restoration of the mansion, slave quarters and grounds. thursday, the 100 anniversary of the national park service live from arlington house at 7:00 p.m. eastern on american history tv on c-span3. coming up next, two former republican members of congress sit down to talk about their time in washington, d.c. and how things have changed in the u.s. house of representatives since the 1980s. we hear from nancy johnson of connecticut and peter torkildsen of massachusetts. it's about 90 minutes. thank you all for coming this morning to the session on former members of congress. i would like to introduce our moderator this morning, david king, senior lecturer in public policy, fact l chair, master in public administration programs in the john f. kennedy schools

of government at harvard university. since joining the faculty in 1992, profession so 1992, he is a member of the core faculty within the carr center frp human rights policy and is a faculty affiliate. in the wake of the 2000 presidential election bs, professor king directed the task force for the national commission on election reform chaired by gerald ford and jimmy carter. that culminated in land marc voting rights in 2002. he later oversaw the evaluation and new management structure for the boston election department and he served in the advisory board of americanelect.org. in the past professor king chaired the bipartisan program for newly elected members of the u.s. congress and he corrected the executive program for senior

executives in state and local government. professor king is the author of three books and published in a range of journals including the american political science review and the journal of politics. please welcome david king. [ applause ] >> thank you. is this amazing just to be in a group of people like who are like you? isn't that wonderful? i mean, i know there's always a level of cynicism anytime we talk about politics and especially legislatures in the united states today, but i think every one of us may have fallen in love, if not with another person, certainly fell in love with some ideas in the jk 11,000 sections of your library. i remember being camped out there for a long time. thank you so much for being here. you have in front of you, not only the subjects of your

studies. i feel a little bit like they're insects and we are all entomologists. we're going to try to understand nancy johnson and peter torkelson a little more. we want to hear your questions and perspectives and open it up to a broader discussion as we move forward. nancy johnson asked just before we stepped up here whether or not we want to talk about rhinos. and was rhino a thing when peter was in congress. and he said well it was just starting to be a thing. congress is changing dramatically or at least it seems. i remembering when speaker thomas bracket reed from the great state of maine was speaker, he had a narrow majority in the house, a thin republican majority, and young

democrats came and complained to him saying two things that are just as true them as they are today. he said the rights of the minority are to show up at work, collect your pay and that is it. and then he said democracy stops at the door after the united states congress, which is a challenging but important point. but article 1 of the constitution wasn't placed there just by happenstance. article one was the most important branch of government in the eyes of the founders. the core, at the center of a representative republic we have the house and the senate which are not run democratically. and we have political parties that are not nominating folks in a democratic manner at all. and it's caused quite interesting results. so when nancy johnson, one of the great moderate republicans of our time was challenged and called a rhino, that was a significant challenge at the time.

and today we don't worry about high noes if you're republicans. if you're a republican in the house today you worry about being captured. it's a different type of dynamic. the institution is remarkably stable in some respects and yet it never stands still, which we minds me of another famous quote, this from al very wendall holmes jr., he said the law must be stable but never stand still. congress must be stable. the rules, institutions, the basic idea of representative democracy stays stable but the institution is always changing. sow the institution that nancy johnson from the great state of connecticut entered in january of 1983 and left after the election in 2006 when she lost, when he left in january of 2007, that institution had changed quite dramatically. but the institution is still quite stable. important work has to get

undone. appropriation bills have to be passed. peter torkildsen who was born in my home state, the great state of wisconsin served in the minority and the majority as a republican from massachusetts. that's almost a definition of a rhino but the term wasn't really widely used at the time. when we were putting this panel together we were asked, who do we want. well we want the very best. doesn't matter if they're d or r, we want people who can be introspeck tiff, tell us how the institution changed and what it was like for them and what their relationship with you as administrators and libraryians and educations, how that might work. we have obviously the institutions are changing at all times. but the way we learn about them, the way our children will learn about them will have you forever more at the center. so i would like to introduce

first and hear from nancy johnson and second i want you to hear from peter torqu torkildse. >> i think at the beginning i'll stand up. being short, you don't see a lot when you stand up. i would rather see you faces. it's a pleasure to be here with you and it's a great pleasure to work with the uconn library as we put my papers there and talk about accessibility and so on. i hope in the few month to completely retire, because i'm still working in washington. so a lot of my friends are there. and so i have a different perspective on what's happening. and it does pain me terribly that the press tells you

practically nothing at all about the big changes that have taken place in restoring a deliberative body, particularly in the house in the last four years. but just to give you a little sense of the difference between then and now, let me just tell you that when i went down to washington, i was in my early 40s. i was a seasoned state senator. i had been the ranking member on all of the important committees, appropriations and bonding and education and planning and development and in connecticut that was a very, very important committee. and really looked at what do we do regionally, how do we manage waste, how do we do a lot of things. so i'd had a lot of experience. and i was in my office -- this is my fist year, and they're debating a hud bill about whether or not seniors could have pets in public housing or

people could have pets in public housing. >> -- we had been through that in the house. and public houses just isn't in the big cities. so i went over and said my peace. as i walked on the floor, there was my friend, steward mckinney, and he looks at me, also ranking member on the hud subcommittee, he looked at me saying, what are you doing here. i said i'm going to speak on this amendment. he said, you are? well you know, i can only give you two minutes. i said yes, i know that. he said, now, don't go over. i said, i won't. so i did my thing and as i came off he said nice job, but remember, freshmen are to be seen and not heard. and truly enough over the next two months, coming up and down the escalators, members would

say to me, nice job nancy. because there were only two women elected that year. so everybody knew exactly who i was and their staff or they had seen me on the televisions. and if you get up there and say really dumb things, that happens your freshman year. you say something that's totally political without substance or fact and you're remembered for it. but it was very good advice. and i was very careful, particularly when i saw how visible anything i did was. nowadays -- fast gard to when the republicans became a majority and neat got a group of us together and said, we've got to teach the freshmen in a hurry that the floor of the house is different from the campaign trail. and you're debating substance not vision for the most part.

