Here & Now

What Bipartisanship Means in Current Congress

Frederica Freyberg:
This week, two Wisconsin Congressmen who hold very different political positions on most everything came together to talk about their shared values. Republican U.S. Representative Mike Gallagher from Green Bay and Town of Vermont Democratic Congressman Mark Pocan took questions at a forum in Appleton sponsored by the history museum there. The program is called Bridging the Gap. In these most polarized of times, the pair seemed to truly enjoy each other’s company and the discussion of where they agree. We started our interview with them asking why they seem to be breaking the mold on lockstep partisanship.

Mark Pocan:
You know, I think part of it’s being from Wisconsin and part of it is present company. Mike is someone who’s a very approachable, nice person. I don’t think we’ve ever had a point where we’ve been disagreeable to each other anything. And you know, Mike’s been wrong a lot. I think it’s really the approach more than anything. You know, find out what you agree on, see if you can move on from something from there. We’ve tried to operate that way. And I think this is what, our third time we’ve done something like this, having a conversation. I just think if more politics happened this way we’d all be better off.

Mike Gallagher:
Yeah. I think it’s enjoyable because it’s so rare in modern politics. I mean I have people that still come up to me after the first couple of these that say we just never see anything like that. It’s not like Mark and I left those town halls agreeing on a lot of things. But we were able to have a respectful dialogue and debate without it devolving into sort of fist fights. We need more of that and that’s the Wisconsin way. You treat your neighbors with respect.

Frederica Freyberg:
What would you describe as your most important shared values?

Mike Gallagher:
What came out in the discussion, I think when we talked about the role of America in the world, certainly as a force for good and a land of opportunity. I mean, I think when it comes down to it, we all kind of want the same things. We want to pass that amazing gift that we have as Americans on to that next generation. We can have a disagreement about how we get there, but the ends remain the same. To continue this experiment in self-government that’s been the most successful one in human history.

Mark Pocan:
I think we both also agree on a lot of the processes that are broken right now.

Mike Gallagher:
Yeah.

Mark Pocan:
So you could do differently and make the Congress work a lot better. So that’s been helpful, whether it be budget review or other ideas that are out there about where concentration of power is among leadership, et cetera. Just the fact you recognize that allows you to see some paths forward.

Frederica Freyberg:
I know you share this. You both voted against the emergency declaration. First to you, Representative Pocan. Why?

Mark Pocan:
I saw it as something that wasn’t really an emergency and an abuse of what the law should be for any president should have that. I would argue that is true of Democrats too. If something’s a national emergency, we’re all stopping everything we’re doing because it’s a national emergency. If it’s anything short of that, then it’s probably not a national emergency. If you can’t convince Congress to give funding for a wall that he wants, he’s got to find other ways to do that. But that’s not the proper way to get it done.

Frederica Freyberg:
Representative Gallagher, you kind of bucked your caucus on that. Why?

Mike Gallagher:
So I was highly critical of the expansion of executive authority under President Obama. I think the distortion at the heart of our Constitution is the fact that Congress has surrendered all of its power to the executive branch. In order to be conservative in any meaningful sense, in order to be intellectually consistent, I have to oppose that expansion even when it is my own party, doing something I largely agree with on the merits. How you do things actually matters in this country.

Frederica Freyberg:
So as to funding that border wall, where do you stand?

Mike Gallagher:
I voted for the $5.7 billion. I would continue to vote for it today. I don’t see a political path forward at present because we lost the election and now the Democrats control the House. It’s my belief based on my reading of the statute that the administration is going to try and spend at least $5 to $6 billion prior even to getting to the money that’s linked to the emergency money. In order to transfer money from one account to the other, they’ll have to get Congressional approval, in my opinion. Article One, Section Nine of the Constitution, you can’t draw appropriations except in consequence of law. I think Congress needs to demand a greater seat at the table. I would love to be able to wave a magic wand and solve any number of issues. But that’s not the way it works. You have to through the difficult process of getting buy-in from Article One.

Frederica Freyberg:
Representative Pocan, as to the funding for the wall, whats your position on that kind of funding?

Mark Pocan:
Yeah, I think that misses the actual point that people are trying to get done. One, we should have a real conversation about comprehensive immigration reform. We’ve got lots of people here who we need to figure out how to deal with that status. And to what the president said he’s worried about drugs getting into the country, he’s worried about human trafficking, gangs. They don’t come in the places that he’s trying to put border walls. We found that 90% of the drugs come through points of entry. Let’s beef up what we do a points of entry so we can stop drugs from coming in the country. But just because he made a campaign process about a wall doesn’t mean that it’s right. I think all the other data shows that it wouldn’t work.

Frederica Freyberg:
What should be done about immigration finally?

Mark Pocan:
I wish — my first session, now four sessions ago, there was a bipartisan effort I think with about 70 votes that came out of the Senate that had a pathway to citizenship for aspiring Americans but also dealt with some security issues. It wasn’t perfect but the fact that it got that much bipartisan support meant it was a really great proposal to at least work off of. I think we need to have that conversation again. You can’t have 11 or 13 million people here right now who are undocumented and pretend as if that’s not an issue.

Frederica Freyberg:
Where are you on that conversation?

