Daniel and I recorded this conversation with Soren Dayton, the Director of American Governance at the Foundation for American Innovation, and James Wallner, non-resident fellow at FAI, about their paper “Rebuilding Congress from Within, How Factions Facilitate Deliberation and Lawmaking.” It posits a view we share that too much of what goes on in Congress now is directed by leadership, to the detriment of the deliberation and negotiation between members that the institution is designed for. Factions, they argue, are one of the few tools currently available to rank-and-file members to restore collective decision-making and fix Congress.
We had a wide-ranging conversation about the history of factions, how they operate, and why members of Congress, the philanthropic community, and the public should embrace energetic debate rather than the false goal of finding bipartisan, politically moderate policy solutions.
Daniel Schuman: We are here today with Soren Dayton and James Wallner with the Foundation for American Innovation. And we’re here to talk about their new paper, Rebuilding Congress from Within How Factions Facilitate Deliberation and Lawmaking. Thank you both for joining us.
James Wallner: Thanks for having us. And can I just say off the top real quick? I really wanted to name it something different. I mean, Soren was like, let’s just go with that. It’s a good name. I was thinking more like, you know, Kong versus Godzilla, you know, rise of the factions or something, spicy to get people in. But, you know, we went with Soren’s title.
Schuman: That’s fair. I mean, you could have done the facts on factions, but that would also be kind of a pedestrian approach.
Wallner: Or factions of life.
Schuman: Oh yeah. You take the good, you take the bad, that kind of thing.
Wallner: There’s so many options. Good thing we’re going to have a never ending series of factions papers after this just for the titles.
Schuman: Your paper argues that Congress is dysfunctional because the members are not organized to deliberate and legislate in the present environment. James? What do you mean by that?
Wallner: Well, I want to take a step back. I think it’s important to maintain a clear focus on agency in this, as you and I have talked about in all of our writings and conversations around town and over the years. It’s important to maintain focus on agency when we say Congress isn’t organized. I think the way to rephrase that, if I’m teaching one of my writing classes and colleges, where it’s active voice, active voice, active voice. And it is that lawmakers are not organizing themselves to facilitate their own participation in the process and to enhance their own ability to deliberate and to impact outcomes. There’s lots of different ways that Congress can organize themselves, but one way is through these things called factions congressional caucuses, intraparty caucuses -- people call them different things -- but they’re in essence, factions, sub-party kind of units. Sometimes they can be cross-party -- not so much in this day and age.
We zero in on these in particular, because if you are an opponent of the status quo – and most of the reform throughout Congress’s history has been driven by opponents of the status quo, the outliers, if you will – you’re not going to be able to rely on existing kinds of legislative organization, right? So, congressional committees and the political in the party structure in the House and Senate, because those are set up by winners of the status quo, they’re set up by the people who are the reason why the status quo is the status quo, and so they’re going to be less inclined to kind of rock the boat. They’re not very friendly to the skunks at the garden party or the ants at the picnic. Factions really become important in that scenario.
And then when you look at Congress today and the dysfunction that we see in Congress today, and the bipartisan frustration from the far left to the far right, that all seem to be echoing the same sentiment. It’s just astonishing to me that they are not using this tool to the degree that it has been used in the past and that it could be used to enhance their own stated goals.
Schuman: So would it be fair to say that Congress is organized, but it’s organized by leadership and it’s not organized by the members? Or is that too much of an overstatement?
Wallner: I wrote a piece a long time ago. There was an open letter in the Washington Post and it was by all these former members and it was like, Congress is broken, the Senate is broken. And then they went through and they’re like, it’s not leadership’s fault. Then they’re like, it’s not the committee’s fault. They’re like, it’s not the rank and file fault. I’m like, well, whose fault is it? Is it some guy from Scooby Doo? Earl down the street? You know, he pulls off his mask or some invisible ghost? No, the Senate is dysfunctional, the House is dysfunctional because the members of the House and Senate make it dysfunctional. They make it dysfunctional when they defer to their leaders, when they empower their leaders to run things certain ways. They make it dysfunctional when they continue to acquiesce in that environment. Look, I’m not pretending like there’s not a cost to this, a social cost or political cost, etc.. Of course there is. But I think it’s important to keep really focused on the main point, which is that the members themselves are the ones who are in charge, and they’re the ones who are responsible for the House and the Senate operating the way the House and Senate operate.
And they have many, many tools at their disposal to change things. If they don’t like how they are operating or try to change things, they are not victims. They talk about themselves in the third person all the time. If you think about how Congress talks like the bill was passed, I’m like, no, you passed it or your colleagues passed it over your objections. The bill wasn’t passed when we just woke up. Oh my God, did you see that the bill was passed? No, you did this. And so I think it’s important to keep that focus, laser focus on that.
This paper, I think, gets into one of those key tools that I think is a kind of a foundational tool. And Soren, I know, shares this thought that allows them to facilitate their own organization, their own cooperation, and then use other tools at their disposal much more effectively.
Schuman: Perfect. So let me pick up on that and turn to Soren. You guys are talking about factions. Are there examples of factions in Congress now? What do they look like? What and what do you mean by faction?
Soren Dayton: So I think in the House there’s two things. There’s two caucuses that look something like what we have thought of historically as a faction. They are the Freedom Caucus and the Progressive Caucus. The Republican study committee is almost just an information machine. They’re not actually a coordination machine.
To go back to the Progressive Caucus and the Freedom Caucus, they both have things like rules about how they should vote together. They have membership requirements. They have regular meetings where it is expected of the members that they will coordinate on activities. And, I think it’s very helpful to read the books of someone like Ruth Bloch Rubin, who goes into a key element of successful factions is that internal rule making process, that internal coordination process that binds people, that requires them to act in certain ways. There are other things, like I think the New Dems and the Republican Study Committee are these huge monstrosities that are essentially a branding vehicle in some cases, or the Republican Study Committee, if you’re a Republican member or a Republican staffer, you want to be in the study committee because it is the only source of information other than leadership.
