there? now we're getting somewhere. so, let's go. let's go faster. let's go further. let's go beyond. ♪ >> midco supports c-sp as a public service, along with these other television providers, giving you a front row seat to democracy. >> congressional researchers preview the new 119 congress at an event hosted by the american enterprise institute in washington, d.c.. they talked about the narrow republican majority in the house, the relationship between the new congress and trump administration, campaign-finance, and elon musk's influence. in the senate --

>> where we look at the 119th that will be. let me first start by introducing my co-panelists. to my immediate right is joshua ruder. he is a senior fellow with georgetown university' us government affairs institute, where he teaches on advanced legislator process, separation of powers, and the federal budget process. he joined the government affairs institute in 2013. he worked on the hill as an american political science professional. he has been writing on politics since 1999 -- a small topic for a small book. to his right is my colleague kevin cozart. he is also a senior fellow at aei, study in congress as well as the ministries of state, election reform, and the united

states postal service. prior to joining aei, kevin worked as vice president of policy, vice president of research partnerships, and senior fellow and director of the government's project. he is the author and editor of several books, including "congress overwhelmed: the decline in congressional capacity." for many years, he worked at the congressional research service, so he is a long hill veteran. the task before us now is to think about what comes next. we had a discussion of all the things troubling the 118. we are going to think about the prospects for the 119th. we have a different configuration of course. democrats no longer control the senate. the publicans have taken control there. we have a new majority leader for the first time in many years.

senator john thune. where does that leave us? let's turn back to the house to start with. in the house, in the 118th, the starting count i believe was 222 -212. republicans had a 10 seat margin to start. in this congress -- check me if i get this right. as of today, 219-215. it is probably going to go down in a couple of weeks to 217-two hundred 15. just the narrowest of narrow margins. the question i want to put to josh is, do house republicans have a real majority in the 119th? at least on some issues? and what happens if and when they don't?

josh: no is the short answer. they do and they don't. one of the things that is really interesting -- i'm glad you pointed out in the previous panel -- was when democrats had to help republicans get over the line to bring the debt ceiling deal to the floor. have been many other iterations, most recently with aid to ukraine, aid to israel. democrats and republicans had to work together just to bring the bill to the floor again. as a congressional scholar who is really into congressional history, these are red flag fire alarm moments. this is not something that happens. kratz and republicans do not work together to bring bills to the floor. there is a notion that the partisan team works together to bring bills to the floor. what passes on the floor substantively, whether it is a bipartisan or a partisan deal -- those coalitions change. but the mechanisms to bring bills to the floor, to make the

house operate, for example -- those are always partisan and have been for decades. we start to see democrats and republicans working together to facilitate the basic operation of the house of representatives. that is like -- what is going on? anybody stop. this is not a normal sort of thing. this is a radical change in the way the houses operated over the last 30, 40 years. and it is indicative of the types of breakdowns we see in the republican majority. we have a republican majority that is very fractured. it is fractured in a new way, a way we are trained to get a handle on. specifically, when you look at congressional majorities, they have fractured along regional lines. we had democrats in power for long structures of the 20 a century, and they were divided between northern and western democrats and southern democrats. there was a very regional interest based divide that broke the coalition up. they came together when they

needed to, but they were very divided in many cases. what we are seeing today is not that. we do not see a regional trend to the house freedom caucus. it is more ideological in nature. as we were talking about in the previous panel, catherine was talking about there is more national media now. we have fewer local and regional institutions that create these novel, parochial interests we used to see in congress. so now we have a sort of ideological divide in the republican that got to the point where it is intractable on some issues. in particular, anything spending and debt related. there are issues that they will find a majority on. i have no question that they will find a majority for something on taxes, something on energy, something on immigration. the collation kind of still comes together for those issues. what i'm basic stuff -- reauthorizing the national defense apparatus or funding the government, or raising the debt ceiling, they are very, very

broken. the question is, how is the president going to interact with this dynamic? are they going to be able to bring holdouts across the line to make it a working majority? we saw a first iteration of this in december when they tried to pass a continuing resolution to raise the debt ceiling. it did not work. it is going to be a very interesting thing to see, but i am not holding out hope that suddenly the republican majority in the house is going to be a more functional majority than what we have seen in the 118th. the senate is a different question. philip: a quick follow-up on the debt ceiling in particular. now we are in january. the suspension of the debt limit on the left i believe has run out. is that right? josh: i'm not sure because it was raised to a number instead of a date. i think it is sometime in early spring, likely. philip: i understand in the very short future we are going to run

