The State Of American Institutions | The Center for Revitalizing American Institutions

Part 1:

>> Welcome.

>> Brandis Keynes Roan: I'm Brandis Keynes Roan, the faculty director of the newly founded center for Revitalizing American Institutions, as well as the Maurice R Greenberg senior fellow of the Hoover Institution and professor of political science. And I'm delighted to be here to launch our first public event. What we're calling the governors had called the governor's panel, and we know that we're trying to be upstaged by two other governors who caught wind of our plans.

And we still think we have the marquee governor's event of today. And we know you will agree as this afternoon continues our events, entitled Executive Leadership in a Polarized Era, Rebuilding Trust in American Institutions. Moderating the panel will be Condoleezza Rice, all three on the panel obviously need no introduction, so I'll keep these relatively brief.

Condoleezza Rice is the director, of the Tad and Diane Taub, director of the Hoover Institution and a senior fellow. From January 2005 to January 2009, Rice served as the 66th secretary of state of the United States and prior to that was George W Bush's national security advisor, much closer to home here at Stanford.

She served for seven years as Stanford's provost in the 1990s and has been a member of the faculty since 1981. Governor Westmore is the 63rd governor of Maryland, he is the first black governor in the state's 246th year history, and just the third African American governor in elected governor in the history of the United States.

Moore's life and career have been defined by service. Before entering elected office, he served as CEO of the Robin Hood Foundation, built and ran a small business that helped underserved students navigate college, and led soldiers in combat in Afghanistan as a captain in the US Army. In 2010, Moore wrote The Other Wes Moore, a story about the fragile nature of opportunity in America, which became a New York Times bestseller.

He went on to write, other bestselling books that reflect on issues of race, equity, and opportunity. Moore is a graduate of Valley Forge Military Academy and College, Johns Hopkins University, and Wolfson College, Oxford, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar. Moore and his wife, Dawn, have two children, Mia, 12, and James, nine, Governor Moore, we're delighted to welcome you here at a Hoover.

 

>> Governor Moore: Thank you.

>> Brandis Keynes Roan: Governor Christopher Sununu is the 82nd governor from the state of New Hampshire and is currently serving his fourth term, receiving in 2020 more votes than any candidate in state history ever.

>> With governor, the

>> Governor Christopher Sununu: That's awesome.

>> Brandis Keynes Roan: With Governor Sununu's leadership, New Hampshire is ranked the number one state in the country for personal freedoms by the Cato Institute.

Governor Sununu grew up in Salem, New Hampshire, he graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a bachelor's of science in civil and environmental engineering. As an environmental engineer, he worked for ten years cleaning up the hazardous waste sites across the country. We're delighted to welcome Governor Sununu.

 

>> Governor Christopher Sununu: Thank you.

>> Brandis Keynes Roan: Here to Hebert's day

>> Condoleezza Rice: Well, thank you very much, Brandis. And I'd like to just thank Brandis, who came to us just a couple of years ago from another university across there called Princeton. They don't take our phone calls anymore after we got Brandis to come, but Brandis has taken on this faculty directorship of the Center for Revitalizing American Institutions, we're going to have a conversation about those institutions.

But let me just say that the reason that we wanted to do this at Hoover is that we understand that Americans are reportedly less confident in their institutions, losing faith in them. But they're pretty spectacular institutions when you think about it. The ones that the founding fathers bequeathed to all of us, that would become institutions that would allow us to change over time, peacefully and so we believe that there's something important to preserve.

I want to start by just thanking you both for joining us here. I want to start a conversation that maybe the framers would have found particularly interesting because they actually weren't crazy about the idea of federal power, as it turns out, they moved the Capitol from New York.

They put it in a swamp between Maryland and Virginia, and they then went back to the state houses where they thought things would actually get done, representatives of the framer's vision of what America would be. But I want to start with a kind of personal reflection by each of you on what it is like to be governor and I'll start by saying this.

I worked for a certain governor who actually made it to the presidency of the United States, and he always reminded us that his favorite job was actually governor. So I'm going to start with you, Governor Sununu, you've been governor since 2017. What has been fulfilling for you, what has been frustrating for you, and what advice would you give to the newer governor here?

 

>> Governor Christopher Sununu: Well, as I was saying, this is great, by the way, I'm absolutely honored to be here and to be with Wes, who I consider a great friend. He's a great governor. Look, being governor is really hard, there's no doubt it is a 24/7 challenge, there's always accountability, there's no days off, there's no vacations.

Whether, God forbid, there's a shooting, there's a flood, there's an accident, whatever it is, you're the one that ultimately has to make a lot of the in the moment decisions, but it can be amazingly fulfilling in that way. If you pull away from that, I guess there could be political safety net or whatever you want to call it.

But at the end of the day, when you challenge yourself, and I'm an engineer, right? So I love redesigning systems, systems of service, systems of mental health, systems of how are we going to deal with the opioid crisis, school funding and education, all these pieces are systems. So for me, it's an incredibly fulfilling opportunity to say, okay, how is it designed, where is it not working, how do we institute better customer service, right?

And have that kind of approach to the individual as opposed to how do we make government better, right? How do we make government more accessible, how do we make more opportunities? So, I think it's incredibly difficult, but I think almost anyone would tell you it's an incredibly fulfilling job when you just jump right into it and it's tough.

I mean, there's no doubt about it. But, and the last thing I want to throw out there, one of the best parts of the job, and I mean this quite sincerely, we really all get along.

>> Governor Moore: Yeah.

>> Governor Christopher Sununu: Right? So across party lines in a bipartisan way, I can pick up the phone to Wes or to almost any governor in the country say, hey, I saw you did this.

How does that work? I saw you had that problem and in that aspect of it, it's an amazing sense of team, which I personally love.

>> Condoleezza Rice: I'm going to come back to this question of polarization and partisanship in a little bit, but let me turn to you, governor, and I just have to say I, moment of personal pride.

Governor Moore was my White House fellow when I was secretary of state.

>> Governor Moore: It's true, this is a very big deal for me.

>> Condoleezza Rice: And I obviously didn't do him any harm, so go ahead.

>> Governor Moore: Thank you. And Madam Secretary, it is an honor to be with you, and great seeing you again.

And thank you. And it is true, I mean, when I think about who some of the governors who have been most helpful to me as I made the transition. Cuz I'd never run for office before I became the governor. And people can think about, it's this governor or that governor or which political party.

The reality is, you've been one of the most helpful governors to me in this transition. And that's a Republican governor who's been incredibly supportive. And so I just wanna personally just say thank you-

>> Governor Christopher Sununu: Thank you.

>> Governor Moore: For all the help that you've given to me in this transition.

This job is unbelievable. I always say, it's when people say, what made you wanna get into politics? I was like, I didn't, I wanted to be the governor. Because governor is a very different type of role. There is real measurements of accountability, it is true. These are your decisions that you are gonna be held accountable for, for individuals who can touch you.

And make sure that you're held accountable for all the decisions that you make. But I tell you, one of the most exhilarating things about it is you can actually get big things done pretty quickly. I remember when, before I was governor, I was running one of the largest poverty fighting organizations in the country.

And we were working with a former governor to try to get them to utilize the child tax credit in their state. Which we knew would have fundamental impact on the child poverty rate inside the state. You can make permanent child tax credit. Worked with him for six months to try to get him to include it.

Told him he should include it in the State of the State. Literally wrote this line in the State of the State that he should include in there. And I got an advance copy of the State of the State. And there was nothing in there about the child tax credit and nothing in there about child poverty.

So I was a little frustrated. I called the head of public policy of the organization I used to run. And after I was done venting and I breathed, he told me. He said, we worked for five months to get them to include a line in the speech. But what if you could write the whole speech?

And that's the point. And so in the first State of the State that I gave a few weeks after being inaugurated, we devoted an entire section about how we were gonna make the child tax credit permanent in the state of Maryland. And two months later, I signed a bill that made the child tax credit permanent in the state of Maryland.

That's the power of the job, if you choose to use it. So it's absolutely exhilarating and just a very exciting seat to be in.

>> Condoleezza Rice: I wanna go to some of the policy issues that you face before talk a little bit about the proper relationship between the states and the federal government.

Which of course that was the founders concern. But obviously the economy is at top of everyone's mind. Talk about how the citizens of your state think about where we are today as the United States of America. And then what do they expect you to do about that state of affairs.

 

>> Governor Christopher Sununu: So I'll say I'm right? So let's start with the live free or die state, right? And it's not for cool words on a license plate. It really is in the DNA. We have that libertarian we as individuals come first, not the government. Local control, limited government, limited taxes, individual responsibility.

Those are really fundamental core tenets that we've carried for 200 plus years. So knowing that, there is a sense of real accountability, I think at the state house. Not, hey, here, solve our problems, but let us have control. Know that Salem, New Hampshire is very different than Portsmouth and very different than Keene.

And allow those citizens to have the push and pulls. I could very easily tell every school in the state what to do if we passed a bill, but that's not right. Who knows better? The parents and the teachers of what the school needs, or some guy in Concord?

So allowing the system to work the right way, I think, is very empowering. All of us have, and it's no secret. I am incredibly disheartened by Washington, DC, and that's the nicest way I've ever put it. I think it's a absolute disaster. And I think a lot of my citizens share that.

They really do. There's no sense of trust there. There's no sense of accountability. There's no sense of, especially in the congressional and Senate level, elect kinda whoever you want. What does it matter? They don't do anything anyways. Now, that's like a nice punchline. But that isn't good, right?

That's fundamentally a problem. Not just so much in the institution, but it's even a bigger problem when the citizens don't believe in it. Now, I think the institution still can be very strong, right? I think individuals come and go. And again, the core foundations of those institutions are strong.

And you can pull a few levers to fix that there. But I think, at least in New Hampshire, we've always had a sense of the individual, the locality. That's the priority. That comes first. Maybe Concord in our capital in the state comes second. And a very distant third is Washington.

All three have to work together. And I fundamentally believe in that as well. Very often I see a city or a town doing something that I don't like. And I have my fellow Republicans coming and saying, hey, we need to pass a bill and stop that. And I said, whoa, you're Republican.

We don't believe in that, right? Limited government. Not just limited government when it's convenient for us, right? And even if a very liberal town is doing something we don't like, as long as no one's being hurt by it, you gotta allow the system, the free market to really work.

And so that's how I approach it. I think that's how the citizens approach it.

>> Governor Moore: I think that's right. I think the thing that I also hear from a lot of people is it's not as much about the idea of limited government. But we want a government that actually works, right?

We wanna system where we're not waiting 18 months for unemployment insurance, right? We wanna have a police force where you call 911 and you're not waiting an hour and a half for someone to show up. You wanna make sure that you have your, you wanna make sure that you have basic facilities and basic mechanisms that are in place.

And people who believe in governing, who believe in accountability and who believe in showing up. And I tell you, that's, that's one of the things that I've seen. Because I completely agree with you on the idea that I think people are kind of exhausted by the politics of all this stuff.

They're exhausted by the back and forth where, and I remember when I went out to, one of the first things I had went out to when I was governor in my first week. There was a boil water advisory in a town called Lonaconing, which is in Western Maryland.

And so I went out there to go assist and go get boots on. And I met the mayor, who has since become a friend. He's a Republican mayor out there. And he told me, he said, governor, do me a favor. He said, turn 360 degrees. So I turned 360 degrees.

And he said to me, he said, the only guarantee I can give you is you didn't see a Democrat within 5 miles of anywhere you were just looking. And he said, but I tell you what, you're the first governor that's been here since 1996. People just want you to see them and they want you to show up.

And they want you to be able to have ideas, listen to their thoughts, show a measure of concern. And be able to do something about it, instead of just screaming about how the other side needs to do this. And that's something that I really see amongst our folks.

 

>> Governor Christopher Sununu: If I could. I think you said something really important there. A government that works. Now think of, what does that mean? What it means to you and you and you might be very different. A government that works is the government that takes care of my problems. No, not necessarily.

You're talking about, I think what Wes is getting at, and I think it's so important. Responsiveness. When there is a need that there's a door I can walk through to get that opportunity, or someone's gonna pick up the phone. And I always go back to that term, customer service, right?

I'm not saying the citizens are customers. But if you have that mentality, are they on hold for 45 minutes?

>> Governor Moore: Correct.

>> Governor Christopher Sununu: And a lot of the services that are being given aren't coming from out of Washington, DC, per se. They're coming from the local fire department, the schools.

What impacts your life 90% of the time in terms of government is local or it's close to home, right? So I think that's really important. So I just think you bring up a wonderful point about responsiveness. And it doesn't mean what we do, you're gonna like every decision we make.

Every policy we have, but at least you're going to get an answer. And that all flows from transparency. I think that's one of the other issues with Washington, right. Kind of a lack of transparency. But you go to your town selectmen, you go to your school board or your teacher, there's much more connectivity there.

You know, a lot of them by first names. Right. And I think that that brings an opportunity of good government, if you will.

>> Condoleezza Rice: Yeah, you also have to do something that I'm going to come back to the right relationship between Washington. What would you like to have Washington do?

But you also have to do something that Washington doesn't do, which is live within your means. So I remember when I was provost of Stanford, my favorite line was, I can't print money. I'm not the federal government. You can't print money.

>> Governor Moore: There's no Maryland dollar.

>> Condoleezza Rice: There's no Maryland dollar.

Thanks to Alexander Hamilton, there's a single currency. But you do have a lot that you need to get done. We have problems in education. We have problems in workforce development. You mentioned some of the issues around the environment and how to respond to climate change. We have a lot of issues.

How do you think about priorities? Right now, the word out there is the american people. Somebody famously once said, it's the economy, stupid. Obviously, the economy is on everybody's mind. But how do you think about priorities? How do you set them? Do you think you set them differently in your states?

You're a Republican, you're a Democrat. I've just got to at least get you to talk from those perspectives just a little bit, right?

>> Governor Christopher Sununu: Yes. No, please, please.

>> Governor Moore: You know, I think it's actually interesting, because I feel like elections are not just decisions, they're azimuths, right? So I think when you think about what just happened in the state of Maryland, where we just finished an election cycle, and we ended up receiving more individual votes.

I don't have the same record as you. More individual votes than anyone has ever run for governor in the history of the state of Maryland. But the reason I bring that up is this. It means that for the people that voted, I spent two years telling them what I wanted them to vote for, right?

I spent two years laying out what is our vision? What is it that we want to accomplish? And so I think one of the nice things about coming off an election year is you have your marching orders. People gave it to you, and they gave you your mandate.

And so when we came in and we said that there are certain things that we are going to prioritize, and that includes things like getting our economy going because there is a measure of frustration I think we all had about just how stagnant Maryland's economy was in comparison to other locales when you consider the assets that the state of Maryland has.

So we had our marching orders because I talked about it for two years. We had our marching orders when we said we have to increase public safety, that if people do not feel safe, they will not stay. If people do not feel safe, they will not come. And that means using an all of the above approach in the way we are going to protect families and protect neighborhoods and communities.

We had our marching orders. And when we said that Maryland needs to be the state that serves, that we want to get more people engaged and involved because service is sticky and service will save us in this time of this political divisiveness and political vitriol. We had our marching orders.

I talked about it for two years. And so I think one of the nice things about coming off of an election cycle is when we talk about prioritization, it's just simply how are you being responsive to what the voters just told you? They just gave you a message, and now your job is to make sure that you are more so being responsive to them and prioritizing the things that you told them you wanted to do.

And they turned around and said, and that's what we want and that's what we bless.

>> Governor Christopher Sununu: And I think to build on that, if I can, I have 1.4 million people in New Hampshire. I don't care what their politics are. That's who I represent. I don't just represent just the Republicans.

Just on a practical sense, one thing I tried to do when I first became governor, and I think all governors tend to do this, which is why there's a better sense of trust there a little bit at the local and state level. You got to go out and just listen to stories.

You got to spend a lot of time listening to stories. The most valuable tool you have as governor is your time. So that is what you give. So when you go out and you listen to 100 stories out there and the majority of them are about the opioid crisis and mental health and their kids access to mental health services, I got my priorities right.

Not because I said so or my party said so. And sometimes, gee, you say, I thought this was a priority, but no one's really talking about that. Just maybe some lobbyists or some political hacks were pushing that over here. So the best way to find the priorities is to talk.

I'm a big believer in the economy and that nothing can happen if you don't have a strong economy. So you say, okay, I'm going to redesign these systems based on the priorities I heard and I'm going to be really amazingly good to business. And I love it when Democrats say you're so pro business.

I said, damn right, because guess what? If they're successful, they create jobs. They pay their business. I don't have a sales tax. I don't have an income tax. I just got rid of my interest in dividends tax. The only taxes we really have to fund a lot of these programs are from our businesses, right?

We have an average business tax. So if I'm really strong pro business and in a place like New England, a little different than Maryland, but not much, you know, this isn't Oklahoma, where it's so big, the idea of getting a business to come over the border is hard.

I got Maine, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, all within an hour's drive. So to draw businesses in from those states and create opportunity, not for me but for the citizens, guess what? My revenues go up. I keep cutting taxes. More people come in. I have more revenue. I can implement new system design based on what I heard.

So that's how it actually works. And I think it works pretty well. I think most governors, you know, take that approach fairly well. So again, spending time and the number one thing I always say, listening to stories can be amazing opportunity. It's hard. I mean, I can't tell you the number of, and I think I speak for Wes as well.

You sit with a mom who lost her daughter the opioid crisis. You sit with a dad whose brother has been struggling to try to get mental health services or an uncle who now takes care of his sister's kids because his sister is now in treatment and recovery somewhere and his kids, again, are two school districts away.

They're having trouble. I focus a lot, and I think I speak for a lot of us, focus a lot on the kids. You want to talk about mental health, focus on the kids. You want to talk about the opioid and the drug crisis, focus on the 18 and under.

Because if you're handling it there, if you're taking care of it there, it really has an exponential payoff. And if I may, it was very hard. I'm a numbers guy and I had to go work with a lot of my Republicans, and I'll throw another one out there.

You know how many people I have in my legislature? 400. 400. They get elected every two years. They get paid $100 a year. It is the largest parliamentary body outside of British parliament and US Congress. So to now get the Republicans to say, so there's a spectrum on both sides, and I have to walk through them and say, look, if we make these investments that we maybe hadn't done before, if we rebuild the system, here's the economic payback.

Here's how it is. So getting all that with an idea is one thing. Having leadership and a voice publicly because we have a microphone, that's one of the best things a governor also has. We have the microphone more than anybody else. So we can drive our agenda and our message with good transparency.

But then with the legislature, you got to bring them on board, too. So you got to know who that audience is. You don't do it by twisting arms and yelling and screaming. You don't do any of that. You do it by knowing your audience and working with them one by one sometimes to bring them on board based on what their priorities are.

And again, the system tends to work.

>> Condoleezza Rice: And you've had to work across the aisle.

>> Governor Christopher Sununu: Yeah, I have. So I get elected every two years as governor. Yeah, that sucks. It's great for New Hampshire. It is awesome for the citizens. I think every governor should be elected every two years.

It's hard for me bcuz I gotta run every two years and I also have to do the same thing.

>> Governor Moore: I don't agree with you.

>> Governor Christopher Sununu: Yeah, no, I get it. Trust me, I get it. Congress is easy, right? Congress is on vacation half the time. Running every two years is nothing to them cause they spend half their time raising money anyway.

We're governors, we have a job to do nonstop. So it's much harder. So my legislature, I had a full. Republicans controlled the legislature. My first, third and fourth term, Democrats controlled. Well, I'll say first and third term, Republicans controlled, Democrats controlled. In the second term, again, I have 400 in my legislature.

You know what my legislative split is right now? 201 to 199. And the Republicans got the speaker of the House on the first vote, by the way. Sorry Kevin. I make the joke with Kevin McCarthy on that. But even with that, it wasn't just I've got stuff done with Democrats and I got stuff done with Republicans, 201 to 199.

One of my most proudest moments. And it isn't just me, it's everyone collectively came together, we got the budget passed unanimously, unanimous budget. I mean that was an amazing, amazing thing. And it was, again, it's not me. I think everyone again was connected to the citizens, connected to the responsibility.

Everyone had to give a little, get a little. It was done the right way. And that's something I take a lot of pride in. And states can do that. That isn't just New Hampshire. Most any state could do that. Washington, not so much, obviously, that's proven out so it can work right.

And that's the faith I always have. That's why I remain an optimist both statewide and even nationally. Because even in these modern times, the models still really work in terms of the value of democracy, the opportunity it creates for individuals to have a voice and the results that they can see with it, no matter who's in charge.

 

>> Condoleezza Rice: Absolutely,.

>> Governor Moore: No, I think that's right.

>> Condoleezza Rice: Because you actually succeeded a Republican governor in Larry Logan.

>> Governor Moore: And we were very intentional about being able. We have a little different where we have a democratic House and democratic Senate and people think, well, that's great, you can just get anything that you want passed.

Like not all Democrats are the same. It's a very complicated dynamic. But the reality is that when we first went in, we introduced ten bills in our first legislative session and not only did we end up going ten for ten on our legislature, we went ten for ten bipartisan.

So we had Democrat and republican support on every single bill that we introduced and we had to work for it. But it was important, and it was important for a few different reasons. One is it's not just about passage, it's about implementation. And even if you say you have the votes to get something by just getting a straight party line, good luck implementing that right.

And good luck making it sustainable, and good luck making sure that the entire state understands the benefit of it. If you can actually forge where you can create not just partners, but advocates for the bills, it makes a meaningful difference not just on those bills, but also what you're looking to get done, what you're hoping to get done next.

And I think that the second piece is also a really important piece. And, Governor, you touched on this. It's, when you think about the impact of this work, the how you go about doing it is also really important because it opens up new avenues of approach. Sometimes people say, like, how did you get Republicans to vote for an increase on the minimum wage?

How'd you get Republicans to vote for increased earned income tax credits? How'd you get Republican? And my answer was simple, is that when you're able to work on the things that we knew, we were able to get grand levels of individual levels of support on. And like, for example, one of the first things we worked on together, we got pathways for free dental care and healthcare for members of our national Guard.

The first state in the country that now has that. And it's because I just don't understand how someone is willing to put on the uniform of this country and put on the flag of their state on their shoulder who still has to worry about dental care, right? So Maryland got that pass.

Awesome.

>> Governor Moore: But then while you're here and I'm getting, you know, delegate so and so, or senator so and so from Allegheny county or from, you know, from, you know, Queen Anne's, I'm like, now, while I'm here, can I talk to you about the minimum wage, and can I talk about the impact that's gonna have on your community and your district?

And we're going to talk directly to the people about it, because when you can do that and build up that type of support, you almost don't even have to become your own advocate. They'll call their own senators and they'll say, I heard about what's happening. I heard about the governor's bill on X, Y and Z, and I want you to support them.

You now have built up an army of advocates who can go and push and make sure the people are advancing the policy issues. But it takes a measure of intentionality. And to your point, it takes a measure of trust. People need to have that sense of trust. And so how you go about investing in it, how you go about building that well and how you go about carefully utilizing it does become important.

 

>> Governor Christopher Sununu: And no trust is ever earned by yelling at somebody. I don't earn your trust. I don't inspire you by yelling at you. And from a political standpoint, I'm gonna guess some of your toughest fights politically are with your friends, right, are with the Democrats.

>> Governor Moore: 100%, 100%.

 

>> Governor Christopher Sununu: And the toughest arguments I ever had, I call it, it's Thanksgiving dinner, right? Our toughest arguments I ever have are you have Thanksgiving dinner, you have your crazy uncle, and someone's spouting off about politics and you have fights about the Patriots versus the New York Giants or whatever it is.

That was what. But when you leave the house, right. You're family first, right? You're gonna defend. But some of the hardest arguments you have sometimes even in politics, are behind closed doors with folks who are like, hey, we're Democrats, we're all gonna do this together, or we're Republicans, we're all gonna do this together, right?

No, everyone has a different spectrum, a different taste, and you have to have an open ear, right? You have to understand where they're coming from. You know, if I could, I don't mean to go too far, but one of the biggest things lacking in this country culturally and really in politics is empathy.

I talk about this a lot. We all know what empathy is, right? Having an understanding of where someone is coming from, maybe what their background is. But do we practice it? Empathy is a skill. You have to practice empathy in tough negotiations. When tempers get high, are we practicing saying, boy, this person is really adamant, I'm really in a 180 degree different place.

Tell me more. Explain to me why you're seeing it this way. Whether it's in your background or what am I not seeing? Give me more information. I'm not convinced. And if you have that open ear again, maybe they don't agree with you completely in the end, but there's trust there.

They know that you're bringing them to the table to have the discussion. And maybe they didn't get everything they wanted this time. Maybe you didn't either. But they know they're gonna be invited back. And that's the most important. Again, you're giving your time as the executive leader. You're giving your time to them.

You're inviting them back to the table even though they don't just politically disagree, but maybe vehemently on an actual issue. So I just, again, I think that's the absolute right approach, and I think that's, everyone thinks the toughest arguments are with across the aisle. For me to argue with a Democrat is like, of course we differ.

I'm not shocked at that, right? It's when your friends come at you and say, by the way, governor, you're not getting what you want. Whoa, what are you talking about? And that's okay. Can't get everything you want.

>> Condoleezza Rice: Well, let's take up this question, because I'd like you to now think about Washington.

I know you don't really want to do that, but let's think about Washington.

>> Governor Christopher Sununu: Hard pass.

>> Condoleezza Rice: Yeah, you'll pass, right? You mentioned some words that I don't think we would associate with the situation in Washington today. Trust. We know that Americans are losing trust in their government.

You mentioned empathy, which comes from listening. Those are not words we would use with Washington today. How do we fix that? I say sometimes to my fellow citizens, we blame everything on our leaders. But some people say, you get the leaders that you deserve. So what are we doing?

That is really bringing that kind of behavior to Washington. To be fair, Washington does get some things done. And you could have this conversation with some senators on a bipartisan basis as well. But it just seems to have to be much less the case these days in Washington.

So you want to start?

>> Governor Moore: I mean, I'd say, I actually don't think that measure of cynicism is a bad thing because I think it's valid. I think a lot of people have come up as the consequence of bad systems and the consequences of bad structures. I mean, I think about it in my own life, right.

One of the earliest memories I have was when my dad died in front of me because he didn't get the healthcare he needed. One of the earlier memories I have was when I was 11 years old and I first felt handcuffs on my wrists because I grew up in a neighborhood that was over policed and we knew it.

My mother didn't get her first job that gave her benefits, and this was an immigrant, single mom did not get her first job that gave her benefits until I was 14 years old. And by the way, this is a woman who went on to earn a master's degree.

So when we're having conversations about inequitable pay between men and women or inequitable pay between people of color and non, I say this is not an economic exercise to me. I grew up in this. So I actually think that the brokenness that people are seeing and experiencing and that they're sharing with us, we shouldn't poo poo it because it's real and for many people it's justified.

I think that the thing we want to remember is, and frankly, it's something that still sits at me, I'm never going to lose my cynicism of the system, and I'm the governor. I'm never going to lose that. But cynicism can be my companion. I just won't let it be my captor.

I'm writing that down, that's awesome. I really mean it. You know, cynicism is something that I always hold on to. It's like, yeah, there are things that need to be fixed, but I just won't let it control my optimism that we can actually fix it. And I think part of that comes back to, and this becomes, you know, the job for elected officials or for people who are working in the social service sector, people working in philanthropy, people working in the private sector, you have to show an ability and an interest in actually fixing it.

If you show an ability of being able to get things done, people will trust you to get more big things done. But if you simply spend your time yelling at another side, thinking that if I scream louder, that gives me a better chance to win an argument. If you simply spend your time talking about how broken things are without offering any frame of a solution, then you shouldn't wonder why people are not looking to you for solutions.

And so I think the way we have to address it is we have to show we can actually get things done. If you show you can get things done, if you show, whether it's at a state level, local level or the federal level, if you show you can get things done, people will give you the trust to then trust you can actually get more things done.

But I don't think that we should minimize the cynicism that people have because it's valid.

>> Governor Christopher Sununu: Boy, that was, I really mean it. That was very well said. So is Joni here? Is senator Ernst here? Ok, so I'm going to make it. I always check if there's a senator in the room before I open my mouth.

But fourth term, I really don't care anyway. Let me define my cynicism, and I say this as a joke, but also quite sincerely, let's take all of the US, every US senator. Let's say for one second they all get fired tomorrow and you replace them all with 100 random working adults in America, just randomly chosen.

Is it going to get worse? Are they going to get less done? Right. So let's understand. And I'm not just picking on the Senate because the Congress is just as bad. They've set that bar so low. Expectations are now so low that if they pass anything, they pass a continuing resolution on a budget, which is a failure, by the way, they want everyone to give them applause and pat them on the back.

So that is the foundation of my cynicism. There are things that can be done whether they do get done or not. This is what I think. First, term limits, absolute. You need term limits for Congress and the Senate. I'm not saying one term, but you have to give them term limits because naturally you're always going to have a certain percentage that have no political bias, if you will, in terms of doing one thing or another thing politically.

It frees them up a certain percentage a little bit. And with numbers so close, that can be just enough to start getting more things done. Second thing, and this is a really hard one to fix, almost impossible, is gerrymandering. So gerrymandering in this country is the number one thing that has destroyed the process.

And it's really, that one's a tough one because you can't put that Genie back in the bottle. That's done at the state level. You'd need a lot of states to step up and say, yeah, we really didn't do that right. And even the party that's in charge is going to say, we're going to give up some districts and we're going to make it more independent.

But you used to have maybe 150 congressional seats that might go back and forth in any given election. Now it's about 50 because the Republican in a real gerrymandered district is more worried about getting primaried than the Democrat. So what happens? They move their politics further right, Democrats move their politics further left.

They take deeper and deeper corners into the, even though maybe that's not where they started politically, that becomes safe for them. So the gerrymandering is a problem. Campaign finance reform, huge issue. McCain-Feingold is awful, especially for a state like New Hampshire. Do you know, in a US Senate race, over 95% of the money that is spent in a US Senate race in New Hampshire is not from New Hampshire.

It is not based on our citizens interests or our interests. It's from outside the state. And that's a real problem. And you have all this dark money that comes in and all that. I think, again, a good piece of legislation can fix all that. They just haven't chosen to do it.

And if you have a system that is more, whether the elections are really more based on what your citizens are looking for, what your citizens are investing in, the voice of those people, then the elected officials are going to be more responsive to the actual citizens as opposed to more national interests.

And the last thing, and I think this is a huge opportunity and can and should be done to everyone's benefit. And again, we're saying that because we're governors, I think. If you get leadership specifically out of the White House, and neither Democrats nor Republicans have been willing to do this, that says, hey, where you started the founding?

We say in New Hampshire, the founding fathers were wicked smart. Right? The states come first. Give the states the authority, the regulatory control, the financial, whatever it is. Let us do what we do best. Because you know what? What's best for Maryland isn't necessarily best for New Hampshire or Massachusetts or California.

50 states, 50 different constituencies, 50 different sets of priorities based on our citizens and our citizens needs. How does Washington know what the priorities of my school are? They don't. Or the priorities of his mental health system are. They don't. So let Wes make the decisions. Let Wes have control of that.

So if you get a congress and a president that go back to what this country was founded in how the institutions were supposed to run and say yeah let's decentralize this the other big issue we have and I don't know if you do that the majority of the laws that are passed, okay fine we passed laws.

But you know what's really controlling thing? All the bureaucratic rules that are made that you never hear of that most of the Congress doesn't even know about the EPA controls this Department of education controls that they're setting the rules which in more instances than not are way more impactful than whatever the law was.

Those rules are affecting your family, your business, your opportunities more than anything. So if you send that process back to the states well then the rules are being done in the states and you as a citizen have way more control. You can talk to Wes, you can talk to his team, you can talk to your legislators at a local level 1000 times easier than Washington, and they're going to listen because you're voting for them, right.

So that by again, decentralizing that process the way it was originally designed, I think is an amazing opportunity. But yeah, it's all screwed up, but it can be fixed. And that's the optimism. It really can. And I don't have all the answers, of course, but it really can be fixed.

But you do need political will and the political will to say, by the way, I'm going to work across the aisle. I'm going to give up power. I'm going to give up control and understand you will be politically rewarded for it. There's a sense that you wouldn't be rewarded.

You will because you're giving people what they want. You're giving them control and a say and their opportunity. As politicians, as elected officials, the opportunity is not for us. We're just trying to create doors of opportunity for you guys. And I think the more you promote and encourage that system, the more people get excited about it, the more they participate, the more they have a voice, the better it all works.

It's a feedback, as an engineer, again, it's the feedback response system. And if you tweak it a little bit and get it back to the way it was originally designed, there's no reason we can't really start cooking on doing some serious work for the country.

>> Condoleezza Rice: I hope Brandis is taking notes.

These are things we might want to look at in the center for the revitalization of american institutions. Let me go to the other part of that. We've talked about federalism. I think, I actually think you're right about the role of the federal government. Let's worry about foreign policy.

Let's worry about immigration. There are some things the federal government has to do. When it gets into things that it really can't do, it also loses credibility because it can't do them, whereas perhaps the states would do better. But there's also the other piece of it, which is just the horrible polarization, just the sense that my job is to make sure you don't succeed.

And that gets reflected in the fact that social media brings the most aggressive comments, the most negative comments, the angriest comments. Politics seems to be about anger to a certain extent.

>> Governor Christopher Sununu: It raises money.

>> Condoleezza Rice: It raises money. So talk about the polarization problem. You've talked about it.

I have a quote here from you say at a time when people's response to the political toxicity is to lean out, I'm asking you to lean into politics. But I have students, I have friends who just say, I just don't want to do anything. I don't want any part of it.

I stopped reading the newspapers. I don't want any part of it. So how do we deal with that sense of polarization? And what comes with it is a sense of despair.

>> Governor Moore: And it's true that there, I mean, part of the challenge is that whether it's social media, whether it's news platforms, which we have to remember, these are businesses, right?

These are businesses with shareholders. And the reality is we can tell whether it is X or Instagram or whether you're talking about cable news networks, they have one exclusive goal, and that is to gain market share and to hold it right. And that means oftentimes you are going to speak to as vibrant and as rabid a base as possible, because it's the best way of making sure that you can keep people and hold people, because it's not about education.

It's really more about validation. And so that does become a problem when you're looking at where are people getting their information from that doesn't have an ulterior motive, because all these things have not just ulterior motives, they have business models behind them. I think the thing that we have got to center in on, and that is true, that was during my inaugural address where I was asking people, at a time when people were being asked to lean out, I'm asking them to lean in.

And I'm asking them to get to know each other that we've got to be. And I think about the state of Maryland, where we are going to be a state that gets to know each other again. We're going to be the state that serves. You know, one of the things that we initiated and got passed in our first session, and we just launched it, Maryland is now the first state in this country that has a service year option for all of our high school graduates and a big reason for that.

And so every single high school graduate now has an option to have a year of service to the state. And they can choose however they want to do it. They can work in the environment. They can work with returning citizens. They can work with older adults. They can work with veterans.

It's completely their choice. We tell them, just tell us what makes your heart beat a little bit faster. And we want to provide a paid pathway for you to be able to do that. And we do it because I'm a big believer in experiential learning and give people an opportunity to see what it is that they want to do and give them a path to do it.

We do it because I'm a big believer in an earned financial cushion for everybody who graduates, who completes the program. They also receive a $6,000 stipend that they can use towards higher education. They can use it towards a trade program. They can use towards buying a car or putting a down payment on a home.

Totally their choice. And we believe this is a great workforce development tool. But also importantly, it's this, we believe in this time of political divisiveness and vitriol, that service is going to help to save us. Where I know I saw it where I had people who I served with in Afghanistan, and they came and campaigned for me when I was running for governor.

Many of them were not Marylanders, many of them were not Democrats. They literally just came and doorknocked on my behalf and were telling people, let me tell you about the guy that I served with, because service is sticky. And so I believe in this time when people are just being forced to retreat and being rewarded for it, when individuals can just say the most bombastic things because they're speaking to a certain base and being rewarded for it, that if we can create a spirit of service and a culture where we can actually get to know each other again and get away from that measure of divisiveness, that we're going to put ourselves on a better plane to have, actually a more hopeful and frankly, a more inclusive future and the one that we all should be rooting for.

 

>> Condoleezza Rice: Yeah, this question of some kind of service year, maybe even voluntary national services, has come up because we don't know each other very well anymore. I remember after the 2016 elections, a number of colleagues saying, you know, maybe I should go understand what those people in Alabama think.

And my view is when you have to do an anthropological dig on your fellow citizens, we have a problem and we don't know each other. Red state, blue state, flyover states, coasts, etcetera. And so there are some opportunities for people to get to know each other, but they're few and far between.

 

>> Governor Moore: There are. And you cannot claim that you love the country when you hate half of the people in it. You can't, right? You can't claim that you love the country when you're despised by half of it. That's right. And so I just, I mean, and for me, frankly, I mean, I got it.

I got. My experience was from the military. I joined the army when I was 17 years old. Now I like to say I was so young, I couldn't even sign the paperwork. My mother signed the paperwork for me because I was still a minor. But after my teenage years, she was willing to sign whatever paperwork that the military put in front of her.

But it gave me an experience to meet people I never would have had a chance to meet, to travel to parts of the country. I mean, I would have never gone to Fort Benning, Georgia, or Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, or Fort Bliss, Texas. I would have never had a reason to go there had it not been for my experience in the military.

And it made me a better person. And so if we can create opportunities for people to get to know each other, to experience new things, experience new culture, experience people who you might have never had a chance to meet or know before, it's going to give you a greater.

Depth, a greater breadth, and frankly, give you an opportunity to expand that definition of who are you fighting for? Because right now it's incredibly insular.