And this is history James knows better than me: the Freedom Caucus got frustrated with the status quo the RSC had been and broke off to be not just the right wing in a sort of substantive policy version, but also more adversarial to leadership and more revolutionary on process. And in some ways, the Progressive Caucus I think is less adversarial with leadership than the Freedom Caucus through a variety of ways, partially. It’s hard to do when it’s that big, and so many of its members are committee chairs and things like that. But at times you’ve seen the Squad be a little Freedom Caucus-like in its sort of adversarialness to leadership, but it’s not organized.
I think you have a slightly different set of entities in the caucus in the Democratic Party: the Black Caucus, the Hispanic Caucus and the APIA -- I’m probably getting the letters wrong -- caucus. There’s affiliated C3s and C4s. There’s staff pipelines, but those are actually really concrete problems they have. But so going back to the Progressive Caucus and the Freedom Caucus for a second, there is a sense of shared subjectivity that I don’t see in the bigger ones, right. These are people that have a certain ideological location within the party, and they have a theory of the need to change the party in a certain way. And I think most of the other things that are factions or that purport to be factions are just sort of people. They’re in a space not with the theory of change about how the parties should change in their direction, or they should leverage their power within the parties, even though they sometimes do leverage their power.
Schuman: Can I push you on that just a touch?
Dayton: Yeah, absolutely. That’s what we’re here for.
Schuman: looking at the affinity caucuses, like the CBC: the CBC, from where I sit, except on a handful of issues, does not necessarily have a policy agenda that it shares, but it does have a procedural agenda that the members share about how the committees are going to function. It’s going to be more based on seniority. I think it also on the Senate side with the Republican steering committee you know.
Wallner: Just the Senate steering committee, it’s not Republican Study Committee.
Schuman: Thank you for correcting me. I knew you were going to do that as the former Grand Puba.
Wallner: I mean, I guess, but I left before we could change the title. It was just executive director. Harry Reid would get very upset about it. [Sen. Robert[ Byrd gave a famous speech on the floor about how there’s no Senate steering committee. That’s a problem. We’re like, we’re not Republican.
Schuman: Yeah. You’re just the Senate steering committee just composed of Republicans, which isn’t the same.
Wallner: There were Democrats when we first got started, but that’s another story.
Schuman: Yeah. Well, I want to come back to that story. But on this, it seems like there can be procedural factions or organizations in the House like you organize by state: the California caucus or the Texas caucus is very powerful, and they achieve goods to bring home and to organize and to elevate their own people into power that they wouldn’t necessarily have. Would those be to your way of thinking a faction as well?
Dayton: Well, one I’m not too worried about, the definitions, and in Congress, people don’t call those factions. They just call them the delegation. Right? I mean, they have their own label for that. It does have many of those elements. When I worked on the Hill, my boss was a Michigan Republican, and the Michigan Republicans had a delegation meeting once a week. And every once in a while there was a bipartisan delegation meeting, but they often voted together. They often had shared interests that sometimes, interests in the state, either political, agricultural, industrial, popped up. You can get manifestations of that with the Dingell family that was tied into Ford or GM, I forget which one Debbie Dingell was a lobbyist for before she became a member. You certainly have examples of alignment of interests that aren’t by party narrowly, or that aren’t purely by ideology. I think in Congress, that is the dirty little secret, right? Anyone who works on a low salience issue sees that all the time.
But the important part about factions is often are you willing to leverage your power sort in a higher salience fight? And, that’s probably where I put that distinction. But I also wouldn’t worry about the distinction too much, because there’s a reason that Congress uses the language delegation to talk about it. And there’s all sorts of entities like political parties that sort of capture and support that.
Schuman: So, James, people have a tendency when they talk about Congress to talk about the House. But the Senate, as it turns out, is also a thing that matters at times. Does the Senate, and if you read like Ruth [Bloch Rubin’s] book in some of the other books, like they talk about gangs, but there’s also more like you were the executive director of a more organized, a more organized faction within that chamber. How is it different on the Senate side? How do factions work there?
Wallner: First, let me just say, I did start my career in the House, working for a Southeast Alabama congressman. I helped write the peanut title in 2008, farm bill. I am the founding executive director of the Congressional Peanut Caucus. And when I left, I don’t know if anybody...I think I’m still the executive director of the congressional caucus. I mean, I’ve never you know, we never really talked about it...
But, there’s different reasons to have some kind of organized or semi-organized factions. What I like to say is everything that’s in the Senate is in the House and vice versa, they just manifest themselves differently, right? Members are going to have different access to the floor in the House and Senate. That’s why factions in the House, historically, have focused on information, right? Going back to the DSG, the Democratic Study Group, RC was modeled on that as well. Even in its founding, RC was much more of a kind of information policy pipeline kind of development organization. Freedom Caucus when it was created -- I was very much there at the time -- was created to be much more operational and focused than to have one goal and one goal only, and that was to vote against rules as leverage and of facilitate the ability of members and the party to withstand the pressure and to vote against rules and then bring that pressure to bear. And you’ve seen them do that time and time again. We wrote a piece on the Kevin McCarthy speakership thing where people are like, the sky is falling. And we’re like, it’s fine. You saw that it was a very successful use of leverage by a kind of a subset of the Freedom Caucus banding together until they got what they wanted.
But yeah, the Senate is a little different because the members in the Senate are going to be much more autonomous. They have much more access to the floor.
