#Worth a read, I live in his district and voting for him several times. Thanks for your service Mr. Price.
I recently sat down with Blake Hounshell of The New York Times and Jim Saksa of Roll Call to reflect on my time representing North Carolina’s Fourth Congressional District, and I wanted to share those conversations with you.
A Departing House Democrat Traces 30 Years of G.O.P. History by Blake Hounshell
As a young congressional aide, David Price witnessed the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 from the Senate gallery. He remembers the dramatic moment when Senator Clair Engle of California, dying of a brain tumor and left unable to speak, was wheeled in to cast a decisive vote.
Price watched the South drift away from Democrats in the years afterward, and he has stuck around long enough to see his party win slices of it back as the region’s demographics have shifted.
He spent much of that time as a professor of political science at Duke University, and then as an improbable member of the very institution he studied — even writing a book on “The Congressional Experience.”
Now 81 and in the twilight of his career, Price is retiring from Congress after more than 30 years representing his North Carolina district, which includes the Research Triangle. He is one of the longest-serving lawmakers in Washington and an especially keen observer of how the place has changed.
And he does not like what he sees.
Over his time in office, Price has grown alarmed at how Congress has become nastier and more partisan — a trend he traces to former Speaker Newt Gingrich, Republican of Georgia, whose “more aggressive and more militant approach” to politics, as Price put it, fundamentally transformed the institution.
“I’m appalled at the direction the Republican Party has taken,” Price said in an interview in his House office. “And I don’t, for a moment, think that the polarization is symmetrical. It’s asymmetrical.”
Many of today’s hardball political tactics were pioneered in North Carolina, a state characterized by bitter battles over the very rules of democracy.
In 2016, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina turned heads when he declared that the state “could no longer be classified as a democracy.” The State Supreme Court has often stepped in as an arbiter between the two parties — most recently when it threw out maps that were heavily gerrymandered by the G.O.P.-led Legislature.
Price first ran for office after trying and failing, as a political strategist, to oust Jesse Helms, the deeply conservative, pro-segregation North Carolina senator. Price took some satisfaction in the fact that the Senate recently confirmed the first Black woman to serve on the Supreme Court.
In today’s politics, Price sees ominous echoes of the 1994 campaign, when the mood of the country shifted sharply against President Bill Clinton and the Democratic Party.
“My town meetings became very turbulent,” he said, recalling how his campaign had to request police protection.
Price became a temporary victim of Gingrich’s Republican Revolution in 1994, losing his seat in that year’s red wave. He made a comeback two years later, and would serve in the House for the next 26 years.
Behind the scenes
Cerebral and reserved, Price prefers to work carefully and quietly on a few priorities at a time. He does not clamor for MSNBC hits or post viral videos of his speeches from the House floor.
“I’ve never been a tweeter,” he said, somewhat ruefully.
Instead, Price has exerted a significant, behind-the-scenes influence over causes like promoting democracy abroad and pushing changes to federal campaign finance laws. You know that tagline at the end of political ads — the one where candidates say they approved this message? That was his idea.
“He’s got his fingerprints all over a lot of things,” said Thomas Mills, a North Carolina political strategist and blogger.
Price hasn’t lost the youthful idealism that brought him to that Senate gallery in 1964. “You’re not going to find me taking cheap shots at government,” he said.
But he agonizes about how dysfunctional Congress has become, to the point where compromise is growing impossible. “Some degree of bipartisan cooperation is essential if we’re going to run our government,” he said dryly.
He warned that some Republicans want to roll back the civil rights agenda that brought him into politics in the 1960s — to the point where, he said, the U.S. is in “real danger” of entering a new Jim Crow era.
In 2013, the Supreme Court effectively struck down the heart of the Voting Rights Act, freeing states with a history of racial discrimination from requirements that they clear any material changes to their voting laws with the Justice Department.
The ruling immediately set off a wave of laws in Republican-led states that restricted voting rights. In 2016, a federal judge said that G.O.P. lawmakers in North Carolina had written the state’s voter I.D. law with “almost surgical precision” to discriminate against Black voters.
