For decades, generations of schoolchildren learned from Schoolhouse Rock that bills become laws through careful committee work, open debate, and thoughtful compromise. But as today’s episode of UnCommon Law makes clear, that tidy version of lawmaking no longer reflects reality. Instead, leaders often craft omnibus bills in back rooms and create deliberately vague laws that punt hard decisions to federal agencies. But with the Supreme Court’s Loper Bright decision ending 40 years of judicial deference to agencies, critics say Congress can no longer hide behind this broken system.
In this season finale, we hear from a current and a former senator on opposite sides of the aisle who both argue that Congress must reclaim its constitutional role. They agree that decades of delegating authority to agencies has weakened the legislature, but they diverge on what should happen next. Should lawmakers strip out vague catchall words to limit agency discretion? Or should Congress work more closely with agencies to ensure workable, expert-informed legislation?
But can a deeply polarized institution actually change? While both senators agree on some solutions, they differ sharply on whether a different approach is even possible in today’s political climate. On today’s episode, we explore whether Congress can reclaim its constitutional role.
Featuring:
- Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-Mo.
- Former Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, D-N.D.
TRANSCRIPT
SCHOOLHOUSE ROCK MUSIC
MATT: Remember Schoolhouse Rock? That cheerful cartoon that taught generations of kids how a bill becomes a law?
ARCHIVAL: Schoolhouse Rock “I’m Just a Bill” (fades under)
MATT: Well, it turns out that little singing scroll of paper hasn’t exactly kept up with the times. The neat, orderly process it described – committees carefully crafting legislation, thoughtful debates on the floor, conference committees reconciling differences – that’s not how Congress makes laws anymore. And that breakdown is at the heart of today’s episode.
This season we’ve been exploring how the Supreme Court’s decision in Loper Bright killed off Chevron deference – that 40-year-old doctrine that told courts to defer to agencies when laws were ambiguous. Today, we’re asking: what happens now that courts no longer have to defer?
MUSIC
Loper Bright didn’t just end an era of judicial deference. It and some other recent cases have led to a kind of wake-up call among some lawmakers. For far too long, they say, the system has been broken. Lawmakers were okay writing vague laws in part because they knew the agencies would fill in the details.
ERIC SCHMITT: This is not a Republican or Democrat blame game. ... Both parties are to blame in many ways, and drafters are to blame.
MATT: That’s Republican Senator Eric Schmitt of Missouri. He led a working group that produced a report on how Congress should legislate in the post-Chevron world. For some, he says, it might require a bit of a culture change.
SCHMITT: And in permanent Washington, that is a bit of a shock to the system, as you might imagine, because this is the way. This was the trajectory for a very, very long time.
MATT: Former Democratic Senator Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota chaired a bipartisan commission that issued its own recommendations for congressional reform. And she agrees that both parties share the blame for where we’ve gotten.
HEIDI HEITKAMP: Congress has been a willing participant in abdicating its legislative responsibility. ... Congress has knowingly let agencies legislate for a long, long time.
THEME MUSIC
MATT: Today on the season finale of UnCommon Law: Conversations with senators on different sides of the aisle, who — perhaps surprisingly -— agree on many of the steps needed to prepare Congress to legislate in a world where vague laws might not cut it anymore. We’ll explore why Congress writes ambiguous laws in the first place, and find out whether there’s any hope for reform in this deeply polarized moment.
MATT: First, the charitable reasons for why lawmakers might have to keep things vague.
QUIRKY MUSIC
MATT: Sometimes, it’s intentional — a way to build bipartisan consensus on the big picture when you can’t agree on specifics. Sometimes it’s because lawmakers genuinely want to leave room for agency expertise. And sometimes, they just don’t see what’s coming. But then we get to the unintentional reasons for laws being vague. And a lot of that has to do with the fact that Schoolhouse Rock lied to all of us.