The Steering Committee was founded by Paul Weyrich around the same time that one year after Ed Feulner founded the RSC with his members in the House. From the very beginning, it took on a much different flair. It’s much more kind of like the Freedom Caucus today, although they have written rules. We don’t have written rules: I got all the files in my closet, I guess they call me and they’re like, what’s the rule for this? I’m like, let me go check the files. It started off just like this weekly meeting, and then everybody started coming to the meeting. Then all the Republican senators are coming to the meeting, and the conservatives are like, well, we gotta get an executive committee now. Then everybody thought they were in the steering committee. And then it turns out, no, they’re not. They’re just coming to our lunch. We got a new thing called the executive committee. It was always much more operational and staff had a much different function, steering staff or monitoring hotlines. We were inserting ourselves in negotiation with committees and party leaders. It’s mainly staff driven: the executive director is kind of like the face of it, but staff are really working with outside groups. They’re working with key interested members on the committee on different things they care about. And as I told my staffers all the time, look, you got to be three, four, five steps out in front of your members. Just make sure if they go left, you’re not going right because that’s going to be problematic. It’s a lot more negotiation based, a lot more kind of operational and tactical and not so much policy development, although there’s certainly parts of that.
Chris Nehls: I want to build on what you’re both talking about and go back to. Soren’s identification of the Freedom Caucus and the Progressive Caucuses like the two that seem most actually factionally faction. One of the things I think is great about your paper is you’re trying to change the way people are looking at the activity in Congress and understand what they’re seeing and what they should be seeing. There’s this conventional wisdom that Congress is dysfunctional because of polarization, and what we really need are moderate members to come together and negotiate and come up with kind of practical solutions and things like that. People have funded that activity very thoroughly. And you’re saying that’s not what we’re talking about at all. Actually, you need to understand the way Congress should be working differently, and faction is one part of that. Could you guys kind of riff on where you think that conventional wisdom came from and why it’s wrong?
Wallner: Let me just give the kind of high level answer and I’ll turn to Soren. I think the conventional wisdom is just wrong. But I think the reason why I think people have lost sight of factions, lost sight of all of these tools that members look -- I mean, the Congress in the 60’s and 70’s, when it was actually relying on subs like the the conservative Southerners who were trying to stop civil rights, you got other civil groups that are supportive of civil rights that are working together, some formal, some not so formal, working with outside groups advancing inside outside games. The 60’s and 70’s was Congress’s most productive legislative period in its history, hands down, and this country was on fire. People across the board are pissed off. There’s violence in the streets. The CIA is killing God knows who, who knows where, all kinds of terrible stuff is happening, and we are picking up the most controversial issues you can imagine, and we’re legislating on them. They picked up the Civil Rights Act of ‘64 in the Senate in March of a presidential election year. [Mike] Mansfield, the majority leader at the time, is convinced it’s going to destroy his party, and he does it anyway. I mean, it’s amazing today we’re like, we can’t do that. We’re gonna have an election in three years, you know? And it’s like nonsense.
But I think that is indicative of a different view of conflict. Today, we have this sense that conflict, that the messy realities of legislating, of disagreeing are a bad thing. And when you see it as a bad thing, you then try to insulate Congress from it and you try to get new people into Congress that aren’t going to facilitate it. You get this emphasis on the moderates and everything.
Moderates in the past, moderates have driven change, too. Think about the 20s and the institutional reforms, particularly in the House, they were driven by moderates in the center, like the progressive Republicans, but they were moderates working with Democrats, trying to force a more decentralization of the process and empower their rank and file.
But I don’t like the idea of moderates and extremes. I think it comes down to do you support the status quo or do you not? And if you don’t support the status quo, are you willing to use the tools at your disposal to change it? My problem with the emphasis on moderates these days is that one, it centers on people who aren’t necessarily so upset with the status quo. Then number two, it centers on people who don’t have the temperament to think like a John McCain. I don’t think he’s an outlier conservative, knuckle dragging conservative or something. I think he is a maverick and he would do things.
And that’s a personality trait that I think that we -- or a Howard Metzenbaum, for instance -- I think that the kind of moderates that we, the kind of philanthropic community, the media, the party establishment center around typically lack that personality trait and they’re not it’s not fun upsetting the apple cart, but I think it does come down to this idea that conflict itself is bad. But last time I checked, the way you get compromise is that you first disagree. And it is literally impossible, impossible to compromise if you do not have disagreement first, right? If you can agree without disagreeing, that’s a consensus. If it’s a consensus, we don’t need Congress, right? We do not need to deal with that. The whole point of Congress is that it is where we go to negotiate the non-negotiable. But our I think our commentary in the academy, in the media, certainly among kind of the reform community and, the members themselves seem to have forgotten that that is the whole point of Congress and that sometimes people are going to disagree with you and you need to roll up your sleeves, get out of bed, put your feet on the ground, look yourself in the mirror and be like, I’m gonna go to work today and I’m gonna try to win.
Dayton: So I have a related, but I think somewhat different take. There are certainly plenty of times in recent years where moderates have leveraged their power to accomplish various things. I would point to the modernization committee itself, where the Problem Solver Dems held out on the speaker’s vote to get some concessions. I think some pretty weak concessions. That said, some important ones you had in a variety of fights, and we include some of these in the paper. You had Gottheimer and similar moderate Dems holding out on a set of issues.
But I think one key part of the difference that people in different ideological locations have is how they’re negotiating for power within the party. And for the most part, there is an alignment between the leadership and the moderates, not on ideology, but on sort of electability, right. They’re all interested in getting the majority, whether they use it for things or not. And, and so there is a pretty clear straight line of consensus there. And, and you see this in critiques from, I won’t say the extremes, but from the edges, maybe, in both parties. You know that said, you could imagine and you’ve seen in the past factions out of the moderates.
I think historically, the Blue Dogs, there’s not enough of them to matter that much, certainly not in the minority. But you know, there have been actions by moderate Dems in the last couple of years. That’s a distinct public identity and it’s important for them to organize as such and leverage that identity as such. There’s also this inside-outside game where, for most people in both parties in the House, they’re essentially running as the generic “R” “D.” So the question becomes for people that are organizing in factions, are they not generic because of ideological or cultural positioning? Think Blue Dogs. Are they not generic because of a status quo critique? Or are they essentially running, alongside the party, and in which case, at least on brand and image, they’re aligned.