up against the debt ceiling and be in the land of extraordinary measures, where the treasury does some shuffling of funds to allow us to continue to meet our obligations. but this is a theme of the politics of the last decade, is having to come up with the votes to pass the debt ceiling. the best, most regular feature of all of these debates is that there have been some republicans who do not want to vote to raise the debt ceiling. they maybe never have. early in the trump administration, you might look back at some of those and say that was easier than you might have thought. if trump is so loudly broadcasting that he thinks the debt ceiling is terrible, maybe that is not the thing that freedom caucus members -- the hill they want to die on. but still, coming up with 218 republican votes on a bill that raises the debt ceiling is going to be really hard, because it just takes a handful of these folks who have a deep, i think sincere, horror at the state of

our fiscal affairs, and don't want to become an accessory to loading on more debt. they see it as a principled stand they are taking that is going to make it hard for them to just get on a partisan bill. kevin, let me turn to you know. i am going to cast you kind of into gabe's role from the first panel. make the bullish case for the 199th congress. maybe the memories of the 118th are going to be behind us. maybe this is a brighter new day. what would that look like? kevin: it is not an easy case to make, based upon the math we have already laid out. if this is an unbelievably thin margin to getting anything done -- just ask yourself. if it is an important matter, do you think you could convene 217 of your friends and family in one room and say can we get to

yes? do you think it would be easy? probably not. there are going to be people who just feel differently. remember in that a structural feature of our system is that we don't have a national election where we picked all the representatives and senators and president from the same voter base. a member of congress may be with the gop and may love mr. trump, but there could be an issue on which his constituents back home feel different. he may have made his brand in a way that saying yes or no on a particular thing is just not possible without him facing the risk of a primary. and primaries, that is a whole other topic. we have talked about incentives and why members would cooperate or not cooperate. there is always that concern about if i do something to tick off primary voters, and going to get it in the neck. i would say a positive case can be made in part because the gop right now is going to be feeling

a lot of pressure. mr. trump has only four years. most of the work is going to have to be done in the first two years. whereas previously, you had a divided government, or they were out of power. they could be vigorously against stuff the other party was doing. they could blame them for a lack of border control, inflation, what have you. they have got unified government now. they can point to the narrow margin, but they are still in charge. they can only engage in blame shifting for so long before voters turn on them. so they are going to have to get together and make good on things like immigration. they are going to have to figure out things like how do you use tariffs as a tool, and at the same time keep inflation down. it depends on the breadth of your use of tariff. and the pressure is going to be

on. certainly, members of both the senate and the house no -- know that the incoming president will not hesitate to hammer them if he gets ticked off. numbers of the house freedom caucus, they are sitting around looking at each other right now and noticing that a certain leader of theirs is no longer theirs -- no longer there. he crossed trump. he endorsed the santos during the presidential race. and trump and company poured in lots of money to run a different candidate, and he is not here. that is a real threat. it is a tradition, i think the -- think, that when you have these brief periods of unified government, legislators try to do what they can to help the president succeed. don't want to kneecap him fresh out of the gate, you know? 20 plus years ago when i was finishing my dissertation, i was

interviewing some hill staff about george w. bush and the "no child left behind" act, the big reauthorization of the 19 65 elementary and secondary education act. i had republican staff tell me they were not entirely happy with the bill, because it was brought up early in mr. busch's term, they did not want to make him look bad by opposing him. that was before social media. so i think there is going to be really intense incentive for republicans to line stuff up that mr. trump consigned to get these things through. we have already seen that the lincoln riley bill was passed. there is always stuff being passed. they are trained to set up the president and their party to look good. they are making good on promises for voters. that incentive is going to be very strong. but there are going to be hard questions around the debt limit. how do you do appropriation bills so you are not omnibusing, etc. philip: let's look back at

recent history -- last week. speaker mike johnson managed to secure reelection as speaker on the first ballot, but only by holding the vote open for a dubiously long period, and doing some backroom arm-twisting, let's say with the help of mr. trump on the phone. is this a happy story for the bullish case because they did in fact get it done? or does this actually put up some red flags? what do you guys think? josh: i believe it is hard to gauge, to be honest with you. it went better than most people probably expected. it was technically one ballot, even though that ballot took a really long time to complete. it is better than most people had. i was going for at least three, personally. they did get him over the line. on the other hand, this is sort