>> Governor Christopher Sununu: I think that's spot fricking on. So cuz I hear that, and then I think, cuz I was thinking about this institute, what one of your missions, something that you guys are talking about is, what are we gonna do for that, let's call it the 6th, 7th, 8th grader, to get them started in that mindset of why service is important?

Why should they don't do it for the $6,000, although that's a great, like you said, that's a great opportunity. But what's going to inspire them to do that? And for me, it's, you know, as a governor, it's, okay, let's talk civics, right? How do we instill, how do these systems work?

What are these institutions we're talking about? How are they designed? Where do they work? What are the pros and cons if we're not building that foundation of what civics is, what good citizenship is, what tithing your time to your community is, the value? It sounds old school, it's Christmas, it always feels better to give than to get.

It's so true. But you can't just say that and expect your kids to know it and walk away. I think I put a lot of the blame on when you look at the younger generation, the angst and all of this out there, the fact that we are at 50 year low in recruitment, in the military and in other forms of service.

Why is that, right? Because I think my generation as parents, I think we missed the ball a little bit. And I take that on very personally. Man, where did we miss it? I think we took a lot of things for granted. So, like in New Hampshire, we said, okay, a couple things.

You're not gonna graduate high school unless you pass a core civics exam. You're not going to graduate high school unless you can pass the naturalization exam that we ask immigrants to pass. Shouldn't you be up to the same, why would we ask folks coming into our country to live up to a different standard than we ask even our own kids?

We've just passed millions of dollars to put into new textbooks that simply say, both online and actual textbooks, there are actual textbooks in schools still that have pages and paper and all that. But we're rewriting a lot of our social studies curriculum around what is New Hampshire, New Hampshire's constitution, the US constitution, just to give them that foundation.

Because I think the more you understand how these foundations, how these institutions came to be, the more you appreciate the good and the bad. And you may agree or disagree with certain things, but at least now you're coming from a place of knowledge. I think there's so much of what we see out there that is dangerous.

And whether you call it angst or fighting the system, and they don't even know what the system is. And it's not their fault. It's not, I get frustrated seeing a lot of these young people, but I don't blame them. I blame us for not instilling that. So both as a governor and as a dad, I try to take a lot of pride in doing what we can to re-instill not just the values of what we're doing, but what it is, what these institutions that we're talking about are and why they're worth saving and why they're actually worth being optimistic about.

Not we have to abolish this and destroy that and democracy is over and all that kind of, no way, that is not the case at all. Well, I won't say who, but a former president once told me, one that I think we all for the most part admire up here, once told me, earmuffs, assholes come and go, but american institutions stand the test of time.

And the way he put it to me was we went through a civil war, right, could have torn this country apart. The institution stood strong. We fought back slavery, we went through such a divisive, but our institution stood. We went through world wars, we went through the sixties, 1968, Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy assassinated, right?

Nixon comes on board. With all that chaos, the whole world, it's over, right? No, we stood the test of time. And those terrible things happened and we were able to come through because our institutions were strong. 9/11, the pandemic, the institutions have stood strong. So while we have some, I think, rules and laws that may need shifting, while we have some individuals that I think put their ego and self interest ahead of the greater good, that's temporary stuff.

The institutions are really solid. When you look at the value of law enforcement, do we have problems in law enforcement? Of course we do. But I'll put the anti-corruption of our law enforcement, the value of our judicial system up against almost any countries in the world. It does actually a very good job.

And the fact that we have new incentives, sometimes new, sometimes they change that. Say, hey, when there is corruption, when there is wrongdoing, we're going to bring it to the forefront, we're going to address it. It doesn't always happen as fast as we want, but it does happen.

The system is incentivized to be that way, not because Washington says, because it's local. When you keep it in the states, when you keep the power at the city level, when you keep the power locally and in your neighborhoods and in your communities, what happens? The value of that service?

My son can see the value of the service because it's helping his neighbors and his friends and his family, right? But it really comes back, I think, to still understanding the core values around civics and what these things are that we're even talking about.

>> Condoleezza Rice: It's something that we don't teach enough in the University either.

 

>> Governor Moore: I was gonna say just one thing, I think the values are enduring, but we can't forget that they're fragile. And that is why I just think we cannot take some of these larger attacks on democracy that we have seen. We cannot take them lightly.

>> Governor Christopher Sununu: Sure.

>> Governor Moore: And I just simply say, because you're absolutely right, that we have to be a system of laws.

We also, though, have to understand that the ability to alter the laws which actually see fewer people and not more. And that when you have people who can and will blatantly go out and not just violate it, but literally use that as a rallying cry to get more people on board.

We cannot minimize some of these dangers to basic democracy and basic freedoms that we continue to see or condone it or push it away or equalize it, because with some of these things that we are seeing, this is not about political parties and this is not about expression of democratic rights.

And I just say this one thing where election denialism and all this other stuff, I was running against somebody who was literally asked that would he accept the terms of the election, and his answer was, it depends on what the results were. There is a danger to that, that I think we have to be very clear and be very clear throated about, about what that means and what that compromise of our democracy can and should look like.

 

>> Condoleezza Rice: In just a moment, we're going to turn to you and you can ask questions for a little bit. As you know, I always say that since I'm a professor, I will call on someone if nobody raises their hand. So please, get your thoughts ready, but I want to go to one last question.

It's where you were taking us. We are about to have another election cycle. And one of the things that we know from our work at the center is some 35% of Americans are just not sure that their elections are actually free and fair. That's really pretty devastating for a democracy, and I don't want to get into the politics of that, but I'd like to ask you to talk about the state's responsibilities in terms of elections themselves.

The question was left to the state. States by the constitution to run the elections. What are you doing? Looking to 24 to make sure that the elections are not just free and fair, that's the term, but efficient. I often think to myself, do we really need to wait three weeks to find out who won that election?

One of the reasons I think people are losing confidence is the elections don't seem to be very well run. It's just kind of a competence issue. So we have beendoing some work with election officials, actually, people who come here who are just election officials, and they're kind of accountants, and they really didn't expect to be in the crosshairs, politically.

They just want to run a good election. Are you making efforts at that? How are you thinking about that? It seems to be harder than it should be.

>> Governor Christopher Sununu: Yeah, I'll jump on this one only because the first in the nation primary is coming up.

>> Condoleezza Rice: Yes, we know, we know that, yes.

 

>> Governor Christopher Sununu: And you should all come. I got front row tickets to the circus, my friends, if you want to come, come watch the show. It's a heck of a scene. So I'm in a state in New Hampshire. I think we're pretty blessed. People in New Hampshire really do believe in how we run elections.

We're very good that way, but let me tell you why. You know what the first thing we do when we get an election machine in the state, and we've always done this. We rip the guts out. You cannot connect any of our actual voting booths to the Internet, right.

So if you wanted election fraud, you'd need mass collusion with 220 city and town moderators, right? So it's just not possible. We only do paper ballots. Frankly, I think one of the problems is technology. You lean more into technology in this iPads and electric voting machines, you got problems.

So every ballot is paper. So it's right there. There's no just, I punched some buttons and then I got a receipt. So your ballot, if someone wants to recount, is sitting right there in the box, and they will recount it right there in the box. I remember 2020.

I was governor at the time. Iowa did the caucus, and I think they're still counting the votes. I mean, really, I mean, I feel bad for Pete, for Buttigieg because he won that, but no one knew he had won the Iowa caucus till it was way too late, right?

And so he lost all that momentum because they tried to be cute by it and do all this crazy technology stuff. You come to New Hampshire, you fill in your ballot. We got a winner that night, and that's why we do it every single time. So having. I almost, I'm not saying go simple, but it's not that hard, right?

So nationally, I'll talk a little bit nationally, obviously, just on the republican side, what Brian Kemp did in Georgia was amazing because he did the right thing. What Doug Ducey did in Arizona was the right thing. So I think at the local level, we take a lot of pride that it isn't about politics.

And how do I game this for my party and my president or whatever it is? It's really about making sure you do the right thing, because at the end of the day, it's the state's role. You should not have federalized elections. Now you got a real problem. It would be a disaster if you did that for a variety of reasons.

That 35% is disheartening, right? That's Republicans and Democrats, right? This election denial stuff has happened on both sides of the aisle. Obviously, Trump is the big one, right? Trump's the one that's on the front page right now, without a doubt. But historically, it has gone to both sides of the aisle and it shouldn't be political.

It's just, it's really tough. I take it very seriously. I know West says, I think all the governors do, no governor wants their state to not get it right. And that's not about who wins, it's about getting it right where the citizens believe in it, so. And that's why it shouldn't be federalized, right, because states and governors take that responsibility on, I think, very seriously.

And I'm not saying one state does it better than the rest, although New Hampshire does it better than the rest. But there are certain things, I think, that work and don't work, and we can learn from each other. And I'm not saying, yeah, let's use technology, that sounded like a good idea.

Nah, it wasn't great, right? Let's use hanging chads. Not so great for Florida, and we learned from that. So the good news is this, if you keep it in the state's hands, you can constantly work to make the system better.

>> Governor Moore: The only thing, because I agree with much of that, the only thing I'd add is there's a few things that we've been focusing on.

One is how are you increasing access for people to be able to make their voices heard in this process? And that includes everything from extending early voting, that includes things like making sure that really working on the enhanced protections of mail and balloting day of and hour of extension.

But really making sure that everybody who is legal to vote can make sure their vote is registered. That helps to build up a sense of confidence when people feel like that the state is really working to ensure that. I think the second piece, though, is this is we have put very real protections around election workers.

There are people who are volunteering their time and people who now find themselves under threat, who find their safety being compromised because they're choosing to be election poll workers. And one thing that we have done is making sure that we are intensifying laws that are protecting these individuals who are doing this job.

And those who are trying to make them feel less safe, those who are threatening them and those who are intimidating them will be prosecuted under the fullest extent of the law. We are going to protect our election workers, which is also going to incentivize more people to take on something that is truly the foundation of our democracy.

 

>> Governor Christopher Sununu: That's great.

>> Condoleezza Rice: Thank you. Excellent. Let me turn to you now in the audience right here. Can we get a microphone down here? Yes, turn to your right and you'll see somebody running at you with a microphone.

>> Speaker 5: Okay, my question is, if we need to reform Washington, and some ideas are really good, like stopping redistricting and also making term limits, who is gonna vote for that?

Is Washington gonna vote for that? Or states can also make influence in making it happen.

>> Governor Christopher Sununu: Well, my two cents is on campaign finance, that has to come out of DC, right. Because that's a national problem, and the McCain-Feingold didn't work. On the redistricting, you need people that just do the right thing in their legislatures.

I'm the only governor in the country that didn't sign a congressional redistricting bill last year. Republicans gave me a redistricting bill for my congressional seats and they gave me three of them and I vetoed every single one of them. And it really upset them. And I said, we're not going down that gerrymandering road.

So it's a combination. There's solutions to be had on both the state and federal side.

>> Governor Moore: Yeah, I think, you take a look at some of those, even the issues you just mentioned, you're right, some are federal, some are state. But I do agree with the premise when we talk about the redistricting in particular, you take a look at the state of Maryland.

We really have one competitive congressional seat in the state of Maryland. Of all our congressional seats, one is competitive, right, the 6th district. Everything else, it's either Democrat or it's Republican. And the main challenge you have is a primary. And so there is something that we have got to fix in the way the redistricting is done within this country.

 

>> Governor Christopher Sununu: And I would add, I think if Congress voted for term limits, everyone in America would say thank you. They would be politically rewarded for that. Sure, their careers may be cut short, but frankly, that's fine. It's public service, not a public career, right? Where's the term public career anywhere, right?

It should never be that. We don't have term limits in New Hampshire. I've served four terms, eight years, and I'm choosing not to run again. I love this job. I'd love to run again, but it's not right. I think only one other governor has ever served eight years in New Hampshire because we have just a natural sense of, now we're moving on.

It's why we only pay our legislature 100 bucks, right? Well, the only thing I'd say, I think my pushback on that would be, I think we do have term limits and they're called elections, right?

>> Governor Moore: We just have to be more engaged and involved in this election process.

The challenge is when someone's in the seat It's very difficult to unearth an incumbent. Financially it's difficult to unearth an incumbent. Name recognition is difficult to unearth in an incumbent. The interest that they've already been working and building out, it's very difficult to unearth an incumbent. So, you know, while I don't know if I, to the extent and the structure that I would agree with or that I think we can get term limits done, we all need to be more involved in the democratic process because we do have term limits.

Person not doing their job, get them out and get someone new in.

>> Condoleezza Rice: A couple more questions. Let's see over here.

>> Speaker 6: Hi, I'm our first year undergrad at Stanford and I'm a resident of New Hampshire. So I have a question for you.

>> Governor Christopher Sununu: The hard part is making sure she comes back.

Let's not get too excited.

>> Speaker 6: Okay, so I have two questions for you. So you talked about increasing civic education through the citizen test and incorporating the textbook. So after just recently finishing the K12 system in New Hampshire, I witnessed how there was a high teacher turnover after COVID in my public high school.

And I wanted to know, like what support systems you have for teachers to teach and engage students in civics. Sure.

>> Governor Christopher Sununu: So I'm sorry, just so I hear the question, right. How are we retaining teachers, effectively?

>> Speaker 6: Yeah. And engaging them to teach in the civics.

>> Governor Christopher Sununu: Yeah, so a couple things.

The state very rarely puts New Hampshire as a state very rarely tells teachers what to teach. We don't really tell. One of the few things we did is we said, you're going to teach the Holocaust. I actually signed that bill and we're gonna teach civics. You know, we have one of the highest teacher retention rates in the country, which is great.

One of our challenges as an aside is special ed teachers, we can't find nearly enough of those. So it isn't so much a teacher's gonna say cuz I tell them you have to stay and I tell them how to teach, giving them, I think, flexibility, giving them kinda the building blocks there.

I don't tell a teacher how to teach. I should never do that. If a parent isn't happy with what's happening in a classroom, they work with their school board and they work the process there. I think one of the keys is keeping everything local. That way the teacher feels connected to the parents, the system feels connected to the parents and the student and the teacher.

And that communication has to be there as soon as the state comes in and says, by the way, thou shalt do this. We basically said, look, this is the test. We're not doing the common Core thing. We're not telling you what to teach. We're not giving you new fangled nonsense that nobody can understand.

We're giving just really the basics and letting the teachers do what they do best. Teachers are amazing, right? But you gotta let the best of them shine through. And you do that primarily just by setting a few guidelines and getting the heck out of the way.

>> Condoleezza Rice: Time for a couple more questions.

I'm gonna go this side over here for a second.

>> Speaker 7: Thank you. So, one of the institutions that a lot of people don't trust anymore is the supreme Court. I think the confidence is, like, 25%, if I remember correctly. I think the judicial system is supposed to function behind the scenes.

The fact that a lot of Americans know the names of the justices is unhealthy. And I think in other states, too, like Wyoming, right? Like, you elect justices onto the state supreme Court. So what are your thoughts on, like, maybe I'm gaining the public's trust in the supreme Court.

And another thing is, like, in terms of the confirmation process, it's gotten, like, a lot more heated. Like, I think justices used to be confirmed by, like, in a bipartisan way. Even Justice Sonia Sotomayor was well over 60 votes. So how do we fix this problem of justice is also just being confirmed in a very partisan way?

 

>> Governor Christopher Sununu: No, I don't have a quick, easy answer for that.

>> Governor Moore: No. I mean, I don't have a quick, easy answer, because if I'm being very frank, we say it's 25% have confidence, cuz I'm in the 75, if I'm being honest.

>> Governor Christopher Sununu: Why is that? What don't you have confidence about?

That they're overly politicized?

>> Governor Moore: Yes.

>> Governor Christopher Sununu: Or that they're trying to create law from-

>> Governor Moore: I think this current court is overly politicized. Yeah, I think this current court is not making decisions that are based on either legal precedent nor legal baseline. I think theses are political decisions.

 

>> Condoleezza Rice: Saying that nonetheless, the system is that you elect a president who gets to select his. And actually, one interesting thing about the court is that the most highly, highly publicized cases split 9-0. An awful lot of cases don't split in the way that you would think. And we've got a former justice right here in Justice Kennedy, who was kind of known to be, is it a terrible thing to call you a swing vote, that you were a swing vote?

Is that awful? It's fine. Okay, all right.

>> Condoleezza Rice: So one of the questions I think that is being asked here is given the nature of the confirmation process, which really does undermine confidence because it is very politicized and it looks as if nobody, you know, if it's 51 49 in every, then people do lose confidence.

Are your courts elected, your Supreme Court?

>> Governor Christopher Sununu: No, I nominate and confirm.

>> Condoleezza Rice: And how does it go?

>> Governor Christopher Sununu: It goes great. I've nominated Republicans and Democrats. I never ask anyone their political affiliation. And we go, so I do believe in the Supreme Court. I hate a lot of their decisions.

I hate the outcomes. Look, I see conservative justices that have voted more liberal. I've seen there are swing votes there, right? If every Trump or Bush nominee voted only strictly on the conservative side and every Obama and Biden nominee voted on the liberal side, I would agree. But I think on some of the more high profile stuff that happened.

So I would agree with you. I get really frustrated with the Supreme Court. I think they are. But to your point, that's the system, right. The fact that we talk about, that's a conservative justice and that's a liberal justice, that's right there one of the problems, right? We've othered them before.

We've even given them a shot to do. Right. So I might hate the decisions, but, and I think they do get political a bit. But in theory they shouldn't have to. There's no bias, there's no benefit in being political, right? Because they're not getting elected again, right? They have the job for life if they want.

I mean, they're free of the politics of it technically. So I think we maybe we nominate very extreme justices on an extreme conservative bent or extreme liberal bent, but I don't think they're doing it for political purposes per se. I'm a big believer the more the justices sent back to the states, the better.

Right. I mean, like you said, there's a lot of functions of the federal government and that should be dealt on the federal side. But the more the justices can send back to the states, the more west can do right by his state, the more New Hampshire I can do right by my state, and the more the citizens have a say in finding that best path.

 

>> Governor Moore: But I think that's right. But I think it is one of the dynamics that we're seeing where you are then putting a lot of that pressure on these state and individual courts cuz we're in the same boat where we appoint our judges. And I tell you, when people talk about what is one of the invisible superpowers of a governor, it's that it's one of the most important things that governors do that nobody talks about during election years, that the governors are the ones appointing these judges who are saying, because, frankly, there are going to be judges who are going to be making decisions in the state of Maryland, who I will appoint, who will be in their seats long after I have already done my two terms.

Two terms, right? Long after. And there is a real power that the governors have. I think my frustration comes back to when I think about the lens that I make my judicial appointments. I'm looking for people that are, really, there's two kind of lenses that I have. One is I'm looking for people who are true jurists, to your point, I never, I don't ask political affiliation.

I don't ask what your party, none of that. People who are scholars of the law and who are going to apply the law, even when the law might disagree with where you are in a certain value, it doesn't matter. It's the law. Your job is to apply that.

The second thing is people who are not going to be robots in robes, we need human beings who are going to sit there and understand the human component of every person that stands in front of you. But when I think about some of the things that, for example, I'll just take one example where in my first session, we ended up passing laws that did things like enhanced privacy when it comes to people who are seeking abortions, enhancing protections for both patients and providers.

And also doing things like, you are not going to criminalize somebody who choose to have an abortion in the state of Maryland. And now next year, it is gonna be on the ballot where we are looking to put abortion access and reproductive health in Maryland's constitution, because it's a way of being able to guard against something that I think was just a baseless decision by the Supreme Court.

And so that's where I think my frustration comes into, and again, that goes back to what you're saying about it, put more stuff in the states that I don't think that the Supreme Court should have done.

>> Condoleezza Rice: I was just gonna say, isn't that actually kind of proof of exactly what you're saying?

These systems are supposed to work together. And so if you get decisions in the court that appear to be, quote, against the will of the people, even if they, as jurists, they've done the right thing, it can go back to the states and it's gone to you. Let me take one more question.

Geez, I get to choose, right here.

>> Speaker 8: The crisis in the Middle east has exposed a lot of hatred and even more fear.bb How do we heal?

>> Condoleezza Rice: Yeah.

>> Governor Christopher Sununu: So I'll say this, I think we have a lot of cultural problems in the country, and this is yet another one.

I'm floored with the level of antisemitism that you're seeing out there. I mean, I was ignorant, I really never thought it was at that level. You always saw pieces of it here, right? I was floored years ago, not many years ago, when you saw all this white supremacy and holy, this is still here at that level in this country.

So never doubt how many problems that could be out there. I'll say this, through all the cultural problems, I hate woke-ism, I hate cancel culture. Through all of this, though very little of it will be solved by a better law. Very little of it is going to be solved by a better politician.

These are cultural problems that are solved in our communities, person to person, one on one, right? And making sure that we, every single one of us, participate in that. Don't go home and say, I can't believe all this anti-semitism, I hope someone fixes this. You fix it. You talk to your kids, you work with your community, you volunteer your time, whatever it is, whatever your passion is.

And so I just, everyone, if we just elect the right side, it'll be fixed. It doesn't work like that on the cultural things, and this is a cultural crisis. And if I can go back, something Wes brought up, I'm not blaming the media, but media is an institution, and having free and open media, media is incredibly biased.

Social media is a new institution, if you want to even call that, so what is their role? One thing the politicians and the elected officials can do is create the guidelines there. I'm not saying control the voice of the media, but what role are we going to have?

And I think that's a ping pong ball going back and forth. What role is the government in right now? It's on the social media side, right? When there's hate speech, when there's things that are clearly not true, is it Facebook's job to shut that down? Is it Fox's or CNN's job to shut that down?

So I think, and the laws and rules around that, I think are still, this is still a very big gray area. How people consume this information, that kind of light, that fire in their heart, that I believe is very hateful. But then I say, boy, where did that come from?

That didn't just come, this isn't necessarily an evil person. This is someone that has just a complete, I believe, wrong view of the world, probably a complete ignorance of civics and institutions and where a lot of this came from. So that's where I think the government can get involved in shaping some of the framework of of making sure we consume information that is free and fair and open and allows that to happen.

But I'm still a believer these are cultural crises and the best solutions, not the only, but the best solutions are going to come from each of us as individuals going home and not just flipping on another episode of Yellowstone or whatever it is, right? Saying, how can I do it?

But you don't have to be an activist. Let's start with your own kids. Ahat have I instilled with my kids today about civics, foundations, good, bad, evil, terrorism versus all this stuff? And you can use the issues of the day to do that. I'd say it's been staggering how much time, and I know I'm probably speaking about it in the same way, how much time I have had to spend with my cabinet secretaries, with my head of state police, with our federal partners, FBI, on this rise of both anti-semitism and anti-muslim hate that we're seeing in our state.

 

>> Governor Moore: It's staggering how much time I now have to spend on this issue, and also how many resources. We just put an additional $5 million towards hardening homes of worship, because no one should be fearful when they're going in to worship God. But this is where we are.

I could not agree more on the idea of how we just spend time to educate and how we have to be. We have to be unapologetic about our ability to be able to educate because education and this stuff does matter. One thing I've realized is that for the vast majority of people, they are in the unsure and willing to be educated range.

You are going to get that, but the vast majority of people are the unsure and willing to be educated. And so when you're having conversations with them about some of the realities of things that are happening, some of the realities of these groups, I was saying earlier, and the secretary knows this, I did my Master's, and my Auburn dissertation.

I will get it done, Madam Secretary, at some point.

>> Condoleezza Rice: Holding you to it, Governor.

>> Governor Moore: Yes, I will get it done, I promise I'll get that dissertation done. But on the rise and ramifications of radical Islamism in the western hemisphere, specifically focusing on groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, etc.

And when you're having conversations with individuals about this and these groups, they're willing to listen, understand, educate, etc. So we have to be unapologetic about our ability to be able to not simply dismiss, not simply push away, but educate. And to the governor's point, laws do matter. And I remember Doctor King has a quote where he said, laws don't change the heart, but laws can protect me from the heartless.

And we have to make sure we have laws that are in place that are making sure that people can feel safe and secure in their neighborhoods, in their communities, and in their homes of worship.

>> Condoleezza Rice: With that.

>> Condoleezza Rice: With that, I want to thank Governor Sununu, Governor Moore, I want to thank all of you for I think being party to what I think was a very enlightening conversation.

 

>> Governor Christopher Sununu: Holy crap, that's General Mattis. Hey, I'm sorry, that was all, I didn't mean to interrupt, I got all excited. I'm such a fan.

>> Condoleezza Rice: Yeah, he's a good guy, actually.

>> Governor Christopher Sununu: I'm so sorry.

>> Condoleezza Rice: No, no, no, they're speaking of one of our Hoover Senior Fellows, General Jim Mattis, sitting over there.

 

>> Condoleezza Rice: Speaking of serving the country in difficult times, thank you, Jim. But I really want to thank the two of you. I want to thank you for modeling the kind of behavior that we hope to see more of in government.

>> Governor Moore: Thank you.

>> Condoleezza Rice: And I want to thank you for ideas that we will pursue at our new Center for the Revitalization of American Ethics.

 

>> Governor Christopher Sununu: Thank you, guys.

>> Condoleezza Rice: Thank you very much. That was awesome.

>> Governor Christopher Sununu: Thank you so much.

Part 2:

>> Brandice: I'm delighted to introduce the moderator of our first panel, Dan Kessler. Dan is the Keith and Jan Hurlbut Senior fellow and director of research at the Hoover Institution. He is also a professor at Stanford Law School and the Stanford Graduate School of Business in the Political Economy group.

He has published in leading journals across law, economics, and political science, not every. So thanks, Dan, for launching the first session.

>> Daniel Kessler: Thank you, Brandis. Thanks for that very nice introduction. With that, maybe let me introduce all of our panelists here today, and I'll start at the end and work my way backwards.

At the end is Philip Hamburger. Philip is the Maurice and Hilda Friedman professor of law at Columbia Law School. Philip's work focuses on constitutional law and its history. He's also established the Galileo Center at Columbia, which is devoted to freedom of speech and inquiry. And is the founder and CEO of the New Civil Liberties Alliance, an independent, nonprofit civil rights organization based in Washington that litigates to defend constitutional freedoms from the administrative state.

Next we have our own Michael McConnell. Michael's a senior fellow at Hoover and the Richard and Francis Mallory professor of law at Stanford. Michael directs the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford Law School and served as a circuit judge on the US Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit from 2002 to 2009.

His book, The President Who Would Not Be King: Executive Power Under the Constitution, is a winner of the Thomas M Cooley Book Prize for the best book in that year in constitutional history. Next we have Andrew Rudalevige, who's the Thomas Brackett Reed professor of government at Bowdoin College.

He's currently visiting at LSE and an honorary professor affiliated with University College London's Center on United States Politics. Andrew's work focuses on the modern presidency, the executive branch, interbranch relations. And his most recent book, By Executive Order: Bureaucratic Management and Limits of Presidential Power, was awarded the Best Book of the Year on the Presidency by the American Political Science Association.

Finally, next to me here is Sharece Thrower. Sharece is a visiting fellow at Hoover and associate professor of political science at Vanderbilt. Sharece is a chancellor's fellow, and her research focuses on American political institutions, the politics of separation of powers, interbranch policy making, and executive power. In 2022, Sharece co-authored the book Checks in the Balance, which I've read.

Legislative Capacity and the Dynamics of Executive Power, which won the 2022 Alan Rosenthal Prize for the best book on practical legislative studies. And the 2023 Richard Neustadt Award for the best book on executive politics from the American Political Science Association. Thank you all for being here. A pleasure to have you, and thank you for coming to listen to us.

So I'd like to start out with just some questions to our panelists, maybe ask you to speak for sort of five minutes or so. I don't wanna cut anybody off with a hook or anything, but speak for five minutes or so, and this is, can be about you just talked about.

Then maybe I'll try to get us into a little bit of a discussion and make sure, and leave 15 to 20 minutes at the end for questions from the audience if you folks have any follow-up questions from there. Okay, well, lemme start with Philip. So, Philip, you've recently written an essay titled administrative harms, just published at Hoover, where you argue that our current administrative state is causing harm both in terms of harm to the Constitution, but also in terms of harm to contemporary politics.

Could I ask you, and I'm gonna ask everybody a similar question, to say a little bit more about the sort of positive evidence that you have in the book, and then, you know, follow up with sort of your normative prescriptions? What do you draw from that? Sophia, turn it over to you, Phil.

 

>> Philip Hamburger: Thank you. If you don't mind, I'm gonna start with a negative, it's much easier to be negative about the administrative state than very positive about it. The administrative state is profoundly harmful. Economists recognize its regulatory costs. The advocates for agencies say, but it gives us regulation, that's good.

Some economists recognize not all that regulation is desirable. Lawyers recognize its damage to the separation of powers. But that's just the beginning, the administrative state is lethal to our freedom and even, I think, to our survival. The administrative state first deprives us of basic structural freedoms. The Constitution secures our freedom of self government, our freedom to live under laws made by our elected representatives.

The Constitution also protects our freedom to be held to account only in the courts, not other tribunals. The administrative state denies us these fundamental freedoms. It legislates through agency rules, thus diluting our voting rights. It adjudicates through agency hearings, not in courts. And there's the opposite of Republican self-government, and it's grossly unjust.

So that's a constitutional problem, I think is bad enough. Second, it gets worse, the administrative state systematically violates our constitutional rights. For example, and there are many examples in-house agency adjudication denies both due process and jury rights. At least the jury right question, by the way, is now coming to the Supreme Court in SEC versus Jarkisy, it's a case in which we've been very involved.

The administrative state is a profound threat to civil liberties. It cuts all of our procedural rights, some of our substantive rights. So I think it's the greatest institutional threat to the civil liberties in our time, and that point needs to be hammered home in litigation again and again.

Third, it gets worse and worse, you see, the administrative state is shifting to what I would call sub-administrative mechanisms. We don't yet have a good name for this, but it's a very disturbing development. The constitution establishes governance through law, this is sometimes known as the rule of law, it sounds very reassuring.

The administrative state substitutes the rule of rules, which at least sounds law-like even if, of course, it isn't. But the executive increasingly doesn't even bother with either law or administrative rules. If a new statute or agency rule will be unconstitutional or politically difficult, no problem, says the White House or the agencies.

Just use the threat of regulatory hassle to get compliance. Use the threat of regulatory hassle to get private entities, usually banks and other chokepoint firms, to cut off disfavored lines of business, whether guns or payday loans and the rest. This is regulatory extortion, and it's just one of many sub-administrative mechanisms that are becoming the cutting edge of the new administrative state.

How dangerous are these sub-administrative mechanisms? These are what allowed the Biden administration to impose censorship through social media platforms. Nice business you've got there. By the way, these are These are the things we don't want to see. And it worked like a charm. Fourth, we have to talk about discrimination.

There are many sorts of discrimination involved in the administrative state. It begins with racial discrimination, but that's another story. Let's focus today on class discrimination. The administrative state is deeply prejudiced along lines of class. Its driving purpose is to shift regulatory power out of the hands of elected lawmakers who are accountable to us, the people, into the hands of unelected experts who are the elite of the knowledge class, right?

So the result is lots of class oriented regulation, restrictions on gas powered vehicles and home appliances, or COVID restrictions that work well for the laptop class. But destroy the administratively disenfranchised who run gyms and restaurants and the like. Fifth, the Ministry of State stimulates alienation. How can you be confident in unelected regulators who are a different class than most of us?

And six and worst I can go on. I'm just giving you six out of probably 20, right? The administrative state causes political conflict, and this is the killer. The 20th century witnessed two very dangerous constitutional developments. First, the expansion of federal legislative power so that the whole realm of life could be regulated federally.

Second, the development of administrative power, concentrating that regulatory power in the hands of agencies, each on its own, is dangerous. Together they're destabilizing. The full range of regulatory power is now concentrated in agencies under presidential oversight. So presidential elections become do or die battles. Presidential politics becomes warfare.

It's not an accident this is created by the existence of the ministry of state, broad regulatory power. So the administrative state is to blame for existential presidential contests which threatened to tear the nation apart. And by the end of this year, perhaps they will, right? So the administrative state is profoundly dangerous, and anything we can do to restrain it is good.

 

>> Daniel Kessler: Thanks, Philip. Thanks very much. I'm going to mix up the order a little bit from our seating order, maybe turn to you, Andy, now. So we ask you to sort of think along the lines of your recent book, executive order and bureaucratic management and limits of presidential power, and talk a little bit about how executive orders and the role that the bureaucracy plays in shaping and at times even effectively vetoing those orders.

And so both from a positive perspective, how does that, how does that happen? And then normatively, is that a good thing or not so much?

>> Andrew Rudalevige: Great. Well, thank you and thanks, all of you, for being here, and thanks especially to Brandis and the team at Hoover for putting this program together.

If you were here last night, you might have heard Governor Sununu's expostulation of excitement when he saw General Mattis in the audience, holy crap, I think you said, and when I looked at the program, that's sort of how I felt. This is an amazing couple of days that have been pulled together here.

But yeah, my recent work takes off from this sort of odd juxtaposition of image. In fact, the image that executive orders and presidential directives generally are a matter of sort of springing full blown from the president's brain. He sits down at the desk, gets out the big Sharpie, scrawls his name, holds it up.

Boom. Policy has been changed forever. But the reality of course is that the process of producing executive orders is not immediate or even fast in most cases, involves any number of federal departments and agencies providing input and feedback. And what's more, those agencies themselves are often the proposers of the order.

This is a bottom up process. Oftentimes then, as you mentioned, the process of vetting the orders can lead to huge modifications and even to an order not being issued at all. It's the kind of peer review that the academics in the audience will be pretty well used to.

There are a lot of reviewer twos out there in the bureaucracy. So just to put some numbers on this for my research, make sure I get it right here. About 45% of executive orders in my data came directly from agencies, right? Not from more centralized White House staff.

More than six in ten are at least mostly decentralized. Again, the preponderant input in their substance comes from the agencies and departments only about 20%. So one in five are preponderantly the product of the executive office of the president. Now, the median order takes more than a month to issue from the time that it reaches the office management and budget.

There's a lot of variance there. The average time is actually more like 75 days and a quarter take more than 90 days to issue. In fact, the outlier in my sample took 1646 days from proposals to issuance. That's four and a half years. So of course many issues, as noted, are not issued at all.

And in fact that may be as many as one in five of what one OMB council told me were the serious orders. There were a lot of things that never even make sort of the real proposal stage. The most common reason for that in my data again, was intra executive branch input and dissent.

So what should we take away from this? I just want to make three or four quick points. So first, just a useful reminder, if nothing else, that the executive branch is a they and not an it's not unitary, but plural. We need to take seriously the fact of the bureaucratic politics of policymaking and that they are ever present and crucial to the policymaking process, for good or for ill, as Phil would weigh in.

We shouldn't abstract, though, away from the complexity of that, as I think often academics, legislators, jurists, citizens, and even presidents sometimes do. So, second, you could go from that and think, well, this is terrible. Not one subset, maybe, of the way that Phil was talking about it, at least certainly in the classic administrative state/deep state sense that here are all these unelected bureaucrats, they're blocking the will of the elected president.

We should deconstruct them all. Now, there's absolutely plenty that could be improved upon in the way that the federal executive is run and that the US civil service functions. But let me just add two more points as we sort of move towards the normative side of things. First, the process I've described, so called central clearance, usually administered by the Office of Management and Budget, is done on behalf of the president.

It's a way for the president to get information on the costs and benefits and substantive and political feasibility of a given proposed executive order. Now, sometimes the agency critiques do show the president that an idea that the White House might have had simply won't work, or that some kind of modifications will be necessary to make it something that can actually be implemented.

So it brings expertise, it brings institutional memories, the good side of the executive branch bureaucracy to the process, right? And it's a process often driven by the short term. It's not a bad thing to have long term expertise applied to that, as in the peer review process, mistakes are caught that might go unnoticed.

Not every executive order that doesn't get issued was a stupid idea, but a lot of them if you read the files, were stupid ideas. Yes. So it's worth remembering, too, that I noted that nearly half of executive orders actually are bottom up, not top down. They're originated by the agencies themselves, which means that a key part of the process is to alert the president that the agency itself might be trying something on.

That they are perhaps using their informational advantage to work win in a turf war that the president may not care about or certainly might not agree with him on. In my own data, the departments of Agriculture and Interior were particularly notorious for this, I should note, maybe with apologies to General Mattis, if he is here this morning, but I bet he was good at this.

The Pentagon is also very involved in those kinds of turf wars. This is a classic principal-agent problem, right? And this peer review/central clearance process helps to ameliorate it. It helps other agencies identify opportunistic behavior for the president's benefit. So finally, what this ultimately tells us, I think, is that presidential management and management skills matter.

When voters look at a candidate, it's worth considering whether that candidate will be able to use agency expertise to their own benefit, and thus, we hope, to the country's benefit. Presidents who can extract information while fending off opportunism are going to benefit their policy agenda and I would suggest, even their political standing, management central to better policy, to better politics.

And so we should expect our presidents to be better at it. So to come back full circle, we maybe are able to get unilateralism in name, but the national interest, in fact.

>> Daniel Kessler: Very interesting. Thanks a lot. Thanks a lot, Andy. Let me turn to, Charice, to you now for a moment, because this is a perfect sort of segue into your book, checks in the balance, legislative capacity, the dynamics of executive power.

So you sort of, in that book, you have a sort of long sweep of history view. And I think at least one of your theses in there is that part of the dynamics of executive power really has to do with Congress's behavior. How Congress either chooses to act or maybe not act is a big factor in determining the extent to which we're seeing the growth of the administrative state and sort of how the executive branch has moved in.

Yeah, maybe tell us a little bit about why you think that and what your judgment of it is.

>> Sharece Thrower: Yeah, absolutely. First of all, good morning, everyone. Thank you, Brandice and the Hoover team, for having me and giving me an opportunity to talk about executive power. As you can probably tell from Andy's work, as political scientists love to talk about executive orders, you need a lot of power.

