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This transcript has been lightly edited for readability.Daniel Schuman: So, we’re here today with Brian Baird, former member of Congress from 1999 to 2011, and as far as I know, the only clinical psychologist to serve in Congress in modern times.Rep. Brian Baird: Well, actually, Ted Strickland served as well. He was a psychologist as well, but think he had a slightly different degree.Schuman: We’re focusing on member security and the way that members relate to each other. There have been a number of mass attacks on members of Congress in the last handful of years. There was the attack recently at the Hilton Hotel, where, of course, President Trump and his Cabinet were -- but there were also journalists in attendance and many members of Congress. And while the executive branch officials were sort of whisked away, many members of Congress were sort of left to fend for themselves in light of an uncertain environment.And of course, we had the January 6th attack just a handful of years ago, where, again, members of Congress were the subject of a mass attack that presumably could leave significantly different attitudes towards their colleagues or how they felt about the institution.And I’m hoping that you could talk a little bit about how members of Congress view their own safety and how these repeated attacks may have changed the way that members, view and relate to one another.Baird: I’m really glad to have a chance to talk about this. I think it’s a hugely important topic that, I think is worth doing.First of all, is just talk about the security situation. And, sadly, there’s grim news on that front, and every member of Congress needs to understand this, as do their spouses, and families. And it’s not pretty: If someone really wants to kill a member of Congress, it’s not hard to do so. All the security measures that have been proposed -- let’s get more Capitol Police on the Capitol grounds, maybe an individual guard when you’re about your official duties. They may make some difference. Certainly, we need to secure the Capitol and the Congressional Office Buildings. But when you’re going about your daily life as a member of Congress, and as a human being, set aside the member of Congress, you still have to go grocery shopping. You still have to come in and out of your house. If you’re doing, parades or town halls or things like that, you’re in the public, and if a person really wants to hunt you down, they can do it.I don’t say that to be alarmist. But the question is then how do we deal with that? Even just the walk to a vote, if somebody’s hanging out outside the Capitol Grounds and they’re not in that narrow perimeter where you’ve got the magnetometers, just walking up the steps somebody can approach you and shoot you.My experience talking to members of Congress, there is a paradoxical, logical inconsistency. On the one hand, everybody talks about how we have to be more secure, but then they don’t necessarily take the individual precautions or the institutional precautions to deal with that.As you know, one of the things that I firmly believe is we need to take measures to ensure the continuity of representation of members of Congress. The first thing we need to do, not for our individual sakes initially, but for the sake of the representative democracy, is provide mechanisms by which you can replace House members if they die through natural causes, accidents, or assassinations. We’ve done nothing to deal with that since September 11th, which is now almost 25 years ago, and the problems remain the same.Why do I start with that? Because it’s one thing to say somebody just doesn’t like me as a person or as a representative and they want to kill me. That’s a challenge and it’s unpleasant. But it’s another thing to say, “If I kill enough of these guys, I could change the balance of power in the House or Senate.”As I’ve said before, right now you could fit more bullets into the magazine of a single semi-automatic pistol than it would take to change the balance of power in both the House and the Senate. In one pistol, it’d be so easy to do. The first thing I would do is assure representation and secondly, I would reduce the incentive, the political incentive for assassination. If there were a way to replace members of Congress with like-minded temporary replacements who could fill the role until a special election occurred, then you could kill 30 of us and they would be replaced promptly by people who probably vote about the same way, and there’s no political gain, no chaos, no disruption, no breakage of representation.So that’s the first point. The second point though is, okay, if you understand that, why are people not acting? And I think there’s this kind of unconscious, if you will, sense that on the one hand I’m cavalier about it -- “Well, that could happen” -- and then on the other hand, that absolves me from taking responsible measures to correct the situation.You still have to do your job, and your staff have to do their job, and your families have to live with the unpleasantness that you could be harmed or they could be harmed even worse. But that doesn’t mean you do nothing. So, step one is take care of the institutional continuity and then remove the political incentive for harming. Step two then is what are the