Let's Find Common Ground - How Problem Solvers Caucus Attacks Gridlock in Congress. Don Bacon & Kurt Schrader

Episode Date: February 3, 2022

From the outside, Congress appears broken. Bills get bogged down in partisan fights, leaders openly smear each other, and animosity between members is at an all-time high. But our guests show that if you look closer, you’ll find a group of dedicated politicians working together across the aisle to craft workable legislation and get things done.  Republican Congressman Don Bacon represents Nebraska’s 2nd District. Democrat Kurt Schrader represents Oregon’s 5th District. Both are members of the congressional Problem Solvers Caucus, a group equally split between Democrats and Republicans who are committed to finding common ground on key issues. In our surprisingly candid conversation, we get a peek behind the curtain at what’s really going on in Congress, how the infrastructure bill was passed into law, and the harmful effect the media has on Americans’ view of politics. 

Two outsiders, Congress, seems totally gridlocked. Bills get bogged down in partisan fights. Party leaders openly smear each other. We heard about the budget mess in our last podcast, but our guests today show that if you look a little closer, you'll find a group of dedicated members of Congress working across the aisle to get things done. This is Let's Find Common Ground. I'm Richard Davies.

And I'm Ashley Muntite. On this episode, we talk to two members of the Congressional Problem Solvers Caucus. This group is equally split between Democrats and Republicans who are committed to finding common ground on key issues facing the country. Republican Congressman Don Bacon is a retired Brigadier General in the U.S. Air Force. He represents Nebraska's second district. Democrat Kurt Schrader is a former veterinarian. He represents Oregon's fifth district.

We start with a question for Congressman Schrader. When we look at media coverage of Congress right now, it seems like we're at an absolute low point for cooperation between the two parties. How do each of you see it at the moment? I disagree, to be honest with you. I think we have terrible leadership and that causes folks like Don and I a lot of problems

because, since we are leadership tries to divide us on a regular basis, they cater to the extremes of our parties, and that's not where America is. Certainly not my constituents, I think both Don and I come from a background where there's equal numbers relatively of Democrats, Republicans, and Independents, and turn our countries out way. The last election was very close. There was no landslide victory, no landslide victory, the election before that.

This last election, frankly, not a nice step up, man. We did the right thing. We made sure that we represented our districts, our state and our country. And we weren't on a party ideology deal. You know, the infrastructure bill that would never have occurred if it wasn't for, you know, the problem solvers caucus had done an eye on our members. So we help get that thing going after the talks between Capito and Biden's fellow part. We made sure down the final stretches that it was still bipartisan despite efforts for trickle on my side to make it a partisan exercise.

And there's members working really hard to work together. And that's where our problem solver's caucus is all about. We made a difference this year. I sure appreciate hearing Kurt's comments on this. I must see some contrast no doubt. I mean, this last election with President Trump and the impeachment, and then you had the certification.

And I mean, so there's a lot of anger on both sides. You can feel it, it's, you know, that's palpable. But yet in the midst of that, we have a group of folks who are trying to find common ground. And so I would say there's goodness in the middle of the badness you see around here in DC. Kurt Schrader, you're the Democrat in this conversation. You made a pretty strong

comment there just a few moments ago about the leadership and why it's not doing what it should. Are you talking about the leadership of both parties in Congress? Yeah, I am. I'm talking about the Pelosi, the McCarthy, the Schumer, and the MacKalons. Their job should be to get us to work together. Every organization I've ever been, my whole business, I'm a veterinarian in the real world. And my job is to make sure my team work together. Otherwise, we couldn't deliver for my consumers,

for my clients, for my patients. And frankly, in my state, let's say, I turn it around about Nebraska, but in Oregon, the leadership would make sure that, you know, despite our differences that Don talked about, and quite real, that at the end of the day, on issues that really mattered the most, the bread and butter issues to most Americans, that we got the job done. Early to ship done, do that. Early to ship, you know, runs one messaging bill up the flag poll after another that has no chance of

passing the other side. I had to push to develop a prescription drug cost reduction plan through that I got beat up for by the far left because it wasn't the same bill that it failed twice before. However, I work close to incentives as well as my fellow members in Congress, our Palm Salvers Group actually played apart in this product too. And we developed a prescription drug plan. It's going to reduce costs for seniors dramatically. They're maximized pocket cost of the 2000 bucks a year.

