EP. 35 — CONVERSATIONS: REP. PETER MEIJER

(Transcripts may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print.)

Weston Wamp: I'm Weston Wamp, and this is “Swamp Stories,” presented by Issue One. 

Rep. Peter Meijer: “I firmly believe the Republicans would be in the majority in the Senate if it hadn't been for the voter suppression efforts of the stop the steal movement. There is no better way to make sure that your voters don't vote than to tell them that their vote doesn't matter. That is just profoundly stupid and suicidal and self destructive.”

Rep. Peter Meijer: “In my view, anything we can do to reduce institutional accelerationism will be a positive, because every single incentive is leading to maximizing the pursuit of power in ways that I think are bad for the country and realistically even bad for the party that's doing it. But if you have a zero sum mentality of our politics and of our country, you will maximize. Even if you stand to lose, if the other side loses more, that's a net gain for you.” 

Rep. Peter Meijer: “If the system is incapable of being changed from within, then the change comes from without, and that's where you get political violence, that's where you get threats and coercion as a way of doing business. It is a very dark path that we are going down right now.”

Weston Wamp: In his first year as a member of Congress, U.S. Army veteran Peter Meijer has not shied away from positions that put him in a slim minority of the Republican party. Among them, voting to impeach President Donald Trump and voting to establish a January 6 Commission to investigate the attacks on the U.S. Capitol. This has made him one of the most noteworthy freshmen members of Congress in recent memory, and one who turned 33 years old just days after being sworn in early last year.

Near the end of his freshmen term in Congress, Meijer spoke with me about why he ran in the first place, what he’s learned while being a member of Congress, and how we can move forward together in an era of vicious partisanship.

This is Episode 35: A conversation with Michigan Congressman Peter Meijer

Weston Wamp: Congressman, thanks for joining us for a Conversations episode of “Swamp Stories.” You've been one of the more consequential freshmen members of Congress that I can remember. And so I'm honored that you join us.

Rep. Peter Meijer: Thank you for having me on. It's a pleasure to be here.

Weston Wamp: Well, let's start here. You've lived an interesting life. You and I are about the same age. You served in the Army. You come from a prominent family in your region of the country. You did work for an NGO. Why did you decide to enter politics?

Rep. Peter Meijer: I spent about three years between Iraq and Afghanistan and I also spent time testifying and working to advocate for veteran education. And so I came at politics from a policy standpoint and very much appreciating that what the government does and what the government doesn't do that lives hang in the balance, and that we frankly need to have folks in office who understand that reality. And I'm on the younger side of the House, I'm 33, and a lot of the decisions and a lot of the actions taking place in D.C seem to be optimizing short term, self-interest at the expense of long term governance.

And as somebody who hopes to be in this country and on this earth for perhaps another half century, I want to make sure that we're not mortgaging our future. But the combination of making sure that folks appreciate the consequences of government policies because they lived it, and they've seen both the intended, the unintended, and the unappreciated consequences, and also making sure that what we have going, we make it as good as we can and make it as sustainable in the long term as humanly possible, despite mounting political incentives to do anything but.

Weston Wamp: When I was in my mid, late twenties, I nearly got elected to Congress myself. And so I've got a bit of a unique perspective on how dysfunctional Washington seems to me because I'm now a father of four and frankly, don't regret that I lost and that my life is in Tennessee. Can you talk about what surprised you in terms of having the opportunity to serve in Congress, just how broken is it from the outside? Some of my friends who serve in Congress seem discouraged as often as they're encouraged about what you can get done as a solitary member of Congress these days.

Rep. Peter Meijer: I think it's bleak. There were plenty of good people out here. And frankly, folks who retain their goodness despite institutional and cultural incentives to abandon it, the path of least resistance is the path that breeds the politics that everybody collectively is frustrated by and hates. I retain a sense of optimism. If I sound defeated right now, that's mostly because of the head cold I'm still going through than anything else, but it is a lot easier to do the wrong thing. It is a lot easier to go on cable news and to throw bombs than it is to sit and do the unsexy work of oversight or to really dive deep in the legislation.

And the reality is that the voters right now tend to reward the bomb throwers rather than rewarding the serious legislators. It's a lot easier to sit there and say, this isn't good enough than to have to argue for why you voted the way that you did, or that the bill that you put forward was good, but not perfect, but you were not going to let the perfect the end be the good. It's a lot easier to criticize than it is to defend. It's a lot easier to shirk responsibility than to live up to it.

