Sensenbrenner talks GOP after Trump, changes in Congress
Before he retired this month, Republican Jim Sensenbrenner spent 42 years in the United States House of Representatives.
To put that in perspective, the six Republicans now representing Wisconsin in Congress have served less than 23 years combined.
I spoke recently with Sensenbrenner about how politics has changed since he came to Washington, including the staggering events of recent weeks when the U.S. Capitol was stormed and Donald Trump and some of his supporters sought to overturn an election.
Sensenbrenner, a former House Judiciary Committee chair, criticized the effort by fellow Republicans to reject the Electoral College results and called Trump “deeply responsible” for the Capitol riot.
But he criticized Trump’s swift impeachment and argued the Senate lacked the authority to conduct a trial of Trump after his departure from office. He also spoke about his retirement and the state of our political culture. Excerpts are below.
But first a few words about Sensenbrenner, whom I covered in Congress for almost 24 years. He was an unusual politician, and some of his qualities — accessibility, a crusty independent streak, a kind of old-school institutionalism — are more unusual now than they used to be.
He was a hard-core conservative and stalwart Republican who drove many Democrats up the wall but sometimes partnered or sided with them. Examples over the years include the Voting Rights Act and some gun control and civil liberties issues.
He wasn’t shy about ripping important people in his own party. These were among the things that made Sensenbrenner interesting and fun to write about. He had serious policy interests but also relished politics and was steeped in the history of Congress, Wisconsin elections, the GOP and the conservative movement.
In describing his personality, reporters would diplomatically reach for adjectives that didn’t quite capture it, like “brusque” and “abrasive” and “cantankerous.” He was well-known in the Capitol press corps for refusing to talk when buttonholed in the hallways. He didn’t like doing TV. But he was responsive to interview requests, especially from print reporters, especially from Wisconsin.
He was famously fixated on decorum and procedure and took pride in meeting certain thresholds as an elected representative. He hardly missed any votes.
Personally wealthy, he published a net worth statement in the Congressional Record every year that was far more detailed than it needed to be, down to the value of his stamp collection and lake house and pontoon boat and old Ford Tauruses.
He held regular in-person “town hall” meetings in his districts when many lawmakers shunned or abandoned the practice. I covered one in the tiny town of Rubicon at which a single constituent showed up and had the congressman to himself until he ran out of things to ask. Other meetings got very stormy.
Elected in 1979 from the deeply Republican suburbs outside Milwaukee, Sensenbrenner was the second-longest serving member of the House when he left office and the longest-serving member of Congress ever from Wisconsin, narrowly edging out Democrat Dave Obey, who retired in 2011.
The following excerpts are from an interview conducted Jan. 11 by telephone with Sensenbrenner, 77, who was self-isolating in Alexandria, Virginia, with his two dogs after receiving the COVID-19 vaccine and waiting for it to become fully effective.
Question: Where were you when the Capitol was stormed? Were you watching on TV?
Sensenbrenner: I was watching CSpan on TV (but) spent the next several hours alternating between CNN and Fox News to see what would happen. Let me say this was a horrifying event. I think this was an insurrection and there were some people that really wanted to start a coup d’etat.
Q. Having served in Congress for 42 years and having worked in the Capitol for that period of time, what did it feel like to watch this happen?
Sensenbrenner: Well, after working in the Capitol for 42 years, the Capitol is effectively my second home. It felt to me, you know, just like my home was being invaded while I was there to be burglarized. … What we need to do, I think, is to have a 9/11 type commission to figure out how this happened, because there was an intelligence failure. ... If it’s just another committee that the Democrats set up to criticize Trump, this is not going to get to the systemic problems that caused this to happen and caused it to get so out of hand.
Q. How do you view (Trump’s) role and responsibility in all of this?
Sensenbrenner: Oh, I think he was deeply responsible. Earlier in the morning, I watched his speech. … I would say that he was less inflammatory, relatively speaking, than his two sons and (Rudy) Giuliani were, but all of them were way out of bounds.
Q. There are people within the (GOP) who think the party has to somehow put Trump behind it. There are obviously a lot of defenders of the outgoing president within the party. ... Where do you think this goes?
Sensenbrenner: Well, looking forward on this, the best thing that Trump and his family and close supporters like Giuliani can do is look at how (Richard) Nixon was able to rehabilitate himself after he resigned in disgrace.
By the time Nixon passed away about 20 years later, Nixon was not a revered figure. He never would have been a revered figure even if he served out his second term. But he was respected for what he said and what he did later on. … What (this) president did was think that he could gin up enough supporters by appealing to them to get reelected. And there were something like 6 million people more that voted for Trump in 2020 than 2016, but it wasn’t enough. … We’ve got to figure out how to expand this.
This has got to be somewhat of a melding of the populist libertarianism that Trump was able to tap into so well, as well as getting back some of the more traditional Republicans. I guess people say that’s the suburban women, but there are more than that who are traditional Republicans that were turned off by Trump.
Q. Do you think that what happened at the Capitol (Jan. 6) makes that harder in 2022?
Sensenbrenner: Too early to tell on that. A lot depends on whether we get beyond finger-pointing and making some systemic changes, so this never happens again.
Q. What about the broader issues of having a radicalized segment of the electorate that would entertain the idea of trying to overturn an election?
Sensenbrenner: I think they have to be called out as being radicalized whether they’re on the right or on the left. There are radicalized people on the left as well. We’ve heard from some of them last summer. We heard about the ones on the right (on Jan. 6). The thing is that they have to be isolated not only by the American public but by the news media.