practical measures that you can take to protect yourself and your family and your staff and the constituents?Really we began to see a dramatic turnaround in threats to members, just the general attitude, back in the early rise of the Tea Party and in the days of the assault weapons ban votes and some other controversies, and Obamacare.We went from having town halls -- I had, by the way, more than 350 town halls when I was in office, I think more than almost anybody I know, and they were usually very informal affairs. We’d meet at a fire station in a rural town or at a library or a high school auditorium or something. Anybody’d show up. There were no magnetometers. There were no crazy crowds. People respected one another. Yes, they sometimes criticized me. It’s their right. I have to honor that right, but there were not massive crowds of people pushing one another to try to get in.Back in that era, believe it or not, there were actually websites created dedicated to telling people how to disrupt town halls. You could log online and search that, and a website would come up that would say, “Get there early. Try to occupy all the spaces. Scatter your supporters around the room. If the member tries to speak, interrupt them. Shout them down. Don’t let there be a rational conversation. Call them liar. Insult...” These were strategic publicized mechanisms for creating a dangerous and threatening environment and disrupting legitimate and essential dialogue between members of Congress and their constituents. It’s only gotten worse.To give you a sense of how significant it was at the time, during the Obamacare, debates and public discussion, the crowds were so large, we actually held one town hall in an outdoor rock amphitheater and we had 3,500 people in attendance. It was totally different, and there were some pretty hostile folks there. So one of the things that has happened now is members of Congress are getting oftentimes plainclothes police officers at their town halls, and they’re getting more security. We actually had town halls in my era of Obamacare where ambulances were parked at the back of the stage in case I got shot. That’s a true story. So, we have to take those kinds of precautions.But somewhere along the line, and this is step three, we’ve got to restore the civility of dialogue and have members of Congress, and the President of the United States and his appointees or designees, stop demonizing people on the other side and stop endorsing hatred. When you have a president of the United States, as we have in the case of Trump, essentially, endorsing people being bullied or beaten up from the podium, when he’s saying things like that, that creates that environment.There’s also a potential hypocrisy here and duplicity that people can say, “Well, if you criticize the president for making those remarks, then you yourself are somehow inciting violence against the president,” that’s duplicitous. I mean, the fact is if you have people who are knowingly and willfully inciting violence through their rhetoric, and condoning violence and you point that out, you are not equal in culpability. So, the first step is to acknowledge the threat, try to reduce the threat through safety mechanisms.By the way, there’s a whole list of things members of Congress can and should do to secure their offices, to make sure that they know who’s coming in, when they’re coming in, that there is an exit strategy. Every member of Congress should do a safety audit with themselves, their staff, and their families. There should be code words that are used if we need to evacuate. There should be designated routes for evacuation. There should be precautions for your family members to take if they see anything coming. There should be ways in which you can contact them if there’s an emergency, et cetera.And every member of Congress should make sure their local law enforcement, at all levels, sheriff, police, state patrol, they all know where the member of Congress lives. They should all have a photo of the member of Congress. I hate to say it, but it’s true, especially members of Congress of color, because there may be a default assumption that the members of Congress are going to be white, or if somebody’s not white, they’re not a member of Congress. They need to really say, “this is who I am. This is what my family looks like. Here’s where we live. If you get a call from 417 North Rogers Street, by God, get there fast. And when you get there, this is what the good guys look like.”There should be safety audits, there should be great contact with your local law enforcement, et cetera, et cetera. I don’t know if that is being done. I’m not hearing of it being done at an organized institutional level, but I think it should be done.I can speak to there has been progress on those lines. There’s more funding available for coordination, between, Congress, and the Capitol Police, and the local law enforcement. Whether it’s sufficient, whether it’s being done properly, we don’t have visibility into that. But there have been a lot more resources put into trying to address at least that particular concern through reimbursing local law enforcement to be incentivized to provide that kind of support. That’s great, and I encourage every member of Congress to reach out proactively to some members of their law enforcement