So I'm glad to have the opportunity. Similar to Andy's book, our starting point was thinking about this perception that's in the public and the media, that presidents can use things like executive orders completely unconstrained. And that there's this common perception that over time presidents have used more executive orders, especially to get around congresses that they don't agree with etiologically.

In the political science research, though, empirical findings keep repeatedly finding the exact opposite, finding that in fact presidents use fewer executive orders over divided government. And if you look at the patterns in the way that they've used them, they use a lot fewer executive orders over time. And so the starting point for our book was to think about why this is the case, and maybe when this is the case, and our answer is really thinking about Congress's ability to actually constrain the president's use of unilateral powers.

And specifically, we think about legislative capacity as being the key to executive constraint. And we define legislative capacity as the ability of Congress just in journal to be able to do its job. And so what it needs to do its job is different resources and tools, things like staff capacity, qualified staffers, experienced staffers, different sources of information that help them write legislation.

So different offices and things like that. And the way that presidents have been able to use executive orders over time has depended a lot on Congress ability to actually constrain them, which is dependent on legislative capacity. So Congress has tools to constrain the executive branch. It can limit its discretion in statutes.

It can engage in active oversight, things like that. But it hasn't always been able to effectively use these tools. So we show that in historical time periods, Congress was actually a low capacity institution. They didn't have this type of staffing that they have today. They didn't have independent sources of information.

In fact, when they were writing policies, a lot of times they relied on the executive branch to write those policies. You could imagine it's hard to constrain a branch of a government where you're using their sources of information to do so. But as things developed over time, Congress realized that it needed help in constraining the executive branch, and it needed the tools to be able to actually effectively combat a really rising source of executive power.

And so it invested in its own capacity. It passed a lot of reforms during the 20th century, particularly in the mid-20th century, that revitalized its staffing capacity, that gave it different sources of resources. Created institutions like the current national research service and things like that, that helped it become a high capacity institution.

And so we use data to look at the ways that executive power has changed over time based on these changes in capacity. So in earlier time periods, when Congress was a low capacity institution, presidents use a lot more executive orders. I think, in fact, on average, a president used about 300 or so executive orders per year, and they were able to use executive orders to bypass Congress that they didn't agree with.

So we see presidents using executive orders more underdivided government in these earlier time periods. So I think early 20th century. However, as congressional capacity grew over time, we see the patterns reversing in executive power. So executive orders were used a lot less frequently. Modern presidents, and I define modern as like, post 1945.

Modern presidents probably, on average, use around 50 to 60 executive orders per year. So contrast that within the 300s that they were using before. And we actually see them using fewer executive orders under divided government. So this we trace in the book is because Congress is able to effectively use these tools of constraint because of the capacity that they have now.

Just because Congress now is a higher capacity institution doesn't mean that constraints on the executive branch are perfect. And I would never argue that there always could be room for improvement. And, in fact, we've seen moments in time where Congress has actually retrenched its own capacity. So the 1990s, for instance, is a good example.

And so I think that there's always room to grow, and we can talk more about this later. But I think reforms like revitalizing staff capacity, giving staffers higher salaries, making sure that turnover is not as high, making those attractive positions. Those are sorts of reforms that are on the table that we should be thinking about in order to revitalize congressional capacity even more as an effective way to really limit executive power.

 

>> Daniel Kessler: Well, thanks very much. So last but most certainly not least, let me turn to you, Michael. So, Michael, we've heard about the balance of power between executive and legislative branches in contemporary period. In the contemporary period now it's changed over time. And you recently have written a book which I see you brought with you, available on Amazon, available on Amazon.com.

 

>> Michael McConnell: It's a bargain. Christmas is right around the corner, the perfect stuffers.

>> Daniel Kessler: In that book, the president who would not be King considers a number of different components of executive power, including the power to control the execution of laws and the power to control the administrative state.

Could I ask you to say a little bit more about your broader argument and what we can learn from history about how to think about the administrative state and the control of it along lines that we've heard from our other panelists.

>> Michael McConnell: Thank you. First autobiographical note, I used to be that guy in OMB who was the one who reviewed the executive orders under President Reagan.

I was, I think, the last person who had fly spec them before they went over for final approval. I so resonated a great deal. I'm also gonna try to put my comments in the context of what we've just been hearing and the topic I think you asked me to address.

I'm going to frame it slightly differently, which is what is the connection between constitutional law and institutional reform? Because these two, I would submit, are not always the same. And in particular, when you begin asking me about the balance of power between the executive and legislative branches. And indeed, when you think of the idea of separation of powers and then you look at the constitution, it looks as though what we're going to be talking about is conflict between judiciary, legislative and executive.

But I think that the idea of executive power actually obscures the most important differences that we see in this arena and make constitutional legal reform harder, because the executive branch, it is in fact a they. But it's most importantly two different things. On the one hand, you have a president more or less democratically elected, and then you have vast numbers of the entrenched bureaucracy.

A lot of people like to use the word deep state. I don't like that because it feels very conspiratorial. So let's just talk about the entrenched bureaucracy. And they were there before President Biden was elected. They'll be there after he goes, and they are there forever, right? And so I think those two, and these produce two quite different problems.

And so to talk about the executive branch and the separation of problems that it presents obscures the fact that we really are talking about two entirely different problems. Each of those sides of it present problems, but they are different and almost opposite. So let's talk first about the first part, the president himself.

And the danger here is executive unilateralism, the president being able to do things that Congress never adopted, that Congress opposes. In examples just from very recent history, we have the example of a president simply refusing to enforce the immigration laws. We have several examples under Obama, Trump, and Biden of the president spending money that Congress explicitly chose not to appropriate.

Think about the wall. But most recently, the president Biden's effort to basically pay off all of the student loan debt without any plausible authorization. Also, such things in the worldwide arena. How about starting wars? My copy of the Constitution says that it's Congress that has the power to declare war.

What were we doing for eight or nine months? Fighting a major league war in Libya? And the president didn't even go to Congress and ask. So warfare is an example. The environmental law, essentially the executive branch, the president coming from top down, the president decided to rewrite the focus of the Clean Air act in ways which were completely transformative and so forth.

So that's one half of the problem. And what are the constitutional law elements that can be brought in to curb this? It is primarily, I'm sorry to say, today, the courts, because Congress is not in a good position to check the president. I'd love to talk to you, Charice, a little bit more about the congressional checks that you think have been effective with respect to executive orders.

But the way I see this is all it takes, is for the president to have the support of one third of one of the branches of Congress. And he can stop Congress from checking him because he can veto any legislation that might come through Congress that would cut back or change the policy.

And then there's, of course, the general problem of Congress being so debilitated that it can't do anything even aside from the veto. So the checks don't really come from Congress, and increasingly they come from the courts. And so here are three issues that we all read about in the paper, and I'm just gonna flag them so we can see how these, what seem to be discrete cases and questions actually fit to this broader question of how constitutional law can be brought to bear upon our institutional difficulties.

One question is standing. Who can sue many of these cases? That's the hardest question. Like when President Obama decided not to enforce a major portion of the immigration laws. Who could sue? Well, it turned out state of Texas sued because one of the downstream implications of this was that they had to issue more driver's licenses, and that cost money.

Why aren't people laughing? It is a joke, but it isn't a joke. It's the honest to goodness truth. The challenge to the lifting of student loans was made by the state of Missouri based upon a really peculiar little technicality in the way the state of Missouri does its business.

There is no straightforward way to bring most of these challenges in court. And that I think is a huge problem and something we need to be doing more thinking about. Second thing, you've probably heard the phrase Chevron deference. Well, what is that? That is the idea that the courts defer to any reasonable interpretation by the executive branch of its operating statutes.

By reasonable, I don't mean the best interpretation. I mean anything that's like not completely fanciful, the courts will defer to. Well, why is that important? It's because in most of these cases, what it really comes, the case really comes down to what did the statute give the president the power to do x?

And the president doesn't just march in to court and say, well, I just made it up. What he does is his lawyers go into court and they find some provision that if you squint at it and you put it under a prism rather than a microscope. And you stomp on it a little bit, you can maybe make it come up with the authority that the president is exercising.

I think that the Supreme Court has cottoned on to this device and that they are no longer persuaded that they should defer to this. Let me quickly distinguish, though, because it makes perfectly good sense for the courts who do not know anything. I speak as a former judge.

It makes perfectly good sense for judges to deferred to agencies with respect to how to effectuate the powers that they honestly have how many parts per million of whatever defer to the agencies. But whether the executive branch has been given the authority in the first place is an entirely different question.

If you defer to the executive branch on that, you're basically letting the executive branch do whatever, whatever they want. And the third piece of this that I'm sure you all read from the newspaper because it's become such a bogey man, is what the Supreme Court calls. I think it's an unfortunate use of the language, but they call the major questions doctrine.

What does this mean? It means that we should not interpret statutes to impart to the president major new powers that were never discussed, not contemplated, and therefore unlikely. I think that's just a matter of common sense statutory interpretation. But I think labeling it the major questions doctrine makes it look like a thing, and it has become very controversial.

I think it's quite important because the main feature here of executive branch presidential overreach has been interpreting statutes to impart power that Congress never intended. And I've used up all my time, so I can't even talk about the entrenched bureaucracy. But I had some points to make about that as well.

 

>> Daniel Kessler: No, thank you. Thanks, Michael. Let me sort of try to sum up a little bit and go back to each of you, because inevitably I'm going to mischaracterize your guys views. But let me ask you sort of how concerned are you about the administrative state and its role, and what's the best way to address those concerns?

What's the best channel to address those concerns? Maybe I'll start, just go in the same order. Start with you, Philip. I think I know the answer to the first question.

>> Philip Hamburger: That's right. I'll try to reconsider. But on the whole, administrative state seems to me a problem. If you worry about distrust in our institutions and whether the constitution is still a viable document, it would be good just to give the constitution a chance.

We're not living with our institutions as established by the constitution. We're living with an executive, which is exercising a vast amount of legislative and judicial power. And inevitably that has consequences for how we view the executive. I think the executive could rapidly restore our sense of confidence in it if it stopped exercising unconstitutional power, if it stopped adjudicating, taking away our rights to be in court with a judge and jury, if it stopped legislating.

Why is it doing that? The president and agencies are not representative bodies. We need, just as a practical matter, even if not as a matter of principle, to have a mode of legislation that is connected to us, that responds to us. Societies do not generally survive if there is not a feedback loop between the people and the government, and that's called representative government.

So we need to go back to that. So we have a very good plan for getting back to responsible government in which we have great confidence, and that's the constitution. And there's not a matter of originalism, it's a matter of principle.

>> Daniel Kessler: Now, go ahead, Mike. You wanna jump?

Do you wanna butt into something?

>> Michael McConnell: I was please. So stop doing it is the answer. It reminds me of King Canute's barons who told him the tides are doing all this damage. And so King Canute marches out into the ocean and says, stop doing it. That's not a solution, Philip.

 

>> Philip Hamburger: I am flattered to be compared to royalty, but I'm obviously no King Canute. So as a practical matter, I think we do have tools in front of us, and they're very, they're not fancy. They're very, very basic, the most basic tool. And here we have a lot to learn, by the way, from Eastern Europe and Russia in past times, right.

We have a lot to learn from the literature of Solzhenitsyn, live not by lies and of Vaclav havel, more moderately, the power of the powerless. We cannot simply rely on academic discussion or on fancy analysis to solve this. We have to be true in our hearts. We have to tell the truth.

So when we're told that you're gonna get an administrative law judge, you should always pause and you put the judge in quotation marks. It's not a big deal. It's an administrative law judge, right? If you're told you're gonna get due process in an administrative hearing, you have to say no.

No, that's not due process. As Michael has shown very elegantly, due process of law means the right to be held to account in a court. It also means you shouldn't have a biased judge. And these judges are not unbiased. They're institutionally corrupted. So these are just little things we can't start.

We shouldn't be talking about the non delegation doctrine. What? Hokum, it's all about delegating, I would say divesting, which is the constitution's word. Divesting legislative power to agencies. By telling the truth, we can change the world. I know that sounds odd, but it's true. Confucius has a doctrine on rectification of names.

It actually has obscure origins. I don't want to dig into that now, but he, or at least his students, recognize the importance of having the right names for things. And if you let the corrupt folks in the Ministry of State define the terms and the names, you've already lost.

If we take back the power to give things their right names, the world changes. That's by the way, why Chevron is on the chopping block. Relentless is one of our cases. Why? Because for ten years we have said no, that's not a separation of powers problem. Instead, Chevron requires judges, federal judges in their own cases, to defer to one of the parties as to what the law is.

And that is judicial bias. It's not judicial deference, it's not Chevron deference, It's Chevron bias. Now, I don't think the Supreme Court is going to go that far. Maybe Gorsuch will. They're gonna shy away from using that very candid language because it's just too much, it will unravel too much.

But that's why Chevron's on the chopping block, because they know it's utterly corrupt and it's gonna destroy the reputation. Truth matters.

>> Daniel Kessler: That sounds like sort of a philosophical how-to. But Andy, maybe let me ask-

>> Philip Hamburger: Can I have just three seconds more?

>> Daniel Kessler: Sure, go ahead, go ahead.

Not too long.

>> Philip Hamburger: Then there's a practical consequence. The second tool is litigation.

>> Daniel Kessler: Okay.

>> Philip Hamburger: And I just wanna put that out there, hardcore litigation, it works.

>> Daniel Kessler: The courts. Okay, Andy, so let me ask you about your view of sorta where on the spectrum-

>> Andrew Rudalevige: So back to the-

 

>> Daniel Kessler: Are we, and then the mechanics-

>> Andrew Rudalevige: So back to your question about what's the biggest problem with the administrative state. Well, Congress actually.

>> Daniel Kessler: Okay.

>> Andrew Rudalevige: But I think there's, well, let me answer that question in two sort of separate pieces. One is, yeah, Congress. I mean, I think Michael raised, perfectly reasonably, the idea that we kinda have to just sweep by Congress cuz they're useless, right?

We know they're useless, we watch them being useless on a daily basis. And yet, right, the powers, in fact, of the Constitution are vested in Congress. And Congress needs to muster the resources, the institutional pride, to take back some of its prerogatives. For example, I think you could shift to the default power in the National Emergencies Act, in the War of Powers resolution, such that the president's action is not going to require a veto override.

But again, that will require Congress to get its own act together. Maybe that's too much to ask. What we then find ourselves in the world of is, again, as Michael suggested, one where presidents are doing statutory interpretation. They have an army of lawyers in the executive branch, and their interest to their client is to find something in statute that they can use to justify what they would like to do.

To paraphrase the late, great Martha Derthick, she said that so much of the action of policymaking is not in the making of new laws, but the finding of new meaning in old laws. The answer to that, I think, is for Congress to write better laws. Again, that's, I hope, not too pie in the sky a solution.

Sharece will tell us how to actually make that happen-

>> Daniel Kessler: Yeah, Sharece-

>> Andrew Rudalevige: Better resolution, perfect. Just to add, can I add one real quick?

>> Daniel Kessler: No, yeah, please do, please do.

>> Andrew Rudalevige: The other side of this really is sort of, I think about our mutual friend Dave Lewis at Vanderbilt loves to say it's time for civil service reform.

It is actually time for civil service reform. Serious thinking, nothing sort of the gutting of the civil service, but thinking about how you make government workers accountable through merit systems protection board that actually works, for example.

>> Daniel Kessler: Okay, okay.

>> Andrew Rudalevige: There are some things we can talk about there.

 

>> Daniel Kessler: Very interesting, yeah, but Sharece, this is a perfect teeing up for you, who I know will be interested in talking about Congress

>> Sharece Thrower: For sure. So I think even if im going to take a step back from Congress, all this makes me think about how our separation of power systems was originally intended to be set up.

As we know that one branch of government's supposed to check another branch of government. And one thing that we thought about in this book that we really came back to is in order for the separation of power system to work, in order for ambition to be made, to counteract ambition, that our institutions need capacity to do that.

So, you know, even beyond legislative capacity, which I can talk more about, but even the capacity of the courts, the courts do play, I think, a huge role in constructing the executive branch as well. They also need capacity. And I think in terms of what Andy was saying, in terms of civil service reforms, we can think about ways to make the bureaucracy a more appealing place, that people will stay for a longer period of time.

And we really invest the resources in the civil service as well. So I guess my larger point is that we should think about investing the resources in these institutions to make them function as they were originally supposed to be intended.

>> Daniel Kessler: Interesting, well, Michael, so it sounds like we've got the range of views here between the courts, Congress telling the agencies themselves they should just stop.

How do you sorta negotiate around these? Maybe the answer is all the above. I don't know.

>> Michael McConnell: So people are not just gonna stop, but there also isn't just one problem there. There are a series of problems, and they require different solutions. For example, Andrew mentions reforming the Emergency Powers Act.

We should all be able to get behind this, it's absolutely a scandal. And Congress didn't mean for it to be the way it is now, we know that. Within the entrenched bureaucracy, I think these are the hardest problems. I don't know that civil service reform is going to work.

But I look at things like these administrative law judges that Philip refers to, this is really a serious problem. You have a dispute with the agency and the judge you're before is appointed by the agency and is part of the agency and decides according to how the agency wants, that's just the way it is.

If we wanted to have a fair system, either we need to find a way to move these into the article three, into the judicial side by having an entire third level of the judiciary. But if we don't wanna move that radically, what I would like to see is for Congress to provide for administrative judges as a core, not different ones, not some for Department of Agriculture and some for the SEC.

But administrative judges who are not beholden to any one agency and who are headed by somebody whose job it is to make sure that people get fair-minded justice in the administrative agencies. The model for this, to my mind, is the JAG, or the Judge Advocate General Corps in the military, which works extraordinarily well within the system.

So that's just an idea, I have others, but that's one.

>> Daniel Kessler: That would be like a new executive branch agency then, sorta.

>> Michael McConnell: Yes.

>> Daniel Kessler: But it can't be an article.

>> Michael McConnell: But standing outside of all the particular agencies-

>> Daniel Kessler: Okay.

>> Michael McConnell: But still being within the executive branch.

 

>> Daniel Kessler: Interesting. Very interesting. Well, this is fantastic. It's 10:00, let's go to the audience, we have 15 minutes, and get some people's questions or views.

>> Speaker 7: So I guess I'm thinking that the fundamental problem is that since certainly, well, maybe since the New Deal, but certainly since the great society.

A lot of what's happened is that the federal government has taken on all of these social welfare functions of society, and that's been kind of the fundamental driver of the increase of the administrative state. Really, the prime way, fundamental way to reverse that is to, in fact, roll back all of those programs because they've taken over all of these administrative functions of society.

And so that's a huge project, obviously, but it would have to come through Congress. So I'm just wondering what you think of that and whether you think that's really the fundamental problem.

>> Daniel Kessler: That's a terrific question. Yeah, Michael.

>> Michael McConnell: So if I can respond to that, you know, I'm probably with you on that, but I don't think the american people are with us on that.

I think there's a reason these programs exist, and it's because they are popular. People would vote out members of Congress who run on the platform of reversing Social Security and food stamps, and we could go down the whole list. And fundamentally, I'm committed to the idea of a democratic republic.

Was it Menken who said, I believe democracy is giving the public what they want and give it to them good and hard.

>> Michael McConnell: Well, I think he's right.

>> Daniel Kessler: Well, fair enough, Philip?

>> Philip Hamburger: Yeah, forgive me, but I would dispute the premise of the question. I think we have to distinguish between two types of power exercised in the executive.

Traditional, lawful executive power would include the distribution of welfare and other benefits under statutory authorization. That's perfectly lawful. That is not what I would call administrative power. There's no objection to that in my mind. The real danger, it seems to me, lies in regulatory power, constraints imposed through rulemaking and adjudication in the executive.

That's administrative power. That's what's lethal. That's what's gonna cause a sort of civil war, right? Because that makes it matter who the president is in a way that otherwise wouldn't matter. So I think it's a mistake to say, when you're criticizing the administrative state, you're asking us to unravel these social programs.

We can have a separate debate as to the value of the social programs. It's an interesting and problematic question. But the threat of regulatory power, that is the core of the administrative state, it's a different question. That's entirely independent, I think, of the welfare state. Does that make sense?

 

>> Daniel Kessler: Andy-

>> Andrew Rudalevige: Just to kinda take on this little piece of that, too. I mean, it's worth noting the size of federal employment has actually not gone up over decades. John DiIulio at the University of Pennsylvania and of the George W Bush White House has written a book, actually called bring back the bureaucrats.

His argument is that, in fact, the federal employment has been level. The federal budget, of course, has skyrocketed. And the difference, he says, is that a lot of the programs you're talking about? I think this is maybe what Phil was getting at, is that these are cash transfer programs in a certain way, non discretionary to a degree.

In fact, literally, they're entitlement programs, right? So you're seeing the money go out where he has issues, right. Is that a lot of what the government does is give money to other parties and ask them to do things. And he says, actually the number of people left in the federal government are incapable of running those programs well.

And so what you wind up with is a lot of middle managers trying to manage contracts that they are incapable of conceiving, much less implementing in a cost efficient way. So he has sort of the counterintuitive argument, actually the government should be bigger to make it more efficient.

You can take that up with him, though, if you don't like that idea.

>> Daniel Kessler: Do you have any views on this, Sharice? Okay, anybody have any other questions?

>> Speaker 8: I'd like to address some of your comments from the state level and throw out two potential solutions, one cheeky and one not so cheeky.

The first one is when I was in a governor's office, we were, the year before, given veto authority over all the rulemaking. Of course, as a staff person, we certainly didn't have the capacity to suddenly review these rules that were all coming to the governor's office to veto.

However, we were able to stop some significant rules that our administration didn't put together, but any administration would look at saying that they were unreasonable. So I curious about your perspective on using the checks and balance system to access that rulemaking authority that agencies are doing. That's the non-cheeky response.

The second one was another tool we used was to send staff from our state agencies out to the counties, put them there for six to eight months, and get them to understand whether the rules that the state was imposing on the counties, particularly in health and human services, were actually working or not.

And what were the barriers? I don't ever remember, as I'm sitting in the governor's office, seeing someone from a federal agency, particularly health and human services. Who are distributing all those dollars through temporary assistance for needy families or those programs come to the state to determine whether what they're doing is actually working for us or not.

So I think, Charisse, about your solution on capacity. I think the federal government has capacity because otherwise they wouldn't be making up all these rules for us to have to follow and then not knowing whether they actually work or not, because we're always requesting exemptions from the rules.

So, maybe comment on veto-making, veto authority across the federal government on rules and then also capacity, sending people in a state for a year to determine whether things are actually working or not.

>> Daniel Kessler: Charisse, yeah, can I ask you to respond to that?

>> Sharece Thrower: Yeah, those are really interesting points, starting with your second one.

I think it's really interesting to think about the ability of these institutions to actually be able to oversee what's happening and have information. And so this is one of the things, when I talked about some of the reforms that were happening in the 20th century that helped Congress become better at overseeing the executive branch.

Take something like the Federal Register Act. So before that act was passed, a lot of times the courts and Congress, they didn't know what the executive branch was doing. Famous examples where they didn't know what regulations were being made. They didn't know that the president was making these executive orders.

And so that was swinging a lot of the power towards the executive branch because they can kind of, it took a longer time for the other branches to discover what they were doing. So I think what you're suggesting in terms of taking that a step further and really looking to see how these things are implemented, I think is a great one.

And then in terms of your first comment about sort of this veto engagement of regulations. So I love that you mentioned the state governments, because in my book, we have a chapter that looks at the different types of powers that legislatures have to combat executive power. And one of the things we looked at is, like, the variation that there is of the power.

That legislatures have to actually review regulations in the states and to what extent that they have input into that process. And we find that when legislatures have that sort of ability, that also helps to constrain executive power for these state executive branches. So I think both of those are really potentially interesting ways to kind of expand those out.

 

>> Daniel Kessler: Interesting, Andy-

>> Andrew Rudalevige: Well, I thought maybe you were from Pennsylvania, actually, cuz they do have a, quite a stringent power in place to review regulations at the state level. By the way, trivia point on your second question, Office of Management Budget, back when it was the Bureau of the Budget had field offices, and actually on behalf of the president.

They would go out and look at federal agencies in the field to see if they were acting efficiently. And it was cut back as early as the late 1950s, early sixties, as a cost cutting measure, because OMB felt that if it was cutting everybody else's costs, it had to cut its own.

Regulatory review, and I'd actually defer maybe to Michael on this. But, I think what we will see, we've seen an expansion of centralized regulatory review by presidents, really starting as early as Richard Nixon. Certainly institutionalized by President Reagan and then his successors have realized it's kind of a good idea to know what's going on.

I would guess we are gonna see a movement, probably not under President Biden, but under successors, maybe of both parties, towards reviewing independent agency rules as well. And certainly my understanding is that OMB has always thought that was legal, but there were political barriers to doing it.

>> Daniel Kessler: Interesting.

 

>> Michael McConnell: Did you want me that we had these debates back then? What you describe, I think, is rather similar to the OMB regulatory review process under executive order 12291. The only executive order whose number I can remember.

>> Michael McConnell: But it doesn't apply to the so-called independent agencies. Now, I don't really believe in their constitutionality to begin with, but even if you do believe in their constitutionality, I did a legal opinion way back when I was like the most junior lawyer in the entire executive branch.

But arguing that even for independent agencies, the president has the right under the opinions and writing clause to demand to have all of the proposed regulations submitted to the executive branch so that they could be put under review. And that was just a little too radical, but maybe it'll happen.

 

>> Daniel Kessler: Very interesting. Time for one more question, ma'am, you've been very patient. Please go ahead.

>> Speaker 9: So something that only Andrew touched on and only tangentially up there is the lack of accountability of the bureaucrats. For example, I live in a town that has an NIH level four lab.

And I've heard several stories. I'll just give you one. There was a scientist that felt that her lab assistant was completely incompetent and wanted to get rid of that person, but was told that the procedure would take over a year and they would have to be working with that person every day for that year.

And then there are things like Lois Lerner, who, instead of being held accountable for abuse of power, was simply permitted to retire with full retirement benefits. So I'd like comments on how it's almost impossible to get rid of people who are bureaucrats in the federal government who are in some manner misbehaving.

 

>> Daniel Kessler: This is sort of toward this civil service reform question.

>> Andrew Rudalevige: Well, I'll talk on it briefly. I'm looking at that countdown over there, but I will. It's a long story, I thought it would be more, but-

>> Daniel Kessler: 15 seconds.

>> Daniel Kessler: We'll go one minute.

>> Andrew Rudalevige: Okay, okay.

Yeah, well, I agree, obviously, hiring and firing are pretty important to personnel management. One thing, of course, created back in 1978, I mentioned the merit Systems Protection Board. I mean, that was designed at the time to make that process better than it had been under previous civil service acts.

It's never been fully resourced, which means you have these very long delays when you're trying to get rid of somebody who is underperforming. Who, by the way, should have appeal rights against these charges. But the manner of adjudicating that has just been extraordinarily slow and also inefficient. And, in fact, for five years, there was no quorum on that board.

President Trump actually refused to appoint members to the board. It couldn't operate. That made the situation worse, not better. And so now it has a quorum, but it's still way behind. And so you're gonna have these problems lagging forward until, I think, you have some serious attention to an overall fix to the system.

Which, again, is going to be difficult to get through Congress, which will be tricky. I mean, we can go into the role of public sector unions. We can talk about all sorts of things, I think, that are relevant here. But just on that specific point of hiring and firing, I think there is a mechanism in the system that if we actually try to make it work, might help at the margins.

 

>> Daniel Kessler: Well, thank you. We're out of time, so I should let everybody go. But thank you to our panelists for terrific presentations, and thank you for some really good questions, which got us, which got us going. So with that, I'll let you go. And we're going to be back at 1030 for our next panel, please.

Thanks again.

Part 3:

>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: Good morning. For those who are just joining us, I'm Brandice Canes-Wrone, faculty director of the newly founded Center for Revitalizing American Institutions. As well as the Maurice R Greenberg, Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution and Professor of Political Science. So I'm delighted today to have these outstanding panelists here to join us.

I'll introduce them in the order in which they're seated. Sarah Binder is a senior fellow of government studies at the Brooking Institutions. She's also professor of political science at George Washington University. Sarah specializes in Congress and legislative politics, as well as Congress's relationship with the Federal Reserve. Her most recent book, co-authored with Mark Spindle, The Myth of Independence: How Congress Governs the Federal Reserve, won two awards from the American Political Science Association.

Sarah was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2015 and appropriately I would say, serves as GW's Faculty Senate Parliamentarian.

>> Sarah Binder: Best job in the world.

>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: Yes. The Honorable Barbara Comstock served as US representative for Virginia's 10th congressional district from 2015 to 2019. And was a member of Virginia's House of Delegates from 2010 to 2014.

Prior to being elected to public office, Barbara served as chief counsel of the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee. As director of public affairs at the Department of Justice, and as a congressional staffer. In 2019, Barbara joined the Baker Donaldson firm as senior advisor. The Honorable Daniel Lipinski served as a US representative for Illinois's third congressional district from 2005 to 2001 and is currently a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution.

Dan served on two House committees, Transportation and Infrastructure and Science, Space and Technology. And has held teaching appointments at the University of Notre Dame and the University of Tennessee. He is also currently the Pope Leo XIII Fellow on social thought at the University of Dallas. And although not part of Dan's official biography, I will add he is also a PhD in the Political Science.

We consider that-

>> Daniel Lipinski: Thank you.

>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: Something to be lauded. Jonathan Rodden is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and professor of political science at Stanford University. Jonathan's research focuses on the comparative political economy of institutions, including on political polarization in the US and abroad. Across his career, he has published numerous books and articles, and he was recently awarded the Martha Dirthuk Award for work that has produced a lasting contribution to the study of federalism.

Currently, he has a major project on polarization and intra-party factionalization in the US Congress. So thanks to all of you for joining us. And we're gonna pick up from the previous session. So for those who weren't here, we heard a lot in the previous session about how the administrative state has grown over time and the balance of power has shifted.

Many of the panelists argued, from Congress to the executive branch. So I'm curious if you agree with this assessment, and what's Congress's role in contributing to this trend? And if you disagree and you think that that's not true, that's fine, we're receptive to different opinions. Sarah, let's start with, with you.

 

>> Sarah Binder: Sure and thank you and thanks for including us all today. So I think we did, as you suggested, get a good sense from the first panel of this sort of growing recognition, at least amongst political scientists. Of constraints on presidents and the exercise of executive power, which certainly stands in pretty stark contrast I think, to either sort of popular perceptions of the executive and president's power.

But also stark contrast perhaps to the political science accounts, Terry Moe, Hoover, and Will Howe, about the presence and unitary power. I think despite the differences that we saw between maybe Charisse and Andy in some of the discussion earlier. I do think shared across all of these accounts is this notion that when we look at sort of Congress versus the president.

That there's a sort of zero-sum game going on here, that a weaker Congress necessarily means a stronger executive. And I'm not so sure about that. And I think it's worth us thinking a little bit about why that might be. Certainly, I think first we should distinguish across different policy areas.

First of all, those areas in which Congress explicitly delegates authority to the executive. Sometimes in often retaining some sort of limited role for itself. So Michael McConnell mentioned war powers, of course, more generally, national security, trade policy. We want, I think, I'm sure we'll come back to it.

We want to bracket for now the notion of the major questions, doctrine, right? Cuz they're asking for, courts asking for a quote, unquote, I think, clear statement of congressional intent to delegate. I'm just gonna assume for now, for this part of the discussion, that there is delegation. And those outcomes look kind of zero sum, right?

Congress weaker, president stronger, by explicit congressional decision making. But there's another scenario, and I think that might cover a broad array of policy errors as well, which is Congress stalemates. That is, it can't make a decision, perhaps because the parties disagree on whether a problem is a problem.

Sometimes they may agree it is a problem and still can't come to a consensus. And then we see presidents step into the breach and try to exercise authority. And many of those, we're given examples earlier this morning, that is, president's trying to act without statutory authority. And I'm not so sure that that's zero sum.

I could imagine a world where that's actually negative sum, right? Congress is worse off because it can't act. Presidents try to act, but presidents aren't then creating durable policy change by use of executive orders or what have you. So strikes me there may be array of policy areas that are surely negative sum.

Both institutions are worse off, weak congress, weak POTUs. And we can come back to some of those issues. But immigration reform, certainly. The debt relief, certainly, the quote, unquote, the Muslim ban. And I think it's worth thinking a little more about why you end up with sort of weakened presences even though they're stepping into the breach to try to exert power.

 

>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: Interesting. Barbara, your thoughts?

>> Barbara Comstock: Well, good morning. It's wonderful to be here. And I just love the theme of this, revitalizing American institutions. And last night was such an extraordinary night. And I was delighted to be here with my neighbors, Justice Kennedy and Mary, they live across the street from me.

So talk about what a privilege to hear Justice Kennedy last night. And one of the things that I thought was so wonderful that he spoke to that I think the whole theme of this conference about, he joked and said, you're asking an 80 something person to talk about revitalizing.

But that is exactly who should, somebody who has revered these institutions and dedicated his life to them. Who is just steeped in all of them, as you all who were here last night heard and has thought about this and approaches it. And you heard that from his conversation last night.

And so it was wonderful to hear the governors talk in that way too and to hear our panel. So it's really a privilege to be here. And so I'm humbled to be in the company of my great neighbor, and on a day when we heard about the passing of Justice O'Connor, who went on the bench the year I started law school, and she spoke at my law school graduation.

So somebody who didn't have those kinda role models when I was growing up, I was privileged to later meet her and tell her how her speech at my graduation actually inspired me to have a third child. Because she spoke about how she had had three boys and stayed home for ten years.

And she looked at me kind of puzzling, like, I don't think that's what I talked about at your law school graduation. But she happened to mention that. And I had two boys at that point, and I thought it would be great to have a third child and I had my lovely daughter.

So at any rate, to get to the questions. But we are so privilege to have people who do revere our institutions. So I think this is such an important effort. But before I was in congress, I was in the State House, speaking to the governors, and speaking to whether we have strong parties or strong leadership.

I was very privileged to have a very strong speaker and the commonwealth of Virginia has a very strong speaker model, strong governor model, too. And I really enjoyed working within that model because the speaker, he even made the decisions of who sat next to who. But we got so much done, it was very effective, we were really encouraged to work bipartisanly, even though when I went in, there were 66 out of 100 Republicans.

We had a split Senate, so we had to work together. All of our bills, we are encouraged to get bipartisan co-sponsors. You had to sit there and listen to your colleagues in debate. And it was a very collaborative process. So even though it was strong leadership, it was also emphasized to collaborate and work on your bills and to make sure they got through.

And then when I got to Congress, after having been a staffer during what were pretty tumultuous times in the 90s, while we impeached President Clinton, we also had a balanced budget, we got welfare reform passed, and we got some tax cuts passed. So you think it was very contentious during the 90s.

Bill Clinton and Bob Dole and Newt Gingrich actually were pretty grown up and did a lot of things even with all that ugliness going on. But by the time I got to Congress in 2015, you had this Tea Party Freedom Caucus groups that had kinda started taking over Republican leadership.

And that was really my experience that really made it difficult. It wasn't the parties or it wasn't leadership, it was this rump group that you've now seen most recently, oust as speaker. And really take over a party and there are other currents going on and why they're doing that.

But it's really taking over the party in a way that makes it very difficult to take on a lot of these issues. I mean, it was bad while I was there, but I was privileged to be able to work with this wonderful man, cuz I was chairman and he was ranking member while I was on the science and technology committees with him.

And so we still got legislation through because while those guys were having their hissy fits on various things, there were legislators who liked to do things. And we could get it to the floor and work together, cuz our committee was a very collaborative committee. So it was kind of a tale of two congresses.

Those guys were starting to take things over and not allow people to work together anymore. And starting to disrupt the Republican conference in a very destructive way that has continued to go on, but we still were able to get things during that time. So I am more in the camp of wanting a strong leadership and even party structure, but you still to get anything done, you know, it's a people business and you have to have relationships.

You have to be able to work together. And again, the Freedom Caucus that just hangs together, their little tight group, that is not something they've been known for, most evidenced by when Jim Jordan ran for speaker. And to his surprise, somebody who had never passed a bill in 16 years and didn't have those relationships was surprised that he didn't know how to pass a bill, which at that time was himself being speaker.

And so, that was his first effort ever to try and get 218 votes. His efforts prior to that had been to just take things down. So I do think advancing something a little different from the power structure thing, but the whole leadership efforts, I think, we've just seen within my party a continued effort to just take the party structure apart.

And in contrast, you saw during, I'm a Republican, while Nancy Pelosi's politics were not my politics, I think Republicans would do well to follow her model. Which even with a five vote majority, she got a lot of things through. She kept her conference together. She ruled kind of with an iron fist.

She probably didn't do some nice things politically, we know, but, that was a much more effective model, and she got things done. And if you're going to have the majority, your whole purpose is to get some things across the finish line, not just to be, having performance. The Freedom Caucus is really kind of the caucus of the Kardashians.

They like to go on tv, they like to perform, but most of them, large proportion of them have never passed legislation, and they kind of don't want to. So, there you go,

>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: Thanks, Dan, so you were in Congress for, as we mentioned, 16 years. I know academics often have this sweep of sort of, we're gonna look at 100 year changes in balance of power.

I don't know if you noticed changes during the time you were in there about congressional capacity. Or just how you would view kind of congressional capacity to stand up to the executive during the period, even if you didn't think it changed.

>> Daniel Lipinski: Well, thank you, Brandice, and great to be here on this panel, and great to be a fellow at Hoover.

One thing you didn't mention in my introduction, I have a Master's degree from actually the school of engineering here at Stanford. So walking to Hoover, I walk by my old dorm. But I think there's nothing more important today that receives so little attention as we're concerned about the future of our republic.

