For most of the twentieth century, conservatives argued for a strong Congress whose closer connection to voters could check the grand delusions of presidential administrations. Now, however, everyone seems to have opted for Wilsonian, top-down executive leadership. Philip Wallach explains how we got here, why Congress remains indispensable for republican self-government, and what sort of structural reforms could help it reclaim its place in our constitutional system.

Philip Wallach, Why Congress (2023)
Philip Wallach, “Choosing Congressional Irrelevance,” Law & Liberty
Yuval Levin, “Congress Is Weak Because Its Members Want It to Be Weak,” Commentary (2018)

James Patterson (00:06):

Welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast. I’m your host, James Patterson. Law & Liberty is an online magazine featuring serious commentary on law, policy, books, and culture, informed by a commitment to a society of free and responsible people living under the rule of law. Law & Liberty in this podcast are published by Liberty Fund.

Hello and welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast. My name is James Patterson, contributing editor and associate professor of public affairs at the Institute of American Civics at the University of Tennessee. I’m here in person—this is a rare treat for me—with Phil Wallach, who’s his senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. We’re going to be talking about his latest book, Why Congress, which is published in 2023 with Oxford University Press. Dr. Wallach, welcome to the Law & Liberty podcast.

Philip Wallach (01:13):

So good to be with you.

James Patterson (01:14):

So the great thing about your book is that it gave me my first question, which is “why Congress?” But of course, the thing about Congress is that it hasn’t gotten a lot of conservative attention, and this is strange. Conservatives are very interested in the Supreme Court and federal courts and interpretation in the judiciary and we’ve had a very strong interest in the presidency and things like maybe the limitation of the imperial presidency, but also the unitary executive theory. There are these really big ideas there. So is Congress sort of the left out branch here for the right?

Philip Wallach (01:53):

I think if you go back to the time of Franklin Roosevelt, conservatives were very interested in Congress and very pro-Congress. They believed Congress was a kind of earthy bulwark that really was connected to the public, to the people close to the ground. And the classic statement of this is Wilmore Kendall’s essay that he is still writing at the end of the 1950s, talking about the two majorities. But he really portrays the congressional majority as embodying this sort of home-spun wisdom as opposed to the utopian, quixotic tendencies of the presidency, which tends to appeal to people’s grand aspirations and engage in world changing projects. And that’s also representing a real tendency that Americans had. But the way of representing the other thing in Congress was he thought as a very important counterpoint. And so there was that time when conservatives and you saw James Burnham write a book around the same time really appreciating the same sort of thing about Congress, but then you see Democrats control the majorities in the House of Representatives from 1955 until 1995—four solid decades.

(03:18):

Of course the Republicans do control the Senate from 1981 to 1986, but Congress just comes to be thought of as a democratic institution first. Of course, Democrats were half a conservative party at the beginning of that period, but by the end of that period, Democrats are a liberal party and they’re very much in control of the Congress. And so the modern conservative movement of the 1970s and eighties defines itself in opposition to Congress. They think of Congress as a corrupt liberal place and the emblematic figure of that is Newt Gingrich, who comes in, from the very first time he starts campaigning, talking about how awful and corrupt Congress is and how we can’t work with this congressional majority—we Republicans need to find ways of throwing it out. They eventually do, they succeed at that, but in that course of those decades, they’ve really sort of lost the sense of what it is a Congress is supposed to be for.

(04:17):

I would argue that conservatives came to adopt a much more leader-centric, Wilsonian model of what politics looks like, including Newt himself. And so in some ways, Congress is sort of without its ideological support from the right for many decades now. And you saw maybe a little bit of efforts to rediscover it around the Tea Party time and when people thought Hillary Clinton was going to be a president, but that’s not what happened. And so conservatives have mostly gone off in a very different direction and don’t genuinely have a lot of use for Congress these days.

James Patterson (04:57):

So there’s been a kind of great forgetting among conservatives and, to a lesser extent, among Republicans about the operations of Congress. Is there also maybe also a kind of change to the institution of Congress itself? Centralization under leaders, for example; it’s not as deliberative as it used to be. That’s led Congress to become less of an object of study.