and they're just bringing too much political rhetoric into the floor. so we talked about that for a while. we each took certain ones and we began gently to teach them. i remember one time each party has somebody to manages the floor. they know exactly what's going on and you've missed and you don't know what amendment you're working on, maybe you don't even know what bill we're working on, they will tell you. i remember one time i rushed to the floor at the very end and he said vote yes, i'll tell you later. he didn't have time to explain to me. he knew my direct and he knew me and he knew i needed to vote yes. so what did i vote for. but with all of the absolute flood of subjects and information, you know, you have to pick trustworthy people whose lead you will follow if you

haven't had time to study it. because you only have so much time to train your own staff. and they are in their 20s usually right out of college, energetic, smart but completely inexperienced. so their conclusion might be completely wrong at the beginni beginning. over time they get to know you and your record. i came with in a senate record. i didn't want to contradict my record. that whole thing of accommoda accommodating as a freshman -- to finish up, a little later that guy who tends the floor came over to me and said the california ladies, i understand that they flew all night but they can't come on the floor in the jeans. i want you to talk to the ladies about the dress. i'm having the men talk to men about the dress. there was a decorum on the floor

of the house that as the politics took precedent over the substance really became a problem. we need to focus on the fact that we're legislating policy that's going to affect people throughout america. when you're on the floor nobody calls you by your first name or your last name, it's the gentle lady from connecticut. in the record they put in parenthesis johnson or whoever. but on the floor of the house you addressed everyone as the gentleman from massachusetts, the gentle lady from connecticut. i don't know how much you want to do now and how much you want to do later, but there are a number of terribly controversial subjects while i was there. the big advantage of the papers being available to someone in

our library -- and after i gave my papers to the library, we moved to a care community. so i went through all of the papers that i had kept. when you go through all of the clippings from beginning to end, you see a completely different life. you see politics that is totally different from our politics from today. some of it we have to get back to. some of it i'm glad it's gone. but you see things that you don't see otherwise. and kids can see that. and they can see the limit. for instance, i spoke always in a school whenever i was out for a day in the district. and the fifth graders were phenomenal. that's the last grade at which they're smart and articulate and they'll ask you any question, whether it's the last one they heard their parents discuss or it came off the television from some extreme show.

you can see all of that boil out. and particularly in our era because in my district, out of 49 towns, i had six or eight newspapers published every single day. and they needed to know what they should publish, you know. they didn't need to know what i thought about things. and i needed to bring it down to that town and what was going to make a difference. they each had radio stations. the radio stations followed the school games and the lunches. they followed their congresswoman too. you better be able to say something quick and easy to help them understand what is your congressman doing for you today. so the challenge was the same but the many ways in which you could penetrate the minds of your constituents or invite their input were far rich wer, not only newsprints and radios but all kinds of organizations.

i mean i went to every chamber in every town, every lion's club, every rotary, every senior citizen center at least once and other organizations as they grew or developed responding to particular things. for a while land trusts were active and needed a lot of help as to what they could and couldn't do. and so on. so that rich relationship, i would go community days, plan my schedule in such a way that i go to this little teeny town, speak to a fifth grade. i got there and they wanted me to speak to every grade. we had to arrange things. so you'd go to schools, you sit down with selectmen, sit down with the united agencies, with business in town, go through a factory that was particularly important. and sometimes you'd speak to the workers as to what you were looking for while you were there. and so you had the opportunity to have a very rich relationship

with your constituents. and yes, of course you had to be there when anything important was happening and they would have a ceremony. there would be the state senator and the state rep, the mayor. but we were all part of the community envisioning its own future or managing its own lives. building its own families, creating its own schools. i had schools where certain days of the week the mothers came in. so it was a wonderful privilege to serve. but it was a deep and systemic relationship, this issue of representation. now because there's not so many avenues to reach through easily, but also members are spending more time raising money, they're less intensely interested. i came into politics from basically service on united way

boards and an active pta mom. it was just kind of a larger arena for what i had been doing as a stay-at-home mom. but you see that in the papers. i was surprised at how vividly it came through. and now i'm sorry that i made the decision not to keep all of the copies of the columns because then we would send out a column every single week. sometimes we didn't think they got picked up. other times every paper would pick them up. but it kept those newspaper people educated about things that were going on and subjects we were dealing with. and sometimes they would be printed everywhere. trade often was printed everywhere, health care. but i kept only one copy. so now i'm kind of sorry that you can't look through it. so it was a great privilege to serve, a great challenge to serve and they would see in

those papers both the difference, what was politics like then, why was it that way, what have we lost. and the other thing they would see is the extraordinary amount of work a member has to do. not just work in their district. we didn't realize we would have no life at home. i mean, because you got off the plane and once staff was waving yoen bye and one was greeting you all prepared. we've got our set of things for you to do. the educational challenge. i never worked so hard learning as adid i did as a member of congress. i was privileged to sit on the arm's control. big things, you got to sit with the people making the decision, thinking the thoughts. when we got into 9/11, the armed services committee had briefings

for all of us, the intelligence committee brief all of us. needless to say they didn't give us the highest level of information because it was going to get out. but you really had the opportunity and the responsibility to know both sides of issues. not just one side. so we've lost some of that. but the work that you have to do, i can honestly say is about as demanding as any job america has to offer. but the rewards are as great of any job you could possibly have. [ applause ] >> thank you for those comments, nancy. it's interesting that nancy and i both being in new england, we had the curse of the hourly shuttles, which is that -- there's always a plane to get

back home. people expect you to be home all of the time. i remember talking to a colleague from idaho and he said by the time his nondirect flight got back to idaho, he still had a 4 1/2 hour drive to get to his home. but nancy and i and people who live in the northeast were always expected back. as soon as congress adjourned ushly on a thursday, you hop on a flight and come back. the staff would be there. my days were longer in the district than they were in d.c. in d.c. oftentimes a session would end, you would get home at a decent time and get some sleep. it was not uncommon for me in any district to have three dinners in one night none of which i would eat at. you go, greet people, give remarks and go on to the next event while everyone sat down and ate. it was your way to maximize your contact with constituents. they want to see, ask you