There's nothing that receives less attention than the decay of our institutions in general. So I think the center has a big job to do, but it is incredibly important. There's so much focus on so many other places where we have concerns, rightfully concerned, about where our republic may fail, focusing on certain individuals, certain groups, maybe.

Institutions facilitate our republic, without strong institutions, then we will not continue to have a republic. And I think there's no more important institution than Congress because Congress is where, in a representative democracy, that's really where the people are supposed to be heard. I've known Sarah for 20 something years as a political scientist, and as Barbara said, we served together in Congress.

I certainly saw in my 16 years in the House a significant change. I entered in 2005. It didn't start then, but I definitely saw different eras in the time I was there. You basically had the second President George W Bush era, where there was still cooperation in the House.

I saw that we got a big energy bill accomplished after Democrats took the House in the 2006 election. Nancy Pelosi actually worked with President Bush on things that the two parties could work on together. 2008 comes, Democrats get large majorities in the House and the Senate, had 60 votes in the Senate.

It happened for only one year during that three year period. But it's the only time in the last four decades there's been a filibuster proof majority in the Senate. And at that time is where I see things really started breaking down. Republicans decide that the only thing that they can do, that they're going to do is work against and try to stop the Democrats.

Now we get an argument over whether that's, well, that's all they can do at the time. But I think that was really a change, and it's also a change in all the Republicans brought in 2010 election, the ones that Barbara mentioned, that I think really didn't have an interest in governing.

And I think things really went downhill from that time. First, Democrats try to do a lot in the two years and probably may have pushed debate that how the things were pushed forward. Big things were pushed forward on a partisan basis. Republicans come in and the Republican Party is two parties right now.

It's not one party, not one united party. I saw all the struggles that speakers Boehner and Ryan went through trying to get anything done. President Trump gets elected. And I saw Democrats, my party decided that they were sort of gonna go all in, in what I call, a lot of people talk about politics now as being tribal, I see it as sectarian.

It is really a identity based, our partisanship has become identity based. And the idea is you just need to beat the other side. Now, I say all this because Congress does not work when our politics are like this. And what we not only lose is the ability for Congress to act and get things done, but it also, it's something very important that I think we miss is that Congress is also, it's not just about the output.

It's also how the process works. And one of the purposes, when the constitution was written of, we have two houses of Congress. There was a number of reasons for that. But one of them is to have two places where people can, their views can be heard through their senators, through their representative.

Congress is supposed to be a place where all these different views are heard. There's supposed to be debate, deliberation, and compromise or reach conciliation. And I think a lot of the problems that we have right now are because Congress is not helping to bring all these voices together.

And actually have real debate and deliberation and figure out how are we gonna work together here. I think that's one of the reasons that adds to frustration people have. So I think Congress is failing not just in lack of production of good laws. I think it's also failing in not helping bring America together.

I think the process is also a problem and this needs to be fixed. A lot of problems are politics, our partisanship right now. But I think there's also internal issues in Congress, especially in the House. And one last thing I'll say now is I completely disagree with Barbara in terms of the, I very much did not like a strong speaker, I think that that is bad.

I think it makes the institution not work. Now it sounds like in Virginia it was very different in the state House where you actually did things in a bipartisan manner with a strong speaker. But that doesn't happen in the House of Representatives. A strong speaker makes sure that it's the majority party that, even look at Republicans right now, despite the fact you might say, well, look, there's not a strong speaker.

Look, all trouble Republicans are having, like I said, the Republican Party is really two parties right now. But the other thing is, if you look at it, all right? Kevin McCarthy is ousted the first time in history. One of the biggest criticisms of McCarthy was that he was not being a strong enough speaker in getting, there's a faction that vote against him who are opposing him.

He's not getting the things done that we want him to get done. So, they're actually saying he's not strong enough. He's not strong enough to force through, even though I don't understand how the small group thinks that they don't understand you need 218 to pass anything? I don't know, but I'd argue that the Republicans-

 

>> Barbara Comstock: They don't have the 218 within their own caucus.

>> Daniel Lipinski: Yeah, so anyway, I think there's multiple issues. I think one we need to make Congress work, or else I really fear for the future of our republic.

>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: Jonathan, responses to others, but also your own independent thoughts on kind of shifts in the balance of power and whether Congress is working well today?

 

>> Jonathan Rodden: Yes, like others, I'd like to start out by thanking you and the Hoover Institution for putting this together. One of the best things for me as an academic about being here is the ability to sit on a stage with two people who've actually been there working in the trenches trying to pass legislation and learning from them.

And I hope I can learn a lot from you. What I wanna do just for a couple of minutes. So, one of the things Brandice didn't say in introducing me is a lot of my work is broadly comparative. So I look at countries around the world in addition to a lot of work recently, I've focused in recent years very much on the United States and trying to understand how it works in comparative perspective.

And so, I just wanna be clear. The United States is a presidential democracy, which has division of power between the president and the legislature. And that's pretty fundamental to what the framers were up to. And that's what we're talking about. The last panel, I think the issues brought up by Mike McConnell and Professor Humberger about the administrative state and these kind of increasing acts of unilateralism from the president is an important issue.

And it is, of course, very related to how we understand what Congress's role is in oversight. So when I look at presidential systems around the world, this is not unusual. Because of this separation between the executive and legislature and the lack of tools with which to punish backbenchers or to get them in line, it's hard for presidents to get their agendas passed.

And this is true in all the presidential systems of the world, many of which are multiparty systems. So, the American system of two-party presidentialism is extremely rare. The other two-party presidential systems right now are Ghana and Nigeria, and you might say South Korea. But what I wanna add to that is two-party polarized presidentialism.

So we had two-party presidentialism back in the era of bipartisanship that we heard a little bit about. And then we heard a description of what's changed, and I think very good descriptions of what has changed in society and what has changed in Congress in the last 20 years.

And so, we now have a system of two-party polarized presidentialism, which is something that academics like Juan Linz have always warned us was not something that would work out very well. And so one of the things that happens in a polarized system like this is that the chief executive tries to find other ways of achieving policy outcomes.

When all of these kinds of, all of these, in an era of divided government, when the parties are behaving in the way that was just described, it becomes very hard for the president to achieve any kind of, to make deals with this type of institution. But even when the party of the president actually has a majority, the problems of factionalism and self interest within the parties makes it very hard for the president to make deals even within the party.

And so all of this creates incentives for presidents to try to act unilaterally. And we see very similar things happen in the history of presidentialism in Chile, Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina. In some ways, this is not surprising, that in this era of two-party polarized presidentialism, we would see presidents behaving in this way.

 

>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: Thanks. So, kind of leading in from this question about this balance of power, I wanna talk a little bit about trust and public confidence in Congress, the title of our session. Whereas the majority of the public consistently had at least a fair amount of confidence in Congress at the beginning of this century.

So this is just a fair amount, this isn't a lot. This isn't even some, but a fair amount. Right now, only 30% of the public has a fair amount of trust in Congress. So, it's a quick decline that's occurring during these years, beginning with the early part of the century.

And this has occurred across different parties controlling Congress. This isn't just a blip of the recent speakership drama and different parties controlling the presidency and Congress. So I'm wondering if some of the factors already that have been discussed, delegating to the presidency, that was talked about in the earlier session.

And we've touched upon, Barbara and Dan, have been bringing up the role of parties, which we can delve into a little more or other phenomena. What's primarily driving this low trust? Sarah, you wrote a piece entitled, The Dysfunctional Congress a few years ago, and have written extensively about the problem-solving capacity of Congress.

Do you wanna start by saying a bit more about your arguments and what they may imply about trust in Congress?

>> Sarah Binder: Sure. So, in 1995, I finished my dissertation, and Tom Mann was at Brookings, and he hired me with the charge of doing research on Congress. And, of course, it's a think tank, some public facing work.

Implicitly, my job was to come up with ways to improve Congress. And I have to say, it's been almost 30 years, and it's a damn miracle I still have a job.

>> Sarah Binder: This is off the record. Okay, so in 96, I began project about asking questions about, can Congress work?

It came on the heels of a David Mayhew book, trying to show that party control didn't matter, trying to look at when does Congress legislate a lot versus when does Congress do less. But the heart of my project was to ask a different question, which is not so much can Congress legislate, or how much does Congress legislate but can it solve problems?

And that required knowing not just what I call the numerator, what Congress did, but to have a sense of the denominator, what's on the bigger, broader agenda of what people think to be major public problems. And so, after a lot of sitting in the library reading microfilm, those of you under 30, I can explain what that is, maybe under 40.

So what do we do here? I end up with the measure of the legislative agenda. And then I know for every Congress from 1947, the data now run through 2020, what percent of the big ticket items are stuck in deadlock. And keeping in mind that one person's deadlock is another person's cause for celebration.

And so when I use the word deadlock or dysfunction, what I really mean is problem-solving capacity. Whether one wants to move policy in a conservative direction, say, entitlement reform, or in a liberal direction, say, more Affordable Care Act and so forth, you need a functioning Congress to do either.

So what do we learn from Congress about those data? And why do I end up recently writing about dysfunction? Those data suggest, as you might expect, a sort of a steady incremental increase in the frequency of deadlock on the big issues of the day. Look at the Great Society period.

My measure tells us about 30% deadlock. Look at recent Congresses and the Clinton administration, Trump administrations. We're talking about 60, upwards of 70% of, say, the 20 big issues ending in stalemate. For much of that time series a second observation, Congress deadlocks more in periods of divided government, as we might expect, for much of that period, right?

When the parties disagree in terms of their electoral incentive and they disagree in terms of policy, more ends up sticking in the denominator, so greater deadlock. Bicameralism matters. I think we care a lot about differences between the branches and competition and disagreements between the branches, but it's disagreements between chambers that often leads to deadlock as well.

And more generally and not surprisingly, the level of what we can call partisan polarization matters quite a bit over the long post-war period. Deadlock more frequent as polarization rises. And whether we think of polarization as ideological in some sense, disagreements over the role of government, or if we think of it as just pure partisanship, team play, my team's for it, so your team's against it.

As that intensity of partisan team play rises, no surprise, perhaps, but Congress gets mired in deadlock. So much so that any differences we used to see between periods of unified party control and divided government, we really don't see that anymore, right? Because the incentives, when you're the minority, to block at any point that you can, those dominate regardless of whether it's divided or unified party control.

So the aggressiveness of the opposition party, whether it's the Democrats or the Republicans, that is the overwhelming reason why we ended up with these periods of stalemate. So legislative scholars, I should say, disagree about degrees of stalemate and disagreement. And Congress does legislate in periods of polarization. And we can come back when we talk about reforms about, what are the conditions under which you can get the parties to the table and to come out with an agreement?

But long-term policy problems certainly persist unaddressed. A little bit of action on climate change, but not all that much. The national debt, entitlement reform, right? Problems for which the rewards are really in the future, such that acting now often imposes costs. With all due respect, many members don't want to impose costs for the benefit in the future when they may or may not still be in office.

So, that's my sort of sense of where we're going. But I think we should definitely come back to what does it take to get people in the room to try to solve problems?

>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: Barbara, building on your earlier comments about parties, and particularly since I know you and Dan have fairly different views on this.

I'd be interested if you think that that relates to the low trust or are there other factors that you think are the more critical ones?

>> Barbara Comstock: Well, I think the people that are seen on the media constantly are the Kardashians, as I mentioned, the performance folks. But it is really a tale of two congresses because to be positive in the front, usually when things are getting done, even in these most contentious times, it's on these sort of crisis issues.

And sometimes the press even covers some of these substantive things because it's a crisis. Right now, one of the most effective committees working right now is the China committee, it was a special committee. It's the one area that Congress came together this year and appointed was it, Mike Fitzpatrick is it?

 

>> Daniel Lipinski: Gallagher?

>> Barbara Comstock: Mike Gallagher. And they're working together great. And there's a big story, I think, on them that just came out this week and they talk about how, what a well working relationship this, again, relationships really matter. Both because it's a crisis and because you have two very mature members who are working together on this, they really have been able to have good hearings, have some good ideas on how they can move forward.

On how we're gonna deal with China and Taiwan, on the military situation and what we're dealing with here. And so, that's been a great example of bipartisanship, probably the last one remaining this year but they've done a great job there. Also to give credit to the Senate and the Senate leadership.

Mitch McConnell with all of the health challenges he's faced, I think he is someone who so reveres our institutions. So, why I am not somebody who is for term limits? He is somebody who is bringing together the Republicans to support this Ukraine, Israel border deal and is working however he can to make sure we can get that.

Because he understands the threat that's going on right now and how important that is. And I think Chuck Schumer is trying to work with him on this. And even the new speaker has indicated that he's open to this now and it seems like there's something going on there.

But I really do give great credit to Mitch's leadership. And the way he governs has been very different with the House Republican leadership has gone on, I think, in a much more serious manner. Even though he does get attacked a lot by the aforementioned people who are on tv all the time, he really respects members across his caucus.

If someone is going to be attacking Lisa Murkowski for not voting for this or that, you will never find Mitch McConnell critical of her. Same thing on the whole other end. Cuz he understands to keep that conference together, it's gonna take people from Texas to Maine to Alaska are gonna have a lot of different interests, and he is very respectful of his conference all the way across.

And I think that's the way you build that confidence. And again, it's the relationships. And then some other areas where they've been working together that I think they should get credit for. Well, it's last Congress, but again, it was Senate Democrats and Republicans and Liz Cheney and the January 6 committee working together on the Electoral Count Act.

This was something we knew had to get done probably before the Congress changed hands. And you had some really good, in the lame duck, they came together and got that done. So there is some good things done there that you don't hear about as much. But the reason the low confidence level is there is because what you're hearing about what you're seeing, certainly turn on the tv this morning, you saw the George Santos expulsion vote.

And whether or not that was going to happen or not, you've seen the whole speaker drama going on. You're seeing months and months of will we not support Israel in this crisis time? Certainly people would have wanted that already to have been done. Why is it dragging out?

So those kind of concerns certainly lower the threshold. And then just getting to the issues that we talked about in the previous panel. Those are the kind of issues that are never going to get press attention. You're not gonna get the cameras to come in on a hearing on what can we do on the administrative state, right?

Our hearings didn't, when we were doing science, budgets and even things on AI and quantum computing and things that are really important, you think those didn't get a lot of coverage on the press, but how are we investing them? What kind of government resources are we putting on?

But there's a lot of opportunity for members to work together. And one of the things certainly in reforms that I think Congress can and should be working together on, and you saw our governors talking about it last night, is pushing things down to the states. And that was something, even when I was in Congress, having been a member of a state legislature, I thought more and more of this money.

Any way we could put together legislation that would push more of the money and the control down to the state level, that was going to both save money in the long run but put the control where it should be. And I think there is bipartisan support for that kind of thing.

But because you don't have those relationships these days and all the fighting and everything else, you never get to that point in our hearings or even in our legislation, even though welfare reform was an area where that was done in the 90s. But there are a lot of models on education would certainly be an area where we could do more of that.

But we just never get to that because of the other issues that make Congress dysfunctional. When there's a crisis, then everyone comes together, sadly, that's what it takes.

>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: Yeah, thanks. Dan, so you issued some different views about the benefits of centralizing power in the leadership. And there's been a shift over time that you might wanna, at your discretion, allude to or discuss about sort of removing as much power from the committees in terms of lawmaking.

I don't know if you think this relates to the crisis in trust in Congress. There are other factors, like polarization. I mean, what do you think the main causes are?

>> Daniel Lipinski: Well, I hope we have a chance to come back to the first part later, I wanna throw a few things out here.

So as an academic, and as an academic, I was always afraid to say anything unless I had studied it for a long time. I had all the data, I had the argument there. You know how hard it is to go from being an academic to being in politics, where politicians just throw out made up facts all the time.

So I still halt now in sort of when I wanna make a claim about something going on. But let me throw a few things out there about why trust may be going down. One is that we are now promised everything. We are promised easy solutions by our politicians.

It's so hard running when you're an incumbent and saying, I did this, I did that. And someone else is telling me, well, I'm gonna solve the health care problem, I'm gonna to solve this. It's an easy solution. And the voters seem to reward people and they think, I think the more they hear from politicians, the solutions are easy.

They think the solutions are easy, and then when the problems are still around, I think that's why people have less trust in government, less trust in Congress. Wait a minute, the solution, I keep being told the solution is easy and they're not doing it. So there's something wrong or corrupt there.

That's why it's not getting solved. I think that's one problem out there. As I said earlier, I think a lot of people who feel like, all right, there's only two. We're given this idea there's only two ways of thinking about the world and about there's a red way and a blue way.

And so, if I don't feel like I fit perfectly one of those, then I sort of feel, well, I'm not really being heard. I don't feel this way or that way. And that's all I hear about. And again, it gets back to people actually feeling like their voices are being heard.

And a diversity, I think we have a lack of diversity of voices being heard in Congress. Diversity, because, again, there's not just two ways of viewing the world and having a set list, which everyone in here could name a set list on each side. You're supposed to agree with all these things.

So I think those are a couple of problems in why there is a lack of trust out there, because people feel like I'm not being heard and the solutions are easy, but they're not being done. And we rely on people. Mike Gallagher, I think Mike Gallagher cares. One more thing.

I asked my father, he served in Congress for 22 years before me. I say, what's changed, what do you think has changed? Human nature doesn't change. Why is Congress so bad? Why is politics so bad? And his answer is that we don't have enough politicians in politics anymore.

I mean, I don't think politicians, they don't do politics anymore. Politics is debate, deliberation, compromise, and it's just we rely on hoping that we elect people who happen to have this concern that we're gonna get things that they need to get things done and work together to get things done.

And I'm not a huge fan of Mitch McConnell, but I have to say Mitch McConnell actually, when Democrats had unified government, he actually could have thrown more wrenches in the Senate than he did. He could have. If it was the House, they would have. But he actually didn't throw as many wrenches in.

And I think he's, Barbara saying, I think he's an institutionalist who believes the institution needs to work.

>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: Thanks. So, Jonathan, two strands of your research, arguably, maybe more, so you can enlighten us on that, relate to this question. So you've done a lot of work over time on polarization, right, which is a very hot topic.

And then you have this recent project of working papers that look at factionalization in Congress. Do you think that these are factors that relate to trust in Congress or what are the various factors you think are driving the low trust?

>> Jonathan Rodden: Yeah, great. So I think that, I haven't made this graph, but I think if I made a time series graph of trust in Congress and the numbers that you described, and we also just look at some of our favorite measures of polarization, that they would be moving together.

Now, unfortunately, there are lots of other things we can put on that graph that are also moving together. But I think there is something there. And so, how does this argument about polarization and trust work? Well, one of the puzzles about American polarization, I think that's really difficult to understand, is that it makes sense to think it sure looks like tribalism and it looks like sectarianism.

We have these two increasingly homogeneous and increasingly divergent tribes that look at everything differently. Well, I think I agree on the divergence part, but the internal homogeneity part I strongly disagree with. I think one of the puzzles of the American polarization is that the parties are becoming increasingly difficult to manage internally.

They're trying to compete with each other with how internally dysfunctional they can be. So the parties are not at all homogeneous. And so to look at what's happening to the Republican Party and conclude that the parties are internally homogeneous is impossible. So the parties are increasingly internally difficult to manage at the very same moment that they are increasingly pulling apart from one another.

And so, if we look at how voters see this. Voters in the United States, if you look in surveys, voters are extremely heterogeneous in their views of what the parties are all about. And so if you look in comparative surveys, Germans have a pretty good sense of where the SPD is and the CDU is.

Americans are all over the place in where they believe the parties are, and they agree less over time. So the disagreement in what voters think the parties are about has actually increased over time, not decreased. So the parties are becoming more internally heterogeneous and more difficult to manage.

And I think that might be part of the reason why Congress has changed in some of the ways that it has. So instead of having these homogeneous tribes, we have these really internally heterogeneous groups. And so what do the parties then try to do to manage the fact that on many issues, their voters actually disagree with many of the most vocal people in their party.

How do you manage this? Well, the way you manage it is to put all of your effort, all of your advertising dollars and all of your messaging into looking at the extremists in the out party and trying to put a microphone in front of them. And trying to stress to people how extreme the out party is while saying very little about your own platform.

And not really doing much to try to convince people that your party has the right platform for the voters. So you put all your effort into demonizing the out party and saying very little about the in party and that leads to increasing disdain for the out party. And also, I think crucially, no increase in affection for the in party.

In fact, a little bit of a decrease in affection for the in party. So you look at that, put those trends together over time and I think that leads to just a generalized increase in distrust as people then look at the institution and see how dysfunctional it is.

 

>> Daniel Lipinski: Can I ask, this work you're doing I think is fascinating, I want to talk to you more about it. One question I wanna throw out there very quickly. In Congress, was heterogeneity in the parties, dealt with in allowing bipartisan legislation, bipartisan work when there are issues that the parties didn't have one view, we're heterogeneity on.

But there was some agreement with some factions across the parties. Well, then you had bipartisan and so that was allowed. And today that's not allowed, today you can't get together. I've tried that. You can't get together and put together something that's bipartisan, and something that's major, something people are gonna see.

But it used to happen all the time, on major issues. I mean, do you see that, Congress doesn't allow that anymore?

>> Jonathan Rodden: Yeah, I think that's part of where the mistrust and the frustration comes from, I think there's a lot of demand for that. It certainly seems to me in public opinion data, so that's what people want from Congress.

But everything that you described has made that more difficult.

>> Barbara Comstock: You're right, cuz I remember during Boehner's speakerships with Paul Ryan you could do that more. Whether it was opioids, people could work together, some write bills with Democrats on that and we were able to do that. Then by the time we got to like 17,18, I remember I had a bill on hate crimes with Debbie Dingell and I was having a really tough time on my side getting it done.

And then I was bargaining with different chairmen I had to go to, but I sort of a lobbyist and trying to get my bill. So I had to go to a hearing, a field hearing for a chairman in order to be able to get him to put my bill on the floor.

So I did the field hearing, I had to drive some place and do some field hearing. So I got my side to do it. And then because I was a targeted member, Democrats didn't want to let it go on the floor. So, God bless Debbie Dingle, because she really wanted this bill, too.

She said to her side, don't you dare pull my bill because you guys are all trying to go get Barbara. And then when we passed the bill and then somebody had written a story about, gee, bipartisan friendships in Congress and how things get done. Because we had also done sexual harassment legislation together that got through, because that became such a big story during MeToo, a lot of the women came together and did it.

And obviously, a lot of the guys supported us, too. But when the story came out, Debbie started getting phone calls and attacks saying, how can you be friends with Barbara Comstock? She's a targeted member on the other side, and you're a Democrat and she's a Republican. And the whole point was we're trying to work together.

I mean, the legislation we had worked together was sexual harassment legislation, hate crimes legislation, there were plenty of things we still disagreed with, but we were friends. We worked together on these things and I know you had the same kind of experiences. But this was the public as well as our own parties we had to fight to get legislation that obviously was nearly unanimously supported, by both of our conferences as well as the public.

But those were the kind of, strange dynamics you face today. So then when you try and get to the kind of things we talked about in the previous panel on executive overreach those are the headwinds we're facing.

>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: Okay, so we wanna leave some time for questions, and we're running short on time.

So if each of you in one minute or less could say a reform that you would, if you could choose and if you could do more than one reform, but I'm gonna really ask you to do one minute so we can hear from the audience. Sarah.

>> Sarah Binder: I'm kind of a skeptical, really effective reforms can't be adopted, it's just the politics that make it hard.

But the ones that, and even the low hanging fruit are hard to adopt, that's probably ten seconds. It's still worth investing in legislative capacity, whether that's Congressional Research Service, JAO, CBO, recreate the Office of Technology Assessment. And I think actually pretty importantly beef up Inspectors General, which can be an arm of Congress, an agenda setting arm for Congress, putting them into those agencies and departments because they have to report back to Congress.

 

>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: Thank you.

>> Sarah Binder: My 15 seconds.

>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: Yes, no, thank you for being succinct, Barbara.

>> Barbara Comstock: I think the governor's brought it up last night, and Kristen pointed out on redistricting, he had vetoed his own state legislators redistricting plans. I think if we had more purple districts, it would work out better.

Now in Virginia, I was in the state house when we were able to do our own lines and everyone collaborated. Yet in Virginia, we lost 21 seats during the Trump administration, even on lines we drew. Then afterwards, we were able to gain back a few. And now we're about 50, 50 even though we lost them, but with lines that were drawn by the court because our guys couldn't agree on doing it, but they're fair lines, basically, they kind of represent.

So, I think redistricting, whether it's by commissions or things like that, you'd end up having fairer lines. The problem there still is people are sorting where they live, so that's what's making us redder and bluer. So you can't stop that. And the courts are already stepping in, too.

So we're seeing that in some of the states where you're having fair redistricting because courts are stepping in when there's some really egregious, which I also think is good. But I think that would, as Governor Sununu pointed out last night, I think that does help and that would make everyone be a little bit more competitive.

 

>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: So capacity redistricting, Dan?

>> Daniel Lipinski: Very quickly, 2018 Speaker Ryan says he's not running for reelection. We knew there was gonna be a new speaker after 2018 election. House Problem Solvers Caucus, Bipartisan Caucus came up with rule changes that we wanted to see to empower individual members in committees, in lawmaking.

And the group first said, we are gonna demand before our speaker vote, we're gonna demand these rule changes. We weren't as successful as we would like to and there's great stories behind that which I can't tell now. But right now, I'm working with Brandice to put together a task force, to academics, former members, former staffers to recommend rule changes.

Again, to empower individual members and committees, what House rules can be changed and put that together and put that out there before the next election. And hopefully get some traction and let members know, and new members especially, that there's power that they can take back for themselves and they should be doing that.

So, we have this task force that we're putting together on that.

>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: Thanks for bringing that up, Jonathan.

>> Jonathan Rodden: All right, thanks, Brandice. So, if you believe that Congress is broken and that polarized two-party presidentialism is not sustainable, then you need to deal with one of those issues.

Either polarization, the two-party system, which I suppose you could deal with through proportional representation, or some other reform that would lead to a multiparty system. Or the problem maybe is with presidentialism itself, and perhaps Woodrow Wilson had it right after he served as president. He wrote about how dysfunctional he thought presidential democracy was, and he advocated a parliamentary system.

I assume these are not the kinds of reforms we're talking about here, I already wasted 30 seconds. So, the 30 seconds more realistically, something we didn't get to talk about, I haven't heard anyone talk about yet, which I'm surprised, I thought one of the two of you would bring this up.

But just the amount of time that members of Congress have to spend raising money and the way in which the committee system now and the way there's a pay to play system involving formal dues for getting plum committee assignments and committee chairs, and that this really distorts everything.

And it's something I thought we might have more time to talk about. But that seems to me to be a rather fundamental problem, and it seems like something that one could imagine reforms and even reforms that would be in the interest of some party leaders, perhaps, to unilaterally disarm on this system of allocating committee assignments via fundraising.

That is something that seems reformable to me.

>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: Excellent, thanks. I think we have time for one or two questions. Okay, right in the front.

>> Male Speaker 1: Thank you, terrific conversation. A number of people across the ideological spectrum have suggested increasing the size of the House of Representatives, even significantly perhaps.

Do you think, that would help in revitalizing trust or impair or neutral?

>> Daniel Lipinski: I'd do anything to try to shake things up, if it's too big, though, you're just going to make it easier for leaders to have control, but maybe add 100, 150, just something to shake things up and bring some new blood in.

I don't think it's a definite solution, but I'm willing to try almost anything.

>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: Anyone else?

>> Jonathan Rodden: Well, it might depend on how it was done, if it was done through just creating a lot more individual, single member districts that were smaller, so that we had constituencies that were more the size of British or Canadian constituencies, that would be one thing.

The other thing would be for each state to be more like the German system, where each state would have more seats and they would be allocated proportionally, which might create a multi party system, and that would change everything. So the devil would be in the details of how that would be achieved, I think.

 

>> Barbara Comstock: I wouldn't want to do that. But, yeah, I had one of the districts by the end of the 10 years was much larger than others. So, it still was manageable. So I don't know that necessarily that would change the problems we face today. I mean, I wouldn't mind shaking it up a little bit, some of the problems are elsewhere.

 

>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: One more question. You're right in front of me, so a little bit of a.

>> Female Speaker 1: Thank you. We're talking about institutional reforms, but obviously, people make up the institutions. And, I think one of you mentioned that it's difficult to attract quality candidates. Who would run for these offices?

Because of all the downsides that go along with becoming a public official. So how do we build that quality pipeline of candidates?

>> Barbara Comstock: Well, I continue to serve on boards, in particular to elect Republican women find great candidates. And you're gonna hear from one of them this afternoon, Senator Ernst.

So I think to find and support candidates and to, to work with groups that are doing that. We are active in primaries to try and find and support those candidates. So when you have open seats, we try and go in early and find and support people who are going to be people who support institutions, people who have the kind of background that really will be suitable, who will be workhorses, not show horses.

So that's the kind of effort that I think you need. And I think to really focus on individual candidates more than parties. I mean, the groups that I'm part of, we're really trying. And I focus on the state houses too, cuz I think oftentimes you're finding people who've already served in other offices.

And one of the things that we found in some of our groups people who've served in the military, like Joni had served in Senator Ernst, served in state legislatures, served in other capacities. They tend to be people who've already had leadership roles, so when they come in, they take the governing part of it, as Dan was talking about, these people who don't want to govern, you want people who really take this as public service governing role.

And so we try and identify those early and give them financial support.

>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: Any other responses?

>> Daniel Lipinski: The primaries are a big problem, let's leave it there.

>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: Thanks so much, to the panelists.

>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: And to you.

Part 4:

>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: We're delighted to have Professor Sunshine Hillygus, who's in the departments of political science and the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University. Professor Hillygus is also the director of the Duke Initiative on Survey Methodology. She's published widely in the areas of political behavior, campaigns and elections, survey methods, public opinion, and information technology and politics.

Recently she published the Cambridge University Press book, Making Young Voters, Converting Civic Attitudes into Civic Action. Professor Hillygus is also a Stanford University PhD, and we're delighted she's come in to moderate this panel. Over to you.

>> D. Sunshine Hillygus: Thank you, Brandice, and thank you, all. Please eat your lunch as you also learn, we'll consider us to be the dessert course.

Because I asked the panelists to speak for just a few minutes, and yet these are people who are members of my dissertation committee and I have absolutely no control over them, I expect them to go longer than expected. So I want to briefen their introductions so that I can get them talking and hopefully get some of your questions in as well.

So we're gonna start with David Kennedy, who's a distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institute and the Donald McLoughlin professor of history emeritus at Stanford University. And he's going to start us off with some historical perspective. And we're going to then have David Brady join us virtually. He's recovering from surgery, so can't deal with all of our germs.

And he's the Davies Family Senior Fellow emeritus at the Hoover Institute and professor of political science emeritus at Stanford University. And finally, Doug Rivers, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute and professor of political science at Stanford. And he's one of the leading experts on survey methodology. And he and David Brady have some survey results and some slides to also show.

So I want to first thank Brandice and the panelists for this very important topic and kick off with David Kennedy just with a little bit of context on history of primaries to get us started. Thank you, Hillygus.

>> David Kennedy: If this were a prize fighting match, you could consider me as the undercard.

And we're gonna get to the real meat of the matter with Professors Brady and Rivers. And I understand that the focus of this discussion, the principal focus, is, as Sunshine just said, the 2024 election. But in the spirit of not knowing where you're going unless you know where you've been, I want to offer a few historical observations about what brought us to this juncture in the history of the republic.

The constitutional convention delegates in Philadelphia in 1787 debated a lot of things. But the question of how to elect a president, as the very consequential Pennsylvania delegate James Wilson said, was the most difficult of all on which we've had to decide. And we've lived ever since with some of the difficulties that they grappled with and arguably failed fully to resolve.

So they debated several proposals for how to elect a president. One was electioned by governors of the various states. The second was election by the national legislature. The third was direct popular election, which was favored especially by James Wilson, as well as Alexander Hamilton, and other advocates of what might be called a plebiscitarian style presidency.

But that proposal was rejected as, quote, too likely to produce a monarchy of the worst kind, to wit, an elective one. So the delegates in Philadelphia compared popular election of the president by a poorly informed populace to referring, again, I'm quoting from the record, a trial of colors to a blind man.

So finally, they agreed, in the convention's closing days or even hours on this contraption we've lived with ever since called the electoral college. So the Electoral College emerged as one of several compromises, of course, to characterize the constitutional convention's deliberations. So the Constitution gave the states considerable latitude as to how they might designate the members of the electoral college who, in turn would select the president.

But left unaddressed at the convention was the question of how were individuals to be nominated for the presidency in the first place? And for the republic's first half century or so, there was an answer to that question, and the answer was congressional caucuses. And that practice strongly suggested that in the republic's first half century or so, the feeling was that the center of political gravity unarguably remained with the legislative branch.

That was the place where the great game of politics was to be played. And that assessment of what was the political culture of the early republic with respect to the relation between executive and legislative branches, I think, is ratified, in a sense, by the observation that the legislature gets discussed in Article 1 of the Constitution.

And it takes 51 paragraphs to lay out what's happening with the legislature. Article 2, only the second article, deals with the executive branch, and that article is only 13 paragraphs long. But about a half century in with the advent of Andrew Jackson, that political constellation of forces between legislative and executive branches began to shift.

And not only did Jackson seek to expand presidential power and assert his independence from Congress, not least of all by issuing more vetoes in his eight years than all six of his predecessors combined had issued in the preceding nearly half century. And he also catalyzed and came to symbolize a tectonic shift in the method of standing up presidential candidates, namely the party convention.

The first political party to nominate a presidential candidate actually was something called the Anti Masonic Party, which disappeared after one very brief appearance in the national arena. But they held a convention in 1831 in Baltimore where they nominated one William Wirt, former US attorney general, for the presidency.

And the lasting legacy of that short-lived party was that Baltimore Convention. The electorate of free white adult males, then numbered well over 1 million persons, the largest electorate in the world at that time, increasingly organized into factions or political parties such as the founders had not envisioned. And those parties were not about to leave the nomination of their presidential candidates to a handful of congressional delegates.

So quadrennial conventions became the norm for selecting presidential candidates for more than a century following the age of Jackson. And some of those conventions were truly battleground affairs, most notoriously, the Democratic Convention of 1924 in Madison Square Garden, where it took 2 weeks and 103 ballots to nominate John W Davis.

But there were harbingers of things to come as early as that notoriously deadlocked 1924 convention. In that year, the Democratic Party held primary elections in 12 states. And the Republicans in 17 states. And most of those primaries, however, were mostly beauty contests that did not oblige the delegates at the convention to vote for the winners of the popular vote in their states.

So, in fact, in 1924, in both the Republican and their Democratic conventions, both John Davis and his rival, Calvin Coolidge, were nominated in the old fashioned way. In the legendary smoke-filled room by the same party bosses that have been controlling the nominating machinery for nearly a century. And that pattern held for another roughly a generation or so.

In 1952, Estes Kefauver, some of you in this room will remember his name, won 13 out of 15 Democratic primaries. But he lost the nomination to Adlai Stevenson, who had campaigned in exactly zero primaries. So the modern history of primaries really begins nearby, here in state of Oregon in 1910, when Oregon legislated the first binding presidential primary election.

And that era of so-called progressive reforms, primaries were thought to be one among many devices, including the initiative, the referendum, the recall, and the direct election of senators. That were aimed at making the political process more inclusive, more transparent, more participatory, more directly in the hands of we the people.

So in short, the cure for the ills of democracy in that era, it was widely held, was simply more democracy. And in a country, in a culture where the concept of democracy approaches the status of a civil religion, it was then, and remains ever since, difficult to argue with that.

California, under its governor, Hiram Johnson, soon thereafter followed suit for the Oregon, as did a handful of other primary states. Some of whom then more or less quickly abandoned the very format they had legislated so after a few electoral cycles. And as late as 1960, Republicans held primaries in just 11 states and Democrats in 10, perhaps most famously in West Virginia, which was dispositive.

Not for the electoral votes that it yielded, but for demonstrating to the party chieftains that a Roman Catholic could win the popular vote in an overwhelmingly Protestant state. And then came 1968, which rang down the final curtain on the already fading era of consequential conventions. Democrats, again, held primaries in ten states in 1968.

Eugene McCarthy prevailed in six of those, Robert Kennedy in four of them. But the nomination went to Hubert Humphrey, who, like Adlai Stevenson in 1952, had not campaigned in a single primary. Now, what many regarded as that high-handed behavior and Humphrey's subsequent humiliating loss triggered drastic reforms and ushered in the era in which we've lived ever since.

Minnesota Representative Donald Fraser, South Dakota Senator George McGovern undertook to rewrite Democratic Party rules for selecting presidential nominees. And inaugurated the era of primaries in virtually every state or their near equivalent caucuses. Democrats retained a bit more of the legacy process by granting votes to slightly more so-called superdelegates than Republicans.

But in both cases, in both parties, the role of the institutional party and its leaders in the individual states was markedly reduced, in deference to the vox populi that was registered in the primary election booth. And ever since 1968, if not earlier, the national conventions have become little more than what I would describe as infomercials.

That essentially publicize decisions that have long since been made through the primary process. So I'm gonna leave it to the other members of this panel to examine further what have been the consequences of that transformation. But I can't help note that the shades of those founders, like James Wilson and Alexander Hamilton, I guess they must be looking on with wonder and fascination.

And maybe more than a touch of second thoughts as they observe the evolution of the kind of plebiscitarian presidency that they had championed. So we've evolved from cozy congressional caucus to noisy convention to wide-open primaries in the age of fragmented, manipulated, and often deliberately misleading information. Now, that may be more democracy, but it's probably not what they anticipated.

