Within about a half hour of one another, two revealing — and ultimately hope-inducing — press releases hit my inbox earlier this week. The first conveyed the news that Congressman Brendan Boyle had received something called the “Newsweek – Stubblefield Civility Award.”
Apparently, the Stubblefield Institute for Civil Political Discourse partners with Newsweek to highlight lawmakers who “bridge partisan divides and foster respectful debate.”
Boyle is a natural fit for the accolade. I’ve known him for something like 15 years — since his state rep days, when he taught a politics class at Drexel University — and I can’t think of a more naturally civil person. Full disclosure: I once lost my shit with him over something completely stupid on my part — I can’t remember what, only that I was a jerk — and his equanimity in response not only shamed me, but made me think: That’s someone fit to lead.
If you attended our Ideas We Should Steal Festival last month, you heard from Jon Grinspan, author of The Age of Acrimony — a gripping account of how the electorate was essentially calmed after a turbulent period of polarization, political assassination and election chicanery following the Civil War. One of the ways the temperature was brought down was through very purposeful acts of civility; that’s when, for example, members of Congress started referring to each other publicly, even amid vicious dispute, with preambles like, “My good friend, the distinguished Congressman from Kentucky…”
Decorum, it turns out, matters. And when those norms are shattered, as when Congress members heckle presidents during their State of the Union addresses, it not only sours the political process, it makes an already disengaged electorate even more cynical.
In that way, Boyle is a throwback to the days when respect in the hallowed halls of the nation’s capital was a two-way boulevard. Which gets us to the second press release, not a half-hour after the Newsweek – Stubblefield award announcement. This one heralded that Boyle and Bucks County Republican Brian Fitzpatrick — whose pragmatism I’ve often championed — had passed out of the House a bill to study and prevent lung cancer among women. According to the Lugar Center, Fitzpatrick was Congress’ most bipartisan legislator last year, and Boyle its 163rd.
This reminder, in rapid fire succession, that rumors of the death of civility and bipartisanship may yet be premature was just what I needed. So I reached out to Boyle, who has climbed the ranks of Democratic Party power since first being elected in 2015. He’s now the ranking member of the House Budget Committee and has been something of a seer when it comes to his party’s wayward ways. He grew up in Olney, the son of an immigrant SEPTA janitor and a school crossing guard; he was prescient in his warning that the Democratic Party has long taken for granted its multi-racial working-class base … well before the results of this election.
What follows is an edited and condensed version of our conversation this week.
Larry Platt: So, in short order, I noticed two press releases come my way. One was this award to you for civility, which I think is well deserved. You’ve always been one of the most civil public servants I’ve known.
Brendan Boyle: Thank you.
And then almost at the exact same time I got a press release about you and Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick celebrating the passage in the House of a bill for women’s lung health. I saw both of those together and I was like, this is exactly what I need right now. I’m heartened by the fact that not everyone is going to their respective corners, that some people are still trying to find a way out of this. So is there a possible third way here that includes civility and bipartisanship or am I a dinosaur? Are you a dinosaur?
It’s funny in politics, right? [Laughs] You are used to getting called too young and then suddenly one day you’re called a dinosaur. But first, I actually want to thank you for having an interest in this and wanting to write about it. Because I know just as well as you do that my winning an award on civility will not get nearly as many clicks or likes or as much notice as if I went on Twitter and screamed my head off about something. That is a real challenge of the era in which we find ourselves.
But the truth is real bipartisanship still does exist and it’s necessary if you’re going to get important pieces of legislation passed. So the Women and Lung Cancer Bill is my bill, and I invited Brian to be my Republican co-lead on it. It’s been a multi-year fight. I won’t get really into the weeds on this, but basically non-smoker women are at an alarming rate contracting lung cancer and no one knows why, and they aren’t being screened for it, and so by the time they find out at 41 or 42, it’s really too late. I mean, it is a vicious form of cancer. So I have a bill addressing that.
“My winning an award on civility will not get nearly as many clicks or likes or as much notice as if I went on Twitter and screamed my head off about something. That is a real challenge of the era in which we find ourselves.” — U.S. Rep. Brendan Boyle
And the way I was able to get the Republican-led Energy and Commerce Committee to act on it was not just my relationship with Brian, but also the lead Republican on the subcommittee is a conservative Republican from Kentucky named Brett Guthrie. He and I have become friends over the years because we both served in the NATO Parliamentary Assembly together. So, three or four times a year, we’ve traveled and spent a good amount of time together. We’re both sports fans, and we’ll go back and forth on text messages about that. And so here was an example where having that preexisting friendship really made a difference where I was able to go to him and say, “Listen, this is not partisan and I could really use your help on this.”
