>> despite his constant, you know, comments about fake news and the media and so forth, i really -- i really feel he enjoy s us having us around because helps drive the message, helps drive the news of the day which he can do every day and does every day, he's constantly driving the message and therefore having us around really allows him to do that. q&a sunday at 8:00 eastern on c-span. >> next ira shapiro, he joined a panel in the brookings institution, this is 90 minutes.

[inaudible conversations] >> let me try to call this full house to order, if i may. welcome to brookings. my name is bill galston, senior fellow here in governance stud ies. thanks so much for coming and welcome also to the people who are watching this event live on c-span. today's topic is the past and

the publication of ira shapiro's second book on the senate, this one entitled broken, can the senate save itself and the country. those of you who read his first book on the senate will know how passionately he reveres the senate as an an answers -- institution and will not know howdy -- how distress as decline this topic could not be more timely. we are just days from the expiration of yet another short-term continuing budget re solution and perhaps even more pertinently from a promised open senate debate on u.s. immigration policy.

will the promise be kept and if it is will today's senate be up to the job of an open deliberation on the most burning domestic question which is more than come itself -- come domestic implication, when it comes to the study of american political institution there are two kinds of scholars. type one people who have trained in academia, and who study and using the tools, the concepts, the categories, the techniques of political science and we here at brookings are committed to proposition, there's much to be learned about political

institutions through the practice of that trade. the scholar practitioner and the latter, he began his government career, the number out of the bag just a little shy of 50 years ago as an intern to the late great republican senator jacob gentleman -- javits, among and i underscore among the other steps in his distinguished practitioner career. he served as legislative legal counsel to the great environmentalist senator gaylord nelson and served as council to the master of the senate rule

book majority leader robert burt as chief of staff to senator jay rockefeller, and if memory serve s obtain rank in one of those positions. his first book on the senate was published in 2012, an updated version with the new preface appeared recently and for fans of popular culture, his first book on the senate appeared on frank underwood's desk in season two of house of cards. [applause] so let me now tell you what's going to transpire in the next hour and 25 minutes.

for about 25 of those minutes ir a will present the main themes of his book, we will then hear about ten minutes of commentary from brookings congressional ex pert molly reynolds, a below -- fellow in governance study program and she's the author of the bookings rule, the filibuster limitation of u.s. senate which would indicate why she's the perspectcommentator for this book after molly delivers her commentary we will all convene on the stage for about 15 or 20 minutes in moderated conversation after which for the last half hour it will be your turn, questions from the floor and responses from these two wonderful scholars. as always, please quiet your

cell phone, that doesn't mean turning them off necessarily and certainly doesn't mean that you can't use them for those interested in tweeting about this event it's #-- there it is, #u.s. senate and without any further preliminaries, on with the show, ira, podium is yours. >> i couldn't have a more generous introduction than the one bill galston gave me.

i thank bill for not only that introduction but for organizing this event, moderating this event. i don't have enough time to go into bill's various credentials so i won't except to say that no one else is a political theorist and philosopher, policy analyst, teacher and a scholar and has served at the highest levels of government and so we all get a great deal from wisdom from bill always and particularly i have never missed his weekly wall street journal column. i'm glad to be here with molly reynolds, i don't know molly that well but her important book is very well timed as you will hear from her comments and given my loose mastery of the senate rules, i've decide today defer to molly on the whole rules

question. bill did make one point that's a little sensitive, for a couple of years i have been planning to advertise my book, the new edition of any old book by using the reference to house of cards, somehow that doesn't look as good as it used to. [laughter] >> i wasn't sure that this panel would draw such a good audience and it's wonderful to see all friends and wonderful to see people that i don't know. donald trump's extraordinary and dangerous presidency so dominate s our landscape that it's sometimes hard to focus on anything else. that's particularly true now with the crisis at hand as the trump white house and house judiciary committee are on one side and the fbi, the justice department important institution s are under attack,

we wait to see whether the president may force the resignation or fire people, special counsel mueller, fbi director christopher wray. rod ros stien, -- as bill said, i've had a long senate career and a deep attachment to it. it's a place that sparked my original commitment to public service and it has been an important part of my life now for almost half a century. there were people who served longer than i did. i was there 12 years when i went back and people have served long er and they've done more but i've had an unusual tenure because i've spent five years in the democratic senate of the

late 70's and then 6 years in the republican senate and then one more year when it flipped back, so i've seen the majority and i've seen the minority, i've dealt with a lot of different different issues and so i think i have some, possibly something to offer on this subject at least. so the first book i wrote i started writing in 2008, i was depressed about the long decline of the senate and i started writing the book at a time when the exciting presidential campaign involving barack obama, john mccain, hillary clinton, sarah palin, one of the great exciting campaigns of all time and i was writing the book hop ing that while i wrote it, i would call attention to what the senate had been and what it was

potential -- potentially could be and write the book to somehow reverse the decline but at the same time i was counting on the presidential election. we'd have a new president at a time of possible hope and change so i thought maybe the election would help. by the time i completed the book , obviously the reverse was the case, the senate was deeply myered in partisan gridlock, the narrative of my bookended in 1980 but i wrote an epilogue to try to explain what had happened after 1980 and that epilogue became the launch pad of this book and i do want to say one thing that i do think is important, i wrote -- undertook to write this book in the fall of 2016 when i was absolutely

sure that hillary clinton would be elected president and couldn't govern unless the senate changed. this book wasn't a response to donald trump. this was about the fact that the senate had failed for so long and had destabilized our political system in my opinion. so let me give you the gist of my argument and then we will try to unpack it, sort of my elevat or speech. we all know that the crisis in american democracy didn't start when donald trump became president or came down the escalator, our political, in trump tower, our political system has been like the proverb ial frog in boiling water , slowly dying as the temperature rises, the senate is ground zero for that failure, the political institution that has failed us the longest and