So when we contemplate the actual consequences, which will be the subject of the remainder of this panel's discussion. As distinct from the theoretical justification of the institutions of direct democracy, conspicuously including primary elections. I at least can't help recollect James Madison's warning about a trial of colors by a blind man.

I can't help recollecting his prediction that the kind of plebiscitarian presidency, which primary elections have nurtured, might lead to. I'm quoting him again, a monarchy, of the worst kind, to wit an elective one. And those kinds of thoughts prompt me to at least explore a near heretical question.

And that is, is there such a thing as too much democracy?

>> D. Sunshine Hillygus: Thank you, David.

>> D. Sunshine Hillygus: We're now going to turn to another David, who I mentioned his title but haven't mentioned that he's also a former deputy director of Hoover. A recipient of amazing teaching awards, a former member of my dissertation committee.

He has joined us virtually on Zoom, and he and Doug Rivers have been working on a survey project that can help us in thinking about what things might look like in 2024. And so, David, if you'll just give us about five minutes of what you have found and a little bit about the projects, that would be great.

 

>> David Brady: So I'm gonna deal with United States Congress, and this is from a survey that we did for YouGov, did for the Hoover Institutions, about 2500 voters. And so in my view, what I wanna show is what's happened to Congress over time. And the 2024 election will give us the same sort of Congress, but I wanna talk about the role of primary.

So if you look at the question, do you favor a 15-week abortion ban? If you look across all voters, it's 50.2% that say they do. If you look at Democratic primary voters and Republican primary voters. Now, what I'm using here is, I'm just using people who say they're strong Democrats and people who say they're strong Republicans since they're much more likely to vote in primaries.

If I were to add to that strong Democrats who were ideologically left, and the converse were Republicans, strong Republicans, I could push those numbers out further. But what I wanna say is, what happens in many instances is that primaries give us candidates that are further left and further right than where the average voter would be.

And so moderates who actually, as recent research has shown, decide elections, they are voting in Congressional elections for candidates they probably wouldn't nominate on their own. So the second slide now, that is, we do know that election turnout, this is election turnout by 2000 to 2020, and we do know that primary turnout is about 20%.

We know that it varies dramatically. By state. And probably one of the great examples of that is Congressman Riggleman from Virginia, who had a very strong heritage support score of 95%. He was a libertarian. He officiated at a gay marriage of one of his college friends. And in a very small turnout of about 3400 people or less, he lost the nomination to be congressman from that district to a fundamental, to a fundamentalist preacher who argued that he shouldn't be congressman because he had done that.

So the level of the turnout makes a difference. So this just is some quick examples of the point I was making. You can see here that on the minimum wage, 50.2% favorite, but 84% of primary voters favorite, and democratic and republican primary voters are 14. You can see the same sort of results with build the wall, cancel student debt, abortion ban at 15 weeks and agree with Dobbs.

So the bottom line is this is consistent across a set of other, and if you look compared to all voters by primary voters, in my measure of it, you can see that on aid to the poor, military environment, the differences are consistent across these set of issues. And then it's also less true with Medicare.

And there are some other issues where it's not. But in general, that first slide is that in general that first slide is correct. So I then took the merits of democratic action, which a liberal group that chooses roughly 20 votes, sometimes a little more or less, in a given congressional in a given Congress.

And they say they score members. So if they say you should have voted this way on 20 issues, and you vote that way on 20 issues, you get a score of 100. Now, I think what's interesting in this is if you look at the average House ADA scores in every single year, the ADA losers, and this is incumbent Democrats who lost from 2000 to 2020.

In every single year, the average ADA loser score is below the average score for the Democrats and the House of Representatives, which means it's the moderates, the people who would compromise, who are gonna lose. And even more interesting, here are the ADA primary scores of losers who lost in a primary.

Now note here in 2008, the average ADA score of someone who lost in a primary was 100. Here it's 92, 85, 80 was close. But 9576-9583 and the reason that's important is so you look like somebody like Crowley who lost the AOC in a reasonably low turnout election.

He had a score of 100. The congressman who got beat in Massachusetts by Ayanna Pressley, those both had very high ADA scores. They were very liberal. And the problem is that sends a signal. So when they're getting beat on their left, and I'll show you the same thing happens for the Republicans quickly when they're getting beat.

The pressure's on that side. The idea of compromise moving a little bit to the right from where they are is not significant. You don't have too many of those. And what you have is the pressure is not to, not to compromise. And now for the Republicans, I use their own measures, which is a heritage score.

And you can see the same thing for the Republicans. You can see that who loses average score of the general after 2012? The people who lose have lower heritage scores, and the primary election losers have much higher scores. So the same thing is true for the Republicans. The people who lose in the general election are more moderate, and the people who lose in the primaries are getting beat from people who are taking them on from the right.

Now, the result of this is, it seems to me, the number of Republicans with zeros on the ADA and the number of Democrats with hundreds, those increase. If I drop that number from ADA score of 100 to 95, it would, of course, shoot up. And this is again, tech, this is the number of Democrats with a 20% or more, with a 20, with at least a 20 heritage.

With a 20 or below heritage score or above. Sorry. And this is the number of Republicans who have a score 20 or above AdA score. And you can see, since those two scores come in, it just drops off. So you end up with the House of Representatives hollowed out.

Moderates lose in the general election and they lose in primaries. Danielle Thompson's book, looking at state legislators, which is a very good source of where candidates come from, she shows definitively that moderates are much less likely to run. And the most probable reason for that is money comes to people who are on the left and on the right.

The end result is you get a House of representatives where moderates lose general elections, where even on the left and the right from both parties, there's very little incentive. In fact, there's disincentives to compromise on legislation. And then you get these sorts of results where you don't get much in the way of compromise.

I'm going to finish quickly with the Senate, where it's a little harder to do for the Senate because you don't have so many elections. But again, note that, and I'm now using the ADA scores solely for our average republican ADA score, 20. Note that the losers were 32, 744, 18, and so on, so on and so forth.

So the people who lose in the Senate. Pretty much the same story. And in the second part, this is the democratic average losers Ada score and the post 2012 Obama. That's what you get here in the 2014 election. Six Democrats lose in that election. Their average score is 65, which is well below the average democratic score here.

It's 89 to 60, 89 to 65. And the end result of this is you get a congress, a Senate, where the number of people with zero scores or 100% scores increase dramatically. And what you get is a House and a Senate. And I expect the 24 election will give us the same result, House and Senate with, where members moderates are hollowed out.

And the end result is there's much less likelihood of compromise. And that's exactly what we see in the Congress. And that's it. I'm not too far off my time.

>> D. Sunshine Hillygus: Thank you, David.

>> David Brady: Especially given the computer difficulties.

>> D. Sunshine Hillygus: Next up, Doug Rivers is going to tell us a little bit about the presidential race coming up.

 

>> Douglas Rivers: A little bit.

>> D. Sunshine Hillygus: Yeah.

>> Douglas Rivers: So we've begun a new project here at Hoover in collaboration with group at Yale and Arizona State to conduct the biggest ever panel study in a presidential. Presidential election. So we're taking a group of 100,000 people and interviewing three quarters of them every four months and the remaining one quarter every month.

And with the idea that we will be able to trace changes happening over what is likely to be quite a momentous election. And thank you very much, Condi, for supporting the project that wouldn't have been possible without the Hoover's participation. We're undergoing a period of remarkable electoral change.

Rural areas have become so overwhelmingly Republican that, they're the basis of Republican wins and elections. And suburban areas that used to be reliably Republican have become competitive, are actually marginally more democratic. And then one thing I didn't have on my bingo card is that minorities, their support for Democrats, would exhibit some erosion.

So, we're in a very confusing time, and it's created problems for polling. Notoriously, we've seen misses, that is, overestimates of what the Democratic vote would be, particularly in the Midwest. But at a more fundamental level, we understand who is moved, but we don't really understand why they've moved.

What is the dynamic that's making this work? So I thought I'd talk a little bit about where we are today. So, you've seen recent polls that show, basically an even race between Biden and Trump in 2024. The problem with that is these are polls that had the margin off by four or more points in 2020, so that an even race is one that is certainly in the places that count the battleground states is gonna be something that's six, eight, or even ten points Republican, which is causing alarm on the Democratic side.

I'll show you some data that we just collected in the last week that shows what the problem is for Democrats. So we asked people who did a better job as president, Trump or Biden, and we divided the group into three groups. On the blue bars are Democrats. And so, not surprisingly, you see that most of them think Biden has done a better job than Trump.

The red bars are Republicans, who believe overwhelmingly that Trump did a better job than Biden. But overall, you can see that the Republican support levels across the board are more consistent than Democrats are. And then among independents, they're more on the Trump side than the Biden side. Republicans need independents to win a national election.

It's not good enough to be even among independents, but the sort of majorities you're seeing at the moment are giving a view that Biden is in serious trouble. I wouldn't take that too seriously at this point. The reliability of polls at this point, and as a predictor of an election a year out, aren't great, but the arm bells should be going off with numbers like this.

And typically, what happens is you have a incumbent president and you have a lot of alternatives on the other side. And so, people can imagine their preferred alternative, and they're gonna be more in favor of that than the devil they know, ideal alternative. What we're seeing, though, this year, of course, is that the alternative is someone they understand very well, which is Donald Trump.

And so that kind of dynamic isn't likely to help Biden out. We also asked people what they think is going to happen in the election, who's going to win. So we said, give us the probability that Biden will win or Trump will win or somebody else will win.

So there are about 15% of the people who think someone else is going to win, which seems improbable at this point. Overall, what you saw is about a 60 40 advantage for Trump over Biden. What these plots show is the actual distribution of those probabilities. So again, the blue.

Well, on the left, we have Democrats. And the blue here is, what's the probability Biden will win? And you can see that most Democrats think Biden will win, but the majority think it's gonna be close to a 50 50 election, which, as a professional pollster in this world, seems to me a relatively accurate perception of where we are.

A small set of Democrats that believe there's 100% chance that Biden will win. There's a bigger set of Republicans, the red over the, excuse me, a bigger set of Democrats who think that Trump is gonna win with 100% probability. So they're quite pessimistic about Biden. On the Republican side, what you see is they overwhelmingly think Trump will win.

There's very little doubt. So, Republicans do believe that Trump is gonna win the 2024 election, and so they're not. Whereas Democrats here have a huge amount of uncertainty. Now, the case for the Biden campaign is, well, maybe this is like 1983. Ronald Reagan did not have great poll numbers through most of 1983 and then went on to win an overwhelming majority in the 1984 election as the economy picked up.

I think their idea is, well, we can overcome all this bad stuff with a good economy, and Trump is the Republican nominee. I think that is somewhat of a misperception in the old days, the famous James Carville line, it's the economy stupid. You don't need to know who the candidates are.

You can predict the outcome of the election by the state of the economy. That was true through basically the 1990s, but it's no longer true today. So let me show you a couple pieces of data on that. First, asking people, is the economy getting better or worse now?

Objectively, I think it's a little hard to say the economy is not getting better now than it was a year or two ago. But the difference between Democrats and Republicans on this is like they're living on different planets. The overwhelming majority of Republicans at the moment say that the economy is getting worse, not better or the.

The same Democrats about, I think it's 37% think that the economy is getting better, but it's not an overwhelming support for the economic performance. If you go to the Ronald Reagan question, which is, are you better off now? So Reagan's famous question in the 1984 presidential debates, are you better off now than you were four years ago?

This is a standard one that we've asked in polling forever, that we usually ask a year ago, because people actually don't remember very well four years ago. And again, what you see here is the overwhelming fraction of Republicans say that they're worse off today than they were a year ago.

Among Democrats, a higher fraction say they're worse off than better off, which is not what you would expect at all. But you see this polarization in people's perceptions of whether they're better off or worse off. Now, it turns out what you can do with a panel study where you keep re interviewing the same people is you can look at what they told you their family income was a year ago.

Well, it turns out their family incomes are up, but that's unrelated to how well they say they're doing. You look at unemployment, well, there's no relationship between unemployment and what people are saying about how they're doing. You would think that maybe if inflation's the problem, that renters, where rents are up substantially, would be more negative than homeowners.

In fact, it's the reverse. So what we have is a situation where people's economic evaluations appear to be driven by their political beliefs rather than their political beliefs driven by the state of the economy. The result of that is a world where we expect much less of responsiveness to a better economy in 2024.

And the result of that is, I think we may see quite a different pattern than what we would have seen 20 or 30 years ago when an incumbent could ride a good economy to a reelection.

>> D. Sunshine Hillygus: Thank you, Doug.

>> D. Sunshine Hillygus: And I'm going to ask a single question that each of you, I hope, will try to answer.

I have a page of it of different questions, but I want to give the audience a chance to ask. David Brady pointed out this pattern that is becoming increasingly apparent, that, right, the primaries are resulting and contributing to more extremism, turnout is low. And so the question is, there have been discussions about various reforms and comparing how we select nominees today relative to how it was done historically.

Should we make a change? And not to say that it's possible, and so this is a little bit of stealing a question from Brandis from the previous panel, but I wondered, in light of what we see in terms of public opinion and the translation of public opinion into the elected officials, is there a reform that you could imagine might make a change?

So I'll start, David Kennedy, with you.

>> David Kennedy: Well, let me say, by way of preface to my answer, that you can't be a student of history for very long without developing a keen sense of irony, because the primary election mechanism, when it was first introduced 100 years ago and as it now dominates the scene, was justified, not unreasonably, as a way to make the political process more responsive to the popular will and so on.

But in practice, because of the polarization that it has nurtured, it's made it more difficult for the political system to express the will of the majority, as David Brady's slides about abortion, minimum wage, and other issues instruct us. So there's something really perverse about the actual consequences of something that was accepted in the culture at large as a majoritarian leaning reform.

Now, having said all that, one doesn't need simply to imagine reforms in the primary process. There are some already out there, including in this state and Washington state and a handful of others. It's called the open primary. So you try to open the primary system up to participants from whatever party, supposedly that creates incentives for candidates to move to the center.

I'm gonna leave it to people with more current data than I have as to determine whether or not that has actually worked. My impression is that it hasn't had much of an effect and what other reforms might be out there. Again, I leave to the more current experts.

 

>> D. Sunshine Hillygus: Thank you. David Brady.

>> Douglas Rivers: One thing that struck me in your talk was you talked about the humiliating loss of Humphrey, who had won zero primaries, and then the modern primary system, that was the McGovern-Fraser reforms that led to McGovern's quite a bit more humiliating. Yes.

>> D. Sunshine Hillygus: But Doug, okay, so to put you on the spot, are there any reforms that you think we should take seriously and advocate for?

 

>> Douglas Rivers: Well, I think anything tweaking primaries would be, you know, the current system is not a good one in terms of measuring public opinion, selecting effective leaders. But the basic problem is polarization, that when the two parties don't overlap at all, then there's the centrifugal force that pushes the candidates selected to be too extreme.

 

>> D. Sunshine Hillygus: David Brady, are you still with us?

>> David Brady: I am.

>> D. Sunshine Hillygus: Great.

>> David Brady: I'm just not with you visually, which is probably a break for all of you. My view on that is that the reforms in California, sort of, I think in the Senate election, where you're gonna get a very liberal Democrat versus a less liberal Democrat.

So I don't think that works well, particularly in states like California. I favor ranked choice voting, and I'm with Doug. I think anything that could tweak those primaries would be a beneficial thing. But as long as you get these sort of people who are in the middle who, unfortunately, are less interested in politics, that constitutes the problem.

And so I've been thinking pretty hard about what is that you could do to increase that. And frankly, I have nothing of value to say on that. I think it's really hard to do, and I don't have an answer as to how to do it.

>> D. Sunshine Hillygus: Thank you, David.

So with that, I think we should have a few questions from the audience, if you have them. If not, I have a backup of pages of things that I could ask, if so, for Doug and for Dave, obviously, partisanship is driving these other opinions on things, even as your own personal finances.

 

>> Speaker 7: But you were looking at everybody in these surveys. What about those who are the potential swing voters? Are they any. Less sort of tied to partisan bias in their views here. If we just looked at them, would we say the economy could matter in determining the election or the perceived state of the economy?

 

>> David Brady: If I can take that question first, Brett Parker and John Farajan and I published a paper last year where we looked at what Doug, the point we made, we looked at data back to 1990 and found out that over this time period, your political party affiliation was much more important in determining what you thought the economy was like, whether it was good or not.

And when we looked at independents, people who said flat out they were Independents, they were the only ones that actually correlated positively with a huge set of measures. What's the status of the stock market, what's the status? So, yes, the independents and people who are actually always mostly in the center, they were much more accurate in their assessment of where the economy was.

 

>> Douglas Rivers: So one quick point here, round numbers, they're about 30% of the population is Democrats, maybe 26, 27% are Republicans, and the remainder, which is, I don't know, 45 or so, are Independentsi So that would make you think there's this big group of people who are, they average out to normal people, but it turns out that there's a big chunk of them who are basically apolitical and don't vote.

Then there are two chunks that don't like the Republicans because the Republicans are too left wing or they don't like the Democrats because they're too right wing. And those groups vote overwhelmingly like they're complete partisans. The set of independents who are actually swing voters is probably on the order of 10, 12 percent of the population.

So you're hanging your thread on a small group of people.

>> David Kennedy: And Doug, isn't it also the case that what we know about independent voters suggest that they're, as you said, the least engaged, they vote less frequently than others and the least well-informed.

>> Douglas Rivers: Except the ones that are highly partisan.

 

>> David Brady: I want to comment on that. What Doug says is correct. But there's also a set of people who, when they ask if you're a Democrat or Republican, are you a strong Democrat or not so strong Democrat? And those people, if you say you're a not strong Democrat or a not strong Republican, those people are much more likely to switch their vote in an election.

And Biden did very well with them, say, in 2020. So the set's a little bigger than Doug makes it out to be, not much, but bigger.

>> Douglas Rivers: 13%.

>> D. Sunshine Hillygus: We have another question here, addressing the independent voters.

>> Speaker 8: You're talking about, is there a way that the primaries could better address the independent voter?

And also, could you include any comments that you have on the growth of the independent voter in current times versus the amount of polarity that is occurring? What is the relationship, if any?

>> D. Sunshine Hillygus: Doug, do you want to take that as I understand your question?

>> Douglas Rivers: We've had rising numbers of people calling themselves independence, a bit of a rise over the last 50 years.

At the same time you've had polarization. And so the primary explanation, which is due to Mofi Arena, who's sitting somewhere over there, is that it's sorting, that what's happened is not that people have changed, but the parties have changed. So there are no more liberal Republicans or conservative Democrats, and the result is that voters then sort themselves into these groups.

I don't know if that's responsive.

>> David Brady: I agree with that. I would say that the Republican Party is more homogenous on that dimension. That is, if you look at them, there are more people who say they're conservative. The Democrats are a little more heterogeneous on that. They still have, as you look at these surveys, week by week, you go economist surveys.

Democrats run between 40 and 35, 30% who say they're either moderate or conservative, much smaller proportions say they're conservative, but the Democrats are more heterogeneous.

>> D. Sunshine Hillygus: So I know I'm supposed to moderate, but let me just say, I mean, beyond the persuadable voter being a book that I wrote in 2009.

So if we wanted to talk a little bit about swing voters, I just want to go back to the point that Jonathan Rodden made, and that is that when you look at the preferences within these coalitions, that there's quite a bit of heterogeneity, right. There's quite a bit of variation.

And the question then becomes, are there any issues on which those coalitions will think that it is so at stake in the election that they are willing to not vote with the party or not vote with their history of voting with the party, even if they don't have a strong identity.

And so that's just something that I think is still in question and a question that I will not have you guys answer right now because I see another hand with my colleague Peter Fever. So we'll let you jump in, but I want you guys to think about if there's any particular issues coming up in this cycle, Peter.

 

>> Speaker 9: Actually, my question is your question re-worded slightly, which is, do you see vulnerabilities in Trump's support? Are there issues or perspectives that cause Republicans to lose interest in him or that cause independents to lose interest in him or that cause Democrats to flee back to Biden. You presented sort of a static picture.

I'm wondering what are the things that might move?

>> Douglas Rivers: I guess that was to me, no, I don't see any. I mean, the amazing thing about support for Trump is it doesn't seem to move at all. One of the things we asked last week was we went through all the indictments and asked people, do you think he's guilty?

And then do you think he will be found guilty, convicted of any of these? And it turns out that while Republicans are less likely to think he's guilty, 40% of them say that he's likely or 50 50 chance or better of being found guilty in these cases. So I don't think, like, if one of these cases went to trial and he was convicted, that that would be an item that would move things much.

There are two wedge issues at the moment. Abortion is one which tends to separate off moderate republican voters. Trump is somebody who gets away with, he appointed the Supreme Court justices that reversed Roe, but at the same time, I don't think anyone seriously believes deep down in his heart he's deeply pro-life.

So I don't think that one cuts much against them and then the other direction, you know, the tough issues for Democrats are. Crime, immigration, and, surprisingly, Israel. So David Leonhardt had a piece this week that basically went through some of our polling that showed that support for Israel by Biden is something that separates Democrats a bit.

So I don't think there's much in the issue space that is likely to move people against Trump.

>> David Brady: So sometimes, that's, as usual, $24 question. So when I think of that, I think rather than in terms of issue, it's how extreme candidates go. So if you look at what happens to Keri Lake in Arizona, what happened to the other guy who ran in Arizona.

When you look at these people on abortion and on defense of the 2020 election being stolen on a set of issues, which there are others, and I agree with John Rodden, there's more there. The question is, I think it's a question of how extreme candidates place themselves. They're the ones more likely to lose.

And other than that, so at this point, I'm not quite sure what those issues might be. But I do think Trump could place himself far enough on these issues that would make it, and that's what looked like happened in 2020. So for me, it's more a question of how far left or how far right.

In the case of Trump, how far right they're willing to go. And that's what I think makes these swing voters go the other way.

>> D. Sunshine Hillygus: Great, we can take one last question. We have one right here, yeah.

>> Speaker 10: Of American institutions. And he is anti institution. So he is an existential threat to democratic institutions.

My question is, what is the role of places like Hoover? The role, the responsibility of places like Hoover, the Republican Party. Democrats can only do so much. More left-leaning organizations can only do so much. The kinds of reforms that we're talking about in the primaries are not going to be, are not going to come into existence in time for this election.

And there is, as we've heard, a very serious threat that he returns to office and threatens the values that all of us in this room are embracing.

>> David Kennedy: Well, a big part of the problem is that thanks to primaries, the parties, as institutions, have less consequential effect on vetting, recruiting, and bringing forward candidates.

Again, it's one of these perverse implications of a more direct democracy kind of arrangement. So I go back again to what I said about irony is inevitable when you study these kinds of evolution. Let me make one last observation. In my mind at least, majoritarian outcomes are essential to the definition of democracy.

You can't really have a democracy without trying to arrange for majoritarian outcomes. We have an institutional reform in the case of primaries that have, again, perversely and ironically driven us in an anti-majority direction. There's another one that's driven not by institutional or structural reform, but simply by demography.

And that has to do with the Senate. So nine states, nine states now contain just about 50% of the American population. Those states have 18% of the representation in the Senate. And that trend, thanks to distribution of population, an ongoing concentration of population in fewer big states, that's going to get even more severe as this century goes on.

So the Senate is, by its very structure, thanks to the demographic changes of the last half century or more, is increasingly a non majoritarian institution. I don't have the answer to how we're going to fix that. It's deeply embedded in the Constitution, but there it is again.

>> D. Sunshine Hillygus: I think with that, we will end on that high note and try to get to the military panel on a little bit of time.

Part 5:

>> Stephen Kotkin: Ladies and gentlemen, I'm Stephen Kotkin, the Kleinheinz Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Director of the Hoover History Lab. Our center director, Revitalization of American Institutions Director Brandice Canes-Wrone, told me that there was a stellar panel on the military during the conference. And I said to her, I will not miss that for anything.

And she said, correct, you're the moderator. And I said, okay, so this is obviously invitation only. Our Thursday panel yesterday was a public event. The panels today are invitation only. In this day and a half conference, the trust in the military is quite high by us institutional standards.

The June poll by Gallup had it at about 60%. That number doesn't sound good, except if you ask, well, what about Congress? That's about 60 points higher than Congress. What about the president? That's about 80 points higher than the presidency. And I could go on. The challenge, however, is that despite that high 60% trust in the military, the direction is not good.

The trust has declined for several years running. We're not at historic lows. 60% is by no means a rock bottom. For those of you who lived through the 1970s and Vietnam or who were there for the failed hostage relief effort in the Carter presidency, you will know that that was our rock bottom in the modern era in terms of trust in the military.

But still, it's worrisome that this great institution is losing trust, even though trust remains high. So the challenge for us today is to talk about what we might do in regaining that trust, rebuilding that trust, rebuilding to the historic highs that we've seen in the military. And we have an extraordinarily distinguished panel today.

Our first speaker will be Secretary Mattis. Everyone knows Secretary Mattis. General Mattis, a four star general, served in the Marines and became the secretary of defense in the Trump administration. You'll know also his book, call Sign Chaos. We'll now take a 15 2nd break for you to go on your phone, Amazon to make sure that you have a copy coming to you shortly.

And he's an extraordinarily dedicated member of our Hoover community. Speaking after him is the National Security Advisor HR McMaster. HR retired, also from the military, lieutenant general, after 34 years in the officer corps and a little bit longer as a rugby player, she was at West Point. The general has written Battlegrounds, which is again 15 seconds now for you to make sure that-

 

>> HR McMaster: Page turner, page turner.

>> Stephen Kotkin: We know that, but they need to go on Amazon very quickly. He's also the author of an important book, Vietnam War, Dereliction of Duty, and he's at work on a book. I know because we're floor mates in the tower on the 11th floor, which we expect to see soon.

Our third panelist will be the Honorable Joni Ernst, the Senator from Iowa elected in 2015, and she chairs the Republican Policy Committee. She's a member of the Armed Services Committee as well, ranking member of the Small Business Entrepreneurship Committee, and Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry. The senator was in the ROTC program at Iowa State University and therefore has a very long relationship with the military.

She, too, served, like our other panelists, in Iraq and Kuwait. She led a company of Iowa National Guardsmen during Operation Iraqi Freedom, and she retired as a lieutenant colonel in the Iowa Army National Guard after 23 years of service. Our fourth and final panelist is like me, only better, that is, he's an academic.

Peter Fever, who's a professor at Duke and has had a very distinguished career, six books. He runs the American Grand Strategy program at Duke and many other things. His most recent book, thanks for your service, is about precisely the question that we're speaking about today. And so if you want to know his bio in a single sentence, he wrote the book.

I think also you should take this 15 seconds now while I'm blathering to pre-order. No, it's out. In fact, not only is it out, can we see it? There you go. So he's got his copy. It's on you now to get your copy. So we could go on with the introductions, all the achievements, the medals, awards that everyone has won, but instead, we'll go right into the substance here.

The question for us, as I suggested, is what is the one thing you think we should do of the many things we could do in reversing this trend and instead increasing trust in our military today? As I said, we'll start with Secretary Mattis.

>> Jim Mattis: Well, thank you, good to be here with all of you.

The one thing, to quote the great Marine, the senior Marine at Stanford for most of my years here, Captain George Shultz, to trust is the coin of the realm. And I think what we have to look at is how do we maintain in the american people's minds that the US military is truly subject to civilian control?

If we ever lose that, then we're going to lose the whole thing. And so I would just point out, starting out here, that Governor Sununu, Governor Moore, Secretary Rice last night made the point about institutions must stand the test of time. And if you look at the US military, critical to the support and defense of our constitution, protection of our freedoms.

Let me start with an amazing statistic. We have two and a half centuries, it's a record of the US military never being a threat to our republic. Now you may say, well, of course not. And yet that's not the norm in most places, and it was not necessarily how the founding fathers saw standing military.

I think there are three areas we have to look at. It won't surprise you that it's the military's role in restoring trust. It's the president's role, it's the legislature's role. And on the military role, I remember my first day in the military, I had hair that was somewhat longer than the senators.

For my 1st 40 seconds before I fell under the tender mercies of Marine drill instructors sitting in the chair that disappeared. And in those 40 seconds, I was looking at a wall in front of me of these fierce looking, crisply uniformed, Prussian haircut, sergeant majors, captains, majors, lieutenant colonels, colonels, a general.

And then up above was a row of people in civilian clothes. Secretary of the Navy, Secretary of Defense, President of the United States. From my first moment in the Marine Corps through all the classes, we actually get classes on civilian control of the military, in the military, as young officer candidates, as young lieutenants, captains.

It even happens when you're a colonel, you get the class. And I would just point out that I've been through a grand total of three years of university level education. I've taken constitutional law. I've been through history courses. And other than hearing the word civilian control of the military, I don't require any long discussion about it.

It's so much an accepted matter that we just take it for granted, I think, frankly. But the question here today is if we have 250 years almost, of civilian control of the military, a little more than that, if you count our revolutionary wartime under the Revolutionary Army prior to the Constitution, how do we build on that for the next 250 years?

In terms of the military's role, I would just say that the lack of civics education today and the way we teach history in many parts of the country, which breeds no affection for this magnificent experiment you and I call America, the military needs to double down on the classes it holds.

It cannot assume the people coming in the military are imbued with a love of the Constitution or respect or knowledge. As the governors pointed out yesterday, if you don't know something, you cannot defend that. I think, too, retired generals, in particular, admirals, need to go silent during elections.

The american people do not need military officers telling them how to vote or suggesting strongly how they vote. General Bradley, when he was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a beloved Army general, said, when admirals and generals retire their uniforms during elections, they should retire their tongues.

And I agree with that 100%. We have to recall that the founding fathers said a standing military is necessary. It's also a potential threat to the republic. And so I think if you look back at our Declaration of Independence, I'm wearing the tie with all the signers' names on it here.

If you look back at that, they were military grievances that led us to that nasty argument with King George III. You're quartering your troops in our houses without our permission. You're giving them an independent role, these military guides, superior to the civilian authority. We don't like it. So I think that the military is responsible for making certain it teaches this, that we do not become a threat in any way to the people.

The president's role, I think the president himself has a responsibility and to make certain he never used the military to police the republic. We protect the republic. We do not police it. And I think, too, that the line has been crossed. President Trump handing out MAGA hats to uniformed troops, put on, encouraging them to put them on when he was visiting bases.

President Biden having uniformed Marines standing on the stage during a political speech. The president has a responsibility not to do that sort of thing. I would also point out we elect our commander in chief in this country, and right now the all volunteer force is in its biggest crisis in 50 years.

It is hundreds of thousands, frankly, short. We keep changing the end strengths a little bit so it doesn't look quite as bad. But the US army has missed its mission and in some cases had to lower its standards over the last ten years. The Navy has missed its mission.

The air force has, the Marines have not. But that is, they take no refuge in saying we're good. They say it's coming. It's coming to the Marines. The army walks. Point for all of us on this sort of thing. And so how many of you can recall the last time that President Obama, President Trump or President Biden said, Uncle Sam needs you?

I can't recall once we leave it to a sergeant down in Illinois or Iowa or wherever to go out and sell the military, and that is not a way to keep trust with the american people. The last point, the legislature's oversight is absolutely critical. I'm very reluctant to say much when we have one of the finest senators here in terms of maintaining the legislature's rightful role, Senator, and you don't get enough credit for it, frankly.

But I would just point out that we are seeing in what Senator Tuberville is doing right now, probably, I think it's for the first time in our history, such a violation of the oversight role. That it's going to take the Senate taking special steps, more than likely, to restore integrity to that.

Also on funding, if you do not fund that military, it's hard for the military to maintain trust with the american people that we can do the job because we can start selling you on some bill of goods that, yes, we can defend the country when in our heart of hearts we know we cannot do that and a cavalier disregard for funding means we go to CR's.

And what that means to you, when you hear the word CR, continuing resolution, you say, no, that means we're going to waste your money for this year. That's what those words mean, because we can't change anything from last year. Can you imagine if your family had some life changing event?

You were forced to spend the same amount on vacations, restaurants and everything else right on through the year, even if your medical bills had gone up or something. That's what we're doing to the military. That will break our trust with the american people when they see that level of a lack of managerial integrity.

Very, very important. I think that when the officers are sworn, we have to give our word to the Senate that we will give our honest opinion that when we give it, we stay out of politics and we make certain that we're not punished for doing that. The founding fathers recognized we had to have special rules.

They told the congress, you will make special rules for the military. They recognize that the civilian imperatives of a democracy might be out of step with the military imperatives of a battlefield. And yet sometimes we have people with no military background trying to impose civilian imperatives that actually endanger our young men and women on the battlefield that cannot be allowed to go on.

Because when you're going into a family and telling them what is most beloved by them, when their son or their daughter is dead. And when it starts being revealed that they weren't properly trained, weren't properly equipped, that will break trust. But here's my key point. Starting with George Washington at Newburgh, when he absolutely throttled his officers to think they could confront the Continental Congress for breaking their word.

And they did break their word to these officers. He said, you will not do this. We are on probation in front of the whole world that our military will never do this, and we remain on probation today. He set the trajectory. But as the great Doctor Corey Schocke, one of the brightest strategists in the western world today, puts it, the Congress and the president have the right to be wrong.

Objectively and strategically wrong, that does not relieve the military from obedience to all lawful orders. A final point I'll make on that, I said lawful orders in the military, it's not just illegal to carry out an unlawful order, it is illegal to give the order. If somebody tells me to do something in the military, and I know it's illegal, if I give the order for someone else to do it, even if they don't do it, I am now subject to the uniform code of military justice, that's court martial.

So there is also a value in the institution to retain your trust that says they will not carry out illegal orders if they're given it, and they cannot even give the order. It doesn't matter if it's carried out, back over to you, Steve.

>> Stephen Kotkin: Thank you Secretary Jim, really brilliantly setting the table.

I like the fact how you hide really what you think straight forward and tell us. We parsed it out anyway somehow, but brilliantly setting the table for us. General HR, maybe you could build on that in your remarks please.

>> HR McMaster: Well, first of all, thanks for this amazing program here at Hoover and the opportunity to be on this panel with people I admire tremendously.

And I would just build on what Jim Mattis said in terms of the importance of the military, the military's role. In preserving our professionalism, our professional military ethics, civil control of the military, respect, and the covenant with the American people to say that our political leaders have that responsibility as well.

So the one thing I would say is for our political leaders to focus on what the military is for and preserve our warrior ethos and to stop trying to politicize the military or distract the military. That's a long one thing, but they're all related to one another. And I think what we have seen is a distraction in many ways about what the military is for.

I think if you read our current secretary's priorities from each of the services, you might wonder, what is the army for again? Is it for combating climate change, do we really need to change the culture in the military? Is the army's culture the problem in connection with some of the maladies that we see across all the services?

But I believe the culture is fundamentally hostile to bigotry, racism, sexism and various forms of misconduct. And so I think there's this distraction about what the military is for, I think that is one of the reasons why we see problems with recruiting. But I think what we're seeing is the erosion of the warrior ethos associated with that distraction, but also associated with efforts to politicize the military.

And this goes kind of across the political spectrum, Secretary Mattis mentioned a couple of the behaviors associated with that. But I think too often many of our politicians have tried to drag the military into the same sort of polarization we see in our society, and I'll talk about three or four ways that this is occurring.

But first, I'd like to just maybe talk about the warrior ethos, what it is and why it's so important to preserve. The word ethos is really a covenant, it's a covenant, and Jim has already alluded to this, between the American military and the people. It is formed on trust and understanding of the military's role to protect our society and to protect our society based on the orders and directions from our civilian authorities.

But it's also a covenant between warriors, between warriors who are bound together by a sense of common purpose, mutual respect, and a sense of honor and adherence to principles. Especially courage and willingness to self sacrifice, willingness to sacrifice for one another, and willingness to sacrifice for those in whose name we fight and serve.

I believe that that ethos is under duress, it's under duress because a lot of Americans don't understand the military and the importance of the ethos. And they don't understand it because we get our information about the military less and less from people who we know who serve, and more and more from popular culture, which tends to coarsen and cheapen the warrior ethos.

And I'm talking about movies and video games and other elements of popular culture. So we don't know very much about why our warriors serve, why they're willing to sacrifice, what is the nature of their calling? And then compounding that, I think are often very well meaning organizations that portray our veterans as traumatized, fragile human beings.

And create in the minds of many of our people, that service in the military is gonna mess you up. When in fact, as we know, even those who have experienced the most harrowing conditions of battle, like sacred Captain Schulz did, for example, in World War II. They emerge from that experience stronger and go on to make significant contributions to our society in other walks of life.

So popular culture and the sense that our veterans are traumatized, fragile human beings. The third, I think, is our political leadership's failure to commit to winning in war. And I think that this has an element of strategic incompetence associated with it, and an inability to connect what we're doing militarily To the achievement of political aims that brought us into that war to begin with.

One of the things that particularly irks me is that how even some of our general officer colleagues have taken up this phrase, responsible end of a war, right? And I've said this before but, I used to box, in a much lower weight class, by the way.

>> HR McMaster: But I never got into a boxing ring and said, I just wanna bring this to a responsible end cuz you're gonna get your ass kicked, right?

You're gonna get your ass kicked, so, in war, each side tries to outdo the other, right? And we have to have a commitment to winning, I think our political leadership should be as committed to winning as our servicemen and women. And I think the true test of strategy is, can that platoon leader explain to his or her platoon how the risks that they're taking and the sacrifices they may make on a mission are contributing to an outcome worthy of those risks and sacrifices?

And here, I think there's a direct correlation between the humiliating surrender and withdrawal from Afghanistan and the reduction in our recruiting numbers. And the other aspect of this, I think, disappointment and maybe dragging the military into politics is how current political appointees in this administration in particular. Are pushing reified philosophies associated with postcolonial, postmodernist critical theories that are trying to teach our servicemen and women that you shouldn't judge the marine next to you based on their courageous, their toughness, their commitment to the mission of each other, you should judge them by their identity category.

