The House and the Senate have mostly the same powers: they both propose and vote on bills that may become law. So why does the House have 435 members, and the Senate have 100? Why does legislation have to pass through both sides, and what kinds of power do each have individually? And finally: what role do you, as a voter, play in ensuring that Congress, and your Congressional delegation, is working in your best interests?
This episode features the opinions of former staffers from both chambers, Andrew Wilson and Justin LeBlanc, former member of the CA assembly, Cheryl Cook-Kallio, CNN political analyst, Bakari Sellers, and the inimitable political science professor from Farleigh Dickinson, Dan Cassino.
Click here for a graphic organizer for students to take notes upon while listening.
Click here for a three part media-based lesson about exploring the differences between the House and the Senate. Students will present their findings in a 1-3 minute video.
Transcript:
Audio clip: Mr. President. Without objection, Mr. President, I call it my amendment per the order. The clerk will report the amendment. The Senator from Vermont.
Hannah McCarthy: What is going on? Why are you making me listen to this?
Nick Capodice: Okay. This is from a YouTube video from 2009 and it's called Senate Chaos. Senator Bernie Sanders from Vermont. He's just proposed an amendment to a health care bill and it's usually happens. He asked the amendment be considered as read since senators usually get these bills [00:00:30] in amendments in advance, there's no need to read them aloud.
Audio clip: ...objection object.
Nick Capodice: All right. Right there. Senator Tom Coburn from Oklahoma objects.
Audio clip: The table of contents of this act is as follows.
Nick Capodice: So the clerk has to read the whole thing. And it's 767 pages. All right. Listen to this.
Audio clip: And had the courage to change from green to red or red to green. How is that possible, Mr. Speaker?
Hannah McCarthy: Woah, [00:01:00] what is going on?
Nick Capodice: What is going on? Hannah is the House of Representatives. Such a magical place.
Audio clip: Is another form of inquiry. Mr. Speaker, Mr. Smith, the Speaker General...(chaos) [00:01:30]
Nick Capodice: Welcome to Civics 101. I'm Nick Capodice.
Hannah McCarthy: I'm Hannah McCarthy.
Nick Capodice: And we are continuing our series on the upcoming midterm elections today, something many Americans are going to see on their ballot. And a question I've wanted to ask since day one at this show, what is the difference between the House and the Senate? They mostly have the exact same powers, with a few exceptions, which we're going to talk about. But they both propose bills that might become laws. Bills can start in either [00:02:00] the House or the Senate, but they have to be passed by both houses before they go to the president to be signed into law. And while the presidential election tends to crowd out the attention for all those other elected officials on the ballot, the midterms are where the race for control of Congress shines, where expensive national political ads are replaced by local, homegrown ads of people running for a seat in the House of Representatives or the Senate for the right to represent your interests. You right there sitting down, listening to this, in the [00:02:30] branch of government that proposes our laws. Now, of course, it's not just about the individuals in the office. It's about the balance of power. Something that could change drastically this November 2022.
Hannah McCarthy: And when you say balance of power, you mean which party has the most people in Congress?
Nick Capodice: Right. And the party with the most people has the most power, has greater control, not only over which bills [00:03:00] are proposed, but also in leadership. And right now, the balance of power is tenuous.
Dan Cassino: The House of Representatives is expected to come very close.
Nick Capodice: Here is Civics 101's very own personal Steve Martin, as he's been on the show more than anybody else. Dan Cassino, political science professor at Fairleigh Dickinson University.
Dan Cassino: In 2022, the odds that your vote for the House of Representatives are going to matter are way bigger than they've been in any recent election. Generally, when the president's party loses seats in the midterm, this [00:03:30] is called surge and decline, and it's a pretty complicated phenomenon. We don't have to get into here. But the surge in decline pattern means that the president's party in this case, the Democrats, are expected to lose seats in the upcoming election. Now, the Democrats have only a narrow margin in the House of Representatives. If they were to lose the expected number of seats in the 2022 midterms, the Republicans would control the House by a margin of somewhere between ten and 15 seats.
Hannah McCarthy: What about the Senate?
