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.

Related Links

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)

Transcript

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 (<a href="https://www.rev.com/transcript-editor/shared/b5l4XL3l4jreKt10p