questions. that was part of the retail end of the policy. before i was a member of congress i was state representative and it was really interesting because not only was i in the mie torety in the massachusetts state house but i was in a tiny minority. lobbyists would walk right by your office space and keep going and talk to the chairman of the committee and that was that. so a lot of issues would come up and you would not ge any contact at all. in washington, d.c. that doesn't happen. every issue is important to somebody, even if it has nothing to do with your district. i think i made had a dozen farms in any district but obviously agriculture is a huge issue nationally. there are always people lobbying on agricultural related issues even though it was not a big part of my district. my district is interesting. the north shore of massachusetts. you know, we had some of the poorest communities in the city of lynn, also some of the

wealthiest suburbs like hamilton and boxer. i was able to interact with people across the sphere and everyone wanted you to know and understand what their situation was. so that was part of my education in the process, you know, learning that, you know, you have to represent people -- you get one vote even though the people in your district may have very very different opinions on what is there. david mentioned the concept of rhino and being kantered. but i was thinking that in new england we saw that process a little before l before eric kanter. we saw joe leiberman lose his primary. he was a democrat in name only. in his particular case he was able to run in the general anyways and defeat the democratic nominee. and at the end of that term he retired. but it's a process we've been seeing, and i think sadly we're going to see more of it as the

parties go to the two extremes, you're not going to have motd rates left on either side. i think that's the worse for america that's happening that, you know, for me, for someone to say eric kanter wasn't conservative enough is just mind-boggling and yet that's what his opponent ran on. if you remember, i studied this a little bit. the issue being whipped, whipped on the house floor at the time. john boehner was having the whip organization assess support for an immigration reform bill. okay? and you know people were looking at, well, they didn't want to do entirely what obama wanted but could they do something. that was the number one issue to attack eric kanter on. even though he had not made pronouncements on it one way or the other, it was still used to attack him. and lane love and behold he's defeated and then there was no mention of every whipping or

bringing an immigration bill to the flash flood for the republicans after that. and you know, obama was like, why can't you do that. but it's like, well, you know, there aren't other members who want to sacrifice their career on an issue that we just saw the majority leader of the house defeated in hi own primary for. it's something that worries incumbents of both parties. nobody wants to stick their neck out so far. and depending on the year, somewhere between like 60% and 80% of districts are considered safe for one party or the other. so those people aren't worry ied about the general election opponent. they're only worried if at all about a primary opponent. to me, something has to give this tl. several weeks ago david and i were on a panel and we were just talking about, well, will the california system help, would louisiana system help.

but some type of chance for the voters to say no, we're not going to choose between the most liberal democrat and the most conservative republican. we want a choice other than that in certain circumstances. but we're certainly not there, not yet. you know, i'm just looking at the situation we're in right now, and you know, the race for president, the democrats look like they're about to nominate the least popular nominee of the major party for president ever, except the republicans said no, wait a minute, we want to have somebody more unpopular for the democrats. i'm still scratches me head at that and it looks like that is going to be our choices this november. and part of it is very much, not entirely but part of it is as the parties are bifurcating so solidly, they're looking at mimicking what is happening in many congressional districts,

you know when hillary clinton started running, she was not the most liberal person on all of the issues. but during the campaign she's begun to echo many of bernie sanders' positions. now if not the most liberal candidate, she's certainly very close to that, which is a different situation than you normally have. republican side, i honestly don't know what to make of it because, i mean, donald trump on paper does not appear to be conservative, does not appear to be a republican, and yet he had a plurality of republican votes, 40%, 42% and he will be the nominee. so you know, there's an old adage that may you live in interesting times. i think we're all living in interesting times. i don't know where it is headed but for members of congress i think their function is even

more important now an for those of you who study the congress, your work is important as well. and in terms of explaining that to people, nancy mentioned fifth graders, certainly the younger the crowd that you can get to, i think the more impact you can have. you know, the people with the most open minds explaining to them that there still is a major role for congress, that their participation in democracy is essential, that, you know, you shouldn't look at it as, you know, choosing our leaders is something that other people do or it doesn't matter if you vote. in my particular case when i was defeated for reelection i lost by less than 400 votes. it was one vote per precinct. i'm one of those walking cases who tells you yes, every vote does matter and you can have a role in that. but while i won't even begin to

predict exactly where the situation this year is going to lead us, i still have absolute faith that, you know, the people control their government ultimately. if they choose to step back, that's their decision and not an informed one in my viewpoint but they still have ultimate control. and to the extent that you can explain and engage people of all ages in that, that is very very helpful. and for your role as keepers of that information, hopefully you will find some students along the way who want to do that extra research, whether it's for a paper in school, whether it's for later in life out of just interest, whether it's for, you know, reporters or people who do blogs and the rest. it really is an essential role and i'm glad that you are still there trying to disseminate the information which is essential for democracy to work. thank you. [ applause ]

>> thank you. i'd like to move the conversation briefly to a little bit about polarization which i know you have been thinking about. and there are -- in political science they call it an overdetermined problem in that there are so many answers to how in the world did this actually happen. so let's just go through a handful of them and after i go through a handful of them, i'd like to hear from nancy and from peter again with their perspectives on what they have seen change and then we will go to you for questions and answers. so we are now, based on measurements that are done with something called dw nominate, mccarty at princeton, best known for this, we're in the third grade epic or third grade movement of polarization in american history.

