Representative Derek Kilmer on the House Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress and De-polarization
Newsletter #310 - January 8, 2025
On December 18, 2024 Heidi Burgess and Guy Burgess talked with Rep. Derek Kilmer, Heidi Burgess and Guy Burgess talked with Rep. Derek Kilmer, Democratic Representative to Congress from the 6th District in Washington State from 2013-2024. (His final term was ending just a couple days after we talked.) Rep. Kilmer is best known in the conflict resolution community as the chair of the House Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress, and the ranking member on the follow-on Modernization Subcommittee of the Committee on House Administration. In those roles he has done a tremendous amount to help Congress work in a bipartisan way. The Select Committee passed 202 bipartisan resolutions, many of which have already been implemented, and others are in process.
In our conversation, Rep. Kilmer told the history of the Select Committee, what allowed it to be as successful as it was, and what lessons he learned from that experience, as well as earlier experiences, about how to make our democracy work better at all levels of government, from the local up to the federal levels. We share some of the highlights of our conversation here, but encourage our readers to check out our full discussion.
Heidi started out by asking Rep Kilmer what lessons he had that he could share with others "about how other people, both in Congress and outside, people who are interested in reducing polarization in this country, can they go about doing that? What have you learned that you see as most important?"
Rep. Kilmer answered that his primary takeaway was that "if you want things to work differently, sometimes you have to do things differently." He went on to explain that as they were forming the committee, they had a presentation from a historian from the Congressional Research Service who explained that most past select committees failed to pass any recommendations, and if they did, they were not bipartisan.
So there was a choice. Would we want it to be characterized as an abject failure, or would we want it to demonstrate some success? And that, for me, really framed our work. ...
Speaker Pelosi asked me "Would you be willing to run this committee?" And I said, "Sure." And she said, "How many people do you want on it?" And I said, "I think it should be an equal number, six Democrats and six Republicans. And in fact, I think that we should require a supermajority vote for passing any recommendations." And she said, "Well, you know you're in the majority, right? You don't have to do it that way." And I said, "Well, I'm just of the belief that if we want to have durable change and systemic change within the institution, it needs to be bipartisan. Because otherwise, we'll make a change. And then when Republicans are in charge, they'll make a change back. And we'll just swing back and forth, rather than doing something that's durable." And to her credit, she said, "Great. Okay. Go for it."
That wasn't the only thing they did differently. Instead of having separate staffs for Republicans and Democrats, they shared one staff, with Rep. Kilmer and his Republican counterpart Tom Graves (a very conservative Georgian) making all the hiring decisions together. They all sat in a circle around a conference table, alternating Republican and Democrat.
Why? Well, when I hear a witness say something interesting that's valuable food for thought, my genetic predisposition, and I think that my colleagues do the same thing, is to lean over to the person next to us and say, "Hey, that was kind of interesting. What do you think about that?" And in our committee, you leaned over to someone from a different party.
We didn't even sit at a dais [as is customary for all Congressional committees]. We sat around a big round table. Why? Well, I don't know about you. but I've never had a good conversation speaking to the back of somebody's head. And so in our committee, we sat around a big round table where we looked each other in the eye and we were not above our witnesses. We were on the same level as our witnesses, actually trying to think through how to solve problems together, not to score points, not to make speeches that we could throw out on social media, but to actually think through problem-solving.
Also, at the beginning of their work they had a bipartisan planning retreat to develop relationships, to determine what each member wanted to get out of their service on the committee, and how they would define success. They also set rules of engagement...
so that when we came to our committee, we all acknowledged that maybe we didn't have all of the answers. So we engaged one another through a lens of respect. And setting those ground rules at the front end — that's just good hygiene, but it seldom happens. It almost never happens in Congress.
One of the hardest things the Committee did was to reconvene after January 6, 2021. Their committee was originally formed in 2019 with a one-year time frame. But they were so successful that they were extended for another year, and then for another two years, into the next congress. That second extension happened on January 3, 2021. And then January 6 happened. After January 6, Rep. Kilmer sat down with each committee member, many of whom told him they didn't think they'd be able to get anything done. Some didn't even want to be in the same room as their counterparts from the other party.
I still remember walking away from one of those meetings and saying to my chief of staff, "Man, we're cooked. I don't really know how we're going to do anything."
So we took a risk. We brought in an expert, an outsider, to facilitate a discussion, someone with expertise in conflict resolution, to facilitate a conversation about the events of the 6th of January 2021, where the 12 members of our committee talked through it. To my knowledge, it's the only place in Congress where Democrats and Republicans actually had a conversation about the events of January 6th.