Philip Wallach (05:24):

Well, it goes along together for sure. If you think of members of Congress, first and foremost, the most important thing they can be is members of the team, good foot soldiers for the party, then you don’t have a whole lot of use for deliberation. The deliberations should sort of happen elsewhere, and then Congress should put through the conservative agenda. I argue in the book that not deliberating well actually handicaps the Republican Revolution to some extent in the mid-nineties, that they sort of don’t actually have a good sense of where they can succeed and where they can’t. And so they make some real missteps because of that. But yeah, generally I’d say this comfort, including amongst members themselves, with the idea that the institution should reorganize itself on a purely partisan basis and that the main thing is teamsmanship in that environment. And of course, if you’re setting things up in that way, then leaders at the top and organizing sort of discipline followership is what matters.

James Patterson (06:37):

I’m remembering one of my favorite sketches in the history of SNL was on Newt Gingrich becoming Speaker. Do you remember this? It is actually kind of hard to find. I’m not sure why, but I had wanted to find it so I could use it in class and I only found an edited version of it, but it’s Chris Farley as Newt Gingrich and he’s becoming increasingly frantic as he’s gaveling in all of these Contract with America ambitions and by the end of it he’s just screaming and hammering on the dais. And that does sort of point to, I thin,k the way that Republicans understood their position in Congress when they finally attained a majority. What do members of Congress do? Do they legislate? Do they fundraise? Do they go on to television shows? It’s sometimes hard for people to pin down because it isn’t abundantly clear that Congress does anything.

Philip Wallach (07:34):

It’s definitely possible to overstate the point, and I think if you literally imagine members of Congress as a bunch of lazy bums, you are seriously deceiving yourself. They are very hustling people. They’re going from one thing to another all the time. A lot of that is to try to maintain organic connections with their constituents. They spend a lot of time trying to be at events in their home district, get out, shake hands, listen to people—that hasn’t gone away. It’s hard to represent a congressional district of 750,000 people, which is around the average today, or most senators, of course, have states considerably bigger than that.

(08:21):

And so they do spend a lot of time on that. And of course, the fundraising part of it also does create connections with the district, but it also creates connections with all kinds of elements of the donor class that might be sympathetic to them, which is not always so geographically oriented, but they spend a lot of time cultivating connections with donors. And legislating is really a reduced part of the portfolio. It hasn’t gone away. There are still quite a few earnest legislators on Capitol Hill. But yeah, I’d say it used to be the case that if you wanted to have a chance to exercise legislative power, there was more of a clear sense that you put in your time over the years on your committee, you prove your worth by making yourself an expert in these matters and showing your colleagues that you know what you’re talking about.

(09:13):

And after a while, once you’ve proved your bona fides there, you get to write the legislation, and the legislation will then get considered and given its chance to become actual on the law books. I think people are much less confident in that path these days. They think if they put in all that time investing and making themselves an expert, it’s likely to go nowhere, that it’s likely to just be a waste of their time. And so I do think a lot of the more ambitious members have reacted to what they see as the incentives showing them. They think actually the way I’m going to get ahead and become a powerful person is by cultivating my national public profile by attending to the new media in all the different forms that takes

James Patterson (09:59):

The way Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez does Instagram live?

Philip Wallach (10:02):

Yes. She’s obviously one of the most successful at sort of taking her position in Congress and turning it into a platform for her to become a major political celebrity who people talk about becoming the president, and it is funny in how many members that is the goal that’s animating them. Maybe that’s not such a new feature of today, but the sort of clarity that the path to getting there is through media celebrity rather than legislative accomplishment is distinctive to our moment.

James Patterson (10:37):

So no doubt. We’ve talked a little bit about the things in your book, Why Congress, but why don’t you give us the elevator pitch, the summary statement that we have so far missed?

Philip Wallach (10:50):

Well, the title of the book is Why Congress, no punctuation. It’s meant to imply that there is an answer, and so the book is an apology for having a strong Congress as the center of our constitutional order because, the way I see it, having this body which is defined by its multiplicity is actually more capable of representing the diverse interests that make up America than a system in which we let everything collapse into this sort of Manichean war between one side and the other. And when we sort of collapse everything into presidential politics, that becomes the natural tendency of our system is to just make every single presidential election seem like this existential conflict. You get people putting their great hopes in their leader as somehow going to redeem the American soul one way or the other.