it's difficult sometimes to measure ideology and they think they have a pretty good approach with nominate scores but we're in the third great moment now. the first grade moment ends with the civil war. the second great moment of polarization ends at the end of the progressive era and the realignment of parties with the democratic party in the election 1932. and we are now at the third great moment. so there have been, there have been these massive changes that can be quite problematic. one, a civil war, second, a major realignment of the parties, and now. well the parties have been realigning for quite some time anyway. and that's issue number one. why do we have polarization. because the fundamental basis of

the political parties have changed. when i was young the republican party in massachusetts was considered the liberal party in massachusetts and the democrats were the conservative party in massachusetts. this begins to change in the early 1960s and in full sweep by the late 1960s as the base of the republican party first signaled by the nomination of barry goldwater in '64 and ultimately the unsuccessful first challenge by ronald reagan in 1976 and then the successful challenge in 1980. the base of the republican party moved to the south and to the west. this is a realignment that happens largely around race. and the correlation between a person's individual self proclaimed identification around party and their individual self proclaimed identification has gone up dramatically. it begins in the 1960 as and

accelerated around, the physical realignment around race. the second argument is that the -- this is an argument i want to shout out to a young scholar named james deangelo. it is the movement toward sunshine legislation in the 1970s has actually made things considerably more difficult for the work of legislating. in 1970 in the house we had the 1970 legislative reorganization act, right, a favorite of everybody in the room i hope, unless yaw happen to like the 46ers and 47 act instead. but the 1970 act was quite a moment. because in this act, you know, moving towards sunshine legislation, all votes in the committee of the whole were then made roll call recorded votes. previously votes in the committee of the whole, only the final passage vote was a

recorded vote. so the crafting of the legislation through amendments and the amendment tree was hidden from public view. you knew the total vote but you didn't know how people voted. and that seems undemocratic. remember, democracy stops at the door. it certainly seems undemocratic. the push to make that major reform was actually done not by citizens groups but by lobbying organizations who wanted to successfully and accurately monitor the members and see how they were doing. it ushered in a rather dramatic change in the orientation of many members. instead of looking at each other and thinking about crafting legislation at the amendment stage and then going public on final passage, every little moment had to be crafted in public view because their final votes -- their amendment votes would be amplified.

and the data is crystal clear. there's a knife edge moment beginning in the early 1970s. the reforms are adopted across the senate and every state legislature for which we have d data. that's a dramatic increase in party line voting that begins in the 1970 was continued up until now. is it that it's simply members becoming more polarized themselves? no. they're presenting themselves to a more polarized constituency and the lobbyists. that's issue number two. there are times when transparency leads to particularly difficult one welcome. the reorganization around race and the political parties was issue number one. issue number three is something we also don't talk very much

about unless you're in to inside baseball but i want to call it out to you. that is the institutional rules, unwritten rules and procedures have changed so dramatically. when you two were on the hill you could go on congressional delegation, these travels. ted, i think you may have actually gotten to go along on a few of these at a time. members were not sleeping in their offices, which frankly is disgusting but now happens widely. they would move to washington, d.c. it was -- you know, if you slept in your office in the 1970s, you would have been laughed out of the institution. and yet now it's recommended because you don't want to go native. begin in 1994, republicans and then later democrats decided they were going to no long move their family to washington, d.c. but they would keep running back

home. it reinforced this idea that institutions really only running on tuesday, wednesday and thursday and then you have to get back home. but it also means that you're not getting to know your colleagues in a deep and careful and thoughtful and loving way, which it used to be. there are many unwritten rules that have been violated. and beyond sleeping in our office and not living with other colleagues another very important one was thrown out in 1994. and that was the strong and violent rule, you could not violate this rule. if you were a sitting member of congress, go into another member of congress's district and campaign for the opponent. if yo do that, how are we going to sit down face to face two days later, two weeks later or two months later and try and cut a deal. if i know that something i tell you in private as we're trying to craft legislation and do the common good, if i know that that

is going to be used against me and you're going to use it against me in my own district, that's insane. when that genie was let out of the bottle in '94 by the republicans and '96 by the democrats, it was a disaster. the rules and procedures are not simply what's written down. they're norms and behaviors. the fourth big one and this will be the final one, is participation in primarieprimar. there's a regular relationship between when primaries happen and how extreme the candidates coming out of those primaries likely to be. it's called the primary gap. the primary gap is the amount of time between the primary. it's say it was in june and the general election in november. if you have a primary in june and a general in november, that's a pretty big primary gap. what if you have a primary

that's actually binding in may or in april? the primary gap in the united states, forget about the presidential primaries. i care about binding primaries for members of congress. the primary gap has been dramatically increased. and when we look at how people represent their constituencies, it's crystal clear. the smaller the gap, the more moderate and wide ranging the candidate will be. if you have a primary, let's say in late september, now you're media is appealing to a general election constituency. you have to broadcast and not narrow cast. but if you have a primary in may or june, it's all abnarrow casting, all about bringing out the narrowest possible vote. primary turnout has been on a monotonic decline. if we look at off-year

congressional elections, so for get about the president at the top of the ticket, all right, off-year congressional elections beginning in 1966 and going through to present day, it is a monotonic decline in the percentage of eligible voters who turned out to vote. so in 1966 it was just over a third of all eligible voters turned out to vote in these congressional primaries. and in the last congressional off-year primary in 2014, 11.8% of eligible voters turned out to vote. it's astonishing. and it's not the moderates who are no longer turning out. it is -- it is the moderates who are no longer turning out. it's the strong identifiers who are still turning out. these are things that we can change. we can change how primaries operate. we can change the timing of the primaries. we can maybe change how

gerrymandering works. the law must be stable but never stand still. the institution is stable but it's always changing. and right now we're at a pretty difficult time in american history with respect to congress. it doesn't have to be that way. we're always one generation away from losing or democracy but we're also just one generation away from having the most vibrant and lively and dynamic democracy that we could possibly imagine and that's going to take every one of us in this room to try and make better. so i would like to -- i was just preaching. i'm sorry. my parents are ministers. nancy and then peter. >> how many of you saw front-page coverage -- it's not on? >> that microphone is not on. >> it's not even switched on. >> is it on now? >> wow. >> how many of you saw about a

month ago front-page coverage of richard neil, a massachusetts member of congress, probably the longest serving now in the massachusetts delegation, and sam johnson, a long serving member from texas having a press conference to laud their bill, their bipartisan bill to fix the social security disability program that is scheduled to go bankrupt this year? how many of you saw those articles? >> didn't show up. >> outrageous! i mean, look at all of the pensions that are going broke everywhere. look at what's happening to social security which we don't take about anymore. this one is actually going bankrupt. this is a bipartisan solution. richie himself said, i want the press to note this is

bipartisan. in my mind, the primary number one cause of the problems in governing america fall at the feet of the press. because they don't report so much. before speaker boehner became speaker, he was asked at the press club in washington -- big deal, these speeches at the press club -- about six weeks out from the election, should you become speak are, what will you do to restore civility? that's our language in washington to talk about all of this. and he said, i'll make it my business to restore regular order. and i'm reading this in the "washington post" and i thought to myself, nobody will get that. i wonder if he's told his team he's going to do that.