And that was hard; it was raw. And after that conversation, I had colleagues on the committee say things like, "Well, I still disagree with what happened that day, and I still disagree with my colleagues, but that was healing for me. I'm willing to work with them." And all of this is through the lens of that initial takeaway, which is, if you want things to work differently, you need to do things differently.
Heidi observed that these processes seemed pretty obvious, to a conflict resolution expert, at least. Why, she wondered, hadn't other committee adopted these strategies? Rep. Kilmer explained that there are "will issues" and "skill issues."
The will issues are all of those things that make negotiation and compromise difficult. People being worried about a primary or gerrymandering that has made their district so blue or so red that it makes compromise politically perilous. And campaign finance is a challenge. Those are "will issues" that lead folks in Congress to often look at this more like a game to be won, rather than as problems to be solved.
Skill issues, he said, involved the ability to listen, learn, to negotiate, and resolve conflict.
Congress is the first place where I've ever worked where, with the exception of freshman orientation, there's really not any professional development for members to get better at their jobs. Things like: how do I negotiate strategically? How do I resolve conflict? How do I have difficult conversations with people who think differently than I do? How do I use evidence to create public policy? Those are all skills. And there are some people who, by virtue of what they'd done prior to Congress, come to Congress with those skills. And there are some people who somehow organically develop those skills within the institution of Congress. But by and large, there's a whole bunch of people here who don't have those skills. And so one of the things that the Modernization Committee recommended was to actually do some skill-building as an institution and help members of Congress become better at their jobs.
And that is one of the many recommendations that is actually being implemented, both for staff and for Congressional Representatives themselves.
Rep. Kilmer also talked about the Bipartisan Working Group, which is made up of about 12 Democrats and 12 Republicans who meet periodically to hash through things together. Their meetings, he explained, have three parts.
In the first part of the meeting, we go around the room and anybody who's working on something where they want to invite collaboration or co-sponsorship is able to make a pitch. In the second part of the meeting, we talk about what's going on in Congress that week or that month. And those can be feisty conversations when you're talking about taxes or immigration or healthcare or what have you. But I'm increasingly of the belief that good democracy is a little bit like a good relationship, right? You don't necessarily agree with your partner on everything. But you've got to be able to talk to each other and listen to each other and not have every interaction turn into the Jerry Springer Show.
And then in the third part of the meeting, we talk about a big hairy issue facing the country and where we might be able to find some common ground. So for example, we brought in Trevor Potter, who was John McCain's campaign finance attorney, who had been a Republican appointee to the Federal Election Commission. He spoke to us about reforms to the Federal Election Commission. He said, "I'm not going to talk to you about ending Citizens United. You're not going to find agreement on that. I'm not going to talk to you about public financing of campaigns. You're not going to come to bipartisan agreement on that either." Then he said, "But I actually think you could come to bipartisan agreement on some reforms to the Federal Election Commission." And he talked through it. And when he was done, I said, "Well, gosh, that's something I'd be willing to work on. That seems like pretty common-sense stuff." And one of my Republican colleagues said, "Yeah, I'd work with you on that." And we had two Democrats and two Republicans work for a few months. And we introduced a bill, which was the first bipartisan campaign finance reform bill in more than a decade. And so to your point about what's in the realm of the possible, we were able to find some of those areas of common ground because we took the time to do it.
Now, I don't want to mislead anybody into thinking that we were sitting around the room holding hands around the table and singing kumbaya or closing our eyes and doing trust falls into each other's arms. We stopped doing that after we dropped a guy. But it was always the hour of each week where I found myself thinking, "We ought to be doing more of this, not just as a Congress, but as a country too."
“How do we get people more invested in doing that?” Heidi asked.
Rep. Kilmer answered that it was a matter of "setting the table for supporting that kind of work." He told several stories of effective conflict resolution efforts that happened in his Congressional District in Washington State. One was following a series of attacks on religious institutions, after which an interfaith group held a "solidarity event," proclaiming that violence was completely unacceptable in their community.
The message out of that event was that part of living in a religiously and otherwise diverse pluralistic democracy is that you're going to live next to people who think and look and pray differently than you do. And that cannot come to violence and conflict.
He also talked about the local YMCAs training their staff and board in conflict resolution skills so they could hold bridging events to try to get people to talk across their differences, instead of fighting with each other, which was getting to be an increasingly common problem. In both cases, the organizers asked him if there was any federal money to pay for such things and his answer was, "no, not currently."
