[House Hearing, 117 Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]


                BUILDING A MORE CIVIL AND COLLABORATIVE 
                         CULTURE IN CONGRESS

=======================================================================

                                HEARING

                               BEFORE THE

                         SELECT COMMITTEE ON THE 
                         MODERNIZATION OF CONGRESS

                                 OF THE

                        HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

                    ONE HUNDRED SEVENTEENTH CONGRESS

                             FIRST SESSION

                               __________

                             JUNE 17, 2021

                               __________

                           Serial No. 117-07

                               __________

  Printed for the use of the Select Committee on the Modernization of 
                                Congress
                                
 [GRAPHIC NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]                               


                    Available via http://govinfo.gov

                               __________

                    U.S. GOVERNMENT PUBLISHING OFFICE                    
48-593                     WASHINGTON : 2022                     
          
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           SELECT COMMITTEE ON THE MODERNIZATION OF CONGRESS

                    DEREK KILMER, Washington, Chair

ZOE LOFGREN, California              WILLIAM TIMMONS, South Carolina,
EMANUEL CLEAVER, Missouri              Vice Chair
ED PERLMUTTER, Colorado              BOB LATTA, Ohio
DEAN PHILLIPS, Minnesota             RODNEY DAVIS, Illinois
NIKEMA WILLIAMS, Georgia             DAVE JOYCE, Ohio
                                     GUY RESCHENTHALER, Pennsylvania
                                     BETH VAN DUYNE, Texas

                            COMMITTEE STAFF

                     Yuri Beckelman, Staff Director
                Derek Harley, Republican Staff Director
                           
                           
                           C O N T E N T S

                              ----------                              

                           Opening Statements

                                                                   Page

Chairman Derek Kilmer
      Oral Statement.............................................     1
Vice Chairman William Timmons
      Oral Statement                                                  3

                               Witnesses

Mr. Yuval Levin, Director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional 
    Studies, American Enterprise Institute
      Oral Statement.............................................     4
      Written Statement..........................................     7
Ms. Molly Reynolds, Senior Fellow, Governance Studies, Brookings
      Oral Statement.............................................    17
      Written Statement..........................................    20
Discussion.......................................................    25

 
      BUILDING A MORE CIVIL AND COLLABORATIVE CULTURE IN CONGRESS

                              ----------                              


                        THURSDAY, JUNE 17, 2021

                  House of Representatives,
                            Select Committee on the
                                 Modernization of Congress,
                                                    Washington, DC.
    The committee met, pursuant to call, at 9:05 a.m., in Room 
2167, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Derek Kilmer 
[chairman of the committee] presiding.
    Present: Representatives Kilmer, Perlmutter, Phillips, 
Williams of Georgia, Timmons, Van Duyne, and Joyce.
    The Chairman. The committee will come to order.
    Without objection, the chair is authorized to declare a 
recess of the committee at any time.
    I now recognize myself for 5 minutes for an opening 
statement.
    So the view from the chair's seat looks a little different 
today, and that is by design. Committee hearings should elicit 
thoughtful and productive discussion about the issues of the 
day, and yet most hearings are structured to do just the 
opposite. Members sit in rows divided by party with the senior 
Members literally sitting above their junior colleagues. We 
look at each other in profile, or, even worse, we are staring 
at the back of each other's heads, which I have two concerns 
about. One, it is not the best way to have dialogue. And, two, 
I am thinning in the back.
    And I know you smell what I am cooking.
    Witnesses who are there to share their expertise are often 
seated below us or even though they know more than we do on 
many of these issues, and a lot of interesting exchanges get 
cut short because the 5-minute rule, and there is no real flow 
to the discussion because Members are running back and forth 
between multiple hearings. Then they jump from one topic to 
another and then back again.
    So, instead of generating interesting debate and good 
ideas, hearings too often promote political posturing and sound 
bites for social media. That is definitely not what the Framers 
intended. Woodrow Wilson once famously noted that ``Congress in 
session is Congress on public exhibition whilst Congress in its 
committee rooms is Congress at work.'' Unfortunately, this 
hasn't been the case for quite some time.
    So the Select Committee is trying something different 
today. Earlier this year we adopted committee rules to give us 
the flexibility to experiment with how we structure our 
hearings, and our goal is to encourage thoughtful discussion 
and a civil exchange of ideas and opinions. Committee members 
agreed that the ability to look right at each other when 
speaking and when listening matters. So does the ability to 
extend a meaningful exchange with a witness or a colleague. 
These two simple guideposts provided the framework for our 
hearing today. And given the topic of today's hearing, 
``Building a More Civil and Collaborative Congressional 
Culture,'' this approach makes good sense.
    So, in accordance with clause 2(j) of House rule XI, we 
will allow 1 hour of extended questioning per witness, and, 
without objection, these 2 hours will not be strictly 
segregated between witnesses, which will allow up to 2 hours of 
back-and-forth exchanges between members and witnesses.
    Vice Chair Timmons and I will manage the time to ensure 
that every member has equal opportunity to participate. Any 
member who wishes to speak should signal their request to me or 
Vice Chair Timmons. You can just wave or gesture or----
    Mr. Perlmutter. Gesture.
    The Chairman. Bird noise.
    Additionally, members who wish to claim their individual 5 
minutes to question each witness pursuant to clause 2(j) of 
rule XI will be permitted to do so following the 2 hours of 
extended questioning. Okay. That is the formal stuff.
    This committee's mission is to make Congress work better 
for the American people, and one way we do that is to practice 
what we preach. It is one thing to call for a more civil and 
collaborative process, but it is another to actually do it. In 
trying out new approaches, this committee is modeling what is 
possible. We understand that what we are doing today may be 
difficult to pull off in some House committees, but 
subcommittees can provide a good venue for experimentation. 
Simple agreement between a chair and a ranking member can open 
the door to new approaches that inspire genuine participation 
in the legislative process.
    Modernization doesn't happen without experimentation. 
Institutions evolve through a process of trial and error. And 
if we don't try new things, we risk stagnation. We owe the 
American people a strong legislative branch that is capable of 
continuing upholding its Article I responsibilities. We also 
owe the American people a Congress that is capable of engaging 
in constructive conflict. The goal in airing conflict shouldn't 
be simply to highlight difference. The goal should be to 
establish clear positions of meaningful discussions, test 
different compromises, and ultimately find a way forward.
    I am consistently struck that Congress as an institution 
has some unique cultural challenges. It is the first 
organization in which I have worked where there is not a widely 
embraced mission or a set of goals. Indeed, Congress often 
feels like 435 independent contractors, all loosely affiliated 
with one of two general contractors, that appear to be in a 
high-stakes competition for market share.
    The incentives, as one of our witnesses today points out in 
his book, which I read on my airplane flight, are often not to 
build or fix the institution but rather to bash it. Much of 
what vexes the institution is not failures and rules and 
procedures but the breakdown of norms or, for lack of a better 
phrase, corporate culture.
    And, finally, there is a recognition that polarization in 
Congress is often reflective of disagreement we see in American 
society.
    So, today, we are joined by two experts who are going to 
help us understand the various factors and trends over the past 
several decades that have contributed to the high levels of 
polarization we see in both society and Congress today. They 
will also get us thinking about how Members perceive their 
roles within Congress and strategies we might consider for 
normalizing civil and collaborative behavior. I am looking 
forward to their testimony and conversation.
    And I would like now to invite Vice Chair Timmons to share 
some opening remarks as well.
    Mr. Timmons. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
    And I want to thank both of our witnesses for taking the 
time to come today. We really do appreciate it, and we look 
forward to this conversation.
    I think that this is possibly the most important work this 
committee will do. We are doing a lot of important work. But 
making Congress more civil, more collaborative is probably what 
I believe to be the most important thing that we can do because 
there is no collaboration. There is no civility. It is 
remarkable that this is where we are, but it is a symptom of 
where we are as a country, and we got to work on the country, 
but we really got to lead in Congress.
    So I spent a lot of time in the first--in the 116th 
Congress on the calendar and the schedule because I think that 
spending more time together, not--I call it pinballing all over 
the Capitol complex--and building relationships is the 
beginning of the conversation because we are not having policy-
based discussions. We are using talking points. You never have 
to defend your ideas in front of your colleagues, and you are 
on Twitter, spouting off mean things, and that gets clicks, and 
then you go on television and say even meaner things. And guess 
what? We are not going to fix immigration that way. We are not 
going to fix our debt. We are not going to fix healthcare. We 
have to have policy-based conversations from a place of mutual 
respect and hear people's ideas and find common ground to move 
forward, and that is what we need. That is what the American 
people deserve.
    So I think that, without fixing the process, giving people 
opportunities to get to know one another and spend time 
together, we are never going to be able to have these 
conversations. And so I just really appreciate you-all taking 
the time, and I am looking forward to it.
    I do want to point out that this week is possibly the best 
example of what is wrong with this place. We had votes at 6:30 
on Monday. We are leaving in 2 or 3 hours. Today is Thursday. 
So we didn't do anything on Monday or today except for this 
hearing, which is wonderful, and we had 2 days of which, you 
know, three members of this committee serve on four committees, 
and I don't know their committee schedule but I can promise you 
that they were double-booked multiple times. We had floor votes 
yesterday for, oh, my goodness, seven 20-minute votes. It was 
probably one of the most inefficient experiences I have had up 
here, which says a lot.
    So just finding opportunities to make this place better 10 
minutes at a time, you know, a day at a time, that is how we 
are going to begin this process of building relationships to 
have policy-based conversations. So I look forward to this 
dialogue, and I really appreciate the different in this format 
because I think it will facilitate a better discussion.
    So, with that, Mr. Chairman, thank you.
    And I yield back.
    The Chairman. Thank you.
    I am going to invite each witness to give 5 minutes of oral 
testimony. And following testimony, and, without objection, I 
am going to grant the witnesses an additional 5 minutes to 
respond to or follow up on points of interest in each other's 
testimony. Witnesses are reminded that your written statements 
will be made part of the record.
    And our first witness today is Yuval Levin. Dr. Levin is 
the director of Social, Cultural and Constitutional Studies at 
the American Enterprise Institute and also holds the Beth and 
Ravenel Curry Chair in Public Policy. He is the founding and 
current editor of National Affairs, as well as the senior 
editor of The New Atlantis and a contributing editor to the 
National Review. Dr. Levin served as a member of the White 
House domestic policy staff under President George W. Bush. He 
was also executive director of the President's Council on 
Bioethics and a congressional staffer at the Member, committee, 
and leadership levels. He is the author of several books on 
political theory and public policy, most recently, ``A Time to 
Build: From Family and Community to Congress and the Campus, 
How a Recommitting to Our Institutions Can Revive the American 
Dream.''
    Dr. Levin, you are now recognized.

