Interview: Jason Roberts

Chris Nehls: Hi, this is Chris Nehls with the American Governance Institute. Thanks for joining us again. I’m here with Professor Jason Roberts at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is one of the co-authors of a great new paper that includes some reform recommendations for the House called Renewing the House of Representatives: How a More Participatory Legislative Process Could Benefit Both Members and Leaders. This was put out by Protect Democracy United and R Street. And Professor Roberts provided some of the historical perspective that is in the paper. You can go over to congressionalrenewal.org to download the paper if you’re interested, and I’ll try to remember to put a link in the, the transcript of this podcast if you’re interested in reading it. But, um, figured we’d take some time today to chat with Professor Roberts about the history of House rules and how we got to the situation we’re in where things are pretty locked down and members are very frustrated. That’s certainly been the case in the past in the House. And it’s important to remember as we go into the next Congress that the rules have changed dramatically over time, and Jason knows a lot about that, so we’ll start there. So thanks for joining me. Jason Roberts: It’s a pleasure to be here. Nehls: You crammed a whole lot of, of context into a, a short section, which is very hard to do. And you did it exceedingly well. So, I appreciate that work. And one of the things that you are trying to get across is that there have been these pendulum swings back and forth between really strong leadership control and decentralization in the history of the House, and that these things have been the result of member frustrations and, the need to set agendas by leadership, and the- these two things have kind of been in tension over time. So why don’t we just start there and talk about how that cycle has worked in congressional history, at least going back to the post-bellum period. Roberts: Yeah, that’s exactly right. I mean, immediately post-bellum, the House was very chaotic, didn’t have a lot of order to it at all. And that really changes under the speakership of Thomas Brackett Reed of Maine. He was at his heart a majoritarian, and he really went to the mat to put a series of majoritarian reforms. He got rid of this thing called the disappearing quorum, where the minority party would be present in the chamber and not voting in order to deny the majority the ability to do business. He ends that and really starts the process of using special rules that we think of today, and just really fundamentally made the House a majority rule institution for the first time. That then carried on under one of his successors, Joseph Cannon of Illinois. Cannon was known as a czar, as was Reed, and Cannon took this even further. He appointed the committees. He was chair of the Rules Committee. He really tried to lead the House like a dictator, and eventually that came back to bite him. A group of Republicans allied with some Democratic friends of theirs and stripped him of many of his powers in the early part of the 20th century. And that was really the last time we had as strong of a central leadership control as we have now. We sort of, muddled through something called the king caucus era, where Democrats tried to rule through their caucus and that didn’t work particularly well. Then most of the 20th century, you have a very divided Democratic majority party between their Southern component and their Northern component, and they just weren’t really interested in, in centralizing power in the leadership because they had such diverse interests. And we really don’t see that pick up again then until the 1970s. Nehls: Great. Yeah. So what, what changes came about in the ‘70s then? Roberts: Well, there’s a couple things going on. A little bit before that, you start to see northern, more liberal Democrats come into the party and say, hey, this, this system’s not working for us. The southerners control all the committees because of the seniority system. They control the Rules Committee. We have a majority in the caucus for things we wanna do, and there’s not really an outlet for us to do this. So, they begin to agitate for change, and you see this, some of this happens in the ‘60s. You see the, the expansion of the rules committee to weaken the power of Judge Smith of Virginia. But then it’s really in the 1970s that this takes off, and when they start voting for committee chairs by secret ballot, and that takes away the strong grip of seniority and really starts to get to make sure that the people in leadership in the party are gonna have to be responsive to what a majority of the caucus wants. Nehls: Actually, let, let me just back up, because you have these great graphs in the piece where you talk about the committee era what folks have been calling the textbook Congress in, in political science. And you look at it, and it’s much more productive in terms of passing bills. It’s always a kind of a tricky metric if the number of bills equals productivity. And we can bicker about that another day. But you’ve got a tremendous amount of bills being passed in the, in the ‘40s and ‘50s and ‘60s. And then it kind of reverses itself later on, and the bills get longer and more complicated in other areas. But, they’re pretty short in the committee era. So let’s just talk about how I think I got a little ahead of ourselves. What were some of the strengths of that committee-driven system in terms of what we would think of as a productive Congress or an active Congress? Roberts: Well, the committees had real power. They could report legislation out in their area of expertise. Also, the seniority system really incentivized people to become