How the Bipartisan Committee to Fix Congress Got Things Done

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CHIEF INTERNATIONAL ANCHOR: Next to the tough work of maintaining democracy once it has been won. Every few decades, the U.S. Congress realizes things aren’t working the way they should and tries to do something about it. The latest effort was the Bipartisan Select Committee on the modernization of Congress also known as the Fixed Congress Committee. And our next guests are two congressmen who led the group, Republican William Timmons and Democrat Derek Kilmer. They tell Michel Martin how they tried to fix it.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MICHEL MARTIN, CONTRIBUTOR: Thanks, Christiane. Representative Kilmer, Representative Timmons, thank you both so much for joining us today.

REP. DEREK KILMER (D-WA), CHAIR, SELECT COMMITTEE ON THE MODERNIZATION OF CONGRESS: Thanks for having us.

REP. WILLIAM TIMMONS (R-SC), VICE CHAIR, SELECT COMMITTEE ON THE MODERNIZATION OF CONGRESS: Great to be with you.

MARTIN: So, we invited you because you are part of the — it sounds wonky, but the Select Committee on Modernization. But it turns out that you all are part of what seems to be, unfortunately, a rarity in Congress these days. You’re a body that has not only worked well together, you’ve actually produced recommendations that many of which have actually been implemented. So, I just wanted to start by asking you, I’ll start with you, Representative Kilmer, why did you want to serve on this committee? What problems did you think needed to be fixed?

KILMER: Well, I think most Americans have a sense that Congress is a bit of a fixer upper. I’m conscious that as a member of Congress, I’m part of an organization that, according to recent polling, is less popular than headlights, colonoscopies and the rock band Nickelback. And you got a pretty good sense of that —

MARTIN: I like Nickelback, but I take your point.

KILMER: You know, the — you’ve seen government shutdowns, you’ve seen dysfunction for quite a long time. About every 20 or 30 years or so, Congress realizes things aren’t working the way they ought to and they create a committee to do something about it. And as you mentioned, this iteration of it was called the Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress which makes it sounds like we were the I.T. help desk. But we were nicknamed the Fixed Congress Committee. And we are looking at everything from how Congress can be a place that does a better job of recruiting and retaining and having more diverse staff, to looking at issues related to technology. Congress has been described as an 18th century institution using 20th century technology to solve 21st century problems. We were asked to look at everything from rules and procedures, to scheduling a calendar within Congress. And as you mentioned, you know, ours was a committee that actually did something. We have made 202 recommendations to make Congress work better. About 45 have been fully implemented, another — more than 70 are on the path to implementation. And we’re going to keep pushing because the American people deserved better.

MARTIN: Mr. Timmons, you are the newer of the two congresses. But you ran in part on the sense that Congress was broken and that something needed to be fixed. So, from the outsiders’ perspective, what did you think needed to be fixed? Which is one of the reasons you agreed to serve in this committee. And I’m also curious about once you actually got to Congress, was your outsiders’ perception borne out by the reality once you actually got there?

TIMMONS: No, absolutely. My campaign slogan five years ago was Washington is broken. And to be given the opportunity to literally fix Congress for the last four years has just been an incredible honor and, really, the most rewarding work I’ve ever done in my entire professional career. Derek Kilmer has shown the American people that Republicans and Democrats can work well together. While there were six Republicans and six Democrats, we had to get eight votes, and we built relationships, we worked together, we found common ground, and we got things done. Congress was worse than I thought it was, actually. I hate to say that. But I’m —

MARTIN: Whoa.

TIMMONS: — I came from the state senate, which I thought was dysfunctional. And then, really, the United States House really was shocking. But a lot of the challenges, I think, come from the fact that really for 30 plus years we’ve been centralizing power into the hands of just a few on both sides of the aisle. And so, a lot of the recommendations we made was to re-empower members and committees and to give them an opportunity to legislate and dig into the policy. A lot of those recommendations were implemented this past — in 118th Congress and we’re seeing the fruit of our labor. So, it’s been rewarding and I do think that the impact that our work will have is going to take years, if not decades, to fully be realized, but we see things getting better every day.

MARTIN: I am interested to hear you say, Mr. Timmons, it was worse than you thought. Can you just give me just one example of something that — and I’m going to ask you for an example that I think both of you would agree with, as opposed to something that is a particular concern to one side.

TIMMONS: The biggest problem is this. There’s 435 people and we bounce all over the place. We’re only in session — let’s go back to 2000 — before the pandemic, we were in session 65 full days and 66 travel days. That’s just not enough time to do our work. We’ve got — average number serves on 5.4 committees and sub-committees, but we also have to have conference and caucus meetings. We have constituent meetings. We have — just our time is overwhelmed. So, we’re — we don’t have the opportunity to actually engage in policy making and to build relationships, and that’s how you get things done. And we hopefully have made some meaningful strides to give members more opportunities and make it easier for them to build relationships.

KILMER: You know, one of the things when we listen to members like —

MARTIN: Uh-huh.