Now, I do think there’s some interesting cases that you run into that there’s very little publicly written on. Both parties in the House have steering committees and how the steering committee seats are allocated is a really important set of questions. And in some ways, for example, the moderate factions in the Republican Party have owned that process really certainly for the last probably 40, 50 years. That’s only really stopped with Johnson, and nobody’s really figured out what’s going on there yet. I mean, a little bit, like McCarthy traded away some seats. But I think that is one of the most interesting things that’s happening right now. What will happen to House Republican moderates if they aren’t winning the fights in the steering committee and if they aren’t getting the steering committee spots? And how does that change their incentives to organize?
You also have a similar sort of question for the New Dems. As Daniel noted, really the power of the Black Caucus is seniority and committee chairs, and the Progressive Caucus has some of that too. And so there is potentially an incentive for the New Dems not on substantive policy, because they’re mostly getting that from the party, but on distribution of power within the caucus where you could see some hardball. And that’s where I look for right now as places where interesting activity could emerge from.
Schuman: So what you’re describing from a certain perspective, not my perspective, I should say, but it sounds like chaos and anarchy, right? This sounds like James, a deep cut sounds like parliamentary war, right? It sounds like just everybody, trying to organize around their own stuff.
Nehls: The Dems are in disarray.
Schuman: Or the inverse statement which drives me up the wall: our unity is our strength, which makes me want to take my head and hit against the wall several times. How do robust factions actually help Congress to organize the disagreements that they have and to facilitate decision making? I mean, not that what we’ve had over the last 5 or 10 years has been a model of the greatest deliberative process that one could imagine, but how would having more and stronger factions make it possible for Congress to do more?
Wallner: I think it just comes down to a realization of how the process works. It’s easier to see in the Senate, but it’s the same in the House. In the Senate, my job at the steering committee was to stop things my members didn’t like. That’s what you do. And so I’d hire people and I’d be like, you got to go stop that bill. And they’re like, how do I stop a bill? I’m like, what do you mean? You just try to win the day. You just freeze action. You figure out a way to freeze the process just as long as you can, and then, you do it again and you do it again. Maybe stuff builds up. Things begin to collapse under its own weight, and then the bill dies. That’s how you stop a bill when the bill goes.
I remember Allen Freeman, the former parliamentarian, was telling me about for this book the rules of the Senate, the rules of the House, there’s a logic to them. There’s a logic to the process, no matter how absurd it may seem on the outside, and that logic facilitates participation, it orders it and it structures it and it produces outcomes. It always, 9.9 times out of ten is going to lead to an outcome. The kicker is you can’t know what that outcome is in advance. You can’t define it. You can’t know with any certainty. You can’t protect what you would like to pass.
Today we have this idea that this is the bill we want to do. And then like the floor now is this really dangerous place. What the leadership does is that they literally freeze the process right when they start the process, which is like doing my job for me. And so I think on a broader level, it makes it really hard to advance bills that people have a lot of disagreements about on the most salient issues for the American people, because it then goes behind closed doors. And when you’re behind closed doors, it is harder to call people’s bluffs. It is harder to set up the debate in such a way, to put people in positions where they feel compelled to go along with what you want, even though they don’t agree with it. It’s harder to bring the outside into play. The system itself becomes much less dynamic, and it becomes harder to get an agreement that everybody can come together on. And then there’s no fight, you don’t see the fight. Losers in the debate aren’t reconciled to the outcome. People on the outside of Congress, the activists and the American people, they’re like, what? Schumer comes out, he’s like, this is the best we could do, and they’re like, well, I don’t trust you. That’s the best you could do? Y’all don’t even try. Maybe they did. Who knows? It was all behind closed doors.
What factions do is that they empower lawmakers to open up that process. And it’s not chaos and it’s not anarchy. It’s just that you can’t control it. If you’re a leader today, that looks like chaos and that looks like anarchy. In reality, the grand scheme of things, Congress is a very permeable institution, and it is going to follow what the people want it to do. It is. And if there is a big debate, a big fight that goes on for a little while, guess what happens? People are going to start paying more attention. More people are going to get involved, more activist organizations.
That’s the [story of the] Civil Rights Act. What tipped the balance there was what Martin Luther King was doing across the South with civil disobedience and others, John Lewis and others, and all of a sudden it’s on the news in the Midwest. Then you have the Civil Rights Act now on the floor and it’s frozen out everything else and you have Midwesterners who are like, we’re kind of with you on this, but we don’t really care, we just want to do this other stuff. Then you have the religious communities, the Lutherans in particular, some of the great unsung heroes of the civil rights movement, like really mobilizing people in the Midwest and getting them to demand that their members get in there with the Northern Democrats. And that’s what ultimately tipped the balance. You would not have had that if there was not a sustained effort on the floor to pass civil rights, coupled with a sustained effort using the same principles out in the streets with civil disobedience.
If the whole point of the House is like, we’re going to figure out what we can pass the majority and we’re going to put something on the floor and we’re going to vote on it. Well, sometimes you can’t do that in a room, right? Sometimes, you need to do it out in public.
And what I think the factions do there is that I could see a scenario where the House, if you’re the speaker and there’s a big thing coming up, what you want to do is get buy-in on the front end, not the back end. So you call together, you know, your Freedom Caucus or SC. Maybe you get the moderate, the Wednesday group or whatever they call themselves now, and you get the factions in the room and you say, this is what we’re thinking, and you kind of try to get them in the process and you say, what do you guys think? And then you bargain with them, and then you try to figure that out so that in the back end, you’re not going to get the whole thing blown up and surprised.
I think, ironically, by decentralizing the process more, by empowering members to participate more and to facilitate more conflict, you are going to get more outcomes, more compromises. And those compromises are going to be sturdier, and they’re going to be viewed as more legitimate. And then it’s not going to then result in this kind of thing that we have today. When Congress doesn’t do anything, kicks it to the executive branch or the judiciary, or they do stuff, but it’s like they wait until the last minute and they try to jam you, and it just leaves everybody feeling worse.