James Patterson (11:50):

I don’t think that’s in the enumerated authority of the president in the Constitution.

Philip Wallach (11:55):

Fair. It’s really not, but that’s sort of so Why Congress is trying to explain, well, when we had a functioning pluralistic Congress back in the day, what did that get us? My contention is that it better legitimized the federal government than what we’ve got today. What we’ve got today is a lot of people imagining that whenever they lose, it’s the end of the world almost literally in those words, people are willing to make the argument and they’re taken seriously and that’s not healthy. That’s not a way—its’ not been working. We haven’t seen Trump or Biden become a wildly popular figure with the majority of the country. They sort of do their shtick and find it difficult to tread water even. So I don’t think that we have a successful alternative to Congress. We’ve let Congress atrophy and that’s in my view, a much larger part of the story of why our politics are so deranged in the 2020s than people realize. I think people don’t even bother thinking about Congress much anymore.

James Patterson (13:08):

Another figure who really has done a lot to return our attention to Congress is Yuval Levin. He wrote the very important essay in Commentary magazine. I think it’s “Congress is Weak Because Its Members Want It to Be Weak” or something like that. Is there something you would add to the argument that he makes, and what is the argument that he makes?

Philip Wallach (13:28):

Well, that metaphor of using Congress as a platform that I already spoke out before comes directly from that piece from Yuval. It’s, it’s a very powerful metaphor that he develops in his book, A Time to Build. Also, we have a whole lot of institutions without institutional loyalties and without a sense that institutions are supposed to shape people. Instead, we have people who come to sort of inhabit the institutions but use them as a platform again to launch themselves as personal brands in the larger sort of media ecosystem. And you see that not just in Congress, but in a number of walks of life, and Yuval is a real believer in sort of the integrity of institution-specific ethics, role moralities, right? If you’re a judge, you’re supposed to act like a judge. You’re not supposed to act like an op-ed writer. If you’re doing that, you’ve lost the plot in some very important way, and he looks around at a lot of different institutions in American life and sees people having basically disregarded the idea of that sort of role specific morality and instead just sort of throwing themselves into the big culture war that preoccupies so much of us in so many ways, and for Congress specifically, again, that makes Congress a less interesting place.

(14:59):

It means that really Republicans and Democrats feel like they can’t have anything interesting to say to each other, or sympathies to build across the aisle because well, “if you’re on the other side of all that stuff, we must be enemies. Our leadership tells us don’t work with those people because you might give them comfort, you might give the enemy comfort and we don’t want that.” So Congress becomes less interesting. It sort of desiccates our politics, and Yuval and I would like to see some people pushing against that. It’s a hard thing to turn it around. We’re kind of in an equilibrium now. It’s not easy for one person to just break out of it because it’s a coordination problem, but we have to sort of at least start to build the awareness that something has really gone wrong here and that Congress can be a big part of the answer if its members are willing to try to take this leap. Our pitch is, “this isn’t pie in the sky because we have seen this institution operate in this way before. It really is a choice of the members should they decide that they want to take it.”

James Patterson (16:12):

How much of this is structural? How much of this is the result of changes to congressional authority, especially in the way they’ve delegated it either to the bureaucracy or to directly to the president?

Philip Wallach (16:32):

I think that a lot of what makes the teamsmanship work as opposed to having to reconcile with the other side and figure out how to do bipartisan lawmaking, is our willingness to circumvent Congress and to make policy through the executive branch. And you’ve seen this in case after case in the last 20 years, where first the president says, “Oh, I can’t do this all by myself. I need to go through Congress.” And then he gets frustrated with Congress not doing what he wants, and they said, “Oh, actually, it turns out I can do this.”

James Patterson (17:08):

Everyone discovers their pen and their phone.