the worst going back 25 years at least at it's best the senate served in walter great phrase as nation's mediator, the a place where competing interests of the two parties and diverse interest s of our country came together to be reconciled through negotiation and legislation and principled compromise. it was in lynn manuel miranda hamilton's words, the place where it happened. when the senate could no longer perform that role, when it over comes it, the american people lost confidence and ultimately turned to an outsider donald trump would not have become president if he wasn't a unique celebrity but he also became president because of the justifiable feeling in the

country that washington was fail ing. now, obviously i'm painting with a broad brush. in a longer discussion we would talk about the issues that at tracted donald trump's voters, globalization and technology, certainly immigration, but today we are talking about the performance of the government and when we are talking about that, the trump presidency is the result of polarization and gridlock and dysfunction but the failure of the senate is the cause. moreover the senate reached a new low at precisely the moment that we needed to be at its best because we have an inexperienced and potentially authoritarian president, so that's why my talk

is entitled the other threat to our democracy and the failure of of the senate for the failure of the senate one man bears this proportionate responsibility. it's no accident that the senate accelerating downward spiral coincides with mitch mcconnell's leader, i recognize that's a harsh statement, it may not be obviously, historians always debate the question how much of this is the individual actions as opposed to the greater forces that are at work. and certainly, many factors are contributing to the deterioration of our senate, of our country and the politics of our country, the ideological has grown, the role of money in

politics particularly since citizens united, cable tv, districts, people picking their own news sources, in fact, their own facts. in america over the last 30 years our politician -- politics have been undermined by the combination of permanent campaign, never time for governing, only preparing for the next election and the politics of personal destruction , with some superb political minds divert talent, designing the campaign ads to do so. so there's a lot wrong with our politics. now senator mcconnell's defend ers would say he's just a very skilled politician who has adapted to the reality and the reflects the realities of today

's politics, in fact, one of his best friends the late senator bob bennett of utah praised him in 2010 for understanding exactly what happened to the senate from dole to mcconnell. think about that for a moment. he understood exactly what happened from dole to mcconnell. in other words, it's a partisan time, we need a partisan leader, there's no time for a statesman like bob dole. the argument doesn't watch for me. many people, even senators get a way with the claim that they were victims of their times or merely following orders but senator mcconnell has earned a substantial place in political history, six terms in the senate , almost 12 years as minority and majority leader. mitch mcconnell doesn't reflect america's poll call climate, he has shaped it.

now, my view of the senate obviously is that senate leaders really matter. they really matter. looking back over the history of the modern senate we find occasions, leaders put mark not only on the senate but on the politics and the government of the time, of course, the most famous example is l lbj. master of the senate, lyndon johnson, lbj did an strair -- extraordinary job of dragging the senate into the 20th century he made a great difference with his incredible force of -- using force of nature, incredible energy. he used all the power he could to overcome what the senate had been before because before lbj,

the senate was dominated by southern committee lead chairman and described as the only place where the south did not lose the civil war, the south's unending revenge upon the north for gettysburg, so johnson did everything he could in book and describes it how he got the first civil rights act through modest measure, but it was the first. johnson wore out his welcome in the senate quickly actually, people got tired of overbearing nature. they were tired of them. when he accepted the vice presidency from president john kennedy offered it to him, people were surprised. johnson thought it was actually the only way to become president for a southerner but he also knew his days in the senate had passed -- past. the political historian wrote,

noisy summer storm that rattled the windows of the upper chamber and then moved on leaving few traces of his passing, he seemed towering figure at the time but the central vision of the senate , about the senate limited his impact which is an interest ing thought. to understand the senate what it was, what it's capable of, what we have lost, you have to go to the las great senate of the 60 's and 70's and i now call it by a better name mansfield senate. mike mansfield, professor of anc ient history. widely represented for intelligence, honesty, intellect and knowledge of the world, mans field has no desire to be

the majority leader. when john kennedy became president, president elect asked mansfield to be the majority leader and mansfield didn't want the job but mansfield made it clear that he would be a different leader, he had a different personality, he believed in democratic small d senate where all the senators were adulls and they were all equal. he believed in the golden rule and acted accordingly. and understander his leadership, all the senators have responsibility. others didn't think it could work and pretty quickly the senate bogged down. mansfield was under so much criticism he prepared a speech announcing, explaining his concept of the senate leadership and he announced that he was going to give it -- made announce meant on november 22nd,

1963. he never gave it, it was put in congressional record. but mansfield then demonstrated his leadership by helping to get the civil rights act of '64 through. lyndon johnson who knew something about the senate call ed mansfield downtown and said, basically you got to break the southern filibuster by wear ing them out because richard russell's old and allen has cancer and mansfield said i'm not going to do it that way and he told them how he was going to do it and had two-month debate and never did anything like that mansfield and they went on from that, they passed 64 act. and then they went on from that to the greatest period of productivity. mansfield created a senate based on trust and mutual respect,

bipartisanship was second nature we all knew that that's the way the senate worked. the senate could battle over -- senators would battle over important issues and then strike their compromises and go out to dinner together. mansfield senate was extended by robert burt and howard baker for another eight years. the air is filled with talk about water can -- watergate understandably, if you look back , the great senators, they were there for watergate, mans field launched the watergate committee with the unanimous vote of the senate two months after richard nixon got 49 state s. robert burt and howard baker played similar positive roles in watergate but mansfield, burt, baker, these people were great senators during watergate because they were great senators all of the time. they didn't change from year to year, it didn't matter who the