of the lowest hurdle to clear, right? this is like stepping over a crack in the sidewalk type stuff. this type of operation is basic, basic operation of a party. this practice of confirming the choice of the caucus for the speaker of the house has been routine since the 1870's. the reason that it has broken down and we are getting to this point where it is like this is really taking a long time -- that is notable. it is hard to say how it is going to go. speaker johnson has a really, really, really tough sled to push over the next few months, whether it is a continuing resolution or a spending bill or the reconciliation bill/bills that will be going through. so i don't know that he is in the clear. it is hard to gauge how effective or how good this was for the party. yes, they cleared it, but it is also the most fundamental and basic thing that parties have been doing for the last 150 years. they cleared it. good.

that does not mean anything moving forward. we don't know. kevin: and there was a risk they were going to have more trouble covering it if they were down the two votes they will be down soon with administration jobs. what do you think? kevin: my point that when you are in control of things that you view the use of time a little differently. when we had that long fight over whether mr. mccarthy could keep his job or whether he could hold it in the first place, they did not have the presidency. they did not have unified control of government. so to some degree it was a calculation that they could make that they could have that fight. folks who were in the previous fight for the most part hold all the cards on this one. they could hold out and play games and bargain for one thing or another. but ultimately they realize that we collectively are not going to be able to make good on the promises that are part and parcel of our brand if we spend a bunch of time falling on our

faces, not being able to choose a speaker and open congress and count the electoral votes and electronic the president. different incentive. philip: i want to talk about the partisan avenue and the bipartisan avenues in this congress. let me start with the bipartisan. so, one of the most important things to understand about recent years, which is the thing that i suppose gives some force to the objections of a unit party -- the spending bills, the defense authorizations, almost always pass with a very strong bipartisan majority. we are talking 300, 350 votes in the house, 75, 80 votes in the senate. sometimes even more than that. even amidst all the partisan rancor on a lot of these, keeping the gears of government turning, we do manage to end up

with big bipartisan coalitions. is that still possible in the second trump administration? >> of course. and if you look back at the first trump administration, he was a far more effective bipartisan legislator than a partisan legislator. there were a lot of things that president trump would push that were not really sort of in the orthodox republican coalition. infrastructure, for example, was one. so he had a really difficult time pushing a lot of things that he wanted to. and he had a difficult time kind of converting his republican colleagues in congress over to his position, whether it was a border wall, infrastructure, or what have you. he was far more effective in a partisan -- the covid packages, the omnibus legislation at the end of congress. he was far more willing to take on those things. prior to the inflation reduction

act, one of the largest investments in climate research and climate sciences and energy was the trump administration omnibus at the end of his term. with 30 some odd billion in climate investment. he is a more bipartisan legislator. how does that interact with congressional politics, republican politics on capitol hill? that is not as clear. what is going on, on capitol hill, is a different sort of populism then the populism that president trump has. president trump is far more open to raising the deficit, right? raising debt, he is far more open to policies that are popular. he is not keen on reforming medicare and medicaid. these are things that are not in his bailiwick in terms of campaign promises. whereas a significant portion of the republican congress -- conference on both sides of the aisle are. it is a difference between the populism of capitol hill and the populism donald trump has been able to manifest.

philip: the physical environment today is very different than the first or around. the first trump administration was often able to cut bipartisan deals by saying let's grow the pie. we will give democrats more on their domestic spending programs. we will give the military more to make her publicans happy. we all go home and call it a win. today, i think, with the concern about inflation still very raw, i don't think you can cut those deals. josh: that is true. and we were running large deficits back then, but to trillion dollar deficits with the covid package -- this is an annual basis. it is a different physical environment. it will be interesting to watch the fiscal hawk caucus of the republican congress -- chip roy -- how did they react to the demands president trump is going to be asking for? yes, bipartisanship is absolutely in the cards. at least from the president' is

perspective. the question is, what consequences does that have for speaker johnson, for example? that is a different question, how you manage the coalition. kevin: if i can chime in on this one, i think out-of-the-box we are going to see republicans struggle. they are incentivized to claim credit. they are going to line up bills that fit with what they campaigned on. lincoln riley is one of them. we will see a lot of those get lined up. whether democrats go for them or not is no matter to them. they want to show voters that they are making good on promises, so they will push those things through. then, we will enter this period where there will be reconciliation bills may be used to deal with what falls in the glass of high salience issues, the issues on which the parties differentiate their brand -- border funding, energy, etc.. that vehicle, which allows you to kind of user partisan