experts. Once you got on a committee, you could stay there indefinitely. It was up to you to leave or not. There were no term limits like we see today. And so it was predictable that you could move up just by staying around, and if you knew you were gonna be on a committee for the long haul and you were gonna have influence in that area, becoming an expert in that area made a lot of sense. And so members could say, hey, I’m gonna learn a lot about this policy area and try to make a difference here. It also distributed the workload across these committees. Part of the problem today is everything tries to run through the leadership, and there’s just not enough capacity in the leadership to handle the entire policy agenda. When it was more distributed, it was just a, a, a just a more efficient way of, of managing the flow of legislation. Nehls: Right. We always have the, the worry that- in the lack of capacity, you get outside groups or lobbyists basically coming in and, and helping out, providing the kind of auxiliary capacity. Do you think that bears out in terms of the, the current situation? Roberts: Yes. I mean, you, you sometimes hear lobbyists say that it’s hard to go talk to people on the Hill because they don’t know what’s going on. They know more than the people they’re trying to lobby. So there’s just not the incentives today for members to develop that deep expertise that there was in the seniority system. Committee chairs rotate every few years. I can understand the argument for that, but it really disincentivizes the development of long-term expertise. Nehls: Yeah. we’ve talked about this on the podcast before about you have the tension within the liberal and conservative wings of the Democratic Party in the the ‘60s over civil rights and other kinds of economic rights issues. And you end up, with the liberal majority of the Democratic caucus deposing the conservatives and then changing how the speakership is kind of oriented. This is something that you’ve written about before academically: what’s been going on since the mid, the early ‘70s in terms of how the minority’s been able to respond to this regime. Roberts: Yeah, so there’s really two parts of this. There’s what the majority party Democrats are trying to do in order to give their caucus majority and chamber majority the ability to govern. That’s a big part of the story. But a second part of the story is what the Republicans did in response. And the star of that show is Newt Gingrich. Gingrich shows up in Congress and looks around at his Republican colleagues and says, hey, guys- We’re not trying to win the majority. Your strategy of cooperating all the time with the majority party and, and giving them votes on things for things in return, this is a recipe for us being a permanent minority. We need to change tactics. And so he really leads them into this tactical change of we’re gonna fight Democrats at every step. We’re gonna make these speeches to make them look bad. We’re gonna start offering amendments to make them take tough votes so we can win some of those seats that are held by these conservative Democrats. And so he really leads the party out of the wilderness in this way and some rules changes really play a big role in this. The Legislative Reorganization Act of 1970, for the first time allowed recorded voting in the Committee of the Whole. And the Committee of the Whole is just this legal fiction where the House meets as a committee rather than the House. They take down the mace, the quorum requirements are lessened, but that’s where they vote on amendments to legislation. And before this change in the rules, they did this through either a standing division vote, a yea and nay vote, or what were called recorded tellers, where there would be people standing at the front of the chamber, and you would simply walk past the yes or no person, and they would count how many people walked past. And that’s how they, they would decide on amendments. Nehls: So it’s- You wouldn’t even say anything to this person. Uh, you just would walk by them. Roberts: Just walk past this person. Lobbyists hated this because they couldn’t track very easily who was voting for their priorities. They would have people sitting in the gallery watching. You’re not allowed to write down anything in the gallery, so they’d have to memorize faces and say, okay, who walked past this teller?” to remember. The 1970 Reorganization Act says, okay, you can have recorded voting in Committee of the Whole. And that’s for the 92nd Congress. It doesn’t really change much until the 93rd Congress when they put in the electronic voting machine. So suddenly it’s easy to vote, have a recorded vote on amendments, and I don’t think Democrats thought through the consequences of that because you have, at the same time that this is happening, you have Gingrich saying, hey, let’s try to put people on the record on these tough amendments. And so they just start offering a slew of amendments. I mean, if you look at the roll call record in the 1970s, it goes from about 10% of recorded votes were amendments to about 35% almost overnight. And almost all these are party line Democratic versus Republican votes. Nehls: And so they had new basically fodder to cut ads This is like kind of the, the beginning of the rise of, of the modern campaign infrastructure newsletters and things like that and mailing lists. Roberts: Yes, the Republicans would, uh, Gingrich started this program where he said, if you’re running against a, a House Democrat and there’s an amendment you would like that person to take a position on, mail it in to us. We’ll offer it for you to get the person you’re running against on record. Nehls: So this is like right at that sea change of right before the Reagan campaign