Nick Capodice: The Senate is split almost completely down the middle right now, 50 Republicans, 48 Democrats [00:04:00] and two independents who have aligned Democratic and the Democratic vice president, Kamala Harris, as the tiebreaker.
Hannah McCarthy: That is a tight margin.
Nick Capodice: Yeah.
Hannah McCarthy: Now, knowing that, I'm curious how these two parts of Congress, the Senate and the House are different and what kind of power my own senators and representative have.
Nick Capodice: To really understand their key differences. We need to go back through the annals of history.
Hannah McCarthy: Please don't do this.
Nick Capodice: Oh why it appears we're at the Old City [00:04:30] Tavern in Philadelphia in 1787.
Hannah McCarthy: Please. Nick, please.
Nick Capodice: Why, is that James Madison over there? The sage of Montpelier??
Audio clip: We only have a Congress. Yes, but ours will be different. Since our plan expands the powers of Congress, we will check that power. Yeah. By dividing it into two houses, an upper house and a lower house.
Hannah McCarthy: And what is that from?
Nick Capodice: You've never seen A More Perfect Union? The bread [00:05:00] and butter of the eighth grade social studies class. Okay, fine. Forget it. Scrap it. But what I'm trying to get at is that during the debates, the great debates of the Constitutional Convention, there was this huge question of representation who should make our laws? How many people should the big states have more power because they've got a bigger population? Or should all states have equal representation? And to make a long story short, we have ended up with both. We have a two House government, a bicameral [00:05:30] legislature. The names can be kind of tricky, though. So here is teacher and former California state assembly member Cheryl Cook-Kallio.
Cheryl Cook-Kallio: And so Congress is technically both the House of Representatives and the Senate. Members of the lower house, The House of Representatives have always been addressed as Congressmembers and members of the Upper House have been addressed as senator.
Hannah McCarthy: So a senator is technically a congressperson, but you would never call them that?
Nick Capodice: Yeah, no. And the Senate is technically one of the houses [00:06:00] of Congress. But when we say the House, we mean the House of Representatives.
Hannah McCarthy: I am glad we got that out of the way. I have always wondered.
Cheryl Cook-Kallio: The framers created a two House legislature in order to make sure that the needs of the people as well as the states were addressed.
Nick Capodice: Length of term is a major thing that differentiates the House. In the Senate.
Cheryl Cook-Kallio: The House of Representatives, the length of term is shorter. It's every two years. It's a more frantic place. It takes on a sense of urgency. The Senate, on the other hand, is [00:06:30] up every six years.
Hannah McCarthy: So in the current midterms, about a third of those Senate seats are up for reelection, whereas you vote for new representatives every two years.
Nick Capodice: Exactly. The next key difference is the number of members. Our current House has 435 members apportioned by state population. So, for example, California has 53 congresspeople, while we in the small state of New Hampshire have two. But every state gets two senators, no matter the population size.
Dan Cassino: The [00:07:00] founders were trying to give the public some power, trying to have some element of democracy. The problem is they didn't trust the people as far as they could throw them. They even called democracy mob-ocracy because they didn't like the idea of the people actually running anything. The reason we have the House of Representatives is to give the people a voice, but to make sure that voice can't actually do anything. The house is supposed to be representative of the people, but as far as the founders are concerned, the people of the United States were kind of like the people [00:07:30] of Springfield in The Simpsons
Audio clip: Monorail, Monorail, MONORAIL!
Dan Cassino: They're ready to jump on any bandwagon with pitchforks and torches and protest against anything. And we've seen this repeatedly throughout American history. In the early 19th century, we had the first major third party in American politics, the anti Masonic Party, a party devoted entirely to a conspiracy theory that Masons were murdering people in upstate New York, dumping the bodies. Then methodically oriented police and judges were covering the whole thing up.
Hannah McCarthy: That was their social [00:08:00] platform, not liking the Freemasons.
Audio clip: (Masonic singing "So voteth theeeee!")