SCHMITT (laughs): Yes, and me too! Think about my surprise when I got here. ... Typically what people think happens, and what happens in most state governments, is you have a bill referred to a committee, you have a markup in the committee, you have the bill go to the floor, you have amendments, those amendments go on, and it goes to the other chamber, there’s a conference committee, there’s kind of a finely wrought procedure that allows you to sift through the wheat and the chaff, right? That’s kind of how it’s designed.
What has happened, because in many instances leadership — I’m not speaking of this Congress, but previous Congresses in the last decade -— didn’t really want all that action. And it was much easier to get four people around and come up with an omnibus to drop with just hours to go before a vote. That is not a good way to run a railroad either, and I think contributed to some of the problems from a drafting perspective.
MATT: That kind of drafting doesn’t lead to precise legislation that provides a lot of clear guidance for agencies to implement. Sen. Heitkamp says you end up with committee chairs begging leadership to slip important language into bills, but without a lot of say as to exactly what the end product will say.
HEITKAMP: It’s going to take some major strategizing to pull that back, but to me the real question is, how much authority do these caucuses and these committee chairs want to give leadership? Because when they have to go hat in hand and beg leadership for things to be included in the must pass pieces of legislation, that gives all the power to the to the Senate leadership -- many of whom don’t have a clue on what the EQIP program might mean in the Farm Bill. They’re going to look at everything through a political lens and not through a policy lens.
MATT: We’ll get to how to fix that dynamic later in today’s episode. But first let’s talk about something else that has led to vague drafting: The idea that if you keep things just ambiguous enough, you might be able to read it the way you want when your guys are in power.
HEITKAMP: A lot of your political positions are in the space of assuming that you’re always going to have presidential power.
MATT: That’s why, she says, both parties have been okay with keeping the text of legislation a little squishy. Some in policy circles have described this as the “Chevron abdication hypothesis” -- according to the Bipartisan Policy Center report that Senator Heitkamp worked on: Congress gradually recognized that it didn’t need to make the hard legislative choices, and could broadly delegate to agencies while claiming credit for passing a bill and avoiding blame for unhappy outcomes.
HEITKAMP: It’s left purposely vague, and that’s the cheat, right? ... And so you fight, fight, fight, and you’re back and forth and back and forth. And eventually it comes to the point where you have to make a decision. You can’t get a compromise. You both sign off on language, hoping that you’re going to have the president in power who’s going to interpret that language -- or, you know, that that presidential power will shift, and you’ll be able to interpret that language.
SCHWARTZ: How do they think about the fact that presidents --
HEITKAMP: Come and go?
SCHWARTZ: Yeah.
HEITKAMP: The reality in Congress is that they think in two, four and six year time frames.
MUSIC
MATT: In today’s Congress, both senators agree, we’re more likely to have leadership making backroom deals and sticking everything together in an omnibus bill that often doesn’t reflect reasoned lawmaking from committee staff. Lawmakers famously don’t even have time to read some of these bills before they vote on them. No wonder it’s often hard for an agency or a court to divine congressional intent!
SCHMITT: I think actually too often, Congress wants to say “I voted for the greatest bill in the world” and then say: “I can’t believe what the EPA just did!” Or “I can’t believe what the Department of Education just did!” Right? Because they can do this kind of fancy two-step, and I don’t want that either.
MATT: Senator Schmitt points to Obamacare as a prime example.
SENATOR SCHMITT: That was maybe the classic example of like there were whole swaths of what, you know, the insurance market would look like for millions of people that was just up to Secretary Sebelius, right? Like that was pretty wild. And part of that was if they made it as specific as they should have, the bill was less attractive, right? So you kind of kick the can down the road again to somebody who’s not accountable.
MATT: Loper Bright, Schmitt says, has presented an opportunity for Congress to reassert its powers -- to start drafting legislation with purpose and clarity.
SCHMITT: The founders believe that we would jealously guard our turf, right? But the Article I branch in many ways has sort of ceded this willingly, because it’s politically expedient in some instances. I think that’s part of this course correction, that we’ve got an opportunity now post-Loper Bright to come back and say, this is the Article I branch’s appropriate role. We need to take more responsibility over the language that’s drafted and pull the power away from the so-called expert class that isn’t accountable to anybody.