president was or whether they were in the majority or the minority, so let's look at the senate's decline for one minute. and my african-american work is this, there's a long decline of the senate that started probably 25 years ago, somewhere late 80 's and early 90's, you can see it and there's a long decline and then all of a sudden there's a second stage of decline and the decline goes like this and then like that and then that coincides with the arrivals of harry reid and the democratic side and mitch mcconnell on the republican side they inherited a senate that was in gradual but unmistakable decline, they had the experience , they had the obligation, they had the opportunity to address that decline and rebuild the senate, instead they became in the words

of journalist steven, the terrible twins of dysfunction. both using procedures to slow and throttle the promise of other's rule. the other's rule. the reporters would argue about this one was worse and never which one was better. under their leadership the long decline accelerated, their joint legacy would be a broken senate but the responsibility was by no means equal. obviously not since reid retired but not while he was there either. just a partisan quite conservative but moderate relative to the maddens --

madness that reflected the republican party since newt newt gringrich, i see him quite different than that. perhaps the toughest negotiator. unfortunately he's used that pow er and his political skills solely as a partisan, never as leader of the senate which requires collaboration with the other leaders and the party. we will get into the discussion, let me give you two quick examples. in 2008, the me k -- triggered a financial crisis, henry paul, ben bernanke, timothy went to capitol hill to meet with the leaders, if we don't act now, bernanke told them, we won't have an economy by monday, mcconnell plays a

very strong role, he steps up immediately, he understands the urgency of it. he helps the senate get the legislation prepared. when the house rejects legislation, mcconnell goes to the senate floor and guaranties the senate will come through. and they do come through and then the house reverses themselves and we get the legislation which was needed, he takes pride in it as he should. three months later nothing, january 2009, nothing has changed except there's a new president, barack obama. the crisis has spread from wall street to main street. and only government action can make up for an economy that's lost three quarters of a million jobs. mcconnell is against anything. it's a new president, he's more worried about the president's

approval ratings than he is about the jobs that are the people are losing. he opposed it, he tries to defeat it. thanks to collins, the senate gets done and the recovery goes ahead. i cannot conceive of another senate leader that would behave that way. last example for the moment, six years of adamant obstruction to obama and then becomes majority leader, january 2015, the senate changes overnight. the legislation starts moving forward. most productive year in a long time. what happened? ..

>> barack obama all of a sudden, we plunged back in. and to the scene, with a republican president, senator mcconnell has violated every pledge that he ever made to the senate about how it would work. there is no precedent for the way the health care legislation was handled. so you recall no process, no hearings, no committee action. when he pulled it down the first time, said he'd go on to tax reform, said we're done with health care, comes back

weeks later and does it a third time. his word in those issues was just not accurate. reporting on-- reporting on senator mcconnell's notable speech in 2014 when he describes the way he's going to run the senate if he ever is going to lead it. jonathan wiseman of the new york times, mcconnell portrayed reid's senate as a wasteland ruled by autocrat. weissman must have looked into a crystal ball, he captured the senate four years later, mcconnell's senate. now, i will say in conclusion, i recognized i've offered a

bleak picture. a second threat to democracy, wasn't trump enough? and i find myself relatively optimistic, that is relative to eastern else. and the reason i say it is i believe that many of the senators up there on both sides of the aisle know what the senate is supposed to be. hate the institution they're serving in now. they will at some point rise to change it. they will if there's the constitutional crisis we may face. familiar faces may step up and unexpected heroes. so, in our country, the shared and dispersed power in our

political system and the diverse nature of our country guarantees that legislating will always be difficult, but it should not be impossible the lubricant in the system is good faith in engagement. working hard to find common ground. that's good faith in engagement every year, not one year in every ten years, no when the leader feels like encouraging, we need people who doesn't make everything a partisan and political calculation and i'm putting my faith in the future and in people that actually will be putting country first. i'll stop. i've used my time. i've used two minutes more of my time. and we'll have discussion. thank you. [applause] good morning,

everyone. first of all, i want to thank bill and ira for inviting me to be here today and to provide some thoughts on ira's book. as someone who recently wrote a book on the senate of my own, i know how both rewarding and frustrating it can be to spend as much time as ira has mulling over the institution and so glad to have gotten to read the book, ira, and speak about it todayment for those of you who haven't had a chance to read ira's book, it's a rich detail-oriented book, to conduct oversight over the past 40-odd years and how its members have risen or more often not risen to those challenges.

it's rare that you find a piece of writing that discusses everything from the omnibus trade and act of 1988 to the clinton impeachment that ira manages to put that off and more in this book. so, in bill's opening remarks he said that there are sort of two kind of people that studied the senate. he said ira is of one model and i am of the other. and i think that that's going to come across in my remarks today and what i'd like to do is spend some time reflecting on a few pieces of ira's argument, use them as a jumping off point for some additional thoughts of my own about what i see as the primary drivers of the contemporary senate's dysfunction and then towards the end, i'll trend some areas we need to focus on if the senate is going in a different direction going forward. so, for ira, as you heard, much of the blame for what's happened in the senate rests at

the feet of senate leadership. indeed, there's a point in the book where he says the senate's ability for partisanship is a profound failure of senate leaders. and there are traces that the leaders make how to run the senate and use senate rules and procedure that have contributed significantly to the environment in which we find ourselves, but what i want to do is think about the environment that those leaders have found themselves in. so, first of all, over the period on which ira focuses. there have been really major changes in the electoral landscape of american politics. ira spends a little time for the degree in which we've seen the disappearance of moderate republicans and conservative democrats which has made bipartisan compromise much harder to achieve. just one data point to illustrate this, as we turn to political science, measures members of congress and ideology, the distance between