Dan Cassino: To me that seems a little ridiculous. Except those folks, the Anti-Masonic Party won a bunch of seats in statehouses and even won a bunch of seats in House of Representatives. So why does it matter? Well, the founders saw this. They thought this would happen. So what they did was they made sure the House couldn't really do anything. The House representatives subject to the whims of the people. So if the anti-masonic party's really popular for two years, guess what? [00:08:30] They can take some seats in the House, but if they took every seat that was up for them in the Senate, they could never control more than a third of the Senate. The House is there to represent the whims of the people. The Senate is there to make sure that the people can't actually get anything done. Now, that's inefficient, of course, but that's exactly the way the founders set things up. The people can pass whatever they want in the house and it'll die in the Senate.
Nick Capodice: Now, it may seem like Dan is saying the Senate is, I don't know, superior in some way or another. But I do want to add the House [00:09:00] does get some bills out there.
Dan Cassino: So depending how you want to run the numbers you get right now, about 4% of bills in the most recent session of Congress have been turned into laws. So overall, you're looking at about 16,000 bills and resolutions that get proposed. And this most recent Congress, we've had about 550 of them actually turned into laws. Now, that's because we're using a relatively open view of what it means to become a law. If we actually drill down on that, it's actually closer to about 1%. The reason [00:09:30] for that difference is that in the modern era of Congress, most bills that get passed actually get passed by being pushed into other bills. So the most recent example we have of that in 2022 is the what Democrats were calling the Inflation Reduction Act. This is a big omnibus bill. And what that means is they took about 30 other bills that they were trying to pass, that they couldn't get passed and just smushed it all into one big bill. And nobody quite knew what exactly was in the bill. But the leadership said they'd read it and the staff read it. So we're cool with that [00:10:00] and they passed that. So that's a whole bunch of other bills that we can consider as being passed because they were pushed into this larger omnibus bill. Now we talk about laws passed. Yeah, something like the Inflation Reduction Act is the thing we think about. Yes, this is a big bill. This is an important bill that's actually not very representative of what most bills are. And so that number of 4% or about 550 600 bills getting passed is really over representing what actually is going on in Congress.
Nick Capodice: And most of them are pretty [00:10:30] uncontroversial bills.
Hannah McCarthy: So like naming a holiday or something like that.
Dan Cassino: So to give an example, the same month that you got the Inflation Reduction Act, we also got Reece's law, which is a law that would require the Consumer Product Safety Commission to put labels on button batteries to make it harder for children to open them. Well, okay. I mean, not the most important thing that the history of the republic, but. Okay, my personal favorite is H.R. 1444. And this is a bill I'm going to give full title to designate the facility. The United States [00:11:00] Postal Service located 132 North Loudon Street, Suite one in Winchester, Virginia, as the Patsy Cline Post Office.
Audio clip: How about giving yourself a little applause there!
Dan Cassino: These are the sort of bills that actually get passed. And we say 600 bills get passed. Most of those are telling people to make coins and naming post offices. We simply don't do a whole lot.
Hannah McCarthy: I want to know what they think of each other. Does the House have, like, an inferiority complex?
Nick Capodice: Well, let's see what they have to say for themselves. So I got a former Senate [00:11:30] staffer, Justin LeBlanc.
Justin LeBlanc: We jokingly often refer to to the House and the Senate with reference to what the British Parliament calls them, and that is obviously the House of Commons and the House of Lords.
Nick Capodice: And a former House staffer, Andy Wilson.
Andy Wilson: Despite the House and the Senate being co-equal branches of government, there's very much a feeling of the Senate is sort of the upper chamber.
Hannah McCarthy: Wait, are they co-equal?
Nick Capodice: They are. But that doesn't stop the sense that one of them is more formal, [00:12:00] a little more hoity toity, if you will.
Justin LeBlanc: It's more dignified, etc.. So there's sort of a different feeling about even the Senate side of the Capitol complex versus the House side.
Nick Capodice: Justin and Andy have both left Congress since. Justin is now the founder and president of Lobby Wise, and Andy works for a PR firm in New York City.
Andy Wilson: Well, I'm a House guy, so I quite enjoyed the the free flowing nature of the House. Other members, other people that might have worked in the Senate might might feel more proud [00:12:30] of having sort of that stately Senate vibe. But I like the House.
Hannah McCarthy: I think it might be a House gal.
Nick Capodice: It sounds a little more fun, doesn't it? Yeah. I want to make it clear, Andy and Justin, we're in no way throwing shade towards each others chambers, but there is some good natured ribbing that goes on.