and all the New Right folks that are involved in that in terms of like Paul Weyrich and people that are pioneering conservative electoral strategies, and this is, this is like basically just free content for them is the way to say. Roberts: Right. And so that leads to the, the Democrats respond to this by saying, well, hey, we’re gonna have to have more restrictive rules. We’re gonna start clamping down on these amending opportunities. Then that leads into a big fight about the motion to recommit. Once you closed off amending opportunities, the Republicans started exploiting the motion to recommit with instructions to report forthwith. So then Democrats start closing that off and Republicans are screaming about that. And so that, it’s just ratcheted it up from there. There really hasn’t been much give and take, you know, take back the other way. I mean for years Republicans claimed when they got in the majority they would have a more open process. They didn’t do it. Finally, uh, I think the, the former rules committee chair finally just said, “Look, I was wrong about this. You can’t run the House with open rules.” Nehls: Yeah, and I’m looking -- we haven’t had open rules since the 115th Congress. Is that right? Roberts: Yes. So almost had a decade since we’ve had an open rule. Nehls: That’s crazy. But both parties are kind of incentivized. I mean, we, you mentioned the Democrats closing off rules with the Republicans. So both parties have this incentive now to really tighten the process to keep collateral damage from happening. Amendments are part of that, but it’s kind of spiraled out beyond amendments, uh, into actual legislation too, right? Is that the case? Roberts: Yes, it’s just been a gradual ratcheting and condensing of everything into the leadership. So committees aren’t doing as much. Members just aren’t having much of .. for a rank and file member, there’s just not a lot to do in the House these days. Yeah. Sit around and wait for the leader to tell you what to do, and I think that’s not a very good work environment for a lot of people. Nehls: Yeah let me just ask you, what’s in the way of just going back to a stronger committee system? We hear this a lot that we need to strengthen committees, we need to return some legislative priorities to the, the committee chairs. There’s been some reform chatter about even strengthening subcommittee chair like giving more authority to certain subcommittees. What do you think, what do you make of that, those suggestions of trying to drag us back into the mid-century in the context we’re, that we’re in? Roberts: Well, I mean, things are different now. It’s a different media environment, it’s a different partisan environment. But at the end of the day, what I think members need to realize is the leadership works for them. The rules are set by the membership. You sometimes listen to members talk about this, and they sound helpless, and the truth is they can change this. They alone can change this, because a majority can do whatever they want in the House. So if they want to change the rules and have stronger committees or subcommittees, they can do that. They just need to get a majority together to do this. But I do think a lot of people, they struggle to coordinate, and I think a lot of people just simply don’t know what is possible. Nehls: So what should they know? If you can get in front of them, what, what would you tell them? Roberts: Well, I’d say that it has worked before this way, and it’s not as if, partisanship didn’t develop only in the... You know, my students think that the polarization in partisanship started when social media started. That’s simply not true. Democrats and Republicans have, have disagreed and disliked each other for a very long time, and you can manage that conflict sometimes if you have different procedures than just we’re going to pile everything on the leader and have one vote on things. Nehls: Mm-hmm. And one of the points in the paper is that we have this narrative in here in DC of the political press being very interested the leader trying to control or corral th the wayward cats of their caucus when they’re in the majority and kind of evaluating leadership based on their ability to keep people together and not have things like have happened in this most recent Congress of leadership having to pull bills or rules going down or on the floor, having to go into recess for weeks because the plan kinda fell apart. But one of the arguments in this paper is that leadership is kind of a no-win situation with the roles that they’re in right now. Is that the, is that what you guys are saying? Roberts: Yeah, on a more theoretical level, I think what you have is a leadership structure now that’s trying to run the House like it’s a, a Western European-style parliament, trying to get party line votes on things that are priorities to them. That’s all well and good, but members don’t run for election here on a party list. They run in a primary, then they run in a district, and they’ve gotta listen to their district voters. Our districts are quite diverse. The media likes to talk about, oh, someone’s in a red district or a blue district. On average, sure, but, but districts vary a lot in what they want from their members. And so what you’re seeing in the House, both on the Democratic and Republican side, is members fighting against this idea that they have to behave as if they’re in a parliament because they’re simply trying to represent their constituents. I mean, we had the episode in September where Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington really angered her Democratic colleagues for voting for a Republican special rule. Well, she’s, she’s representing a Trump district in rural Washington. She can’t vote with the