one is to create Congress as a law making
body, and Wilson says Congress will be much better served doing less legislating and
a lot more overseeing of administration. And so what you see after nineteen ten
is a decentralization of power into committees, and the committees basically serve now as
oversight bodies, and the legislative powers have been transferred over to the administrative state.
So the argument I'm making in a nutshell is if by taking out parties
and party leaders in Congress, the Progressives crippled Congress and facilitated the rise of
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some really smart people in Congress right now, you know, freedom concress people.
I'm thinking particularly of Chip Roy. And you know, not every member
of Congress is as aerad dite and has this sort of well formed substance of
understanding of the process you just described, but some, some of them really
do and they're operating under this correct understanding of the process here. And I
wonder, Joe, what you think the kind of solution is. Let's say,
you know, hypothetically, there is a speaker, Jim Jordan, there's
a speaker, Chip Roy. They have, you know, this power at
their disposal, which is limited, and maybe you can get into some of
that. You know, I don't think most of the country even realizes that
we're without a speaker. I don't think most of the country can name at
any point in time like who the Speaker of the House is, even though
it sort of has Washington d C. Here you embroiled in the sort of
palace intrigue. What should that kind of roadmap to making Congress, you know,
taking Congress as you put it in the Heritage paper out of limbo.
What does that look like? Yeah, well so that's a really difficult question.
But the one thing I'll say about it is that I think conservatives,
and this includes people on the Freedom Caucus side of things, Jip Roy and
Jim Jordan, who looks like you very well maybe the next speaker, I
think conservatives have a bit of a blind spot here. They tend to really
love the idea of regular order. They're very nostalgic for the idea of regular
order. They love the notion of the committees being back to doing the legislative
work that the committees used to do. And they're right about this, they
say, in the seventies and the eighties, you know, forty or fifty
years ago, committees were places where you did see serious legislative work. You
had markup sessions where you would dig into a bill and you would mark it
up. You would you know, you would amend it, and then you
would vote it out of the committee and it would go to the floor.
I mean, this is Schoolhouse Rock, right, that famous you know,
short video of how a bill becomes a law. And there's something beautiful about
that image. Where the committees are these many legislatures, they get all this
expertise, and they do all of this, they do all this serious work.
The problem with that vision, and again this is the vision that many
Freedom Cocus members want to return to, is that the committees tend to be
captured by the interest groups. This is essentially the iron triangles that we used
to describe when we would talk about how Congress works. People don't go seek
out positions on the Agriculture Committee because they just want to do serious legislative work
on agriculture. They get on the Agriculture Committee so that they can protect their
constituents' interests. And so what happens in a lot of these committees is that
they work in tandem with the administrative agency to whom they've delegated power and the
interest groups, which of course grow up around those administrative agencies. So take
something like military base closures or you know, Rivers Harbor's Infrastructure Transportation Committee legislation.
These things tend to actually be less about what's good for the whole country
and much more about what's good for the interest groups that are overly represented on
these committees. So, in other words, what the Freedom Caucus tends to
like is the idea that the committees will be revived as the places where legislative
work happens, and the leadership the Speaker's office basically becomes just a facilitator of
what the committees are doing. I think the problem with that is it gets
captured very easily by special interests, and that's why you need strong parties who
can think about the national interest and offset all of these interest groups as they
try to capture the government in these various committees. So there's a reason why
Newt Gingrich and other conservatives over the last you know, generation or so saw
the need to nationalize elections and in so doing, nationalized Congress and put more
hands in the put more power in the hands of the party leaders. They
did that because they saw the administrative state thrives when there is no national party
leadership in Congress. So I would warn anybody on the on the in the
Freedom Caucus or serious conservatives that if you try to put the committees in charge
of the process, you're going to find out that you're going to get a
lot less conservative legislation out of those committees than you think you would. That
is a really interesting point, and it's one that I rarely hear when these
conversations come up. And you know, I think the last time Speaker Gingrich
was on the show. Someone can go back and listen and correct me if
I'm wrong. I want to say, I asked about the kind of counterintuitive
effect of also slashing congressional staff, and I wonder, Joe, if you
have some thoughts on ging Gritchian changes that were made to Congress that after four
decades of democratic role in the House of Representatives did feel fresh and actually refreshing
at the time in the nineteen nineties, but may have had deleterious attacks effects
on the body downstream of that over the last couple of decades. Again,
that is not a leading question. As somebody who talks to a lot of
these Hill staffers, you kind of watch the twenty two year olds, right
the bills, questions do come up, what's your take on whether that kind
of the Gingrich revolution had some counterintuitive effects? And the nationalization point is an
interesting one. Are there others? Yeah, so it's a great question the
ging Grish Revolution. Everybody likes to point the finger a New Gingrich for why
Congress is so broken. In fact, if you google New Gingrich Congress broken,
you'll find articles in The Atlantic. I think one title is I think
this is a direct quote how New Gingrish broke American politics. So he's sort
of like the evil genius of the nineteen nineties who comes along and just destroys
everything. I think that is a dramatic over simple of what's happened over the
last fifty years in Congress. And in fact, I've made this argument in
a few places online. The real turning point in Congress that gives rise to
this nationalization effect, it's the middle of the nineteen seventies. That's when it's
the post Watergate election in nineteen seventy four, when a bunch of left wing
Democrats come in and they basically overthrow their speaker, a man named Carl Albert,
who says, I tried to be the leader of this group that refused
to be led because Carl Albert from Oklahoma was a sort of moderate conservative Democrat.