MATT: So that’s how we got here. So both senators agree on the problem. But as we’ll hear after the break, their solutions reveal a fundamental divide about who we should trust to make the rules that govern our lives. Stick around.
PROMO
MATT: If you want to understand what happens when Congress writes vague laws, look no further than the decades-long battle over “Waters of the United States” – or WOTUS, as it’s known in Washington.
SOUND DESIGN: News montage about WOTUS battles
MATT: The Clean Water Act gives the EPA authority over “navigable waters.” Sounds simple enough, right? But what exactly is a navigable water?
SCHMITT: Well, a navigable waterway -- I’m from a state with a lot of waterways, like the Missouri River and the Mississippi River -- It certainly never meant a dry c reek bed on someone’s farm in Northern Missouri that might go to a creek, that might end up in some other tributary that then ends up in the Missouri, that ends up in the Mississippi.
MATT: But under some administrations, that’s exactly how the EPA interpreted it. Schmitt calls this “the classic example of the administrative state gone wild.”
SCHMITT: They just sort of wanted to do something and they found the predicate to go do it.
SCHWARTZ: Is it possible that Congress intended to give the EPA broad authority by simply stating it can oversee the waters of the United States and knowing that that was broad? Could that be intentional? And if the experts decided, well, this probably could mean a dry creek bed. If Congress definitely didn’t want that, couldn’t they have said that?
SCHMITT: Well, so here’s the problem though, and we get back to the sort of the first principle. Let’s just say that is widely -- 90 % of the country hates the idea, right? Of that, there’s no recourse. Like if I voted for that, that’s one thing. But nobody ever voted for that, right? The navigable waterway was never intended to be a dry creek. It never was, and it was never interpreted that way until somebody wanted to actually regulate and charge fees on about 98 % of Missouri land. So that changed over time. I would say this though, if you’re getting at, does Congress bear some responsibility in this? I would agree.
MATT: Senator Heitkamp agrees the lack of clarity in the Clean Water Act has been a problem.
HEIDI HEITKAMP: Think about one of the most difficult issues that’s been back and forth in and out of the court, is the definition of waters of the United States, right? How? What the Clean Water Act and what’s the extent of the jurisdiction? And, you know, this is highly controversial, and EPA ruling under Democratic presidents has been highly controversial for rural states.
MATT: She says she tried to fix things, to reduce the ambiguity, but...
HEIDI HEITKAMP: Senator Inhofe and I introduced a bill to clarify what “waters of the United States” meant. And guess what, no one wants to talk about it because they don’t want, they don’t want to give an inch.
MUSICAL TRANSITION
MATT: So what now? Both senators see Loper Bright as an opportunity for Congress to reclaim its constitutional role. Their prescriptions range from the immediate to the transformational. Let’s start with a surprisingly simple suggestion from Senator Schmitt: You know all those catchall words that lawmakers write into bills that give agency heads the wiggle room they need to make expansive regulations? Words like “reasonable” or “necessary and appropriate”? Yeah, just get rid of those.
SCHWARTZ: You write in the report that ... it may be helpful to “control F” draft text to ensure these words stay out of legislation. Were you being metaphorical there or did you literally mean staff should search for those words?
SCHMITT: (laughs) I mean search! ... Broadly speaking, the intent of the recommendations on the drafting was to tighten it up to be more prescriptive. Now there is some limitation to that. It’s not to say that that one bill can contemplate everything that might happen, but you certainly want to limit an agency’s ability to deviate from what the law was ever intended.
MATT: Those catchall words, he says, can give agencies too much power. And he says that when agencies deviate from Congressional intent, that runs counter to the way the Framers intended our system of government to work.