 STATEMENTS OF YUVAL LEVIN, DIRECTOR OF SOCIAL, CULTURAL, AND 
  CONSTITUTIONAL STUDIES, AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE; AND 
 MOLLY REYNOLDS, SENIOR FELLOW, GOVERNANCE STUDIES, BROOKINGS 
                          INSTITUTION.

                    STATEMENT OF YUVAL LEVIN

    Mr. Levin. Chair Kilmer, Vice Chair Timmons, thank you very 
much. Members of the committee, thank you for the opportunity 
to testify today. It is an honor to be able to contribute 
something to the enormously important work that you are doing 
and to think with you a little bit about how to improve the 
culture of the Congress.
    In my written remarks, I offer some reflections on the 
sources of today's cultural distempers and on how what is 
happening in this institution is related to some broader trends 
in our society. I am happy to discuss that, of course, in our 
conversation. In these brief opening remarks I thought that I 
would draw just one part of that testimony which focuses on a 
few key principles for reform, some crucial points to remember, 
maybe pitfalls to avoid as you consider ways of improving the 
culture of the institution.
    I would start by saying that it is important to remember 
that prescription is not diagnosis in reverse when we think 
about how to fix institutions. There are reasons why Congress 
is the way it is, good and bad. But those reasons don't offer 
us a map for improving things. You can't go backwards and try 
to play that movie in reverse and think you will solve 
problems. So that understanding how we got here can help us to 
understand some of the constraints that reformers face in 
trying to fix things but doesn't offer us a map of where to go 
next.
    Secondly, I would really urge you to avoid the lure of 
selective nostalgia when thinking about Congress. The problems 
with the contemporary Congress is not that it isn't like it 
used to be. It is that in some ways it isn't what it needs to 
be today, and it is important to think about the difference 
between those. It is easy to approach the kind of work that you 
are doing in this committee by trying to think back to some 
golden age when Congress supposedly worked and everybody 
supposedly got along. I would just say it is very unlikely that 
whatever golden age you have in mind was actually as golden as 
you might remember or as people might say, and it is important 
to see that change has to happen going forward and not going 
backward.
    Your committee very wisely describes itself as devoted to 
modernization of Congress. Modernization involves adapting to 
changing circumstances. And that is the right attitude to 
maintain, even if there are lessons we can learn from the past.
    Third, I would really urge you to focus on incentives when 
thinking about the culture. Members of this institution behave 
the way you do for reasons, for serious reasons. You are all 
intelligent men and women, ambitious men and women, and you are 
trying to succeed and to achieve something for your 
constituents and for your country. And so, when culture breaks 
down, there are reasons that have to do with incentives with 
the kinds of pressures you face. And if we want to think about 
how to change the culture, it is important to think about how 
to change incentives.
    Some of the strongest incentives that Members face are 
obviously electoral incentives, which aren't so easy for 
Congress itself to change, but there are also incentives 
created by the nature of legislative work itself, by the nature 
of the schedule, the nature of the structure of the 
institution, which can be very powerful, which shape behavior 
as much as they shape work, and it is important to think about 
change in terms of altering incentives.
    Fourth and related to that, I would say that reforming the 
culture of Congress requires reforming the work of Congress. It 
is worth thinking about things like how to encourage Members to 
spend more time together, how to encourage Members to take 
retreats together or have dinner together. That matters, but I 
would say that ultimately what matters more is the work of the 
institution. The cultural change of the work encourages a 
different kind of culture, and just spending time together is 
not really a way to get at the core of the culture of the 
institution. You have to think about how Congress works and, 
therefore, how its Members work.
    And, fifth and finally, I would urge you to think 
explicitly about how you understand the purpose of the 
Congress. Reforms of the institution including reforms focused 
on improving its culture have to take for granted some idea of 
the purpose of Congress' work, but there is a rather deep 
disagreement about that purpose that I think is implicit now in 
a lot of the thinking that surrounds congressional reform and 
that sometimes leaves some of the that work incoherent. Simply 
put, I would say reformers have to ask yourselves whether the 
purpose of the Congress is maybe like the purpose of the 
European Parliament, to enable the majority party to achieve 
its objectives while it is in office until the public throws it 
out, or whether the purpose of the Congress is to enable or 
even compel accommodation across lines of difference in 
American society, to bring people together across differences. 
Those goals are not mutually exclusive, obviously, but 
particularly in an era of closely divided parties, they can 
really point in different directions.
    That latter purpose, enabling accommodation, bargaining, 
compromise, dealmaking is plainly, I think, implicit in the 
constitutional design of the legislative branch. The U.S. 
Congress really isn't like a European Parliament. It is 
intended to work across lines of difference, and I think the 
distinction between the two is especially important when 
thinking about the culture of the institution. A culture of 
implacable partisan polarization is not necessarily an obstacle 
to the functioning of a purely majoritarian legislature like a 
European Parliament, but it is absolutely an obstacle to the 
cause of a more accommodationist, compromise-driven model of 
legislative work.
    In essence, I think reformers need to decide if the goal of 
reform is to make cross-partisan engagement less necessary or 
more likely. That you are concerned about that kind of question 
and that you are concerned about the culture of the institution 
suggests to me that you are--that you take that kind of cross-
partisan engagement to be an essential goal of congressional 
reform, and that is certainly my own view, too. I think we have 
to wrestle with that question of what ultimately is the purpose 
of the institution. How do we expect it to solve problems 
before we can get to particular reforms?
    My written testimony does suggest a few categories of 
particular reforms that could be especially useful, I think, in 
moving the culture of Congress in a particular direction, and I 
am happy to get into those but I thought that starting with 
these general principles might be a way into a broader 
conversation. And in any case, I now stand in your way of 
hearing from Molly Reynolds, who is truly one of the great 
Congress experts and knowledgeable in a way that I couldn't 
hope to be. So I am going to get out of her way and let her 
inform you.
    Thank you very much.
    [The statement of Mr. Levin follows:]
    [GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
    
    The Chairman. Thank you, Dr. Levin.
    Our second witness is Molly Reynolds. Dr. Reynolds is a 
senior fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings 
Institution. She studies Congress with an emphasis on how 
congressional rules and procedures affect domestic policy 
outcomes. Dr. Reynolds is the author of, ``Exceptions to the 
Rule: The Politics of Filibuster Limitations in the U.S. 
Senate,'' which explores the creation, use, and consequences of 
the budget reconciliation process and other procedures that 
prevent filibusters in the U.S. Senate. Her current research 
projects include work on oversight in the House of 
Representatives, congressional reform, and the congressional 
budget process. She also supervises the maintenance of ``Vital 
Statistics on Congress,'' Brookings' long-running resource on 
the first branch of government.
    Dr. Reynolds, welcome back to our committee. You are now 
recognized.