And of course the left wing Democrats, as the Democratic Party moved to
the left, they had to overthrow their party leaders because they wanted a more
monolithic party, a more ideologically cohesive party, and so they sort of took
the party over from the grass roots. And what they ended up doing then
was replacing Carl Albert and then turning over more power into the hands of the
speaker of the House. This led to a guy like Jim Wright in the
nineteen eighties becoming a very partisan speaker. You know, this is the thing
about these movements in Congress. For every action, there's an equal and opposite
reaction. So as the Democrats kicked out the conservatives from their party as they
became more monolithically liberal, they centralized power in their speakers' hands, and then
this gives rise to a more conservative Republican Party, a more combative Republican party.
And Gingrish's rise is really a counterweight to the rise of a more liberal
Democratic Party. So it's not that the Republican Party moved right, it's that
the Democratic Party moved left, and that caused the Republican Party to become more
monolithically conservative. And so Gingrish is really kind of a symptom of a deeper
trajectory in American politics over a long period of time. But then to get
to Gingrish more specifically, some of the things he did worked very well.
He really did by centralizing power in the speaker's hands, he disciplined these committees
that were full of Republicans who wanted to do business as usual. And in
fact, what did we get by the time Gingrich had become speaker for a
few years. We got budget surpluses, we got negotiation between Clinton and Gingrich.
You know, everybody thinks about Clinton as a sort of triangulation third way
moderate Democrat. Well, the point is he was forced to be that way
by a very powerful speaker who had united the Republican Party behind a conservative agenda
instead of letting all these these Republicans sort of, you know, do business
as usual. So Gingrich I think had a good strategy in the broad scope
of things to nationalize power, or to centralized power and nationalize elections. He
did make some mistakes. I think the biggest one that most people on the
right have identified is the just absolute gutting of staff on the House of Representative
side really has destroyed oversight, the ability of the House of Representatives to hold
the administrative state accountable. So I think even Gingrish himself, if you know,
he were forced to reflect on that aspect of if his plan, I
think, or at least I hope he would, i'd say admit that that
was a mistake. And one of the things I think conservatives and Republicans can
agree on right now is it would probably be a good idea to strengthen the
House by adding more staff. The problem is, it's really hard to pitch
that to your base because it kind of looks like a swampy thing to do.
But sometimes increasing the power of the House and increasing the staff of the
House is needed. To offset the permanent government that exists in the administrative state
right and to disincentivize the revolving door to some extent as well. If you
can't make a middle class living raising a family in the House of Representatives in
Washington, d C. Where super expensive to live. Anyway, this sounds
like, you know, crocodile tears for Washington, d C. But there's
a very important point actually that you're making. It's also you get the revolving
door because you can't you can't make a career on the hill totally, and
that means you end up leaving by the time you're thirty, and then you
go and you know, use all those contacts for industry and et cetera.
It's not a great thing, but everyone who follows this closely season happened just
about every single day now. Kevin McCarthy is a really really interesting figure,
I think a very misunderstood figure in the media, and I wanted to ask
Joe about how he was very much a reaction to Nancy Pelosi's speakership. Nancy
Pelosi was a very intentional speaker. I always say, when she passes away,
there will be buildings here in d C named after her, certainly in
San Francisco, but she she's just a towering figure in Washington, d C.