Q. What do you say to critics of (Trump) and of the Republican Party who just say this was a “deal with devil,” and this guy was beyond the pale, and the party made its bed with him and now we’re reaping the consequences?
Sensenbrenner: The answer to that is that Trump won the 2016 Republican primaries fair and square. The antiTrump vote was split . ... The quote Republican establishment unquote did not favor Trump in 2016, but they had so many other candidates, most of whom were very well qualified to be president I might add, who split the vote between them.
That was the nomination. But (what about) the criticism that Republicans did too much to enable (Trump) during his presidency — enable his bad behavior?
Sensenbrenner: I don’t think so. During the first two years of his presidency, Paul Ryan was speaker of the House. And Paul certainly didn’t do anything to enable his presidency. What Paul was interested in was passing legislation.
Do you think the election was stolen?
Sensenbrenner: No, I don’t think the election was stolen. But what I can say is there was an awful lot of sloppiness involved and to get this behind American democracy we need, number one, to be looking at where we can tighten up the sloppiness that can be abused without disenfranchising legitimate voters.
Secondly, the important thing is to have uniform standards for the conduct and counting of election results set by state legislatures, so that you don’t have a state election board coming up with guidance and then clerks deciding how to apply that guidance in different manners depending upon what county you’re living in.
Are you going to look back on Trump as just a flawed figure or something worse than that?
Sensenbrenner: He obviously had his flaws, and everybody knew about those flaws before they elected him in 2016. What I can say is that his business plan was to get around the media by getting 88 million Twitter followers. … I give him credit that this was a brilliant business plan.
Now that the election is over, and Trump is leaving, Twitter has decided they’re not going to let anybody do that again. I strongly criticized them because that’s censorship of political thought and the internet was supposed to be a free exchange of ideas . ... The thing that happens when you do this, if you look at history, is it drives the opposition further underground, rather than it being in public, and I think we’re in for bigger trouble if the opposition to what they’re doing is driven further underground.
Very few Senate Republicans voted to overturn the results in Arizona and Pennsylvania, but a majority of House Republicans did. Do you think it was unfortunate that a majority of House Republicans made that vote?
Sensenbrenner: The answer is, yes, I
do. I’ve studied a lot of history in my 77 years. If you look back at the Constitutional Convention … there was a huge debate on how the president should be elected. And the whole thrust of the Constitution was the rejection of the system of parliamentary supremacy (in England). … I don’t think the president should be elected or serve at the pleasure of the Congress. That was rejected back in 1787.
I think it has served our country very, very well. It should be independently elected by the people choosing electors and electors actually choosing the president. So, the thing is that everybody who voted not to accept the Arizona electoral votes ended up basically rejecting the decision on how the president was to be elected made at the time of the (Constitutional) convention.
Recap for me your decision to retire.
Sensenbrenner: I said I was going to stay in Congress as long I was able to do the job (and) as long as I thought I could make a positive contribution not only to Wisconsin but also the nation. When we went into minority, the ability to do that was significantly reduced...
Secondly, I am slowing down. I can tell you the (2019) hip replacement did not work out the way I had hoped it would. I am getting a little more tired, a little less vigorous. I was not physically able to do (community) parades.
Then we got to the point where town meetings were not good discussions of issues but screaming contests where the services of the police were frequently necessary.
I decided I had done this for about 42 years, this was the way to do it and I wanted to do it on my own terms. So, I made the announcement early when there was nobody announced as running against me, so nobody could say they forced me out of office, because there wasn’t anybody that had the standing to do it.
Let’s talk about your big-picture thoughts about the institution (of Congress) and how it has changed.
Sensenbrenner: When I first got there, the committees did an awful lot of work. There were very few bills that were brought (directly) to the floor. Literally since about 2006, and this applies to whichever side is in the majority, the committees do what the leadership tells them to do.
And you have leadership staff drafting bills and deciding when they’re ready for prime time, rather than having elected members of committees who have spent most of their professional careers drafting legislation and doing oversight and, I would submit, know a little bit more about the subjects on both sides. … So, the quality of the output ends up being really diminished . ... So, in terms of individual members of the House … they had much less influence than a 25-year-old staff person who happened to work in the majority leader’s office.
What about the cultural change in the institution?
Sensenbrenner: Oh, the cultural change in the institution also was pretty severe. When I got there, you’d go out to dinner and a lot of the dinners were bipartisan in nature ... people would want to socialize with one another.
I will give you an example. In 2010, Cheryl (his wife of 43 years who passed away in 2020) got to be a close friend with (Democratic Congressman) Dennis Kucinich. The Sensenbrenners and the Kuciniches went out to dinner at a Thai restaurant (on Capitol Hill). There were three freshmen Republicans that ended up walking in and seeing us eating together and were appalled.
The next day on the House floor, a couple of them came up to me and said, ‘Why were you eating with that Communist?’ And I said because me my wife and I enjoy their company.’ Then they walked away.
That is a cultural change.
Sensenbrenner: And a bad one!
How does that extend more broadly to how the parties interact with each other institutionally?
Sensenbrenner: They don’t. That’s the issue.
Why do you think people have so much trouble today separating their personal and working relationships with their political differences?
Sensenbrenner: Well, let me say this is really sad and really crippling for our democratic system of free debate. I guess I would answer (that) political philosophy has risen to, or above, belief in religion. Those who believe in religion do it on pure faith and the people who are strongly on both sides of political philosophy think that that overrides everything else in their life. (To them), if you are not for this or against that, you’re either on the take or too stupid to talk about it.