                  STATEMENT OF MOLLY REYNOLDS

    Ms. Reynolds. Thank you. Thank you, Chair Kilmer, Vice 
Chair Timmons, members of the committee, and staff. Again, my 
name is Molly Reynolds. I am a senior fellow in the Governance 
Studies program at the Brookings Institution, and I am so 
appreciative of the opportunity to be back to today testify on 
how Congress might improve its culture.
    With my time this morning, I want to----
    Mr. Perlmutter. Is your mike on?
    Ms. Reynolds. Is that better?
    Mr. Perlmutter. That is better.
    Ms. Reynolds. Okay. With my time this morning, I want to 
build on two of the principles that Yuval laid out in his 
testimony that prescription is not diagnosis in reverse and the 
necessity of avoiding the lure of selective nostalgia. And I 
will draw today on my own research and that of other political 
scientists, and I want to offer some observations on why these 
principles are so important.
    To begin, a review of a few familiar but useful trends in 
American politics may be helpful. Voters today are better 
sorted into the two parties along both ideological lines and 
social identities. Research also suggests this increasing 
homogeneity has led votes to see partisanship as a stronger 
component of their social identity, which, in turn, leads them 
to see themselves as more different from and to dislike Members 
of the other party.
    Second, on the issue of polarization in Congress, while any 
single approach will have drawbacks, the measure most often 
used by political scientists indicates that polarization in 
Congress was relatively low between the 1930s and the 1970s but 
grew to record levels by the 2000s. The period of increasing 
polarization since the 1970s has been asymmetric to the extent 
that it has been more associated with the movement of 
Republican legislatures to the right than with Democratic 
Members to the left. To the extent that Democrats have moved in 
a more liberal direction, it has been driven by demographic 
change in the Caucus as additional female Representatives and 
Representatives of color have been elected as Democrats. 
Indeed, the House has nine times as many women, four and a half 
times as many African Americans, nine times as many Latinos and 
Latinas, and seven and a half times as many Asian Americans 
today as it did in 1971. To be clear, a more diverse House of 
Representatives which better reflects the diversity of the 
country is a good thing for our democracy. But a more diverse 
Chamber cannot and should not operate under the same 
institutional culture than its less diverse predecessors did.
    The changing demographics are not the only reason why we 
cannot divorce a conversation about the changing culture of 
Congress from one about racial politics in the United States. 
We must also consider the consequences of the realignment of 
southern White voters from the Democratic Party to the 
Republican Party. As political scientist Frances Lee, who this 
panel heard from in the 116th Congress, has argued, one 
consequence of the long, postwar dominance of the Democratic 
Party in Congress is that it shaped Members' expectations about 
the outcome of the next election. Members of the both parties 
believed that Democrats would hold the majority during this 
period. Beginning in the 1980s, both parties began to see the 
majority as winnable. And Members' behavior changed 
accordingly. When party control is seen to hang in the balance, 
Members see more value in a style of partisanship that 
disincentivizes cooperation.
    Charting a course for change also requires being honest 
about elements of previous Congresses that may have encouraged 
a collaborative culture but to which we cannot return for other 
good reasons. Here I would point to the example of calls for 
Members to move their families to Washington. The notion that 
the culture of Congress has changed for the worse because 
Members and their families do not socialize with each other is 
widely held. The shift away from relocating one's family is 
often attributed to changing expectations in the 1980s and 
1990s, whereby Members should avoid being seen to have ``gone 
Washington.'' Viewing time spent in Washington as something to 
be avoided is detrimental to the health of the institution, and 
we should work to change the understanding of it.
    But even if this framing is harmful, that does not mean 
that the push to roll back one of its consequences in calling 
for more Members to relocate to Washington is automatically the 
right thing to do. We lack comprehensive data on the 
occupations of congressional spouses, either historically or 
today, but it is fair to suspect that many more Members today 
come from dual-career families, and if we care about continuing 
to diversify the range of perspectives which lawmakers bring to 
Washington, we do not want to create systematic barriers to 
individuals with caregiving responsibilities from serving in 
Congress.
    Finally, I will urge you, especially as you think about 
improving the norms of interpersonal behavior that facilitates 
what are distinct from legislative behavior, to consider what a 
culture of civility is in service of. Civility and good 
interpersonal behavior more generally can encourage 
collaboration and other productive methods of doing legislative 
work.
    But calls for civility also have a long history of serving 
as a means of attempting to suppress marginalized groups. The 
norms that persist are the ones that Members believe will serve 
them well. That can also mean they help preserve the existing 
status quo. Building new norms requires convincing Members 
inclusively that they will help them accomplish their goals.
    And, with that, I might yield back to Yuval to begin a 
conversation about proposed reforms that might advance the goal 
of a more civil and collaborative culture.
    [The statement of Ms. Reynolds follows:]
    [GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
    