because the republicans started writing legislation in the speaker's office because they had a desperate need to feed their base. nancy pelosi wrote the entire affordable care act in the speaker's office. the committees were explicitly told no structural amendments. you can amend around the edges. and but that was -- that's why it didn't work so well. because it didn't have the airing. you can't make this stuff up. you know, law is law. and i can tell you from chairing the human resources committee of the ways and means committee where we did foster care, we did welfare reform, it is the part of congress that does the children's stuff, even though it's ways and means. under our tax law is where you find social security. we take all of your money but we give it back. so ways and means is the giver backer as well as the taker. we do unemployment comp, disability, we do welfare, we do

foster care because the foster care child is just a person with no means of income. so we had a lot of hearings on these things. and both richard neil and sam johnson are on the ways and means committee and this is a victory. it's not like the way we paid doctors that took us 15 years to figure out how to fix it and every year we're punting and punting and they never know, are they going to get paid or not get paid. but it got no press. now, when boehner said i'm going to return it to regular order, that got no press. got one sentence in the "washington post" and they know better. now my first thought was did you tell your guys that. so boehner started that process. i don't write in my office. go see the chirm. they would tell you go see the subcommittee chairman. fred upton said to me one time,

served with him many years, we both -- he's from michigan. i spent a lot of time in michigan. and he said, well who is your democrat? now, fred announced when he became chairman that any amendment that had bipartisan sponsorship would be taken first. and most all of the amendments put themselves at a disadvantage if they don't. so they all scurry around and get bipartisan support. if you get bipartisan support, i'll tell you my best story about bipartisan support. you remember ted kennedy, i hope. well he was really concerned about children and health care. and he wrote this bill that became known as chip. and he could not find a sponsor in the house and he needed a sponsor in the house. part because the republicans were in the majority in the house. so his staff approached my staff and my staff and i talked about it and i said, it's an

entitlement. anyway, i read it and we thought about it and i said, well, i have to talk to him because i can't do this -- i can't cosponsor this if this is just through medicaid because becaus medicaid is a joke, you cannot find a doctor to take medicaid so it's just a false promise. i am not going to do that. so ted and i met in his little office in the capitol and he told me the history of it. that was lot of fun. we had a good time. and he agreed that they would not have to deliver -- they would not have to do it through medicaid, they could do it through whatever program they want in connecticut, it became known as husky, so that's a good thing since huskies win. so children joined husky who didn't have other insurance. but we needed that flexibility at the state level. and from chairing reforms for foster children i knew how different the state health care

systems were. so that was my contribution we couldn't get the senate on board and orrin hatch is the key person and he said i can't do an entitle me entitlement. so we agreed to a capped entitlement. this meant you couldn't serve all the children. but on the other hand you have the ability to manage the program the way you want. you can pair it with things that you're doing. you can put it down through community health centers. the feds pay big money for community centers much bigger than under medicaid so we all agreed on that. now we have a bill that has the support of hatch, the support of kennedy and the support of myself but it's way deepened the legislative session. but we had the support of newt

gingrich and of bill clinton and i don't know how they got it done but they did. it didn't go through committees. it did go just out in the final bill. i don't remember whether it was a reconciliation but it got woven in. because some things are to too controversial, you know, to get through the committee process unless you have several years. a good bill takes five years from idea that everyone agrees with to legislative form. i mean, we should have kids study what's the initial one, what does it come out as? because it can't go in and serve connecticut and still serve wyoming. you can't have a bill that is exactly the same for chicago and good for torrington, connecticut.

this is why the affordable care act -- i'm a big advocate and was an early advocate of universal coverage. because it was done the way it was, it's laid over. i was interested in one that recently got the right to expand coverage but not through medica medicaid. well, the waiver section has been there all that time but burwell wasn't flexible enough until toward the end. they said well, do it through the waiver system, do it your own way. we just have to see that if you look back and see how it was done then you can see what was

good about them, what wasn't. currently, because boehner made that commitment and started that process, ryan is even better about it. i mean ryan is going to have a program that the house republican members are going to run on so that he can get them out from under whatever the dialogue is at the top. and those that -- the structure of that, remember under newt, the republicans did this with the contract for america and that was a pretty loose group who did that and it was signed off by everybody. so boehner's only choice was to go to the floor and let the body work its will, so to speak, and i've speakers do that on the other side. it eyesed to eused to be part process just to show his freshman that you don't rule the world, honey.

that's what made her so unpopula unpopular,. but ryan is letting the committee work through and yet it comes back through the conference process. whether that will result in compelling enough initiatives to be a flat form to run on that's strong enough. now, i have a totally different view of the trump/sanders race as i call it. but i've said too much already and i'll come back another time.

>> it's fascinating because i understand a lot of the inside baseball that she's talking about. but at some point -- when the republicans took power in 1995, it was the first time in 40 years they'd been in the majority in the house. you go to the most senior member who was in the majority last time but we had no one in that

situation. we had to ask bill emerson who was a page in the 1950s to preside because he was the closest thing to have been a member. so we were learning our way. sometimes we look at things and say, well, this needs to be changed and you don't pay as much attention to it and while that first term of the republican majority most bills were written at the subcommittee and the committee level, but over time it began to appear, well, this is easier if the speaker does it, if the republicans in the 2000s as well as the democrats took over for four years, you don't see the negative as it's happening. and then in the case with john boehner, you know, when you have a two-party system that's one

thing john boehner was a speaker of the house with three parties in the house. two of them were on the republican side but most people didn't know until he ended up resigning that there was a block of 30 republicans who looked at themselves as a separate party from the other republicans. and is very difficult to preside in a body like that. speaker ryan to his credit said i'm not campaigning for the job. if you want know do it, you come to me and we'll work out something. so the commitment to regular order from john boehner and the bumps that went with it, and now speaker ryan who is very much determined not to write legislations in the speaker's office is a good thing for the count country. so it's a situation where the process is headed in the right direction. but there's a lot of unknowns.

you don't set yourself up in a structure that a group of 30, no matter who they are, can have veto power over the process. you want that to continue and in some cases if you're going to be a majority party, sometimes you have to accept a defeat, you can move on to the next issue. if you try to block everything that's when your party gets thrown out of power and that's one thing that i've been researching and want to do more study on. the republicans had not won a majority in 40 years, bill clinton had been the first president of either party to control the house and the senate going back to jimmy carter.

