Let's Find Common Ground - Bridge Builders in Congress. Reps. Derek Kilmer (D) and William Timmons (R)

Episode Date: March 17, 2022

The public’s trust in government is near an all-time low. Now some politicians are recognizing that polarization and division in the United States is a threat to how our democracy functions. In this episode, we hear from two members of Congress: One Republican, one Democrat. Representatives Derek Kilmer and William Timmons both work together on the Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress and are leading supporters of the Building Civic Bridges Act — a proposal that would fund federal and local efforts to reduce polarization.  We also discuss how bipartisan support for robust measures in response to the invasion of Ukraine may strengthen efforts to improve ties between Members of Congress of both parties.  This effort comes at a critical time. Recent polling has found that about four-out-of-five Americans are very or extremely concerned about America's political divisions. "Let's Find Common Ground", produced for Common Ground Committee, is co-hosted by Richard Davies and Ashley Milne-Tyte.

The public's trust in government is near an all-time low. Increasingly, members of Congress are recognizing that polarization and division in the United States is a threat to how democracy functions. We speak to two of them. One Republican, one Democrat. This is Let's Find Common Ground. I'm Ashley Muntite. I'm Richard Davies.

Democrat Derek Kilmer and Republican William Timons are both bridge builders. They work together on the House Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress. They've already agreed on a series of proposals that could help make Congress function better. Both congressmen also support the Building Civic Bridges Act, a proposal that would send funding to federal and local efforts to reduce polarization. We'll learn more about this in our interview. We've got a lot of ground to cover. Ashley, you get the first question.

As we record this, the war in Ukraine is raging. Do you think Putin's invasion has offered a chance for both parties in Congress to work more constructively together as they respond to this urgent crisis? I think so. You saw during the President's State of the Union, this was one area where there was not a divide between Democrats and Republicans. There was full-throated support for the people of Ukraine and I think solidarity and wanting to stand uproated support for the people of Ukraine, and I think solidarity in wanting to stand up to Putin. But the nature of your question, I think, drives at some of what B. Devils Congress right

now. There was a recent poll that found that 70% of Americans, believe our country, is so polarized that it is incapable now of solving big problems. And certainly, the situation in Ukraine is a big problem that needs us to get beyond partisanship and be able to do what's best for not just our country, but for the world. Congressman Tinnons? I agree with the chairman. I think it is a great opportunity for Republicans and Democrats to set aside their policy differences. And it's just shocking to me that in 2022, the sovereignty of a European country is being challenged. And I mean, I'm hearing some terrible reports about human

rights violations. I just can't believe that we're in this position right now. And I think that the United States needs to take a stronger leadership position in the world and make sure that everyone knows that this is not going to happen. And we need to provide the strongest check possible to protect the lives of our allies in Ukraine. So I do think this is a great spot for us to work together, and I think that there's no partisan challenges here. Have you seen some signs of that happening as a result of this crisis? I have. I mean, I don't think that anybody in Congress has a differing position.

Everyone wants to do something. Some people want to do more than others, but everyone is united in holding Putin accountable and protecting our allies. You both have been working on your committee to strengthen and improve how Congress works, assuming that it isn't functioning very well right now. Make the case for why we need Congress to function, to work better. Well, I'll say upfront, I mean, it's strange to be part of an organization that according to recent polling is less popular than headlice, colonoscopies, and the rock band, Nickelback. And I think that's somewhat indicative of just the fact that too often, the dysfunction

in Congress impacts the American people. Listen, when we see even outside of just the toxicity that often shows up on cable news that repels the American public, there are consequences, for example, when Congress is unable to pass a budget, when we have a government shutdown or when we have, as we've had, for years and years and years, what's called continuing resolutions where Congress basically kicks the can on federal spending. And the consequence of that is really evident in a district like mine, where the largest employer is the United States Navy, where you've seen shipyard workers get sent home when the government gets shut down. There is a need, I think, and really the rationale behind the creation of this committee is