Mike Gallagher:
I think it has to start with border security because I don’t think we’ll have the trust of the American people until we actually, effectively secure the border. I believe it should be a bipartisan goal to get 100% operational control of the border. Now you’re right to suggest that that’s going to involve many more things than just a wall, right? We going to have to deploy technology. Right now we have AI technology that allows us to really get comprehensive coverage of some sectors of the southern border. We’re going to need more personnel. But really the crisis we have right now is we have people in Central America that are coming up and they’re claiming asylum and surrendering to the authorities. We don’t have the legal resources necessary to adjudicate those asylum claims. Sometimes they get released, particularly if they’re with children. And they never show back up. Until we can solve those immediate problems, Im not sure we’re going to be able to get to comprehensive immigration reform. But I do think there’s some common sense fixes like a state-based guest worker visa program making it easier for people with STEM backgrounds who study in our universities to stay here that we can work on simultaneously.

Frederica Freyberg:
Bringing this a little bit closer to home, we know that Wisconsin dairy farms rely very heavily on immigrant labor. How do you protect that class of employees and the farmers themselves?

Mark Pocan:
Yeah. It’s one of the big things you hear right now. With farms, they’re worried about the workforce. A lot of folks are people from other countries who are working on it. And secondly they’re worried about some of the president’s trade practices, too. I meant that’s the other part because of the fight with China and not exactly clear where we’re at with NAFTA. Soybean farmers, dairy farmers are really facing some real challenges. So they feel like they’re being hit from a lot of fronts. What we don’t want to happen is lose the small family farms, all just become a bunch of big corporate farms. That’s happened in other states. We’re doing our best to make sure that doesn’t happen here.

Frederica Freyberg:
That’s quite a crisis in Wisconsin as we know.

Mike Gallagher:
Huge crisis in Wisconsin. At a time when we’ve had persistently low milk prices for years now, farmers are now getting caught in the crossfire of the Section 232 tariffs. These are largely the tariffs that we placed on our allies’ steel aluminum tariffs against countries like Canada and Mexico. It’s my belief that we should absolutely be getting aggressive economically with China under Section 301 but then to simultaneously pick a fight with our allies under 232 doesn’t make any practical sense to me. It’s not fair for Wisconsin farmers to ask them to shoulder that burden at a time when they’re already struggling.

Frederica Freyberg:
You split on HR1, which is a piece of legislation that you sponsored. Describe to me briefly what that is and why you sponsored it.

Mark Pocan:
HR1 was a comprehensive way of trying to deal with the mess that’s sometimes known as Washington D.C. So it was trying to deal with election reform, campaign finance reform and ethics reform and had a lot of provisions in there that people I think have been talking about for a very long time. It did pass out of the House and my guess is that if it doesn’t pass through the Senate, we’ll break it up into pieces. I know there are some thing that Mike and I have talked about he also agrees with. There’s things he doesn’t. But the bottom line is one thing Donald Trump was really right about was when he said, “Drain the swamp.” Most people rightfully so realize special interests have way too much influence in Washington. The problem is he drudged it deeper, built a high-rise luxury condo on a swamp. We really need to address that. And this bill was trying to get at many of those problems.

Frederica Freyberg:
Why did you vote against it?

Mike Gallagher:
There’s certain provisions in there like the public, 6 to 1 match, public money for small dollar donations that I view as counterproductive. That would inject more money, in this case public money, into our elections when we actually need to do the opposite. We need to reduce the amount of money in our elections. While I support things like nonpartisan redistricting as well, I don’t think its the role of the federal government to tell the states how to do that. But Mark’s right to suggest there’s a lot in that bill that I like, particularly on the ethics section, which I believe is the first section. There’s some cases I didn’t think it went far enough in terms of banning lobbying from former members of Congress for lifetime. So I think there’s some stuff we can salvage even though I voted against the bill.

Frederica Freyberg:
The president’s budget sharply cuts domestic spending but sharply increases military spending even more, I understand, than the Pentagon asked for. But what in your minds does his budget say about his priorities going into the 2020 election?

Mike Gallagher:
Well, these budgets — we were talking about budget reform. The budgeting exercise is almost become a joke. These aren’t real documents. They’re messaging exercises and so it’s up to Congress to determine where the money’s actually going. And there’s a lot of areas where we have Wisconsin priorities we need to protect, like the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative. I think the president is right to suggest that we need to continue to sustain the military rebuild that we’ve had some success on in the last two year. And it’s going to require at least 3% to 5% real growth over the next ten years is my belief in order to keep pace with some of the investments that our competitors like China and Russia are making right now.

Frederica Freyberg:
Representative Pocan, what do you think this presidential budget says about his messaging going into the campaign?

Mark Pocan:
Yeah, I mean in its perfect sense, the budget should be a statement of your values. Where you actually put money is where you cared enough to actually invest our tax dollars. Unfortunately, his budget missed a lot. I mean it cut things like National Institutes of Health to help fund cures for diseases, something that bipartisan — in a bipartisan way Congress has increased money every single time. He cut that. He cut double digits to education, to human services, a whole lot of areas. And then of course he had his money additional for the wall. And I would argue Id prefer that if we’re putting money into defense, it goes to our service members rather than some of the other activities. This president has been pretty inconsistent on how he’s given direction to the Department of Defense. I think it’s a document that probably doesn’t have much standing right now, the way we do the budgeting process. It’s far more likely that the appropriations process will hopefully function and will wind up with a Senate version and House version and a conference committee will hopefully come up with something. I think we can move a little farther this time than perhaps the last few years.

Frederica Freyberg:
All right. We need to leave it there. Representative Gallagher, Representative Pocan, thanks very much.

Mark Pocan and Mike Gallagher:
Thank you.