>> because he could contrn't co his party. >> but it was very interesting. a couple years newt lost a few seats then he left as speaker. but then you have george bush elected as president. winning the electoral college by the bare minimum. and nominally he had the majority of the house and senate so the democrats after a few months had control of the senate. then we had 9/11, the republicans ended up controlling the senate and the house, but by 2016 the american public again soured on what was happening and it wasn't just they were in my view not just disapproving of what george bush was doing, i think they're disapproving what the republicans in congress were doing, too, and they threw the

republicans out of power in the house and senate. and my ability to do things is getting worse over time because i thought it will be a dozen years at least before the republicans take the house back after losing it -- you know, that's the way it's going to be and then barack obama wins huge victory in 2008, 2010 comes around and republicans take the house back and make huge gains in the senate so barack obama had a two-year window of one party control and the american people again said, well, we don't like the direction this is going. i'll stick my head out and say if by chance one party controls the white house, the house, and the senate after this election, i predict two years from now the american people will take at least one branch of the congress away because the partisanship that's driving the primaries and the members of the election there is not what people want to see in a national agenda and their only way to veto that is to say if the next off-year

election we're going to have a wholesale shift of membership to get that done. >> thank you, peter. questions, comments, observations? yes, sir? >> can you speak about your relationship with your repositories? have they done anything that's delighted you and is there any down side to having your papers collected? >> i donated my papers to the massachusetts historical society so on paper i'm in great company because my papers are with thomas jefferson's and john adams and john quincy adams. [ laughter ] i don't have that many anymore but they're in a situation where they have not tackled them and i am not in any hurry but i do

stay in act i have contact with them. they have quite a few projects going on of national importance and i'm sure at some point they will get to them and that's fine by me. i know they will be safe for when the seal is cracked. >> i just want to make sure when we ask a question let's repeat the question so everybody can hear it. do you want to take this question on the archives or should we go to another question? another question? yes, sir. >> i know recently having gone to d.c. and visited our delegation from oklahoma, as a repository that gets into those conversations, their immediate concern is oppositional research down the road. a lot of these people are going to continue to wear public life. as former members, what is the advice you give to somebody? even if it's good they haven't touched those papers yet, what is the comment or advice you

give to say donation is an okay thing, a good thing, a positive thing or would you simply say that it isn't. i struggle in those conversations to communicate with people in this environment because i understand the pressure they're under and i understand there is life after congress and they have to keep that in mind. what advice would you give your colleagues when they're facing the question of who did-to-donate to and how to donate papers to repository ies? >> well, they have a very sophisticated system and have organized them quite impressively. you have to ask them how much demand they get for anyone to look at them. and that's not surprising. it's a different kind of material than we have ever

libraried before and we've done it at an era when nobody -- when everybody uses their little thing so the idea of them looking through something was written and done by others. is it at the top of their list? that doesn't mean that in the long run historically it won't be terribly important. but i do think we need to refine how we use it. when i was defeated, it was in the first election in which there have been cycles in the elections. tom delay was known as the hammer but actually what he brought to the republican party was a greater determination to raise money. we were always without the money and always behind because we -- the unions always contributed standard money to the democrats and also standard labor force and the republicans didn't have anythi anything. now the evangelicals didn't turn anything into that, at least the labor force, for a while.

rahm emanuel was the head of the democrat operation. the first was the goal was to go after people's character. before that it had always been go after their stand on issues. but it was very interesting. but that's a whole different story. but i think but that affected us as we donateed our papers we meant sure to make sure there wasn't anything to be misinterpreted easily and i didn't do it. but i've always told you that when i retired i wanted to spend time with them. when i moved i went through my notebooks more carefully.

i thought i'd slick m it down f my kids. the interesting thing is not in the slimming down, the interesting thing is in the volume of it and leafing through and seeing what the communication was so my set is better than theirs. there were places that were incomplete so what's been written is already public information about their positions. if you could get to their archives, you could see what they really did. this is what the press said they thought and what the press said they did. i've gotten to be very, very down on the press about the last few years i was in office. maybe the last eight years the reporters were so ignorant it was pathetic.

they didn't know anything about government or policy or the issues people at the hartford "courant," they didn't write stuff it was a personal attack. if you have something substantive to say, we're interested. if you don't we're not interested. but they're great papers. you should be doing -- we should be in our high schools having kids write a paper on why we should elect trump, one team in the class, and the other one why we should elect bernie sanders. it's not much fun to talk about hillary right now. it's much more -- well, it's much more instructive because you think the republican party is in trouble, ladies and gentlemen? at least -- i mean, i'm one of those republicans like brooks and every other republican i know and probably peter, too. incidentally, peter and i only served four years together but in those four years we met weekly, the moderates. we were very active so we know

each other better. so -- shucks, with that eddy i forgot what i was going to say. >> you were talking about trump and sanders. >> see, trump is responding to -- when i said oh, he'll go away, normally he would have gone away. the fact that he didn't go away, who would have thought sanders would have lasted so long? attacking hillary clinton who's been secretary of state and -- i me mean, never have we had a candidate of that caliber attacked like this. and held. now, remember, trump's philosophy is government has let us down, it's a crummy organization, it just feeds on its own, it's out of touch. there is some truth in what he is saying, like it or not.

i tried to get people to see how we could do international trade and still have a bearing on local tool industries. you have to do both. so the issues are complicated and at the same time we've killed off our newspapers, killed off the communications equipment, we've even killed off town meetings. toward the end i couldn't have town meetings because they would be picketed by some special interest and the article would be about the picketing but again this is the press. instead of going in and listening to what people were saying to me and what i was saying to them that the article would be simple because it would be on the steps. and the picketing. look at trump, who made trump? not trump. that first debate, the question to every person was how did you feel when trump called you this name?

never have we had a national debate with that focus. but trump fund level of disconnect between people and their government. there used to be mutual respect for people's opinions and it's not there anymore. we've killed it. trump is a problem for all of us. bernie is the old democrat who thinks the government can do things better than the private sector. well, that is a huge threat to the way we have built our economy and our society. so i've taken a perverse joy in this election. [ laughter ] no, really.