That’s just one example. I mean, I had another bill that got passed and signed into law to help reform the way the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) works and was able to get that passed out of budget committee unanimously despite the fact that Republicans are in the majority. That would not have happened if it weren’t for having relationships and doing the not glamorous hard work behind the scenes.
With Guthrie — he’s from a conservative district in Kentucky, so what could the sports trash talk be about?
Well, we are fans of all sports, but in this case, particularly college football [laughs]. He is a diehard Alabama fan and I am a Notre Dame alum. So over the years we’ve spent a lot of time on these trips traveling together talking college football. I’m one of the few Democrats from the North who pays attention to SEC football, which is, you know, basically a religion in the South.
That goes to how sports is such a bridge. I learned that watching Ed Rendell all those years — a sitting governor hosting the Eagles post-game show every week.
Absolutely.
Let me ask you this. If relationships are so key to getting stuff done, why do I keep hearing that the members of opposite parties don’t socialize like they used to? Is that part of the problem?
Obviously, I didn’t serve in the 70s and the 80s, but folks who have institutional memory from then, it is true that there is a lot less socializing together. Most members live in their districts. I mean, I live with my wife and daughter in Philadelphia. There was a time when most members of Congress lived in Washington, D.C. So the positive of living in your district is you’re more connected to the folks who voted for you. But there is a downside, and that is that there’s less time getting to know colleagues on the other side of the aisle.
Do you commute home at night?
When I can. I do have a place where I stay here when we’re in session, but if we’re going to be done voting early, say on a Tuesday, and I can get home then I’ll just come back on Wednesday morning. Being the ranking member on the Budget Committee has given me more responsibilities and that makes it a little bit more difficult to do that. But we have a 10-year-old, so any opportunity I have to get home, I take it.
The other thing though is, let’s face it, both political parties are now ideologically pure and consistent. Generations ago, and as recently as the 60s, 70s, and 80s, you had two heterodox political parties. You had conservative Democrats and you had liberal Democrats. You had conservative Republicans and you had liberal Republicans. That made it easier to achieve bipartisan compromise. When Tip O’Neill was Speaker of the House, he knew that he had to keep together a coalition, which stretched really far ideologically. It was easy for liberal Democrats to find liberal Republicans in the North who they were able to bring along on certain bills. Nowadays you have a totally right wing Republican Party and a completely left of center Democratic Party. That makes it more difficult to actually achieve bipartisan compromise, but it is still possible.
How do you disagree with your colleagues? Can you give me an example where you’ve exhibited the sort of civility that you’ve been honored for, with someone you might disagree with?
That’s a tough question for me to answer without feeling like I’m being kind of immodest. But in the Budget Committee, the chair is Republican Jodey Arrington, a conservative from West Texas. He and I have become very good friends. He was my lead Republican co-sponsor on my CBO reform bill. We kick off every committee hearing. He speaks for at least 5 minutes and then I speak for at least 5 minutes, and we both set the tone. A lot of times we’re talking about things on which we strongly disagree. But in those hearings, I really try to make it clear that the disagreement is about policy, not personality, and we’ve conveyed that, I think. We’re actually two people who legitimately get along and are friends. I feel like that’s an example where we’ve had an impact because I’ve had other members tell me that in previous years, the committee was much more contentious.
Speaking of the Budget Committee, you’re going to have to deal with Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and this idea you can just take $2 trillion out of the federal budget.
Oh yeah, it’s so easy. Just find the line item that says “Waste, Fraud and Abuse.” Just find that line item and you eliminate that, no problem.
Well, you’re going to have some interesting conversations, because I assume the Republican members on that committee know it’s not easy.
Yeah, it’s completely made up.
But they may be cowed by the cult on the right. And, to a lesser degree, you have a cult on the left and together that really perverts our discourse, no?
There’s no question that there is the language police on the left, who, if you say something that strays, will react. That said, though, I do think it pales in comparison to what Donald Trump is doing on the right. I mean, people know that I’m close to President Biden. I’ve been a strong supporter of the administration, but there could be areas where I speak up and disagree, and I’m not going to have to worry about either the president or any other Democrat trying to weigh in and primary me or sway people to vote against me.
Whereas on the right, on the other hand, boy, you step out of line just once and you have to worry about Donald Trump turning his fire on you, and then there’s that whole media ecosystem they’ve built up on Twitter and on podcasts like [former Trump strategist] Steve Bannon’s and [political commentator] Ben Shapiro’s. I mean, they have a whole system in place to enforce discipline and to go after perceived heretics. That really doesn’t exist on the left and certainly not nearly to the same degree.
