Can the senate save itself and the country . He spoke at the brooking institute. Let me try to call this full house to order, if i may. Welcome to brookings. My name is bill gallston. Im a senior fellow in governance studies. Thank you so much for coming and welcome also to the people who are watching this event live on cspan. Todays topic is the past, the present and possible future of the u. S. Senate. The occasion of this discussion is the publication of ira shapiros second book on the senate, this one entitled, broken can the senate save itself and the country . Those of oh you who read his first book on the senate will know how passionately he reveres the senate as an institution and will not be surprised to learn how distressed he is by what he describes as its precipitous decline. This topic could not be more timely. We are just days from the expiration of yet another shortterm continuing budget resolution and perhaps even more pertinently, from a promised open Senate Debate on u. S. Immigration policy. Will the promise be kept . And if it is, will todays senate be up to the job of an open deliberation on the most burning domestic question, which is more than domestic, in its implications facing the country . When it comes to the study of american Political Institutions, there are two kinds of scholars. Type one, people who have been trained in academia, wonderfully trained in academia in many cases, and who study american Political Institutions, using the tools, the concepts, the categories, the empirical techniques of political science. We here at brookings are committed to the proposition there is much to be learned about american Political Institutions through the practice of that trade. But there is a second way of studying american Political Institutions, the scholar practitioner or the practitioner scholar. And ira shapiro is the latter. He began his government career, ill let the number out of the bag, just a little shy of 50 years ago as an intern to the late, great republican senator jac jacob j jacob javvits. Among his distinguished practitioner career, he served as legislative Legal Counsel to the great environmental senator gaylord nelson. He served as counsel to the master of the senate rule book, majority leader robert bird as chief of staff to senator j. Rockefeller. And in addition to his senate service, he has occupied senior positions in the office of the u. S. Trade representative during the clinton administration, and if memory serves, attained ambassadorial rank in one of those positions. His first book on the senate was published in 2012. An updated version with the new preface by the author appeared recently. For fans of popular culture, his first book on the senate appeared on Frank Underwoods desk during season two of house of cards. So, let me now let me now tell you whats going to transpire in the next hour and 25 minutes. For about 25 of those minutes, ira will present the main themes of his book. Well then hear about ten minutes of commentary from brookings congressional expert molly reynolds, a fellow in our governance studies program. She is the author of the brookings book exceptions to the rule the politics of filibuster limitation in the u. S. Senate. Which will indicate why she is the perfect commentator for this book. After molly delivers her commentary, well all convene on the stage for about 15 or 20 minutes of moderated conversation. After which for the last half hour it will be your turn, questions from the floor and responses from these two wonderful scholars. As always, please quiet your cell phones, but that doesnt mean turning them off necessarily, and it certainly doesnt mean that you cant use them. For those interested in tweeting about this event, its hashtag is. There it is, u. S. Senate. And without any further preliminaries, on with the show. Ira, the podium is yours. I couldn. I couldnt have a more generous introduction than the one bill galston gave me. I thank bill for not only that introduction, but for organizing this event, for moderating this event. I dont have enough time to go into bills various credentials, so i wont, except to say that no one else is a political theorist and floss fir, a policy analyst, a teacher and a scholar and has served at the highest levels of government. So we all get a great deal of wisdom from bill always, and particularly i have never missed his weekly wall street journal column. Im glad to be here with molly reynolds. I dont know molly that well, but her important book is very welltimed, as you will hear from her comments, and given my loose mastery of the senate rules, ive decided to defer to molly on the whole rules question. Bill did make one point that is a little sensitive. For a couple of years, ive been planning to advertise my book, the new edition of my old book by using the reference to house of cards. Somehow that doesnt look as good as it used to. [ laughter ] i wasnt sure that this panel would draw such a good audience. And its wonderful to see a spattering of old friends and its wonderful to see a lot of people who i dont know. Donald trumps extraordinary and dangerous presidency so dominates our landscape that its sometimes hard to focus on anything else. And thats particularly true now with the crisis at hand. As the Trump White House and the House Judiciary Committee are on one side and the fbi, the justice department, important institutions are under attack. We wait to see whether the president may force the resignation or fire people. Special counsel mueller, fbi director christopher wray, rod rosenstein. So i thank you for taking the time to come to a panel that doesnt have trumps name in it. As bill said, ive had a long i had a long Senate Career and a deep attachment to it. It was a place that sparked my original commitment to Public Service and it has been an important part of my life now for almost