>> so just a comment on your question there. because of opposition research, a lot of people are not only afraid to donate their documents, they're afraid to keep their documents. >> yeah, that's right. if you have people retiring and your organization has the ability to reach out to them, it's worth it to keep the record there. if they're thinking about running for office and you are able to keep it under seal, fine. or if you say keep it later, don't destroy it. i mean at the mass historical society there was a democrat who retired a few years before me and he went out of his way to tell the mass historical society that he had burned his papers. they were not happy about that. he had been there for a dozen years. chet atkins. remember chet? i mean, it was just like -- you know, you did what? but the record is so valuable it's worth it to do that.

i mean, i'm actually someone who -- i believe in, you know, transparency and all the rest but even the idea of having presidential records unsealed relatively quickly now is you have people who are running for office who were in an advisory position to a president whose comments are coming back now and i'm thinking maybe it needs to be a little bit longer period of ti time. historians will have a crack at it but you don't want people not saying things. as it is now in politics, there's plenty that doesn't get recorded. a lot of the work that i did, i did it on the house floor. i would go -- and i was not -- a very senior member, she had people coming to her, as a newer member i would go to senior members on the floor and say i need this, can you help me with that? the best comment you can get is "i'll see what i can do."

but there's no written record of that. so for the little bit that is written that might help you understand what happened, you want to preserve that as much as you can and you also don't want people to be afraid of committing things either to hard writing or electronic writing because then you have no record to work with at all. >> i want to have a couple scatter shot quick answers to this. i'm sure you're thinking about electronic resources and who will store the old e-mails and so forth and i want a shoutout to the sunlight foundation. their grant project specific, so some of their projects will just last for a couple years but they have done jaw-dropingly wonderful work on keeping some of the materials that are available on capitol hill so look at their web site, you can also put in for them, with them for a specific project if you have one in mind. i also want to shout out to the hewlett foundation which has made a substantial contribution

to improving the understanding and recordkeeping around congress through the madison initiative which i think is up for renewal soon so the hewlett foundation has done great work. then i also want to shout out to a book that you haven't seen yet, but if you want to have it reaffirmed how important work of the archives are, and i've seen this in manuscript form, garrison nelson's new book coming out on speaker john mccormack is going to give you chill chills it should be out in september. and finally as somebody who doesn't spend as much time as garrison did i want to thank everybody for arranging things

chronologically. because i never know what it is that i'm looking for and it doesn't help me that much. and in order for me to understand what's happening in context, it's the chronological bends and files that you're maintaining as opposed to issues of specific bins and files that are incredibly helpful. so don't get too organized, just leave it in chronological order and i'll be a happy person. next question. yes, sir? >> i have a question which i think either or both of the former members of congress may answer. my question is that as somebody who over the years has done research and has written books and articles about former members of congress and presidents and what i've noticed over the years is that it is user friendly for the researcher. it will be helpful for the researcher for his or her writing projects is that the repositories vary greatly in

terms of quality and utility. and talking about john mccormack, informs the fall of 1997 that i went from boston university to look at his papers and i was stunned by the fact that -- i remember this vividly. it was literally brown paper shopping bags with just all kinds of letters and television interviews stuffed willy-nilly into these brown paper bags and the fact that the man had been speaker of the house, the fact that he had been a representative -- a u.s. representative for more than 40 years that they were still -- left congress in 1969, almost 30 years before and to compare that to much better experiences, the dodd center at the university of connecticut, looking at papers of senator thomas dodd, prescott bush, looking at eddie bolan's

papers and tip o'neill's, do you know what criteria or anything you follow trying to decide whether you want to put your papers and in terms of how they'll be cataloged, organized and treated and all the rest? >> well, in my particular case it -- it did not have a huge amount of thought, it was very pragmatic, there was a gentleman who was a state senator in massachusetts who had been like a mentor to me because he had helped candidates that i had supported when i was in college and shortly thereafter, his father had been governor in the -- massachusetts house speaker and a u.s. senator as well and i know he was active in the mass historical society so i called him up and he introduced me to the folks there. i do not put any restrictions or recommendations on the donation at the thought i gave them too much stuff but they sent out an

archivist and we went through and she said, yeah, that would be of interest, that would be of interest and that stuff. but i do not put a lot of thought into organization given where we are right now, if i knew then what i know now i would have kept my files differently to begin with because while not quite as badly organized as the brown paper bags, they definitely could use some help and so i can't -- i can't say i had the foresight to do it then but it's a good question. >> i had a friend who left congress before i did and he left -- he announced he wasn't going to run again, this is gunderson from wisconsin, he was a very active legislator and a real leader, particularly on work force issues. so he said "why would i leave someone else this junk to write what they think my record is?" so he and the staff picked out

stuff, wrote their own history and that's what they gave to their library and i think there's some usefulness in that. we just followed the lead of the librarians and what they wanted to keep. there was way, way too much stuff. i'm sure they threw out half the stuff. but it is -- it's hard to know what to keep and particularly if you're interested in history. and i think there needs to be more feedback i think there needs to be a discussion about what the libraries are looking for and the academic world and the members because there's so many things that go on that are terribly interesting and very important the process that you can't see. for instance when we were there brent scowcroft, there would be a breakfast where he would be and you would be invited and they would work through the freshman class to expose them to

minds like that on defense and arms control. same with on tax policy and on other things. there was a sense that you needed to be exposed to the great minds. well, you know, you wouldn't really see that in the paper so they're probably some improvements we can make but at the simplest level of how does democracy function. you can see a lot. in the middle group you won't have any paper, it's all electronic. they do their constituent mail electronically and you have to decide do you print off one copy of all their constituent snail i don't know how you're going to do it. i don't know how they do it. whether they send short answers to the short e-mails but i remember when i was first elected i took toby moffett's seat -- because he ran for the senate, not because i defeated