The insulin wouldn't cost more than 35 bucks a year. I mean, it's a pretty phenomenal stuff. And yet I got beat up because I wasn't following the party doctrine. There's ways to get stuff done. Our leadership should be doing a much better job bringing members together. They just don't do that.

I think Kurt's time is something. The majority parties, and I'm not just picking out of the current majority party. I saw it in the 115th Congress. There's this culture that we're gonna pass the perfect bills for our party. We can do it because you got 218 votes plus, but it has no chance on the Sun.

And that was what I observed in the 115th Congress. We passed a record number of bills out of the house, very strong Republican conservative type bills. And if you're Republican like, wow, this is great stuff. I mean, 98% of it went nowhere in the Senate. It's because you could get 60 votes. And so my takeaway is we got to start working together from the beginning.

When we leaders, some it's going to do this. That says, okay, if I can get a bipartisan bill out of the house, I can get 60 votes out of the Senate. And we have to have a cultural change. We can't be demanding 100% in a majority party, which should be taken maybe 60 or 70%. But the other party has got to have a slice of those because you'll never get 60 votes in the Senate. And that's the way it was designed. The filibuster was designed to ensure that we have more consensus and more sensuous policies. You don't go left or right.

But the House does not operate with that in the minds of we should operate with that as a foregone conclusion ahead of time from the beginning that we got to do that and not at the end. You're obviously both really passionate about working together, but there are 58. I mean, it's actually a fraction, isn't it, of the House. So why aren't there more of you?

Why aren't there more problem solvers? I'll jump in on this one. Maybe it's a start off and sort of flip around here a little bit. 80% to 90% somewhere in there. There are various little bits depending on the election. Our hard Republican or the hard Democrat. And so there's very few competitive districts now, which I think competitive districts lend itself to more folks want to be the proud solvers working together because you have to. I mean it might district is 37% Republican, 36% Democrat, and the balance is independent or not aligned.

And so, but if you have a hard Republican, a hard Democrat district, it tends to put people more in the progressive means of the Democrat party, or maybe the Freedom Caucuser, more strident on the RSC side, or the Republican Study Committee, which is more conservative groups. But we do need to grow this 58 to 100.

The problem is with the last redistricting that we're seeing, it's actually becoming more polarized. After all, the new districts we're seeing, there's a fewer competitive districts, which concerns me because it's going to be harder and harder to plan consensus builders if that's the case. That's right. The gerrymandering that goes on to create these districts is travesty. If the districts were more balanced, more reflective of the general populace,

and we didn't pack all Republicans in one district or pack all the Democrats in the other district, now they live in Enneco Chamber. All they hear is from that one party. Don and I hear from everybody. We don't have an Enneco Chamber. I got my mail, whether it's email, hard mail, phone calls, you know, on any given issue, I'm hearing from both sides. I got a, you know, two-thirds

that like this bill, one-third that doesn't, then it flips around on the next bill. And that keeps us thoughtful, you know, we can't get out and left field or right field and be effective anyway. We can pretend, we can sell these outrageous statements, make sure you're all you guys in the media world, love us, or we can be effective. And like Don and I choose to be effective. We're supposed to govern. We're not supposed to sloganize. We're not bunch of activists in Congress.

We are members of Congress. We are governors of our great country. We're the ones that make the laws, and that's what we're elected to do. So at some point, we've got to put all this passion into effective legislation to drive the country forward. That's what we're all about. And how would you rate your progress so far? The best years I've had the United States Congress was 2020. We saved the country. If wasn't for the COVID relief bills, it were almost universally bipartisan, by huge bipartisan margins, we passed four or five bills.