So that is a very much a bipartisan infliction that is very much, has a generational component. And I think, the people matter, the process matters and the incentives matter. And right now, there's not a lot of optimism in any of those categories, but I view that as a challenge to overcome. It's very tempting to search for a silver bullet. And there are folks who think you reform campaign finance, everything else will fix itself. You reform ballot access, everything else will fix itself.

Realistically, it's going to take all of it and far more. And there are going to be some things that are going to be driven by policy changes, some things driven by institutional reform. And frankly, some things that will just require a long term commitment to improving our culture and improving how we view and conceptualize what the government does and what we expect of it.

Weston Wamp: There is no silver bullet, but we've talked to a couple of members on the Republican side, on this podcast, who've detailed in their first term or first two terms in Congress, process areas that need improvement. I think about Congressman Timmons from South Carolina, who is the vice chair of the Select Committee on Modernization. He dove headlong as a former state senator into addressing the schedule. Congressman Gallagher from Wisconsin has a lot of thoughts from money in politics, to, he and I have spoken about his belief that the committee structure should change. While there are no silver bullets, are there some process changes that you'd love to see that you may even think changes that could be pursued across party lines?

Rep. Peter Meijer: Yes. I think one of the fundamental things that I've been working on. If I think 40,000 foot, what are some of the holistic problems with our government? It's that number one, power has flowed from more accountable bodies to less accountable bodies. From the legislature to the executive, and then even within the executive to the administrative state. It makes it incredibly challenging to make rules or laws responsive and makes it really easy for bad things to persist.

So you have that component, then you also have just the broader trend of things flowing from city responsibility to state responsibility, state responsibility to federal responsibility, the centralization, federalization, and then executive-zation of everything. So right now we have a bill that we dropped in the fall, the National Security Reforms and Accountability Act that when it comes to war powers, when it comes to arms export, when it comes to emergency powers, seeks to correct the imbalance we have today, where the executive kind of does whatever they want, bring a lot of that back into the legislative purview as the Founders intended, not to tie a president's hands, but to say the president will need to respond in an emergency context, but once it shifts from that emergency moment, Congress should ratify it.

We have separation of powers, we have a system of checks and balances for a reason. That's one area when it comes to how the body itself functions, though, I know some who will bemoan the lack of regular order and want return to regular order. One of the challenges is we haven't had regular order for so long that what we are right now becomes the regular order. The lack of floor amendments, even the weakening of committee chairs, respective to party leadership.

I know enough to be slightly dangerous there, but I don't have experience in the counterfactual and being in the minority, I even have less insight to how the body as a whole governs. I focus on reforming, you know, who is running, what do they need to do, how can you incentivize good people to go forward and how do you frankly make it harder for folks who are cancerous to the body politic to survive rather than right now, they are thriving off of continuing to mutate the cells that we depend on.

Weston Wamp: Let's discuss the continuing issue on our side of the aisle, the Republican side of the aisle, that persisting in circles — I live in Tennessee, certainly in Southeast Tennessee, in North Georgia — there is a persistence of the belief that there was great fraud in the 2020 election. Despite for example, the Virginia elections statewide going the direction of Republicans. How do we make headway amongst our conservative friends in regaining their trust in this very core institution in a democratic society?

Rep. Peter Meijer: It's a very large challenge because it's not as simple as there was a murkiness that some viewed as being leading to one outcome. There were people making a lot of money and making political names for themselves off of encouraging and repeating this, and frankly doing it in an incredibly destructive way to the Republican party. I firmly believe the Republicans would be in the majority in the Senate if it hadn't been for the voter suppression efforts of the stop the steal movement. There is no better way to make sure that your voters don't vote than to tell them that their vote doesn't matter. That is just profoundly stupid and suicidal and self destructive.

Now, the thing that also really frustrates me is how insane that argument some of those proponents get when they start talking about Italian military satellites, when they start talking about bamboo ballots from China, when they're going off the deep end “here's my algorithmic, complicated, but also completely lacking any semblance of grounding in reality or how computers work” explanation for why Dominion voting machines tossed this election and switched votes and all this other stuff.