a half a century. There were people that served longer than i did. I was there 12 years actually working when i went back. And people have served longer and theyve done more, but i had an unusual tenure because i spent five years in the Democratic Senate of the late 70s, and then six years in the republican senate. Then one more year when it flipped back. So ive seen the majority and ive seen the minority. Ive dealt with a lot of different issues. So i think i have some possibly something to offer on this on this subject at least. So, the first book i wrote, i started writing in 2008. I was depressed about the long decline of the senate. So i started writing the book at a time when the exciting president ial campaign involving barack obama, john mccain, Hillary Clinton, sarah palin, one of the great exciting campaigns of all time. And i was writing the book, hoping that while i wrote it i would call attention to what the senate had been and what it potentially could be. And i wanted to try to write the book hoping i could help somehow reverse the decline. But at the same time, i was counting on the president ial election. Wed have a new president at a time of possible hope and change, and so i thought maybe the election would help. By the time i completed the book, obviously the reverse was the case. The senate was deeply mired in partisan gridlock, the narrative of my book ended in 1980, but i wrote an epilog to try to explain what had happened after 1980, and that epilog of the first book kind of became the launchpad of this book. I want to say one thing that i do think is important, i wrote undertook absolutely sure Hillary Clinton would be elected president and couldnt govern unless the senate changed. This book wasnt a response to donald trump. This was about the fact that the senate had failed for so long and it destabilized our political system in my opinion. So let me give you the gist of my argument. Then well try to unpack it. Sort of my elevator speech. We all know the prices in american democracy didnt start when donald trump became president or when he came down the escalator. Our political trump tower. Our political system has been like the proverbial frog in boiling water, slowly dying as the temperature rises. The senate is ground zero for that failure. The Political Institution thats failed us the longest and the worst, going back 25 years at least. At its best, the senate served in walter mondales great phrase, as our nations mediator. It was a place where competing interests of two parties and all of the diverse interests of our country came together to be reconciled through negotiation and legislation and principled compromise. It was in Lin Manuel Mirandas words, the place where it happened. When the senate could no longer perform that role, when it succumbed to partisanship rather than overcoming it, the American People lost confidence and ultimately turned to an outsider. Donald trump would not have become president if he wasnt a unique celebrity. But he also became president because of the justifiable feeling in the country that washington was failing. Now obviously i am painting with a broad brush. In a longer discussion, we would talk about the issues that attracted Donald Trumps voters, globalization in technology, certainly immigration. But today were talking about the performance of the government. And when were talking about that, the Trump Presidency is the result of the polarization, gridlock and dysfunction. But the failure of the senate is the cause. Moreover, the senate reached a new low at precisely the moment that we needed to be at its best because we have an inexperienced and potentially authoritarian president. So thats why my talk is entitled the other threat to our democracy. And the failure of the senate, for failure of the senate, one man bears disproportionate responsibility. It is no accident the senates accelerating downward spiral coincides absolutely with Mitch Mcconnells time as leader. I recognize thats a harsh statement. It may not be intuitively obvious. Historians always debate the question how much of this is the individual actions as opposed to greater forces that are at work. And certainly many factors have contributed to the deterioration of our senate, of our country the politics of our country. The ideological chasm between the parties has grown. The role of money in politics, particularly since Citizens United, the impact of the 24 7 cable tv. Gerrymandered districts, people picking their own news sources, in fact, their own facts. In america over the last 30 years, our politics have been uniquely undermined by the combination of the Permanent Campaign where theres never time for governing, only preparing for the next election. And the politics of personal destruction, with some superb political minds devote their time and talent to poll testing what messages and votes can destroy their opponents and then designing the campaign adds to do so. So theres a lot wrong our mcconnells defenders hes just which say hes just a very ski skilled politician who has adapted to and reflected the reality of todays politics. In fact, one of his best friends, late senator bob bennett of utah praised him in 2010 for understanding exactly what happened to the senate from dole to mcconnell. Think about that for a moment. He understood exactly what happened from dole to mcconnell. In other words, it is a partisan time. We need a partisan leader. Theres no time for a statesman like bob dole. The argument doesnt wash for me. Many people, even senators, get away with the claim that they were victims of their times or merely following orders, but senator mcconnell has earned a substantial place in american political history six terms in the senate, almost 12 years as minority and majority leader. Mitch mcconnell doesnt reflect americas political climate, he has shaped it. Now, my