Dayton: I can tell a fun story: James mentioned civil rights and the Wednesday group or whatever their name is. The actual history of the Wednesday group is amazing. It was the Republicans that voted to expand the Rules Committee in 1961, when Democrats in the House wanted to expand the Rules Committee to get civil rights and other legislation through under JFK. And Halleck, the Republican whip, wanted that expansion to fail just so the other team failed because that’s in fact, what your job is, mostly in the minority. And these were the people who wanted to pass it to get civil rights legislation. And they were ostracized in the party and got and just they started doing what you do in Congress: they started drinking together on Wednesday nights, and that’s how they became the Wednesday group. And they organized themselves later. That experience in 1961, they became the Wednesday group because they had lunches on Wednesdays. Then you had the conference lunch on Wednesdays, so they had to become the Tuesday group. The Tuesday Lunch Bunch was the name, right, because they organized on Tuesday.
Wallner: but they never got anything done.
Dayton: Yeah.
Wallner: Monday through Friday was just…They never even saw them. They’re just tanked, schnockered all the time.
Soren Dayton: Well, many of them are already schnockered across the ideological spectrum in both parties, but that’s a somewhat separate question. But the idea of these people working together and shaping the institution and changing the rules of the institution is a perfect example of how people can have power. But it’s also that time when our politics was much less presidentialized.
I think one of the hard questions and part of what we were trying to do in this paper, and also the connection to philanthropy and outside groups is that you can’t solve these problems in today’s world without solving external brand issues, right? This is why the Blue Dogs have such a clear identity. You know, the Black Caucus doesn’t need an identity. mean, it’s sort of baked in, shall we say, same same for the Latino caucus. The Freedom Caucus certainly has an identity. The Progressive Caucus has an identity and works with parts of the ideological ecosystems. But if that recognition that it’s an inside outside play in a time of a presidentialized media ecosystem is a key part of the story here as our parties have hollowed out and we just communicate by email and, and TV ads.
Nehls: So is it going to be on the outside groups to cultivate faction then? Or can we incentivize or encourage members to start to map on to that 60s and 70s experience into their own, their own negative experiences now of just being basically cattle and getting them to do something different.
Wallner: I think there’s a couple of things. The ethics environment’s a little different today than it was when the RNC and the steering committee were founded. I think Heritage [Foundation] was paying Weyrich. I think there’s a kind of a scholarly component, an academic component of trying to educate people on the historical parallels, what is possible and that’s how members typically relate to things and ideas: how has this ever worked in the past? I think that’s important. And, various organizations, nonprofits, philanthropy can help to fund those efforts.
I think there’s a space for philanthropy in particular, and people don’t appreciate this, but it’s so critical. The role of space. Space is so important, because space is where people gather together to talk and deliberate and negotiate and bargain with one another. And right now, all of the spaces inside Congress are pretty much dominated by the party leadership. And you may have some of these factions that meet, but even then, if you got a big faction, you have to find a place to get everybody together in the room. In the Senate, we’ve got big personal offices. The steering committee had like 16 people when I was there. When I started, it was like eight, so you could fit everybody in the room. We would have a weekly lunch of just the LDs for the steering committee members over at the Heritage Foundation where we met and talked. It was the meeting before the meeting every week.
It wasn’t necessarily a faction thing, but I started an LD lunch in the Senate with AEI and they would bring in [experts] and they would educate people. They would have a speaker that would come and talk, but then they would leave at the end and we had this room. I created this environment where the LDS all got together just like the members doing the steering lunch and could talk to one another and yell at one another and tell each other what they thought and say, this is what my boss is thinking. And it was the leadership was not in control. I was in control of the meeting, and I made sure no one was in control of the meeting. And I’ve heard from people across the spectrum in our conference how valuable that was. And so I think philanthropy can, with existing rules, provide spaces for the members, provide spaces for their staff to help facilitate their own internal conversations and negotiations instead of having to rely on the leadership controlled spaces in essence.
Dayton: It’s not an accident that FAI’s new office is two blocks from the Senate, and it’s very nice. Across the street is Searchlight, right, which is Adam Jentleson’s organization. It is a place where it’s still hard to get members to come off, but we’re about as far away as Heritage was.
One of the one of the things that I think is unfortunate about the political science discipline -- and I mean, there are many things that are unfortunate about the political science discipline -- is I actually don’t think the sort of mechanics of that history with Heritage are well understood. And I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with it, but the Heritage Steering Committee and our SC role started in the 70’s, as James said. I think some of it’s over at CPI now to some extent with the Freedom Caucus, they’re probably still connected to our SC, but I think that’s a really important model. And similarly, in a although through a very different mechanism, the Black Caucus and the Hispanic Caucus and the P caucus and the Democratic side have these outside groups that provide paid internships because, internships aren’t paid on the Hill and provide talent pipelines for staff because in many cases, those are the big challenges that those caucuses have.
I do think along these lines, an interesting test case may be the attempt to rebuild the Blue Dogs, because you have now a self-conscious C4, Blue Dog Action, and you have potential allies in something like Searchlight and a lot of things. If Searchlight’s the [John] Fetterman thing, there’s a lot of cultural connectivity there. I could see something emerging there. You have the components, you have some funders, you have you have members, but not too many because too many members, you have to feed too many children. And, and you have a distinct ideological location that’s being sold to voters as such. So that’s one of the places where I think something could emerge that’s new and interesting.
Schuman: One thing that would be fascinating to do, I haven’t seen anyone do it well, is just mapping the geography around Capitol Hill about who owns what buildings – not just the holding companies, but who is actually operating in there is really because I’ve walked around a bit and I’ve looked at it, and it’s fascinating to see the trade associations and the advocacy groups.
What I wanted to ask is, if factions are so useful, how can they become weak compared to what they were previously? What happened? Do we know?