Hannah McCarthy: So I've got a good feel for their differences due to size and term length. But what are the specific differences in their powers?
Nick Capodice: Here's what Justin said about that.
Justin LeBlanc: I think the most significant difference between the Senate and the House [00:13:00] really comes down to two things. While they both have to pass legislation and they have to pass the identical legislation in each chamber before it can go to the president for signature only the Senate has the constitutional responsibility and authority to advise and consent the White House on treaties. And so any treaty agreed to by the White House has to be approved by the United States Senate. The House does not have such similar authority.
Nick Capodice: And not just treaties, but the Senate confirms all [00:13:30] presidential appointments, cabinet secretaries.
Hannah McCarthy: Like Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, etc..
Nick Capodice: Yeah, and ambassadors, and the big one, Supreme Court justices.
Hannah McCarthy: Which is a pretty big deal, especially recently.
Nick Capodice: Right. Four of our nine current justices were appointed in the last five years.
Justin LeBlanc: And then on the flip side, all appropriations measures, that is all measures that fund the federal government. Those bills must begin in the House. The Senate does not have the authority to initiate an appropriations process.
Nick Capodice: This [00:14:00] has a fun name, by the way. It's called the Power of the Purse. The framers wanted the House, the voice of the people, to be dominant when it comes to how we tax and spend money. The Senate cannot make money bills. But besides money, there's also impeachment powers. Here's Cheryl Cook-Kallio again
Cheryl Cook-Kallio: Again, the other specific job the House of Representatives have is that any articles of impeachment for any elected federal official goes through the House of Representatives if they are passed in the House of [00:14:30] Representatives, the trial is held in the Senate. That's a specific job of each House.
Hannah McCarthy: If you had told me in 2018, when we first did a series on the midterms, that in a mere four years our Supreme Court would look so different and we would have had two impeachments. I probably would not have believed you.
Nick Capodice: Yeah, I wouldn't have believed myself Hannah. You know, there is another big difference between the House and the Senate, and it has to do with voting and power.
Andy Wilson: In the House. [00:15:00] It's majority rule. So in order to pass a piece of legislation in the House, it's 50% of the votes plus one. So if you know, if the Republicans have a 20 seat majority, they can basically do whatever they want.
Audio clip: Bending the rules and passing H.R. 3109 if ordered. This is a 15 minute vote.
Andy Wilson: Whereas in the Senate, people might be familiar with the filibuster, which frequently requires 60 votes for something to pass. You know, 60% of the of the Senate has to agree [00:15:30] for something to be passed, which requires a great deal of consensus, a great deal of coalition building. Even when a party is in the majority, they may not have enough to pass that 60 vote threshold. And so you have to work with the opposing party, or at least some members of the opposing party.
Nick Capodice: So in my mind's eye, the Senate is sort of like a buttoned up dinner party with scallops wrapped in bacon and a string quartet in the background. Whereas the House is more like the big party you throw where too many people show up and nobody goes home till four [00:16:00] in the morning.
Dan Cassino: The House of Representatives has 435 voting members. Now, the problem is that that so many people that you're never able to wrangle all of them, if you let everybody talk, they're never going to shut up. If there's one thing politicians love, it's the sound of their own voice. So as a result, the House of Representatives is incredibly tightly controlled. Everything that happens in the House of Representatives first has to go through. It's called the Rules Committee Committee. That doesn't even exist in the Senate.
Hannah McCarthy: What.
Nick Capodice: I know they don't even have a Rules Committee!