majority to get what you want -- some of those high salience issues are going to be taken through that process. meantime, there is going to be a lot of low salience stuff. the parties cannot really camping differently on it. you get stuff like how shall we reauthorize the federal aviation administration. things like that where your average voter does not pay attention to it. you do not campaign on the sort of stuff. so the incentive to try to stick it to the other side is way lower, and the incentive of cooperating can be quite high, particularly for individual members who are invested in this stuff, or things that affect the people back home quite tangibly. so that is the kind of flight course we are going to be on, i think. the low salience stuff is going to get done, but it will probably be done later. bipartisan stuff will happen.

meanwhile, high salience stuff will go through reconciliation. and yeah, partisan bills are going to be the norm, i think, for january. philip: let's stick on reconciliation for a minute. for the audience to get back up to speed on this -- reconciliation is part of the widget act. it was originally conceived of as a way bipartisan legislators could get together and balance the budget. ironically it has become the vehicle for passing some big bills that blow out the deficit and make it even bigger. it was the way that republicans passed the tax cuts and jobs act back in 2017. it was the way joe biden passed his big stimulus act coming in, past the inflation reduction act subsequently.

it is the way that we avoid the filibuster in the united states senate. now, that all makes something called the byrd rule very important. that tells you what you are allowed to put in a reconciliation bill after the late, great senator robert byrd of west virginia. and it basically says it has to be about taxes or spending to get into a reconciliation bill. what is really about taxes and spending? how far can you stretch that? that has been a constant fight between the parties and the parliamentarian gets yanked around in awkward ways. but exerts some kind of stabilizing force, perhaps. what are we going to see this year on how much republicans think they can put into a reconciliation bill? are they going to sort of stealthily, effectively into the filibuster -- stealthily

end the filibuster with reconciliation? josh: one of the things i have been surprised about with the new republican senate is there fidelity to the rules. i personally have been waiting for the death of the filibuster for about 10 years. i thought it was dead. i thought it was going to die. i have wanted it to die because it is an institution that has sort of corrupted the legislative process in a way. you were talking about the omnibus legislating in the prior panel. that is really a function of the filibuster. you just cannot do even uncontroversial stuff in the senate without it being filibustered. it could pass with 90 votes and it gets filibustered. we are not bringing the nasa bill to the floor because a senator has a problem with it. that is a filibuster problem. i have been surprised because it has been an institution that i

thought maybe with a narrow majority in the house and a narrow majority in the senate, they could have one or two items that you could not get through -- that you could not put into a reconciliation package or immigration or energy legislation -- something along those lines -- it would be the issue that blew up the filibuster once and for all. but so far, senators from across the spectrum on the republican side of the aisle have said i am not going to do that. we are not going to have a carveout for reconciliation. we are not going to have a carveout in the legislative filibuster. we are not going to damage that institution. so i don't think you are going to see any real novel plays, at least it does not appear right now. that could change as we get into the actual legislative details. one of the problems with forecasting this at the moment is we literally have no idea what they are going to put in this bill, and they don't either, which is fun to watch. you can kind of see all the different asks being made, and nobody knowing which is going to come through or not. but i don't think you are going

to see any sort of wild departures from the filibuster, sickly because one of the underappreciated factors of this is that it does protect members of the majority party. they can blame reconciliation. they can blame the senate parliamentarian. i did not get my provision in because the parliamentarian said it could not be in. we saw that over and over again in the 117th congress. provisions that were scored as $50 billion or more annually, like the minimum wage provision that bernie sanders tried to put into a reconciliation package -- that was struck as being not merely incidental by the byrd rule, and therefore not available under reconciliation. $50 billion is a chunk of money. but what it does indicate also is that democrats did not have the votes to overrule the parliamentarian in this case. so it is a shield for majority members. i think a lot of republicans are hoping for that shield to hide behind as different provisions

get thrown into the mix of what may pass under reconciliation or not. getting rid of the filibuster may embolden a lot of majorities, but keeping the filibuster protects a lot of majority members. i think we are going to see it around for another two years. kevin: i thought we got a signal from senator thune, majority leader for republicans, who has taken over for mitch mcconnell, the other week. he said we are not anticipating trying to got to the filibuster -- trying to gut the filibuster, and i hold him to that. he is an institutionalist. he has been trained up. and he knows that if he does this, the to it will be responded by a tap from the other party. the worm will turn and republicans will find themselves in the minority. he was there just a few years ago, when democrats had the majority in the chamber, and they decided to bring up a 700 page bill to remake america's