SCHMITT: The broader question, at least for me, if you want to understand a lot of the frustration that’s out there in the real world, it’s the idea that there are these faceless bureaucrats that make laws that nobody ever voted for, right? They’re not accountable to anybody. And our system of government, of self-representation is kind of based on a level of accountability where you can praise me or blame me, can elect me, you can reelect me, you can send me home, there’s somebody that is weighing in on important questions that you have an outlet to hold accountable. ... It’s about regaining trust with the American people. I think there’s a lot of frustration about the things that happen that, you know, that emanate from the broader administrative state. So that’s why I think as a sort of a philosophical matter or kind of a first principle that we’ve got to, you know, take on the administrative state.
MATT: I told Sen. Heitkamp about Sen. Schmitt’s “control F” idea, and asked what she thought about that immediate solution to the problem of overly vague laws. But unlike Sen. Schmitt, she was sympathetic to the agencies.
HEITKAMP: What I would say is, when I see the Congress actually legislating, what those terms mean, right? Actually legislating, then you can point the finger at the executive agencies. The executive agencies are operating in a void, and I think there is an inclination on the Republican side to see something nefarious in every decision, something political in every decision that has been created, having been and a regulator, having seen regulation many times, what those agencies want is they want to know, what do you want from us? What can we do? I mean, how are we supposed to take this, this idea that you’ve now handed to us with no clarity in terms of what this means? What do you want us to do with it? And so it’s a it’s a lack of, I mean, it is an over politicizing of agencies. It is a suspicion of agencies that that is not particularly helpful, and it is a lack of introspection on why it is that agencies have this authority, as opposed to, you know, making it about politics.
MUSIC
SCHWARTZ: (Senator Schmitt,) it’s easy to invoke this boogeyman of the unelected bureaucrat that’s basically grabbing a kind of legislative power that Congress either defers to them intentionally or unintentionally, or wherever they can find a place in the statute to do it. But aren’t some of these unelected bureaucrats actually experts? And I know that Democrats often have a worldview where they trust the experts. And they are willing to turn over a large amount of delegated authority to the administrative state. I take it you don’t trust the experts in the agencies?
SCHMITT: I don’t. No. Now they may have an opinion I agree with, but I think if COVID proved anything, is the sort of the weaponization of every people’s lives. Think about for example, OSHA was an agency created to make sure for forklifts beep when they back up, was somehow going to force a hundred million people to get the COVID shot. And I actually brought that case when I was the AG in Missouri, and they slapped that down.
MATT: Here’s something that both senators do agree on: the need for committees to reassert their authority. That would go a long way toward reestablishing the “regular order” Congress used to operate under, before committees started ceding their power to leadership, or now, to the White House. Here’s Sen. Heitkamp.
HEITKAMP: I think we can get back to a time when committees functioned the way they should function, and where Committee Chairman and committee expertise is majorly significant. And actually, when I came into the Senate, committee action was still pretty significant. And now what happens is committees may hold hearings. People try and get their, you know, their 15 seconds of sound bite and fame so that they can tweet it out and say, look what I’m doing. I took this person on, or I did this. And there isn’t a lot of behind the scenes back and forth, both both in terms of majority minority members of committees, but also bicameral back and forth on legislation. It’s like raw power. The use of raw power. I’ve got 50 votes, and I’m going to use my 50 votes and cram as much as I can into reconciliation. And reconciliation is a shortcut to bad legislation.
MATT: If committees can redevelop their expertise, if they can actually work together to draft legislation, maybe they wouldn’t have to keep bills vague. Maybe they wouldn’t have to delegate to an agency, or hope that their party wins the White House and they can sort out the details later, on the back end, once the law has already passed and now it’s up to the agency to figure out how to implement it. Heitkamps says the solution begins with committee staffing.
HEITKAMP: I think that the first thing is it’s got to be staff, so that the expertise still matters. And it can’t be, it can’t be, you know, just listen to us, because we’re on the committee. So I think you’ve got to re-establish committee expertise. You’ve got to look at hiring people who have extensive policy backgrounds, not just political backgrounds. And we’ve got to kind of separate the policy staff from the political staff.