party all the time, not ever try to get her own priorities forward and expect to win re-election. It just doesn’t work that way, and so we’re, we’re essentially trying to put a, a square peg into a round hole, trying to run the House as if it’s a parliament, and it just doesn’t work that way. Nehls: And now you’re seeing, I mean, we’ll see what happens in a couple weeks with … it does seem like voters are looking for a little more of a homestyle representative system in the Congress that has basically handed over even the legislative agenda to the White House even. So it’s even even taken it up a notch. I don’t know if you would agree with that or not, but- Roberts: To an extent, yes, that’s certainly true. Nehls: So how do we get out of this? Roberts: Well, the good news is the, the, as I said, the members can change the rules. The House doesn’t consider itself a continuing body like the Senate does. When they show up in January, the rules are literally a blank slate. They can adopt any set of rules they want. So, if they want to change the rules, they should change the rules. That’s how you get out of it. The question of whether that needs to be member-led or leader-led is an open question. I know some people are trying to work with, some people who are anticipating that Democrats may win the majority have tried to work with the perhaps incoming Democratic leadership and say, hey, you’re gonna have to manage this differently if you’re gonna succeed. I mean, I don’t think the example of this Congress is something that if I were looking at that, I would say, hey, that’s something I want to try to replicate, because I think Mike Johnson’s life has been pretty miserable trying to run the show this way and just trying to get these people to do things that they don’t really want to do, and he doesn’t really have a lot of control over them. Nehls: Yeah. What do you think he could have done differently in terms of managing the caucus? Or, or is that the wrong question? Is it really the problem is the, is the attempt to manage a caucus that, that really is a impossible task? Roberts: Well, it’s been hard for him to do things given the narrow majority. I mean, when you have a, two or three-vote majority it really increases the incentives for people to engage in what we would call a classic hold-up problem of like, hey, you can’t do this without me, so I can ask for lots of things. And then once you’re willing to give someone something, everyone else thinks they should get that kind of treatment, and so it, it really unravels unless you have unity on what you want to do going forward. And they haven’t had that. And again, I think part of it where they’ve gotten some of their agenda from the White House. What the administration’s priorities may not be what the membership’s priorities were. I think a lot of members saw some of the administration priorities as actually counter to their electoral goals, and so it makes sense that they had conflict. I really don’t know what Johnson could have done differently. I think he was in a very difficult position with a, a narrow majority and unruly caucus and an administration trying to push them in certain directions. Nehls: So if we have a... And it, it looks increasingly likely that not only will we have a, a Speaker Jeffries, but he might have a little more of a cushion than, than, a six seat or a three seat or whatever it seems like he’s gonna have a little bit more of a cushion. What are some of the ideas out there to make his life easier? What would you suggest the Democrats consider in terms of, you need to stay coordinated, you need to... They’re in a little different of a situation in that it’s divided government still, so much of what they’re going to be putting out there is of course going to be setting up 2028. But what should they be thinking about? Roberts: Well, he’s going to have a difficult job. I mean, even if he has more than a three-seat majority, which I’m not willing to get into prognosticating on that one. Nehls: That’s okay. Roberts: If anything this era has taught me is I don’t predict election outcomes. So, uh, if you were coming here looking for that, uh, you’re going to have to go somewhere else. But their caucus is still going to be quite diverse. You’re going to have members there who are representing districts that voted for Trump. You’re going to have members who are very, very progressive, who have knocked off, you know, mainstream Democrats in a primary, and they’re going to have very, very different legislative priorities than people who are sitting in Trump districts. So Jeffries would be wise to try to get those fights out of his office and get them somewhere else. And so one of the things we propose in this paper is look, set up a system where if legislative proposals have some threshold of bipartisan support, there’s a provision where those things can automatically get a vote. The way things work now, everyone has to go through speaker’s office and try to get their priorities put in. And so it puts this one person in this job of saying yes or no to everything. We think if you decentralize that a little bit, get people out of the speaker’s hair and say, hey, go build a coalition. Go find people who support what it is you want to do, and then we can have a vote on it. And I think that’s been a problem that, that Johnson has run into, is that a lot of his recalcitrant members have things they want, that they want to take a vote on. Not only do a lot of their colleagues not want that thing, they don’t want to take a vote on it. And so it’s been really difficult for him to manage that. Nehls: Yeah, let’s dig in on that a little bit because you hear a lot in the reform community about, we need to come back to building bipartisan consensus, and