something that happens basically every two or three decades or so. Congress realizes things aren't working the way they ought to, and they create a committee to try to do something about it. And this is the current iteration of that. The last one was in the early 90s. And our task is pretty simple, but challenging, and that is make Congress work better for the American people. I'll follow up on that. I think technology is really advancing the human civilization in incredible ways, but I think it's creating, it's creating challenges. I mean, they

didn't have these until 2000 something. It allows us to remove the relationships that we have. You know, when you think about it, most members of Congress do not have substantial interaction with the opposite party. The vast majority of members of Congress. They can tweet mean things at each other, and that is what replaced dialogue and conversations from decades ago. So we're struggling with maintaining the relationships

that are necessary to find common ground. And we've spent a lot of time on the committee trying to see how we can build relationships across the aisle and with our colleagues to get back to that. I talk about evidence-based policy making in a collaborative manner from a position of mutual respect. That's what we're supposed to do. We don't do that anymore.

And so anything we can do to force people back into the room and use their inside voices and find path forward. That's what I think this country and this Congress needs. Your members of the select committee on the modernization of Congress give us an example of something that you've done that could make a difference. So we've spent a fair amount of time looking at how can Congress as an institution do a better job of recruiting, retaining, and having more diverse staff that looks like the American people?

You know, we've worked on that in part because under the status quo, there is dramatic turnover in this institution. The average tenure is about three years. And the consequence of that is, you is, every few years, the institution basically self-labotomizes and loses capability to solve big problems. And nature of whores of vacuum, as an institution, that means we're either incapable of solving big problems or what fills that vacuum too often is paid lobbyists,

which I would argue does not serve the best interests of the American people. So that's part of the reason we worked on these issues related to staffing. William held up his cell phone. Congress has been described as a 18th century institution using 20th century technology to solve 21st century problems.

That doesn't really work right now. When we're dealing with all sorts of technological issues, everything from cyber security to how do we protect people's privacy and the institution needs to keep up with the times. And currently isn't. So we've worked on that space too. And then just to underscore the point that William made, one of the things that most B-devils this institution

is just the ability, the inability of people to work together constructively, too often policy conversations resemble the Jerry Springer show, rather than constructive dialogue to try to actually solve problems for the American people. And so we've tried to make some recommendations to make some just targeted interventions to try to make the place function better. Derek, your committee has an equal number of Democrats and Republicans.

You agreed to a series of proposals for change, right? So we've so far passed over 140 bipartisan recommendations. About 75% from the last Congress have either been implemented or have seen some meaningful action. And then we're on a pretty good clip to see the implementation on a number of the recommendations that we've made this Congress as well. We've been really intentional about the work that we've done. In part, we made a decision that if we could find agreement on recommendations, we would vote on them rather than just waiting till some end date

And two we wanted to make sure that we weren't just making recommendations that we were making change Some of it's also involved just doing things differently as a committee So as you mentioned actually our committees six Democrats and six Republicans If you watch one of our hearings on C-SPAN and six Republicans. If you watch one of our hearings on C-SPAN, one, it probably means you have too much time on your hands. But if you want one of our hearings on C-SPAN, you'll find a few things. One, we don't sit with Republicans on one side of a Dias and Democrats on the other. I don't know about you. When I hear something interesting, my genetic predisposition is to lean over to the person next to me and say, hey, that was

kind of interesting. In an art committee, when you do that, you lean over next to someone from the other party. So your hearings look different from the hearings of other committees, rather than it being a usual kind of courtroom arrangement where you have members at diocese making brief speeches, you have this round table. What kind of difference has that made to the dynamics of your discussion?

Will you mean we'll take that? Sure, it's changed everything. And, you know, it has facilitated an environment of, I mean, I would go as far as I trust. I mean, we literally talk to each other, we exchange ideas. We do things that no other committee does. We don't go in order of seniority, we go in order of who has a question. I mean, we operate in a way where we're actually trying to figure out the best path forward as opposed to talking past each other. We're trying to do our job and it's really been incredibly rewarding and we've all become friends and we've made great progress.

