which president harry truman slipped away to avoid the press and commotion associated with such a close election. as david tells the story in his award winning book "truman", around 6:30, the president had a ham and cheese sandwich and a glass of buttermilk. at 9:00 p.m. he went to bed, believing he had lost the election. at midnight he awoke, turned on the radio next to his bed and heard nbc declare due deuy the winner. he went back to sleep. four hours later, his secret service agent woke him and told him the late returns put um over the top. he had won the election. a few years ago passing through this bit of information to my nephew, we drove to the hotel, that is now part of the sheridan

chain. believing that the hotel must have a small room, to memorialize the front desk where i inquired where we could see the room where harry truman learned that he had been elected president. with no sign of embarrassment, the person behind the desk responded, said when we remodeled that hotel, we made that into a broom closet. well the lesson is, we never know when the occasion will arise that we will be called upon to do our part to preserve history and our heritage. so keep your eyes open. this evening was made special by contributions from the following. the pharmaceutical company, cobank, airlines for america, bank of america and home depot. we appreciate your generous support. thank you for coming, ladies and gentlemen. we were treated to a unique event and now we ask you to join

the mccullough family and other members of the board to our reception. good evening. [ applause ] american history tv airs on c-span3 every weekend telling the american story through events, interviews and visits to historic locations. this month american history tv is in primetime to introduce you to programs you could see every weekend. our features include visits to college classrooms across the country to hear lectures, by top history professors. american artifacts, take as look at the museums and archives, reel america, revealing the 20th century through archival films,

and newsreels. the civil war, hear about the people who shaped the civil war, and the presidency focuses on u.s. presidents and first ladies to learn about their politics, policies and legacies. all this month in primetime and every weekend on american tv on c-span 3. coming up next, how things have changed in the u.s. house of representatives since the 119 1980s. the edward m. kennedy institute is the host of this event. it is 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, faculty chair, master in

public administration programs in the john f. kennedy schools of government at harvard university. since joining the faculty in 1992, he is a member of the core faculty within the carr center for human rights policy and is a faculty affiliate. of the tone man center for state and local government. in the wake of the 2000 presidential elections, 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 directed 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 have also agreed that 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 quite 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 then 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 of 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 rhinos if you're republicans. if you're a republican in the house today you worry about being cantered. 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 oliver 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. so 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 she left in january of 2007, that institution had

changed quite dramatically. but the institution is still quite stable. important work has to get done. 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 introspective, tell us how the institution changed and what it was like for them and what their relationship with you as administrators and librarians 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 torkildsen. two wonderful former members of congress. thank you. nancy? >> 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 a few months 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, one of the really great moderate republicans of all times. 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 forward to when the republicans became a majority and nute 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 who 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 district 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 beginning. over time they get to know you and your record. but, you know, i came with in a senate record. i didn't want to contradict my record. any way, that whole thing of 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. he said, i'm not telling them. i want you to talk to the ladies about the dress.

but don't think it's only the women. 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. for instance, 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. so there were -- 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 41 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 richer, 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 do 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 me, 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. they made homemade soup, and that was lunch. 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. you know, and, so, 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. what do we need to gain? and the other thing they would see is the extraordinary amount of work a member has to do. not just work in their district. my husband is here with me. and, you know, we didn't realize we would have no life at home. i mean, because you got off the plane and once staff was waving bye and one was greeting you all prepared. we've got our set of things for you to do. but also, the intellectual challenge. i never worked so hard learning as 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 briefed 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. so he was not someone who was going to rush home and rush back because it wasn't practical. but nancy and i and people who live in the northeast were always expected back. as soon as congress adjourned, usually on a thursday, you hop on a flight and come back. the staff would be there. and without exaggerating, i told people 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 my 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 minority in the massachusetts state house but i was in a tiny minority. and, so, you had lots of issues that would come by. and 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 get 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 maybe 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. because he was not -- he was a demo instead of a rhino. 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 moderates 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. to address the issue. and it had gotten that far. and 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 then he ees 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 his 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 worried about the general election opponent. they're only worried if at all about a primary opponent. to me, something has to give there. 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 scratching my 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. so now she -- 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, somewhere like 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 and 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 great 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 1960s 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 you 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. of the united states congress. 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 more 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 data. and for every state legislature for which we have 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 unwelcome outcomes. 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 longer 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. you could not -- if you were a sitting member of congress, go into another member of congress's district and campaign for the opponent. if you 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 primaries. there's a regular relationship between when primaries happen and how extreme the candidates coming out of those primaries are likely to be. it's called the primary gap. the primary gap is the amount of time between the primary.

let'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, based on that primary gap, 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 about narrow 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 our 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. >> that's what i'm checking

here. >> 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 talk 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 speaker, 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 chairman. they would tell you go see the subcommittee chairman.

fred upton said to me one time, good friend of mine, chairman of energy and commerce, 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 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 entitlement. i can't do an entitlement. so we agreed to a capped entitlement. now, in some states, 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.

so you have to -- legislating is a profound experience. it goes to the heart of how you build human communities. 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. it doesn't fit. it can't tie itself down because in some states there is a different pattern. i was interested in one that recently got the right to expand coverage but not through medicaid. well, the waiver section has been there all that time but burwell wasn't flexible enough until toward the end. and then it was kind of too late to say they said well, do it through the waiver system, do it your own way.

legislating is fascinating and interesting. 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 seen speakers do that on the other side. it used to be part of our

process just to show his freshman that you don't rule the world, honey. there's still a majority of the body that makes law. that's what made her so 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 platform to run on that's strong enough. in a sense to power through trump, i don't know. 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.

>> peter? >> it's fascinating because i understand a lot of the inside baseball that she's talking about. and if you don't, at some point there is questions you can ask us about this. but i see is that when the republicans took power in 1995, it was the first time in 40 years they'd been in the majority in the house. and the other times they had been in power for just one term, unless you go back to the 1920s. so it had been a long time since they had been in the majority. normally when the party switches power, 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 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 it 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 me to 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 country. even though it's definitely going to have some bumps along the way as well. so it's a situation where the process is headed in the right direction.

i hope that it continues in that direction. but, again, there is a lot of unknowns. i think it is an improvement that you do allow members to participate. 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. but, you know, in 1994 elections, 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. and two years later he lost the house and the senate. >> because he couldn't control his party. >> but it was very interesting. and then, republicans, a couple years newt lost a few seats then he left as speaker. but then you have george bush elected as president. in 2000, losing the popular vote, but 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 2006 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 ] they have done something to delight me in that they have not touched them. it's a case where -- i thought i had a lot of papers and then nancy don't me how many she

donated. but they're in a situation where they have not tackled them and i am not in any hurry but i do stay in active 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 be in 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 to-donate to and how to donate papers to repositories? >> 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. but i don't think we've really learned how to use this material

to our advantage. 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 anything. now the evangelicals didn't turn anything into that, at least the

labor force, for a while. so we went -- but that election i lost was the first one. 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 donated our papers we meant sure to make sure there wasn't anything to be misinterpreted easily and i that's what i was told. 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 have a duplicate set i sent to them because i thought i'd slim it down for 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. and what they really thought, versus 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. where as before that, we had a very seasoned guy at the her had and another guy 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.