James Wallner: I think it’s a change in how people think about politics, when you think that the way you win policy is you win elections, right? We have this idea now that politics has shifted and it’s now like a factory, like Congress becomes a factory. The number one thing you have to do if you want to control the factory is you have to control the means of production, right? Let’s put all our, Marxist hats on, you got to control the means of production. How do you do that? Well, you win elections. That’s how you get gavels. That’s how you get votes. That’s how you get majorities. And then you have to keep winning elections.
We have this idea that the way you win elections is by unified parties. And then we have this further idea that you can’t divide your party, which is why all this messy legislating has now been migrating away from public spaces and the parties try to present a unified view. So, Chris, to your point about polarization, we talk about our politics like it’s polarized, right? But in many respects, it’s just reflecting this like kabuki dance. The parties, as you see, are just an utter disarray internally. But yet they don’t like to present that. Ultimately, we in that environment, if you are trying to do something and it’s going to expose rifts and divisions in the party, which by definition, anything meaningful that you do is going to do that, If you’re trying to change the status quo, then you’re going to be ostracized. You’re going to be marginalized and you’re going to be made an example of, and it’s going to be very unpleasant, and you’re going to be told you’re the reason why everything bad is happening. The republic’s falling in the ocean, right? It’s not really about you, it’s about everybody else so they don’t get the same idea.
Over time, that has translated into this view of conflict being bad. We just need to win the next election. We got to keep our moderates. We got to do this. We got to do that. Can’t push too hard, you know, and it’s not the way we do politics. It’s not the way we’ve ever done successful politics in this country. Any big meaningful stuff from the left to the right doesn’t matter. That’s not how we do it.
But in this environment, it is very hard for members because at first they have to establish that it is legitimate to have a faction in the first place, and then to go to war to fight your own party and then everybody says, well, we were with you. I’d love to do that. Of course, of course I’m with you. But if we do it, we’re not going to be able to do it ever. So we shouldn’t try to do it if you want to do it right. And they never talk about the actual thing you’re trying to do. And it’s always about, well, you’re just undermining control.
I think that right now, instead of just saying it’s already hard enough to organize, it’s hard enough to band together, it’s hard enough to navigate the space, it’s hard enough to find people who know how to do it from staff to members, it’s hard enough to go to war with your own party, much less your own president sometimes. But to add on top of that, you have to legitimize the very basic fact of your acting as an okay thing to do, is it makes it almost impossible for anybody. And I think right now that’s where we are. The idea now is that it is not legitimate for individual members to go out and act on their own, to try to do things, that is not an okay thing to do. We had this civil war in both parties in the Senate from 2008 to 2014 or so, 2015. And the side that said we should individuals acting as an okay thing to do lost. We lost that on both sides of the aisle, that’s what we’re grappling with. Members have to both defend what they want to do, but also they have to defend the very tool they’re trying to use to do. It is not being something that’s disruptive and is going to undermine the whole enterprise.
Dayton: The other thing is it’s got to be worth something to organize and there are two issues here. Again, I go back to sort of presidentialized, national branded politics where members have to make a decision how and when they’re going to differentiate from the party brand. One important strategy is what I call squeal and cave: complain, complain, complain so that you get press, you get press in the district and then, cave to the party, give party leadership what they want or the party interest groups what they want so they can’t actually campaign against you on like substantive things. I refer you to the literature on what happens in times when elections are closely or when majorities are closely contested. All the incentives for the reasons James mentioned are to just line up and provide support for winning.
I still think there’s factional activity on low salience things, but not on high salience things because they don’t have those sorts of branding opportunities. That’s why you see things like the talent pipelines in the tri caucus, and that’s why you see on regional issues, things work a little differently. Finally, and this goes back to the moderate discussion, I’ve heard from moderates in both parties that one of the challenges they face is finding good campaign staff that actually knows how to campaign on moderate issues. I won’t share the name in a broadcast format, but one high profile moderate chief of staff told me once that they had an education issue that they were working on and their campaign manager in the district didn’t know how to run a campaign on a moderate education issue. He only knew how to run sort of red meat issues. And so they basically
Wallner: Gonna reveal all names on the Patreon page. Be sure to subscribe. $100 fee to know what the guy is talking about. We’re going to name his name. Names will be named on Patreon.
Dayton: I think sort of really thinking deeply about the political challenges these people have like talent pipeline challenges and positioning challenges are important. Finally, it’s only worth doing if you’re going to make policy. Is it worth a fight with your party if there’s not real wins, if there’s not a real branding win, if you’re not actually changing activity. That’s the history of these things at their best. The blue Dogs had those. I used the governance group, the civil rights people were fighting over real substantive policy and cultural identity. These are the fights that matter. But you’re not just going to stand up and fight over nothing, and I think a lot of discourse has been fighting over nothing.
Wallner: I tried to convince a steering chair once to pick a fight with McConnell, because I wanted the Daniel Webster statue outside his office. Let’s just pick a fight and then in the end, be like, we’re going to cave. But I need that statue.
Nehls: But rejoinder we hear is leadership is just going to shut you down.
Wallner: Leadership can’t shut you down unless you give them the power to do so. They can make your life difficult. They can make it unpleasant, of course. Any effort to change how Congress operates in the current environment is going to take away power from leadership, so of course they’re going to resist anything that would do that. It makes complete sense. But leadership, especially in the Senate, but also in the House leadership does not have the power to stop you. They can try to do various things and you can push back. I mean, look at Mark Meadows. It took his gavel, they took him off these subcommittees. And what did he do? He ended up getting Boehner fired. Boehner resigned, he said, okay, fine, he followed his motion to vacate the chair. And people are like, I can’t believe he did that. And I’m like, well, then don’t take away his committee, Boehner. Right. Like we’re like, oh my God, what are you doing? And it’s like, he’s just using a tool he has at his disposal.