Dan Cassino: And [00:16:30] the Rules Committee is going to side for any bill that comes out of committee if that bill is going to make it to the floor or not, what terms that bill will be argued under and how much debate you're going to have. Now we say how much debate you might be thinking two senators or two representatives come up and debate and talk back and forth. But that never actually happens outside of Hollywood. In the House of Representatives the most common rule we get is what's called a closed rule, meaning there's going to be no amendments allowed whatsoever and they're going to allow somewhere around 15 minutes of debate. So you get 15 minutes of Republicans [00:17:00] talking about the bill, 15 minutes of Democrats talking about the bill, and then you're going to have an up or down vote on the bill and that's all you're going to get. Because if they actually allowed amendments, you have all these radicals from both sides there. Nothing is ever going to happen. They've basically given up on trying to build consensus in the House of Representatives, House of Representatives is all about mobilizing your party in ramming through whatever you can. And the Speaker of the House, because that becomes enormously powerful. If the Speaker of the House doesn't like a bill, that bill is dead. [00:17:30]
Nick Capodice: Failure to act on a bill is the equivalent of killing a bill. So the Speaker of the House can just refuse to allow any bill to come to the floor so it'll never be voted on. And that's unless you do this thing called a discharge petition, but that's got to be in another episode.
Hannah McCarthy: So thinking about midterm elections, if your party has the majority in the House, it's not just that you have an advantage when voting for legislation, right? Your party also holds the speaker's seat and that means your party has more control over [00:18:00] what bills even make it to the floor.
Nick Capodice: Exactly.
Hannah McCarthy: So how does power work in the Senate?
Dan Cassino: The biggest difference between the House and the Senate is the way that the modern structure of the Senate really empowers individual senators. So you're in the Senate, there's 100 people, and if it's a normal bill that's been filibustered, so you have to get to cloture. The important person to be is the 60th voter.
Nick Capodice: Basically, in order to stop a filibuster, you have to have 3/5 of the Senate vote on it. That's 60 members.
Dan Cassino: You [00:18:30] don't get any prize from me in the 59th vote or because only 59 supporters. Well, the bill's not going get passed. You don't get any prize for being the 68th supporter because they don't need you. They need exactly 60. So the question becomes, who is that 60th vote? Or in the case of one of the rare bills that's not subject to the filibuster, who is the 50th voter, for.
Nick Capodice: Example, confirmations cannot be filibustered. And that Inflation Reduction Act, that was considered a bill that couldn't be filibustered because that's what's called an appropriations bill. It has to do with [00:19:00] the budget. To learn more about that, listen to our episode on the Senate Parliamentarian.
Dan Cassino: And that 50th voter gets whatever they want. And this is what everyone's fighting to be. You want to be that 50th or that 60th supporter. You want to be the pivotal voter, especially in a Senate that's divided as closely as the current Senate. There are lots of potential pivotal voters, and because of that, individual senators have an enormous amount of power. Now, this is, of course, not what the founders [00:19:30] intended at all. The founders definitely intended the Senate to be a place where bills go to die, but they didn't intend to work this way. What they wanted was the Senate to make sure that the whims of the people didn't overwhelm the rights of the states. Today, it's much more about they want to make sure that the whims of the majority party don't overrule the rights and privileges of the minority party in the House of Representatives. Basically, nobody's the pivotal voter. There's 435 voting members. The odds that the bill is going to come down to 218 [00:20:00] versus 217. You are the 218th supporter boy howdy. It just doesn't happen very often because Nancy Pelosi or the Speaker of the House knows what they're doing and they're not going to bring a bill to the floor if they don't already have all the votes lined up.
Nick Capodice: However, Dan says that the people with the most power in the House tend to be those who have been there the longest.
Dan Cassino: If you want any power in the House of Representatives, you have to serve for a long time. You have to rise up the ranks. You have to get to the head of a committee, and then you can shape a bill in committee and push it on the floor. We should also say seniority is not [00:20:30] the only thing anymore. So if I'm the Speaker of the House, my job is to protect my majority. And one of the ways I'm going to do that, I'm going to say, all right, you're a vulnerable member. You're from a district that's a purple district. Could a Republican Democratic. You know, I'm going to do I'm going to put you on the best possible committee. I'm going to help you get all that money back to your district and put you on one of those AAA committees. So you're going to be on defense. You're going to be one of these other committees that can really deliver for your district. So as a voter, I'm not going to lose out on all the benefits by bringing someone new [00:21:00] in, especially if it's a close district. Well, I'm going to get some of those benefits anyway, because the Speaker of the House is going to make sure to put that person in committee where they can deliver for my district so that person can get reelected.