the most conservative democrat in the senate and the most liberal republican in the senate, has basically doubled since 1980. so to the extent that major legislation does ever still get done in the senate, it continues to be on a bipartisan basis, but much harder to build those coalitions in times of polarized party. so senate leaders are heading into a legislative environment where the ideological positions made it much more difficult to work collaboratively regardless of the tactics that they use. the electoral experience of individual senators has also become more attached to national political forces, decreasing their individual incentives to work with the party. one data point on this, 2016 was the first time since the advent of the popular election of senators in the early 20th century that in every state where there was a senate election, the party that won the senate seat also won the

electoral votes in the presidential race. voters, in other words, are not splitting their tickets the same rate they once were, which means that senators have less incentive to try to formulate the kind of independent brands that involve working across party lines. for me, perhaps the biggest electoral difference though is the increase in partisan competition for control of the chambers in congress, since about 1980. there's a really wonderful book by political scientist francis lee that documents this and she talks how the period between the early 1950's and the early 1980's was dominated in congress by the democrats. the party controlled both chambers and republicans did not have a reasonable expectation that they would take control after that next election. since about 1980, however, majority control of the senate has been more or less up for grabs each election cycle. so, because of this heightened competition, both parties have an incentive to engage in more

messaging activities over legislating and those helped to win elections and this is especially true for minority parties who have little incentive to make their opponents to look like capable legislators. this emphasis on messaging and shift in party control mean there can be more value on putting bills on the floor that are intended to fail. and so a majority party might think it's worthwhile to write a piece of legislation that it knows won't become law in order to signal to voters and allies what it would do if it had more power after the next election. a great example of this is the bill that repealed-- that would have repealed large parts of the affordable care act that president obama vetoed in 2016. republicans knew it was going to be vetoed and they wanted to keep the topic active during

the 2016 election. beyond these changing electoral circumstances, we've also seen growing incentive from outside the chamber for senators inside the chamber to exploit all of their individual procedural rights, to try and achieve political goals. my brookings colleague, sarah and her co-author steve smith made this argument in the book about the senate filibuster from the late '90s. it's a new argument, but once external allies and external audiences rewarded them for used this. and ted cruz's decision to engineer a government shutdown over the affordable care act, that use of procedural rights helped build his national reputation. when senators believe there's political value in using all of their procedural tools, they're less-- they're more likely to do so at the expense of bipartisan

legislative work. so ira in his book discusses the problem presented to senate leaders by jesse holmes, willing to pursue an individual agenda. that sort of behavior is incentivizes lots of senators these days. these broader political circumstances have also made it more difficult for senators of both parties to unite as a counter balance to executive power. so in the early 1970's, we saw several high profile pieces of legislation, things like the congressional budget act, the measure that created the senate intelligence committee to oversee some executive branch activities. and we saw large bipartisan majorities, in part because senators of both parties saw a reason to work together to increase the legislative branch of power at the expense of the executive branch. the president has become an increasingly polarizing figure in american politics, however, i don't mean just our current president, i mean the

presidency as an institution. it can be more difficult to build support on institutional grounds. even ripe for cross-partisan coalitions can be harder to get done if the president is too closely identified with them. so, my favorite example of this actually comes from the house, but i'm still going to talk about it today. so in 2015 when president obama was lobbying congress on trade permission authority, it was reported that someone on the staff of representative paul ryan who was then the chair of the house ways and means committee, called the white house to ask that obama stop asking congress to give him trade promotion authority. ryan didn't want republicans to think they were granting obama anything special. merely identifying the issue with the president was making it harder to build a legislative coalition. given all that context, i want

to turn on what it would take to fix the senate. here, i think the most fundamental question to ask is, do individual senators really want to regain more power over the process? and if they got that power, would they actually use it to do the hard work of legislating? there are all sorts much things individual senators could do to try and signal their objection to how the institution is working, especially in the narrowly divided senate like the one we have today. the most extreme version of this would be something like what we saw senator john mccain do on the republican health care bill last summer, which is to vote against a major piece of legislation that at least publicly he claimed were about the process. senators could object unanimous consent requests, they could work together in committee to stall, though probably not ultimately prevent nominations from coming to the floor, et cetera. the point is if senators wanted to try and send a signal to their leaders that they don't

like the way the chamber is working, they have tools to do that. the issue for me is that by and large, i think senators don't necessarily care as much about changing the way the senate works as they do about getting policy done that is close to their own preferences as they can get. take here the experience of last year involving both the tax bill and the health care bill. both pieces of legislation moved to the senate on a quick party line process with little deliberation. if senate objected to that process they could have threatened to withhold their votes until they got what they wanted. let's assume for a second that senators genuinely would prefer a chambers that operated in a more deliberative way. what would that look like? one challenge is getting senators to believe that any initial efforts to generate more opportunities for collaboration won't just gist r disappear at the first sign of trouble. so, take, for example, and ira

talked a little before about the senate in 2015, and this is an example from early in that year. so, majority leader mcconnell allowed an open amendment process on the keystone xl pipeline bill, the first major piece of legislation in the senate after republicans will retaken the chambers in the 2014 election. senators filed nearly 300 amendments to that bill perhaps in part they weren't sure how long the chance to often amendments freely was going to last. so, in short, the senate needs to find a way to convince its members that any particular change in practice is going to stick and that's harder said than done. because i hate to leave things on a pessimistic note, i will note there are still bright spots of potential cross-party collaborations on this. for me, the senators are willing to use the tools available to them to force leaders to respect their work. so, i'll stop there. i'll invite bill and ira to

come back to the stage and we'll have some discussion and then turn it to all of you. [applause] >> well, thanks to ira and molly for clearly forceful presentations. and i have a very long list of questions. not going to be able to get to all of them, but i think in fairness, i should give ira a minute or two to respond to what i take to be molly's

princip principal thesis. and that is as between the impact of leadership on the one hand and on the other changes in the environment that affect both the relationship between the two parties in the senate and the incentives of individual senators to behave in a certain manner, she is more impressed by the impact of the latter two than you are and less impressed by the impact of the first and i wonder how you responded to that? >> well, first i should say, i don't think you can have a better responder or commenting than molly and i think her book, which has come out too recently for me to have read it fully is going to be very important in people's thinking about the senate.