Philip Wallach (17:10):

Yes, so I mean certainly thinking back to Obama and the DACA program, the immigration program that he fashioned for people who were brought to America illegally as children, and that’s a very sympathetic class of people. There was a legislative push to do something about them. It didn’t pass, and then Obama cut it off. He said, “Okay, never mind. I’m not going to work with Congress to pass this law. I’m going to create this program through a massive use of my prosecutorial discretion not to bring actions against these people and actually because I’m not going to bring actions, I’m going to create this weird permitting program that doesn’t really have any legal basis.” That’s DACA. And Democrats in Congress did not say, “Oh my gosh, why are you cutting us out of this process?”

(18:01):

They said, “Good for you, Mr. President. You’ve reacted to Republican obstructionism and the only way that’s really reasonable by making progress for the American people, bravo.” And that’s the story of our politics today is members of Congress sort of wanting to be cut in, but if they don’t get what they want right away, then saying actually maybe cut us out. And I’m afraid that’s a bipartisan story. By now, we’ve sort of lost our will to really struggle through the hardest problems in the legislature. As soon as we see they’re really hard, we say, “Okay, never mind. This isn’t a legislative agenda item anymore. This is something that the big people over in the White House and the Supreme Court building are going to go figure out.”

James Patterson (18:53):

Another structural problem, one that’s not really the result of anything the members have done, I get from a book by Morris P. Fiorina called Unstable Majorities, and he talks about how the way that parties have now sorted so ideologically—that was once the objective, and I think it was in the 1954 American Political Science Review, they wanted more ideological parties. They thought the Democratic Party was too internally incoherent. So now here we are with a case of be careful what you wish for. We have very ideologically sorted parties, but they also don’t have a single majority. The old political science term for this was a “sun party” and then the minority party, we called the “moon party” and there would be this effort of the minority party to kind of figure out a way to pivot into a majority position. Instead, it’s a 50-50 country, and so members of Congress are always waiting until they can clear a large enough majority in Congress. I think what’s the majority in Congress now for the Republicans, like three, two?

Philip Wallach (19:54):

Oh, in the Senate?

James Patterson (19:55):

In the house.

Philip Wallach (19:56):

It’s gotten real slim.

James Patterson (19:58):

So the problem is that you’re not going to be able to legislate that much with that, and you can always wait until the next two years, when maybe you’ll have a larger margin, and then you can really go for it.

Philip Wallach (20:08):

Yeah, I think to be fair, we haven’t stopped seeing legislation. We had a really big important enactment this summer that we shouldn’t pretend didn’t happen. So that was a case of all the Republicans except for very few getting together such so they could pass an all Republican giant spending law.

James Patterson (20:29):

Right. Yeah. This is the one big beautiful bill?

Philip Wallach (20:30):

That’s it.

James Patterson (20:35):

One of the greatest names of a piece of legislation. It is exactly what it says.

Philip Wallach (20:39):

Well, the keyword is one. They really put everything they could put in there, subject partially to the whims of the Senate parliamentarian adjudicating the details of the bird rule, which is what exactly is allowed in a reconciliation.

James Patterson (20:57):

So maybe not beautiful.

Philip Wallach (20:58):

They put an awful lot of stuff in there. It’s a substantively very important law. People shouldn’t lose sight of that. They don’t have much of a legislative agenda after it passed, to be clear. There are exceptions you can find, but it’s kind of striking how little of the president’s ambitions run through Congress now. He has a lot of stuff he wants to do, and pretty much none of it depends on convincing congressional majorities. I think you going back to the Fiorina book, political scientist Francis Lee has a lot of similar discussions, they’re very convincing. There is something structurally about being on the knife-edge where every election is decisive. We really don’t know who’s going to control Congress after the next election, and that does change the way things look quite a bit. So yeah, that’s part of why it’s so hard to get, there are an awful lot of features of this equilibrium that are rational and so are we stuck in it until the structural features change? Maybe I would say there are a lot of margins that members could push at, and we have seen them pushing at some, right? We ejected a Speaker of the House in the middle of a term just a couple of years ago, and we’ve seen an increase in the use of the discharge petition in the House of Representatives.

James Patterson (22:20):

What’s the discharge petition?