“The evidence just couldn’t be clearer that months after preclearance was gone, it was ‘Katie, bar the door,’” Price said.
If you can’t join them …
The only reliable way to defeat such efforts is for Democrats to win elections, Price argues.
Last year’s infighting over the Build Back Better Act, a mammoth piece of legislation that was rejected by two Democratic senators, didn’t help.
“We can never make a binary choice between turning out our base and appealing to swing voters,” he said. “We will not succeed if we don’t figure out how to do both.”
Part of the Democratic Party’s problem, he said, is the discomfort many on the left feel about promoting the party’s successes when there’s always more work to do.
“I often think about how Trump did this,” Price said. “He just bragged about his achievements, however illusory.”
“I’m not suggesting we do that,” he hastened to add. “But I do envy the ability to do it.”
As he leaves Congress, Price worries about what might happen if Kevin McCarthy, the minority leader, takes over as speaker, given “the kind of forces he’s going to be beholden to” on his right flank.
“I want to see a healthy, right-of-center Republican Party,” Price insisted. “So much of it just seems nihilistic these days.”
But for now, he said, “We just have to beat them.”
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He may be a political scientist, but Rep. David Price doesn’t have a ‘magic key’ by Jim Saksa
David E. Price wrote the book on Congress. “The Congressional Experience,” by the political science professor turned longtime lawmaker from North Carolina, is now in its fourth edition.
He doesn’t just update his book, he references it. “I can show you a diagram in the book if you want,” the Democrat said during our interview back in March. But as the retiring 81-year-old leafed through the pages he wrote, he was interrupted by a phone call: It was Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
“I have to take it,” Price said, apologetically.
Heard on the Hill was not offended, though slightly disappointed, when Price wouldn’t reveal what the conversation was about. Instead, he returned to expounding on Congress, his historical perspective on contemporary politics, and the future of liberal democracy here and abroad.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
Q: When you were first elected to Congress, the Berlin Wall was still standing. As you leave, do you feel more or less hopeful for the future of liberalism and democracy?
A: It does kind of bookend my service, since you ask it that way. I came here just as communism was crumbling, and one of my first and most satisfying involvements was with Martin Frost’s bipartisan commission that reached out to parliaments in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and the Baltics. It was not clear that democracy was going to work in these places. Some are now backsliding, but these countries that emerged from Soviet rule became members of the family of parliamentary democracies. It’s never a done deal totally, but it’s well established that that’s what they aspire to be, and that most certainly includes Ukraine.
OK, but am I optimistic looking forward? I have to say I’m apprehensive. I mean, I know what the trends look like, the Freedom House trends that everyone cites. Countries that we have worked with in the House Democracy Partnership, the next generation of emerging democracies, a lot of them are in trouble. Tunisia is in trouble. Sri Lanka is in trouble. Burma is certainly in trouble. Kyrgyzstan has backslid. In other countries, democracy seems to be on a positive trajectory, like Armenia and Moldova. Overall, there’s ample reason for concern about whether democracy is or can be the wave of the future.
Ironically, what Putin has just now done may actually, in the end, improve the chances. The West is reacting. What’s going on in Poland and Hungary right now as they see this? I bet it makes a lot of people think.
Q: What about domestically? How have politics changed since your first election?
A: People think things have never been more contentious, but I cut my teeth on North Carolina politics. Jesse Helms set the pattern early on for a very negative attack mode. I was by no means the worst victim in my campaigns, but I got a flavor of it. I lost a tough election in ’94, in the Gingrich revolution, but I made a comeback and managed to stay ever since.
For most people, though, campaigns today are worse. The situation is not only more polarized, but less constrained by norms of how you conduct yourself in a democracy and less constrained in terms of the money spent. And the polarization is asymmetrical in the sense that the Republican Party has particularly gone off the rails in terms of ideological extremism.