When we literally saved our country, the bombs were facing now, our victims of our own success. I mean, we've kept them manned up. We've incurred, get a lot of people stay in their homes. We've let small businesses survive. We did great stuff. When the country really needs us,

we showed up this infrastructure package, the bipartisan infrastructure. That's huge. Biggest investment ever in American infrastructure. And we've done it to your point in the most partisan environment ever. We can get stuff done if we work at it. Still, there is a feeling that Congress could do more. Recently, New Hampshire Governor Chris Sonunu, who's a Republican, said he decided not to

run for the U.S. Senate. Why? Senate Republicans reportedly told him they just wanted to hold out against President Biden until the end of his term. Don Bacon says part of this unwillingness to play ball is that Joe Biden ran as a centrist, but isn't governing as one. There are things that we can do if we have, I think, the executive decided to be a little more generous in this thing.

This last year, though, at my sense of it was, we got a chance to do reconciliation, we can get some overreaching bills, and that was hard for most Republicans to be apart of. Thankfully, the infrastructure bill is an exception, and I think it's an example of what we can do when we're working together, and there's other areas that we can do this with. I think the infrastructure bill, unfortunately, Kurt said that his leadership tried to make it more partisan, so did ours, and there was no need for it.

President Trump wanted even a bigger bill, right? And we've been a lot of infrastructure for about two decades. This should have been an easy one and it was still hard. But I think it was an example of what we can do when we're working together. I was going to ask you about the infrastructure bill and what went into that. Well, they sort of what went on behind the scenes to get that done. It was sausage making and I hate to say that because my name's Baker. I'll tell you, it was fun working this out. I felt when President Trump came out and said,

you want an infrastructure, the proud solvers had already started. This is something we can do, but there was still four other priorities from the previous president. So we just, this thing get there and I got too too nasty between him and speaker policy I believe. There was some dynamics there. But after the election,

the proud solvers didn't say, okay, we're done. We got more I believe there's some dynamics there. But after the election, the protestors didn't say, okay, we're done, we got more serious. And there's a subset that really put a lot of time into it. And we came up with about an 80% solution, I'd say 90% solution. That's when the senators said, hey, we would like to take it because we got to get 60 votes in the Senate.

I think we had six Republican six Democrat senators. We sort of took the sign. And then we would meet with them once a week, once every two weeks, where we'd go back and forth. And really the senators took our 80% solution and they finished it off and they got, you know, a very good bipartisan vote out of the Senate.

Could've even been better, but there's already some partisan clouds coming in on this thing. But you know, when you have leader McConnell, vote for it. My good friend, when my bus friend's deadfisher, voting for it, Senator Grassley, that's a pretty good my partisan bill. And did it came back to us? And for some reason, then both leadership tried to ground this thing out. And I'm going to tell you what's the problem solvers. I got to give Josh got Haymer credit here for insisting that it get delinquent from the bill back butter bill.

And that's what Pelosi and a lot of the progress is on the link of the gather, which that needs to be a partisan bill. On the other hand, our guys, our leadership just didn't want to give a victory, but it shouldn't have been seen now. This is a victory for the country. I too was overjoyed and really pleased when I saw the Santa vote. You know, it was pretty dramatic. We kind of voted for the thing.

And I thought, all right, we're done. We're good. It comes over to the house and Pelosi sits on it. And I'm going, what's going on here? And it was all this, the far left didn't have faith enough in the rest of their social agenda that it could pass on its own, say, one to link it to our bipartisan infrastructure bill. And that was not the deal we made with Don Bacon,

the Democrats of the problem-sarvers group made a deal with our Republicans of problem-sarvers group. They're, you know, we're going to, this is separate bill, you know, we did good work here, at Don's point, we helped birth it and Senate made it to its own, the president adopted it, it was a huge priority, huge priority for the country. And we were adamant we were going to keep the faith with our Republican colleagues and the American people and keep this as a standalone, excellent bipartisan infrastructure bill. The best known members of Congress are very often the hardliners. There's the gang of four in the house on the left, Bernie Sanders,

and then on the right, we hear a lot from Josh Hawley and from Ted Cruz and from other hard right members. Is there any frustration that the media is always about clashes and controversies and doesn't cover the center doesn't cover the areas of agreement the friendships that you have. One of my colleagues recently said there's show horses and there's work horses and a lot of the show horses around TV I get a lot of coverage I'll give say we want you to be like this person or that person I'll say that person's got they get a single bill passed you know on, in this Congress, I mean, they have much influence on any legislation. They may have a lot of influence on on TV, whether it's MSNBC or Fox, whatever.