Nick Capodice: We have reached the other big part of the job for both the House and the Senate. Campaigning. We're going to talk about that and how to use your power as a voter to make sure your legislators are working for you. Right after this break. But before that break, a quick reminder that Civics 101 is listener supported. If you like what we're doing, given [00:21:30] any amount at our website, civics101podcast.org, or just click the link in the show notes.
Hannah McCarthy: All right. So senators have a six year term and representatives have to run for reelection every two years, meaning that every two years the entire House and about a third of the Senate is up for reelection. Doesn't campaigning take up a lot of their time?
Nick Capodice: Oh, yeah. Dan said that elected officials can spend up to five or 6 hours a day [00:22:00] to stay in office in both the House and the Senate. Here's former state rep and CNN political analyst Bakari Sellers.
Bakari Sellers: Let me just say that when you're in the House of Representatives, the campaigns never end. You're in a perpetual sense of campaigning because it's that two year period. You don't stop. You don't take a reprieve. You win an election and you you move on to the next elections.
Dan Cassino: If you want to run for the house, the big thing you have to have is name recognition in your community and a relatively small community. 700,000 people [00:22:30] for most House seats. People have to know who you are and you have to be able to knock on doors and mobilize people to knock on doors for you.
Nick Capodice: So what does it take to campaign for the Senate?
Bakari Sellers: Oh, for if you're campaigning for United States Senate, you should have been campaigning your entire life. There's there's no there's no waiting until the filing period. And I love to see that you have these, like billionaires or millionaires or people who have this amazing sense of self, and they wait until the filing period, which is usually like March for June or July [00:23:00] or August primary. And they think they can just parachute in and run a race and spend money on TV.
Dan Cassino: If you want to run for the Senate, the big thing you need is either be really rich yourself or to know a whole lot of rich people because that Senate race cost you tens of millions of dollars and you're never going to knock on enough doors. So the types of candidates you get are going to be very, very different. This is also one of the reasons why we see a lot more women running for the house than we do for the Senate. Well, women are able to mobilize other voters just as well as anyone else. They actually have a harder time raising money [00:23:30] because they don't necessarily have the business connections because of lots of other things going wrong in our society that would let them easily run for the Senate.
Nick Capodice: And that doesn't just affect gender in the Senate.
Bakari Sellers: It's you can literally still count on less than two hands. But, you know, if you go back in history and you're talking about Ed Brooke and Mo Cowan and Carol Moseley Braun and Cory Booker and Kamala Harris and Tim Scott, I just ran through there may be one [00:24:00] that I'm missing or two, but I just ran through the African-American members of the United States Senate in history. And so it's a very it's a very deliberative body, but it's also a very old white male body as well. Usually there's a sense of patriarchy that puts you in a position to run for that office.
Nick Capodice: And as of this recording August 2022, there have been 11 total black US senators ever. [00:24:30]
Hannah McCarthy: 11 total in the history of the country
Nick Capodice: In the history of the nation.
Nick Capodice: And though both the House and the Senate have gotten more diverse over the last couple of elections, there's still a long way to go. Currently, we have 11 nonwhite senators, and in the House, 33% of representatives are nonwhite. And that group includes a lot of newly elected legislators. Hannah As I was making this episode and hearing about all the things the House and [00:25:00] the Senate have power to do and the sheer volume of hours and money that goes both into the work and constant campaigning. Personally, it struck me that as a voter, it was really easy for me to feel disconnected from what's happening at the Capitol building and that any kind of progress or responsiveness to issues that I cared about was frustratingly slow. So this is something I asked Dan Is this how it's supposed to work? [00:25:30] Is this system broken? And if so, what about it is broken? Can we fix it?
Dan Cassino: So Congress is working as intended. This is what the founders wanted. Not the way it works, right? They didn't want parties. They were very much against parties. But the idea that the House proposes a bunch of bills is a bunch of things that could pass the House. Nothing could pass the Senate, therefore nothing happens. That's exactly what the Founders wanted. They wanted a government, a federal government that didn't do anything. It left everything up to the states because they didn't trust the federal government. [00:26:00] They wanted the states to have more power. The problem is that this is a 18th century form of government working in the 21st century, but that's not what the public necessarily wants now, the public doesn't want a government that can't do anything. I think people on both sides of the aisle. Right. Republicans very much want a government that can do something about undocumented migration, that can do something about cutting taxes and red tape. Democrats definitely want a government that can do something about climate change. You can have a government that is more efficient, but we are not designed to do that.
