Exit Interviews: Congressmen Bid Farewell to D.C.

WOULD YOU WANT THE JOB?

The 118th Congress, which adjourns this month, is on track to be the least productive in decades measured by the number of bills enacted into law. With a wafer-thin Republican majority, the House of Representatives has, however, produced more than its share of bickering, taking 15 ballots to elect Rep. Kevin McCarthy as speaker in January 2023, then deposing him in October and arguing for three more weeks before finally electing Rep. Mike Johnson as his successor.

In the meantime, it spent a great deal of time on one impeachment investigation against President Joe Biden that never made it out of committee and another against Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas that passed on a party line vote and was quickly dismissed by the Senate. As of August, according to Gallup, just 19% of the country approved of the job Congress is doing.

The current dysfunction on Capitol Hill is largely asymmetrical, plaguing the Republicans more than the Democrats — more on that later — but over the past several decades, neither side is blameless. Under both parties’ control, Congress has not passed a budget on time since 1996, relying on continuing resolutions and huge omnibus funding bills to keep the government running. Another stop-gap bill will be required this fall, unless Congress can’t agree and the government shuts down. Again.

Related coverage

Features

Run Tiger: These Princetonians Are on the Ballot in November

All this is a departure from what is sometimes referred to as regular order. That term has different meanings, but Princeton politics professor Frances Lee suggests that regular order is just another way of describing the traditional legislative process: A bill is crafted in committee, gets debated by the full House and Senate in a manner that allows individual members to offer amendments, and then, if passed, is sent to the president. And, she might have added, a full budget is passed on time. It is the form of civics many of us learned as children from the “I’m Just a Bill” song. Recently, though, the legislative process has often looked like Schoolhouse Rock as reimagined by eccentric filmmaker Wes Anderson.

Fifty-three House members are leaving Congress this year. While that number is not historically large, commentators say it is remarkable more for who is retiring. “What’s very pronounced for 2024 is we’re seeing a raft of retirements on the part of more institutionalist members,” Cook Political Report’s David Wasserman told Axios in November.

Congressional observers aren’t surprised. “One thing that you hear from members of Congress is that it’s just not a very fun place to work,” says Gabriel Debenedetti ’12, the national correspondent for New York Magazine. “A lot of people from both parties have basically thrown up their hands and said, ‘Well, there’s not really much collaboration that goes on. There’s definitely not a lot of problem solving across the aisle.’”

“There are a number of members now who see no incentive to getting back to regular order. They see the role of Congress as implementing party messaging or giving their personal brands a boost.”

Gabriel Debenedetti ’12,  national correspondent for New York Magazine

Among those stepping down are four alumni members — conveniently, two Democrats (John Sarbanes ’84 of Maryland and Derek Kilmer ’96 of Washington) and two Republicans (Ken Buck ’81 of Colorado and Mike Gallagher ’05 of Wisconsin). Their reasons for retiring are different, and so is their timing. While Sarbanes and Kilmer will leave in January, Buck and Gallagher have already resigned. All, though, would have been safe bets for reelection.

As they leave Washington, PAW spoke with the four, who collectively possess 46 years of institutional memory, in what might be called a series of exit interviews. They offered their insights into the state of their parties, the state of Congress, and the state of the country — and how each might be improved.

Buck: ’I Still Struggle’

Ken Buck lives in a subdivision in Windsor, Colorado, with an American flag on a flagpole out front. His house is crammed with knickknacks from his years of public service that he had to move back home when he stepped down in March. It’s a nice place, but nothing fancy.

Serving in the House is less glamorous than it might appear. More than half the residents of his former district earn less than $50,000 a year, so no one wants to hear this, Buck acknowledges, but getting by on the congressional salary of $174,000 was a strain, especially compared to what he could have earned in the private sector. He had a mortgage in Washington and another in Colorado, two cars to pay for, two sets of clothes, furniture, and appliances to buy. “It’s just a ridiculous lifestyle.”

Buck is a fierce deficit hawk and a hard-core small government conservative. He opposed emergency pandemic relief funding because it would have added to the national debt, and to this day has not gotten a COVID vaccine on the grounds that he is “an American [and has] the freedom to decide.” He was one of the original members of the Freedom Caucus, the ultra-right-wing House faction that voted to oust McCarthy as speaker. Buck joined that effort, claiming that McCarthy had reneged on promises to curb spending. “I mean, I’m not inconsistent,” he says.