that usually is coded towards, um, electoral choices, right? It’s usually about finding more moderate candidates or in both parties or, or whatnot. And we’re not, so sure about that. We’re not particularly enthusiastic about that. But the potential to come together on specific bipart- on specific issues that have a kind of maybe unusual bipartisan salience is something that’s out there that really hasn’t, at least to my mind, been explored. Just to give you an example on privacy rights or surveillance state stuff, there’s an overlap between very progressive and very conservative members of the House sometimes on, FISA reauthorization or things like that. Would that be compatible with the reforms you’re talking about or, or is this something else? Roberts: Well, I mean, it’s a lot of that. There is more bipartisanship than people seem to realize. ... Francis Lee and Jim Curry have done great work on this and, you know, the media cover the big partisan battles. They don’t really cover what some people have called it the silent Congress that- that’s doing things in a bipartisan manner. And so you see that in a lot of ways. You do see the, the things like FISA and whatnot, where you create these, some people call it ends against the middle coalition, some people call it the horseshoe theory of politics where we’ve bent back so the right and the left are with each other. I think an issue we run into today is with the narrow majorities and with the leadership trying to structure everything, they often don’t want to see these bipartisan coalitions emerge because they’d rather have the issue to run on in the next election than to have the accomplishment. You sometimes see the minority say this, it’s like, “hey, we can’t convince the voters to replace those guys if we’re working together with them and getting things done. Why would they make a change? And so you really need to somehow create a system where people are able to do these kinds of things and not be punished for it. There’s such a focus on party unity. When you think about these members -- let’s assume the Democrats have a majority. If you think about the members who are going to be sitting in more conservative, maybe even Trump districts, they will be happy to take votes where they disagree with their DSA far left colleagues. That will make them very happy to be able to say, hey, I’m not with these people. I’m standing up for something different. I want to be able to set myself as apart from, you know, a San Francisco liberal or a New York liberal and, and show the voters that I’m, I’m really representing this district. And so in terms of majority maintenance, actually allowing people to do this kind of thing might be helpful. Nehls: You’re looking at people that might win seats that Trump won by double digits- Right ... in some cases, which is kinda insane and yeah, not wanting that to be a one-off, you’re, you’re certainly right that they’re going to want to … there seems to be a real tension, and maybe, I don’t know how much political science has gotten into the, the tension between your personal brand, your personal messaging as a representative of your district and the nationalization of these politics. Roberts: There’s a bit of a chicken and egg problem here, and I don’t know that we have a, a definitive answer. I mean, it’s certainly true that voters are voting more straight ticket party than since probably the late 19th century. There’s a lot less split-ticket voting. Voters are just less willing to, support one party for Congress and the other party for president. I mean, in 1984, Ronald Reagan won 49 states, and he won 192 House districts that Democrats won. That’s just unthinkable today. Part of that is, is no doubt that voters are more partisan and more sorted. But another part of it is the kinds of candidates who can win in more moderate or, or other party-coded districts just don’t exist as much anymore. You don’t see the kinds of people emerging, the Glusenkamp Perezes of the world are much rarer than they used to be. The primary system weeds them out a bit. The constant pressure to vote the party line weeds them out, and so you just don’t see as many of those people. So it’s bit self-reinforcing. There are a few people like that left. I mean, Susan Collins in Maine and on the Senate side’s an example of someone who has survived by consistently attracting the votes of people who vote Democratic for president. You know, but who knows if she’s going to be around in January or not. She’s very much on the endangered list, and so it’s just become more difficult for these kinds of members to emerge and survive. Nehls: Yeah. You guys put out proposals that you know, either on amendments or basically an alternative to discharge petition with a certain number of Ds and Rs agree on, on co-sponsoring something that it gets an automatic vote. I think it’s, there’s certainly been other proposals similar to that and mechanically what do you think is a good number for how many people need to be signing onto something for it to, for the leadership to want to say, Okay let’s let this ride? Roberts: I don’t know that I have a definitive answer on that. We did not put a number in there on purpose. I mean, if you get too big, you end up getting into the kinds of things that probably currently pass now under suspension anyway. I think you want to keep it low enough that it’s not just something that’s going to be by acclamation. I would think at least double digits. I mean, if you can get 10 or 20 on each side, I think that starts to show sufficient support for something that, that is probably worth taking a vote on. Nehls: Okay. Yeah. Makes sense. Roberts: Similar for amendments, we think that if one of the reasons we have so many closed rules is