    The Chairman. I would like to ask both witnesses whether 
they have any additional points or comments that they want to 
make, having heard one another, before we move on to member 
dialogue and questions.
    Mr. Levin. Well, thank you. I appreciate that, and I 
appreciate the opportunity to respond to Molly's very 
thoughtful remarks.
    I think, as she suggested at the end, that it might be 
worth our spending this brief period thinking about specific 
ideas for change that might build out from some of the points 
we have made and some of the points we each make in our 
testimony. And I would do that by stressing the point I 
suggested, which is that changing culture means changing work 
especially. And it is important to think not only in terms of 
how we can get Members to cooperate more, to get to know each 
other more, all of which matters. It is important that we think 
in terms of categories like budget reform.
    The budget has always been at the core of the culture of 
this institution from the very beginning. It is at the essence 
of what Congress does. The power of the purse shapes the 
ambition that members come here with and the nature of the work 
they do, and Congress has moved to change the nature of the 
budget process very often in response to what are in effect 
challenges to its culture or rather to its ability to work 
effectively.
    The budget process that you work with today, which comes 
from the middle of the 1970s, is not well-suited to the needs 
that Congress has now. I think that is true both in terms of 
the needs that involve spending Federal money but as well as 
the need to work together across party lines in an institution 
that is divided and that has been closely divided now for a 
generation.
    This budget process comes from a time when one party had 
held control for 20 years and expected to hold control for 
forever and did for another 20 years after that but that has 
not been the case now for quite a while and a budget process 
that is suited to a Congress where each party thinks it might 
gain control next time I think would look rather different than 
the kind of consolidated process you have now which, if you 
think about it, assumes an enormous amount of coordination 
capacity which now is very difficult in Congress. I think it is 
very important to think in terms of budget reform if you want 
to change the culture, the nature of the institution.
    Secondly, I would urge you to think, as this committee has 
in very constructive ways, about ways of re-empowering the 
committees of the House, the committees of the Congress. That 
is important both for advancing the work of the institution but 
also for allowing Members to see how they can matter, even if 
they don't happen to be the Speaker or the majority leader or 
even a committee chair, and allowing Members to see how their 
time is spent in ways that translate into meaningful work they 
can show their constituents and they can point to in explaining 
how they are improving the country.
    Committees are enormously important in that way, and I 
would distinguish strengthening the committees from 
strengthening individual Members. That is, it is not just about 
decentralization. It is about that middle level where Members 
work together and engage with each other over concrete, 
substantive policy issues. I think that is enormously important 
if we want to think about changing the culture.
    And, finally, I would just point to one idea that is in my 
testimony which I think has--can be a sensitive issue in 
Congress but has to do with the question of transparency. There 
are a lot of ways in which the increased transparency in this 
institution has done an enormous amount of good. A public 
institution needs to be transparent, but there also need to be 
forums in which Members can work together in private. A lot of 
the work of Congress is bargaining and negotiation. Bargaining 
and negotiation are not well-served by absolute transparency. 
So that, while it is very important to that Members be 
answerable for the decisions they make, that they are 
ultimately responsible for their votes and for proposals and 
ideas, there has to be some room for negotiation.
    That fact is now dealt with by Members working with each 
other outside the structure of the Congress, creating little 
groups where they meet and talk about what a bill could 
include. Well, that is what a committee is supposed to be, and 
the reason that that doesn't happen in the committees is, 
frankly, that it is very hard to do that on television or 
livestreamed to your most engaged constituents. There has to be 
some room for some engagement with one another before Members 
step out in front of cameras and do the part of their work that 
is ultimately public. I know that is easier for me to say than 
it is for to you say, but I think it is very important to think 
about as you ask yourselves how to improve the culture of the 
institution.
    Ms. Reynolds. Thank you.
    So, to start, I will sort of endorse many of the ideas that 
Yuval offered in his remarks there. And then I will say that 
generally I think what is important for improving legislative 
behavior is creating more opportunities for Members to have 
efficacy in the legislative process. I would encourage you to 
think about more ways to provide Members opportunities to claim 
credit for legislative wins, even when those wins don't involve 
the passage of a bill on which you were the lead sponsor.
    So this would include things like formatting committee 
reports in such a way that make clear which provisions were 
added as the result of Member requests at the drafting stage or 
as a result of specific Member amendments, providing a clear 
accounting of which standalone bills are incorporated into 
large omnibus packages. That would help acknowledge the hard 
work of the Members in the committees that went into those 
individual components. Another approach would be to involve 
sort of formally designating what you might think of as a lead 
bill coauthor, so a kind of additional category between sort of 
the formal sponsor of a bill and the cosponsors to signal in 
some formal way that someone else had made major contributions 
to the origins of a bill.
    The last thing I will say is that I--while I think these 
reforms and the kinds that Yuval mentioned are important, there 
are limits to what you can change by changing your rules and 
procedure about the culture of the institution. I say that not 
to discourage you from doing this hard work, because it is 
incredibly important, but just to acknowledge--if anything, to 
make it more important that you do the best work you can but to 
acknowledge that there are lots of things outside these four 
walls that shape your culture as well.
    Thank you.
    The Chairman. Thank you. I appreciate--oh, sorry.
    Thank you. I appreciate both your testimony. Until the end 
of the hearing, this will be the last formal thing I say.
    I now recognize myself and Vice Chair Timmons to begin 2 
hours of extended questioning of both witnesses. Any member who 
wishes to speak should signal their request to me or to Vice 
Chair Timmons.
    So, prior to the hearing, Vice Chair Timmons and I had a 
little bit after discussion around just some of the things that 
got teed up in the testimony. Both in your written testimony 
mentioned committee empowerment, Member empowerment. There was 
discussion of budget and appropriations reform. I know Vice 
Chair Timmons wants to hit on the issue of time and schedule 
and how that impacts things. So we have a few threads to pull, 
and, as we mentioned at the start of this hearing, our intent 
is to have this be a little bit more free-flowing so that, 
rather than being a regimented 5 minutes per person, that if we 
are hitting on a topic you want to ask a question about, let us 
know and you can ask the question. That is part of the idea 
here.
    So, maybe just to kick us off, I want to get a better sense 
from you of what committee empowerment looks like and that, you 
know, if I airdropped you onto this committee, other than 
running, screaming for the door, what would you do? What would 
you recommend to better empower committees?
    I know--and, Dr. Levin, in your book you actually reference 
the fact that, you know, some of what we see now in terms of 
centralization of power was due to reforms in prior 
generations.
    So what do we unwind? What do we change? What does 
committee empowerment look like?
    Mr. Levin. Well, thank you very much, Chair Kilmer, for the 
question.
    I would start by stressing that point, which is that a lot 
of the problems we face now were solutions to problems that 
Members faced in a prior generation, and that is just natural. 
That is how institutions evolve. It doesn't even mean they were 
wrong to do what they did. A lot of the centralization of power 
that happened in Congress began in the 1970s in response to 
excessively powerful committee chairs and a sense among younger 
members that some committee chairs, especially southern 
Democrats, were standing in the way of important reforms that a 
lot of Members felt that they had been elected to advance. And 
they worked to take away some of the power of those committee 
chairs, and the way they could do that is as young Members was 
to move that power to leadership and to empower their party 
leaders to take away some of the authority that committee 
chairs had, and that began a process of centralization.
    I think there is another wave of that that came in the 
1990s when Republicans took control of Congress for the first 
time in decades. And, frankly, they didn't have much experience 
of running the institution through the committee system. They 
had been elected thanks to work of a Speaker and majority 
leader, and they gave that Speaker and majority leader a lot of 
power, which ended up centralizing power away from the 
committees in ways that did advance some important agenda items 
but that have left us in a situation now where I think a lot of 
Members feel like their time on just a normal week in Congress 
is not devoted to enough work that is really going to 
ultimately matter and result in legislation, result in 
something they can show their constituents.
    To me, it is very important to think about the answer to 
that in terms of committee empowerment more than individual 
Member empowerment. Congress is plural. It is not an 
institution where a single Member can really drive the agenda. 
And empowering individual Members, I think, very often just 
results in grandstanding because that is what members can do. 
They can find a camera and make their name that way.
    The committees have a very distinct and unusual role in the 
institution because they allow power to flow in ways that 
enable groups of Members to work together and represent some of 
the diversity of the larger institution that can then result in 
legislation that might have a chance of moving. So, to me, 
empowering committees really means allowing the everyday work 
that Members do in committee to result in legislation. And it 
is not nearly enough the case now that that work has any chance 
of really resulting in legislation.
    One practical idea I would point to is something that a lot 
of State legislatures do now. More than 20 State legislatures 
allow committees to control some floor time so that there is 
once a month in most cases a certain amount of time that 
belongs to the committee, to the chair and the ranking member. 
Or different legislatures do this differently where, generally 
speaking, what happens in that time is that legislative 
proposals that have passed the committee, so have some support 
that reflects some of the breadth of the larger legislature, 
can move to the floor, regardless of whether the party leaders 
want that or not. That time belongs to the chair or the 
committee.
    And that means that the work of the committee, especially 
when that work is somewhat consensus-driven, has the support of 
a large number, and some State legislatures require that there 
be a supermajority on the committee for a bill to meet the 
requirement of that time, can actually get to the floor. And 
that means that Members don't have to think about whether what 
they are doing will satisfy their party leader. They can look 
at the around them, around the committee room, and see that 
this work can get somewhere, that if we work together and get 
to a place where enough of us agree, then the larger 
legislature can look at it. That is one idea. There are many 
others.
    But I think the point of that is to enable the work that is 
done in committee to matter. I would describe the problem right 
now as a sense that that work really doesn't matter enough and 
that what you can do in committee is, you know, badger somebody 
in such a way that might get you on your favorite cable news 
channel that night rather than thinking about producing 
legislation that might actually get somewhere.
    Ms. Reynolds. I will just start where Yuval ended, which is 
to say that I completely agree with this notion that one of the 
challenges in committee--with committees right now is that 
there is no--often no reason to believe that the hard work done 
in committee will result in legislation that actually comes to 
the floor and has a chance of becoming law and Yuval suggested 
one way to address that is by giving committees protected floor 
time. Sort of a related proposal would be to guarantee each 
committee sort of some number of bills that they get to bring 
to the floor each session. So I think there are a number of 
different ways you can approach that, but fundamentally I think 
that that is the central challenge here.
    The other thing I would say, going back to some of the 
history where Yuval started, is that, when we talk about 
empowering committees, we need to be careful to specify what we 
mean by that and that what I think we want is committees where 
individual Members feel like that is the place where they can 
have a say in the legislative process. And one of the sort of 
part of how we ended up where we are today is reforms that 
disempowered committee chairs because they had sort of 
developed little fiefdoms around the institution where even--we 
would have said in the middle of the 20th century that 