MATT: Sen. Schmitt totally agrees -- he says that rebuilding committee expertise will start to rebalance government in a way that restores the primacy of the legislature.
SCHMITT: It’ll shift the power. I mean, these agencies in many ways have grown into massive behemoths and the staff is much larger than any kind of legislative staff you would have here, right? If you’re going to have a battle of where you would want to have people to rely on for those things, in my view, we’d rather have it on the front end, on the legislative side than on the administrative side. It’s not to say that the executive branch doesn’t have a role of enforcing statutes. Of course they do. That’s kind of definitionally what the Article 2 branch is supposed to do. I think the challenge is when you get into something beyond or never intended by the statute. And I think that the biggest takeaway from the Loper Bright decision is the court recognized a mistake that was made in Chevron, which gave way too much discretion to agencies doing too much of that.
MATT: But beyond just developing committee expertise, Sen. Heitkamp suggests another committee reform that could help lawmakers be more clear in the post-Chevron era: Invite greater participation of the agencies themselves in the creation of legislation.
HEITKAMP: So, the ability to not just sit back and then get handed something that’s unworkable, but to actually have that dialog, in that conversation, to actually talk about implementation as part of that process of legislating, not just -- okay now the ball is in your court, good luck. Because the agencies know a little bit more about what legislators don’t know. And so I think the ability to have that conversation and to have clarity.
... I think it does provide the opportunity to write committee reports that are detailed enough to provide greater clarity to the courts in terms of what was the intention and what was the reason for legislation to be passed to begin with. ... I was an EPA attorney. On every desk was the legislative history of the Clean Water Act. And these were bound volumes. I remember they were green. You know, I remember referring to them when you were looking at writing regulation, or implementing regulation. We need to get back to a time when committees provided that level of direction, that had that level of expertise, that understood what those challenges were, and we’re not just writing political documents.
SCHWARTZ: Well, courts don’t really love looking at legislative history, but you think it’s useful for agencies to do that?
HEITKAMP: If agencies are really trying to fulfill the legislative intent of a piece of legislation, I think legislative histories are incredibly important when they are, in fact, reflections of the debate and the dialog and the compromise, when they are simply political documents saying this is what we intended, and it’s not something that is released. And remember that for all these committee reports, there’s an opportunity for a Minority Report. ... We have serious problems in this country and to not have serious people try and figure out what that direction should be, is pretty damaging to the economic future of the country.
SCHWARTZ: One of the other recommendations I saw in the report was to, in addition to increasing committee funding -- getting more expertise on the committee -- was expanding committees access, attaching a public participation form to each hearing announcement, basically highlighting how public testimony or letters can be submitted to committees to get more input from external groups. Sounds a lot like what agencies do, like, requests for comment, getting more involvement from the the industries impacted. ... Is that the idea?
HEITKAMP: Yeah, I mean, you know, you should understand. It goes back to the obligation that legislators have to understand the impact and the cost benefits of what they’re proposing. ... If we’re going to to claw back the authority to legislate from an agency, then why shouldn’t we have a broader level of participation by the public? You know, there’s going to be people who don’t like it, there’s going to be people who do like it. There’s going to people who say, Look, I don’t care, but these are questions I have in terms of how this is going to affect my business. Why is that not absolutely essential reading for a committee that’s going to legislate?
... It’s easier to legislate in the dark of night when no one’s telling you what to do. Shortcuts aren’t working anymore. To provide certainty to the American economy and the American people and to solve huge problems, shortcuts don’t work. So let’s just do the tough work.
MUSICAL TRANSITION
MATT: While they both agree on the need for stronger committees, Senator Schmitt sees the Loper Bright decision as an opportunity for something much more ambitious - a fundamental restructuring of how Congress operates and how courts review agency actions.
Senator Schmidt believes this moment calls for sweeping structural reforms that would permanently shift power away from agencies and back to Congress.