In no small part because she was so intentional as Speaker of the House
of Representatives. Kevin McCarthy interviews with me and other journalists and even up to
just this last month, has repeatedly said, you know a lot of this
when he when he lost the vote on the floor, he came out and
said, you know, I think we lost a lot of this when Nancy
Pelosi started yanking people off committees or or you know, not allowing Jim Banks
and Jim were going to be on the January sixth committee and doing the first
impeachment. You know, a lot of people talk about how on the House
side that was. Kevin McCarthy talks about how for him that was kind of
a make or break moment when he had his eyes opened to almost what you
were describing from the nineteen seventies show. What is the interplay between how Pelosi
governed and then how Kevin McCarthy sort of stepped into her shoes ended up saying
he wasn't going to put ilhan Omar on foreign affairs and Eric Swallwell on intelligence.
What does that dynamic tell us about you know, Congress and Limbo.
Yeah, it's hard to know exactly what to make of it. I'll take
a stab, but it's hard to It's really hard to figure out what's going
on on the Democratic side right now. So one thing we can say for
sure is historically the Democratic Party has been much more united than the Republican Party
in the twenty first century in the House when it came time for the Democratic
Party to push for hard left legislation, for say, the Affordable Care Act
Trade Dodd Frank, this is all the stuff that gets done in Obama's first
term. You have a very sizable number of blue dog Democrats, moderate Democrats
who say, this is not what our constituents want us to vote for.
And in fact, we're going to be taking a really big hit in the
twenty ten midterm elections because you're governing from the far left instead of kind of
where the party is as a whole, which includes some moderate districts. And
Pelosi got those, even those Democrats representing moderate or even conservative districts to vote
for all that stuff, even though it sort of against their own interests,
and of course they lost their seats in twenty ten, but the lot of
the legislation is still with us. So Pelosi manages to managed when she was
Speaker, really to keep the party much more together than say Speaker Bainer or
Speaker Ryan or Speaker McCarthy. However, I don't know if that's going to
continue indefinitely because one of the things I'm suggesting here in our conversation is that
parties in American politics are actually quite weak, and party leaders are actually quite
weak. It's the incentives for individual politicians is to go against their party leaders
if their constituents want them to, and there's not much that the parties can
do to maintain that kind of cohesion or maintain that kind of unity. I
don't know how Pelosi did it so effectively. I mean, she raised a
lot of money, and she could distribute that money to a lot of members
to help them with their reelections, so that certainly played a role, but
that didn't help McCarthy. McCarthy gave a lot of money to a lot of
Republican members, and I suppose you could say it helped with the overwhelming majority
of them, and it only took eight for McCarthy to be ousted, but
one of the most telling things I think involving the Democrats in this respect is
that in twenty fifteen, when Speaker Bayner was facing the motion to vacate,
it had basically already been threatened, and he knew he was going to have
to have a vote on the floor of the House to maintain his speakership speak
or Nancy Pelosi, then, of course, Minority Leader, told Bayinner that
she would have all of the Democrats vote present in that vote, basically in
order to save Speaker Bayner. So in twenty fifteen, the Democrats were ready
to set out such a vote in order to maintain the power of the Republican
Speaker. I think because they interviewed Pelosi about this, and she said,
no person can govern, no person can lead or set an agenda. When
ten percent of your own conference has a knife right to your back, right,
that's just a recipe for a disaster. And so that's twenty fifteen,
and that's Pelosi leading the party. What happens in twenty twenty three is that
under Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic Party is now much more eager, just on
a purely partisan basis, to embarrass the Republican Speaker and so what you see,
I think is that the Democrats are no longer interested in thinking institutionally,
or to put it a different way, the Democrats are doing kind of the
same thing that the Republican Party has done over the last twelve years, which
used to say when the Democratic Speaker Jeffries, if and when that day comes,
when he's Speaker of the House, he's going to find that his left
flank, that the squad is going to be much more difficult to deal with
as with him as leader than it was for Pelosi. I'm not sure how
Pelosi kept those people from destroying the Democratic Party agenda, but I don't think
that if he becomes Speaker, I don't think that Speaker Jeffries will be able
to do the same that yeah, the Democratic dynamics. I also wonder if
there's sort of what the kind of precedent is going back for Democrats either helping
Republicans or Republicans helping Democrats, or maybe even before those are the two major
parties when it comes to electing the speakers, there anything where they've because right