KILMER: — what’s really striking was how partisanship was baked into the cake from the very beginning. Members who would talk about showing up for freshman orientation and being told, OK, Democrats, you get on this bus. Republicans you get on that bus. So, one of our recommendations was, stop doing that. You know, actually try to build some bipartisanship into orientation. That doesn’t seem like rocket science but there are, I think, strategic interventions that could be done to at least try to foster a dynamic of more civility and collaboration within the institution. Our committee also tried to model some of that behavior. If you watch one of our hearings on C-SPAN, you probably have too much time on your hands. But if you do watch one of our hearings, you’ll notice, we don’t sit with Democrats on side of the dais and Republicans on the other. We stagger our seeding. So, that when you hear a witness say something interesting, you know, my genetic pre-disposition is to lean over to the person next to me and say, that was kind of interesting. What do you think about that? And in our committee, you’re leaning over next to someone from a different party. We don’t even sit on the dais. We sit around a roundtable. Why? Well, I don’t know about you, I’ve never had a good conversation speaking to the back of somebody’s head. And so, we’ve tried to foster within our committee more of a dynamic of actually having the interchange of ideas. Of actually trying to learn something in committees, rather than it being performance art where members, to William’s point, hop into a committee for five minutes, a speech of five — for five minutes so they can throw something up on social media and then ditch and head to their other committee because they’re in three or four committees at the same time.

MARTIN: Some of the innovations that Mr. Kilmer just shared about, you know, sitting at round tables, not. like, looking at a dais where you’re basically literally looking down on people. Having more retreats, for example, if you started the work at the session with a bipartisan retreat where everybody could kind of lay down their guard and kind of get real with each other. Mr. Timmons, why do you think it’s so rare in Congress?

TIMMONS: I think technology has made engaging in real human interaction harder. We travel back and forth through our district. We’re only there a limited amount of time. The outrage of the day is what people want to hear about. And so, it’s challenging to actually engage in either relationship building or policymaking. And it has to be something that’s intentional. And again — I mean, historically, we’ve seen power centralized to the leaders and that has created some challenges. And so, we have decentralized a lot of — we’re empowering committees, we’re empowering members to actually do the work. And, you know, it’s challenging to make — build relationship with 435 members of Congress but it’s not as challenging to look at your committee. We only have 12. So, that was a huge benefit. I’m on financial services which has 50 something — almost 60 people. And oversight probably has 45. So, I mean, it’s easier to try to target those people and just spend time together. Get to know them on a personal level. Build a relationship. You have to have trust in order to do anything. And if you don’t trust the people that you are trying to engage in policymaking with, you’re never going to get anywhere. In our committee, not only did we build trust, we build friendships. And, you know, that made so effective at our job and that’s what we hope Congress can learn from.

MARTIN: Is the argument here that the reason that Congress has such a toxic atmosphere, at least from what we see on the outside, the reason that people — sort of, the bomb throwers, the flamethrowers are rewarded for — with attention, if not productivity, is that it serves somebody’s interests. If that’s the case, what do you do about that?

KILMER: Well, that’s a lot of the focus that our committee had on trying to foster more civility and collaboration. We had the author Amanda Ripley testify in front of our committee, and she introduced the concept of conflict entrepreneurs, people who profit off of creating conflict. Congress is filled with those folks who, you know, whether it be as a means of raising money or as a means of being invited on cable news or as a means of getting social media followership. There is a common denominator which is if you say a bunch of crazy stuff, you can do all three of those things.

MARTIN: Uh-huh.

KILMER: Our committee, kind of, worked under a presumption that if you want things to work differently in Congress, you need to do things differently in Congress. Which is why, you know, the work we did around, you know, seating arrangement, that was not cosmetic. That was with an eye towards rather than having partisan bickering back and forth that we actually focused on trying to solve problems. But never been part of a successful project that on the front end, it didn’t say, OK. So, what do we want to get done? And so, one of the things that we did in our committee was having bipartisan planning retreat where Democrats and Republicans sat at the table and said, so, what are our goals? And you know, we may not agree on everything but let’s at least try to lay out some of the problem statements and some of the solutions that we want to pursue. For — to my knowledge, that’s the only place in Congress where that happens in a bipartisan way. And so, we are trying to both model good behavior and change up some of the incentives within the institutions so that there can be more focus on progress and less some partisan bickering.

MARTIN: You both talk about the incentives for some of your colleagues to, you know, it doesn’t matter if they ever passed a bill with their name on it. They’re getting what they want which is to be on TV, I guess, or on social media. They have a lot of followers or they don’t particularly care about legislating. And I just — I’m curious, do the incentives overall to get to Congress and how you stay in Congress, can those be — are they kind of contributing to this hyperpartisanship and can they be overcome? Do you think with rules in the body, do you think that?