Does that amaze you though that this isn't the normal way of doing things in Congress? Yeah, we've made a number of recommendations at least encouraging committees to try to do some of the things or experiment with some of the things that we've done. The sort of approach to dialogue that William just mentioned, I don't know about you, I've never had a good conversation speaking to the back of somebody's head, which is why we thought like, hey, let's ditch the dius because by its nature, it puts us at a higher level

than the witnesses that have come before our committee, which I think is kind of a bizarre dynamic, but beyond that, it means we're all talking to the back of each other's heads. So we've changed that up. Too often the approach in committees is members sort of pinball from committee to committee because the schedule means that you're in three or four committees at the same time. As a consequence, there's not a lot of listening that happens in committees, and we've made some recommendations to try to change that,

just with regard to schedule and calendar. But also, the consequences, even when members are there, they're there to make a five minute speech to stick up on social media rather than to actually listen and learn. If we want Congress to be a place that can solve big problems, that means members have to develop expertise on the issues that come before their committee. It means that committees need to be empowered to try to do more problem solving. And it means we can't just talk past each other. We don't limit our members to five minutes. If they want to pull on a thread that a witness has mentioned, we say, hey, you know, who wants to pull on that thread? And as a consequence, I think we found just a lot more value

out of the hearings that we've had. We've even done some other things that, frankly, initially people thought we were a little nuts. Like what? Well, when our committee started, the first thing that happens is the committee gets its budget. And in every committee in Congress, what then happens is some pretty simple math.

Usually they divide by two, sometimes they have even worse with more money going to the majority than the minority. And then what happens is Democrats use their part of the money to hire people who have a democratic background who put on blue jerseys and Republicans hire people with a Republican background who put on red jerseys and then they spend the rest of the time arguing with each other. We decided not to do that. What we said is we

don't have enough resources as a committee and these problems are too big not to force multiply. So what we said is, hey, how about this? Why don't we jointly hire people and we'll make hiring decisions together and we'll hire some people who have a democratic background and some people who have a Republican background. But they'll all put on a jersey that says let's fix Congress. And as a consequence, we've got really a team that's trying to solve problems together rather than trying to find avenues to screw the other party. It really has been incredible. We have a very talented team and we're all like-minded

and we're working well together. You know, it's just been impressive to see how this place is supposed to work. Representatives William Timons and Derek Kilmer talking about their work on the select committee on the modernization of Congress. Our podcast is Let's Find Common Ground. We aim to do that one episode at a time. I'm Richard. I'm Ashley. We're members of Democracy Group, a podcast network that features conversations

around reforming democracy. Here's a word about one of them, democracy paradox. Hello, this is Justin Kempf with a brief thank you for listening to Democracy Group Network Podcasts. I host Democracy Paradox where I talk to scholars and thought leaders about democracy, democratization, and world affairs. This week's guest is the legendary, one of a kind, Moises Naim. You can learn more about my podcast at democracyparadocs.com or check out our other great shows in the network at democracygroup.org.

Now back to our interview with House Democrat Derek Kilmer and Republican William Timons. Derek mentioned the staffing issue as being a real problem, something that needs to change. William, can you just talk about another couple of things that maybe outsiders average people would be really surprised to hear about that need fixing that you're hoping to fix? Sure. So, minimum wage in Washington DC is $15 an hour. You extrapolate that. It's like $30 something thousand a year.

We have a lot of people in Congress that work on the hill that make less than that. So we don't abide by the rules of Washington DC. And you know, you have a lot of people that work on the hill that have multiple jobs. DC is extremely expensive. So you know, it's just ridiculous that you're gonna ask somebody to have two or three jobs or to live in what is basically in pivorous conditions in order to work on the hill. There's a lot of opportunity on the hill, but it shouldn't be that way. So, hopefully there's gonna be an increase in the member's representation allocation,

which will allow members of Congress to pay their teams more. I think that will be a huge step. We also have an exodus of top talent. And one of the recommendations we made that the speakers are implemented, it allows members offices to pay their staff up to $193,000 as opposed to previously they were capped at $174.