And there is nothing that is more destructive to unit cohesion and combat effectiveness than that. And so I think we do have to, certainly within our military, preserve our professional military ethic and our warrior ethos. But I think it's really important at this time for us to lay that expectation on our politicians, stop trying to politicize the military.

There's a narrative that feeds on each other across the political spectrum, right, what do you hear? What are you hearing some on maybe the far right or whatever it is, the military is woke. On the far left the military is extremist, hey, our military is not woke, it's not extremist.

And when you put those narratives out there, it shouldn't be a surprise that the army has 10% fewer white males volunteering for service, that's the, That's the demographic that matters right here. Nobody's talking about it, nobody's talking about that. But it's that politicization of the military that has affected a demographic in our country in a way that they don't see the rewards of service that await them if they enlist or seek a commission in our armed forces.

 

>> Stephen Kotkin: Thank you so much for that, general. Senator Ernst, how does it look to you? How can we build on those first two companies?

>> Joni Ernst: I could make this easy and just say ditto because I agree completely with what's being said already. I'll add just a little bit more, but it does keep in theme with what HR and Jim have already said.

And I'll start with and build upon the wokeness in the military issue. And the original question is, why does the public not trust our military as much as they used to? And we have seen a significant drop the wokeness. Now you hear that a lot. But I have been pushing back on this because that is coming from people not in the military.

It's coming from outsiders that are looking in and describing the military as woke, not by actions coming from the men and women that are actually wearing the uniform, but by political appointees, those civilians that are in charge of the military. So I'll use an example. You mentioned climate change as one of the goals for our military to combat.

I'm sorry. When I served, that was not a goal that I was working towards. I always thought our military was to be the most lethal fighting force on the face of the planet. I think that's why we were put into being. But one of the goals in this administration has been to completely transition all non-tactical vehicles in the military's fleet to electric.

Okay, that great goal. And to do that in the next few years. And I'm not going to knock you. If you want to drive an electric vehicle, that's great. But I can tell you you're not driving through a combat zone, okay? So, and again, this was the non tactical vehicle fleet, but the goal was to build and continue with the non tactical vehicle fleet to electrify the entire force.

So I was a transportation company commander. So I led those convoys that were driving up into Iraq. And I can never in a million years imagine 60 of my vehicles towing cargo up into Iraq, desperately looking for a charging station, okay? No. No way, no how. The technology has a long way to go before I would ever entrust my men and women in electrified vehicles in a combat zone.

So that is a goal right now. Not to make sure that we have the best technology available to keep our men and women safe, but to appease those that might be on the fringes of various ideologies. Okay, again, we need to be a lethal fighting force. That's why the american public looks at our military and says, wow, they are woke.

But those are decisions not being made by the men and women in uniform. Those are the decisions being made by civilian leadership. I think we do have to be careful when we talk about woke ism in the military and redirect our comments to the fact that maybe the civilian leaders don't fully understand why we have a military.

They maybe don't like the idea of engaging in war. And what was that end? What was that phrase?

>> HR McMaster: A responsible end.

>> Joni Ernst: A responsible end. Okay, no, that's not the way I see the military, especially when it comes in defense of our own nation and our people.

I wouldn't be asking for a responsible end to protect the people that I know and love and represent here in the United States of America. It would be a conclusive finish, okay, to protect the people of the United States. That's what we have to have. But I would encourage everyone as we're talking about wokeism in the military not to phrase it like that, please.

I served in uniform. My daughter now serves in uniform. She is on active duty, and I encourage that. And I'm glad that she does. But I don't like it when people from the outside will point the finger and say, you're a woke military. I can tell you my daughter's not woke.

She is a hard working young soldier. She loves what she does, and she's committed to our great United States of America. So I think that that is one issue is too often we throw terms around casually, and eventually it does hurt the public trust in that institution. So I would just caution us on that.

The leadership is very important, the civilian leadership, you must lead by example. And that needs to occur in the military as well. And I think too often today, our moms and dads and just general public out there, when they look at leadership, they don't see the type of leadership that they feel will actually lead and do good for our nation in the army.

And I'll paraphrase, but the definition of leadership or a leader is someone who will inspire others towards a common goal or objective for the good of the unit or the organization, inspire. And when our public looks at military leaders who have become political, when they look at political leadership that they don't feel has the military's best interests at heart.

They're not inspiring. And trust is lost. So I think wokeism, I think leadership, and I do think, and HR, I'm glad you brought this up because this is something I was going to comment on as well, is that too often the public sees the, quote unquote, endless wars that we have engaged in.

And I'll mention the global war on terrorism in particular. That has left a number of our military men and women with injuries that they will have the rest of their lives. So whether they've lost a limb, maybe they've suffered from traumatic brain injury, those are things they'll live with a long time.

And when we don't take care of our veterans, and that's on Congress, okay? When we don't take care of our veterans, why would the public trust the military if we're not going to be doing right by the very ones we put into harm's way? So I think there are so many things that we need to work on.

And it's not just Congress, but it's the nation as a whole on how we address these issues. But, you know, I would just leave you with this, that we've got incredible men and women that serve uniform. They're not extremists, they're not woke. They are just Americans that love our country so much.

That they chose to stand up and raise their right hand. So I'm thankful for everyone that chooses to serve. To Peter, I know I haven't read your book yet. I'm looking forward to it.

>> Peter Feaver: I can help you with this.

>> Joni Ernst: Yes. And I know where to go on Amazon to get it.

But when we say thanks for service or thanks for your service, one thing that I like to do when people say it to me is just to turn it back on them and say you're worth it. That also is part of the equation is that we need to educate people on the fact that we do live in the greatest nation on the face of the planet.

Our country is worth it and our men and women in uniform need to understand it. And I think by all working together then we'll develop greater trust in our military and the institution.

>> Stephen Kotkin: Thank you, senator very well said. Professor Peter, you've decades of research. You served in the National Security Council.

How does it look to you? What's the way forward for us based upon your.

>> Peter Feaver: Well, thank you. And I want to begin with some thanks. I want to begin by thanking Duke Medical School for teaching senator Rand Paul the Heimlich movement, which allows me to do this, to give you this.

So thank you, Duke Medevir. I also wanna thank.

>> Joni Ernst: You may donate to him at any time.

>> Peter Feaver: I also want to thank Hoover stalwart Bob Oster, who invested in the research, made the research possible that's in that book.

>> Joni Ernst: That's amazing.

>> Peter Feaver: I'll just point out for the academics in the room that he gave a very generous gift in December.

And in March he emailed me and said, how's the book coming? So I'm afraid it took me several years before I had a good answer for that email. But I do encourage you to look at it. It's a great gag gift if you get it as an audiobook because it has 160 tables and figures and the poor guy reading the audiobook has to read each one of those.

So it's worth it. The bottom line about the book is that public confidence is high but hollow. That is, it's high relative to the other institutions, as we know from what Steve said and we've heard earlier this morning. But it's hollow because the drivers of it are likely to go down rather than up.

It's driven up. When you're at war, there's a rally to the flag. We're not at a traditional war frame. Now. It's driven by close connections to the military. But as HR mentioned, those connections are dwindling. So we no longer have the greatest generation, the world would generation where everybody had somebody in their family that served.

We're seeing a passing of the draft era and Vietnam generations where many, many Americans did. And increasingly we recruit into the new all volunteer force, children of the old volunteer force. So that's a smaller and smaller dwindling. A fraction of the American people have a connection. And there's a great book that Secretary Mattis and Corey Shockey wrote a couple years ago that addressed this gap question in some detail.

This is going to drive down public confidence in the military just inexorably because of these factors. It's hollow also because it's propped up by social desirability bias. It turns out people say they have confidence in the military, in part some people, because that's what they believe is the correct answer to give.

And when you use survey techniques that are meant to tap into latent attitudes, that confidence, their actual confidence drops eight to 27 points. So there's a hollowness there that suggests that different moves. If the permission space changes, then you could see a dramatic drop. And I would point to a change permission space as of mid September 2020, which I think Secretary Mattis will remember because this is a moment when the president of the United States and the leading republican candidate, I mean the republican candidate for president and commander in chief, attacked by name.

Some senior military who had served in his administration and argued that the military, senior generals wanted to go to war because they wanted to sell arms, etcetera. And that created a permission space for Republicans to look at the military differently. Then that got echoed in the woke military critique that you mentioned, Tucker Carlson, other prominent Republican opinion leaders messaging a very different message about the military that allows for that social desirability bias to be popped.

And I think much of the drop in the last several years can be explained just with respect to that. So high, but hollow. And of course, it is as HR has said, threatened by the politicization of the military and that's a big concern. I have one more thing to say about that.

At the end, we should care about this. So this is my second point. We should care about public confidence in the military because it correlates with other things. We care about it. It does make recruiting harder. When public confidence goes down, that's fewer people recommending to others to serve in the military.

People with higher confidence recommend to others to serve. And the recruiter's job, which is already extremely difficult because of the labor market, is that much more difficult when public confidence goes down. And it's also correlated with high willingness to spend more on defense. So providing the resources that the military needs, it's not an unadulterated good.

So high public confidence can lead to pedestalization. Putting the military on a pedestal and saying, you are better than the rest. That's why I love your response to, thanks for your service. You're worth it. It's a reminder to the military not to look down from the pedestal on the american society.

And also it's a warning to the American people, don't put them on a pedestal that you will then knock off and ignore. Pedestalization can lead to alienation in either direction. So what I call for is not lower confidence in the military, but rather than deservedness of high confidence by doing some of the measures that Secretary Mattis and General McMaster and Senator Ernst suggested and then propping up public confidence in the other institutions for them to deserve higher confidence, too.

That's the solution, not driving down the military and knocking them down a peg. What are the things that the rest of us can do? Well, I have one modest proposal here, and it's a version of what HR suggested. I want us to cultivate the norm that gives the uniformed military non combatant immunity in the culture wars.

That is, they are non combatants in the culture wars. The hold you mentioned with Senator Tuberville, there's a legitimate policy dispute at the root of that. I think it's reasonable for pro life caucus to be concerned about the policy choice made by Secretary Austin. And I think Secretary Austin had the authority probably, and under the OLC's ruling, did have the authority to make the choice.

That's a policy fight that has a culture war element. That fight should be made by civilians. The military should have non combatant immunity. So that requires one party to stop targeting the military. Requires another party to stop hiding behind the military, stop asking the military to carry the water for issues that are controversial.

But if you can get a military panache around it, wrap it in a uniform, it's a little easier to sell. And crucially, it requires the military to talk about their values in ways that do not make them sound like culture warriors. And this is hard, because the culture war language industry moves at warp speed.

There might even be a Moore's law about it that is operating. And the military training moves at the speed of glaciers. And so you train up senior military leaders on the proper language that was acceptable a couple years ago. That language might be triggering today. So the military needs to recruit across all walks of life in America.

We have to recruit from all corners, and we need to bring them together and forge a cohesive fighting force that is mission focused. What I just described. I think everybody in the room would agree with that. That's what some people mean, and that's what some senior military mean when they say diversity, equity, inclusion.

But if you use that phrase today, it signals, it triggers a totally different understanding. And so you have to talk about your values, if you're military, without sounding like culture warriors. Stop targeting, stop hiding, stop sounding like a culture warriors. Finally, just to reinforce what Secretary Mattis said about the importance of the public understanding civilian control, the public does not understand what is meant by civilian control and does not understand how precious is that.

It's a very dispiriting finding that's reproduced by me and many others who do this work, that the public does not know what good civil military norms looks like and are not asking and holding the military accountable and holding political leaders accountable to the proper norms we need to improve civics education.

And Secretary Mattis has made a contribution here. He and all but one of the retired secretaries of defense and then all but one of the retired chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff wrote an open letter published in September of 22 that says, here are the fundamental principles of civilian control.

This is the grading rubric, apply it to our record, apply it to the current team. Then the current team would be Millie and Austin. And let's have every future general and flag officer be held accountable to this understanding of civilian control. This is what it means, not what you're hearing on cable tv.

And I think if we push those kinds of forms of civic education, I think we can chip away at this. And I'll stop there.

>> Stephen Kotkin: Thank you so much. We're gonna come back to the panel. They're going to want to comment on each other's comments. I just want to get the room involved as much as possible.

This is the Hoover Institution, so we have active military members here in our audience. We have veterans in our audience. We have not only generals up here on the podium, on the dais, but we also have admirals in the audience. I'm going to take this opportunity to turn to one of our admirals.

Yes, the Marines are technically Navy, but-

>> Stephen Kotkin: Let's be honest-

>> HR McMaster: They'll never admit it.

>> Stephen Kotkin: Let's really be honest about that.

>> Jim Mattis: Senator, we're the men's department.

>> Joni Ernst: That's right.

>> Stephen Kotkin: I want to bring the Navy in, if I could. Admiral James Ellis Junior.

>> James Ellis Jr.: Thanks. Thanks to this wonderful panel.

I certainly, as probably the guy who's been out of uniform the longest, wanna associate myself with the remarks that I've heard so far. And first amongst them is the point that Secretary Mattis made, is that the military needs to conduct itself, that it's deserving of the trust that it receives from the nation.

That's absolutely essential, and I would argue that it is deserving of that. I mean, it's got challenges, and we've talked about them on the recruiting side, but it is the most combat experienced military in the world. It's the most combat experienced military this nation has ever had. And in terms of capacities to deter aggression on the part of others, we need to continue to expand on that and give them the materials that they need.

But I would also agree with Senator Ernst and Peter Feaver that this politicization has gotten out of hand. I mean, we see senior officers in exercising the accountability that Secretary Mattis described in civilian accountability or oversight of the military. That you see military leaders being pressed with questions that are carefully constructed so as to force one of those when did you stop beating your wife kinds of answers.

That put the leaders in a milieu where they're, quite frankly, they're not experienced and they're not comfortable. And I always remember that George Washington once said that it's better to be alone than to be in bad company. But unfortunately, our military leaders don't have that option. They have to appear in front of Congress and the like and they don't have the option.

Somebody once said, misery loves company. And of course, with the Congress, with apologies to Senator Ernst hovering at 8% approval rating in that poll that Peter Feaver quoted, misery loves company. And the senior military doesn't have the opportunity of declining the invitation, in a sense. So you've got to go.

And they need to be more skilled as the Senator has so powerfully said in navigating those conversations. But I also think that at the end of the day, these things will go full circle. And we don't want the US or the American people to be challenged, particularly in our leadership role that is so important in the international community.

But I'm reminded of that last verse from the Kipling poem, Tommy, where it's Tommy this and Tommy that and throw him out, the brute, but he's savior of his country when the guns begin to shoot. And so we don't want that to be the restorative force. We need to find a way to move back to a dialogue that extricates the military from the inappropriate political conversations that they're increasingly being dragged into.

And I think that's an important dimension of the conversation. Thank you.

>> Stephen Kotkin: Thank you so much, admiral. We have a very distinguished professor here who likes to say that if nobody raises their hand, she'll call on them. But she just saved me from that by raising her hand.

 

>> Stephen Kotkin: Professor Rice, can we pass the mic up here, Tom?

>> Condoleezza Rice: Well, thank you for a really wonderful panel. And I especially want to thank Senator Ernst for being here and Peter for coming across the country. Can you speak to the role of the military academies and where we are now with the military academies, that is a place that there has been a lot of concern about what is taught in the military academies, what is expected of the military academy.

So can pick any of them. You can pick West Point, Annapolis, or the Air Force Academy, but just what do you think is happening there?

>> Joni Ernst: Yes, and thank you for that, secretary. The concern that I have, again, is that we are projecting thoughts from the outside into organizations.

And we have heard many times over the last couple of years that the military is woke. They're teaching woke classes at the academies. And so my daughter did graduate from West Point. And so I often, when I heard. Heard of these classes being taught at West Point, I asked her.

Okay, Libby, tell me about these classes that are being taught at West Point. She's like, I've never been to any of those classes. So I think there's a lot of misinformation that gets pushed out there. Or it could be maybe they have a sharp day, which is sexual harassment training, how to report it, things like.

So maybe they're going through a class on sexual assault, sexual harassment, and somebody somewhere might view that as woke classes that they're forced to go to. So I think, again, it comes down to terminology and how we're phrasing it and actually knowing before we start challenging these institutions, really knowing and understanding, what is it that you are doing and teaching our young men and women.

But again, going back to the overall issue of the military and how we carelessly toss around a woke military, I will share with you, and I hate this. I sat down a week and a half ago to go through the academy packets that come forward as senators and congressmen we nominate.

We have so many nominations we can give to students in our states for the academies, the service academies, the Naval Academy, the Air Force Academy, and the military academy at West Point. I normally have between 60 and 90 applications every year. Mind you, Iowa is a very sparsely populated state, but 60 to 90, that's kind of typical.

This year, 33.

>> HR McMaster: Mm-hm, wow.

>> Joni Ernst: 33 applications. These are some of the finest four-year institutions that we have in the United States, and it's concerning to me. And if we continue on this path, especially for these incredible academies, I don't know what we're going to do, but it really is a signal to me that we have got to do better.

We have got to figure this out, I'm glad we're having this discussion today. We're gonna continue this discussion at the Reagan National Defense Forum. We've gotta figure this out because we have incredible young men and women that want to serve, but maybe are being discouraged into not serving.

And so collectively, we need as a United States to figure this out.

>> Stephen Kotkin: General HR, I know you've recently been reengaging with West Point, where you're alma mater. Give us some insight on what you saw.

>> HR McMaster: I mean, just to tout my bipartisan credentials, I got fired by two presidents.

 

>> HR McMaster: President Trump and then President Biden fired me from the board of visitors at West Point as he got rid of all Trump appointees, which I think was a mistake. Trump didn't do that to Obama appointees, for example. So just a small, insignificant example. But I could be a great voice for West Point, being on the inside with the board of visitors, and saying, hey, it's not happening.

But I am concerned, again about civilian leadership trying to push it on the academy. I think some of the problem has been with guest lecturers who are brought in, who are proponents of various critical theories or to be anti-racist, you have to be racist. I mean, the Ibram Kendi kind of arguments.

And I think that our students ought to be aware of that, and universities are an opportunity to expose people to a whole broad range of views. I don't think that's the kind of philosophy that our military should endorse, for example. For example, I recently saw an advertisement for professors of history written by a civilian professor of history at the history department.

And what concerned me the most was not how they were seeking professors who had done their research in very narrow areas of minority studies that, you know, that are important. But, of course, how about an American historian who can talk about the Black experience in America and the evolution from slavery to the present, rather than someone who is a specialist in one particular area?

I mean, I didn't really care about that as much as the description of West Point as a small, elite liberal arts college with about 4000 students. And I thought, who the hell in their right mind would write that description?

>> HR McMaster: And so I think that, again, I have tremendous faith in the superintendent of West Point.

The dean at West Point was one of my old lieutenants. I'm telling you, the academy is in great shape overall. It's important just to recognize there are these kind of pressures, right, to drag it into. As Peter said, give them immunity, man. I mean, give them immunity from it, protect them from it.

The cadets I know, and I kind of mentor a little bit the rugby team there at West Point who lost the Navy in extra time. Navy's got an amazing team, I think Navy's gonna win the national championship again this year. And I root for Navy all but one time in the year, when they play Army, and go, Army, beat Navy this weekend, football.

 

>> HR McMaster: But I think that the war ethos is alive and well there. I just wrote the fore to a really neat book called Brothers, which is about the class of 2002 rugby team at West Point, and how that team went on to serve and to make sacrifices after the attacks of 911.

And you can't help read that book, but just think how fortunate we are to have young men and women who volunteer to serve our country. And so I feel really good about it, Stephen and Madam Secretary. I think that we're in good shape, but those pressures do exist, and we have to, I think, help the academies in a positive way, right?

Help them be granted immunity from this.

>> Peter Feaver: Can I add a word?

>> Stephen Kotkin: Yes.

>> Peter Feaver: It would be wrong for the military academy to teach critical race theory, and thankfully, they do not. But it's not necessarily wrong for them to teach about critical race theory. And when my fellow Republicans ask me about that, I say, one reason they have to do it is because they're asked by you in congressional hearings about critical race theory.

And the senior generals will come in and say, what the hell is that? I don't know what that is. They may have to be briefed on what this thing is because it is in the political ferment. And so there was one course, an advanced american politics course at the Military academy, that taught, one week, the key readings of critical race theory, and the second week, the key readings critiquing critical race theory for advanced students in american politics.

That's a reasonable, I think, exposure.

>> Stephen Kotkin: I study this military, Secretary Rice can identify with this, since she's a specialist in this area. There was a marxist military, and they spent all their time teaching Marxism to them. They didn't really teach them how to shoot, they didn't put them into physical fitness stuff.

But they were haranguing them about Marxism classes, at kulak, bourgeoisie, imperialism, all the stuff that they teach here in the humanities at Stanford.

>> Stephen Kotkin: And then there was a war scare, and this document came in, which, Which was commissioned by the guy in charge. And he commissioned the document about readiness and etc.

And the document was done by the secret police on the military, and it was not a positive evaluation of their readiness should Great Britain attack, as the war scare indicated, might be a possibility. And so what did he do, this guy, who's known to be a bit on the brutal side and not really a humanitarian, he decided he was gonna increase their military training.

He was gonna cut some of the political commissars out of the loop, reinforce discipline, make sure the officer corps knew military doctrine. And so the guy who was in charge of marxist ideology globally, his name was Joseph Stalin, he had a panic over the lack of preparedness over his military in the late 1920s, and he launched, both on the industrial side and on the training side, lethality, a real military combat and ability to fight.

And when I first saw that document, I said, you know what? We need that document now. We need that same process to happen. Secretary Mattis, you know this well, that was your call sign in many ways, in terms of the policies that you tried to implement. Right Git?

And so the purpose of the military is really what we're talking about. Right? We have a military so that we don't have to use it. But if we do have to use it, it better be good. It better be able to do it. Social engineering doesn't help that much when the shooting starts.

And if the guy that I'm talking about could figure that out, well, I think we can figure that puppy out, too. Let's get two questions from the audience here. Yes. Let's take them sequentially. Wait for the microphone.

>> Speaker 8: I was wondering if you could comment on the use of private contractors in the military and HR to you specifically after your discussion of the warrior ethos, whether or not the use of private contractors has any effect or erodes or that warrior ethos.

 

>> Stephen Kotkin: Private contractors. Next, please. Right over here.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: Senator Ernst, it's really exciting to have you on the panel, and I want to ask specifically to you, because you served in the National Guard, what role the National Guard and to some extent, the reserves play in this trust dynamic between the us military and the us public, especially since they are your citizen airmen, your citizen warriors.

 

>> Joni Ernst: Thank you.

>> Stephen Kotkin: Okay, so we got the private contractors, we got the National Guard. We got potentially one more and that would be it. Before we go to the panel for a final word.

>> HR McMaster: Hey, that was the awesome Jackie Schneider, by the way, who's a phenomenal scholar and also an air force officer.

 

>> Stephen Kotkin: All right, thank you.

>> HR McMaster: So, just so you know her background.

>> Stephen Kotkin: We got many other people I know wanna ask questions. But let's begin with Senator Ernst on the National Guard, and then let's come back down murderer's row here.

>> Joni Ernst: Yeah, absolutely. And thank you. And I served in both the army reserves and the Iowa Army National Guard, retiring out of the Iowa Army National Guard.

And I haven't seen the specific polling, and maybe Peter would know different, but because we have national guardsmen and reservists out in our communities, more so. And Iowa is a little different, because Iowa is the only state in the United States that does not have either an active duty military installation or coast Guard station.

We are the only state. So our communities however, are filled with incredible national guardsmen. And in my own experience, I served and commanded the same company that my father had served in as a sergeant mechanic way back in the day. I served with a soldier that enlisted the same month that my father enlisted in that unit.

This older gentleman actually deployed with us, but had to retire when he got back. We had cousins that served in my command. I had a husband wife team that served overseas. In my command. I had twin brothers that served in my. So you get the picture. This is rural Iowa.

And because they are guardsmen that come from the rural areas, they serve together. They're out in their communities. They participate in parades. They're doing open houses at the local armories. They're pitching in when there's a veteran's funeral, people see them. They are their neighbors, they are their friends.

And the trust and confidence I feel in our reservists and national guardsmen, at least in Iowa, are pretty darn high. It's pretty darn high right now. And I went back and specifically talked to our Iowa National Guard recruiters, both air Guard and army guard. And what we have found with the National Guard right now is that the highest numbers of recruiting are coming from the rural areas.

There is a much higher level of patriotism in our rural areas, and those are their words. The patriotism in the rural areas is higher than what they're finding from young men and women in the more metro areas. And we don't have many metro areas in Iowa, but they're large, in part pulling their numbers out of the rural areas.

They are also finding great significance. Greater numbers of recruiting coming from green card holders in Iowa. And what you find common theme there is that the patriotism in the rural areas very high. They want to serve their nation, their state, and they see that they are valued in these units and by their communities.

Their mission is a little different than active duty. They are there to protect the local populations from natural disasters and otherwise. But with the green card holders, they want to be Americans. And by serving in the military, that's a fast track for them to become citizens. And so they want to be citizens.

They want to serve and earn their citizenship. So I think the confidence in those men and women that put on the uniform once a month, you know, for a weekend, it's really, really high, at least from where I sit, it's really high, and it's very much appreciated.

>> Stephen Kotkin: Thank you.

Let's take general hr on the private contractors and then a final word from Professor Peter and Secretary Jim.

>> HR McMaster: Okay, great, David, thanks for that question. You know, I think that you're raising a really important point. I think private contractors are a necessity now, but they ought to have roles that are narrowly circumscribed.

Circumscribed to maybe logistics or I mean, laundry, bath facilities, you know, the kind of logistics facilities you need that you can really, you can use soldiers for other important tasks or for those tasks in an expeditionary environment. But then also, they should never be put on offensive operations.

And I would say that would include even security details for military personnel, for example. I'll just tell you one quick anecdote. We went to the town of Halal, which is a mixed place between sunni and shia populations, very contested area, with a great chief of police there who was ultimately killed by shia militias under the influence and control of the Iranians.

And when I went to see him, we were moving through a crowd, and it was a private security company detail that came with me because I was just a member of the staff then. And they were pushing Iraqis out of the way and screaming and yelling at them and had sunglasses on.

And I yelled for them to stop and I pulled him in. I said, you're not gonna behave this way toward Iraqis. And they said, well, you're with me. It acted like that. It wasn't my call. And I said, I'm leaving right now if you continue this. They said they had to project intimidation.

And these are people who maybe washed out of the service earlier and have great war stories to tell Uncle Bob at the barbecue. But they weren't soldiers, in my view, and they were having a mission impact. So I think some of them, perimeter guard. Right? Gate guards, that's worthwhile to employ them, but there are certain roles that they're completely inappropriate to employ them on, and especially those where you expect soldiers, marines, sailors and airmen to behave in a way that's consistent with our warrior ethos while they're in dangerous environments.

I think private security companies just can't do that. And then I think that applies to aid as well. You know, a lot of times we run aid by just contracting out to service providers. Right. And oftentimes, they don't operate as if they understand the competitions that are going, political competitions in this case, within, for example, government ministries and institutions, we get.

We are too reliant on the quick, easy contract button. And then there were silly things. Can I say something really silly? You know, about this? In Afghanistan, because of these stupid troop caps that we had for so long, we had situations where a US army aviation brigade, the secretary knows as well, would deploy to Afghanistan, leave its mechanics behind with no aircraft, hire really expensive maintenance services for that aviation brigade, while the skills of those aviation mechanics are atrophying back at Fort Campbell, Kentucky.

So I think that there are a lot of silly policies that are put in place at times that encourage the use of contractors in a way that is actually detrimental to the mission and detrimental to readiness.

>> Stephen Kotkin: Yeah, catch 22 wasn't written for nothing. We're gonna have Professor Peter and then we'll close out with Secretary Jim.

 

>> Peter Feaver: I would just say that the american public knows in theory, about the differences between the services, between the guard active and reserved, and between active and retired, in theory. But they're actually not very good at discerning who is who and who's what. They don't know that the Navy is the finest service, for instance, and they don't know that the norms that govern active duty don't apply to retired.

And that's why it's so dangerous when we use the military in ways, whether they're deployed in the homeland to suppress civil disorder, that will look like it's the military doing that. Whichever group in uniform is doing it. And that's why his name is general. First name is general for the rest of his life.

Yours is secretary. I'm trying, but secretary. So what General McMaster says in retirement gets folded in the american mind, as that's what the military is saying, and that means that the military has to be much more careful about its public profile. And I'll close that.

>> Stephen Kotkin: Secretary-

>> Peter Feaver: Secretary Mattis.

 

>> Jim Mattis: Yeah. Stephen did introduce me as general. People call me general. Once you're a general, you can't turn the hand of time back and say, I'm not one. You gotta act like you're general and keep your mouth shut. In certain things, hr hit the nail on the head.

If you want a limited war, limit your political ends that you're going for. Don't limit the military means to get there. Because when you put these ridiculous troop caps on people, pretty soon you're putting our officers in a position where they have no reserves, they have to commit everyone.

They have nothing to fall back on. We're finding helicopters deployed with pilots and no mechanics who could think up something like that. Would any of you get on an airplane at San Francisco that had not been looked at by mechanics? I think not. So we've got to get over that.

But I think any time you're going to put a weapon in the hands of somebody overseas with the american imprint. We were not in the US army. Excuse me, we're not in the army or the Marine Corps. We were in the US army, the US Marine Corps. We're answerable to you.

And if we're going to draw down and take a life, I think that should be someone under our constitution who's held accountable for firing that weapon. I don't like the idea of having contractors. Besides which, they have gotten us into a lot of trouble from the kind that was just related here to four.

And they're not all Americans, by the way. They're not subject to our authority in some cases. Have four contractors decide to drive, draw a straight line from Baghdad to a place called Telecom. And it went through a town called Fallujah. And we just turned over at the 82nd airborne, and they said, there's trouble.

We had a great turnover, and they drove right into town, got killed, dismembered, burned, hung up on a bridge, international media showing it. And my whole military chain of command stood by me when I said, don't order us to attack a city with 350,000 innocent people and more terrorists than I have marines under this troop camp.

Let me get this tribal. We have tribes in there that don't like who did it. We have their pictures. We'll hunt them down. We'll kill every one of them with a targeted raid. We'll get the bodies back for their loved ones, to get them home, and that sort of thing.

But the political leadership said, no, you will attack Fallujah. So we did it. But here we had four contractors not checking in with the marines, just drawing a line. And we call them combat tourists. And they all had guns, and they all got themselves killed. And then we had hundreds of soldiers, sailors, and marines killed in charging into a city while we're still under troop caps.

You can see where this goes. Okay, so at certain points, you wanna say, this is the political end state, and that's what our leaders need to set. And then you give the military the means to finish it as rapidly as possible. All the means they need. Don't limit it.

Don't limit that in a limited war. Stephen.

>> Stephen Kotkin: Thank you. I've mismanaged the time here as my only duty. I failed to bring this to a responsible end.

>> Jim Mattis: We overran immediately.

>> Stephen Kotkin: We have a different form of warfare, far more kinetic, as our next panel. Universities and civic culture following immediately.

Part 6:

>> Stephen Haber: Good afternoon, everyone, let me invite you to the panel on civic culture and universities. I'm Steven Haber, I'm a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution as well as professor of political science and of history by courtesy of economics. I have the distinct pleasure this afternoon to moderate a panel, includes four people I deeply admire.

So, let me briefly introduce them to you and then pose some questions to them and we'll have a discussion. But I also wanna leave plenty of time, given the importance of this topic, and I know it's a topic about which many people in this audience have serious concerns about.

So, we'll leave plenty of time for discussion questions in the answer from the audience. On my far right is Anna Grzymala-Busse, she nodded at me because I almost always mispronounce her name and students in fact call her Anna GB. Because anyway, Anna Grzymala-Busse who is the Michelle and Kevin Douglas Professor of International Studies in the Department of Political Science at Stanford University, and a senior fellow by courtesy at the Hoover Institution.

Anna's research focuses on religion and politics, authoritarian political parties and their successors, the historical development of the state. She serves as director of the Europe Center and senior fellow at the Freeman's Spogli Institute, who's received Carnegie and Guggenheim Fellowships. And I will add a footnote to this, that she has been my partner in crime within Stanford University pushing back on, dare I say, policies and regulations that have infringed academic freedom.

And freedom of expression by the faculty and students, and so, thank you. To her left is Jonathan Holloway, who became the 21st president of Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, post he assumed in 2020. He previously served as provost of Northwestern University, and dean of Yale College.

Jonathan Scholarship is centered on post emancipation US history, with a focus on social and intellectual history. I don't know how you have time to do this as a university president, I put my hat off to you. He teaches a first-year course called citizenship institutions and the public for the Burns seminar program at Rutgers.

To his left is Josiah Ober, known affectionately to his friends as Josh, especially those who share his taste in Scotch, who is the Chair in honor of Constantine. He's professor of political science and classics who has recently become, I'm thrilled to say, a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution.

Josh is the faculty director of the Stanford Civics Initiative and played an instrumental role in developing Stanford's new first year course on citizenship in the 21st century. Topic of which I hope we'll have some time to talk about. His latest book, The Civic Bargain, How Democracy Survives, co-authored with Brooke Manville serves as a guide for democratic renewal, calling on citizens to recommit, to quote, a civic bargain with one another to guarantee civic rights of freedom, equality, and dignity.

Finally, to my immediate right is Keith Whittington, who is a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution and the William Nelson Cromwell professor of politics at Princeton University. Keith is a scholar of American politics and public law. In his recent book, Speak Freely, Why Universities Must Defend Free Speech, won the prose award for best book in education and the Heterodox Academy Award for exceptional scholarship.

Keith is the founding chair of the academic committee of the Academic Freedom Alliance and will be joining the faculty of the Yale Law School in 2024. Let me just then jump in, throw a question out, and we'll see how good things happen as smart people interact. So, trust in higher education within the US has plummeted in recent years.

No longer do a majority of independents or republicans have a good deal of confidence in higher education. And even among democrats, confidence has declined notably. So, first question, what do you think are the causes of this decline, and how does it relate to the challenges you see on campus?

So, chatted a bit beforehand, and Josh over generously agreed to get us started on an answer to this question. So Josh, the floor is yours.

>> Josian Ober: All right, thank you very much, Steve. And I just want to thank all of the organizers, Brandis, it's really a great thing to be able to talk about this topic here today.

So, I think this is a complicated story, but I see a few key things happening. If you think about the middle decades of the 20th century, university education especially in the state universities, was quite affordable. And universities still thought that an important part of what they did was offering education for citizens one way and another.

We had at Stanford a program called problems in citizenship in the earlier part of the 20th century that was replaced by a program in western civilization and so on. By the later 20th century, attending college became much more expensive, although also much more common, and at the same time, universities gave up on civic education pretty much entirely.

I think there's reasons for that, the rise of identity politics was part of it, made citizenship courses of any sort more fraught, and therefore risk adverse faculty and administrators were less willing to offer them. So meanwhile, by the last decade of the 21st century or the 20th century well, the end of history narrative had made civic education seem kind of quaint, why bother?

Liberal democracy is the wave of the future, there is nothing else. We don't need to teach people citizenship, it's just going to simply happen. And so, universities could once again abandon education for citizens. And as a result, ultimately the university just reduced to a very high cost and often not very effective training for jobs that sometimes don't eventuate.

This ultimately undercuts, I think the university's value proposition. You add in then, very high-profile incidents of students and faculty, let's just say, acting out in ways that most Americans find offensive. That is, not only are they not engaging in civic education, but they're engaging in education in incivility.

And given the background conditions, the collapse and trust in the higher education as an institution seems, at least to me, fairly explicable.

>> Jonatahan Holloway: I'll just add on a few thoughts, it's actually great and very surreal to be here. I was an undergrad here, and for 20-year-old Jonathan to even imagine this would be laughable, this, not this, sorry.

 

>> Jonatahan Holloway: But thinking about the question specifically, there's so many different dynamics going on. This one question could take up all of our time, frankly, I'll be very brief about it. I agree with everything that Josh presented, wanna add a few layers and caveats to it. Universities are supposed to move slowly, ideas take time, now different parts of the university are designed to move more quickly than others, we know that.

But broadly speaking, we move slowly, we deliberate, we ponder, we get things wrong, we sort of figure them out. A place like Stanford is like a super tanker, you change decision, but it's gonna take a very long time to actually feel the change in direction. So, that's just a pretty standard fact, that seems familiar if we don't all agree with it, at least.

But we are living in an age that is increasingly impatient, facilitated by technology, I say facilitated in a very loaded way, I must say. And so, we now have, and we all know that students expect things done right away, faculty wanna take longer. Administrators just drag their feet to continue these different stereotypes, but students can now expect things.

They can share their opinions and voices in the blink of an eye, and administrators are not trained to do that. Technologically we're not trained, and we shouldn't be responding that quickly, so we make errors in that way. So, you take these two very different kinds of moving extremes, and because I think higher ed, and I'll say myself, weave myself into being part of the guilty party, we have done a poor job of explaining.

We move slowly for a very principled reason, we wanna get it right. We wanna take very, very old ideas and take time to explain them to 18- and 19-year-olds, and it's hard to do so because they're really complicated ideas. And the 18- and 19-year-old, I'm oversimplifying for effect, of course, will just discard us, discard the request to be patient, because everything must be done yesterday.

You take that phenomenon at a major state university, you take the disinvestment from states in the higher education model. And the expectation we must still deliver a high-quality education at a cut rate price. You take all these dynamics, and I'm cutting out many other things I can talk about, and it becomes fundamentally unstable.

