Understanding Congress

As listeners know, every two years the House of Representatives is reborn. After the November election each party convenes in Washington, DC. They discuss and debate how they will run their parties, and what their legislative priorities will be. And if they are members of the majority party, they will discuss and decide what the rules of the House should be. Then when they open the new Congress in January one of the first things they will do is to vote along party lines on a new rules package.A group of scholars and former House members recently released Revitalizing the House (Hoover Institution/Sunwater Institute), a report calling for the House to revise its rules. You can find that report on UnderstandingCongress.org.To discuss why the House should change its rules I have with me one of the authors, Dr. Philip Wallach. He is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He is a colleague and a friend. At AEI he studies America’s separation of powers, with a focus on regulatory policy issues and the relationship between Congress and the administrative state. His latest book is Why Congress (Oxford University Press).Click here for the full transcript of the episode.

The topic of this episode is, “What does the House Ways and Means Committee do? And how does it do it?”The House Ways and Means Committee is the oldest committee of the United States Congress, first established in 1789 and became a standing committee in 1805. It has jurisdiction over raising revenue for the government to spend---taxes, tariffs, and the like. The term “Ways and Means” comes from English Parliamentary practice, wherein there was a committee with authority for finding the ways and means to pay for government actions and policies.My guest is Tom Reed, a former member of the House of Representatives. He was in Congress from 2010 to 2022 and represented New York’s 29th and 23rd districts. Importantly for this podcast, Mr. Reed served on the House Ways and Means Committee and was deeply involved with its tax reform work.Click here for the full transcript of the episode.

The topic of this episode is, “How can the House of Representatives better prepare new members?”My guest is Rep. Stephanie Bice, a Republican who has represented Oklahoma’s fifth congressional district for the past four years. She previously served in the Oklahoma state legislature from from 2014 to 2020. Prior to that, she worked in business for her family’s technology company and her own marketing firm.I first met Rep. Bice perhaps eight years ago. I was studying alcohol policy reform and she was deep in the process of helping rewrite some of Oklahoma’s outdated alcoholic beverage laws.Rep. Bice, I should add, sits on the House Appropriations Committee and the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology. And most relevant for this podcast, she also is on the Committee on House Administration, which has jurisdiction over many matters including the onboarding of new members of Congress.

The topic of this episode is, “How does media affect our perceptions of Congress?’As listeners no doubt know, Americans are down on Congress. Public approval of Congress has averaged about 20 percent over the past 20 years, according to Gallup. Certainly, the people on Capitol Hill are partly to blame. We have legislators who behave as if they are on a reality television show and who spend a lot of time starting fights on social media. Congress also has hurt its reputation by failing to address major public policy issues, like immigration and the soaring national debt. And then there are the occasional scandals that disgust the average American.Yet, Americans’ dour opinion of Congress also is fueled by media coverage.To talk more about this I have with me Rob Oldham, who is a Ph.D. candidate in politics at Princeton University. This year he will be an American Political Science Association Congressional Fellow, and will be spending a lot of time on Capitol Hill. His published papers investigate the relationship between supermajority rules and bipartisan policymaking. His dissertation considers congressional policymaking in response to crises during the era of polarization.And importantly and especially relevant for this podcast is that Rob is the coauthor (along with James M. Curry and Frances Lee) of a fascinating, recent article titled, “On the Congress Beat: How the Structure of News Shapes Coverage of Congressional Action.” This article was recently published by Political Science Quarterly.