United for Term Limits: Democrats and Republicans agree there are Drawbacks to Institutional Knowledge
U.S. Representative Jared Golden and State Senator Rick Bennett discuss the drawbacks of institutional knowledge in Congress. Both agree that term limiting Congress will reduce the concentration of power among entrenched politicians. It will shorten the ladder to chair positions empowering citizens from all walks of life to resolve the current issues Americans face on a faster timeline. Find out more by watching this insightful political dialog.
Rep. Golden: I think sometimes institutional knowledge can actually be a bad thing. So we have a professional core of politicians right now, and just the institution itself, let’s look at a debate like what’s going on right now over the debt ceiling, raising the debt ceiling, so we can continue to meet our obligations that we owe. It’s about the credit worthiness of the country and also our budget. And there’s a whole institutional knowledge or based upon years of learned experiences and battles past fought about how to go about winning. And what’s winning? The Dems beat the Republicans, and the Republicans beat the Dems. There’s all kinds of institutional knowledge about how to posture and jockey and position in order to get the big win, crush the other side. Very little conversation about what’s in the best interest of the country.
Speaker 7: I think it’s exciting to talk about something that Americans actually agree on these days, or united on, so thank you for that opportunity, and I’m certainly one of those folks. I’m always fascinated that it seems like the critics of term limits seem to point more to the experience point that you reference the institutional knowledge.
Rep. Golden: This “I alone… I’m the only one that can do it,” being the indispensable individual or even nation. It’s just not true. Everything I learned about leadership in the United States Marine Corps infantry was about the whole group, and how every squad, that’s right down… Or team down to the four person level, you had to find the strengths in every individual, and everyone had to be ready to lead if necessary. And that’s my viewpoint of the congress as well. And I think that’s what the American people understand as well.
There’s just so much talent in this country now. I think sometimes institutional knowledge can actually be a bad thing. So we have a professional core of politicians right now, and just the institution itself, let’s look at a debate like what’s going on right now over the debt ceiling, raising the debt ceiling, so we can continue to meet our obligations that we owe. It’s about the credit worthiness of the country and also our budget. And there’s a whole institutional knowledge or based upon years of learned experiences and battles past fought about how to go about winning. And what’s winning? The Dems beat the Republicans, and the Republicans beat the Dems. There’s all kinds of institutional knowledge about how to posture and jockey and position in order to get the big win, crush the other side. Very little conversation about what’s in the best interest of the country. And I think that when you just fall back on common sense and gut instinct, there’s plenty of institutional knowledge out there or just knowledge. Forget institutional, just knowledge. The American people are smart, they’ll send representatives to Congress to do the right thing.
Sen. Bennett When you talk about institution knowledge, it often boils down to knowledge of the process. Well, the news is the process is there to make the legislator, the congressperson, me as a state senator, the most effective I can be. I’m not there to serve a process, I’m there to serve the people. And if the process is getting in the way of that, we need to change the process. And I’ve been working hard on doing that in mundane ways and more profound ways, but it’s like we just gotta remind people that it’s not… Fundamentally, it’s about serving the people that we’re elected to serve. It’s not about preserving some process that is ultimately frustrating for a lot of people.
Again, institutional knowledge, often an excuse for keeping things the same, rather than changing them critically. It’s fine if you’re serving for 10 or 20 years, you know what’s coming. But for new legislators, you ought to build the training and the orientation and the… Into it. So that they can be effective on day one of service.
Rep. Golden: Yeah, this is important to you when you think about the experience aspect of it. I like to think of politics is more of an art than a science, but increasingly it seems like it’s treated as a science. There’s a way of doing things, it’s very rigid polling and there’s a process, the parties kind of control the two different sides. And that’s something that’s very unique about American politics. Just two very powerful parties, almost no other option for voters out there, but at the end of the day, this human… It’s an art, not a science. We’re all human, and we often forget about that human element of what’s going on in Washington and largely in the national political debate. And the longer the people are there, they bring a lot of baggage with them through experience that they lived.
Everyone that goes there, I think largely goes there to do good things. They fight passionately for what they believe in. You get scars along the way. People argue, sometimes they criticize, there’s hard feelings, people win, they lose, sometimes reputations can almost feel like they’re on the line and you can have people who’ve been leaders for 20 years, 30 years from one party, another from the other party, and they can barely even look each other in the eye anymore. They almost detest each other strongly, and all of that gets in the way of the process and the politics gets really difficult. So I think that’s something you gotta think about too, where… Okay, maybe you do lose some experience and you might lose some really great leaders, but there’s more common behind them. And they won’t be carrying the baggage of 20 or 30 years of passionate political debate. And I think that’s a good thing.
Sen. Bennett Yeah, if I can just add to it. Newly elected people don’t know what they can’t do, it’s the art of the possible versus the impossible. If you really want change, you need to be inspired to think about the things that the other people who have served longer say we can’t do that, it’s not possible. So it’s only not possible because of human will and the way that the people have constrained themselves. And so one of the benefits of bringing in fresh perspectives and new folks is getting at the art of the impossible.
Ken: Turn this one up.
Speaker 8: I think it’s really refreshing to hear elected leaders mention the words humility and art. So thank you.
Ken: And I crunched the numbers on institutional knowledge, I did some… I wasn’t very good at math, but on this one I wanted to do some research. So the average tenure of a state legislator is about 10 years. Same in Congress, about 10 years as the average. Now 50% of members of Congress were first state legislators. So they have 10 years on average of state service and when you combine 535 members of Congress in the House and Senate, we come up with 8,000 years of combined institutional knowledge sitting there right now. What is that getting us?
Sen. Bennett Well, look, I mean, most of the bills that we deal with in the federal Congress or a state legislature, don’t have to do with the functioning of the Congress or the legislature. It has to do with real people’s issues. So if you’ve served on a planning board in a town or a selectman, or you’ve run a business, or you’ve worked in a business, or you’ve been a teacher or a doctor, a nurse the vast… This is the kind of experience that should inform policy making. Not how many years you served on a given committee or the holding a seat in Congress.
Ken: Exactly. Yeah. I would take real life experience over institutional knowledge every day of the week. That’s what we need and that’s what term limits will do. We’ll get people with different backgrounds, different experiences kind of just refresh this on a consistent basis.