committees were quite powerful but that they were not powerful 
in a way that meant that individual Members felt like that was 
the avenue through which they could have input into the 
legislative process.
    And so, as we think about empowering committees, I think we 
want to be clear that we want them to be places where real 
legislative work is done by all of the participants and not 
just, say, the leaders of each individual committee.
    The Chairman. I know Vice Chair Timmons wants to get in on 
this, and I think Mr. Phillips also wanted to.
    Mr. Timmons. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
    I am actually going to step back a little bit and try to 
frame this. I am seeing three kind of areas of focus. Time is 
one. And, you know, we have talked about the calendar. In 2019, 
we traveled for 70 days, and we were here for 65 full days. 
That is crazy. We made a recommendation last Congress about two 
weeks on, two weeks off. We can talk more about that, but it is 
not just being here more. It is our time here and how we are 
efficient with the floor schedule and how we are efficient to 
not be in multiple places at once with committees and 
subcommittees. So we are working in that area, and I am sure we 
are going to talk more about that. So the first is time.
    The second is relationship-building opportunities, and we 
have talked about a number of different ways that we can do 
that, and we are going to go deeper in that category.
    And then the third, and I definitely agree one of the most 
important, I refer to it as restructuring incentives and, you 
know, you have got budget reform, and that is huge. We haven't 
passed a budget in decades. I mean, this is crazy. And, you 
know, I like the idea of restructuring committees and 
empowering Members. And, you know, we have been talking about 
that. And, you know, another thing would be maybe expedited 
hearings for, you know, we have the discharge petition, which 
is useless--it is just a messaging device--and then, you know, 
maybe creating a lower threshold for a discharge petition but 
making it equal Rs and Ds, so 80 Rs and 80 Ds. And you get a 
hearing where--maybe within the committee you get, you know, 
maybe 50 percent or 40 percent of the actual committee, but it 
has to be equally Rs and Ds; you will get an expedited hearing 
or you can force a hearing or just anything we can do to create 
an incentive for bipartisanship, because I think that is huge.
    So can you-all speak really quick? Do you agree that those 
are the three categories we should be focused on: time, 
relationship-building opportunities, and then restructuring 
incentives? Is that fair, or is there another area that you 
think would be important to add to our top three?
    Mr. Levin. Well, thank you. I do agree that those are three 
important categories. I think I would place the third of those 
first.
    Mr. Timmons. Sure.
    Mr. Levin. And that it is particularly important to think 
about the nature and work of the institution.
    I would also say one other thing. The way you put things 
and the way that I would often put things, too, which says it 
is crazy we haven't passed a budget in 30 years--or, you know, 
it is really now 7 years--I guess, since there was really an 
organized budget process. Maybe it is not that crazy. Maybe the 
question is: If this is how Congress works now, what should the 
rules be to enable that to be a way to pass legislation? If we 
are not going to push our way through the 1974 budget process, 
what are we doing? And what would it look like for a Congress 
that wants to do that, to establish its rules in a way that 
enable that to lead to constructive legislation?
    I think it is worth your while as members to think about 
how are we working? If what it takes to pass a bill on 
infrastructure is to put aside the committee system and get 
members together in a private room to talk about 
infrastructure, well, maybe that is what the committee system 
should be. If we can't seem to get a budget passed in the way 
that the budget process requires but there are other ways that 
we do spending bills, well, let's think about what the budget 
process would look like if it actually enabled Members to do 
what the evidence suggests they want to do.
    This is your institution. You can change the rules. The 
Constitution creates very, very broad frameworks for what your 
work has to involve and lets you set the rules within that to a 
very great degree. None of these rules is sacred. None of these 
things has to be this way. And if ask you yourself, you know, 
on that flight where you spend most of your time, you ask you 
yourself, why am I spend something much of my time here, the 
answer to that can just be, well, maybe I just shouldn't, and 
there are ways to change this.
    I would think the same way about the budget process, about 
the committee system. You really can change the way this works. 
I think that is the premise of this committee. It is a premise 
that a lot of Members need to internalize and really, before 
attacking Congress for failing to do something, think about how 
to change Congress so that it could succeed in doing what you 
think you were elected to do.
    The Chairman. I know Mr. Phillips wants to get in on this.
    Mr. Phillips. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
    I want to continue on the theme of incentives to which you 
both refer. The incentives here are perverse, I think it is 
fair to say, and I would like to go further upstream. We all 
know that Members who come from very safe districts not only 
are not rewarded for working together; they are punished. They 
are labeled as traitors by their base, whether it is a deep 
blue district or a deep red district.
    So my question for each of you is: Are there some changes 
to our electoral system that might reward candidates on both 
sides of the aisle who would come here with the ethos of 
working together? Is rank choice voting or independent 
redistricting commissions or changes to our primary system? Any 
thoughts on how to create an awards system before people come 
here to incentivize collaboration?
    Ms. Reynolds. So reforms to the electoral process are 
certainly beyond my expertise, but I would say that it is 
important to think about the sort of biggest incentive 
structure possible when you are asking yourselves kind of why 
did the incentives that you face shape your behavior in the 
ways that you do. So the question is absolutely the right one. 
I can't speculate. I don't know if Yuval would like to on sort 
of exactly which reforms to the electoral system might change 
your incentives and, thus, your behavior in specific ways, but 
I do think it is the right question to ask.
    Mr. Phillips. Mr. Levin.
    Mr. Levin. Well, I would only say that I think it is 
important to experiment with changes on that front because that 
is the most powerful incentives that a lot of Members face. And 
I say ``experiment'' because it is easy to get things wrong in 
unexpected ways. I think the incentives that members confront 
now have to do a lot of the time with a set of election reforms 
that were advanced in the 1970s that created the primary system 
we know now that were intended to solve real problems and that 
ended up creating I think in some ways bigger problems. That 
was not the intention of their designers. They were not meant 
to make our system more partisan, but they absolutely have made 
our system more partisan.
    So I do believe that there is great value in experimenting 
particularly with rank choice voting for the House, but I think 
it is enormously important that that be experimentation. The 
reason I think it is valuable is because this institution is 
meant to be representative of the breadth of our society, and 
that means it has to represent more finely some of the 
distinctions and differences that exist.
    I would put it this way. I think one of the strange things 
about the contemporary Congress is that there aren't a lot of 
intraparty factions. Polarization, on the one hand, means the 
parties get more and more different from each other. It also 
means the parties get more and more similar internally, and 
there are fewer internal differences among Republicans and 
Democrats that might allow for some room for some Republicans 
to work with some Democrats. The electoral system can help to 
change that.
    And there is some experimentation happening in Alaska next 
year. It is being considered in a variety of places, as you 
know. I think that is very constructive in that it is important 
when we face an element of our system that we think is failing 
us that we ask ourselves how can we change it and that we try 
to do that and see what happens. And so I am encouraged by 
those experiments, but we shouldn't assume we know how they 
will go because these kind of things have a way of surprising 
us.
    Mr. Phillips. Thank you.
    The Chairman. I think Mr. Perlmutter wants to get in on 
this.
    Mr. Perlmutter. Yeah, just more I want to respond to Dean, 
and I will just use Colorado as an example. We went to allow 
all unaffiliated voters to vote in the primary, and they get a 
Democratic ballot. They get a Republican ballot. They can 
choose one ballot and move forward. And I was opposed it to. I 
said, ``No, you got to be a member of the party. You know, you 
are working hard.'' So we did this 2 years ago.
    And, as an example, John Hickenlooper, a former governor, 
sort of a moderate-centrist kind of guy, dealmaker was running 
against Andrew Romanoff, our speaker, who is a darling of the 
left. And based on what we saw from sort of party kinds of 
things, Andrew was going to clean his clock, and John ended up 
clobbering him because the unaffiliated voters in this 
instance--and moderate Democrats--just said, you know, ``No, 
this is our guy.''
    And so that did moderate kind of the extremes in that 
instance, and I was opposed to us going to this thing, and I 
was wrong, you know.
    The Chairman. And I think we have got a couple more 
questions around incentives before we shift gears.
    I have one on incentives, and I know Vice Chair Timmons 
does, too, but so one example of where the incentives have 
broken down is on the floor. You know, I came out of a State 
legislature where every bill was taken up under an open rule, 
and in 8 years in the Washington State legislature, I can count 
maybe five or six times where people used that to make 
political hay, but, by and large, the incentive was or at least 
the norm was don't be a jerk, in part because you don't know 
when you are going to be in the minority and you don't want 
people to be a jerk to you. And yet we see a lot of the 
activity in our Nation's Capitol certainly much more focused on 
making political statements than on trying to make law.
    So how would we change the incentives on that? How--you 
know, I think this gets into this issue of Member empowerment, 
too. People want to have a sense of efficacy, but it is this 
tricky dynamic. I shared with Dr. Reynolds, you know, when I 
was 10 years old, my parents gave me the opportunity to have 
free rein over the pantry and to use the stove, and I quickly 
gained, like, 70 pounds, right. It was very empowering, but I 
abused it, right. And, you know, and then I lost the keys to 
the pantry, right, so which is why we have closed rules now. It 
is, you know, we have taken away the keys to the pantry. So 
what do we do?
    Ms. Reynolds. So I will say that I think one of the biggest 
challenges here is convincing Members that any opening up of 
the amendment process would be a durable, persistent change and 
that one of the things that we have seen when both parties in 
both Chambers have made steps down the road to a more open 
amendment process is that that happens. The first time Members 
are confronted with the open pantry, to use your metaphor, Mr. 
Kilmer, they sort of go all in. And then the only response to 
kind of manage that chaos is to tamp down on the process in 
some way and then say, ``Look, we gave you a chance, and you 
all failed us.''
    And so I think this isn't a sort of concrete proposal 
except to say that their getting from sort of A to Z on a more 
open floor process would be messy and there would have to just 
some willingness to kind of push through that sort of 
interregnum, that middle period, before there was a new, kind 
of equilibrium of more open debate.
    Mr. Levin. I very much agree with that.
    I would add only that I think it also requires Members to 
have a tolerance for the unpredictable. You know, we complain 
about centralization of power and Members certainly complain 
about it but part of the reason it happens is the party leaders 
protect Members from votes they don't want to take and from 
votes they don't want to answer for at election time. And, 
obviously, open rules can be used by one party to force Members 
of the other party to take exactly those kind of votes.
    I think part of what it would take to think in terms of 
empowering Members is building up a greater tolerance for 
expressing views on questions that are put on the table by the 
other party where you may not want to tell your voters that 
that is your view on this question, but you don't really get to 
just not express an opinion when you run for Congress. So there 
are other things you can do in life but, you know, if you chose 
this one, you have to be willing to vote on hard questions.
    And I think that it is a mistake to think that the rules 
are all closed because the leaders want all the power. Part of 
the reason is Members don't want to be exposed. And in calling 
for more open rules, which I think would be very helpful in a 
lot of ways, there has to be some openness to the chaos that 
results. I mean, that chaos is a process of negotiation and 
bargaining. Sometimes it is just politics, too. And, you know, 
I think Members have to kind of know what they are in for and 
what they are asking for and, as Molly said, not be shocked the 
first time that this is abused and say, ``Well, we got to go 
back to what we are doing before so we don't face this 
threat.''
    Ms. Reynolds. And If I could just add one thing, the one 
sort of perverse part of this is that one of the consequences 
of having more restrictive rules and fewer amendment votes is 