i certainly agree with some of the points that molly's making. i think every point she makes is actually correct. nonetheless, there are still leaders who bring people together and try to solve certain problems and there are leaders that don't, who decide that the senate should work a different way. i have said in my book, in the last chapter, i point out that the senate rules have not been looked at in a comprehensive way since 1979. when senators reid and mcconnell came in as leaders, they might have said place isn't working too well, what can we do to think about it? do we really believe that these filibusters should not be real, they should simply be people indicating that they won't give

unanimous consent. do we really think that holds should not be temporary courtesies, but permanent? there are a lot of things that could have been addressed and, indeed, should have been addressed, and they should have been addressed when somebody said, we're not going to change the rules this week to benefit us. what would it look like if we had new rules two or four years from now. so, i think the connection that molly makes important points and i think that real leaders could actually address some of those points and incentives, but the other thing i will say having been in the senate during changes from democratic control to republican control, to democratic control, i saw the senate go on functioning. i saw the senate go on functioning because the democrats had good leaders. the republicans had good leaders and they all worked together. so, that's how the two things

relate in my mind. >> the one thing that i will say in response to ira's response to me is that when we think about this question of rule change or procedure change, first of all, i applaud you for thinking about the degree to which we need to look further down the process, if you will, and think about will the-- will the procedure benefit us now versus in the future? and one of the major challenges for me to think about is how do you get-- how do you build a coalition of individual senators to move from the current procedural situation to a different procedural situation and when you have senators who have come to use the procedures that are available now to enhance their

reputations, how do you convince them that it's in their interest to change to a new set of procedures in the future? >> well, actually, i'll respond just briefly, which is to say, one reason i believe you can do it is that i think most of the senators, 75 or 80 of them, hate the institution they're in now. they can't stop talking about how much they hate the institution they're in. they know that the senate should work differently. they have in their mind what the senate is supposed to be. so, i do think there's a positive constituency for that change. i think i took some solace in the emergence of the common sense coalition by suzanne collins, will he had by susan collins and joe manchin, which

was the recent shutdown, but may have lasting value. >> let me now invite the two of you to take an even broader historical view, if such a thing is imaginable. ira, you and i are both quintessential baby boomers and i think it's becoming clearer and clearer to us as, you know, we swim upstrome towards old age that we were privileged to grow up and live in extraordinary times. extraordinary economic times, extraordinary political times, extraordinary times for the role of the united states in the world and a question that i ask myself all the time, and will now address to you is, are we taking the exception for the rule? are we taking as a baseline an

extraordinary period in the history of the country that created an environment within which the kind of desirable senate behavior that you describe was more possible than it was before or since? i note the fact that you yourself describe the senate before lyndon johnson grabbed it by the throat as a quote, reactionary institution. that doesn't sound like a very great institution to me. so, there was a before as well as an after and to what extent -- to what extent is it perhaps an analytical mistake to assume that what was possible under the most favorable circumstances remains possible now? >> that's why he's bill galston. it's a great question and i have thought about it. i said in my first book that the senate i was describing

from 1963 to 1980 was a senate that was different than any that had come before or any that had come since. so i agree with that. but you have to at least have in your mind a model or a vision of how the senate could work and then you look at certain aspects of it and see whether they could still apply. so you have to make sort of a-- we can't replicate those times, bill, i completely agree with that. the men and they were all men at that time, and the men who served there were unusual men, it was an unusual period of time for the united states. having said that, you've got to decide would you like to have a senate that worked on a more bipartisan basis or are we going toward a majoratarion

institution. do you want a senate where they work together or don't work together? is it going to be more like the house? there are all kinds of questions. i take the point that it's completely different and you still have to model off something. >> yeah, so, i think that the political scientists offer reefer refer to the period you're talking about is textbook congress. we have to ask similarly is that the way to think of it. i'm somewhat of a different generation and i'm inclined to think that that period was an abberation and certainly since the early 1980's as i was saying earlier, the rise in political competition for particularly control of the senate i think has come to profoundly affect the environment in which the senate works. you know, part of what made it possible for there to be

bipartisan and collaborative legislating in the middle part of the 20th century was the persistence of both southern democrats and northern republicans, and we've seen both of those groups largely disappear, and i think that part of what led to the demise of the southern democrats are social changes, to which we would not object, and so, just kind of thinking about what has changed more broadly in the united states and what that's meant for the way the senate works. >> ira, i'm now going to share with you the single piece of the book that i-- your book that i found more shocking and it's not going to be anything that you've talked about up to now. and you'll-- and this is -- i'm going to take all of us back to the fall

of 2002 when it was very, very clear that the country and the senate faced the most momentous decision that a country can face, do we go to war or not? on page 79 of your book you talk about the national intelligence estimate, a lengthy analysis that was used to support the proposition that saddam hussein had weapons of mass destruction, certainly chemical and biological and was pushing hard to reconstitute his nuclear arsenal. it was a long important document and you report that