to do just this. Don’t leave it up to the Capitol Police. That’s, that’s a key message, hardening the targets, if you will. I hate to say it that way, but that’s what you have to do.Then there’s the issue which you contacted me with, and that is how do we cope with this risk of assault? The first is acknowledge that it’s there, try to reduce it, but don’t imagine that, that you’re going to be 100% safe.What we found post-September 11th, when I led initiatives to try to help staff and, to some degree, members of Congress cope with the reality of being targets now, and with the massive loss of human life that was unprecedented on civilian targets at the time, we found that one of the essential ingredients was a deep sense of purpose to help people get through this. Why are we doing this? Why are we exposing ourselves to potential risk when there’s a thousand other jobs we could do that are probably less stressful, pay more, and have less risk?It’s a tragedy that public officials at all levels now, not just members of Congress -- school board members, library officials, elections officials, almost all public officers are, both elected and hired, employed -- are now denigrated and criticized and potential targets for not only opprobrium but attacks. That’s been a concerted rhetorical effort and consequence. When people despise their own government and say that their own employees are worthless, lazy, criminal, dishonest, as frankly, the President of the United States did during COVID, implying that medical doctors and nurses were stealing or misappropriating protective equipment, well, that conduct on his part was reprehensible, but it’s also damn dangerous. And it’s destructive to the fabric of the society.So back to the sense of calling, members of Congress ideally should be called to serve. They shouldn’t be there to become famous or to make a lot of money, or to pave the way to their next job as a YouTube influencer or something. They should be there to serve, and, that’s a service with humility, I believe. But it’s also a service that carries with it some risk. Nobody said the job would be easy. It shouldn’t, carry mortal risk, but it is a degree of risk that one faces. So, getting at peace with that, yes, I understand there’s a risk, but I’m willing to take that risk to do my job responsibly.One important element about that is that you not be cowed into either changing your policy judgment out of fear. And, interestingly enough, whether that’s fear of reelection or fear of assassination, at some point you have to say, “What do I think is the right thing for the good of this country, even if it means I get unelected?” It’s funny, I think I’ve talked to members who probably are more afraid of losing an election than they are about losing their lives. But neither should be the governing factor in a democratic republic. You should be able to say, “this is what I believe. Here’s why I believe it. Here’s why I’m voting this way,” and certainly be willing to risk a defeat in an election, but possibly willing to risk even your own life for it if you think it’s that important.Schuman: can I hone in on that for a second? I think a lot of members -- and you would know better than I do -- have the sense of calling. They have the sense of responsibility.Baird: Members don’t pass legislation on their own. There is a collaboration that happens. You often hear people talking about the need for bipartisan collaboration. The January 6th attacks… I call it the Trump insurrection. President Trump incited a mob to go and sack the Capitol. Previously, there had been a crazy person who went and tried to kill Majority Leader Scalise and a number of other Republican members who was also motivated by ideology.Certainly, as I talk to different folks, both members and staffers, they say that something has changed, that the willingness or ability to collaborate across the aisle for members has changed, because they view the other side as not just being the loyal opposition, but some of them as aiding and abetting, efforts to kill them. On one hand in Congress, you have to find ways to work together. On the other hand, you are afraid that some folks are inciting your death.Schuman: Can you talk about how a member’s perspective changes in those circumstances? How do you cope with that in a body that’s supposed to be collegial but clearly is not?Baird: Well, it doesn’t work easily. I’ve talked to so many, current members and former members as well, and their staff, and especially as you were saying, Daniel, post January 6th, things really changed. Since the Civil War, there had never been that kind of an insurrection. Prior to the Civil War there were beatings, there were duels, there were people carrying swords and guns onto the floor. But that hadn’t happened to that magnitude since the Civil War.Post-January 6th, you now had people who condoned, and actually who encouraged the insurrection, who perpetrated the lies upon which the insurrection was based and refused to sanction the president or the would-be assassins who entered the building calling for the execution of the Vice President of the United States and the Speaker of the House, and possibly would’ve done so if they’d have had the opportunity. So now you’re working with people who…
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