Philip Wallach (22:22):

Basically, when leadership or committee chairman are bottling something up, not letting it come to a vote, a majority of the members in the chamber can sign a discharge petition, file it with the clerk, and then they have a right to call up that bill whether the leaders want it or not. So we’ve seen a lot more use of the discharge petition all of a sudden in the last couple of years. We’re seeing a very high-profile fight with it right now about the Epstein, some kind of legislation to force the government to release more of the Epstein materials.

James Patterson (22:54):

For those who don’t know, there’s the Epstein list is what, I’ll let you handle that question.

Philip Wallach (23:01):

No, let’s go on.

James Patterson (23:01):

The issue with Congress is then not as, sometimes people portray it where members go to their offices, take calls from donors and then go on to cable news. They’re actually working and in many cases are pushed in a lot of different directions, as you said. What are some of the things that members of Congress do that we don’t see?

Philip Wallach (23:21):

Well, I don’t want to dispute some basic correctness to what you just said. I think members really do spend a lot of time sitting on the phone calling donors, and that’s really unfortunate.

James Patterson (23:35):

They have quotas, right, don’t they?

Philip Wallach (23:36):

Yeah. Basically getting ahead in committee placements these days is just very sort of straightforwardly connected to your fundraising prowess,

(23:48):

Your ability to kick dollars up into the team, not just your own bank account, and yeah, I think that’s not great and it’s not great just as a time use problem actually. It really is something that legislators half a century ago would’ve been horrified by because it has become much more of a chase. So that is a big thing. I think the whole connection with constituency is still more important than people realize, and legislators do hustle to try to know their constituents, to try to perform constituency service. That’s an old Fiorina standby. The bureaucracy creates lots of problems. One of the ways people try to deal with these problems is by contacting their member of Congress’s office. A good portion of the staff on Capitol Hill spends their time trying to do constituency service, make things right that have gone wrong for people and members involve themselves in that at some level, that’s part of how they learn about what’s going wrong in the federal government, so that’s constructive.

(24:55):

It’s a perfectly respectable use. I think that it can sometimes crowd out bigger thinking. If you keep tending to the symptoms of a problem, but you never fix the problem, there’s something going wrong there. I think members do spend a lot of time trying to figure out some angle that they can take into the fight of the day. They’re always looking for certain way that they could hold that hearing that’s going to get on the news, that they could be the member who makes themselves the main character of a news cycle. That takes a fair amount of craftiness and scheming and a lot of trying without succeeding.

James Patterson (25:36):

One of the more startling examples of that really having a major effect was when former, she’s not a representative, Elise Stefanik. She, I’ve blanked on this. Is she still in the House, or did she take up? Anyway, Elise Stefanik created a moment in higher education in her interviews. She didn’t pass legislation. She used the hearing as an opportunity to kind of expose some pretty serious issues. Is that something of what you have in mind with Congress taking on its more traditional role ,or is that an example of the problem?

Philip Wallach (26:14):

I mean, I wouldn’t want to gainsay the success of that particular example. She clearly performed very well in this very well-created forum where Congress asking some tough questions to powerful people made a big difference. I think that kind of oversight function that doesn’t necessarily have to route through legislation can be very successful. So period, congratulations for that. But at the same time, okay, now the Trump administration is in, we’ve got Republicans in control of both chambers of Congress. Maybe this is the big chance for Congress to try to steer a new course in federal higher education policy, and I mean indeed it is. We are seeing that, but it’s almost all just through executive branch action.

James Patterson (27:05):

Grant cancellations and stuff like that.

Philip Wallach (27:07):

Even taking the civil rights laws and finding whole new interpretations of them that are favorable to the sort of right-wing suspicion of affirmative action, instead of, so we see, again, people make use of strategies that are available to them in this environment. Some of them are good at that. To me, it’s regretful that some of the most potent tools are left neglected and that there’s opportunity to really fight things out in a deliberative way on the floor of Congress is often also just neglected, and so we don’t feel that we sort of make a lot of progress. We sort of have one side get its advantage for the moment or the other side, and we kind of expect things to flip back and forth in a fairly mechanical way when the election results change. It would be better if we actually had a way to figure out a modus vivendi that we can make more stable.