TIMMONS: So, we have a number of hearings on this issue. And the — you can look gerrymandering, you can look at the way primaries are structured, you can look at number of things. And the question is, how can Congress try to heal itself and still address the other issues. So, that’s part of it. But I really think that technology is the bigger challenge. We are currently grappling with the degree of interconnectedness that our cell phone brings to this. You know, we have people on social media that are just saying things that they would never say. I mean, my grandfather called it the desk drawer rule. He would write a letter if he was mad and he put it in the desk for, and he said he threw away 99 out of 100 of the letters he put in his desk drawer. He couldn’t — he had to wait to the next day to send them. They ought to make that button on Twitter, the next day tweet. They’re not going to do that. But I — we just don’t know how to manage — we don’t know how to manage information. We don’t — we’ve lost — I mean, journalism had suffered from it because of the lack of readership and the transition to digital, which are all of these different challenges. But I do think technology is a part of it and we’re trying to work through it.

MARTIN: I guess what I’m hearing you say, Mr. Timmons, is that despite the magnitude of these challenges, you feel hopeful. Now, I could site polling that just shows you the sense of despair that some people have about the direction of our society. So, I guess the question would be, what’s giving you hope that this can be — these kinds of massive shifts can be overcome.

TIMMONS: I mean, my disillusion with Congress was overcome by our commitment. We had 12 people that work together to build relationships that engaged — I always talk about evidence-based policymaking in a collaborative manner from a position of mutual respect. That’s what we’re supposed to be doing. And we showed the American people that Republicans and Democrats in Congress can do that. And I made a number of friends along the way. And I’m looking forward to using the lessons that I learned from my good friend and former chairman Derek Kilmer. And I’m going to continue to work hard to get results for the people I represent and for the American people.

MARTIN: Is it possible that the work of your committee — the work of your committee was in part made possible because you were dealing with processes and not beliefs? Because some of the issues that divide us as a country really aren’t based on and evidence, they’re based on beliefs. The work of your committee was not to decide what books my kid could read, what medical interventions I might be able to do for my body or a child’s — you see my point? So, some of the things that really tear us apart as a country right now are based on beliefs, not processes. And I just wonder if you can apply the work of adjusting processes to work that speaks to deeply held beliefs.

KILMER: So, let me answer that in a few ways. One, you know, there were issues that our committee took up that were pretty polarizing. You know, one of the recommendations we made was to restore the ability of Congress to make investments in projects in a member’s district rather than deferring to executive branch. People have very strong opinions about that and yet we were able, over the course of a whole lot of time and discussion, to find some common ground on that issue. What we proposed was a new system that we called community project funding that had transparency built into it. That had accountability built into it. That measures to ensure that funds were spent efficiently and above board. We even have bridges to know where and that type of thing. And, you know, to the credit of appropriators, both in the Democratic and Republican Party, that’s been implemented and I think in a very responsible way. But that wasn’t easy to get there. There are strong opinions on that and there were strong opinions on our committee. Second, to your point, I think there are going to be committees where it’s just going to be tough. You know, where ideology will make it very difficult to do evidence-based policymaking. Nevertheless, I think one of the reasons that Congress is sometimes struggled is in too many places, there has just been a dearth of evidence and attempt at problem solving.

MARTIN: I’m curious about whether the leadership of either party has made any effort to call attention to this work. And if they haven’t, what does that say?

KILMER: I think the good news is that you’ve seen the leadership on both sides of the aisle, one, support the extension of the committee. Initially this committee was only supposed to last for a year. It was then extended for another year, and then extended for two more years after that. That’s not just because William and I were slow, it’s because there was support for the work that we were doing. That there was — we were being encouraged to continue to make progress and to make recommendations to make the institution function better. You saw with the new Congress a bipartisan agreement and under the new Republican leadership, the creation of a new subcommittee focused on implementation of these recommendations. So, you’ve really seen support from both sides of the aisle. In fact, when our committee was slated to phase out, you saw the freshmen members, the new members of Congress, Democrat and Republicans, send a letter to House leadership saying, hey, this is important work. Can we keep this going? And so, thankfully, I think this has been something that’s been supported by leadership in both parties. It’s been supported by rank-and-file members from both parties. And I think that’s a testament to the fact that we were doing important work and that people want to see institutions function better.

MARTIN: So, before I let you go, the committee is no longer your — it’s a select committee. It was sunsetted.

KILMER: Yes.

MARTIN: And now, you are done. So, how do you keep the momentum going? And how do you keep the friendships going?

TIMMONS: Well, just in regards to how we’re going to maintain the relationships. Nikema Williams and I are doing a district exchange. We’re working together on at least a dozen pieces of legislation. Emanuel Cleaver and I are serving on the finance services committee. We worked together on a number of issues. It’s always good to see him. We speak often. Sit together when we’re out on the floor. You know, the relationships that we built will transcend our work on modernization. And I have a feeling that Derek is not going to see the end of me for a very long time. So, he’s stuck with me.

MARTIN: Congressman William Timmons, is a Republican from South Carolina. Congressman Derek Kilmer is a Democrat from Washington. They were the chair and the vice chair of the Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress. Congressman Timmons, Congressman Kilmer, thanks so much for joining us today.

KILMER: Thank you.

TIMMONS: Thanks for having us.