He was elected as a Tea Party Republican in 2014 following a career as a Justice Department lawyer and county attorney and an unsuccessful run for the U.S. Senate. Blunt but approachable, Buck was chosen to be president of the GOP freshman class, where he formed an unlikely friendship with California Rep. Ted Lieu, the Democratic freshman class president.

“What I have always appreciated about him is that, even though we’re largely ideological opposites, Ken has been willing to find policy areas where we can find common ground,” Lieu said in a statement when Buck retired. “That’s what legislating is all about.”

Despite compiling a zero rating from most liberal groups, Buck was hard to pigeonhole, co-sponsoring legislation, for example, that invalidated nondisclosure agreements in cases of sexual harassment. The issue that dominated his attention was the influence of big tech companies. He even wrote a book about it (Crushed: Big Tech’s War on Free Speech), one of three he wrote while in Congress. In 2021, Buck partnered with Democratic Rep. David Cicilline of Rhode Island to steer a series of six bills through the antitrust subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee that would have constrained or in some cases broken up internet giants such as Amazon and Meta.

When the bills failed to get a floor vote despite bipartisan backing, Buck blasted the leadership of both parties for bowing to corporate pressure. The following January, when the GOP regained the majority, Buck was passed over for chair of the antitrust subcommittee.

Buck’s break with the MAGA wing of his party began after the 2020 election, although his path has not been entirely straight. In December 2020, he signed an amicus brief asking the Supreme Court to hear a suit by the state of Texas challenging the election results. But on Jan. 6, Buck and Gallagher were among only eight House Republicans who refused to join a GOP-led effort to block certification of the electoral votes, claiming that Congress lacked the constitutional authority to do so. (Texas Sen. Ted Cruz ’92 led the anti-certification effort in the Senate.)

“I signed that amicus brief, and I think it’s absolutely appropriate to go to the courts,” Buck later explained to The Hill. “The court said no, and I voted to certify the election.”

Over the past few years, Buck’s opposition to election deniers in the GOP has hardened. “I think that when I decided to leave the Republican Party was when we started lying to the American public,” he says today. “The 2020 election wasn’t stolen. The [people arrested on Jan. 6] aren’t political prisoners. They’re criminals.”

He later denounced GOP efforts to impeach Biden, going so far as to call out his colleagues in a Washington Post op-ed. Several months later, Buck opposed the effort to oust Mayorkas, blasting the secretary’s performance but insisting that he had committed no impeachable offenses. The Freedom Caucus swiftly voted to expel him. Meanwhile, government spending, Buck’s key issue, kept going up. On March 22, he resigned.

“This place has just devolved into this bickering and nonsense,” he said on CNN shortly after stepping down.

Back home in Colorado, Buck has opened a consulting practice advising small tech companies. He’d also like to promote greater voter participation “so we get better candidates,” even looking into innovations such as open primaries or ranked-choice voting.

Still, partisanship dies hard. For Buck, supporting Kamala Harris, as Liz Cheney and other Republicans have done, remains unthinkable. Come November, then, will he vote for Trump — or a write-in candidate — or just leave the ballot line blank?

“One of the above,” Buck says, smiling ruefully. “I still struggle.”

John Sarbanes ’84 was elected to his father’s old congressional district in 2006.

Zuma Press/Alamy

Sarbanes: Time For Another Chapter

John Sarbanes’ path to Congress seems almost preordained. His father, Paul Sarbanes ’54, served in the House for six years and the Senate for 30 years. After working as a health-care lawyer and as an assistant to the Maryland school superintendent, the younger Sarbanes was elected in his father’s old congressional district in 2006.

Asked to explain the decline of regular order, Sarbanes observes that both parties have centralized decision making in the leadership and taken it away from the rank and file. He attributes this to the nationalization of politics and the narrow majorities both parties have held recently, which makes it important to have a unified message and strategy. But it has made it harder for members to freelance, innovate, or work across the aisle.

“You need more party discipline if you’re at war every day,” Sarbanes says. “So, there’s a kind of grudging acceptance of the fact that you need to get marching orders and just execute on them.”

If so, the Democrats seem to have done this more successfully than the GOP. Nancy Pelosi had just as narrow a majority as McCarthy and Johnson from 2021 to ’23, yet she never lost an important vote or faced a threat to her speakership.