SCHMITT: The Loper Bright decision I think is then a level set where you effectively get to no deference. But there is a concern, and why I think it’s important for the Article 1 branch now to weigh in legislatively... because there could be a situation where lower courts begin inserting some kind of new deference, right? Whether it’s like Skidmore or something akin to it.
MATT: In other words, Schmitt sees Loper Bright not as the end of the story, but as the beginning. He wants to make sure courts never go back to deferring to agencies. He recently reintroduced the Separation of Powers Restoration Act, or SOPRA, which would enshrine the end of deference directly into law.
SCHMITT: And so for me, one of the reasons we filed the SOPRA Act was to legislatively codify the de novo review, right? To kind of cement the status in our, you know, codify it in statute. I think that’d be important to do sooner rather than later. Cause what could happen is you could have some, again, some other sort of deference pop up. Then there’s some circuit split. The court kind of weighs in again and you just keep kind of going round and round.
MATT: SOPRA, if it passed, would officially require courts to review challenges to agency actions “de novo” -- that’s Latin for “from the beginning,” which essentially means the agencies get no deference at all; it’s entirely up to the court to decide what they think. By the way, that’s basically the opposite of what the democrats have proposed: walking back Loper Bright and re-establishing Chevron deference as the official standard.
Schmitt points to other legislative reforms, including something called the REINS Act, introduced a few years ago by Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky. That act would look at an agency proposal, and if it would have an impact of more than $100 million on the American economy, Congress would have to approve the agency regulation before it could go into effect.
SCHMITT: Any agency regulation that has an economic impact of, pick the number, let’s just call it $100 million, I might argue that should be lower, Elizabeth Warren might argue that should be higher, whatever that number ends up being, is that before it goes into effect, Congress has to approve it. Like it would go through some sort of resolution that Congress would give an up or down vote on. To me, that would really solve the problem because at that point then Congress has assented to something more specific and it kind of solves a bit of the challenge of being as prescriptive as you can in statute, but then knowing agencies may have some sort of interpretation on the back end and then Congress ultimately has this additional check. So if you were to ask me what’s the best design, that’s probably it.
MUSIC
SCHMITT: So hey listen sorry we’ve got to cut it off. This has been great and thanks for your thoroughness on this reporting.
SCHWARTZ: Thank you, Senator, for your time.
SCHMITT: Okay, take care. We’ll see you.
MUSICAL TRANSITION
SCHWARTZ: (Senator Heitkamp,) you’ve spoken to lots of former and current lawmakers, are, are the are the lawmakers generally happy with the status quo, or do do you see a desire for change?
HEITKAMP: What I see is an acknowledgement that article one is failing, and even even people who you know are favorably inclined to this administration realize that we have a problem and it and this recognition is bipartisan, is for people who are actually in the Congress right now, who recognize it, but also people who are former members.
MATT: But just becomes some people recognize the need for change, she says, doesn’t mean anything is going to change.
HEITKAMP: At this point, Loper has been ignored, except for people who understand, like Senator Lankford and Senator Hassan, who understand its significance. It’s being ignored because it doesn’t have impact in real time.
SCHWARTZ: What’s being ignored?
HEITKAMP: Loper.
SCHWARTZ: It’s being ignored by current legislators?
HEITKAMP: Sure. I mean, are they saying, Oh, look at this very important case. Let’s, let’s step up and evaluate regulation. Send me the list. And you can say, okay, Schmitt has his thing on what do we need to do now? But have you seen any legislation?
SCHWARTZ: I have seen some proposals. We’ve got Schmitt’s Separation of Powers Restoration Act. ... And then on the other side, you’ve got Senator Liz Warren, who has proposed legislation that would establish a deferential Chevron style, standard of review in the Administrative Procedures Act. ... And I’ve seen Rand Paul’s REINS Act. ... So there are some people who are thinking about this.