That’s a great point. You mention the language stuff. You know, after the election I quite unhealthily dug into the exit polling. I attend a lot of meetings that begin with land acknowledgements. Well, one of the things that struck me was that Trump is reported to have won anywhere between 51 percent and 65 percent of the Native American vote, because it turns out they voted like other rural, economically-stressed voters. Do you feel like your party is going through the proper journey of introspection that the election results ought to have prompted?
Well, as you know from our previous conversations, this touches on something that I care a lot about and I’ve been trying to work on for a number of years. The Democratic Party does have a working-class voter problem. It started as a White working-class voter problem about a decade ago, and it has now spread. It has certainly spread to Latino voters, and we also saw our votes drop among Asian American and African American non-college educated voters as well.
“I mean, [the right] has a whole system in place to enforce discipline and to go after perceived heretics. That really doesn’t exist on the left and certainly not nearly to the same degree.” — U.S. Rep. Brendan Boyle
I founded along with a colleague of mine the Blue Collar Caucus eight years ago to attempt to begin to address this disconnect. I genuinely believe that the policies and the economic programs of the Democratic Party are best for working-class Americans. I genuinely believe that the Republican Party’s economic program is heavily geared toward benefiting the top 1 percent. But I also have to recognize the reality that a lot of working-class voters did not reach the same conclusion in this past election. And as we look not just at one election but really over the last decade, that trend line really worries me. So I’m glad now that more Democrats are talking about this as a serious problem that needs to be addressed because, while there was some of that after 2016, there was not nearly enough. And I’m actually hearing it now from folks who eight years ago were disagreeing with me on this topic.
So is this a policy program or just a messaging problem, as some have suggested?
I certainly have no monopoly on the answer and a lot more exploration needs to be done. But I do believe that we have a cultural disconnect between the way the Democratic Party is perceived. To too many working-class Americans of all different races and ethnicities, our party brand is that we represent people that aren’t like them. And that’s a real problem. I think it’s more about culture and social issues than it is economic issues.
There is an irony here, that Donald Trump, who inherited $400 million, is seen as some kind of Harry Truman champion of the working man …
… the anti-elitist with Elon Musk tagging along. It genuinely is sickening to me the way they have been able to cosplay working-class hero.
Let me ask you what I always ask every elected official, it’s sort of my political character test. Can you give me an example where you’ve stood up to an interest group of your party and/or an example where you’ve changed your mind on a substantive issue?
It’s not one that I necessarily want to revisit. The toughest vote I’ve cast in my career came in my first term. I came to the conclusion as a freshman member that the Iran nuclear deal, the JCPOA, was not worth doing and that it was a mistake to lift sanctions on Iran and that brutal regime in Tehran. I feel good about the vote.
I think history, frankly, has proven my position to be correct, but boy, it was enormously difficult. I mean, I was heavily lobbied by the Obama White House. There were those who threatened me with a primary — not President Obama himself, not people close to him, but there were others. I was protested at one of my offices. That was a challenging time and I was certainly going against the grain. Among House Democrats, I was one of 24, while the other 200 or so were voting for it.
That’s a great example of political character. The only other question I had for you was to call you out on one thing. Seven years ago, you tried to pass a campaign finance law — basically, a restoration of former Republican Rep. (turned MSNBC pundit) David Jolly’s The Stop Act, which would free elected representatives from spending hours each day doing nothing but dialing for dollars. It never happened.
Oh, yeah, about not being able to fundraise while we’re in session …
Right, staffers could, but the idea was to free up legislators to legislate.
Yeah, when Rep. Jolly left Congress, I know I reintroduced the bill that term. Boy, I’m glad you reminded me of this. I actually have to talk to my LD [legislative director] about this. I think I joked to you at the time that I’m for any reform that prevents me from having to spend time fundraising and doing call time. I’m not in a frontline district, so I do have it much easier than others. Only roughly 10 or 15 percent of all of Congress is fundraising every single day. That is just a miserable experience that I would not want.
And don’t you have to physically leave Congress and go to these phone banks to make fundraising calls?
Yeah, which is so silly; you literally have to walk a couple blocks because you can’t use government resources. I’ve always said, why don’t we pass a law that if you’re using your phone 10 percent of the time for political reasons, cut a check at the end of the month to reimburse the Treasury? When I explain to regular voters what we have to do, they usually react, like, Oh, that’s really dumb. It’s one of the many, many things about our system that does not make sense, but I thank you for reminding me of that.
Well, if you ever do bring it back up, let me know. I do think this relates to the working class, who sees the political game as rigged due to all the money in the system.
I remember way back when they were looking at you for Congress, the first thing they talked to you about was, “Can you raise a lot of money?” and “Can you self-fund?” That has made it far more difficult to get people into office from working-class backgrounds.
Thank you, Congressman, for taking the time, and for your civility.
Always fun talking to you.