federal elections processes. when republicans did not go along with it, they called up to try to vote to exempt it from the filibuster. he knows that that can be done. i don't think he wants to invite them to do that. and i guess i should just say as a public service announcement -- the byrd rule, if you are trying to figure out what exactly this means, what it looks like, what falls a field of it, what can pass through it, my former employer, the congressional research service, has nice little reports if you just google crs report byrd rule. they have a nice, plain description of the matter. philip: let me zoom out a little bit. we have been taking congress very seriously in a way here. is there some case to be made congress is a lot more superfluous at this point, that

the trump administration is actually going to do everything it wants to do, mainly by going the executive way? it is going to do a lot on tariffs. it is going to change a lot on southern border policy. maybe mr. trump has a lot of new foreign policy goals all of a sudden the don't really require routing through congress necessarily. we saw this drama play out in december when we were talking about trump reset congress so he could make all of his cabinet appointments by recess appointment. the trouble of having congress actually take all the votes seems like too much of a hassle. i don't know exactly who within the administration is pushing that kind of perspective. it seems that there is a block of people within the incoming administration that really

things of congress as a pretty lowly nuisance and ready to circumvent them as much as possible. i'm not sure. there may be a different faction within the administration that is more interested in making mr. trump into the chief legislature -- legislator, who can with things and get things through congress. how do you see the relationship between this new administration and congress playing out? >> that is a fantastic question. i would not say congress is superfluous. to take the devils advocate perspective here, i think in the last trump administration, we saw congress empowered in a lot of ways. they did not do it in big, bold ways. he took a big major executive push. we did deny him a lot of things. making some changes he would like in legislation. the president really worked on congressional republican terms

in his first time around. so i don't know that they are superfluous. they will come under a greater challenge and a greater threat for sure. one thing that the president in the first term -- he really stretched the power of executive authority. he will test that again for sure, and maybe in ways that are even more bold and more dangerous than the first time around. and it will be up to congress to either abide by those shifts or to let them go. and it is going to be hard, especially in these high salience standoffs. for example, declaring executive emergencies, for example, on the southern border. do you take funds from various military accounts to pay for a border wall? those are really big affronts to congress's power. impalement seemed to be another one where the president is granted a certain amount of authority, or agencies are granted authority to spend in a fiscal year. if the president refuses to spend the money, saying that is

not necessary, that is another huge challenge to congressional authority. it would spark a major clash between the two institutions. so superfluous, i don't know. but they will be stretched, for sure. how they respond to this -- they have been more eager to deny things that he has wanted in the past, rather than to take away things, if that makes sense. they won't give him things in legislation, but they are not necessarily eager to undercut their president. remember, they only overrode one of his vetoes in his first term. it is going to be a very difficult time for the first branch, to be sure. their authority may be challenged more significantly than in recent years. josh: let me answer this by saying if you go to understandingcongress.org and you surf down a little bit on the opening page, you will see a post co-author ride -- co-authored by phillip, that

puts together some data which shows that the incoming trump administration has a significant number of members -- former members of congress who are working for him. and you would hope that that would be an asset in bargaining between the branches, avoiding some of the miss communications and the gaffes that occurred during the first trump administration, that in many ways kind of set the stage for a lot of fighting. and a lot of needless stumbles. will they do it? will they not do it? we will see. i think mr. trump probably to some degree will do congress a favor by issuing executive orders and starting regulatory processes to deal with a number of issues, which really congress should be legislating on, but rather than wait for them to grind through that and to eat up all the calendar time -- with whatever else is needed, he will just try to push it through the

other venues. you know, it -- as for the legislative part, the sequencing is going to be so critical, you know? which things do you vote on first? which ones do you think you could assemble the majorities for to get through both chambers? i think there has got to be a lot of preplanning that occurs so they can pull these bills up and do them in a way that keeps that very narrow majority onboard. and if that does not happen, things could very quickly go south, and we would have a lot of finger-pointing amongst republicans. philip: i will ask one more question and then i'm going to turn to the audience, so get your questions ready. the does -- foge -- doge, often in the news. there are no carcasses in the house and senate. is this a real development? what do you make of that?