that then there are fewer votes overall. And so the ones that 
you do take get more attention than they would if you were 
voting on lots and lots of things. And so, you know, yes, you 
are forced to take one vote over here that you didn't 
necessarily want to have to take on the record on something. 
But in a world where that is part of a much bigger set of 
votes, a much richer voting record, the consequence of any one 
vote may not be as high as they are in this more restrictive 
environment.
    The Chairman. Mr. Timmons.
    Mr. Timmons. Before I get to my question, I am going to 
start with addressing this issue. I was in the State senate for 
2 years before I came to Congress and every time we were in 
session--there were 46 of us. We sat in the room and anybody 
could stand up and ask anything, propose an amendment, and we 
only had two instances in the entire 2 years where someone 
abused that process. And I think part of it is because when you 
take the well and you say something ridiculous and you propose 
an idea that is ridiculous, you see the faces of your 
colleagues, and you see, one, you are going to--you have 
intentionally done this to make half of them mad. And the other 
half, your party, is looking at you like, ``You are really 
doing this? Like you don't--this is not appropriate.''
    And so I think, in large part, we are going to have to do 
some self-policing, and, you know, if we do go down this more 
open route, the fringe are always going to try to take 
advantage of it, and it is going to be hard to police the other 
side, but we got to police our own side. We got to keep people 
moving in the right direction because creating problems is not 
going to solve these huge challenges facing this country.
    So, to my question, all these changes that we are 
discussing involve decentralization of power, you know. Whether 
it is not being here, when you here, you are pinballing around, 
that centralizes power to leadership; when, you know, the 
committee structure currently centralize power to leadership. 
The incentives currently end up with four people making all the 
decisions in Congress, and you get a bill that is 5,000 pages 
long, and 6 hours later you are expected to vote on it.
    So, you know, all of these changes do decentralize power. 
So my question is this, and I am going to give you my thoughts 
on it and then I want yours. The fact that this committee 
exists indicates a willingness for change. The fact that we 
have been extended one year and then now a full Congress 
indicates a willingness to consider changes. The dysfunction is 
so severe that even leadership, I believe, is open to making 
some legitimate structural changes. Could you talk a little bit 
about your thoughts on the challenges with decentralization of 
power in regards to leadership?
    Ms. Reynolds. Sure. So I would begin actually with a point 
related to something that Yuval said in response to the last 
question, which is that one of the reasons that power is 
centralized in the way that it is, is because it is challenging 
for, in some situations, for individual committees to come to 
agreement on what a proposal should look like. And when an 
individual committee cannot do it, it gets sort of run up to 
the leadership and that there are situations in which leaders 
are the ones who have sort of the power to say this is what the 
deal is going to be. I am not saying that is true in all of the 
cases, but I think this is--these are all sorts of pieces of 
the same puzzle.
    So, in order for some power to flow away from the 
leadership, you need some kind of somewhere else for it to go, 
and you need, I think, we would both say, one place for it to 
go would be to committees, and there you need committees to 
have the tools and resources they need to be able to do the 
work and feel like, if they do the hard work of getting to a 
proposal on which they agree, that that proposal is actually 
going to go somewhere.
    And so I think that that--I think, as is the case with many 
things in Congress, I think sometimes we blame the 
centralization of power in the hands of party leaders for more 
of Congress' pathologies than it is necessarily the sort of 
chief cause of, and, in some cases, it is the response to other 
challenges that Congress faces. It is what Congress sort of how 
Congress has evolved to deal with other challenges.
    Mr. Levin. I very much agree with that, and I think it is 
important to see it. I mean, I would say the centralization 
that happened in the late 1990s, I was a staffer in the 
nineties on the Budget Committee, and then I worked for Speaker 
Gingrich in his final 2 years, and I would say that a lot of 
that centralization happened because Republicans had gotten 
elected on a very ambitious agenda of institutional reform, and 
none of the committees knew how to do that. They came in 
realizing they had promised to do things that they just weren't 
equipped to do, and so they felt like the only way to do this 
is to put all the power in the Speaker's Office and let this 
move.
    I think that that over time created a culture in the House 
that left Members without much experience of a more 
decentralized House and so without a sense that they could 
really do it so that, while it is easy to complain when it 
feels like you have no power, it isn't, I think, simply obvious 
what a decentralized House would look like as matter of moving 
a legislative agenda now.
    One other point I would make is that there is also--there 
is a way in which decentralization should be attractive to 
leaders now. Obviously, nobody wants to give up power, but the 
power that is now centralized in the leaders, in both party 
leaders in both Houses, is excessive in their own view. We had 
a strange situation in two Congresses ago now where the Speaker 
resigned, retired, whatever you want to say, and everybody 
looked around and said, ``Who wants to be Speaker,'' and nobody 
wanted to. And, you know, someone literally got forced to be 
Speaker, more or less.
    I think the reason for that is that the job has become 
very, very challenging as a matter of managing a coalition that 
looks to you to keep it from becoming unruly. I think it is 
just an unreasonable expectation to have of the Speaker, that 
Speakers know that, and that there is some appeal to allowing 
more of the work of the institution to happen through the 
committees where the Speaker can say this is working its way 
through the House. Speakers say that now, but it isn't really 
true, and I think in some ways their quality of life would also 
be improved by it being more true.
    The argument for decentralization needs to look like that 
as made to them because they have got to be persuaded that it 
makes sense for them to give up some power which is never 
obvious or easy.
    Ms. Reynolds. I would also say that it just, from purely a, 
like, legislative throughput standpoint, the more--the less 
powers in the hands of party leaders, the more work can be 
done. If--right now, often the sort of MO is you have to get, 
you know, the leaders to sign off on the agreement, and it is 
just matter of workflow. There is only so much that can go 
through four people.
    And so, as you kind of think about decentralizing, 
devolving some of that power, it also just opens up the 
possibility to do more work when there isn't the one potential 
bottleneck in the process.
    The Chairman. I am--I want to call on Mr. Joyce, but can I 
quickly ask: Your recommendation about giving the committees 
floor time, isn't that in the rules now, like Calendar 
Wednesday, or--I mean, isn't that basically in the rules, and 
we waive them?
    Ms. Reynolds. There are probably ways you can use the 
existing rules to try and do that. I think the bigger challenge 
is just convincing committees that they will actually get the 
opportunity to do that. And there are other ways--you know, I 
don't want the--sort of the time is one piece of it. I think 
thinking about it in kind of units of legislative proposals 
might be another one, the idea that, you know, each committee 
gets the ability to bring a package of some size to the floor, 
and that is protected, is another way, I think, to approach 
that.
    The Chairman. Okay. Mr. Joyce.
    Mr. Joyce. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
    In my limited time here--I have been here since 2013, and I 
have certainly seen the ideas flow from Speaker's Office 
leadership to the floor, and then we are stuck voting at them, 
and then you have people who make a habit out of going out and 
saying nobody could have read this bill.
    Now, being on appropriations, we have--Derek, we work on 
these bills for long periods of time. Unfortunately we know the 
things that are in your omnibus and things like that.
    Would it make more sense--and I wasn't here for the ACA, 
but certainly for the AHCA--to have, say, like that, a 
healthcare month, so all the committees of jurisdiction would 
have those hearings. That is all that would be taking place in 
the institution, and having, you know, believe it or not, 
learned witnesses coming in and talk about, you know, like, in 
Cleveland area, we had two fine institutions, Cleveland Clinic 
and UH.
    When you talk to the people there, they have great ideas on 
how to bring the cost of healthcare down. But having experts 
from throughout the country, because obviously the city of 
Cleveland is going to be different than some urban area or 
rural area, you know, but to have those people come in and 
testify, whether it is E&C, whether it is Ways and Means, and 
that is all the news media would have to focus on for that 
month, would be the issue.
    And so the American people, I believe they are bright 
enough to, when presented with, you know, here is the problems, 
here are the costs, these are the potential resolutions, reach 
out to your Congressman or reach out to your Senators and let 
them know where you stand, that we would input throughout 
instead of having people running against the institution and 
against the bill to the detriment of the American people.
    Does that sound like something that would work?
    Mr. Levin. Well, I think there is--that that is certainly 
one way to think about how to focus the attention of Members on 
their substantive work rather than on participating in the 
larger kind of theater of cultural war politics, which is what 
you do when you don't have other ways of using your time 
constructively, frankly. It doesn't seem like the rest of what 
is available to you would be of any purpose, and so at least 
this is something voters do care about.
    I think one thing I would say about that, there is value in 
the committees of the Congress--and Molly just got to this, 
too--working in parallel on different issues. Congress can work 
on a lot of different things at the same time when it isn't the 
case that one person has to approve everything that gets done.
    And so there is a kind of advantage to parallel processing 
where different committees can focus on different areas at 
different times. And Members don't have to think that their job 
is to focus the attention of the public on this issue in an 
intense way right now so that we can get something done, but, 
rather, see their everyday work as working on a variety of 
important public policy issues that move on the schedule that 
the system allows for.
    But I agree with you that Members have to take account of 
the reality we are living in, and that reality means that there 
are times when significant legislation can only really move 
when there is public pressure within that theatre of our 
politics. And there has to be ways of using the committee 
system and not just the platforms that are available to leaders 
to make that kind of change happen. So you have to be creative 
about how to do it.
    Ms. Reynolds. I mean, I will just add one note on this and 
Yuval's point about parallel processing, which is that is part 
of the reason Congress has committees in the first place. So, 
if we look at the history of the development of the committee 
system over time, the reason Congress created committees to 
handle specific jurisdictions of work was so that it could 
process more and more complicated issues in parallel at the 
same time rather than having the whole Congress have to sort of 
take up every and do the work on every issue and to create kind 
of durable groups of Members who could specialize in particular 
areas.
    So I think, in that sense, allowing for that kind of 
parallel processing goes back to the very origins of why we 
have committees.
    Mr. Joyce. But healthcare is one-sixth of our economy. You 
know, it is something that needs to be dealt with.
    Ms. Reynolds. Absolutely.
    Mr. Joyce. Infrastructure, ever since I have been here, 
nothing has more bipartisan support and the less get done than 
infrastructure, and here we are talking about it yet again. And 
one 17-hour markup in a committee does not make a bill. I mean, 
it takes more to figure out what the needs are for our country 
because they are different in all 50 of the States. I just am 
trying to think of a way that people have input and work 
through these things and work together in concert versus us 
against them.
    The Chairman. I know we have been talking about Member 
empowerment, and I know that Ms. Van Duyne wants to ask about 
freshman empowerment, too, and new Member--how new Members are 
on-boarded, so go ahead.
    Ms. Van Duyne. Thank you.
    Well, look, I sit in a seat where all of you have been as a 
freshman. We have that in common. My freshman orientation might 
have been a lot different than all of yours, you know, coming 
in during COVID and having everything separated, wearing masks, 
not really getting to know other Members, new Members.
    I am interested in finding out a couple of things. Many 
things, but two questions.
    From your perspective, freshman orientation was very 
different this time and seemed like we were very separated, 
Republicans, Democrats. The reason for that was we didn't have 
enough room, right, to have everybody together.
    Events that we would normally have that are much more 
informal were not available to us. But we are still learning. 
And, when we are going into committee hearings, when we are 