I mean, a lot of that angst and energy at the time also went into the Freedom Caucus and Mark Meadows, Jim Jordan, the founding members, because they were frustrated with the RNC and its inability for it to kind of coordinate action with the members. But yeah, leadership is great. I mean, but they’re not like Zeus. They don’t have bolts. They’re not sitting up in the sky throwing things down, smiting us mere mortals. They work for the rank and file. Full stop.
Schuman: And I’m going to take that point and aim it at Soren, which some of the paper argues that this is actually good for leadership.
Dayton: Certainly there are certainly cases. This is Ruth Rubin’s second book, [Divided Parties, Strong Leaders]. I’ve heard a delicious story that I have instincts on how I’d check, but the history of the Mainstreet Republicans, which is sort of the second moderate Republican faction, as it were. I joke it’s the moderate Republicans in red in red seats when the Freedom Caucus was created. Leadership was like, that means when the table has Freedom Caucus, RSC and one moderate, we need to make another moderate group. And that this is the actual story of where it came from, because they needed to be able to balance a room of human beings.
I also think it doesn’t matter, to James’s point. You have power and you can fight and get what you want. Here’s where I go back to the modernization committee, here’s where I go back to many of the things that Gottheimer has done over the years. People get annoyed, people hate it. He gets good press and actually sometimes even gets policy wins and that’s like, you can fight. You can fight in the center. You can fight at the edges. There are plenty of proof points. And the question is, do you have the disposition to do it? Especially for the people in the center, they have a play that’s tucked tail behind leadership. I keep giving Republican examples because that’s what I know, but the only time you ever saw letters from the moderate Republicans was explicitly in defense of leadership, because they know they can go to leadership in private. They don’t have to do it in public.
Wallner: Factions also offer a pressure release valve, especially in the House. If you have a structure, an institutional structure that is more or less formal that facilitates participation of disgruntled members in the process, gives them a voice. And then it’s a sore point about the table and they’re interacting with leadership all the time, and that voice is then percolating up and it can change things here and there in various things. It doesn’t put the leaders and these kinds of disgruntled members in an adversarial position throughout the process. It actually, by creating that structure, helps to release pressure, helps to generate buy-in, even if they don’t prevail in the end. It’s not as bad versus if you’re just sitting there getting kicked over and over and over again and you’re ignored, then you know what’s going to happen: You’re going to blow up the party, you’re going to leave the party, you’re going to do the kinds of things that, like the progressive Republicans were doing in the 20s and that’s not good.
Then you have the Freedom Caucus. They try to be, so far as I can tell, a team player. They use their leverage to push their team here and there, but they’re not bolting. They’re not trying to completely undermine their party because they see their party is their source of power. What they’re trying to do is use the various leverage points they have at their disposal, both in public and in private, to influence negotiations inside the party. And so I don’t think factions are adversarial, but when you’re a leader and everybody expects that you’re the ones who figure out what’s going to happen, you can control what’s going to happen, and then if things don’t happen that way, it’s on you and it’s your fault, which is absurd, right? But if that’s what you kind of embrace and imbibe that worldview, then you’re going to be terrified of anything that doesn’t make that easier.
Schuman: This is a good chance to get to the final section of your paper. Leaders are getting blamed for not making the trains run on time. I know if I were writing this paper for you, James, you would mark it up because who’s blaming the leaders for not making the trains to run on time? It’s the people who donate to the party, but it’s also the editorial boards and the journalists who report on it.
One thing that we were talking about was having space to meet. I’m sure that the FAI building was provided at no cost to the organization as a general rule. If you want space, you need money, right. And if you want lunches, there’s money. But when you talk to a lot of funders and some former funders who are commentators in this space, they are very much drawn to either non-partisan approaches. We’re we’re above the fray, We’re not we’re not Democrats or Republicans, or bipartisan approaches where you got to get a lefty and you got to get a righty and you got to bring them together. But what you’re describing as a factual approach is not bipartisanship. Not really. It’s not non-partisanship. It seems like it’s like multipartisanship or something. What can funders do and why should they embrace a different way of thinking about supporting organizations that are playing in the space? Why is this worth their time? Why should they be different?
Wallner: First off, just look at what’s happened. Has the considerable investment in this space produced any meaningful change? I would argue the modernization committee aside, this stuff here and there aside, no it hasn’t. Doesn’t mean it’s all been wasted. Doesn’t mean there’s good stuff that’s happened, of course, but it hasn’t produced meaningful change. And the reason why it’s not focused on the stuff that produces change, if we just make it as simple as we possibly can -- which is what I always try to do, I try to dumb it down so much where it’s like, I feel like I might be dumb at this point -- But if you are concerned about Congress not functioning, not legislating, not deliberating, if that is what you are concerned about, it seems to me that the what you need to do is to get members legislating and deliberating and arguing. You don’t need to get the right members arguing about the right things and being reasonable and all this other stuff. No, you just literally want to poke people until they start acting and one person does something and another person’s going to try to stop them. And then, next thing they’re going to be legislating, And so I think we need to have a much more focused approach on not trying to control what the outcomes are. And I think a lot of the space, a lot of the philanthropy in this space, a lot of the work in the reform community in this space is all focused on outcomes.
We need to get the appropriations process working better. How about we just get members trying to appropriate? If they do that, they’re going to do it, it’s going to happen, and then stuff’s going to happen in the end. How about we empower members, whoever they may be, to know what the rules are, to know what their tools are so that they can use them and get out there and try to achieve their goals. We’re not going to empower the people we agree with, and I think it’s this idea of funding efforts, funding organizations, funding spaces and working with people on the Hill through ethics compliant means, of course, but doing it all in a way that is its nonpartisan approach, because you’re doing it by definition for everybody. I’m a conservative Republican, but throughout my entire career, on and off the Hill and certainly off, I help everybody who comes to me, every member, every staffer, I will tell you every single thing that you can do to achieve your goals and then the cost and trade offs that might come along the way. Because my true goal is not policy: my true goal is institutional. That’s what wakes me up and keeps me up at night; it’s the concern about this institution. And so for me, if I can get a liberal or a conservative doing something that is a huge victory. And so I think it’s that kind of nonpartisan type approach.