James Patterson (28:08):

The issue with Congress right now is that we have a shutdown. We have another shutdown. I remember when this was a huge deal. I was a younger guy when we had the shutdown during the Gingrich speakership and we’ve kind of had these shutdowns. Why can’t Congress pass a budget? Why can’t it handle fiscal issues the way that you would think are existential for the Republic?

Philip Wallach (28:40):

There’s a lot—as a Congress pedant, first I just have to slap you with a wet noodle for saying “the budget,” right? Our budget process is a complete mess. The only thing it’s used for anymore is budget reconciliation laws, which they used it for back in July, right? The whole budget process is supposed to be the opportunity Congress takes to look at the big picture and chart a long-term course that makes sense. Again, we’ve just completely disregarded that as a real opportunity to do real work. It’s become a partisan tool. It’s a disaster. Our annual appropriations process, which is what we’re having trouble with right now, why we have a shutdown, only controls a very small portion of federal spending, about a third.

(29:28):

Most federal spending is on autopilot as a result of entitlement laws. The thing driving us into fiscal peril is largely stuff that Congress doesn’t even pretend to touch on a year-to-year basis. But we have annual appropriations, something like $2 trillion that we are talking about allocating every year. The past year we’ve just been on a continuing resolution where they said, “actually, we’re not going to be able to figure out anything. We’re just going to continue the spending levels from the previous year,” and there’s a pretty darn good chance at this point that we might see that. Again, so levels that were agreed to under President Biden just continue those

(30:11):

And somehow assume that the Trump administration will do some on-the-fly adjustments of dubious legality to make things work out. That’s where we are right now. In the bigger picture, the shutdown itself is a little bit perpendicular to all that. It’s a little bit random or strange or something. Why do we have it? Because Democrats feel like they can’t say yes to anything involving Trump right now. They feel like their base is so sick of them seeming compliant that they needed to take a stand, so they took a stand and didn’t allow a continuing resolution into November or December, which is common as dirt in our system. That’s what Congress does every year, and the Republicans were not making any big policy asks to get that. It’s just that Democrats felt they had to say “no” to something, so they said no to this, and now it’s not quite clear what the way out of the impasse is.

(31:04):

They need to be given some kind of concession that they can spin as a win, but Republicans aren’t actually inclined to give them, and meanwhile, even if they were to agree on a short term continuing resolution, that doesn’t fix the larger problem, the Democrats don’t really feel like they can bargain with Republicans at all because they’re so afraid of how Trump is going to renege on the bargain. It’s kind of a big problem where even in Trump’s first term, we saw bipartisan cooperation happen on a fairly routine basis, and we really are at a point just now in the fall of 2025 where it seems like partisan cooperation might be something we just can’t do, and our government is not set up for that situation.

James Patterson (31:48):

See, the downside of doing these in person is getting hit by a wet noodle. I don’t know if we should do this again, but there are lots of people who have lots of ideas about how to make this better. I’ve heard removing cameras so that it’s not so much of a public display, increasing the total number members, excuse me, the total number of members in the House of Representatives. Obviously, you can’t do that in the Senate without pretty significant change to the Constitution. What is it in your book? Why Congress that you have in mind for improving this state of affairs?

Philip Wallach (32:25):

I do want to see us get back to committees. So there are structural things we could do to make committees stronger and to give them more of a clear share of agenda control. I’ve articulated my sort of preferred slate of structural changes, but I have to admit that the how question really seems quite secondary. It’s like whether we actually want to fix this problem, and based on what I’ve seen in the last year, the answer is just no. That pains me. I would like to be somebody helping this institution move toward relevance and move toward a sense of revival and understanding its place in the constitutional order, but that’s just not where we’re at this particular moment. The sort of more we can just get by the skin of our teeth at the moment is kind of the more realistic hope for right now. The larger turn back toward Congress has to come because people feel totally burnt out on this president-centered government and the way that it creates whiplash, and maybe more and more people who take these existential stakes that they perceive literally and try to solve problems with bullets. I would say that seems like a pretty predictable feature of the politics of this country in the coming years. So that’s bad. I would love to turn away from that, but we need to get to a point where people actually are ready to turn away, and right now, I just think people want to be in control of that chair.