>> i don't know what to make of it. i will be honest, right now it seems like two guys in a room with some ideas. they may have very good ideas that may catch fire, but i also am a little skeptical that it becomes an official department of the government. for one, you are expanding the executive branch in order to reduce the executive branch. it is an interesting concept. i think there is some appeal to creating more government efficiency. there is no question about that. reducing redundancy, all of those sorts of things. that meshes very well with republican ideology, historically speaking. is it going to happen? is there going to be a department of government efficiency? i don't know. it would need congressional authorization. they would need money. you have transparency laws. there are all sorts of things that go along with becoming an official department and agency. i don't know that it will become

more, though it could spur more activities in terms of looking at agencies, looking at redundancies, and trying to create more efficiency. philip: let me ask one more question to you, kevin. the doge has partially captured some reformist energy in the country. there are other kinds of reformist energy percolating around. do you see any chances in the 119th congress for any big picture system reforms -- how we elect representatives, how big congress is, any of that kind of stuff? we hear some chatter. we have lots of dissatisfaction. is any of that going to breakthrough? kevin: well, no. my observation is that when people win they are less interested in changing the rules, because they won under the old rules. it is pretty farsighted to say the system did not work for us.

we just happened to get through. so i doubt it. i think whatever great arguments there are four, say, expanding the house of representatives, or getting rid of partisan primaries -- i don't think there is any gop appetite collectively for doing the sort of things. and i think the reformist energy as you have referred to it is certainly caught up in the doge. i would have to say that whether or not it is going to be a good expression of those energies is an entirely open question. the doge, even if it became a department, which i doubt it will, does not have any real authority. it cannot just change regulations. it cannot stop money from being spent. it can't do a whole lot of anything, you know? if you are worried about federal spending, for example, you should realize that more than

half the budget goes to entitlements, which are kind of on autopilot. in a big chunk of change goes to paying on the debt. how do you make those things more efficient? it is no easy question, and it is going to require pushing a statute through congress. i asked a colleague who has a new piece out called "how the doge can succeed." essentially, it has to figure out what it wants to be. it could focus foremost on the regulatory side. there are more than 186,000 pages of regulations presently in effect. by calling some of that and rationalizing some of it, you could bring economic growth which is good for the revenue side and for the country generally. philip: all right. thank you. we will turn to audience questions now. down in the front, please say your name, and wait for the microphone and ask a question.

bob: bob wyman. i am probably showing my age by admitting that i remember the days when the announcement of the pastorate rule was considered somewhat shocking. but today, the idea that having a majority of the majority vote for a bill -- that almost seems quaint. today, i think the idea is that unless the bill can pass with only the majority's votes, the bill won't move. this is a very different congress than i grew up with as a kid. and then i think anybody intended to create in our founding. i remember as well back in the days before gingrich, when committees and even individual members seemed to have a significant amount of power. over time, since at least gingrich, and before, the amount of power that has moved from the members to the leadership is just astounding. i cannot help thinking that part

of the problem here is not just that congress is having some problems due to polarization in operating, but it is almost like what we have done is we have got a homegrown parliament that is trying to run with rules that are designed for a congress. and a congress and a parliament are drastically different things , completely different cultures, completely different dynamics. you cannot have an efficient parliament if you have got the rules for a congress. you cannot have a good congress if you are trying to run with the rules of a parliament. have we built a system which is completely different from that which we are designed to have? >> you are singing my song, to some extent. a large portion of my book is the top-down dominance not just in the house, but in the senate, which is maybe even more extraordinary, how dominant the leaders in the senate have been in the 21st century, since harry reid.

that is a really dramatic development, and it really does cause rank and file members to feel cut out of what matters in the institution. and we have to understand that the members themselves have ratified these dynamics, in part because they believe in the importance of fighting the next election, like we talked about in the first panel. but yes, i think things have reached kind of a breaking point where members want to push back. i think -- i was involved in efforts to push proposed rules changes in the house that would allow committees more of a guaranteed route to the floor. i think that would be an important way of pushing back against this dynamic. i think it is overdue. but the members themselves don't have as long of a historical

memory as you just had in your question. most of them did not surf before the obama administration. let alone before the gingrich era, right? trying to get back to thinking about the possibilities for congress is a challenge right now. certainly, that is one thing that we hear hope to provide for congress, is a sense of, just based on the history of the institutions, there are a greater range of possibilities for the way they organize themselves and function than we have seen recently. do you guys want to chime in? >> i think exactly right. we have created a system that is far too based on what the majority leader and the speaker thing, right? we have created a system that is so based on partisan cooperation, in a country that does not really effectively use or utilize partisan cooperation. we don't have parties that work with that kind of homogeneity and unity.