Asked why, Sarbanes replies, “I’m biased, obviously, but I think our leadership’s more effective.” The key to Pelosi’s success, and that of Hakeem Jeffries, her successor as Democratic leader, is this: “You’ve got to know how to count. You’ve got to know exactly where everybody in your caucus is for a given vote. And you don’t bring a vote to the floor if you don’t think you have what it takes to carry that vote.”

Sarbanes has centered his work on electoral and voting issues. When Democrats regained the majority in 2019, he introduced the For the People Act, a collection of reforms including automatic voter registration, expanded early voting, and restrictions on large corporate donations. He has also supported the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act sponsored by Rep. Terri Sewell ’86. Both bills have passed the House only to die in the Senate.

To road test his own campaign finance proposals and to put his donor’s money where his mouth is, Sarbanes unilaterally ran his own races in 2020 and 2022 under the reforms he was advocating. He placed hundreds of thousands in high-dollar donations in escrow and refused to touch them until he had raised at least $1,000 in small-dollar contributions from 100 different precincts in his district.

What comes next for Sarbanes remains uncertain. “When I got to Congress, I had in my mind that I would do something else at some point,” he explains. “If you’re thinking you’ve got another chapter coming, you start looking at the clock on the wall, and you start thinking, well, I better get started on it before it’s too late.”

Mike Gallagher ’05 spent seven years in Congress, resigning from his seat on April 19, 2024.

Bonnie Cash/Alamy

Gallagher: Serve and Get Out

Until very recently, Mike Gallagher looked like a model Republican House candidate. He joined the Marine Corps the day after graduation and served seven years on active duty as an intelligence officer, including tours in Iraq as an aide to Gen. David Petraeus *87. He speaks Arabic and earned a Ph.D. in government from Georgetown before working briefly as a congressional staffer and adviser to former Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker. Gallagher was elected to the House in 2016.

One of his biggest complaints about Washington is that too many people don’t want to legislate. “We’ve turned Congress into a green room for Fox News and MSNBC, instead of being the key institution of government,” he told The Washington Post in August.

Gallagher did want to legislate and found considerable success working across the aisle. In 2017, he and Democratic Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi ’95 of Illinois formed the bipartisan Middle Class Jobs Caucus and helped pass a bill promoting technical education. In 2023, the two teamed up again to co-chair the House Select Committee on Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party. This past March, they championed legislation that would force the Chinese owner of TikTok to sell the app or have it banned in the United States. Their bill passed the House by a vote of 352-65.

“We had differences of opinion but were able to engage in a productive way,” Krishnamoorthi says. “Mike is one of those on the other side who, in my humble opinion, tried to rise above the daily partisan politics of the House and do what’s right.”

Gallagher’s decision not to challenge certification of the electoral votes in 2021 brought him a primary challenge in 2022, which he defeated easily. But he learned firsthand how nasty contemporary politics can be. One night last December, a SWAT team from the local sheriff’s department showed up at his home after receiving a prank call saying that Gallagher had been shot and his wife and children taken hostage. It’s a form of harassment known as “swatting” and it helped drive him out of politics.

On Feb. 10, a day after voting against the Mayorkas impeachment, Gallagher announced that he would not seek another term. When attacks against him intensified, Gallagher accelerated his departure date and resigned his seat early, on April 20, leaving the GOP at the time with only a single-seat majority.

“I signed up for the death threats and the late-night swatting, but [my family] did not,” he told a Wisconsin NBC affiliate.

In August, Gallagher joined the software company Palantir Technologies as head of its defense division. He has said that he will not vote for Trump. With the misery of his final months behind him, Gallagher now imagines that, had he remained in office, he would have continued working his way up the ladder.

“And then all of a sudden, I’d have woken up and become the very person I promised myself I wouldn’t become, which is a lifer in Congress,” he says. “I just don’t think that’s the model the framers had in mind. Serve, get the hell out, and go back to private life.”

Derek Kilmer ’96 joined Congress in January 2013.

Zuma Press/Alamy

Kilmer: Road Warrior and Reformer

Few have thought more about how to fix Congress than Derek Kilmer, whose district encompasses Tacoma and Washington’s Olympic peninsula.

House members are encouraged to live among their constituents, but those, like Kilmer, who live on the other side of the country spend much of their time on airplanes. In most years, he says, representatives spend more time traveling than they do legislating. He details his own grueling schedule.