When they go off on that end, it's really easy for them, the Democrats to just say, “all of your concerns are unfounded and crazy.” When the reality is there are a lot of pandemic related modifications that were said to be temporary changes that are now presumed to be the way that we should operate. And so on both sides, there is a massive amount of misinformation. Now, the misinformation is crazier and zanier on the Republican side.

And it's more, how can we cast our opponents in the most devious light possible. That really makes it hard to have honest discussions about what should our expectations be about ballot drop boxes? What should our expectations be in terms of safeguards and checks when it comes to absentee voting? How should we be approaching keeping voter rolls updated? We had a situation in Michigan where the secretary of state used state funding in order to send out absentee ballot applications. These absentee ballot applications are something you could have printed off on the internet.

There was no actual security thing there. But because they used a massively out-of-date and a massively dirty voter roll, if I'm sitting at home and all of a sudden I get a letterhead from the secretary state, not just to me, not just to my spouse, not just to maybe adult children who live in the house, but addressed to people who had moved many years prior, addressed to people who had died, addressed to maybe adult children who are now out of the house and had lived out of state, when that is what you were seeing at home and it's a very small line to draw or a very small confusion between an absentee ballot application and an absentee ballot.

And it's coming from the secretary of state, and you say, the secretary of state doesn't even know this person's dead. The secretary of state doesn't even know these people don't live here. That also massively undermines confidence. I don't think that changed the outcome of the election one iota. But that becomes the smoke that some can use to allege fire. And so the whole conversation around elections is just so toxic that we need to actually be talking from a shared set of facts and also a shared set of understandings of what is the responsibility at the federal level. And what is the responsibility at the state level.

10th Amendment. Founders put it in there for a reason. But again, this federalization of every issue makes this perception that if 2016 was the “Flight 93 election,” as Michael Anton said, the Democrats are also saying voting rights is our “Flight 93 moment,” if we don't have a federal set of standards, despite the fact that this is supposed to be a state-level issue, then we're going to lose this country forever. It's creating a sense of catastrophizing that then gets completely removed from what the actual facts of the matter are and takes it from a realm of policy discussions where we can agree. We can disagree. We can probably find some areas of common ground, but it takes it from that to this side is evil. They're trying to destroy the country. We're trying to save it.

Weston Wamp: So coming out of your first year in Congress of all first years to serve in Congress is a pretty destabilized moment in conservatism. I think the last several years were disorienting for those of us who've been around conservative policy for a long time. With that in mind, how do you, when you're back in Michigan, how do you talk to fellow Republicans? I'm sure they have some election reform questions, but how do you talk to them about the future of conservatism and the future of the party?

Rep. Peter Meijer: I'd say it's up for us to decide. I think one of the more dangerous trends is the complete unmooring from any sense of underlying ideology the belief that might makes right, that maybe pursuing a strategy of limited government is the loser path and the weak path instead we should try to seize the reigns of government control and wield it against the people we perceive as wielding it against us today. And honestly I think that's a game that you lose just by playing. The centralization and federalization and growth of the federal government is, I believe, a threat to the survival of our constitutional order, because of the ways in which it has destroyed the feeling writ large, that we can redress our grievances within the system, that the system has and holds ways of changing and reforming.

Because if the system is incapable of being changed from within, then the change comes from without, and that's where you get political violence, that's where you get threats and coercion as a way of doing business. It is a very dark path that we are going down right now. So I'm deeply concerned on that. And again there's a lot of political projection going on. There's a lot of people on either side that accuse the other side of doing what they are doing exactly. There's some weird psychological imbalance there, but we need to have those honest conversations. And when I talk to conservatives, I say limited government, economic freedom, individual liberty, viewing the individual as sort of the core basis in that the foundational institution of our country is not the government.

It's the family, like everything else should be geared towards supporting that and what is going to support it best. A government that does only those things that no other entity can, a government that is held to a high standard. And in a belief that prosperity comes not from what the government gives you, but from a vibrant economic system that the government only provides guardrails for, but lets flourish in the most efficient way possible that ensures a degree of upward social mobility and that doesn't pick winners and losers.

Weston Wamp: Despite the obviously heated rhetoric and the perception of division in Congress. We've detailed as recently as our last episode on “Swamp Stories,” examples of Republicans and Democrats coming to know each other and working on common ground issues, or just problems that either have a regional or other connection to the passions of the members. You have traveled the world with your Democratic colleagues. You've demonstrated yourself as, in my opinion, as a person who is ideologically conservative and pragmatically willing to work across the aisle. Talk about your desire — I suppose at this point, quite infamously you went to Afghanistan with a Democratic colleague — what led you and a Democrat to go on such a what seemed to be dangerous, but significant endeavor?