out of the hundred senators, precisely six availed themselves of the opportunity to read that document. i was shocked. because that had nothing to do with partisanship, polarization, leadership, it had to do with a sense of individual responsibility on behalf of the senators who knew they were going to have to vote on that. so, i wondered, what was your reaction to that episode and what did you take away from it? >> i was appalled by it and it's important, thanks for reminding me, bill, because it is important to not focus on only one thing. i would say that there's been sort of a secular decline of the senate over time and people, people and committees

not quite doing the job the way they should. so, i was appalled by that. the other points i made in that section were to cite the very powerful arguments that were made by senators kennedy, levin, and byrd, against the rush to war as opposed to the people who seemed to want, and sadly i would blame the democrats, for the sentiment that we've got get this behind us and move on to talking about the economy or health care. i found it to be a terrible abdication and that's why i spent some time illustrating how much -- what byrd said and what some of the others said. >> yeah, well, i will -- you

know, i think it's an interesting counterpoint to the other arguments because it does suggest to me-- let me back up for a second. i find it difficult to believe that in earlier sentence with such an issue at stake that senators, whatever their position, would not have availed themselves of the opportunity to become as fully informed as possible about the decision that, in my judgment, turned out to be the pivotal decision for the united states in the 21st skcentury up till nw because it's colored everything foreign and domestic since. and it was a decision taken with fully half of the democratic senators in support. >> well, i agree. i agree, and i think that what

it reflects, it reflected the tenor of the times. after 9/11 there was a tendency to sort of support the president, even when the president and the vice-president and the team changed the mission and broadened the war to try to go to iraq. it was a tenor of the times and it's an unfortunate reflection of what had happened. the senators we call the great senators, jackson and fullbright, disagreed on everything, but they would have read the intelligence report.

[inaudible conversations] >> i'll do it from here. there's a half an hour, as i promised for questions from the floor and responses from our panelists. okay. i'll just do it from here. and i have just a couple of requests. that's an understated now for what i actually have in mind. first of all, do identify yourself by name as you're recognized, if there's an institutional affiliation that you think is relevant, please state that and then state a question. there are many opportunities for giving speeches, this is not one of them. yes, and there is a roving microphone, i see a woman with her hand up right there.

>> thank you, bill. it's paula stern. congratulations, ira, on your book and thank you for your presentations, both of you. my question is about the abberant issue that was raised. was the period in which ira and i worked together with bill on the hill in the '70s an abberation? the vietnam war, civil rights, the protests, this was a period of the greatest activity and yet-- and congressional assertiveness vis-a-vis the white house and yet, we also had nixon being called the imperial president. so, my question really to you is to go back to this discussion, you think it's maybe the baby boomers that explain the abberation.

i'm wondering if there's something more systemic so that we can go back to that period of congressional assertiveness and responsibility taking. >> so, i will say, one of the things that i mentioned in my opening remarks is that i think that period involved a willingness by congress to try for institutional reasons, to reassert power for itself vis-a-vis the executive branch. and i don't think it's unconnected, actually, from the expectation that democrats would just be in the majority for a long time. i think that given that expectation, it was a little bit safer for some republicans to work with democrats on these questions of, you know, i do a lot of work on the congressional budget process and thinking about the budget

act, and the willingness of the parties to work together to stand up to what they had seen as an overreach by the executive branch. >> yeah, i guess my perspective on it it would be that congressional reassertion of authority was a reaction to the imperial presidency and the imperial presidency as manifested by the vietnam war, but not just the vietnam war sense that president johnson had overreached and made a mistake in vietnam and the senate wanted to make up for that, as did the house, and that president nixon was overreaching in other ways, including the budget. and so congress reasserted itself. now, from my standpoint, be a nice time for congress, if it

had the independence and any bipartisanship, to be reasserting itself, given the fact that we have the trump presidency. you know, and yet, it hasn't worked out that way as yet, and so, the question will be what happens when the crisis really hits? >> next question, please. >> i see a hand all the way in the back on the row of the-- the gentleman on the row there. >> thank you very much, it's an interesting conversation. i'd like to-- to your point, ira, leadership and molly, to your point, environment. what happens when defacto leaders, like flake, corker, mcgain, end up leaving the senate and hatch as well, but you know, i think that they're a check on this current president. what happens when they leave? do you have any, you know, visions for the future for the

senate? >> i mean, what i would say is when we think about-- so one of the things that i abbi asked us to do is think about the role of individual senators, not just leaders in trying to rebuild the senate. so for me, it is troubling to see senators who are willing to try to assert some power for themselves and the institution, to retire, but it's equaling troubling for me to only be more willing to do that after they've announced that they are leaving the chamber. and so, i think the fact that, you know, you've just listed for us, three republican senators, senators flake, mccain and corker, two have

announced they're not running for reelection, including bob corker in a seat that i don't think anyone really thought was going to be in trouble for him. the flake situation is a little different, he's facing a primary challenge from the right and the strong democratic challenge in the general. but i think it's concerning to think about to a degree which reasserting the authority in the chamber and vis-a-vis the executive branch is something at this moment we are socialing with members of the republican party who are not seeking reelection. >> well, i've thought about that a lot. and i guess i would say the following: the individual senators that we think about as showing some degree of independence, mccain, corker, flake, i would add

senator susan collins and i would add lamar alexander. they a there are different models. collins thinks for a long time to run for governor of maine. she decides to stay. alexander leaves the senate leadership in 2012 because, although mcconnell's his friend, he doesn't like the way the senate is functioning and he goes off and tries to legislate, day after day with patty murray of washington, it actually can be done. flake, if anyone hasn't read senator flake's book, you really should. it's one of the great books ever written in terms of what people should think about politics. corker, i don't know bob corker from a hole in the wall. i guarantee you that anyone who talks to bob corker who knows him would say, he's leaving

because he hates the way the senate works. he has resented the leadership of the senate since he got to the senate. they have stifled everything he's tried to do. and, look, i need to add one thing to put my comments in context. because my comments are a harsh criticism of the current leader, mitch mcconnell. i didn't come to that with any great enthusiasm. i came to that by studying a situation. i don't believe in singling out individuals for blame. i think that he's played an extraordinarily disruptive role and the thing i wanted to basically say about it is, because we have the trump presidency, almost everything else looks like some modification or some version of politics as normal.