going into meetings, we understand completely the seniority 
perspective and how, you know, freshmen have--being a freshman 
is tough. Being a freshman in minority is even tougher, but, 
you know, working our way through that.
    But, when we are in these sessions where the cameras are 
on, a lot of people are talking into the cameras. They are only 
there to talk to the cameras. Everything seems to be so overly 
formal that, where you need to have conversations, we don't. 
Even in committees, there is very little conversation. There is 
no back and forth. You have your--this is a much different 
committee than most, but normally the chairman--you have 5 
minutes. You ask questions of the witness. You don't talk to 
each other, and that is it.
    So a couple of things. One, freshman orientation, what 
things do you think we should really address in freshman 
orientation to get that kind of camaraderie from the get-go?
    And, two, in committee hearings or in committees in 
general, how do you set up an informal way where we are--you 
know, you don't lose it to the floor where you have people 
bantering back and forth, but you can at least have 
conversations where this compromise or discussions take place 
and not just speech giving?
    Mr. Levin. I think it is a wonderful set of questions.
    I would say a couple things. One thing I would stress in 
terms of orienting new Members is helping Members understand 
the history of the institution and especially helping Members 
see that Congress hasn't always worked the same way, that, at 
different times, if you encountered the House of 
Representatives, you would find a very different kind of 
institution, very different kind of budget process, a very 
different kind of committee system, very different sorts of 
relationships across party lines.
    And I think the reason it is important to see that is that 
it is very easy to come into just an existing structure where 
things are going a certain way and think, ``Well, I have got to 
sort of find my place here and figure out, you know, how do I 
find the CNN camera and stand there and complain about 
Congress''?
    There really are other ways for this institution to work, 
and it is up to the Members so that reform is possible. And, if 
there is something in particular that stands in the way of 
enabling the kind of work you want to be doing, that something 
could change. And it is entirely possible that there are other 
Members who agree that it should change. I think that is very 
important and just helping Members see that this is up to them 
and that it could be different.
    And, to your second question, I would get back to the 
question of cameras everywhere. There should be cameras in some 
places in Congress. There needs to be transparency. The work 
can't be done in ways that don't allow Members to be 
accountable to their voters. But there also needs to be room 
for Members to talk to each other, to bargain, to negotiate, to 
raise ideas that don't end up going anywhere, to raise 
suggestions and someone says to you why that is not a good 
idea, and then you can actually say, ``Yeah, okay, that is not 
a good idea.''
    You can't do that in public. You just can't do it. And I 
think a lot of Members now feel like, in order to actually 
advance anything, they have got to be part of some group that 
meets outside the normal process. That should lead you to think 
about how to change the normal process so that it enables that 
kind of work to be done and be the appropriate and proper work 
of the Congress.
    So I love C-SPAN. I am a C-SPAN junky, but there are rooms 
in which there shouldn't be cameras. And I think that has to 
be--that idea has to be kind of socialized in this institution.
    Ms. Reynolds. And I would--on the topic of committees, I 
would encourage more committees to experiment the way that we 
are today, as we speak, with different formats and particularly 
the sort of notion of drawing out one issue until Members who 
have questions or who want to sort of speak on that issue have 
had a chance to do so. I think that that certainly, from the 
perspective of a witness, a couple--an hour or so into this 
hearing, I have found that effective.
    And so, just in general, being willing to try more 
different ways and getting out of the 5 minutes for a Member of 
the majority, 5 minutes for a Member of the minority, in order 
of seniority, who is present in the room--out of that box is a 
place that I would encourage folks to think of.
    And, you know, one of the advantages of having 
subcommittees of full committees is that is another venue for 
experimentation, so--and particularly since they are usually 
much smaller than the full committee. So, if a subcommittee is 
having a hearing, that would be a great place to start 
experimenting with some different formats.
    The Chairman. Go ahead, Mr. Perlmutter, and then Mr. 
Timmons.
    Mr. Perlmutter. Yeah. I am just thinking of sort of the 
physical----
    The Chairman. You have to put your mike on.
    Mr. Perlmutter. Just in this room, so, you know, Democrats 
on one side. Republicans on the other side. We each have our 
own anteroom, and, you know, there is no real--if we just had 
one anteroom where we all got to come in and we are visiting 
and it is not in front of the camera, you might get some--a 
little more socialization. But, I mean, the physical premises 
and the premises upon which the physical premises are designed 
is to separate us.
    So what do you think about that? I mean, I would like--and 
there is nothing that stops us, and I often will go over to the 
Republican side if I want to get a deal done on something, but 
it really--the layout of the place is designed for separation.
    Ms. Reynolds. I think that is a very important point, and I 
will just underline something you yourself just said. Nothing 
is stopping you. This is a point that Yuval has made several 
times, is that, if there are changes that you want to see made, 
you are the people to make those changes. And maybe that starts 
with breaking down the norms of only gathering with other 
Members of your party before a committee hearing.
    But you are absolutely right that the sort of evolution of 
the Congress and its physical space means that there--we--you 
are sort of physically separated in many situations. But I 
would--I would just encourage you to be the change.
    Mr. Perlmutter. Okay. Thanks.
    The Chairman. The primary difference in the anterooms is 
which cable news channel the TV is turned to, and one has, 
like, Whole Foods sandwiches, and the other Chick-fil-A, but, 
other than that, it is--Vice Chair Timmons.
    Mr. Timmons. Thank you.
    I want to talk about committee structure. You know--and I 
am going to clarify this. Remove partisanship from this because 
I think, if the tables were turned, it wouldn't be any 
different. I want to clarify that.
    So, right now, there is 25 Ds and 18 Rs on Ways and Means; 
33 Ds, 26 Rs on Approps. I can keep going down. HASC is 
actually the only one that is close. It is 31-28; T&I, 26-31. 
Financial Services is 30-24. So there was a huge kind of tussle 
over the number of Members on each committee at the beginning 
of the year.
    And my understanding is that it is entirely at Speaker's 
discretion. And there is historical precedent, and it is argued 
over, but it is kind of Wild West; you don't really know what 
is going to happen. Everybody has got ideas, but, until the 
Speaker's Office actually says, ``This is how we are going to 
do it''--well, and there was negotiation after that because 
they go back and forth.
    Is there any--one, given a slim majority, you would think 
that the committees would be more similar to that. And, again, 
I am--if Republicans were in the opposite situation, it would 
be the exact same.
    So is there any thought to maybe an algorithm that dictates 
it as opposed to just kind of saying, ``We are going to figure 
this out, and you are going to deal with it,'' to the other 
side?
    Any thoughts on that?
    Mr. Levin. Well, I think that, in a sense, it is a matter 
of prioritizing that. I would probably urge you against 
replacing bargaining with an algorithm. I don't think that is 
the way to--and certainly to take on the culture of this 
institution. I would say that this kind of decision has to be 
made by what you describe as a tussle, by a bargaining process.
    I think it makes sense that, if a majority is exceptionally 
large, that it has an exceptionally large majority in the key 
committees, a very tight majority should allow for closer votes 
in those committees and so closer party alignment in those 
committees. But I think it makes sense for that to be worked 
out in a negotiating process at the beginning of each Congress.
    I mean, ultimately, this institution is an arena for 
bargaining. It is an arena for dealmaking, for accommodation, 
for dealing with each other. And I think it is very important, 
over and over and at every layer of the institution, to see it 
that way because Congress is the only place in our political 
system where people with differing views, representing 
different elements of our society, actually deal with each 
other, literally deal with each other.
    That is why legislation can allow for durable solutions to 
public problems because people are heard, because views are 
moderated in order to get through the process. That kind of 
bargaining process is really what this institution is for.
    I think that is how legislation should move and how 
internal decisions ought to be made, too.
    Mr. Timmons. Conversely--again, I am very clear to say 
that, if the tables were reversed, it would be the exact same. 
So, next Congress, if the tables do turn and there is a very 
slim majority, I would say it would be inappropriate for there 
to be a seven-seat difference on Ways and Means if it was a 
six-seat majority. So, like, do you think that is a good idea?
    Mr. Levin. Yeah, and I think that ought to be a fight 
between the two party leaderships, between the membership, too.
    Mr. Timmons. The response is going to be, ``We are going to 
do what you all did.'' And that is not good, so we have got to 
break the cycle of that, and--I don't know. Okay.
    Mr. Levin. Yeah. I agree with that, but here is a Member 
saying so, right? And that is the only way it can happen.
    Mr. Timmons. Sophomore.
    Ms. Reynolds. Yeah. I will just say that I agree with 
everything Yuval said, but I would also point out that some of 
this is driven by the demands of who wants to be on the 
committee. So, you know, when--among the sort of things that go 
into the tussle are what do--you know, some committees are more 
attractive than others, and one of the things that has to be 
balanced is who wants to be on which committee.
    And it just--it is--at the end of the day, it is a--it is a 
political question. I don't mean that in a pejorative way. I 
mean that in an everything-you-do-is-politics way. And so I 
agree with Yuval.
    The Chairman. Go ahead, Mr. Joyce.
    Mr. Joyce. I was thinking about this a little more. The 
idea of obviously wanting sunshine laws to be adhered to and 
transparency, I am not sure if--I can't recall it ever 
happening before. You might know. We go on a retreat, and the 
Democrats go on a retreat. But would it make more sense if, 
like, we had a bipartisan infrastructure committee retreat, or, 
you know--because, you know, I know, on Appropriations, many 
other Members on different committees don't really understand 
how we operate. But we understand how we operate, and we can 
have the discussions on the things that are taking place.
    Has that existed before, or do you think it would be 
worthwhile?
    Ms. Reynolds. I don't know if it has existed before. I--Mr. 
Kilmer, you can correct me. I seem to remember this being an 
idea that you all just--ideas of this kind were ones that you 
discussed in the last Congress.
    The Chairman. Yeah. In the last----
    Mr. Joyce. I wasn't here.
    The Chairman. That is all right. You know, in the last 
Congress, we both talked about having the institution have a 
bipartisan retreat, in part to--acknowledging that there are 
going to be differences in goals, but that, you know, there may 
be relationship building and at least some alignment on some of 
these big-ticket issues that we say, ``Hey, what do we want to 
try to get done?''
    And then similarly within committees. I mean, part of the 
reason our committee did a bipartisan retreat is we recommended 
that other committees should do a bipartisan retreat. So----
    Mr. Joyce. Ours was by Zoom.
    The Chairman. Yeah. Ours was by Zoom, unfortunately, this 
time around.
    I want to--so, Dr. Reynolds, in your written testimony--and 
you spoke to this a bit--I am trying to remember how you worded 
it. We are looking at legislative behavior and interpersonal 
behavior, right? And, actually, next week's hearing, we are 
going to kind of dive into these issues around interpersonal 
behavior.
    But I feel like it is, to some degree, one of the big 
challenges, you know, are the working part of this, right, is 
hamstrung sometimes by the inability to get past the 
interpersonal.
    Are there levers you would pull on that front? I mean, 
obviously, we are going to dive into that issue more next week, 
but if you have guidance for us. I think sometimes the work is 
stymied by--I mean, we have Members who don't want to be in a 
room with each other, right?
    And I think sometimes we have this notion that trying to 
work together is somehow taking--leaving your ideology at the 
door. I don't think that is what it means, right? Like, people 
come here to represent their values, but sometimes we can't 
even move forward on things on which we agree.
    So thoughts on levers that this committee might look to 
recommend to get at some of these interpersonal issues, whether 
it be bipartisan retreats or other stuff we haven't thought of?
    Mr. Levin. Well, I think that those kinds of ideas are one 
way to do that, which is they both allow Members to get to know 
each other and allow them to talk substantively without being 
on display, which I think makes an important difference. I 
would say that some of this is also a function of allowing 
changes in the structure of the work to gradually change 