But in the end, it's we're here to be legislators and we need more workforce mentality and the media doesn't glue to that. But in the long run, good policy is good politics. Well, I'll be a little blunter. The media is the problem. Media is terrible. Social media is horrible.

It undermines the fabric and democracy, and I'm a present company excepted Richard, but I am very disappointed in how the media showcases these extreme people for ratings and to get people to view your site, I get it. You know, it's America, do whatever you want, but there are the work courses that Don talks about like you and I that that's fine. Cover all these other people.

We're going to try our best to get the job done. And America, they outside of the show here, it's about how divisive we are. Well, it really isn't that way and we could be better, but you showcase all the divisiveness. You don't talk about the stuff that we agree on. You don't talk about all the veterans bills that constantly get nearly 400 votes a piece or more every time they come up or the Energy and Commerce Committee that we're on that talks,

where it's almost always bipartisan stuff on the drug addiction front. You name it, but you guys never cover that. You never cover that. The media will all be respect. Huge problem for Congress. Congressman Kurt Trader and Don Bacon on Let's Find Common Ground.

A couple of minutes ago, we heard the name Josh Gottheimer. He's co-chair of the problem solvers caucus. Other leading members will hear mentioned include Tom Reed and Brian Fitzpatrick. Our interview continues in a minute. I'm Ashley. I'm Richard. We have a special episode of Let's Find Common Ground coming up.

It's being released next week to mark Black History Month. The theme of this year's celebration is Black Health and Wellness. We'll discuss that and other themes, and include special moments from past podcasts and public events from Common Ground Committee. Race represents both a challenge and an opportunity in finding Common Ground, where calling our upcoming episode special for good reason. Now back to our interview with Republican Representative Dom Bacon and Democrat Curator. You've talked about the infrastructure bill that was passed with a great deal of help from problem solvers caucus.

How important is your caucus in getting things done in Congress? And are there prospects for more progress this year? I think we're the hope of the future. We're sure, and I think we're the blueprint of how this is supposed to work. If you want to get 60 votes in the Senate on a hard build, you better have a blueprint like problem solvers for getting it out of the house, so you have a good mix of Republican and Democrat support.

If you're gonna pass up on a party line vote out of the house, it's dead on arrival in the Senate, bottom line. Our caucus's value is sometimes when on major as well as not so major legislation, particularly major legislation where their leadership is having trouble getting consensus from both sides of the aisle, but it's an important piece of legislation, whether it's dealing with the border issues, the southern border issues, we played a huge role as problem solvers in that about three, four years ago, whether it's an infrastructure bill. When things start to fall apart, a lot of times the problem solvers caucus because we talk to each other because we break bread every week. We're the only place in Washington, DC where members of Congress from both parties

sit down on a regular basis and talk to one another about these types of issues. We have work groups on these big issues of the day that Donald needed to, for instance, on the transportation piece. We have won on prescription drugs. We have lots of different work groups. So we're poised and ready to jump in. That's the sweet spot for the problem solvers caucus.

On things like the bleakest we can step in and sometimes bring a little sunshine. There's a new development too that I'd like to just update. This year, we started working with the senators that are in the same mindset, a 12 of them in particular. And this is really good because you get the synergy now of like-minded senators what they're willing to do.

And that really has made us even better, I believe. So this is the, I think the next step forward, if you want to have government that's working and getting things done. Well, alluding to difficult things for a minute within problem solvers, is there concern about potential political violence, either in the upcoming midterms or the 2024 presidential election? Is that something you talk about? I have it much with the problem. So I mean I am concerned about this 2016. The legitimacy of the election was brought in question a lot of charges of what's the transferability with the Russians.

I think Mueller laid 95% of that to Russ now. We had 2020. We got worse with the deal legitimizing elections and now we're even the press conference with President Biden. There was a little bit of, you know, 2022, the deal of general internet. This is not good. This undermines our great country, respecting election results is critical.