so one of the things that has got to happen is that whenever speaker johnson or majority leader thune are going into a meeting, they are presumably speaking for their entire chamber, but i don't think anybody could speak for the republican party. that is going to be very, very difficult to adjudicate or to actually fix, because the speaker is in charge of the house and the majority leader leader is in charge of the senate. all these members don't agree and don't agree with the deals they are making. i think this speaks to a lot of the dynamics on these panels, and a lot of the problems with the congress at the moment. we don't really have a majority that is functional. and so one of the reasons we don't have a lot of members that have relationships across party lines or with members they have just met is because the power has effectively gone from them. it is with the speaker and with the majority. until we get a system that actually enables legislators to be part of the legislative

process, we are not going to see the kind of more cooperative congress, a congress that is more interested in its constitutional privileges and rights. we are not going to get a congress that is going to really promote bipartisan legislation more forcefully. we are not going to get a congress that is going to not have speaker fights every few months, right? i think a lot of the root of it is that we are in a place for the parties are not really a majority of the institution anymore because they don't have the votes for it. but also in a place where the institutions are run by the majority party. there is a disjunction between the electoral politics and the governing politics that cannot be fixed. it is going to be very hard. >> you are right. there is a cause i parliamentary power that has been grafted onto a congressional system, and it does not work well. another long sweep of history change is that it used to be the case that a president in this country was, to some degree, a

creature of the party. and now the party is becoming a bit of the creature of the person who becomes the president. and that is. that is going to have clear effects on legislative behavior. we would be remiss if we did not mention the brute fact of the intense competition between the two parties for control, and the logic that that creates amongst legislators. if you are really worried about holding onto power right now as a republican, you have strong incentives to not buck the speaker or the majority leader in some overt way, not upset the president, and to be a really intense team player unless you are absolutely confident that you have got such a huge majority at home that it does not matter if you lose control of the chamber or if your president tanks. both legislators -- most legislators don't have that luxury. some do, and they will be the

maverick sort of characters. but people on capitol hill -- the overt madness we sometimes think is going on there -- is -- are very rational actors. another interesting factor that has aided the empowerment of the speaker and majority leader is campaign-finance. if you are facing competitive elections, you need to raise a ton of money to try to eke out a victory over the other side. you don't want to have 53 numbers of your party all running around trying to raise money. would you rather centralize things and have the majority leader do the calls, instead of doing your share as an adjunct to that purpose? inevitably, that means you as a legislator to some degree are in hock to the person at the top of the chamber. there is no easy way to undo that unless you create your own fundraising machine, like aoc, like marjorie taylor greene, elise stefanik.

these are people who were able to build their own model and create their own oceans of money coming in. they were able to create their own space if they wanted to distance from leadership. philip: we are running low on time, so let me try to take a few questions from the audience consecutively, and we will try to give some lightning round answers before we conclude. folks in the audience -- in the sweater, right here. >> thanks. and watching what happened with the shootdown of the reconciliation bill, we saw some interesting dynamics, which is that you did get elon musk involved. he apparently had his people use ai techniques to go through that bill, that 1500 pages, very, very quickly, pick out issues, and then revert to social media to dispute those issues and create the whole dynamic that happened. so i am really wondering -- this

leads me to think that we may be -- what do you think forecasts may be for reverting to what is actually an older concept, the nixon years, what were referred to as the imperial presidency? are we going to see sort of a trumpet imperial presidency, simply because our dynamics are, to use an earlier term today, fractured now, and manipulable by those who have mastered the temporal dynamics of a social media environment? it leaves a 500 plus person entity in the dust. thank you. philip: great questions there. the buddy else? in the back. >> thank you. relatively short question. with respect to the importance of relationships in the senate

and the general tendency of the senators to work behind the scenes, across the aisle, and across the ideological divide, do you feel that that will remain in this 119th congress? philip: ok. and does anyone want to ask one last very quick question? roger: roger coach eddie. would anyone in the panel care to speculate on what it is that donald trump did to swing those two votes? was it a threat? was it a promise? was it intellectual persuasion? it may say something about how this congress will proceed, and what works and what does not work. everybody is wondering how did the flips take place. does anyone have an idea? philip: i will just answer that because that is reporting that i have read. mike johnson was asked what did