James Patterson (34:05):

You’re right. The sources of political authority and political change become increasingly scarce, and as they become scarce, the stakes for securing those become higher and then they start to engage in things like firing on presidential candidates, and it seems like such a major opportunity for whichever party can mobilize in Congress that they can seize like a tremendous amount of political authority in Article One, Section Eight powers to say the least. So, is that what you think it’s going to take, this kind of catastrophe in dealing with some kind of presidential issue that leads us back to Congress, or is there even a way back?

Philip Wallach (34:46):

I guess I also tend to believe that we need some major disruption to our partisan organization, which Trump himself has been a major disruption, and I think I would push back a little bit on the idea that we are very well ideologically sorted anymore.

(35:07):

I actually think that if you try to figure out what do people in the Republican party believe about issues X, Y, and Z, from trade to should we legislate on morals to taxes? I think that the Republican Party is actually full of internal dissension, and so I think that there is more multipolarity out there in the electorate than we realize. Our political system really is set up to effectively shut it down, and it does a good job. But I think that some kind of forcing event could come through and kind of shake things up, and we could find ourselves unstuck and Trump, the most predictable event that we know should be coming is Trump’s withdrawal from the scene.

James Patterson (35:59):

Yeah.

Philip Wallach (35:59):

Don’t know when that’s going to come. You can argue about that.

James Patterson (36:02):

Well, there’s all these conspiracies that he’s building this ballroom, so clearly he wants to stay. I think he just likes to build stuff. That was his job before all this, right before game show host.

Philip Wallach (36:15):

But in any case, clearly the Republican party has organized itself around him over the last decade, and it will have to do something other than that before too long. So that creates some kind of forcing event for some kind of big fight where we try to figure out what this Republican party is all about. I think there is a fight about what the Democratic Party is all about going on. I don’t know how much it’s going to break through, but yeah, I think possibly the structural changes in Congress need to come downstream of a sense of political disruption, a sense that to accomplish something politically, some frustrated, bipartisan, cross-cutting coalition needs to make its move. Right. The touchstone moment that I look back to is the revolt in 1910 in the House of Representatives. So you had an extremely powerful speaker of the House, Joseph Gurney Cannon, a fascinating figure well worth learning about. He ruled the house with an iron fist, and he had a very orthodox Republican sense of what his party was about, and the fact that there was a growing progressive segment of his party who was frustrated with his leadership did not interest him very much. He felt that they should make their arguments in the party conference and have their say there, but once it came time, they needed to be good party regulars.

(37:53):

And eventually, these progressives made common causes with the Democrats, stripped him of many of his powers as Speaker of the House to get their legislation moving. They thought regulating the railroads was that important that they were willing to blow up their party coalition. What’s the something that’s going to make people get to that moment in the 2020s or the 2030s? I don’t know. I try to come up with a scenario in my book, and it is not a convincing scenario.

James Patterson (38:22):

What about entitlements blowing up?

Philip Wallach (38:26):

Yeah. Gosh, that’s really not so far over the political horizon anymore, right? Having to figure out something about the funding of Social Security and Medicare. I actually don’t think there’s a lot of bipartisan disagreement on these. In some ways, it’s about the mix of taxes and benefit cuts that we have to agree on, and it’s so painful that no one’s willing to get out ahead and incur political costs for no reason. So we have to kind of wait until we hit the wall. But actually I’m a little bit of a quietest on that one. I kind of think the parties are in enough substantive agreement that they’ll have to come up with some answer, so I think they will, but it’ll be ugly.

James Patterson (39:09):

And not a moment earlier than they have to.

Philip Wallach (39:11):

Not a moment. No, no, that’s for sure. So Trump, not his problem.

James Patterson (39:15):

That’s right.

Philip Wallach (39:16):

That’s very much clearer to him, and he’s just like all the other politicians we have right now. In that respect. There’s nothing special about it.

James Patterson (39:26):

Well, it’s been really great having you on the Law & Liberty Podcast. The book is Why Congress, the guest is Philip Wallach. Thank you so much for coming on.

Philip Wallach:

Pleasure, James. Thank you.

James Patterson:

Thanks for listening to this episode of Law & Liberty Podcast. Be sure to subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts, and visit us online at www.lawliberty.org.