And peaceful transition of power is a part of the reason. We are that bright shiny city on a hill. I think we as representatives got to do butter and I think our American people got to do butter here. We got to we have the greatest country in the world and we got to pass it out or it gets and grant goods, but this deal of jimites and elections undermines that. Totally great. Totally agree with Don. When January 6th occurred, we don't agree all the time. And it was concerned about members of our caucus that were not inclined to validate the electoral count. And rather than yell at one another, rather than threaten one another,

Josh and Tom and Brian decide to have a conversation. And we talked about it. We talked about why different members said, here's why I feel I'm upset with you. And here's the other member would say, well, here's why I voted the way I did. And it was a tough conversation, but it was a good conversation. It was an ethical conversation. And I added that, I'm not sure we changed each other's minds

on anything, but we at least listened to one another. And I'd like to say maybe respected the other person's point of view. Didn't agree with it maybe, but respected that he's a fellow American. He represents 700,000 Americans or she. And okay, let's move forward. This is ultimately is on set a great country. We started undermining the electoral process

where in big, big trouble. Is there any generational difference that you've noticed between those in Congress who are willing to work together, such as problem solvers and those who aren't, or is it across the board? That's a good question. Some of the newer members,

I think are more radicalized on the left and the right. But I don't think it's a generational thing to be honest Bernie Sanders for God's sakes. And then you've got a Kassu Cortez. They both are similar in their philosophies. There's a little bit of difference generationally between them. So I don't think so. I think it gets more to the way these districts are constructed and the fact that they're less and less competitive to Don's earlier comments. And you know, as a result, there's these echo chambers where activists groups instill disagreement, sometimes a reconcilable disagreements. I don't think it's generation leader. I agree with Kurt. I've seen

I don't think it's generational leader. I agree with Kurt. I've seen consensus builders that are more senior and consensus builders are more younger and the opposite as well. I've seen good bad ugly young and it's a good bad ugly old. Hope I'm on the good side. No problem.

The caucus, the problem solvers caucus, represents just a fraction of the House, are both of you hoping to grow its size. Absolutely. Absolutely. Actually, there are a lot of folks who agree with us, but are afraid to speak out because they're afraid of the far left or the far right. I think there's an appetite among most members of Congress, the vast majority of members on the Republican side and on the Democratic side to work together and get stuff done. And most of the issues we agree on,

we disagree maybe on methods to get there, but that is the role of the problem soft talk. So let's sit down and talk about that and see if we can bridge those procedural differences to get to what we really want at the end of the day. So yeah, we hope to grow it. Think as we make more and more of an impact like we did this past year and a year before that,

there's gonna be more interest. But we want people that are truly problem solvers. We don't want people in there, they're gonna say, yeah, we're problem solvers, and they're not indoor spills, not work with us, not standing there when the fight gets pretty tough. So we wanna make sure it's an effective group. I hope we will grow, but the less competitive districts come out of this

redistricting, probably is a influence that will make that harder. The other hand, if the voters demand a country that's going to get things done, and they want to have more central policies, then the voters have a choice here. And they can put in people that will campaign and make those promises. I would just say, this thing with the infrastructure bill, in one way was a refining moment for me. I mean, I had to set up against the leadership.

I took a lot of heat, and so was refining in that way, but it was also defining, because in the end, I knew this was a good bill, and I leaned into it. I was at every media. I went to all these town halls. I was doing everything, saying time off this bill. I think whether it's storm and I think this is really a straight thing for the future, whatever I'm working on because right makes money. And I feel like we were on the right side of this and we're in the end, we're going to win because it was the right thing to do. We were on the right side of this and we're in the end we're going to win because it was the right thing to do. Congressman Don Bacon and Kurt Trader on Let's Find Common Ground.

You can find out more about the work of the Problem Salvers Caucus at ProblemSalversCaucus.house.gov. You can also go back and listen to an episode we did in 2020 with two other Problem Salvers episode 15 was with representatives Brian Fitzpatrick and Abigail Spanberger. Find it at commongroundcommity.org or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Richard Davies. And I'm Ashie Miltite. Thanks for listening. This podcast is part of the Democracy Group.