Rep. Peter Meijer: To put it bluntly, the incompetence and lies of the Biden administration. I fundamentally do not root for a party to fail especially when that party is in a governing position and I try very hard, mostly quietly, mostly behind the scenes, in private conversations to say “how can I help fix this problem?” The border is a great example. I would vastly prefer that that be depoliticized and we actually fix the problem. Because both parties love to keep problems alive because they can stand more to benefit from attacking the other side than taking credit for the solutions. So that's not my reflex, that's not my instinct. I don't have an appetite for political stunts, but when the issue is a desire to move past something, to forget about it, to focus on domestic priorities, rather than addressing large issues, such as Afghanistan, wanting to just leave it behind in the rear view, I'm not going to let that get left behind, especially when that has a real true human cost and real enduring geostrategic cost.

Weston Wamp: Do you think that there's an opportunity among our fellow conservatives to partner across party lines in order to address some of the confusion that emanated from January 6th? The Electoral Count Act, we did an entire episode on the need to update it. It seems like there's a pretty bulletproof case from either a conservative or a liberal standpoint, that we would be better served to clarify what that antiquated law means. Do you think an opportunity exists on a significant but acute issue like that to work across party lines for positive reform?

Rep. Peter Meijer: I do. And this was one of the arguments that I was making to my colleagues internally, is we are basically setting the precedent for the Democrats down the line if they have a majority in the House and in the Senate, to throw out states that — whatever we are alleging in terms of voter fraud, they're going to make complete the same flip side of the coin argument on voter suppression. And so we are going to do a fantastic job of not only, and I was saying this, we are going to lose today. Get that right, setting aside the merit, setting aside the constitutional impact. Politically, this is dumb. This is not going to work, but it will be, we're going to lose today. And, and we are laying the groundwork for us to lose in the future.

Now it's important to note that on January, or ahead of January 6th, what was being argued internally, by and large, was not that there was voter fraud. What was being argued is that there were non-legislative modifications to electoral processes at the state level, and that violated the “Time, Place and Manner” clause of the Constitution. And even though the Electoral Count Act of 1887 specifically, and in addition to more contemporaneous court rulings like in Wisconsin, that precluded objections because of nonlegislative modifications, that that Electoral Count Act had never been challenged or was poorly written, but had never been constitutionally challenged, and thus, constitutionally upheld. So there was murkiness around its constitutionality. Now that is not what the people outside on January 6th were saying, that's not what they thought, but that was the sort of fig leaf argument internally.

And I think it's important to offer that clarification. In my view, anything we can do to reduce institutional accelerationism will be a positive, because every single incentive is leading to maximizing the pursuit of power in ways that I think are bad for the country and realistically even bad for the party that's doing it. But if you have a zero sum mentality of our politics and of our country, you will maximize. And even if you stand to lose, if the other side loses more, that's a net gain for you. And I think, again, that's a destructive mentality, but it's an easy one to grasp onto.

Weston Wamp: Congressman Meijer, thanks for your time for your unusual brand of leadership in today's current political environment. But most of all, thanks for your time today.

Rep. Peter Meijer: Thank you Weston, it was a pleasure.

Weston Wamp: On the next episode of “Swamp Stories,” we will revisit one of the swampiest bipartisan tradition in Washington: the use and abuse of leadership PACs as corporate-backed slush funds. New research has exposed even more about how leadership PACs money is being used in our nation’s capital.

Weston Wamp: Thanks for listening to “Swamp Stories,” presented by Issue One, the country's leading political reform organization that unites Republicans, Democrats, and independents to fix our broken political system. Please subscribe to the podcast and share it with your friends. Even better, rate and review it on iTunes to help us reach more listeners. You can find out more at swampstories.org. I'm your host Weston Wamp. A special thank you to executive producer, Ethan Rome, senior producer Evan Ottenfeld, producer Sydney Richards, and editor Parker from ParkerPodcasting.com. “Swamp Stories” was recorded in Tennessee, edited in Texas and can be found wherever you listen to podcasts.

HOW TO LISTEN