usual politics. and i'm suggesting that mcconnell's leadership of the senate is not, that it crossed way into the-- across the line. it's not politics as usual. it's not the senate the way it's supposed to work, it's destructive to the institution. >> okay. i now see a sea of hands in response to that. i see this gentleman here, i see other hands in the back, and i'll try to get to all of you. >> thank you. my name is mike, i wonder if the senate can be changed for the better in the current media environment? . in the good old days you've talked about in the '70s which maybe weren't such good old days, deals could be struck by senators without fear that they would be immediately attacked on fox or msnbc, that twitter

feeds would not fill up with invective, that they wouldn't be countless blogs in which they were criticized and attacked, and this sort of highly democratized media environment. deals were made quietly and behind closed doors and people moved ahead. what do you think is the implication of the current democratized media environment in which all voices count the same for making the senate a more well-functioning operation? >> sure. this is something i think about a lot in response to, say, calls to reinvigorate the committee process in either chamber, frankly. and i ask myself, what would it look like for committees to have long, deliberative markups that are covered minute by

minute on twitter? and i think that's -- i don't have the answer to that question and i don't know quite where i come down, but i do think that's a serious question that we have to think about when-- it's with this broader idea, do individual senators want the power back? do they want to have to deal with those kinds of consequences in the modern media environment for doing the open deliberative work that many of them say they would like to see? and i don't know the answer, but i'm-- i don't necessarily think it's a for sure yes that they would love the idea of doing this open deliberative work in a way that has so much attention drawn to it. >> i think i always try to say that it's much, much more difficult to be a senator now

than it was 40 years ago or 20 years ago for all the reasons, particularly that you're citing. there's no doubt about it. and yet, there are always some of them that seem to manage to do it. i said patty murray and lamar alexander, we can think of other examples. the senate broke down entirely in 2016 over the garland thing, and there's alexander and murray grinding away producing a major education bill. producing a major health care bill. it can still be done. i can't-- none of us can change the overall environment. what we can have is people who function like senators and function like senate leaders are supposed to function. and there's no excuse for the way they're functioning now. so, i take those examples and i say collins now, i say carl

levin who recently retired. there's any number of them, and my sense and to the extent i have any relative optimism, it's that some of them, many of them actually want to function differently, although certainly, everything molly says about the change in sense is absolutely true. >> okay, i'm going to take one more question from the front here and then i'm going to move back again. >> excellent presentations. i'm ralph nace, former chief counsel to republican senators edward brook and dave nuremberger and the former leadership of the conference on civil rights and also a good friend and colleague of ira shapiro and bill. i loved the first book. i haven't read the second one, ira. and the one disagreement we had in the first book, i thought 1981-1993 was an error of

bipartisan cooperation, whether it's the social security act or whether it was the tax reform act, or strengthening all the major civil rights laws. now i hear what you're saying about how to reform the senate and get back to the senators of the '60s, '70s, and '8s. 1994 was the line of demarcati demarcation. how do we do that without the destruction of electoral politics. who do we do that without being afraid of being primaried and the right or left. does either book look at incentives to have them engage in timely bipartisan compromises? >> briefly, ralph, and in defense of my first book. [laughter] the book cuts off in 1980, te

e e epilog, we identify as newt gingrich as part of the problem, anyway, i think that i can't change the whole system. i support a lot of the reforms that people are working on, particularly with respect to gerrymandered districts and changing that. the reason i focus on the senate, besides the fact that's where i've spent my life, as you know, is that they don't have that same excuse, number one. number two, there's a big cause and effect question here and bill has thought about it probably more than anybody has. of course we're a partisan and divided-- polarized country.

so, the leaders have to respond to that. and i would argue that we are a polarized countries in part because of the leaders, basically, because the people have not seen anyone come together to try to solve any problems. if in 19-- if in 2009 the republicans had joined obama in a bipartisan economic stimulus package the economy would have recovered quicker and the public would have had more confidence. if in 2009 the republicans had said, that health care proposal of his looks a lot like the republican idea we had at the heritage foundation and that governor romney used in massachusetts, and they could have come together on a health care bill. and the people would have felt better about it. so, there's a cause and effect

thing that's quite profound. >> yes, a woman in the middle on the aisle. >> hi. lori sherman and a former colleague of ira's who i adore. >> and now for a tough, hard-hitting question. >> well, i'm in total despair, actually. but i've come back from an event in new orleans with a lot of people interested in fixing democracy in the united states, which gives me some hope, but my question, ira, you just mentioned gerrymandering, the answer is citizens united and campaign finance. and i'd be interested in you both addressing to get the big money, the dark money out of politics, would things change? >> so, i do think that there has -- that one of the reasons that, say, folks like senator flake, who we were just

discussing, has to fear a primary challenge from the right in his case is because of the ability of big money interests to mount those kinds of campaigns. i think it's worth noting that we've also seen to varying degrees of success more, what we might call establishment republican interests, try to counter that in the republican party. and so, i don't -- i don't think it's helped matters at all, but i'm not terribly, at this point, optimistic on a major change to campaign finance law in the near term. and so, i think as with most things that we've put on the table today, the question is, how do we work within the existing set of incentives to change people's behavior. >> yes. >> let me just say one--

yeah, sorry, two things. first of all, on the-- going back to ralph's question about being primaried, it is obviously on people's minds. i would suggest one way to describe to it is the way lisa murkowski responded to it when she lost her primary or the way that joe lieberman responded to it by running as an independent or a third party candidate, they both won. jeff flake, who i think will have an extraordinary career in whatever he does, he could have run as an independent in arizona, that would have been one way to respond to it. on the money question sh, look, i'm given to overstatement and simplification. citizens united's decision was the worst decision of the supreme court since dread scott. it's a very terrible decision.