But I looked into it. It turns out the United States actually does spend tens of millions of dollars in trying to foster social cohesion and bridging divides as a means of strengthening democracy. In other countries! It's done through the National Endowment for Democracy.
But we don't do that here in America. And so that led to the creation of a bill that I authored called the Building Civic Bridges Act, which focuses on a few things. One, doing some grant-making to these hyper-local efforts that are trying to bridge divides. Two, training AmeriCorps members in the skills related to bridge building, in part because AmeriCorps has footprints in all of our districts. And those folks can be force multipliers in our communities if we give them the skills to help bridge divides. And third, to support colleges and universities that are doing research in that area of bridge building. When we introduced that legislation, we did so with 10 Democratic sponsors and 10 Republican sponsors. Unfortunately, the bill hasn't moved yet. [Though according to an article by the National Civic League there is new momentum behind it and Rep. Chrissy Houlahan (D-PA) will be reintroducing it in the upcoming Congress, with Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) and Todd Young (R-IN) leading the bill in the Senate.]
Guy observed that not only is it hard to find common ground across the partisan divide, but it is also hard to find a common understanding about what democracy is or should be. He wondered if Rep. Kilmer had thoughts on that. Rep. Kilmer responded by quoting President Kennedy:
In a democracy, we all hold office as citizens. And to paraphrase that further, the manner in which we exercise those responsibilities, to some degree, dictates what we get. And I think that's a valuable message. To some degree, if we want government to work in a way that is about solving problems, that is how we ought to engage one another. And if we want to see our elected officials engage with one another in a civil manner, then each of us, not just elected officials, but as citizens, need to engage in a civil manner.
He went on to tell a story about Olympic Forest Collaborative that brought environmentalists together with loggers to decide on a better way of managing the local forests. "The first six months were generally an exercise in just trying to keep people in the room." But then they went on a field trip out into the woods, and each side explained the issues and the problems as they saw them. After that field trip, they came back together and
as the meeting kicked off, one of the leaders from one of the conservation groups said, "my organization has taken a vote, and we've decided that we want to help you guys harvest some more timber. We just want to make sure it's done in a responsible way." And we are willing to commit some of our organization's budget to hiring a forester to supplement the work of the Forest Service and to get more timber sales out the door. We just want to be at the table and make sure that it happens in a responsible way.
And I'll be honest with you, I almost fell out of my chair. ...
So what I would tell you is the hard work of bridging divides and making progress is doable. In my view, bridging divides for the sake of bridging divides is important, but bridging divides to make progress is even better. And bridging divides to make progress—we all get a say in that. We all can figure out that this is a local problem that we want to work on,... and it doesn't necessarily require Joe Biden or Donald Trump to do anything.
And so I don't view democracy as solely what happens in the White House or in the US Capitol Building. It's been said, and I don't know who said it, but I like it, that "democracy is the problems we solve together." And I think that's what we have to be about, right? What we need to be about is the hard work of solving problems together.
One impediment to doing that which we discussed is declining faith in our institutions. Rep. Kilmer agreed, saying
The relative faith in institutions is at a record low. We've lost faith in higher ed as an institution of good. We've lost faith in our governmental institutions, even the polling around religious institutions is bad. You know you're in trouble when we've lost faith in faith.
And yet, I keep thinking about a speech someone gave me when I became chair of the Modernization Committee. It was a graduation speech that John Gardner had delivered at Cornell University in 1968. He spoke about the importance of being a loving critic of an institution. He said institutions suffer from uncritical lovers who deny an institution the sort of life-giving eye toward improvements that's necessary for effectiveness. And he said, "Institutions also suffer from unloving critics who treat an institution like the pinata at the party and have an eye towards demolition, rather than towards construction. And God knows I see a lot of that in Congress.
We talked about how to get around that, and how to get people working towards construction instead of demolition. It is a matter. he explained, of getting people to be bold, inquisitive, creative, and collaborative. He told a story about how he was able to work with Tom Cotton, a deeply conservative Republican, on a banking bill. They agreed that it was a good idea, though for completely different reasons. That didn't matter. They wrote it together, got bipartisan cosponsors, and it passed.
So one of my takeaways from that is you can have very different perspectives, but if you are willing to have the conversation, maybe you can end up in the same place. And that part of leadership and part of citizenship is trying to find those shaded areas of the Venn diagram so that we can at least move forward on the issues on which we agree. ... There are so many benefits to actually just being willing to talk with people who might think differently than you. ...it can take effort to have that type of dialogue. But I think a healthy Democratic republic requires it.
This is all we have room for here, but we hope you will check out our full discussion to hear or read more great stories and profound insights about how we all might "do democracy" better.
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