he give up to get those two votes. he said nothing. trump said i did not threaten anybody. i just reminded them that we need to all be together now. so there was a sense that the folks slowing johnson down were not really all that determined to stop him. i think that would be fair to say. they wanted to put him on notice. they didn't seem to really expect to get that much. that is my best understanding from the reporting that i have seen. so that is the third question. let me turn it over to you, josh and kevin, for some of these big questions. how about will this nimble social media mass that elon musk could marshall in december have made congressional deliberation obsolete? will that somehow bolster the imperial presidency, which is certainly something that has made a big comeback, apart from trump even?

what do we think of that idea? >> i think one of the issues is that -- there are a couple problems here. with social media, i think it can be marshaled to influence legislators. i think legislators also take social media with a larger grain of salt than they used to. when i was working on capitol hill, twitter was new, so we checked the mentions to see what was going on. now, we know the mentions are a verynow we know that the mentios are just the hyper engaged people and may not reflect your constituency with the kind of accuracy you are looking for. and i think what we are seeing with elon musk derailing it at last is that it wasn't the way that was negotiated, with the johnson, behind closed doors, literally by himself in some cases, then, presenting it to his conference. that was an extremely problematic way to go about things. congress can steamroll. congress can do what it wants to

do, but it buy in. it needs to feel like it's voice has been heard, whatever outcomes they put out there. i think that in that particular situation where the speaker was not really negotiating with his of congress in an effective way it did not create the buy-in needed for the bill to continue despite opposition. >> it did not take a lot of challenging or high quality challenging. there was no buy-in to start. >> right. republicans were already frustrated by how things were going. they were like, i can't stand this and this guy will not be speaker. they were saying this while he was negotiating a bill for them. that is part of it. we are in an unknown right now. we have ever had someone this sort of power and influence this closely connected to government itself. so, we will see. but i am kind of of the opinion congress can and will do the

things it wants to do and it is mostly in the business of doing popular things. having a couple tweets here and there are both derailed out. but it really does depend on the type of negotiation and the political context in which it has been made. that there is no buy-in, even for a small change, a small curveball from the social media world may be able to derail it. >> your question is fascinating. part of me wants to go back to the early 20th century to see how legislators and presidents dealt with depressed barons of the day, william randolph hearst, these sorts of people, who had the ability to blast out across the nation editorials and things like that that could really affect public sentiment. mr. trump has shown he is more than willing to change his mind, to the exasperation of people in congress who think they have him to a negotiating position.

he flipped and he has thrown elon in their who, if anything, has been made to care about his personal history, he will do what he wants to do for the most part. he certainly will not ask permission. it could be quite a wild ride. it depended on the content of the tweet, he says something, like, this bill has a god-awful provision to do an evil thing, a lot of followers will instantly repeat that and call out congress. it will immediately put certain representatives in a position where they have to say, do i try to tell them that is not quite accurate? do i try to explain and justify this? you are just creating more work. this is where the insight would be to just say, i will say yes to this thing. >> we are coming to a close. let me offer a couple closing takeaways from today. i think that one of the main themes running through here is

it is not just what congress does or can do, it is also how it does it. the how really matters. getting to your question, gentlemen in the back, when is it that we are able to make a backroom deal that will stick? there has to be some amount of trust involved. that is one of the fascinating things about joe manchin and kyrsten sinema, who made a lot of deals happen in the 117th congress. they were willing to put their trust in some of their colleagues and put themselves out there for a fair amount of abuse because of that. and sort of act as a glue to make things come together. it took long investment in relationships from those two and some believe in this fellowship of the senate. we do not know where those things stand today. i think that's urgently losing those two in particular is significant. but, somebody else may step into their shoes.

we have to find ways of deliberating, ways of working our way through issues that people can accept as legitimate that can stand up to whatever whims of the day come through social media so we are not just blowing hither and thither. the one thing we want to leave you with is we do not know what will happen with the 119th congress. congress is in some ways at its best when it is the least predictable. it can be a lively, vital place that surprises us all all the time. we will all be >> tuesday, how u.s. allies and partners navigate trump's policies live from the center for strategic studies on c-span,

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