Democrats have the Squad, we have a few members on the far end of the spectrum, but it’s just nothing like the Freedom Caucus. The content of the ideology matters too, alternating between libertarian and Trumpian.
The setting I really enjoyed as a new member was the freewheeling committee activity, introducing a bill, the classic “bill becomes a law.” You work up to hearings, you have a markup, get compromises worked out and then the committee product goes to the floor. Well, you know how that has gone. That is not the way it’s done anymore. And I’m not saying there’s not a good reason for a more centralized operation. When Nancy Pelosi became speaker, nobody predicted that we’d go back to the good old days when the committee chairs ruled the roost, and I didn’t want us to do that. There needed to be a more disciplined party operation. But there is a loss there too. Hopefully post-COVID we can strike a balance whereby we keep strong leadership but we also have robust committee operations.
Q: You’re a political scientist, and you’ve spent 17 terms here. If you had carte blanche, how would you fix Congress?
A: One thing I say in my book is that congressional reform is considerably oversold. OK, maybe there are things that we can do. We shouldn’t be voting on the debt ceiling, for example, since that’s a huge diversion, and we need to respect and pay and train our staff better. Professionalization on the staff side has deteriorated and was dealt a damaging blow in the Gingrich years. But I don’t have a magic key.
I mean, the troubles of the Congress right now are not just troubles of rules and procedures. The troubles in the Congress are political, and so the answer is simply to win an election. I’m not saying Democrats are all virtuous or anything like that. But some of the most satisfying, coherent operations I’ve seen here have been in the years where there was unified party control, and it was Democratic control. Especially given the turn the Republican Party’s taken and the threat of Donald Trump coming back, I feel very strongly we need to win these next elections.
It’s a kind of political distemper. I asked a Republican colleague the other day why they didn’t just take care of some obvious problems they had with another member, and his answer was, “Oh, the base loves it.” Give me a break. You have to guide, you have to offer some leadership. And I think it’s really, truly alarming the extent to which Republican members have not done that. I thought it would happen after the insurrection, but it didn’t.
Q: What’s your advice for the next generation of lawmakers?
A: Gosh, you make me sound like a sage. I do think the legislative branch of government is the first branch of government, so if it doesn’t work, democracy doesn’t work — and I’m talking about our country, but also parliaments all over the democratic world.
Free and fair elections are important, but what happens between elections is even more important. It can’t just be our own performance platform for a social media audience or whatever. If you’re elected to this institution, you are representing your people in a very direct way, and you need to feel some responsibility for making the institution work.
I think it’s damaging that some of our members these days think the only way to show how much they care about something is to threaten to bring the house down. OK, I believe in fighting for what you believe in and strategizing to get the most you can, but then you need to be part of the solution at the end.
Q: One of the joys about retiring is you get to tell the people what you really think. Do you want to do that?
A: My experience is once you’re retiring, everybody loves you. The decibels go down somewhat when you’re on the way out. I’ve had such nice things said by people from both parties. My heart is warmed by that, and I return the affection.
Last book you read? I have a family friend named Walter Bennett who was a lawyer for his whole career, and then he wrote this interesting novel called “The Last First Kiss.” And “Burning Down the House” by Julian Zelizer is really good.
In politics, can the ends justify the means? Yes, but not always. I used to teach ethics. There was a time in a caucus meeting when I had to make an argument about this, and I didn’t use these words, but I said in Ethics 101, you learn the difference between deontological and consequentialist ethical decisions, and there are times in politics when you make both.
Least popular opinion? That members of Congress should be less self-indulgent and take more account of the way the institution is working.
What are you proud of? Setting up the House Democracy Partnership, the parliament commission I initiated. And one appropriations victory in particular, to conclude a nine-year process of funding the world-class Environmental Protection Agency lab in North Carolina.
What’s next for you? I’m going to go back to North Carolina. I’m certainly not going to take another formal position, but I expect to do a good bit of teaching.
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It was a pleasure to sit down with both Blake and Jim, and I look forward to the months of service to the Fourth District ahead.
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