And the American public is not good at dealing with things that are unstable. Give the public one or two or three simple ideas, not that they can't handle complexity. But at the level of the university's complexity, we don't do a good job of making our story digestible. And one of the results is a declining investment, it's too hard to understand.

And why should we pay $50,000 a year, by the way? Not many people actually pay that, but why should you pay $50,000 a year for something I don't understand? And then last thing I'll say, and I'll be quiet, is that going to the point about education that may or may not eventuate into jobs?

Things are speeding up so quickly, we don't know what jobs we're training for, they don't exist yet. I'm on a board of a tech company dealing with academic integrity, Turnitin and ChatGPT, OpenAI ChatGPT was something a year ago, literally, it was saying two to three years, we got to deal with it.

ChatGPT dropped two weeks later and turned everything upside down. The speed of change is outstripping our ability to accommodate it, process it, deliberate it, and digest it into a simple idea. And I'm very nervous about the consequences.

>> Stephen Haber: So, I wonder if I can build, okay, Keith, go ahead.

 

>> Keith Whittington: Sorry, I just wanted briefly, I endorse all this, but I want to pick up on a point that Josh made at the end of what he was noting. Which is one of the striking things about the loss of confidence in universities is that especially among Conservative Americans, Republican leading Americans.

There's just a crash of confidence that occurs quite recently. So, if you went back ten years ago, you would not have seen that same kind of parson divide. But over the last five years or so ago, Republicans in particular, have dramatically lost confidence in American universities. I think partially it is a function of the fact that they see people on university campuses acting out, as you characterized it, in ways they had not before.

I think partially the rise of social media and all the implications of that have changed the dynamic about how Americans understand what's happening on university campuses cuz they see it differently than they previously did. But it's also true that the campus has grown dramatically leftward over time. Campuses have always leaned to some degree, but I think all the data suggests over the last 20 years or so.

The university faculty have migrated dramatically more leftward than they have been before. Campus administrators have gravitated far more leftward and become much more prominent than they were before. I think it's gonna be hard to recover a lot of Conservative American trust in higher education, given that reality and given how they're being exposed to it.

There's a lot of ecosystems of university watchdogs and others who have a lot of interest in bringing to, especially Conservatives' attention. Every bad thing that happens on university campuses. And it's going to be hard to counter that, I think ultimately, when no matter what we say about the value of what we're contributing on university campuses, there's going to be others who have an incentive to say.

Yeah, they say that, but let me show you the most ridiculous, crazy thing that's occurring on campus. And tell you then that's representative of everything that's happening across American higher education as a whole.

>> Stephen Haber: So, let me sort of build on sort of a theme that sort of emerged, which is this sort of an underlying idea that there's a purpose to American higher education.

And ask, okay, so what is the purpose and what does it have to do with civic culture? Because we're dancing around, okay, so what's the purpose? Anna am I picking up that you, that was a yes, I'll go there.

>> Anna Grzymala-Busse: No, I'm staring in fear.

>> Anna Grzymala-Busse: No, I think it's very simple, right?

Our role is to produce and disseminate knowledge, that's our lane, that's where we should be sticking. And it's to model debate and resolving disagreement that's based on logic and evidence, not appeals to authority or identity or anything else. And I think this gets back to what we were talking about just a few minutes ago.

That's part of the reason why there's this loss of trust, a lot of institutions are losing trust. But for universities, I think it's because we're not staying in our lane, and we engage in all kinds of auxiliary activities that aren't seen as core to that mission.

>> Josian Ober: I would just add that I think that universities, at least traditionally, and I think a lot of people, myself I assume a lot of parents still expect that their students are going to be getting something besides, as it were, effective job training.

And they'll be doing something that helps them not only to enter the job market four years down or whenever it is, but also to live better lives, to live better lives as individuals and to live better lives as members of their communities. And if they're not getting that, once again, I think that is seen as a loss, is seen as something that's missing.

 

>> Jonatahan Holloway: If I could jump in there, and I would have absolutely agreed with you until I went to Rutgers. I mean, having been at elite private universities for my academic career, that sensibility, totally understand it. But at a place like Rutgers University, which represents more of higher ed than the Ivy Plus does, which is the place I called home.

40% of our students are first generation or low income, and it's overlapping, that's close enough. So, the notion of what is college worth is really about return on investment in a way that was new to me, I must confess, when I started. And I've never been at a university until now, where there's a department of criminology that's actually playing a very important role.

I've not been in a school before that has majors in accounting, also a very important role, and doing all the, what I'll call high level research one activities. So, one of the things we need to really think about when we're having these conversations about universities is which universities, what types of universities?

Because the Ivy Plus represent a very small percentage, but they carry the cultural weight of the industry. And that leads to some things that are a little out of balance. This is not really a critique, like I said, until three years ago, everything you said made complete sense, I'm just adding a layer of complexity to it.

And I think that's one of the challenges, is that a very small percentage of people who go into higher ed are gonna be attending highly selective universities, private or public, most aren't. They're gonna be in places where there's a much broader general education, and it is about how can you add to the family coffer to keep the roof over the head?

And so, there's a way in which higher ed does not talk directly to that population in a way that I think is effective. And I've been absolutely guilty of that myself. And I've been learning as I'm going that we need to develop more robust ways to bring everybody into the conversation, not easy.

 

>> Josian Ober: Can I just-

>> Stephen Haber: Can we let Keith in, and then, Josh, you respond. But I wanna give Keith.

>> Keith Whittington: Yeah, I just say, as a product of the University of Texas, I fully appreciate the difference that exists between, I think places like where I'm currently teaching at Princeton and places where I came from, like University of Texas.

I was in the business school as a major there, certainly part of what the significant reason why I went to college was precisely in order to establish a more successful middle-class life. And so, that value proposition of why you're going in part as precisely prepares students for a capacity to have a better economic position down the road.

And it's certainly true, I think not only is that important aspect of what universities do in American society more broadly. But it's also something that I think is easily ignored in our cultural conversation about universities. It is certainly true, I think, that the Ivy League schools and the like are the ones that carry a lot more cultural weight in terms of how people think about higher education.

People don't notice as much what's happening on the vast swath of university campuses. And often the story there, I think, would be more appealing, to most Americans than the story that they see in the news about what's happening at the most elite institutions. Because a lot of the state universities across the country, things are progressing in a somewhat more stable and secure way.

There's less acting out in this fashion, and they see more first-generation students and others who are simply going to classes and learning and getting things done. And I think partially higher education as an industry needs to think more about how we spotlight those success stories and those features of higher education and take some of the attention off of these most visible political conflicts that we're sometimes seeing on some of the most elite, but also smallest campuses.

 

>> Josian Ober: So, just my grace note on this is my undergraduate education was University of Minnesota, so Texas. And then I went to graduate school at Michigan and taught then for ten years at Montana State University. And certainly, a lot of what Jonathan's talking about is true, but it wasn't true all the way down.

I mean, the idea was it wasn't just that you were there for job training, I remember one of my students at Montana State who had taken not only my basic western Civ class, but then a more advanced class with me. And I knew the guy was from a ranch, he was gonna be going back to the ranch.

I said, why are you taking this? And he said, well, my dad, and you have to do this with a proper Montana accent, which means you had back in the day sort of a plug of tobacco talking about that literally. And this was absolutely true, anyway, he said my dad said, well son, you go up there to the university and you're going to take those ag classes, and you've got to do that.

You've gotta know how to run the ranch, I mean, it's a business. He said, but son, you've gotta take some other stuff to, because if you're spending all winter up here on the ranch, and all you can read is a seed catalog, you're gonna go nuts.

>> Josian Ober: And so, I thought that sort of encapsulated something.

There's supposed to be something else, and at least that father of that son, I think maybe that is still there in at least some of our-

>> Jonatahan Holloway: It absolutely is, I was just adding another.

>> Josian Ober: Absolutely, yeah.

>> Stephen Haber: I wonder if, as moderator, I could sort of push us a bit on this.

So, I'll have to review a bit of, since Josh has talked about personal history, I'll talk about a little of mine. So, I was what is now referred to as a low-income, first-generation student. Back when I went to college, I was just known as poor, and I remember this remarkable moment sitting in the person who became my advisor's office.

We're still in contact to this day, given all my gray hair, you can imagine how elderly he is. But we still have dinner twice a year, and I remember just being blown away by the fact that his job was that he read books. And then he talked to me about them, and he would give me stacks of books to read, and I would go read them, and I'd come back, and we would talk about what parts of the books held water.

That is, what stood up to evidence and reason, and what didn't. And it was in that interaction I realized, wow, there is this important role for universities to teach students how to separate out claims that are demonstrably false from those that may be true. And so, one of the things that strikes me, and it started with Anna's, she talks about staying in her lane, doing research, disseminating, and then faculty doing other things, and the other things undefined.

Have we, as faculty, gotten away from the truth business? Is that part of the problem? And teaching students that that's why we're here, and I'm gonna go a little further. I remember engaging our provost, our past provost a couple years ago on this, and she said, well, I want all students to be activists.

And I said, no, I think that's wrong, we should want all students to be scientists. So, I wonder, have we, I want to put this on us. Have we abdicated our job of being in the truth business? That is there is a problem, part of the problem, the faculty.

 

>> Anna Grzymala-Busse: I don't think we have, I think nearly every faculty member I know profoundly cares about both research and pedagogy, that's why we're here. I think the pressure comes from other places, right, I think there's new disciplines with very different standards for what constitutes knowledge. I think something we haven't talked about is the corporatization of the university and the way in which there's kind of a wholesale importation of high-level administrators from the corporate world who impose speech codes.

Apply the wrong kinds of standards to policing events, who want to eliminate risk at every possibility. And that also creates a very different atmosphere for the pursuit of knowledge and people sort of holding back and not saying things when maybe they should. And I don't mean to suggest that as citizens, of course, we should engage in whatever political activists in free speech we want to.

I just don't think that this is a line to walk here whereas researchers and as pedagogues, that's not what we should be transmitting in the classroom. But again, I just don't think that most faculty, I mean, everyone I know profoundly cares about truth and wants to do the best job they can to teach students how to think, not what to think.

But I think there are pressures that come from elsewhere that might be responsible.

>> Jonatahan Holloway: If I could build on that, I do agree, I have two email inboxes. I think every university president does, the president's one and the private one. I don't know how to access the president's one, and by design.

So, by design, I cannot send a message to the community. We all hear these stories of, in a fit of passion, you say something, and that's a former president.

>> Jonatahan Holloway: But on Saturday, I was enjoying a quiet day, such as they are, and then got a couple of alerts.

And then one of my executive assistants says, we'll talk about this on Monday. Like, that's not good, she was trying to preserve me for the weekend. What happened on Saturday was 8000 emails came into the president's inbox, it's now over 10,000. In fact, I've been sitting in the back, moved cuz they now have my personal email address, not fun.

And I've been moving things out, and this goes to the issues of truth or speech codes they are all about, and it's copy and paste. So, I've really received one email, but it's copy and paste about a seminar that had been planned at least nine months ago, the last session of which features some scholars.

I would call at least one of them a provocateur, but that's part of the dynamics of the university faculty. But on Palestine liberation struggles, the number of emails, well, I told you, 10,000 emails telling me to cancel it. Now, of course, that's violation of academic norms, freedom of expression.

It's also bad administrating, because if I were to cancel it, it become the news you would all know about. It's the last thing I wanna do, even if I found the ideas repugnant, I would not be canceling these things. The irony is, at my freshman convocation this year, I told the 8000 freshmen at New Brunswick campus in a speech called listening, it was about academic freedom.

Like, we are really good at talking in this country, we are horrible at listening in this country, and we need to do both. And the university is there to teach us how to listen and judge, make decisions, weigh evidence, dealing with truth, seeking it. And boy, have we gotten bad at that, the we, as society, and the expectations facilitated by cut and paste activism is that in this case, a president can actually shut everything down.

A president should not be shutting everything down, this is the whole point of our exercise.

>> Stephen Haber: Let me sort of pursue this a minute, and sort of drill down a bit into what we do as faculty, and that has to do with the place where we most commonly come into contact with students, which is in the classroom.

So, what are your reviews? The biggest challenges within the classroom, and connected to that, what are the biggest challenges in curriculum, and what should we do about it?

>> Josian Ober: Well, I would say that the biggest challenge, I think, that we're all facing is really enabling and advancing really serious discussion among students who have different points of view and doing so in a way that is civil and respectful, I take it that's essential to the advancing the search for truth.

It's essential for whatever sort of liberal education we imagine that we're giving them, and it is genuinely difficult. I think it is possible to develop new curricula that do in fact, do this. At Stanford, we have successfully inaugurated a program, new three-quarter freshman sequence, now taken by all freshmen.

They currently need to take two of the three, soon they'll be taking three of the three quarters. The first one is called why college? What are you doing here besides becoming a good computer programmer, which of course at Stanford is what you're doing. The second one is the one I've spent most time and energy on that may be most salient to this conversation, is called citizenship in the 21st century, in which we try to introduce them to the idea that being a democratic citizen, or being a citizen in a democratic country is not an easy thing.

It entails both rights, but also responsibilities, it's difficult because collective action is difficult without somebody giving you orders. And a democratic society assumes that in the end, there isn't any final boss giving you orders, we found that it actually can be done. I was very excited to basically get this thing going, I worried that in the end, because it is now a mandatory course, or part of a mandatory sequence, that students would hate it.

At least our preliminary result is they don't, they're giving it high marks. So, what we're now trying to do is find out ways to develop a series of more advanced courses. So, that students who begin to care about being an effective member of a community, being a citizen, can take courses that would be laddered through the rest of their years here at Stanford.

Perhaps get a certificate of some sort at the end, effective citizenship, and in the meanwhile, trying to have conversations with people at other universities, especially public universities, cuz after all, we are a small and elite operation here. We have to expand this out, trying to think about ways in which we might, at a national level, have a sort of general set of principles that could be widely accepted by faculty, not imposed from above.

But widely accepted by faculty, and yet would allow a great deal of flexibility between states, between regions, between college and university types, to deliver education for citizens in ways that were locally appropriate. And yet somehow have some umbrella conception of, yes, we're doing something in common. So, I think it is possible, it's difficult, I think it's the most difficult thing at the moment, but also the most important thing we can be doing as university faculty and administrators.

 

>> Stephen Haber: Anna.

>> Anna Grzymala-Busse: I think you know it's also we get trained in human subjects' rules and in sexual harassment and in financial responsibility. I think it would be great if we could be trained to conduct and facilitate difficult conversations, because as a student body gets more diverse and has such different viewpoints, sometimes it's hard to manage those conversations in a way that still stays within the boundaries of civil exchanges.

And I think the other thing I would say is that for the students, what I keep finding is that there's such a loss of trust. They've sort of lost faith in the faculty being able to conduct these conversations, and they've lost faith in each other. And so, it's very hard for them to have these tough conversations without sort of the fear of recrimination or repercussions, or having their name pasted all over TikTok in the next few hours.

So, I think both the faculty and the students I think, have a job ahead of them.

>> Stephen Haber: So, I wanna build on this, if I could, first for a second, because there is a problem of loss of trust, but it goes two ways. So, we're all sort of quite senior people, and so, university administrators tangle with gray-haired faculty of a certain standing at their own peril, especially those who have lawyers on speed dial.

But for younger faculty, there's a real fear, and it's a fear of the students, because the basics, the economics of our industry is that you get ahead by having other universities seek you out, offer you better conditions than you. So, you may not know this, but when you start as an assistant professor at Stanford, you get a dollar and all the brown rice you can eat.

And as a former dean, I can tell you this, the only way that you get to move out of a garage is that University of Chicago calls you up one day and says, we're gonna triple your salary. And their fear is that if there are complaints about them and they're investigated by their own universities, that this is going to kill any hope of ever moving out of the garage.

So, there's a problem going in both directions, and so, I guess my first question is am I diagnosing this part of the problem correctly, that there's now fear on both sides? And if so, what do we do about that.

>> Jonatahan Holloway: Well, I see where you're going, I do think more junior faculty are a bit more tuned in to all the dynamics of a demographically changing undergraduate population, and so are a little more depth with technology and therefore maybe more aware of the bad sides of it.

But my experience has been that they've been much more willing to do the training or suggest, hey, we should do new kinds of training, because we just have this whole different population, we wanna look to the skills. But it's the classic challenge of the faculty who need it most, this is just endemic, right, are the ones who just aren't gonna do it.

So, I think there's that to it also, but the social media thing, it can do wonderful, transformative, powerful, and affirmative things, yes. But my goodness, most of it I find really quite toxic and quite destructive, and Josh, in his most recent book, I'm boosting you-

>> Jonatahan Holloway: This beautiful phrase about civic friendship, and that really stuck with me.

And it's an amorphous concept, I feel like I got it right away because I'm of a certain generation where it just made sense to me. I really worry about the tangibility of something like civic friendship, which means we may really disagree with each other, we may not like the thing you said, but we actually recognize we have something in common.

That's a really hard thing to do today when everything is particularized algorithmically to what you represent in bits and bots.

>> Keith Whittington: So, part of what you suggest about sort of the fear that some faculty are living in in our current environment, and that it's a consequence of the ways of which it affects people's teaching.

I've certainly encountered a lot of that with the work I've done with the Academic Freedom Alliance over the last few years. One thing I've been very struck by in that regard is I have not found that senior faculty are not so concerned about it because they have tenure protections.

They have lawyers on speed dial and the like. Instead, I find a tremendous number of senior faculty who feel like they're walking on eggshells. And don't find teaching in the university fun in the way that it once was, precisely because they're afraid of their own students, afraid that they'll say something wrong, that students will weaponize something that they've said.

And moreover, there is now a campus bureaucracy of administrators who are designed to respond to those kind of student complaints in order to investigate and discipline faculty. And often have a completely different sensibility about the nature of academic freedom and what faculty ought to be doing in the classroom.

Younger faculty certainly feel that as well. But I don't think it's just the case that only the youngest of faculty feel it. It's also worth bearing in mind, of course, that there's an extraordinary number of contingent faculty out there who are working class by class, semester by semester, who don't enjoy tenure protections at all, are not worried about do I get the call from University of Chicago and can increase my salary, but instead concerned about will I be allowed to teach again next semester?

And those people are extraordinarily vulnerable to these kinds of complaints and often will get not only yanked out of the classroom, but fired in the middle of a semester if students are complaining about them to administrators. And unfortunately, some of these state legislatures, such as Florida, are thinking from a conservative direction, not just a pushing back against that, but adding a whole new layer of bureaucracy, surveillance, and potential discipline of faculty from a different perspective about what kinds of concerns about what they're teaching.

But it makes the environment of teaching in a classroom extraordinarily toxic. And I think there's a tremendous number of university faculty that are pre depressed about what the current situation looks like as a consequence.

>> Stephen Haber: Anna, you wanna jump in?

>> Anna Grzymala-Busse: I just wanted to, first of all, underscore very much the precarity of contingent faculty, and they're far more vulnerable than any faculty member, tenure or untenured the university is.

So, very much want to underscore that. The second thing is that when we talk about these bureaucrats who come in and start investigating, a lot of them have no sort of training in what academic freedom or free speech is. They're not academics, this is not faculty governance. They're imported from jobs in the corporate world.

And so, their sort of natural reaction is to eliminate harm. And that means going after any accusation and pursuing it to the full rather than thinking about it in terms of academic freedom or people making mistakes and being allowed to apologize and move on. And so again, I think this is of a plea for more faculty governance and less corporate rules.

 

>> Stephen Haber: I wanna move on, but one thing I think important for the audience to understand is that this problem is so large. So, my staff and I did a study on how common these sorts of websites that universities have created for students to inform on each other and inform on faculty are.

So, we did a study, the top 100 ranked universities in the United States, 84% have systems to report on other students or on faculty for something that they might have said. These are not, I want to underline, these are not judicial, because something that is illegal cannot go through these systems, right?

So, we're not talking about sexual harassment, we're not talking about criminal activity, we're just talking about things that make people feel harmed. And I want to underline, feel harmed with mostly speech. And then amazingly, 82% of those 84 allow the reporting to be anonymous. Let me move on, because one of the places that we all, as academics, I want to say we all cuz I know that Jonathan, as a university president, has a much bigger portfolio in terms of engaging students and then the public.

But speaking as a faculty member with a lawyer on speed dial, I'm not joking. We come into, faculty tend to come into contact with students in the classroom. But the students actually, that's a small part of the reality of life or the experience of being at college, and of everything you should get from being at college.

And there's this whole world beyond the classroom. And so, I guess my question is, what do you think are the biggest, what do we think, or individually. What we think we can bounce off each other are the biggest challenges outside the classroom in terms of what kind of world the students should be experiencing and what can we do about it?

 

>> Josian Ober: I think Jonathan really brought up one of the key things, and that is the world of social media, the internet, broadly so construed. And I think one of the worries I have is that at least when I was a young faculty member, there was at least some sense of a buffer between the world and the university, between the society out there and what we were doing in here.

Obviously, the buffer was never complete. There was not a bright line, but still in all, it wasn't just an immediate response. I think now there is simply no buffer at all, what happened? Jonathan's 10,000 emails happening boom overnight. And it's because of things happening outside the university are suddenly reflected by things going on inside the university.

A seminar about the topics that people don't like, and I worry that this is then something that even becomes potentiated within the university so that the hot button issues outside immediately come inside, and they get hotter. Because the students and faculty by nature are in a sense in a kind of a hothouse, have a certain amount of time to respond to things.

There's a certain incentive, I think, for student groups. Perhaps some faculty as well to feel that it would be great to get provocateur on campus because that gets them more play. And the provocateurs get more provocative because that gets them more play. And so, things begin to build up, and so instead of the university being sort of a space that is at least a little bit outside the world.

It becomes a place where the world becomes that much hotter, more exciting, but not in a good way that allows for real dialogue.

>> Stephen Haber: I think that's true, but I think there's a further wrinkle to it as well. Partially this sort of lack of space between the outside world and the inside world of universities helps explain, in part.

This sort of weird phenomenon that we're seeing lately of student protesters on campus being extraordinarily angry when anyone tries to film them engaging in their public protest. And it's precisely because they see that as a threat, because it will feed into this larger social media world. And next thing you know, the students are gonna be at the receiving end of the 10,000 hateful emails precisely because you have people mobilizing that kind of concern.

I have to admit that as a faculty member, I assiduously tried to avoid anything about student life and tried to pretend like it didn't exist. But my daughter just recently graduated college, and so I was instantly exposed to it in all its glory. And one of the things I was surprised by, was not only to the extent to which this factor is true for students today, but also the extent to which internal university communications are adding pressure.

So, immediately upon entering college, she's put on a tremendous number of direct message and text lists in which she's communicating with all the freshmen class. Everybody in her dorm, everybody on her wing of the dorm, all the students in the university more generally. And those things are constantly communicating with one another and moreover, constantly reporting on one another.

This student said something in this class, and not only are you worried about what's gonna happen when that gets exposed to the outside world. But more immediately, you're concerned about everyone in my dorm is now going to be informed about this stupid thing I said in class today.

So, it's impossible to escape, and it is extraordinarily poisonous for both the academic enterprise of universities, but also makes life very unpleasant, I think, for students as a consequence.

>> Jonatahan Holloway: Yes, to all of everything you said, years ago when I was dean of Yale College, there's a big conflagration on campus.

It was bigger off campus than on campus, and alumni came back for a regularly scheduled event, and the alumni were really worked up about all of this stuff. I'm like, I get why you're angry, I understand that, but think about when you were 18 and 19 years old.

You all did dumb things, you're supposed to when you're 18 or 19, but you didn't have cameras. And so, as much as I was frustrated by the way the students were behaving, also felt empathetic. Because they're living in a world, I would never want to go to college with self-declared journalists, always living in a panopticon, basically, that does damage to civic culture, to the Abi, we should all be able to make mistakes.

That's what college is for, so we can actually learn and be better, and I don't know how to get out of it. So, it's a very serious lament, but I do want to extend some grace to the people who drive me craziest on campus, but not extend the grace to those who are outside here whipping things up.

 

>> Stephen Haber: So, I think this may be a really good point because I felt like the temperature in our group sort of progressively going up over the last 45 minutes, and then reading the body language of the audience. I think this would be a really good point for us to open things up and take questions or comments from the audience.

So, the floor is open, ma'am, right here.

>> Speaker 6: Thank you all, this probably is the most intereting topic for me, and the reason is I have four children, two of whom have already graduated from college, and one is applying to college this year. And my concern has been that in college campuses, there's no longer any academic freedom to freely debate, exchange ideas, or even encourage, to think critically.

And what I'm hearing from the panelists today is that even among the faculty members, there's fear of exchanging ideas or even interacting with students in a free manner. So, who's the adult in the room, and how do we lead our students, our children, to learn what they're supposed to in the higher institution of education?

And I have a second question, which is about corporatizing universities, what is driving it, and in your view, if there was no corporatization and, you know, governance by faculty, would that make any difference?

>> Stephen Haber: Josh.

>> Josian Ober: To your question of who's the adult in the room, we are, we must be.

We, the faculty, must be, we the serious administrators, must be. And I think this is a moment when there's a general sense among the faculty I talk with anyway, that things have really come to a point of crisis and that it's time to make a difference. This is what really made possible the creation of the civics initiative that I direct.

I got a lot of buy-in from my fellow faculty, from the Stanford administration because there was a sense that wasn't a partisan thing. This isn't a left right thing, this was just a general sense that we need to be doing something about it. And so, that's why we created the citizenship class, that's why we have the initiative to create more advanced classes that are all specifically designed to do exactly this thing, to allow for civil, respectful discourse, even in the face of all of the headwinds that we face.

I think that there is a lot of desire in the universe, the higher education world, to address this, and I think there is a real chance now to do it. It is a sense of crisis, but crisis is, of course, opportunity. And I think this is a point in which we could see a tipping point to beginning to address the crisis exactly how we're going to do it.

That's gonna be tricky, and that's not gonna be one size fits all, but without the will on the part of the faculty, it will not be addressed. And I think that there is increasingly the frustration that faculty are feeling about being in this sort of position, is creating that kind of beginning to rebuild that backbone.

To say it's time to try to address this and try to spend a lot of the sort of energy and truth-seeking, the things that we do, to aim it at this end, to try to recapture.

>> Jonatahan Holloway: So, I feel like, I'm Josh's wingman here, always saying add a wrinkle.

And the wrinkle is, I agree, it has to come from the faculty, people think that presidents run universities. We manage the real initiatives really come through the faculty, appropriately so. And this is a bridge to the corporatization element, which I'm looking towards you since you raised it. But in this case, in this instance, the presidents are right in the middle because we are trying to hopefully cultivate a great faculty.

Not necessarily manage, but cultivate, right, but we are definitely trying to manage boards, and I'll give one quick example. And in an era of hyper politicization, going back to our lunchtime panel about primaries and how that's leading to disaggregation of how we talk to one another, our ability to do so.

COVID vaccinations, and this is, okay, I'll boast that Rutgers was the first university to require student vaccinations. We weren't trying to be, we just were the first one to do so, but of course, we leaned into it when that became newsworthy. But my peers, especially at public universities, were reaching out, how did you do it?

Other presidents, we know this is the right thing to do, but how did you get it past your board? I'm like, well, I've actually got a supportive board, and there's a loophole in New Jersey law that allowed us to do it. But what I heard from my peers was, I want to do it, but my board chair says no, or my governor says no, or the senator says no.

And the president's job is to protect the university, which means staying in the job in these cases. And then the external factors, superior factors, governors, legislators, board members, such as state schools, are saying, if you do this, we will remove you and will put somebody else in place.

And we've seen it happen, especially in the free speech area, we've seen it happen. And so, we presidents are in a very kind of a lose situation on this kind of issue, from these corporatizing, no-risk board environments to a helpfully volatile learning environment. And we're just in the middle trying to navigate it.

One thing I'll just add real quickly, and I'll be quick, is that there is freedom of speech on campus and people wanna have it, but it is more and more contested. It's just, it's more and more fraught, it is there, if it wasn't there, I wouldn't have 10,000 emails in my inbox, but it's there.

It's just, it is getting harder for people to stand up to do so, and that's where presidents do have an obligation to stand up and say the show will go on in the case.

>> Stephen Haber: I see a hand here, ma'am?

>> Speaker 7: I hope this question won't make me sound like this skunk at the garden party, but I do have to inquire.

Since we all know that most faculty at our universities are on one certain side of the political spectrum, are they going to have the objectivity to be impartial about attempting to improve the free speech opportunities for the very much smaller segment who are on the other side of the political spectrum?

And I'm not questioning their integrity or their good intentions, but just as a human being with certain biases.

>> Stephen Haber: I'm happy to, unless Keith, you wanna go, I'm happy to take it.

>> Keith Whittington: I'm happy to jump in, at least, I think there's a lot of support across faculty, across the divide, ideological and political divide on this issue.

I know there have been a tremendous number of faculty, as Josh suggested, who think we're sort of in a crisis point. They've seen a lot of activity, and that's true in this broad area, but also in this free speech area in particular, there's a lot of faculties who are very embarrassed by some of the things they've seen on university campuses and realize that can't continue.

And so, it's still a struggle as to how do you do it very effectively. There certainly is a component of the faculty, I think, are quite hostile to what I think of as very important principles of free speech and academic freedom. But I think there is still, at the moment, at least a broad sub basis of support that can be leveraged, just like, make some progress, but I do worry 10,15 years from now that might not be so true.

 

>> Stephen Haber: So, a topic about which I've given some thought and comes out of my own experience here at Stanford, working in large part with Anna. One of the things that's really impressed me about the coalition that has formed to defend academic freedom and freedom of expression is it's a coalition of the center left and the center right.

Because the greatest threat, the faculty members who are most under threat are not people like me, they're my colleagues on the center left who are going to be assaulted by the far left. And so, there's been a realization, even though we may disagree about all kinds of things in politics.

I think there's been a realization that the university is something we love, we devoted our professional lives to something, and we're watching it be destroyed. And there's therefore a coalition of both, what I'd call the sane left and the sane right, that have come together. Because one of the great things about the United States is it's built on markets, and there's a market for sanity, and that the supply curve sort of to meet that market it has been emerging from.

It's a coalition that you wouldn't have imagined, let's say, ten years ago. The other thing that's happening that gives me hope is that because it's now become a generalized understanding, I think, in the society, that something's deeply wrong. Parents are actively looking for alternatives to where their children can go, where they can actually receive an education.

And there are university leaderships that have emerged that see a market opportunity. So, one of my favorite examples of this is Vanderbilt, with Daniel Dietmeier as president. Another is Chapman University, where they realize there's a market opportunity for us, it's not happening, let's say, in the Ivy Pluses, because they're the big incumbents.

But the sort of disruption in this market has been coming, let's say, at the next tier down. Where they say, well, there's an opportunity for us to catapult ourselves into the top tier by appealing to the market for sensibleness, put it that way. We probably have time for more questions, Miss here, I apologize if we will not get to everybody.

 

>> Speaker 8: Hi, my question is, faculty have beliefs, they're people, they have their own beliefs. Do you think it's better for them to be upfront with students and say, this is what I believe, or this is my political affiliation, or do you think it's better for them to try to remain neutral and not let students know what their political affiliation is?

And yeah, what should they do about that in classes?

>> Jonatahan Holloway: I think it depends on the topic, I prefer they keep their private life private, frankly, and teach material. I have very strong political opinions, they are irrelevant to my presidency as far as I'm concerned. Sure, they'll guide me, of course, I'm human, but they're irrelevant, and I would think faculty should operate the same way, but it depends on what you're teaching.

There are sometimes where you're gonna get into great areas, some topics, but I think a great teaching model is like Socratic method, devil's advocate. Keep them guessing, cuz the point is you wanna hear their ideas in this way, you wanna help the students form their ideas. I'm not saying that very well, but not push your ideas from an ideological perspective down.

 

>> Josian Ober: I think that one way to think about this is that today, diversity is one of the big terms that every university embraces. But what's sort of fallen out of the idea of diversity is something that I think no good hearted, decent faculty member would reject, and that is the importance of diversity of viewpoint.

So, that to the extent to which a faculty member who's teaching any kind of controversial material offers only his or her own viewpoint. That faculty member is really violating the implicit contract between teacher and student. And so, that offering a diversity of viewpoint and for a university to offer courses which have an overall diversity of viewpoints seems to me to be something that it's very hard to make an intellectual argument against.

I've never heard anybody come up and actually make the argument that my right way of thinking should be the only way to be, I mean, I'm sure that it has happened.

>> Stephen Haber: I know I'll arrange a drink.

>> Josian Ober: But is something that can't really be presented in any kind of really sustained and reasonable argument kind of context.

 

>> Stephen Haber: That'll concede. I am mindful of the time, and I realize there are many hands, and I'm gonna apologize that we don't have time for all the questions. But we do have a break, and I hope that many of us can continue this informally over the break, but I am mindful that there's more to come today, and that we are already running behind.

So, let me thank my colleagues.

>> Stephen Haber: And let me also close by thanking Brandis Keynes Roan and Condi Rice, both for the American Institutions Initiative, but also for this panel, the American Institutions Initiative. I dare say this is not a panel that would take place at many places in a higher education I know, we're close to Thanksgiving, so let me say thank you to Brandis and thank you to Condi for creating the kind of environment in which we could have with you all.

This kind of discussion about the real challenges to civic culture and higher education, thank you all very much.

Part 7:

>> Sarah Anzia: It's really such an honor to be here and be part of this amazing conference. And it's an enormous honor to be asked to moderate a panel on elections, which is among all of the important topics we've discussed today, at least among the most important. Political scientists have a lot of different ways of defining democracy.

What that means, is it that makes a country a democracy or more democratic or less? But at the heart of even the simplest definition of democracy are elections. There are so many ways a person or a group can participate and try to influence politics and policy, but the primary way in which we seek to ensure that the people govern and ensure some equality of participation is through elections and through the design of our electoral institutions.

And yet, as it stands now, Americans trust in elections has declined considerably in the last couple of decades. Their confidence in that their own vote, or that the votes of the American people will be counted properly is down significantly compared to 20 to 25 years ago. And we have candidates and elected officials who are telling people that the system is rigged to.

So what does this tell us about american democracy and what can and should be done about it? That's our topic for this final panel. We have four terrific panelists to discuss their work with us and their experiences today. And I just want to introduce myself, I'm Sarah Anzia.

I'm a visiting fellow here at the Hoover Institution this year and a faculty member at the University of California, Berkeley at the School of Public Policy and the political science department. And I'm going to be moderating, and I'm just so thrilled to introduce these terrific panelists. First is Ben Ginsberg, who is the Volcker distinguished visiting fellow at Hoover Institution.

Ben is a political law advocate whose work is focused on election law and regulatory issues, including voting issues and elections, federal and state campaign finance laws, recounts and contests, government investigations, election administration, and redistricting. He's represented four of the last six republican presidential nominees and has served as co chair of the bipartisan Presidential Commission on Election Administration.

Ben has held teaching appointments at Stanford, Harvard, and Georgetown, welcome. Professor Justin Grimmer is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Morris M. Doyle Centennial professor of public policy in the Department of political science at Stanford University. Justin's research focuses on american political institutions, elections, and developing new machine learning methods for the study of politics.

Some of his recent projects focus on voter fraud claims in the 2020 election and subsequent elections, and on understanding the impacts of election law on voter turnout and election results. And he serves as co director of the Democracy and polarization Lab at Stanford. We also welcome Lieutenant Governor Deidre Henderson, who is Utah's 9th lieutenant governor, serving as the beehive state's second highest elected official, chief election officer, and secretary of state.

Prior to being elected to the lieutenant governor role, Deidre served eight years in the Utah Senate representing South Utah County. She has built a reputation as a strong conservative and champion of women and families. And last but not least, Professor Rob Willer is a professor of sociology here at Stanford University and is director of the Polarization and Social Change Lab and co director of the center on Philanthropy and Civil Society.

Rob studies politics, morality, cooperation and status. He led the Stanford Democracy Challenge, which brought academics, practitioners, and industry experts together in a collective effort to identify effective interventions to improve Americans commitment to democratic principles of political engagement. Thanks, Rob. So I'm gonna start with a question for each of you individually, and I'll start with Ben.

So, Ben, a lot of your work for the improving American elections initiative, I wanna ask about that. Has been studying what you refer to as myths, myths in the political process that both political parties use, whether it's suppression or fraud, to form their electoral strategies. Can you discuss some of those and talk about how fraud suppression, these claims underlie the parties get out the vote programs?

And how has this been, and has it been a factor in increasing polarization and skepticism about the integrity of elections?

>> Ben Ginsberg: Thank you, Sarah, and thank you for putting on this terrific program today. And I'm really excited to be on this panel with these great folks to talk about this really important election.

Much of what we're doing at Hoover is looking at elections, especially in the context of the increased polarization in the country and figuring out exactly how our elections, a trusted institution, has come under so much fire and what can be done about it. The polarization that animates the country is obviously a huge factor in this debate over what's happening with elections today.

And just as a general starting point in the studies, the notion that 35% of the country today does not have faith in the reliability of our elections is, I'd submit, pretty unsustainable for the country and needs to be improved. And that's not a partisan statement, it would affect the ability to govern of a Democratic candidate if he's elected, but it certainly would a Republican candidate as well.

Because the toothpaste is a little bit out of the tube on this issue if distrust in the institution remains so high. So how can you improve trust in the institution? Well, I practiced election law for 40 years, pretty much in the trenches of republican candidates. And what Hoover and Rai has done is allow me to step back and look a little bit at why there is such a lack of faith in elections.

And I think, in all honesty, part of that is because of many of the myths that do undergird both parties sort of positions on things. And the rhetoric around those myths has become so poisonous that on each side it has lessened public faith in elections. When Republicans say elections are fraudulent, people lose faith in elections.