notwithstanding that, both sides raise a lot of money and sometimes the candidates with less money win and bernie sanders deserves enormous recognition for showing you could raise $27 million, $27 at a time. the energy that's out there in the country is going to make up for some of the money problem, but i do believe the constitutional crisis that may be coming, if the president decides to fire mueller or try to force the resignation of him through some other way, will put the republican senators to the test. do you care more about the country or your republican donor base led by the koch brothers? and i think at that point, many people will come forward and

stand up for the country. >> let me just add a brief comment here apropos of nothing in particular. and that is that yesterday's reforms often turn into today's problems. we are now living with the legacy of progressive era political reforms of which the primary system is one, and i would just put on the table, as i'm a defrocked namely college professor. so for further credit i assigned the task of thinking through the compatibility of the progressive era primary system with today's highly polarized politics, do the two of them fit together? i'm not so sure. there's a gentleman back there who has had his hand up

patiently for 20 minutes and now he's about to be-- yes. there you go. >> my name is dave hopy. let me ask a question and you both touched on it as a possible solution. one can look at the leadership of the senate after the 2006 elections when senator reid became majority leader and see a real decline in participation in the senate. people did not have the right to offer amendments, such that a democratic incumbent elected in 2006-- no, 2008, excuse me, lost his ewilkes in 2014 because he never got to offer an amendment in six years in the senate. i would argue that there's something to look at there. but to get to the question of whether this is potential solution, both of you touched on the idea of how easy it is to use a filibuster in today's

senate. it's basically a cadillac, you get half the day off. i'll do this and come back tomorrow and do the cloture vote. and some don't know when the next quorum is coming. they say we're not doing this anymore. if you want to do it for a significant real purpose, okay. if you want to do it for a joyride-- i understand it will make senators uncomfortable and staff even more uncomfortable. i've been in that position. do you think it has a possibility if you go to a real filibuster and requirement that you pull it out that way starting to get us back to a regular order which you both talked about?

>>. >> there you go, i favor a return to the real filibuster. i favor getting rid of holes, not just saying who has the holes, but i favor getting rid of holes, but i mostly favor a process of consideration by which you would produce a result that 75 senators would say, those are world while changes and we agreed to them. i don't favor lurching from crisis to crisis the way reid and mcconnell did and then some rescue comes out that lasts for a month or two, and you avoid the nuclear option. and by the way, it was never from reid and mcconnell, it was always from schumer and alexander and levin and mccain. the combination of a leader-driven senator with two leaders who hated each other was not a good combination, but

i think there are changes that can be made, but you have to enlist a lot of people in it and get broad support for it. >> citing generally one thing that the senate's current abberations don't do terribly well is provide ways for people to reveal the intensity of their preferences other than just the direction of their preferences, so, this is one example that because, you know, we-- because cloture has become a routine part of how the senate works, it's not the case that it works as a way to signal how intensely a senator feels about something. and so, i think more-- i'm not sure that i think making people talk all the way through a filibuster is the best way to do this, but i think more opportunities for individuals to be able to signal the intensity of their

preference as opposed to the direction of their preference would be healthy for the current senate. >> let me just add one thing, since i focus, tend to focus on leaders. i'm not so hot on the followers either. i mean, i don't think-- i don't think the senators should have stood by year after ye year, giving up authority of the committees, moved toward to leader-driven senate without pushing back hard. that's the reason that i -- common sense coalition or others, those things, i think, matters. the senators -- i wrote an article in 2012 saying, senators, take back the senate. it's sort of up to you in the first instance and it's up to the public in the second instance. >> well, we have only one

minute left. so let me pronounce the benediction. as i'm sure you know, the founders of this country in designing our political institutions did not want a party system, did not anticipate a party system, but within six years after the establishment of the constitution, we got a party system and we've had a party system ever since, almost always a two-party system. and so, we've been wrestling, really, since the mid 1790's with the question of how the institutions which were designed to-- you know, which were thought through without regard to political party, how are these institutions going to function in the context of two political parties. if you go back to james

madison, the assumption is that the different fly wheels of the system will check and balance one another, when individual ambition is attached to what madison called the place. that is a location within an institutional order. the assumption was that loyalty to the senate or the house or whatever institution you were in would tug against loyalty to the president and the president's program. that's the classic madisonion conception. then woodrow wilson came along, you know, with his palpable envy for the british parliamentary system and put on the table the idea of a more parliamentary constitutional system in the united states. and political scientists in the united states have taken up this cry from time to time. there was a famous committee of

the american political science association which produced a report called "toward a more responsible two party system" what they meant by responsible was ideological clear and distinguishable. another case, beware of what you wish for because we now have in effect two homogennous parties. and the senate has been perhaps the major casualty of the movement away from deliberation and towards party unity and responsiveness to the institutional leader and the president, if the president is of your own party. so, these are deep problems a century old. we have madison to blame for not anticipating the rise of political parties and woodrow wilson for making too much of them in his envy of brits and

now we have to sort it out in the 21st century. please join me this thanking ira and molly. [applause] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] >> the u.s. senate is about to come in and lawmakers may work on funding the pentagon for the rest of the year. tomorrow, senate democrats have