view of the senate obviously is that Senate Leaders really matter. They really matter. Looking back over the history of the modern senate, we find occasions when leaders put their indelible mark, not only on the senate, but on the politics and the government of the time. Of course, the most famous example is lbj, master of the senate, Lyndon Johnson. Robert carrys master of the senate. And lbj did an extraordinary job of dragging the senate into the 20th century. It was a reactionary institution before lbj. And he made a great difference with his incredible tos of nature. Incredible energy. He used all the power he could to overcome what the senate had been before, because before lbj the senate was dominated by Southern Committee elite chairmen and it was described as the only place where the south did not lose the civil war. The souths unending revenge upon the north for gettysburg. So johnson did everything he could in caros book, describes it, how he got the first Civil Rights Act through. A modest measure but it was the first. Johnson wore out his welcome in the Senate Quickly actually. People got tired of his overbearing nature. They were tired of him. When he accepted the vice presidency from president john kennedy, people were surprised. Johnson thought it was the only way to ever become president for a southerner, but also knew his days in the senate had passed. Louis gould, the political historian wrote, for the senate Lyndon Johnson was a noisy summer storm that rattled the windows of the Upper Chamber and then moved on, leaving few traces of his passing. He seemed a towering figure at the time, but his essential vision about the senate limited his impact, which is an interesting thought. To understand the senate, what it was, what it is capable of, what weve lost, you have to go back to the last great what i call the last great senate of the 60s and 70s. And i now call it by a better name mansfield senate. Mike mansfield, professor of ancient history, was perhaps the most Unlikely Senate majority leader. Although widely respected for his intelligence, honesty, his intellect and knowledge of the world, mansfield had no desire to be majority leader. When john kennedy became president , the president asked mansfield to be the majority leader, and mansfield didnt want the job but acceded to kennedys request. But mansfield made it clear he would be a different leader. He had a different personality. He believed in a democratic small d senate where all the senators were adults and were all equal. He believed in the golden rule and acted accordingly. And under his leadership, all of the senators had responsibility. Dirksen and others didnt think it could work. Cant work without a Strong Senate leader after johnson. And pretty quickly, the senate bogged down. Mansfield was under so much criticism, he prepared a speech announcing, explaining his concept of the Senate Leadership, and he announced he was going to give it he made the announcement on november 22nd 1963. He never gave it. It was put in the congressional record. But mansfield then demonstrated his leadership by helping to get the Civil Rights Act of 64 through. Lyndon johnson who knew something about the senate called mansfield downtown and said, basically, you got to break the southern filibuster by wearing them out because Richard Russells old and Allen Ellender has cancer. And mansfield said im not going to do it that way. He told them how he was going to do it, they had a two month debate, and he never did anything like that. And they went on from that. They passed the 64 act and then they went on from that to the greatest period of productivity. Mansfield created a senate based on trust and mutual respect. Bipartisanship was second nature. We all knew that thats the way the senate worked. The senate could battle, senators would battle over important issues and then strike their compromises and go out to dinner together. Mansfields senate was extended by robert byrd and howard baker for another eight years. The air is filled with talk about watergate. Understandably. If you look back, the great senators, they were there for watergate. Mansfield launched the Watergate Committee with the unanimous vote of the senate two months after Richard Nixon got 49 states. Robert byrd and howard baker played similar positive roles in watergate, but mansfield urged these people were great senators during watergate because they were great senators all the time. They didnt change from year to year. It didnt matter who the president was, whether they were in the majority or minority. So lets look at the senates decline for one minute. And my framework is this it was a long decline of the senate that started probably 25 years ago, somewhere late 80s, early 90s you can see it. And theres a long decline. Then all of a sudden theres a second stage of decline. And the decline goes like this and then like that. And the that the coincidesed with arrivals of harry reid on the democratic side and Mitch Mcconnell on the republican side. They inherited a senate that was in gradual but unmistakable decline. Head the experience. They had the obligation, they had the opportunity to address that decline and rebuild the senate. Instead, they became in the words of journalist steven colinson, the terrible twins of dysfunction. Both using arcane procedures to slow and throttle the promise of the others rule. Their supporters would argue about which one was worse, never which one was better. Under their leadership the long decline accelerated precipitously. Their joint legacy would be a broken senate. But the responsibility was by no means equal. Obviously not since reid retired, but not while he was there either. So let me turn to senator mcconnell for a moment. I believe theres a tendency to misunderstand him even after all this time. He has been there so long, he has to be an institutio