“On Monday, I leave my house at five in the morning,” Kilmer says. “If I’m lucky, I arrive in D.C. around 4:30 p.m. Eastern time. We have a full day Tuesday and Wednesday. Then on Thursday, we’re done by noon, and I fly home and roll into my house at about 10 p.m. Pacific time.”

Besides turning members into road warriors, that truncated schedule reduces the amount of time committees can meet and the amount of time each member, who serves on several committees, can spend drafting amendments or digging into testimony.

“If you want decisions to be made from the bottom up, with actual legislating happening in committees, rather than having members pingpong from one hearing to another, you have to have more committee time, which means there have to be more full workdays,” Kilmer reasons.

Though his hopes to rethink the congressional work schedule have not been successful, Kilmer has initiated a raft of other reforms on the bipartisan Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress, which he co-chaired for four years with Republican Rep. William Timmons of South Carolina. In its 280-page final report issued in December 2022, the select committee made more than 200 recommendations for ways to improve Congress, at least 97 of which have been enacted — “far greater success than other congressional reform panels in recent decades,” The Almanac of American Politics noted.

Some of those reforms were more technological, such as getting rid of the antiquated paging devices members were issued and integrating the scheduling system so different committees’ hearings don’t overlap with each other. Others, though, tried to get members out of their partisan silos so they might get to know each other and, if possible, work together. Especially after Jan. 6, committee members modeled the collegiality they hoped to promote by having regular dinners together and holding hearings seated around a circular table rather than on a dais. (According to Washington Post columnist Amanda Ripley, they also sought advice from a professional mediator and a psychotherapist.) Acting on the recommendations from Kilmer’s committee, Congress has begun to institute bipartisan retreats at the beginning of each session and create meeting spaces in the Capitol where members of both parties can socialize together.

For the past two years, Kilmer has shared some of these lessons in a junior policy seminar he has taught at the School of Public and International Affairs called Fixing the People’s House: Policy Reforms to Restore the U.S. House.

“This year, I’ll complete 20 years of public service,” he says. “I taught a junior Policy Task Force at SPIA this last year, and I was conscious that I had run for the state legislature in 2004 when most of my class was either not yet born or babies. I’ve always looked at life in chapters, and this felt like the right time to conclude this chapter.”

’Genuine Hope’

To a man, the four departing members are proud of their public service.

Even though government spending is higher and the national debt bigger than when he arrived in Washington, Buck says his years there were worth it. “You know, I played football for a team that lost a few games,” he reasons, referencing his service as Princeton’s All-Ivy punter in 1979. “I just know that I was supposed to be there and do my very best to tell the truth, and that’s all I can do.”

Adds Gallagher, “Even at the height of whatever insanity was going on, it was an absolute honor and privilege to do it.”

“Stuff does get done in Congress,” Debenedetti observes. “It’s just not the politically spicy stuff that people like me write about, but it is in many cases very important.” He also points to the highly productive 117th Congress just two years ago. “But there are a number of members now who see no incentive to getting back to regular order. They see the role of Congress as implementing party messaging or giving their personal brands a boost.”

Asked about the state of democracy, Sarbanes replies bluntly, “I think it’s in a fragile state.” That, he says, is why he has worked so hard on bills to make it easier to vote.

“You can’t divorce the efforts you’re undertaking inside the institution from all of what’s happening out in your district and in the country,” he continues. “We have to figure out a way to get people to believe again, that their voice matters, and that they’re well represented when they send you here.”

As Americans go to the polls, perhaps it is worth considering whether the real problem isn’t Congress, it’s us. Thomas Jefferson is reported to have said, “The government you elect is the government you deserve.” Those who vote for chaos or gridlock or grandstanding, get it.

“I don’t think large-scale reform could address the large-scale problems that we face in American national politics,” Frances Lee says. “Those are political in nature more than institutional in nature. The fact that the American people are so undecided about what they want in terms of the direction of national government, I think that is the source of the stalemate in politics.”

“I’m a genetically hopeful person,” Kilmer concludes. “Not a blind belief, like Kevin Bacon yelling in Animal House that all is well, but genuine hope.”

He paraphrases a quote from Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, who said optimism and hope aren’t the same thing. Optimism, Kilmer says, “is the belief that things will get better. Hope is the belief that if we work hard enough together, we can make things better.”

Mark F. Bernstein ’83 is PAW’s senior writer.