Nick Capodice: Dan reiterated [00:26:30] to me that sometimes this inefficiency is a good thing and that it makes legislators work for something that could have broad appeal.
Dan Cassino: Again, this is not necessarily a bad thing for everyone. It's not a bad thing because if you think about the Inflation Reduction Act, this is a bill that was actually heavily negotiated between wings of the party, between relatively liberal people and relatively conservative people, and brought together a whole bunch of people and got Democrats largely what they wanted and got policy outcomes that were, I think, amenable to most of the American public. [00:27:00]
Nick Capodice: And again, the Inflation Reduction Act didn't even have to be filibuster proof.
Dan Cassino: If you negotiate, if you have to get 60 votes, I'm not sure you get something that looks anything like that.
Nick Capodice: So this is the flip side, that the inefficiency can make it really hard to pass any legislation at all or legislation that anyone is happy about.
Dan Cassino: Think about the most recent gun control bill. There's a gun control bill that literally no one was happy with. It doesn't go nearly far enough because this requirement to get to 60 votes. So is the House [00:27:30] and Senate working the way supposed to? Yes. Is that a good thing? Not necessarily, because it does mean we wind up with a very inefficient government.
Nick Capodice: So for a final question I asked Dan, so what? What's the upshot in all of this? Where does that leave us as voters?
Dan Cassino: This is important, remember. Politicians are a cowardly and superstitious lot. They are terrified, all of them, at all times that [00:28:00] they will lose their reelection bid. Even the people in the safest seats, if they see the slightest chance they're going to lose. They start to shape up and they start to get very responsive very, very quickly. I'll give you an example from here in New Jersey, we have a representative guy named Don Payne, and Don Payne represents mostly Newark. And Don Payne is in a Don Payne Junior because his father had the seat before him. He is not going to lose the election. He is going to win that election. He doesn't even face challenges in the Republican race. He is set. Because [00:28:30] of that, he's been a little complacent. So he has the highest absenteeism rate over the course of career of any member of the House Representatives. There are some years where he doesn't show up for 40% of the votes. He just doesn't go to work. Does he win? Yeah, of course he does, because there's no one challenging him. This past election cycle. There was a young woman who was very much inspired by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who went and started knocking on doors in his district, running against him in the primary.
Audio clip: My name is Imani Oakley. I'm a candidate [00:29:00] running for Congress in New Jersey's 10th Congressional District. And one thing that most people don't know about New Jersey and New Jersey elections is that we have the most corrupt ballot design.
Dan Cassino: Now. She was underfunded. She was literally just she and some volunteers knocking on some doors. And you know what happened? Don Payne, for the first time in years, started doing interviews. Like he went and talked to the press. He started raising lots of money. He started talking to voters. He started showing [00:29:30] up to work. He didn't missed a vote this past year because he's so scared that someone is coming for his seat in the safest possible seat you could have. He's still scared. Politicians are a cowardly and superstitious lot. If they get any inkling that someone is coming for them, they are going to shape up and they're going to do what their voters want to do by voting against someone who is going to win, by giving money to a candidate who has no chance. You [00:30:00] are scaring your representative. You are getting them in line. Even if they're not the party you like, they're going to start voting the way you want them to vote because they're scared of losing their seat. Even if you can't change them, who they are, you can change the behavior by scaring the bejesus out of your representatives. And that's the way to actually make a difference in Washington.
Nick Capodice: This episode is written and produced by me Nick Capodice with Christina Phillips and Hannah McCarthy. [00:30:30] Our staff includes Jacqui Fulton, and Rebecca Lavoie is our executive producer. Music for this episode comes from Blue Sessions. Creo, they did that house music in the beginning, Broke For Free, Jahzaar, Electric Needle Room, our electric needle room. Isaac Elliot, Bonkers Beat Club Alpha J Winters, Aria Light Fields, Xylo Zico and Cusp. Civics 101 is a production of NHPR. New Hampshire Public Radio.