Dayton: I would add that the question about philanthropy has a couple of different versions. One is, there are the sorts of philanthropy, the sorts of foundations that have funded things like the modernization stuff and sort of the big institutional investors. But another one is the ideological ones, If you’re giving millions to help members get elected. Maybe there’s some logic in giving some of that money that’s going to the TV guys and some of that’s some of that money that’s going to the digital guys and putting some of that in capacity building for your ideological allies. I’m not even saying give money to the modernization project. I’m saying, and you actually have seen this on the right and I think to some extent on the left, although I don’t understand the CPC’s, the CPC Foundation funding source in the same way, but like the people that spend money electing Republicans often also give money to Heritage or to some of these other groups.
There’s also an argument here that these people can be spending their hard money, but they can also use their C3 on this stuff and build something. One of the things that would be useful from mainstream philanthropy is to see that kind of politics is constructive. Here, I actually think we’re making progress with some parts of philanthropy and the academics where they’re like, no, no, no, these people fighting could actually be useful if they had that institutional capacity and point of view in their associated C3 and C4s, where they could think in better institutional ways.
My ideal world is actually leveraging some of the analytic credibility of the big philanthropy and matching it up with the ideological fervor of the people that give hard money to elect people and soft money too, for that matter. But too many people only think of politics of getting involved in supporting factions is spending money. The hard money side and the superPAC side of the C4 side, when they can also be doing it in these other ways and making the members that they support and help get elected more effective once they’re actually in office.
Schuman: Who would think that the two years in between the congressional election cycle would actually be a place where you’d want to put some effort and interest?
Wallner: Who knew? One other thing I just want to say, factions will generate more inter-party collegiality. It will facilitate more respect. This is just a basic thing that we’ve lost sight of. John Quincy Adams, when he came back to Congress, this guy didn’t like slavery. John C Calhoun is the first statesman, is a brilliant guy in a lot of ways, but he’s the first guy who argues for the moral good of slavery. This is a big deal. This is the issue, right? They fight on it. They disagree with one another. Same thing with Webster and Calhoun as well. When John Quincy Adams dies, before he dies, he asked Calhoun to be a pallbearer in his funeral.
Then, when Webster is giving a speech on the floor, he goes and sees Calhoun. Calhoun’s on his deathbed across the street at this boarding house. And he’s like, I need you to come hear this speech. Webster’s giving a speech where he is bashing Calhoun. He’s like, this guy is wrong. And Calhoun says, I can’t make it in. Webster’s giving the speech. And then Calhoun struggles up, gets over there, and he keeps trying to say that he’s there. And Webster’s talking on the floor, and Calhoun’s on the floor, and Calhoun can’t speak. He’s got consumption, he’s about to die. And finally he bangs his cane on the floor, and he just croaks out, I’m here! And Webster turns around and sees him. He bows to him. Calhoun bows to Webster. Then Webster turns around and proceeds to go on bashing Calhoun.
It’s this premise that game respects game. When you go to battle with somebody in the arena and you lose or you win, and the other side puts up a good fight, you generate a relationship with that person and a familiarity with that person, even though you do not agree with that person. And over time you get a respect, a begrudging respect. And that is one thing, I think that everybody in this climate of ours today misses about old politics, and I think that it can come back. It can come back. And one way it can come back is through a robust, rigorous, deliberative process. And the best way, I think, to get that it’s not the only way, but one of the best ways to get that is to facilitate members’ participation in that process by empowering them through factions.
Dayton: Also, these people are just really lonely.
Wallner: There’s a loneliness epidemic among lawmakers.
Dayton: Yeah, there absolutely is. These people need more hanging out with their buddies and need to develop more buddies. Maybe they do some of that with the in state delegations, but they certainly don’t do it much in committees these days. This is a way to help people experience each other a little bit more and work together a little bit more. That’s the only way you ever get anything done in politics. But let’s face it, being a lawmaker is really hard right now. And so another thing we’re talking about here is just giving people more friends to get things done together with.
Wallner: Stay tuned. I want to have a television show. It’s like a 17 foot flat skiff, you’re in the Florida Keys, two members because it’s a tiny boat. You’re on there all day long, just fly fishing or something. And it’s like Bernie Sanders and Ted Cruz and then like a video crew and you’re just stuck on the boat. I bet you there’ll be some interesting stuff that comes out of that. Call it precisely to Soren’s point, it’s crazy what happens when you bring people together.
Schuman: You call it Cruz Control, maybe.
Wallner: Oh, I had that when we were at steering. I’ll just say this, maybe say it for the Patreon page. We were at steering, and I want to do this thing called Cruz Control. And we’re going to have Cruz over at Union Station. We’re going to do like a live shot from the lunch and it would be like Cruz walking up to people going, what do you think about Mitch McConnell’s amnesty effort or something? And they’d be like, we hate it because of course we’d plant the people. And it was all it was Cruz control. I like that.
He didn’t like it. We didn’t do it.
Schuman: Before this gets worse, I’m glad that we’ve established that factions are good and that philanthropy should consider if they want civility, they need to encourage more fighting. And that. I guess the final thing is that Doren and James, Chris and I just really appreciate you making the time to talk with us.
Dayton: Thank you. Yeah. Thanks for having me.
Schuman: Game recognizes game.
Wallner: Daniel, I, I love you, man. We’ve worked together a lot. We disagree on a lot, and we also agree on a lot. I think this is a great example of the kind of thing that we’ve all been talking about, you’ve been talking about in your work as well. You can have intense respect and admiration for people that you disagree with on some policy questions. I guarantee you’re not going to disagree on all policy questions. And this also represents, I think, for philanthropy out there, you and I have the same goal. I think this is a great example of how this kind of effort can produce institutional change for the better.
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