HEITKAMP: What I was what I would ask is, are any of those ideas new? REINS has been around forever. You know, there’s a reactive piece, the de novo piece. There have been attempts to legislatively repeal the Chevron Doctrine. Those have been introduced for a long period of time. Senator, Senator Portman and I had a very reasonable kind of middle ground in terms of how we could move forward. None of those have moved and that’s my point. My point is there’s that that this decision did not create any urgency in changing the way Article One functions.
SCHWARTZ: Well, but I’m looking at, I see this bipartisan committee commission put out its report, and I see Eric Schmitt’s report. And I’m not in the Congress. I’m just looking -- I’m peering into -- the Capitol’s over there. I can see it, peering in from the outside. I saw a hearing last week, they were interviewing some people about this. It seems like they’re thinking about this. Am I a naive rube?
HEITKAMP: You know, I think what, what I what I have said, is that the ground is not fertile for our report. The ground is pretty frozen. Everybody’s position has become politically charged and polarized, and so you can only have a level of reform and dialog when there’s opportunity for bipartisan support, and there is no appetite right now in Congress for bipartisanship. ... The atmosphere is so politically charged, you are not going to see any meaningful response to the reversal of Chevron until you actually get over, until the fever breaks or the ground thaws.
What happens is a lot of floor speeches and not a lot of response to. It, and you don’t have people who are running the institutions who are particularly interested in protecting the institution. You know, one of the things I say is the beginning of the challenge that the Senate has is that when the Senate leaders started being political leaders and not leaders of their institution.
SCHWARTZ: Well, this just makes me feel sad. We’re spending all this time talking about how to fix things, and you’re telling me there’s no appetite for it. Everything’s too political right now -- we have to wait until the fever breaks -- but I don’t see that happening anytime soon.
HEITKAMP: Well, you don’t know. I mean, right now we are in a highly charged environment, and there is no trust. In order to legislate, you have to trust the other side, and there is no trust. Trust has been broken. It needs to be re established, and it can’t be dictated out of the White House, and legislative action today is completely dependent on what the White House says.
SCHWARTZ: So how do we how do we rebuild trust?
HEITKAMP: It’s a relationship thing. It’s doing some small things that are successful, and then working and building on those small things that are successful.
SCHWARTZ: Senator, just one last question. Do you think that Congress will be able to reform?
MUSIC FADES IN
HEITKAMP: I think we’re going to have to get through the Maga period, and that’s why I just, I don’t see, you know whether the midterms change any perspective, but it’s going to -- I do not see a leader like Ted Kennedy who protected the institution, a leader like John McCain who believed that in the institution. I don’t see the kind of historic leadership and the people you would automatically have gone to people like just Chuck Grassley. The people that you would have automatically gone to, like Mitch McConnell. He’s aging out of the system, I mean, and it’s only going to happen when legislative leaders start leading their organization and not taking their orders from a president. And I don’t care if it’s a Democratic president or a Republican president, they’re not your boss. Yeah, and so when we actually elect a Congress that wants to do its job, we’re going to see reform.
SCHWARTZ: Senator Heitkamp, thank you so much for your time.
HEITKAMP: Matthew, it’s been so much fun. I’m sorry you had to hear me rant and rave about my frustrations, but I know that a podcast like yours will help inform kind of where to go forward. And so it’s just been an honor to be on with you.
THEME MUSIC
MATT: That’s it for this season of UnCommon Law. We hope you’ve enjoyed our series on the rise and fall of agency power. I’m heading out on paternity leave, so I’ll be back early next year with more UnCommon Law for you. In the menatime, if you have found this series enlightening, enteratining, thought-provoking, go ahead and leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It really helps to spread the word.
UnCommon Law was produced and hosted by me, Matthew Schwartz. I also did the sound design for this episode. My editor on this episode was Loren Duggan, deputy news director at Bloomberg Government. Thank you Loren for all of your insightful edits on this episode. Our cover art was designed by Jonathan Hurtarte. An additional thank you to Keith Perine, Tom Taylor and Cesca Antonelli. See you next time!
To contact the reporter on this story:
To contact the editor responsible for this story: