Here & Now

Gallagher on How to Fix Congress

Frederica Freyberg:
“Every two years, candidates will inveigh against the status quo in the swamp and promptly then get swallowed by it.” These words written by newly re-elected Republican Congressman Mike Gallagher of Green Bay. This week he penned a long article for the “The Atlantic” magazine bemoaning the utter dysfunction of Congress that he came to understand in his first term starting in 2016. He unravels the mess in his article titled “How to Salvage Congress.” Congressman Mike Gallagher joins us now from Washington. Thanks very much for being here.

Mike Gallagher:
Thanks for having me.

Frederica Freyberg:
Just ahead of getting into your dismay over how Congress works, what’s your reaction to the House flipping its majority?

Mike Gallagher:
Well, I worry that we’re going to see more of what we’ve seen in recent decades, which is to say gridlock. If the next few years just becomes an exercise in preparing for what will be an acrimonious presidential race, then we’re going to waste two years. And ultimately gridlock is bad for the economy, which means it’s bad for Wisconsin families. That 11% approval rating that Congress is currently rocking will get lower and lower. And that distrust of the institution is bad for the country.

Frederica Freyberg:
You say that when you were elected two years ago, you found the problems weren’t as bad as you expected, they were worse. Why does this dramatic assessment come now?

Mike Gallagher:
Well, listen, it’s taken me a while to sort of observe how things work in Congress. I spent the last year and a half not only trying to advance certain legislative priorities, but really taking some time to step back and reflect on the institution. I hadn’t ever run for political office before so I consider myself new to this. But I remember sitting in orientation with my Democratic colleagues two years ago and I was struck by the fact that all of us were speaking the same language. We had different views of the future of health care, but we were elected to change the status quo in Washington D.C. So I found myself wondering why is it that every two years, people sort of campaign against Congress and yet, nothing gets changed. So I did a deep dive into past efforts at Congressional reform, which really starts with Wisconsin history in the 40s under Bob La Follette, Jr. led a reorganization effort. And that informed my assessment of how the institution isn’t working right now. So it took me a while sort of to get my thoughts on paper.

Frederica Freyberg:
In fact, you write that Congress is dysfunctional and not doing the work of making laws and providing oversight because leadership runs the whole show. Congress is not equipped to get anything done. You say it has instead become a theater used by both parties to stoke the outrage of their base. What’s an example of that?

Mike Gallagher:
Well, listen. All you need to do as I allude to in the piece is turn on C-Span on any given day and you’ll see people giving a speech to an empty House chamber. I think perhaps the most distrusting example is the way in which Congress has outsourced its power of the purse to the executive branch. Most of what we fight about in terms of the budget is actually a very small portion of taxpayer money. 70% of taxpayer money just goes out the door every day for mandatory programs. When we actually do get around to passing laws, these are actually vague pieces of laws that give the executive branch more and more authority. So a good example would be to read sort of the Politico’s ongoing piece where every week they do “Five things Trump did When You Weren’t Looking.” And I love doing this because if you’re conservative, you read it, and you sort of like the policy outcomes. But he’s doing everything through executive order. So if you’re a conservative, you shouldn’t like that. And so if our politics devolves into a presidentially-focused system, where every four years, we’re waiting the coming of some messianic figure to solve all our problems, well, that’s a sign that Congress isn’t working ’cause if you read the Constitution, if you read the Federalist Papers, the preponderance of power is invested in the legislature for good reason. Because it is most– or should in theory, be most accountable to the people, who are ultimately in charge.

Frederica Freyberg:
You’re talking about how leadership really runs the whole show. Were you okay with this while Paul Ryan was House Speaker?

Mike Gallagher:
Well I think the fact that Paul Ryan was able to get as much done as he was is the exception that proves the rule. Paul led through the sheer force of his good will that he had built up through 20 years of being a high-integrity person and a thought leader. Paul Ryan is somebody who came to Congress who actually came here to do real, deep, intellectual, policy-focused work. But I think it’s also fair to say that every Speaker of the House in recent memory has struggled to impose regular order. You can look back at the speeches that John Boehner gave prior to becoming speaker. He talked about a lot of the things Im talking about, which is just how the process has broken down. You need only look at the few years of just kind of how the budget process has broken down. Also I quite candidly admit that the Senate is a huge part of this problem. In the House, we’ve actually passed over 600 pieces of legislation that remain mired in the Senate. I don’t presume to have a fix for the Senate. There’s a lot of ambitious people in the Senate who seem uninterested in doing real legislative work. That’s a big part of it. I didn’t have enough time or space to tackle it in my piece and I readily admit that.

Frederica Freyberg:
You do have solutions, starting with having Congress work harder. What would that look like?

Mike Gallagher:
So I think most people would be surprised at how the schedule in D.C. actually works. You parachute in here on a Monday or a Tuesday night. You have 48 to 72 hours of very frantic activity. A lot of that activity is actually not legislative work. It’s on the political side. It’s people raising money for re-election. Then you fly back home to your district. This practice sort of started in the ’90s when people didn’t want to move their families to D.C. because they didn’t want to get primaried in an election. So what is lost in this is the time necessary to one, develop real relationships within your party, across the aisle, get to know people so you can arrive at a common understanding and figure out where you can work together. And, two, just time to do your basic job of showing up to your committee hearings. How about this? Reading the actual bills before that you vote on, before you vote on them. Most people aren’t doing that right now. The schedule gets more and more compressed. If you add on to that the demands of fund-raising and more and more money flooding into our elections every two years. What you get is a legislature that’s kind of faking it right now and just waiting so they can get re-elected or using their position to run for higher office.

Frederica Freyberg:
Youd also streamline committees and have committee members choose their chairs. Why?

Mike Gallagher:
I think if you look at the evolution of the House, since the ’70s, it started with the Democrats and then it accelerated with the Republicans in the ’90s. The real change has been power has flowed from committee chairs and members and has been tightly concentrated at the top. I actually think you get more regular order, better debate by devolving power back to the committees. The reason you want people — you want most of the action to happen in the committee work is that that’s where you can really develop the expertise necessary to understand what the heck the federal government is doing and also understand are we spending money on things that are working? Are we as a government a learning organization? Or are we simply wasting money and not actually solving problems we want to solve. So electing committee chairs by committee members is one way to get at that devolution of power. I should note however that I proposed this amendment yesterday in our caucus and it did not pass. It did spark a very robust debate. There were some useful perhaps counter-compromise measures that were suggested that Ill be taking a look at. The streamlining committees is a bigger thing. The biggest legislative reform that was successful as I mentioned before was in the ’40s. It was this exercise in streamlining committee jurisdiction. Right now we have overlapping jurisdiction. We have a fundamental division between authorizers, who tell certain federal government agencies what they’re allowed to do and then appropriators who actually give them the money. And really a lot of authorizing committees are left without any power and influence. Everything gets stuffed into a last-second appropriations bill, an omnibus bill, a massive spending bill that people just don’t have time to read and analyze and understand if it’s worth voting on or not. So I think a simpler structure where everyone had clear lines, lanes of responsibility would make a lot of sense and help the institution out.

Frederica Freyberg:
Very briefly, with about 30 seconds left, how will it be for you working in the minority in the House?

Mike Gallagher:
Ive been thinking about that a lot. I’ve obviously never experienced it. But quite honestly, I don’t intend to approach the job any different. I know most Republicans right now are thinking about, okay, how do we take back the majority and raise a lot of money. I understand that’s politics. But I think being in Congress for two years, whether you’re in the majority or minority, is still an awesome responsibility. So I wake up every morning energized just to do what’s right for northeast Wisconsin. I’m going to continue doing that even if Im in the minority and we’ll see where it goes. I don’t want to waste the next two years just throwing bombs on cable news.

Frederica Freyberg:
U.S. Representative Mike Gallagher, thanks very much.

Mike Gallagher:
Thank you.