now, for example, the centristwing of the Republican Party is kicking around the
idea of working with the centris stwing of the Democratic Party to cobble together a
coalition and support someone for speaker, which I mean, I think there's virtually
zero percent chance that that would work out. There is some I guess mathematical
You could put the math down on paper and say, I guess, in
theory there's a way to do this, But is there any precedent for anything
like that. There is, but you have to go back a long way
and the context is completely different. So coalition style governments have existed in American
politics, but they're basically a relic of the nineteenth century. And in fact,
if you look at some of the speaker races prior to the Civil War,
I think there's one where there was over one hundred, maybe even over
one hundred and thirty ballots to choose the House Speaker of the House prior to
the Civil War. There's one point in which they just give up and they
say, okay, well it's a plurality vote. Now, you don't need
to get a majority of the members to vote for you. It's just whoever
finishes first. And this is because of course the two party systems breaking down
leading up to the Civil War, a lot of people are going to draw
some interesting comparisons here, right that you know, what happens to the two
party system in the nineteenth century as we get closer and closer to civil war,
you basically get sectional parties and the splitting up of the two parties into
four parties, right, Northern Democratic Party, a Southern Democratic Party, a
Northern Whig Party, and a Southern Whig Party. And people will draw analogies
to today, right, the sort of cold civil war that we're in,
and look at what's happening to the parties that they're governing like coalitions now instead
of two parties. I don't really think that's what's happening though. I think
what's happening really is that there's no incentive for anybody to work towards the middle.
So the problem essentially is that you have there's no way a coalition style
government would work in this context because Democrats would never move to the middle in
order to capture those twenty moderate Republicans that they would need to maintain their coalition.
Like if we sort of game theorized this out, you know, the
Democrats could get to a majority by grabbing like fifteen Republicans, but in order
to do that, Democrats would have to start governing from a more centrist position,
and the members of Congress and the House on the Democratic side would immediately
start to look like they were compromising, they were selling out, and then
they would face primary challenges back home. So their incentives aren't actually they'd rather
govern, or they would rather not govern and be in the minority so that
they can be reelected, then build a coalition compromise to do that, and
then get primary out of their seats. So and increasingly then you see the
Democratic votes fall off. So I don't see the opportunity. I mean there's
an opportunity, but I don't see Democrats actually being able to pull it off
where they can get Republicans to vote for a Democratic speaker. And so I
think you're left with just a situation in which the majority party is going to
have to be the one to assemble the majority to govern. And this again
shows how the Democrats, as opposed to the twenty fifteen when they were willing
to set the vote out, the Democrats aren't thinking institutionally, what are they
likely to get as the result of all of this. It looks like they're
going to get Speaker Jim Jordan. Now, from the point of view of
the Democratic Party, this is not improving their situation, right, They're not
getting a speaker that's more amenable to their priorities. They're getting a speaker who's
going to be less amenable to their preferred bills. I suppose what they're thinking
is that they can just retake the Chamber in twenty twenty four and that they're
thinking, well, if we embarrass the Republicans, that we can score points
in order to do that. So which you're really seeing that is the perpetual
campaign instead of a bunch of people getting together and trying to govern. And
how much of that can be explained by maybe special interests captured too, Because
one of the conversations going on right now, this is like a tertiary storyline
in the presidential election, is that you have people like John Huntsman and Joe
Manchin kicking around the idea of, you know, a third party run.
Robert F. Kennedy Junior obviously announced the third party run, but no labels
is such in particular, that is such an interesting group because where Joe Manchin
and John Huntsman so ostensibly a Democrat and Republican are able to find common ground,
and that strikes a lot of people as really appealing and attractive. But
in reality, where they are able to strike common ground and where people in
Washington are going to find themselves striking common ground between Democrats and Republicans on committees
and then on the floor, it's going to be on things like the farm
bill. It's going to be on That's why they love the omnibuses. They
love those freaking things. And so to a lot of people on the right,
they would hear, you know, there's no incentive to move to the
center and think hell yeah, like that's awesome, and you know, go
Matt Gates. You know, we're at a great position now, Like who
cares Congress isn't working? Congress is in limbo to borrow phrase, screw it.