Members' sense of what happens in this institution.
    A number of you have been talking about experiences in 
State legislatures, saying, well, people just didn't abuse--
they just didn't abuse the open rules. And I think part of the 
reason for that is a sense that, after a while, the culture of 
the institution changes around the structure of the work.
    If you made some of the kinds of changes to structure that 
we are talking about, I think early on, the first result of 
that would look pretty ugly. It would be people using those new 
venues to grandstand. But, over time, as it became apparent 
that there isn't any camera here, so why are you talking to me 
like I am a cable news viewer? It would just become--people 
would, through experience, come to approach each other a little 
bit differently.
    It is hard because, you know, it is not--this isn't a 
kindergarten class, and you can't just tell people to behave, 
right? Everybody here is an adult who is--has achieved a lot in 
his or her life, and who is very ambitious, who worked hard to 
get here, and deserves to be here. And so there is no one who 
can really tell anybody else to behave.
    I think the only way to change behavior is to build a 
culture around forms of work that encourage people to take 
themselves and others seriously. And, you know, that is not a 
simple thing.
    Ms. Reynolds. Yeah, I would agree with that.
    And I would also just say that, at the end of the day, it 
is important to ask yourselves as, you know, people who come to 
work in a workplace, how do you establish the norms for what is 
acceptable conduct, and who do you look to to enforce those 
norms against one another?
    And, you know, Yuval and I can give you suggestions, but, 
at the end of the day, this is the place where you do your 
work, which is fundamentally what people send you to Washington 
to do. And so it is about--some of it is just about, you know, 
what do you consider acceptable behavior, and how do you set 
that for yourselves in the same way that would happen if you 
were in the, you know, diversity of jobs and workplaces that 
you had before you came to Congress?
    One challenge that I think the reform community and folks 
who kind of think about the work you in Congress face is 
drawing lines between what makes Congress unique as an 
institution and as a workplace, and what doesn't? And I think 
this is an area where there is a lot to be learned from sort 
of, how do we build a good workplace?
    And I am eager to watch the folks that you bring for the 
second hearing on this topic because I think they will have 
some constructive thoughts on this as well. But I think, again, 
I would just remind you that, at the end of the day, you are 
all coming to work in a place, and there are--and it is up to 
you to determine how to enforce good standards of behavior with 
your colleagues.
    The Chairman. Yeah. I will say I have sitting on the desk 
in my office a framed version of the rotary four-way test: Is 
it the truth? Is it fair to all concerns? Will it build 
goodwill and better friendships? And will it be beneficial to 
all concerned?
    And I am reminded on a daily basis how often we violate 
that in this place, right, and that it is a problem, right? It 
does not engender goodwill or the ability to be productive.
    I want to make sure, if other Members have threads they 
want to pull before we--I know votes will be called soon.
    Go ahead, Vice Chair Timmons.
    Mr. Timmons. We talked about budget reform earlier. We made 
a number of recommendations last Congress. I think there were 
seven of them, annual fiscal state of the Nation, biennial 
budget resolution, a number of other changes. And we used the 
joint select committee that was ultimately unsuccessful, and we 
kind of built on what they started.
    Any additional recommendations that you think we could make 
in that area that we have not?
    Mr. Levin. Well, one idea I get at in my written testimony 
as illustrative of a kind of change that might affect culture--
and I am cognizant of saying this with an appropriator in front 
of me--is to think--sorry--two appropriators--is to think about 
the distinction Congress draws between authorization and 
appropriation as an open question because if what we are asking 
is, how do we make the work of the committees matter more, then 
surely anybody who has had the experience of seeing an 
authorizing committee at work can recognize that much of what 
happens in their work doesn't seem like it is going to make a 
difference, while the appropriators are firing real bullets and 
spending money on programs.
    There are ways of thinking about combining authorization 
and appropriation, maybe just in some areas of Congress' work 
and maybe in general, that I think could really change the way 
we think about what the budget process is for and what Members 
do with their time.
    The distinction between authorization and appropriation is 
longstanding in Congress. It has been done since the 1830s, and 
it was done actually with this notion of parallel processing in 
mind. It became difficult for Congress to spend necessary funds 
because there were debates about broader kinds of legislative 
questions. And so the House and then the Senate decided to just 
put spending on its own path, on its own track so that 
necessary things could be done while these other debates were 
happening.
    But I think we are at a point now where, if the question is 
how do you get Members to become interested in channeling their 
ambition through the work of the committees they are in, 
breaking that barrier between authorization and appropriation 
is a question to think about. It is not a new idea. There was a 
proposal like this in the 1980s that Senator Kassebaum and 
Senator Inouye proposed that got pretty far in the process. 
Obviously, appropriators tend not to like it.
    But I think that would be a dramatic way to change the 
budget process----
    Mr. Perlmutter. I like this.
    Mr. Levin. Yeah.
    Mr. Perlmutter. I like this one. Okay.
    Mr. Levin. It would be a way to help the work of the 
committees matter.
    Mr. Perlmutter. I will take you guys out and do it, right? 
David Joyce and Van Duyne and I can take care of all of it.
    Mr. Timmons. We could get 10 votes. We might get 10 votes. 
We are not getting 12, though.
    Ms. Reynolds. Before you get too excited, Mr. Perlmutter, I 
would--my advice here would be to--actually to go back to 
something Mr. Joyce said earlier about--you sort of made a 
passing reference to the degree to which you as an 
appropriator, Mr. Kilmer as an appropriator, you actually are 
very well read into the details of what is in the bills that 
you have worked on.
    And I would encourage that as a sort of starting place for 
any reforms, that much of what--to the extent the 
appropriations process continues to work, it is because you and 
your colleagues do the hard work of digging into those details. 
And even if what we ultimately end up with is one big omnibus 
vote on the floor, having done the sort of deliberative work in 
the early stages is not to be lost.
    And, in fact, that is sort of, I think, what we should 
protect, and that would be--that is less of a specific 
recommendation, but more of a principle for thinking about 
additional budget and appropriations reforms.
    Mr. Perlmutter. Do not pay the appropriators compliments 
like that, please, ever. You want to make this place work, 
okay? Can I----
    The Chairman. Go ahead.
    Mr. Perlmutter. I do have something----
    The Chairman. You have to turn on your mike.
    Mr. Perlmutter [continuing]. To follow up on this subject a 
little bit, and it is sort of this chicken and egg. The 
structure of the place and the type of work we do can add to 
collaboration and working together.
    But Beth and I were just talking about the women's softball 
team, and William and I play golf against each other, and David 
and I play baseball against each other. And I--in a context, 
that isn't legislative but is like normal, you know, not so 
much baseball or anything else, but sports or outside of this 
place, relationships can be developed, especially the women's 
team. It is bipartisan and bicameral. So it develops 
relationships not just here, but over across the way.
    And, you know, you still have the whole electoral thing, 
you know, I am Democrat and a Republican, but in--at least in 
that instance, relationships are developed that go beyond sort 
of, okay, you know, what is in the budget today, or, you know, 
just pure work.
    And I think that makes a big difference. And the codels and 
in those kinds of things, all of a sudden, you have got a 
relationship on a different level that allows you to have the 
conversation, even in a setting where you are divided like this 
room.
    What is your reaction to that?
    Ms. Reynolds. So I think building relationships among 
Members is important. It feels a little--I feel a little out of 
place saying as to what I believe is Seersucker Thursday in the 
Senate, which is one of that Chamber's greatest examples of 
this. But I don't want to oversell the importance of those 
opportunities to build relationships.
    This gets back to something I said in both my written and 
oral testimony, which is that we have to ask ourselves kind of, 
what are the interpersonal relationships in service of? And 
they can be helpful, but, at the end of the day, what matters 
is the degree to which you can use them to do good legislative 
work and making sure that we are not sort of romanticizing or 
being overly nostalgic about a world where Members, you know, 
because they lived here with their families, had dinner 
together--that is important, but it is--I don't want to 
oversell it as a solution to the challenges that you face.
    Mr. Levin. I agree with that. But it is, I think, as you 
say, a chicken-and-egg issue, that it does matter that Members, 
when they are in a professional setting in a committee, know 
one another and can't just use another Member as a prop, but 
have to think, ``Well, that is somebody I am going to see on 
Thursday at the baseball game,'' or ``that is somebody whose 
family I know.''
    That obviously does make a difference. But I just think it 
is easy to overstate the degree to which change can work in 
that direction. I think that, ultimately, if you really want to 
change the culture of the institution so that it can be a more 
effective legislature, the kinds of changes that involve 
actually structuring the work to enable cross-partisan 
bargaining and accommodation are going to matter more, not to 
the exclusion of it just mattering that you see each other as 
human beings, but ultimately you have to work together as 
legislators.
    Mr. Perlmutter. But, coming back to the chicken and the 
egg, say William----
    The Chairman. Turn on your mike.
    Mr. Perlmutter. If I have got an idea that I need some help 
with and I think that he might be interested in it or at least 
I am not afraid to approach him or I know that I can approach 
him to help me shape this thing, so----
    Mr. Levin. Yeah.
    Mr. Perlmutter [continuing]. I mean, our business is a 
people's business. It is a people business. It isn't just a 
legislative business. It is a people business, and these 
relationships are key.
    I agree with you guys, though. You have got to still feel 
like, even if you work together, can you get something done? 
Can you have a real product that benefits America in some 
fashion or another?
    So thank you for being here today.
    The Chairman. Any other questions?
    I think that buzzer was the sound of votes being called. So 
I actually have one more quick one. I hope--well, maybe quick 
one. Both of you made references to State legislatures as 
models, right, the notion of having coauthors listed that might 
be cross-partisan, the notion of having a budget process that 
actually looks like what you are actually doing, the idea of 
providing floor control to the committees at times. You know, 
these were all recommendations you made to foster better 
culture and collaboration that we can learn from State 
legislatures.
    Any other lessons from State legislatures that we should be 
looking at, that we should be, you know----
    Mr. Levin. I would just say I think it makes sense for this 
committee to think in a formal way about learning from State 
legislatures, inviting Members who offer ideas that come from 
their State, maybe from their own experience, for those who 
were State legislators. There are a lot of ways in which the 
State legislatures are built on the model of Congress, but 
there are also a lot of ways in which, because they have had to 
solve various problems along the way, they have innovated the 
legislative process in ways that Congress could learn from.
    And I think that is the case in many State legislatures. 
There has been a lot of innovation in State legislatures in 
this century in the past 20 years, and, you know, they are 
living in the same culture that you are. They are living in the 
same political culture and the same country, and so surely 
there are a lot of ways to learn.
    The Chairman. Terrific.
    Okay. I want to thank our witnesses for their testimony and 
for gamely participating in our first roundtable hearing. I 
would also like to thank our committee members for their 
participation and willing to try something different.
    Without objection--I also want to thank the folks who are 
recording the proceedings and the folks from C-SPAN. Thank you 
for being here. I think we are on C-SPAN 8 today. Thank you. De 
ocho?
    Without objection, all members will have 5 legislative days 
within which to submit additional written questions for the 
witnesses to the chair, which will be forwarded to the 
witnesses for their response. I ask our witnesses to please 
respond as promptly as you are able.
    Without objection, all members will have 5 legislative days 
within which to submit extraneous materials to the chair for 
inclusion in the record.
    I also want to thank our committee staff for putting 
together a great hearing with two terrific experts. Thank you 
very much.
    And, with that, we are adjourned.
    [Whereupon, at 10:39 p.m., the committee was adjourned.]

                          [all]