So that's another great opportunity because if you're starting a family or you have a family, it's just really challenging. And a lot of people that work on the Hill could leave and make double or triple. And so we want to maintain the most talented people. And we want to make it easy for people to serve their country and their community by working in Congress as well as serving in Congress. So Derek, what about the broader issue of bringing more civility to Congress?

You know, we've spent a fair amount of time looking at how do you create a more collaborative workplace? You know, when we decided to take on issues related to civility and collaboration, I can confess most people said Good luck and I got a lot of offers of prayer, but the committee brought in experts in organizational psychology, a management consultants, folks who have expertise in conflict resolution, negotiations, some sports coaches who took over dysfunctional teams. I thought about bringing in an exorcist to talk to us. But, you know, we're trying to figure out, how do you just make the place function in a more, well, one function? And ideally function far more collaboratively than we see right now.

So, let me give an example of something we heard. I talked to a sports coach and I said, you know, you took over a team that had a notoriously bad culture. How did you fix it? And he said, you know, we fixed it focusing on the new members of the team on the and the incoming freshmen. And then he asked me a question. He said, how does Congress bring on incoming freshmen? And do you know the answer to that? Literally, from the beginning, it's tribal. William tells a story about showing up at freshman orientation and being told, OK, so Republicans get on that bus

and Democrats get on that bus. So it is literally, and I think that may or may not surprise the American people. So one of the recommendations we have made as a committee is stop doing that. Stop dividing, let's make the orientation process, one that's focused on civilian collaboration and having a functional institution, rather than, you know, gang warfare. Derek Kilmer, you are one of the leading proponents of a new bill about civility? Can you tell us more?

Yeah, and thankfully Congressman Timmans is a co-sponsor of that bill too. I'll tell you the genesis of it. We had a couple things happen in my district that I was pretty alarmed by. One this fall we had unfortunately a series of attacks on religious institutions. The Islamic Center in Tacoma was burned to the ground. Two Buddhist faith leaders were beaten up at their temple. We saw a vandalism at a couple of churches. And in the spirit of something good coming out of something bad, the interfaith community decided to hold a solidarity event to basically say, you know, we're we're gonna have each other's backs. And it was actually really inspiring and

basically the message was, you know, part of a strong pluralistic democracy is that you have to be able to live next door to people who think differently and pray differently than you do and not have a turn into conflict. And afterwards one of the faith leaders came up to me and said, you know, that was a really good 90-minute conversation. But if we did this right, it'd be more than a 90 minute conversation. This would be something that we tried to do on a prolonged basis. And he said, just out of curiosity, is there any federal support for doing anything like that?

I said, you know, not really, at least not currently. And then in November or December, I got invited to one of my local YMCA's thinking they were going to talk to me about the fact that gymnasiums are losing money. That's not what they wanted to talk about. They said, all of the conflict, all the polarization that you see in Washington, D.C., that we see on cable news, has unfortunately infested our YMCA.

They said, we've literally had fights break out over pick your red or blue issue. And they said, it's become such a big problem. We can't ignore it anymore. So we've actually decided to hire a consultant who's going to train our staff and train our board and conflict resolution. We're going to try to host some events

to bring people together across differences. And then they said, just out of curiosity, is there any federal support for anything like that? And I said, you know, not really. And at the same time, William and I are cheering this committee on someone sent us a report from the National Academy, it is called Our Common Purpose about strengthening American democracy.

And chapter four of it is entitled Strengthening Civic Bridge Building. And it makes the point that the United States through the National Endowment for Democracy spends tens of millions of dollars each year trying to promote social cohesion and build civic bridges to strengthen democracy in other countries. But it does none of that domestically.