him. but when we went in to say see him he said "oh, yes we answer every phone call with a hard copy. i thought to myself, you've got to be kidding. they weren't, you just do it because that's how you hear from your people so there's a lot to be learned about how to cultivate this and it's very important because so many other repositories of that conversation have collapsed. the small newspapers and things like that so there's a lot to be learned from the communication amongst members about bills, with their constituents about bills and some of the letters you'd get from your constituents were very valuable. others were just -- you know, the number 1,000 on a certain subject from a big insurance company and they all wrote from the same letter but so that too has some significance. i think the libraries are remarkable resource that we have

but like lots of resources, as times change you have to kind of figure out how to get people interested and we're missing with our high school kids and even those faith graders how much fun it would be to have them if we could figure out how to let them do original research in the library about these people and have it organized in such a way they could do that, that would be an interesting project. >> one final question but first another little sermon from me and that is over the last 20 years we've seen an increase in civics education in terms of common core which now on the act some of the history questions are obviously civics oriented, statewide exams are trying to drive more civics education. but we learned with our head and we learned with our gut and it's that interaction between the head learning and gut learning

where real learning takes place and over the last 20 years we've seen a very disturbing monotonic trend down words, every year it's worse and that is in high school and middle school student government. they're going away. children may be learning in terms of book learning about civics education but are they allowed to have their own student government, student newspaper, class president, collecti election? the answer is yes, many students still have it. but student governments in the united states are on a rapid decline but in very important ways. it's a rapid decline in particular in urban areas and in minority communities. we learn by doing, not simply by reading. i think it's wonderful that you all are associated with university libraries and big-city libraries. please, if there's a way for you to imagine reaching out to those

middle school kids, their teachers, the communities that no longer have student government, there has to be a way to bring it back because we are, again, one generation away from our demise and one generation away from a truly vibrant democracy but it has to be something we practice and learn in our schools and libraries. who likes the final question? is there a dean of this assembly when everyone says, oh, oh, yes, we must talk, you must hear from us. that person, does that person want to stand now and ask the final question? [ laughter ] >> or have they already spoken? we have four more minutes. >> well, i'll throw in an anecdote. earlier david mentioned how in massachusetts the republican party used to be the liberal party and the democrats were the conservative. well 1948 is the first year

democrats ever took control of massachusetts house of representatives. first time ever, the republicans had it since the civil war and the democratic minority leader that year was this guy named tip o'neill. and they was minority leader in massachusetts. and he found his great ballot question to organize elections on in 1948. the ballot question was to legalize birth control. the republicans were in favor of legalizing it and the democrats were opposed to it so tip o'neill owed his becoming speaker of the mass house and later member of congress to being opposed to birth control and that's how different massachusetts was in 1948. [ laughter ] >> let me tell you another anecdote. when we took the majority in the house under newt we took control of a lot of property we didn't even know sort of existed so newt created a team that was to

go out and look at all of it. they closed four or five warehouses and stuff that was so old nobody wanted it and that was stored elsewhere. and so i just tell you that story because if trump comes in and looks at the government, that could be not all bad. the affordable care act did no repealing to any of the old law, stark and other provisions. if you know people in health care they think -- have driven them nuts. but we need someone to do it. so we're literally desperate. we can't keep spending so much money on government. no one else is, to business is operating like it was ten years

ago, none, and no employee is doing the same thing because they have different cool tos and you have to keep them on. and they don't learn it. you can't imagine some of the conversations. look at what's happening at the irs making it partisan. partly because this issue of who's nonprofit is too complicated and the who's an interest group and who should be free and get a tax subsidy for free speech. i hope on tax reform i've come to the point where we wipe them out, we can't do this. when you're a nonprofit family service agency all it means is that the state governmenttops doing it, pays you less, considerably less to do the same thing that they were doing for more money and there's no way you can keep doing a good job if everybody pays you that so there's real coming to terms.

certainly every 40 years we ought to think about what's the structure of our government. >> thank you very much for all of you for inviting us here today. [ applause ] congresswoman nancy johnson, congressman peter torkildsen. thank you so much. i know there's been food for thought. i understand we're at the moment now where you get food for yourselves so break for lunch and we will see you later. thank you very much. mesh history tv airs on

c-span 3 every weekend telling the american story through events, interviews and visits to historic locations. this month american history tv is in prime time to introduce you to programs you could see every weekend on c-span 3. our features include lectures in history, visits to college classrooms across the country to hear lectures by top history professors. american artifacts looks at the treasure at u.s. historic sites, museums and archives. real america, revealing the 20th century through archival films and newsreel. the civil war, where you hear about the people who shaped the civil war and reconstruction and the presidency focuses on u.s. presidents and first ladies. to learn about their politics, policies and legacies, all this month in prime time and every weekend on american history tv on c-span 3. coming up today on american history tv, while congress is on break, a look at congressional history. we begin with a history of organized crime in the south during the 1950s.

that's followed by the history and research on the capital page project and then historian and author david mccullough receives the freedom award. a little bit later, a look at the congressional papers collection. 100 years ago president woodrow wilson signed the bill creating the national park service and thursday we look back at the care takers of these natural and historic treasures. beginning at 10:00 a.m. eastern and throughout the day, we take you to national park service sites across the country as recorded by c-span. we're live from the national park services most visited historic home, arlingtonous, the robert e. lee memorial at arlington national cemetery. joining us with your phone calls as we talk with robert stanton,

former national park service director and brandon buys, the former arlington house site manager who will oversee the upcoming year-long restoration of the mansion, slave quarters and grounds. thursday, the 100th anniversary of the national park service live from arlington house at 7:00 p.m. eastern on american history tv on c-span 3. >> up next, history professor tammy ingram discusses her book "the wickedest city in america." she chronicles the crime investigation city chair in 1950 and 51 and field hearings they conducted in the house. the center for legislative archives hosted this event. it's just under an hour. >> thank you for attending today's researcher talk, i'm the historian at the center for legislative archives, part of