When Democrats say there's suppression, not everybody can vote, our elections aren't really free because of that lack of voting, you've got to have evidence, no matter who you are, to be able to prove a statement like that that reduces confidence. And that's what's lacking. So what we're trying to do is to look at those myths.

Myth number one is the model that each party uses for turnout. Republicans say there's fraud, and you got to go out and vote to stop fraud. Democrats say, there's suppression, you have to go out and vote to affect suppression. There is painfully little evidence of each to justify the temperature of the rhetoric that's taking place.

So we're looking at studies of both fraud and suppression in the Examples, the rhetoric that's used, and in part on what really is a fraud suppression industrial complex these days. That there is a whole class of consultants and nonprofit groups who are vested in this turnout model in every election year.

And there is evidence that the charges just do not justify the rhetoric that reduces the polarization. There are other myths as well. One is that high turnout in elections helps Democrats and hurts Republicans. So Republicans, as a result, try and pass a certain set of laws and use a certain set of rhetorical charms to try and make the point of high turnout helps Democrats, low turnout helps Republicans.

A lot of the laws you've seen passed in states go to that model. So we take a look at that. I'd submit that in 2020, high turnout actually helped Republicans. Yes, Donald Trump lost, but Republicans swept everything else in federal elections and state and local elections on the ticket.

Similar tale in 2022 in house elections. Number three is that vote by mail helps Democrats and hurts Republicans. I'm a Republican. My party is the aging party. It is not the younger party. It is counterintuitive that vote by mail is something that hurts Republicans. And Lieutenant Governor Henderson state votes solely by mail.

So there have been no fraud scandals in your state to buttress that. Vote tabulation timing, a lot of the lack of credibility and a lot of the problems that have occurred in the last two elections came because vote totals got in late. Both parties are at fault there.

Republicans in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin don't allow the processing of absentee ballots until Election Day, or maybe now, the day before election day. That's not enough time. It yields late results. The Republicans are convinced that the results will leak early and create momentum that hurts them. There are other Republican states that don't do that, it is a myth.

Democrats believe in extending the receipt of absentee ballots till well after the election on the grounds that more of their voters vote late and can't meet deadlines. The obvious solution is to expand the number of early voting days on the front end so there aren't fewer days to vote and to get results done in a timely fashion.

And fifth is the new state laws that have been passed in sort of great controversy and a lot of rhetoric, whether it's Jim Crow 2.0 or all elections are rigged. Justin has done a terrific paper looking at how all the fighting overdose the laws that have been passed in the states to extend early voting or open up the franchise has really a marginal effect on actual votes and turnouts.

So that we hope that by taking a look at the myths in the process, we can help to restore some credibility, hopefully get the parties acting more responsibly in their rhetoric, in trying to motivate their voters, and to get back to the institution of american elections, where the peaceful transfer of power that undergirds everything we do is restored.

 

>> Sarah Anzia: Thanks so much, Ben. And that really cues up a good question for Justin, which I've been wanting to ask, which is about your work on election law reforms, and in particular, what does it suggest about how some of these reforms affect turnout and which party wins, what the outcome of the election is?

 

>> Justin Grimmer: Yeah, well, thank you, and thanks to Brandice for putting on such an amazing day today. So I think it's a really surprising fact about this legislation because it's so hotly contested. We had Joe Biden in Georgia saying that SB 202 was Jim Crow 2.0, and we've heard Donald Trump say that if mail in balloting is allowed, republicans will never win an election again.

Meeting these sorts of proposals, there's massive litigation with millions of dollars being spent, and political parties are forming some of their central platforms around these reform ideas. Indeed, for the Democrats, HR one was a bill about election reform, and yet the rhetoric just simply does not match the reality of what we know about these laws.

We consistently find that the laws have either a marginal effect or no effect on who turns out to vote, and certainly on the partisan advantage either party has after a law is implemented. And so what we do in this paper is we provide a framework for understanding why this could be the case.

And basically what's going on is that we're gonna multiply three very small numbers together to make an even smaller number, that's the story. These sorts of laws tend to target only a small subset of the population. And then among the folks who are targeted, it affects turnout only some relatively small amount.

And then among those who have their turnout affected, these laws are unable to target members of one political party or the other. They're usually bipartisan and who could potentially be affected, and so there's a relative balance in the partisanship of who's affected. When you put this all together, it means that these laws have incredibly small effects, if they have any effect at all.

So let me just give you an example about what I mean here. And I think this one's a nice example, because it also shows how the sort of litigation and the fight just simply doesn't match the partisan rhetoric. And so the example comes from a case that was decided at the Supreme Court, Brnovich versus the Democratic National Committee.

And there's a few issues in this case, but one of the big issues is whether voters in Arizona will be allowed to cast their ballot on election day out of precinct. That means that if you're in the correct county, but you happen to go to the wrong precinct, will you be allowed to cast your ballot and have that processed, or will that ballot be rejected?

And so a law that had been passed in Arizona said that this was not allowed. If you go to the wrong precinct, your ballot's gonna be rejected. And the case was litigated around whether this provided a partisan advantage. In fact, election officials from Arizona, attorneys for Arizona, were at the Supreme Court arguing in favor of this law because it gave them a partisan advantage.

And those who opposed the law said, look, this is gonna target people, it's gonna have a real effect. We did an analysis of the effect of that law, and in a statewide election, we would expect 177 voters to, sorry, a 177 vote advantage for the Republican Party after this law was passed.

So in the big state of Arizona, where even the closest elections, the election for attorney general, this is an insufficient number of votes to swing that election. What's more, you might object to this sort of analysis by saying, look, sure, it's only 177 vote advantage for republicans, but maybe every vote matters and there's lots of money in elections.

Maybe that's how we should direct it as to getting this advantage or preventing this sort of advantageous. But that misses that there's also considerable uncertainty about the effects of these laws. We simply often don't know whether a law will advantage Republicans or Democrats. This has become all the more obscured because of recent demographic changes in who supports the parties.

There's been a large educational realignment with the most reliable Republican voters now are low education white voters, and these are also individuals who are quite likely to be affected by the law. So I want to be clear here, and one of the points we make in the paper and one of the points of the work I do here at Hoover isn't to say that we shouldn't care at all about these laws or that it's unimportant what laws are passed or how we administer these elections.

That couldn't be further from the truth. I think we should care deeply about the laws that are being passed, the intent behind those laws, and I personally care considerably that we pass laws that are going to foster trust in the process of elections. But it does mean that we can opt out of this rhetoric that Ben referenced, this race to the bottom rhetoric, where one side says there's considerable suppression and the other side says there's considerable fraud.

There's just simply not evidence to support that claim. And we instead should be having discussions about elections that focus on the issues that are actually at stake.

>> Sarah Anzia: That's so terrific, and I have follow up questions, but I'm gonna save them and go to lieutenant governor Henderson and ask about your experiences in Utah on some of these issues.

In Utah, trust in elections is high compared to the national average. For instance, recently, 87% of Utah residents have expressed solid or high confidence in their state's electoral process. Compared to national polls that suggest less than a majority have such confidence, with even fewer Republicans. Do you think that these allegations of fraud and suppression have an impact in Utah?

And to the extent that this impact is lower in Utah than elsewhere, why do you think that is, based on what you've seen?

>> Liutenant Governor Deidre Henderson: Well, they for sure have an impact on Utahs. And as the chief election officer of the state of Utah, it's supremely frustrating to me to hear a lot of these allegations, to hear people tell me that something, someone, they think, something they think happens in another state happens in Utah and is some big problem that we have to solve.

There's a lot of misinformation out there. And the reason is because election administration is pretty complicated, to be honest. It's complicated. And when people don't understand something, they tend to distrust it. One of the benefits that Utah has had, and I came to office as lieutenant governor in January of 2021.

Before that, for eight years, I served in the Utah state Senate and I helped push forward some of the election reform, small reforms, some of the bills in the Utah state Senate. When I first came into the Senate, there was an adage that I would hear senators say over and over that you should have to climb a mountain, rustle a bear and swim an ocean in order to be able to vote.

And I just thought, you know what, I don't believe that. Voting is not a privilege, it's a right. For the people who are eligible to vote, it's a right. And as a Conservative, I just rebuffed the idea that government should arbitrarily make exercising one's rights more difficult without good reason.

So we have really fought hard in the state of Utah to hold two thoughts at once. And that is that you can have secure elections and you can also have easier access to the ballot. And this is something that we have tried to really preach and teach and talk about and drill into the people of the state of Utah to take politics out of elections, at least out of election administration.

And that's the goal. We're not perfect at it by any stretch of the imagination, but we do try to do things very differently in Utah in just a way that makes sense to our citizens. So we have, yes, we're a by mail state. 98.5% of the people of the state of Utah, I don't have the numbers yet from our recent general election cuz it was just last week, we had to push ours back a couple weeks to fill a seat in Congress.

But our municipal primary election that we had in September, 98.5% of the people in Utah who voted in that election voted by mail. Only one and a half percent of the voters went in and voted in person, and the vast majority of those that did go in and vote in person did so on election day.

We do have early voting in our state, but we subscribe to the notion that we should have people exercise their constitutional right to vote in the way that they feel most comfortable. If that means going in in person and voting and getting your I voted sticker and having that experience, then people should be able to do that.

If that means sitting at your kitchen table and taking your ballot, which sometimes in our state, I don't know about your states, but in our state our ballots can get pretty long. We have judicial retentions. Next year, we'll have a presidential election, we'll have a US Senate, we'll have all five of our statewide constitutional officers on the ballot, not to mention local legislators and county officials.

And then we've got propositions and we've got constitutional amendments, they're really long ballots. And you can sit at your kitchen table and you can look everything up, and you can make an informed vote if you would like to do that. Or you can go, you know, in person.

It used to be that you'd go in person, you'd stand in line for quite a long time, and you'd have 2 hours of line behind you, and you'd feel a lot of pressure to hurry up and just vote straight ticket or just pick the top person or whatever your method was, if you didn't know.

And now you can actually make a more informed decision. So people love this, and we actually put it in place, it wasn't a top down approach. It was a bottom up approach, which we've heard multiple times throughout this conference, is very important in a lot of ways. Starting in 2012, the legislature changed the law to allow counties to opt in to vote by mail.

And I think that was the key. We have rural counties in our state that they're the ones that opted in first. Our tiniest, most rural counties were the ones that opted in first. And then by 2020, when the whole world shut down, we already knew what we were doing and we had the kinks worked out.

So that is part of the reason why we have a lot of trust. We had that advantage over some of the other states. So I absolutely understand that. But also, one of the things that has been important to us is educating the public. We have people who are out there spreading misinformation, spreading lies.

Even elected officials in Utah, some of them have practiced this. And it's frustrating to me because they got elected on the same ballot as the people that they're saying were elected illegitimately. And so we've opened the doors, the county clerks have opened their doors, invited the public in.

We've tried to educate the public, and we've also had the idea that as much as we like to pat ourselves on the back, we're not perfect and our processes are not perfect, and there's always room for improvement, always. So we're continually improving. We're continually revisiting our systems and our processes, and we're not afraid of that.

But we hope hopefully, and my goal is to hopefully the policies don't change based on the rhetoric or misinformation of a few loud voices. If we're changing policy, if we're changing what we do, it's based in fact, and there's a real reason behind it, and not just out of fear.

 

>> Sarah Anzia: Talking about the lay of the land and the example in Utah is so important because I think it gets us and helps us with the consideration of what needs to be done about this. If we're gonna target certain constituencies or use certain strategies, what should they be?

And I wanna go to Rob to ask about some of your work on this, in particular your work focusing on what happened in Utah in 2020, where Governor Cox and his democratic opponent produced an ad in which they pledged to support the election results regardless of who won.

So you started a project that is co-funded by REI in which you are building on Governor Cox's and the National Governors Association's efforts to encourage other gubernatorial candidates to do the same. Could you say a little bit about that project, and what do we know about the effects of that ad in Utah and your plans for what's going to happen and what you'll do in the 2024 election?

 

>> Professor Rob Willer: Sure. Happy to do it. I wanted to say thanks to Brandis and RAI for this amazing convening. It's been terrific, all these panels, and it's an honor to be on this one. I don't know if you all are familiar with this public service announcement that Governor Cox and his gubernatorial challenger in 2020, Chris Peterson, put together in the final weeks of the 2020 election.

But basically, they got together, filmed a series of short public service announcements where they gave essentially bipartisan endorsements of the electoral process. So they got together and they said, hey, we're in the final stages of this campaign. We have very different visions for Utah and for the country.

We hope to beat the other one. So we're clearly competing, but at the same time, we also are pledging to pew to the rules of the game. We're gonna acknowledge the results of the election at the Utah and the national elections. And in a way, they're sort of surfacing this thing that's implicit in our democracy, which maybe you all see very vividly and political theorists see everyday citizens don't, which is that in an election, yes, you're competing at a level, but you're also cooperating at another level.

You're committing to follow the rules of the game, to acknowledge the results. When the referee blows the whistle, you're going to stop and you're going to follow the rules. But that's been left implicit for a long time. And I think that's part of why this ad is so striking or the series of PSAs that they filmed, and strongly recommend you check them out.

They're even kind of touching. We were really interested in what kind of effects an ad like this might have on everyday citizens in Utah, but beyond. And so we tested it in the context of a very large survey-based experiment that we did a couple years ago, which Sarah mentioned, the strengthening democracy challenge.

It was just one of several ideas we tested, but it was one of the most effective ideas that we tested for reducing Americans levels of animosity towards their rival partisans support for bipartisan cooperation. It reduced people's support for political violence and their support for undemocratic practices. So one of the more effective things that we tested, these are small effects they didn't endure for a long time.

You know, watching a 1 minute public service announcement, you know, we didn't find any evidence that that was transformative three weeks later. But it was a good proof of concept that something like this, it's not going to make things worse, and it could make a difference, especially if you could scale it, if you could get more people doing stuff like this, get more of our elected officials committing to endorsing the electoral process publicly in a similar way, it could really make a difference potentially.

So we wanna kinda go that next step. Governor Cox is now the chair of the National Governors association, and in that position is trying to scale what they did in 2020, which is, I think, an admirable thing to do with that position. And they've crafted a campaign called Disagree Better, where they try to get pairs of democrat and republican politicians together to do something like what Cox and Peterson did.

So endorse the democratic process and communicate mutual respect by appearing on film together and sort of say, we disagree. We have really serious, morally rooted disagreements we need to work on here. But we also can have a civil conversation. We can work together and cooperate on policy. So they're starting to roll these out.

They're starting to produce them, and we're gonna do a field experiment that's funded in large part by REI's generosity and is possible because of that. And our hope is that we'll find similar results for people watching these public service announcements out in America. So we're gonna randomly assign Americans to see lots of these public service announcements in the course of their organic TV watching or not.

And then in this assessment, led by Chagai Weiss, who's a postdoc here at Stanford, we're gonna see if it has a sort of positive effects on partisan animosity, support for undemocratic practices, and also faith in elections. And the hope is that it could make a difference, yeah.

>> Sarah Anzia: It's great.

Well, so a couple of questions I wanna throw out to the panel, see who wants to take them. One is a follow up on some of the things that Justin was talking about, which is, look, if these reforms that are being passed by so many states or at least being considered, are not having a big impact on turnaround, are not having a big impact on the partisan outcome of an election, why all the sound and fury?

What are they doing, right? So there's that. And then I think the, maybe more concerning one is how can politicians be incentivized to promote well functioning electoral processes and then boost voter confidence in them when, as you were saying, Ben, there are these electoral advantages to raising skepticism about precisely those things, how can those incentives for politicians be shifted?

 

>> Ben Ginsberg: Well, for starters, what happens at the ballot box is the ultimate incentive for politicians. So if in an election, a theory like election denialism is rejected uniformly and consistently, that is the single best thing you can do to incentivize politicians, given that we are in a c three environment.

I mean, I think the other things are talking about the processes in an election and showing really what Lieutenant Governor Henderson said they do regularly in Utah and isn't done everywhere, but talking about the safeguards in the election system to make it right so that when a politician comes up and starts criticizing the election, the election officials and even other public officials are armed with the material about why elections do work.

I mean, historically, elections have had great credibility, so there was no need for election officials to try and say how they work. That has obviously changed in recent history, but it is sort of a longer process to, to get people talking about it.

>> Sarah Anzia: Anybody else wanna weigh in on the questions I threw to you, Rob?

 

>> Professor Rob Willer: I think in terms of shifting incentives, I mean, one thing that could be helpful would be more donor intervention in this space. I think that one thing that I would love to see is to see donors that don't believe in election denial and think that it is destabilizing to the government and society in a way that's undesirable for them.

Intervene and say I'm giving my regular political donation to To these candidates if they will commit to publicly endorsing elections via something like Governor Cox's public service announcement series. And that's the kind of thing that could actually shift incentives a bit as well as, I think, better awareness of what the data is really showing.

So, like, Andy Hall here in the GSB at Stanford finds that, yes, in 2022, there seemed to be a small advantage in primaries to election denial on the republican side. But there was a slightly larger and probably more certain deficit in general elections, suggesting election denial was a little bit of an electoral trap of you might gain a little bit in the primary.

You might not have needed it, depending on what your primary is like, but then you lose a bit and with a little more confidence in the general. And so from a donor's perspective, they've got a longer term vision. They're like, that's a trap, I don't want that if I can avoid it.

A politician that's scrubbing and even get nominated is in a somewhat tougher spot.

>> Sarah Anzia: Yeah, can I go to you and your experiences in Utah, from your experience, how that ad in particular, right? How did it affect the way Utah residents saw the election processes and the claims that were going around about illegitimate elections?

Perhaps, if you're open to talking about it, even Trump's claims about the subject.

>> Liutenant Governor Deidre Henderson: Yeah, so I think what that ad did, and in Utah, the governor and lieutenant governor run together on a ticket. So we were both running in 2020. It was a really vicious race. We had tried hard, Governor Cox and I, then he was lieutenant governor at the time.

We kind of made this pact, we're not going to let ourselves devolve to the level of some of the other candidates in the race. I mean, outrage sells and negative campaigning. People engage in negative campaigning because it works, right? And we thought, we don't care if we lose the race, we're going to stay above the fray.

But what I think that ad, and when leaders at the top defend truth, and they don't give in to the negativity, it may not change certain people's minds, but it will help some people. And it's those, some people that we're after, right? It gives cover to the people who maybe don't believe all of the denialism and the outrageous claims and the crazy stuff they hear or see on social media or see on TV, that have some doubt in that.

It gives some cover and credibility to those doubts that they have. And that's a really good thing. So I think that it's not easy to write this ship, but it is possible. I am hopeful, and it absolutely has to start with the people at the top, in the public sphere who have the microphone, people who maybe don't cast doubt on other states processes in order to try to bolster the credibility of your own.

You cannot build up while tearing down. You can't do it. So having these conversations and helping political leaders, community leaders know that it's not hopeless. That the negative voices out there are loud, they are sometimes awful, but there are people who can be swayed. We want them to be swayed by positive messages, not negative, false information.

 

>> Sarah Anzia: Yeah, I wanna stand this a little bit and ask Justin a question about this, which is okay, the 2020 elections. Claims regarding the counting of votes in them. What does your research suggest about this? And do you have suggestions about how we could improve voter confidence going into 2024?

 

>> Justin Grimmer: Yeah, the 2020 election obviously looms large in any conversation about election administration. My research group has spent a lot of time and been obsessive about it, identifying empirical claims that have been made about the 2020 election and evaluating them. And I'm very happy to go deep in the weeds with anyone who's curious.

But at a high level, the finding is not a single one of these claims hold water. And I don't mean they don't hold water in a way where it was difficult to assess them, and it was a bit confusing, and it was initially plausible. Each one of these claims, particularly claims that were made by plaintiffs in the 2020 election, were obviously wrong based on misunderstandings, basic statistical errors, and often, frankly, amateurish analysis.

Where political science experts that were asked to respond were able to identify this, I think very quickly. Let me just give you one example of this. A regularly repeated claim is that 66,000 underage voters in the state of Georgia were allowed to cast their ballot. That's just obviously wrong.

The number is zero. But the way that analysis was conducted, several 90-year-old individuals were identified as underage voters. And while I'm sure they appreciated the compliments.

>> Justin Grimmer: It is well within their rights to cast a ballot in Georgia. What's also interesting about these claims is that they've expanded from the sorts of claims that we've seen around the 2020 election into much broader claims.

So Ben referenced the suppression fraud industrial complex. This is the fraud part of that industrial complex. So there are individuals who go around touring the country, and they claim that every election, everywhere, is being manipulated. They'll go into a small rural community, and they'll say Mark Zuckerberg is influencing your school board elections.

And I think it's an obviously absurd contention. The evidence where their claims are absurd and they don't hold water. And we might be able to write this off as a sort of group of people who perhaps don't matter much or very much on the fringe, but we've already seen them matter for election policy in places like California.

So in nearby Shasta county, just a couple of hours north of here, there was a push to cancel their Dominion contracts institute hand counting. The state had to pass a new law in order to prevent the sort of last second changing. And it's created incredible headaches for the election administrators in that county.

And so another way to think about what's going on after the 2020 election is that there's a group of people, I think of them as sort of data vigilantes. They're going around. They think that in every voter file they're gonna find the smoking gun evidence for fraud. And the result of this effort is not just creating headaches for election administrators, but it's really spreading misinformation, disinformation, and undermining trust in the public.

 

>> Sarah Anzia: So, Ben, can I ask you a question on the same topic? Which is, what about your thoughts on specific strategies that could be used for restoring public confidence in US elections and the accuracy of these voting results through improvements to election administration, civics, education, whatever it is you have to suggest?

 

>> Ben Ginsberg: Well, I think all of those matter a lot. I mentioned before getting a document that validates the safeguards in each of the nine steps of the election process. We're having a conference next month here with Justin's help, where we hope we'll produce a document that we can get to election administrations everywhere.

On sort of a big global matter I think that that battle is best waged really locally. The national environment, as you've heard from a number of panels over the course of the day and yesterday, is really poisonous. But I think we found that on a local level, people have pride in their communities and know that peace and prosperity is correct.

And so going into the most contentious election jurisdictions and getting leaders of the community to understand, to study the local election process and then be validators is extremely important.

>> Liutenant Governor Deidre Henderson: Can I just add to that? So in 2021, we were suddenly in Utah. We felt kind of immune.

We weren't to Georgia or Pennsylvania or Wisconsin or we felt pretty good about ourselves. And then the caravan of election deniers started coming through our state and holding their town hall meetings, and we got bombarded with open records requests, I mean, just vexatious requests and threats and just horrible, ugly things, all looking for something.

I'm still not sure what they were trying to find. They didn't find anything. There's still trying to look. But one of the message I realized that we really needed to stop the bleed. We wanted to keep Utah. We wanted their confidence to remain high, and we wanted to increase their confidence in elections.

So one of the messages, and we did a whole public service campaign about this, is to help people recognize and remember that their elections aren't run by nameless, faceless bureaucrats in Washington, DC. They're not even run by the state. They're run by their neighbors and their friends. The people they go to the grocery store with, the people they go to church with, these are run locally.

And when we messaged that, and we featured local election workers in some of these ads, some of them had been poll workers for 50 years, we got a very positive response. And we were able to drive up confidence from 81% to 89% by the end of the election in 2022.

But that local effort is so important. It's also really hard, it's hard. It's a lot of work. It's like the starfish analogy where you're just throwing one starfish back in the ocean. It's kind of the hand to hand combat, one person at a time. But it has an effect, a positive effect on mitigating some of that noise out there.

 

>> Sarah Anzia: Well, I mean, I think so. As someone in a public policy school and a political science department, social scientists are better at, in some ways talking about problems than about figuring out solutions to problems. And at policy school, one of the things I appreciate is that we're pushed a little bit to think about what you're going to do about it.

And I think we're getting to that a bit. And I also think it's only by diagnosing the problem that you start to get good ideas about what is going to move the needle on solutions. But I would love before we're going to open it up to the audience, questions from the audience.

But before we do that really quickly, I would love to hear each of you just really briefly say, okay, without pinning the blame on anyone for the rise in distrust. Where should our efforts in the next year to be focused? Should it be focused mainly on trying to influence public perception?

Should it be changes in election practice? If so, what? Should it be changing the behavior of candidates and elected officials? I'll just go down the line and start with Rapp.

>> Professor Rob Willer: Yeah, that's a really great question. I mean, in our lab, the thing that we found makes the biggest difference in Americans trust in elections is being presented with republican endorsements of election integrity that if you present people with several of those back to back, that increases confidence in elections.

Why doesn't that happen more? Well, there's really significant electoral disincentives to republican politicians who probably don't believe for the most part that 2020 was rigged. But face, they perceive really serious electoral disincentives, especially in primaries. And I don't know how wrong they are. I think that it's not as bad as they suspect, but I think working on that like, how do you change the terrain of not just perceived incentives but actual incentives for republican politicians so that they're in a space where they can endorse election integrity, seems like a place to intervene.

 

>> Sarah Anzia: Governor?

>> Liutenant Governor Deidre Henderson: So I think the number one thing that everybody can do, but, of course, people at the highest level, elected officials, it's even more important, is to tone down the rhetoric. They have got to tone down the rhetoric. The idea that they can get more support and more votes by peddling disinformation or outrage is really, it's really repulsive.

It's an incentive that is completely misaligned with the public good. And if people could just tone down their rhetoric, stop assuming the very worst of everything in the hopes of gaining some political, some paltry, apparently political support, then that would be my number one wish list.

>> Justin Grimmer: So I think there's longer term reforms.

Obviously would love to reform various parts of the electoral process in the next year. The thing we could do overnight is reform how the media reports on election night. So one of the biggest sources of controversy among people who are skeptical of the 2020 election is Edison data on the vote counts that were coming in.

So there's this syndrome among the networks where they want to count the votes as if this is a basketball game. And you almost make the same chart for a basketball game that you can make on election night and see how these votes are counted. Of course, that's all a fiction.

All the votes are already counted by the time they're doing. All the votes already cast by the time they're doing that counting. So simple reforms, even as simple as reporting results only on the hour as an update, delaying and the calling of races a bit longer, I think this could go a long way to just taking the temperature down and removing misperceptions about what's going on in the election.

 

>> Ben Ginsberg: If I could wave my magic wand, and I agree with everything that everyone said, and they're all important, it really would be having each election official engage in a program of transparency of how their elections work so that there are no questions on the local level about the process itself.

And if I was going to look longer term, I would face the difficult realization that we have 10,000 different jurisdictions in this country. And so if you actually want to fix that problem, you need to think globally, within a federalist context still of how you can reduce that number of jurisdictions.

 

>> Sarah Anzia: All right, I would love to get questions from the audience in the back here, please.

>> Speaker 7: What gives you confidence that ballots that are submitted are in fact submitted by someone who has the authority to vote? In other words, maybe there's no voter ID, maybe signature authorization doesn't exist effectively.

Why are you confident that that's not a significant issue?

>> Justin Grimmer: Yeah, so I'll take that. So first off, voter identification is required a number of places. So, for example, In Georgia now, you have to provide your driver's license number or other sorts of identification. Not all. What's that?

 

>> Audience: Not all.

>> Justin Grimmer: No, no, no, I said in Georgia. Yeah, but there's also signature verification in other states. For example, in California, when you return your ballot, there's signature verification. There's a lot made in Pennsylvania about a potential lack of signature verification. So we can contextualize that concern a bit.

So certainly there was still verification in counties that the name that was signed there corresponds to the name that should be there. That was still happening. But also in Pennsylvania, an individual has to apply for that ballot. And so it's different in California, where everyone's receiving the ballots.

There's not a lot of ballots floating around in Pennsylvania. And to that end, Pennsylvania instituted a set of processes so that you could do the entirety of that mail-in balloting in one stop. Now the question is, another way to interpret your question is, could I assert to you that every ballot that's cast in the election is legitimate and no one could.

And in fact, we know that there was some small instances of fraudulent ballots being cast. Now, there's this separate question. Were there concerted organized efforts in order to swing the election by doing something like pooling absentee ballots and fraudulently casting, or illegally casting those ballots? And not only is there no evidence for that, it would be extremely difficult to do in a state like Pennsylvania, it would require a number of false applications.

You have to acquire the ballots, then return them. And we just simply not seen any evidence of that sorta conspiracy happening in Pennsylvania. I know there's allegations from, I could talk more about True the Vote has made some allegations. That evidence isn't particularly strong.

>> Liutenant Governor Deidre Henderson: And if I could just chime in on this one, too.

In Utah, we have signature verification on our ballot envelopes. Utah state constitution guarantees an individual the right to a secret ballot. So we're very, very careful about making sure that we can't ever match up a ballot to a voter. But we do match up the envelope to the voter.

There are barcodes that that envelope is directly tied to the voter. They sign the outside of the envelope. And our system holds up to five signatures of a voter. So a driver's license or previous ballots or their voter registration card. And those are verified if the signature doesn't match.

And it does happen where signatures don't match. Sometimes a husband and wife might accidentally put their ballots in each other's envelopes, but sometimes someone other than the voter does sign the envelope. And in Utah, this happens it gets caught every time it happens. And the biggest offenders are missionary moms, missionary moms who've got kids off in Uruguay or something on a mission.

And they probably had their kids permission and signed the ballot, filled it out for them, and they get a call from the county clerk, and they don't do it twice.

>> Ben Ginsberg: One other point is that each state has its own rules for allowing poll watchers and observers from campaigns.

Now, some of those rules could be improved, but just to give you some idea, Donald Trump did claim a 50,000 poll watcher army. You can stick your representative in every ballot place around the country and watch the process. And so if you find something amiss, then you've got a whole contest, recount litigation procedure for putting forward that evidence of that.

So there have been a lot of rhetorical claims made, but precious little evidence beyond what Justin referred to as the evidence. So you do have self checking that campaigns can do to resolve those fears.

>> Sarah Anzia: Hakeem, did you have a question? Go ahead.

>> Hakeem: Good to see you.

 

>> Sarah Anzia: Good to see you, too.

>> Hakeem: Thank you. This has been fantastic. So thank you, Brandis. And thanks to the panel. I suppose my question, and Justin might have anticipated it. I'll pose as a question, are we worried about what I see as a false equivalence and language, say, the fraud suppression industrial complex?

There is no evidence of fraud at any large scale in american elections. I think we'd agree on that evidence. But there is, I think, quite a bit of evidence that the panelists are all quite aware of, of attempts to suppress the vote. And so it's a different question as to whether those attempts work.

But the idea that there is alarmism that's unjustified in terms of attempts to suppress the votes seems to miss the mark. And so I suppose the question is, are we at all worried about a language that puts these claims on the same plane? The claims about fraud and claims about suppression can be considered equivalent.

 

>> Ben Ginsberg: I don't mean to create a moral equivalency in what's gone on in the past few years. And there have certainly been a examples of suppression in the history of the country, just as there have been examples of widespread fraud in certain elections in the country, and big city voting machines that did apparently do fraudulent things.

That's why the eternal vigilance of people in the polling places is really, really important. And in every polling place in a contentious jurisdiction in the country today, you have a squadron of over caffeinated lawyers looking for some problem to be able to report on election day. That's why when I say you've got to be able to present the evidence of it, I think that's true.

And the rhetoric that I'm referring to is, for example, the Jim Crow 2.0 rhetoric about Georgia. I mean, the factual basis for that was that Georgia reduced its early voting days from, I think it was 23 to 17, which is still seven days more early voting than a democratic state, like, say, Delaware.

So that the rhetoric that does create a lack of confidence is prevalent on both sides of, I take the point that the Republicans have done far more in the past few years about it, and that's the evil you gotta deal with for right now. But it's true on both sides.

 

>> Sarah Anzia: For a minute, I thought that was my cue to stop the panel. But we have time for one or two more questions. I think here in the middle.

>> Speaker 9: Can you address the Voting Rights Act that was gutted, I mean, we're having this conversation about the fact that there is fraud.

And I think that Justice Ginsburg wrote in her dissent in one of these cases that we have to be continually vigilant because of our history of voter suppression and fraud. So how does the National Voting Rights Act play into this discussion about fraud and suppression language? Which that you're using.

 

>> Liutenant Governor Deidre Henderson: I'll say as a state, we have to abide by it. And, in fact, we actually have a county in Utah a number of years ago. It's under the jurisdiction of the Department of Justice now. I mean, no one wants to admit that they might have a county in their state that was so egregious in some of their practices that they ended up having to be babysat by the Department of Justice.

But the fact is that we do in the state of Utah, a county that had some things happening years ago, a county with a large population of Native Americans. And so we absolutely have to take all of that into account. And I would just add, too, that there's more than one way to suppress a vote.

And so in my mind, as an election official, it's important, and as a former policymaker, I guess, former legislator, important to make sure that I'm looking at systems and processes as a whole as to whether or not those systems or processes are good or not good in helping people exercise their constitutional rights.

I should not be looking at these systems or these processes based on a hoped for outcome, because if it's good for me to do that, it's going to be good for someone else to do that. And that's what people, I think, are failing to recognize, especially probably some people in my party, is if they can do it to someone, then someone can do it to them, and that's not good for anybody.

So we absolutely have to take and hold in highest regard people's constitutional rights. And I don't know any of my counterparts around the country who doesn't do that or any local election official who doesn't take people's rights into account. Nobody cares more about running fair and good and clean and secure elections than the people who actually run them.

 

>> Justin Grimmer: Just to add, there was a lot of concern about the Shelby decision, for example, and there's a recent paper that shows no effect of Shelby on minority turnout in the south. Doesn't make it more likely that Republicans are going to win. If anything, there's a slight move in the other direction, but that's not statistically significant.

So I think this is part of the rhetoric. There are decisions. People say the sky is falling. We're concerned there's gonna be a wave of laws that are gonna make it much harder to vote, and that simply doesn't manifest, I think, because, first, there's other parts of the Voting Rights Act that are still very much in effect and widely used.

And second, that many of the laws that get labeled as suppressive are actually often legitimate attempts just to organize an election. For example, I don't think it's voter suppression to have a law that organizes drop boxes across counties, but sometimes that gets labeled as voter suppression. And so how we categorize that, I think, would be important for understanding, but also because these officials in general have good intentions, despite what we might think, they get labeled otherwise.

 

>> Sarah Anzia: Okay, Charisse, and then you get the final question after Charisse. Go ahead.

>> Charisse: Hi, this has been such an interesting discussion with a lot of great points. I wanted to circle back to this discussion about the effects of some of these voter administration laws on turnout, and particularly the fact that we don't see a lot of empirical evidence about these laws depressing turnout.

But one consideration I was thinking about that I want to kind of highlight is the role of a lot of these counter mobilization efforts. So the role of activist groups that have been really pushing back to try to counter some of the negative effects of these laws and thinking about what would be these effects in the absence of these groups that are doing a lot of work on the ground to try to get people to turn out to vote in response to some of these potentially negative laws that could affect their turnout.

 

>> Justin Grimmer: Yeah, so I'll just take that briefly. So we talk about this a bit in our paper and do an analysis of claims of counter mobilization. And the current literature just cannot support the claim that in the absence of the activist groups, there would be some massive effects of the law.

So there's a paper from Cantani and Pons who analyze voter identification laws, and they also find perhaps some evidence of a counter mobilization effect. But they find, at best, that that law, maybe that would be responsible for something like a half a percentage point of increased turnout due to that counter mobilization.

So that's not gonna help explain sort of the absence of big disparities because of these laws. It would require much more money that's being spent and much more effective mobilization efforts to have any sort of plausible effect.

>> Sarah Anzia: Okay, final question, and then we will welcome Brandis back up to close us out and welcome you to the reception that we will have after this.

 

>> Speaker 11: On the voter oppression front, might it be, and could there be some kind of effort that when states are changing the law, that there's a particular attempt to make it bipartisan? Because when it is, so often the changes either way are made on a partisan basis, and that builds the mistrust.

And I think particularly on issues where, say, on a drop box or voter ID even though the intents might be right on either side, you certainly have a history on something like voter ID or in the drop boxes, certainly racial history that you can certainly understand why it would be interpreted as oppression.

So even if there's not an impact, and particularly if there's not an impact, the people who are trying to change it, if there's no impact on the voting at all, maybe that kind of can bring people together to say, you know, this isn't going to have an impact.

Will it really matter if we have a few more drop boxes to get people to trust the system and to not have this racial animosity? So can we come together in some way and can your efforts that you're working on to dispel these myths maybe bring the legislators themselves together?

And could there be some effort on that front? Because I know when I was in the state legislature having those discussions and hearing those stories going back were helpful in changing on the margins at least. And that was before all the craziness.

>> Justin Grimmer: Yep, so I think that's a hope of our effort.

 

>> Ben Ginsberg: It is, and there's a collection of provisions from all the states which do form the basis of a bipartisan agreement to sort of balance out things. I mean, when I said, for example, get votes in by election day rather than let them come in a week afterwards, if they're postmarked on election day, well, have them come in by election day, but increase the early voting period so there's every much opportunity to vote for people.

 

>> Speaker 11: The more voting is bad for one party, the other. That's gonna be very helpful as you get that information out, because that misinformation, in Utah's example, is great. That needs to be used more to just calm the waters on all of this. Thank you.

>> Sarah Anzia: Well, let's welcome Brandis Keynes Ron back for a concluding word, and thank our panelists.

It's wonderful.

>> Brandis Keynes Ron: This has been an ambitious conference, which is why we're running a bit over. So I'm not going to keep you from the open bar. I just wanna say that following this ambitious conference, which started with a large public session, today had the by invitation only full day.

We have a very ambitious agenda for REI. So we hope you'll keep abreast of what we're gonna be working on and all the projects that you've heard about that are ongoing and which we're excited to disseminate. Thank you for being such an outstanding audience and for supporting the institution, both ReI and Hoover, and for your great questions and thanks again to our panelists.