And so that was really the impetus for this bill that you mentioned, which is focused on setting up a new pilot program through AmeriCorps that would do grant making to these hyper-local efforts to try to bring people together across lines of difference, to also to train AmeriCorps participants and some of the skills related to civic bridge building, and even to support some of the research being done by colleges and universities in this space. And we chose AmeriCorps in part because it has footprints in most of our communities, and I think anybody who's been involved in a service project or after a natural disaster

knows that you're not checking party identification when you're working on a service project. And beyond that, the AmeriCorps is unique and that it's empowered under its statute to accept private philanthropy. So our hope is that with a little bit of federal money, we might be able to leverage it into something that could really make a difference in our communities

at a really polarized time. As Ken Burns has said, our national motto is, eat flora bus unum and these days it feels like we have a lot of flora bus but not a lot of unum. And hopefully something like this could be helpful. William, do you have anything to add? The same challenges we have in Congress, we have in everyday society. People are no longer connected in a way that they used to be. And I do think technology is a lot to blame

next time you go to have a meal somewhere, look at the table next to you. The four people sitting there are gonna be sitting here like the bent over their phones. We've lost the human relationships that have existed throughout human history, and we've got to find a way to overcome this. I mean, again, I love technology.

There's huge benefits. But I do think that we're having some growing pains, and I do think that we need to make sure that we remember the human decency and relationship to matter. Derek, you've mentioned the Building Civic Bridges Act, the need for it, what's in it? Yeah, and I think one of the cool things about this bill, we introduced it with nine Republican sponsors and nine Democratic sponsors. I think there is a bipartisan understanding

that we need to overcome this polarization. So the bill would create a new program within AmeriCorps that's focused on building relationships across lines of difference. It would focus on providing grants to those local entities that are doing this work on the ground in our communities. The local YMCA, the local interfaith organization that's trying to get past some of these differences

that too often make it feel like we're kind of tearing at the seams in our country. I'm not sure we're gonna solve all of that in Washington, DC. You know, maybe this gets solved from the bottom up by these efforts in our local communities, by work being done by AmeriCorps participants, and that's part of the bill too,

is to train AmeriCorps participants in the skills related to civic bridge building. Andy Barr, who is one of my colleagues from Kentucky, has in his district the Henry Clay Center at the university and in his state that's doing research related to how do we actually bring people together across lines of difference? How do you actually foster collaboration in a way that too often seems like a lost art right now in our country? So I'm hopeful that we'll see, I was really pleased that we saw bipartisan support at introduction for this bill.

I'm hopeful that we'll see some positive momentum and get it across the finish line. Before we go, you two are from opposite parties. How do you get along and did you hit it off right away? What did it take some doing? Well, I was originally the freshman member on the committee and Derek was the chairman. He leads by example. I mean, you know, he's the chairman of the committee, but he Includes everybody. He makes sure everyone has input in the process.

And I hate to say this, but I'm on financial services. I don't think the chairwoman could pick me out of a lineup. And that's not against her. If the Republicans were in the majority, I promise you that the Republican chairman would not know the freshman on that committee. It's just, it's a different world that we have created on the modernization committee.

And we've developed mutual respect and friendship and you know it has been a very rewarding process. I really appreciate the spirit that William brings to this committee and his embrace of this mission of just trying to make the institution function better. William tells a story about running for Congress under the theme of Congress is broken and we need to fix it. And I think he's taken that approach. Listen, it's hard to do things differently in Congress. It's hard to do things differently in any institution, in any organization. When you say, hey, we're going to have joint staff or we're going to do committee hearings in a way that's different.

You know, every now and then you get kind of the side glance. But I really appreciate William and actually all the members of our committee who have said, part of the way to make things function differently is do things differently. And I'm very grateful for his partnership and his willingness to kind of roll the dice and do things a little differently. And I'm very grateful for his partnership and his willingness to kind of roll the dice and do things a little differently. Derek Kilmer, chair of the House Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress and ranking minority member William Timms. Let's find Common Ground is produced for Common Ground Committee. Find out more about our

podcasts, programs and mission. Go to commongroundcommity.org. I'm Ashley Melntite. I'm Richard Davies. And thanks for listening. This podcast is part of the Democracy Group. part of the Democracy Group.