Is there is that kind of air of celebration in any way appropriate or
is the bigger story here that something is fundamentally broken and it's not working for
the American people? Yeah? I think it's the latter, And I encountered
with thinking all the time what we really like is the fact that Congress is
now broken, Congress is now dysfunctional with a speaker who's really going to govern.
From our point of view, that means that nothing will get done because
there will be no compromise. But that's a good thing because that means that
the government is crippled. That whenever the parties get together and do something,
it's always bad. And therefore we want the parties not to be working together.
We want there to be gridlock. We want Congress to be crippled.
I think in order to believe that that's good for conservatives, you have to
presuppose that if Congress doesn't pass bills, nothing happens in Washington, DC.
And that's the fundamental error because that presupposition is wrong. When Congress doesn't act,
the administrative state just goes on autopilot. What we need right now and
this is this sort of reversal thinking that is a challenge for people on the
right. We need to actually reverse our thinking. The constitutional checks and balances
are not working against us, because once you've entrenched the administrative state, you
now need government to put together a coalition to take power back from it.
And this means that you have to proceed as if Congress must act in order
to reign in the EPA or in order to reign in Oshia or in order
to reign in some of these other agencies. To this point, we've said,
we know Congress isn't going to reign in these agencies, let's hope that
the Supreme Court will do it. And I think that strategy might be working
in the short term, but it is going to fail in the long term.
It's already putting enormous stress on the Supreme Court as everybody kind of realizes.
What we really need is for the American people to take power back from
the administrative state, and they have to do that through their elected representatives,
but that means that they are going to be compromises along the way. You
never accomplish great things in a republic all at once. You always accomplish them
incrementally. You build the consensus, you accomplish something, you show that you
can govern responsibly, and then you expand that consensus and you take steps further
and further and further. That's the kind of institutional and incremental and strategic thinking
that we need, and I think it's the kind of thinking we don't see
very much on the right these days. So it's sort of counterintuitive, right,
What we really want to do is to shut everything down. But the
ironic thing here, the paradox here, is that in order to sort of
take power back, you can't shut it down because you can't shut the administrative
state down unless Congress affirmatively acts. So I think something is fundamentally broken here,
but it got broken over the last century, and it's not going to
be an easy fix, and we really are going to have to work incrementally,
and that means compromise in the short term in order to get to where
we want to be in the long term. You started by talking about Madison
and Federalist ten and one of the big questions I have and wanted to ask
you, I think about this a lot. There's that John Adams quote people
go to all the time about, you know, how a republic depends on
a virtuous citizenry, and are some Madis quotes to that effect. Now,
the specific ones are eluding me at the moment that there should be an incentive
to sort of move to the center, even though they're the Madisonian kind of
obstacles to just pure direct democracy like California has demonstrated just so beautifully, So
you know, there should be an incentive to kind of work together, but
it does seem like we're on such different pages now. It does seem like,
you know, the question of whether a citizenry is virtuous when you know
you are nationalized to the anth degree you have social media, you know,
it's tempting to not just see these as evolutions in the human strains on constitutional
republicanism, but something that is a new threat altogether, because you know,
it feels now like in the country where wop was what the top song for
however long, we just we just don't have a virtuous enough it doesn't to
sustain a constitutional republic at this point. Is there evidence of that as we
look at the abject chaos that has enveloped Congress for the last year or so.
Yeah, I think I am on both sides of that question, and
it's really hard to know which of my impulses is actually the correct one.
So all of the evidence that you're start of putting together, right, the
rise of social media, the fact that people seem to be behaving in less
civil ways, just some of the positions you see people staking and being proud
of it these days are pretty remarkable and seem to be positions that no sane
person was taking twenty or thirty years ago. It does kind of look like
we've just lost virtue. We've lost basically the necessary prerequisite for self government.