that the majority is fearing these politically motivated gotcha amendments. We’re just trying to make you look bad on this vote. We’re not really trying to change the underlying bill. I understand that. And so if you say, okay, if you’ve got a sufficient number of, of sponsors of this amendment on both sides, then it’s probably not a gotcha amendment. It’s a serious legislative proposal, so there should be a mechanism to get that to be heard and get a vote on it. Nehls: Would these rules changes kind of work to slow down maybe and maybe this is an intentional design but we hear a lot about the 72-hour rule for reading a bill is basically fake. You can introduce a bill basically stretch a day or two days into 15 minute minute period depending on when you drop something. We talked to Jim Curry about this about how leadership controls the controls time strategically, right, to make sure that members don’t know what’s going on. So do you think these rules could have a positive impact on that? If you want to circulate an amendment and get signatures on it you need to know what’s in the bill. So kind of mechanically, like how would this work in terms of the legislative conveyor belt that we have right now? Roberts: It would require people to, I think you’re right, to know what’s going on. And there often is some time between when amendments are proposed and when, when a rule comes out. It might help us take those 72-hour rules and whatnot more seriously. There’s the control of time in this Congress has been something. We’ve designated days not to be days. I was teaching this to my students the other day, and I said, well, look, the fundamental thing you have to understand is a majority of the House can do whatever it wants. And so that includes martial law, that includes saying a day is not a day: but it does require a majority. And so again, if members are frustrated by this, they don’t have to vote for it. Nehls: Yeah. We talked to Max Spitzer about this, uh, how the, the rules have changed to the point where the speaker can just abolish the House essentially. Roberts: I think that’s something we mentioned in the report, that the Speaker should not be able to just indefinitely send the House home because he doesn’t want to take a tough vote. Nehls: Something that started with over snowstorms or something like that. It’s kind of spiraled out of control. What’s not in the report that you think that members should be thinking about in terms of the pendulum swing back to some decentralization? Roberts: Well, I think I’d go back and rethink this idea that we have to have recorded voting in the Committee of the Whole. And before we did that, it was still the case that if an amendment was adopted in the Committee of the Whole when the bill came to the floor, someone could request a roll call on that amendment and it would happen. I think that makes a lot of sense. But if you got rid of this recorded voting in the Committee of the Whole, you would really get rid of the incentive to offer disingenuous amendments that are just for position taking or electoral purposes. And then if that incentive is muted a bit, then I think you end up with more legitimate proposals that people would want to make a bill better by offering them. And I think that would improve the legislative process. I think it would probably improve legislation, and I think it would get members more engaged in the legislative process. I think a big problem members have now is like, I come to the, I come to the, the office, there’s really nothing to do except raise money and wait around to vote on something the way I’m told to vote. And so you see people leaving left and right who are serious legislative players because there’s just not a lot of outlets for that kind of activity anymore. Nehls: Yeah. Now the government transparency folks, which I might work for one of those would say, we should know what members are doing. We should know how this process is working. And how does, how have we kind of balanced that in the past before the creation of electronic voting, . Roberts: I mean, it still took place in the Committee of the Whole. It’s still, I- I’m assuming it would in this day and age still be on C-SPAN. It’s still observable from the gallery. It’s not that I have something against transparency, but I do think, and we need to be realistic about having every single thing being transparent, can it sometimes be at cross purposes with bipartisan compromise and negotiations and, and just making progress on issues that maybe if you don’t see every step, you can get a little farther in the process. I understand the trade-off and it’s one that I’m concerned about. But what we have now is we don’t really have a very transparent process. I mean, these bills are written in the leadership office. They’re not being amended on the floor. This I would say this is a step in the right direction, even if it doesn’t get you to full transparency. Nehls: Great. Any last word in terms of your hopes for the next Congress? Roberts: Well, I just hope that the- I find it very frustrating when members seem to think that they don’t have any power to do anything about this, that they feel stuck under this set of inherited rules, and I wish members would understand and realize, hey, they can change this if they want to. They decide how much power their leader has. They decide what, what the House is going to look like, and hopefully, they can put together a set of rules that they’re happy to govern under. Nehls: Yeah. Great. I think you’ve given them a lot to chew on in this report and really appreciate your time. Thanks for, for joining me. Roberts: Oh, it’s my pleasure. Happy to be here. Get full access to First Branch Forecast at firstbranchforecast.substack.com/subscribe