On the other hand, when you look at American history, I think you
see a lot of moments where everybody was saying the same stuff that we're saying
right now. They say, oh, well, you know, it's all
over. The republic is lost, We've lost our virtue. And they're even
saying this in like seventeen ninety eight. The Jeffersonians and the Madisonians and the
Democratic Republicans are saying this because they think the Federalists have turned the system into
a monarchy, they've basically corrupted the entire government. And then when they win
the election of eighteen hundred, the Federalists all say, well, basically,
now all of the vicious people, all of the demagogues have gained power,
all of the Jacobins and the French revolutionaries have taken over. So I don't
think that virtue is ever completely lost in a self governing republic, and I
think that there's always hope to recapture it. And I also think probably we
spend a little too much time looking at social media and taking that to be
sort of where most Americans are. I think that most Americans aren't even on
these platforms, and so we're getting a bit of a skewed sample when we
look at those places, those places for gauging what's going on in terms of
the virtue of our republic. I guess maybe the last thing I would say
about that is because this is a point that's sort of been in my mind
a few times during this conversation, but I've not quite been able to sort
of added into the discussion. If you look at what's happening in state governments,
and this is not true of every state, but it's true of many
states. State governments are performing or their functions at a much higher level than
the federal government is right now. And a lot of these things that you
know we see happening in Washington, the gridlock, the dysfunction, the inability
of parties to work together to accomplish goals, that's not really happening at the
state level. So maybe one of the things that we should be working to
do to restore this kind of virtue and self government in these habits is to
be investing a little bit more on what's going on in our states and trying
to use those as mechanisms for rebuilding our muscles for self government and showing how
parties can function effectively in a legislative body. And maybe we can sort of
have that filter up a little bit into Washington, d C. Which really
was always the way the system was designed, right, It was supposed to
have Washington d C. As the representative of what's going on in the states,
rather than a top down model in which Washington was imposing its model on
the states. So, actually, there are places that you can find virtue,
There are places where you can find hope, you just have to look
for them, and maybe not the usual the usual places. And last question,
actually I realized as we were talking, I'd be remiss if I didn't
ask whether the So we're waiting on the or arguments in the Chevron deference case
to take place in the next couple of months, and that means within the
next year we expected judgment on Chevron deference that could be sweeping, could be
minor, could be bad, could be good. But if this current Supreme
Court rules in a way that is sweeping against Chevron deference, is that going
to be again not a leading question. A big step to addressing this problem
of bureaucracy in America is you wrote at book's length about how serious is that
a threat to the administrative state? It, Yeah, I don't think it
will change much of anything. So the Chevron deference principle right, which says
that judges have to defer to administrative agencies when they issue their interpretations of law,
and essentially pretty much everything an agency does is, you know, a
sort of interpretation of law. So basically Chevron means the courts have to defer
to the agencies, and this gives more power to the administrative state. I
think that's true, but I don't think that getting rid of Chevron deference will
change much because I think courts will defer to agencies in a lot of cases
anyway, because they're going to be afraid to second guess the experts on things
like food and drug regulation or energy regulation. And so I think the courts
will not save us from the administrative state. And I think that's one of
the things I've been trying to tell conservatives now for close to a decade,
is that we've been trying to use the courts to fight battles in taking on
the administrative state, and we've won important short term victories. You know,
West Virginia versus EPA sort of limits the power of the EPA to implement climate
change regulations. And we've used the courts to strike down vaccine mandates issued by
Ocean and so forth, and those battles need to be fought. But I
think in the long run the only way we recover authority from the administrative state
is through legislature rather than through the judiciary. So then you have to ask
the question, what do we do to rebuild a functioning legislature? And I
think the last couple of weeks have put on pretty stark display that you have
to have some form of leadership. You have to have a party that's capable
of acting together to some extent, because you don't accomplish much of anything if
you're constantly fighting amongst yourselves. And really all that does is it opens up
a lane for government and especially the administrative state, to operate without any oversight
at all. So I think the Chevron case is important. I will be
watching it very carefully. I have my own I'm rooting for the fishermen and
not for the government in that case. Not that that would surprise anybody listen
to this. But and I care about that case. I think it's an
important case, but I think it is a short term victory if it's won,
and it's not one that will fundamentally. You know, the swamp will
not be drained by the ending of Chevron deference. It's a much bigger problem
that requires a much more ambitious solution. Really helpful perspective. Joe Postel,
professor at Hillsdale College, author of Bureaucracy in America and also the author of
the Heritage Foundation paper Congress in Limbo. Thank you so much for joining the
show today. It was great to be with you. Of course you have
been listening to another edition of The Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Emily Dashinsky,
culture editor here at The Federalist. Will be back soon with more. Until
then, the lovers of freedom and anxious for the friend I heard the fame
by the reason