Sharing Remarks from Sen. John C. Danforth

Beltway Bulletin published in the Winter 2025 issue of The Federal Lawyer magazine

This year’s Annual Meeting in Kansas City was a terrific event, packed with educational offerings and networking opportunities in a great location. On Friday morning, former Senator John Danforth (MO) offered observations about the state of politics in our country and suggestions about ways we, as lawyers and leaders, can counter the pervasive divisiveness that threatens to tear apart our nation.

We are deeply grateful to the Senator for allowing us to reprint his remarks in the Beltway Bulletin. If you heard them delivered in person, we have no doubt you will be glad to have a print copy. If you were not able to join us in Kansas City, we have a treat for you. —Cissy Jackson and Dan Renberg

KEYNOTE ADDRESS BY JOHN C. DANFORTH
FEDERAL BAR ASSOCIATON ANNUAL MEETING
KANSAS CITY, MISSOURI
SEPTEMBER 6, 2024

Thank you for the honor of addressing the Federal Bar Association. I’m going to start by telling a personal story that may cause you to doubt your wisdom in inviting me.

When I retired from the Senate and rejoined Bryan Cave after decades away, it had changed dramatically from the firm I had left. Now there were a thousand or so lawyers instead of 26. Now, the firm was divided into various practice groups: corporate, tax, trusts and estates and so on.

Not knowing what to do with me, firm leadership placed me in the litigation department where, after a time, a matter came my way. It was in the Eastern District of Missouri, and it involved a single issue, the interpretation of a consent judgment. Firm leadership was delighted. They said this was the perfect case for me. It was simple, and there was a favorable Supreme Court case directly on point. All I had to do was cite the precedent. There was no possible way for me to lose. This would be a good result for the client and a good experience for me.

After I lost, the firm transferred me to the real estate department.

I know that you haven’t invited me because I’m a legal scholar or an accomplished practitioner. I’m neither. I’m an old politician. I spent much of my life in elective politics, eight years as our state’s Attorney General and 18 years in the U.S. Senate. So I’d like to speak as a politician about the current state of politics and about what you and I might do to make things better.

There’s no need to belabor a sorry situation. We see it every day. There’s nothing uplifting about it. Politics is relentlessly negative. The tactic is to energize the angry base of each party by promoting grievance. Americans learn to think of themselves as victims in a world of us against them. For the left, America is divided between oppressors and oppressed. For the right, ordinary citizens are the targets of elite forces in universities, woke corporations and the deep state. For the left and the right feeding resentment and rage is the way to electoral success. And it’s the business model of the media where anger is the means for drawing and keeping an audience. All this makes for extreme polarization. The center no longer exists.

Here’s the basic point I’d like to make. Right from the start, our American challenge has been to hold our fractious people together as an indivisible nation. But now, our politicians and our media seem to be doing everything they can to tear us apart.

I’m going to suggest three approaches you and I should take, three ways in which we can help turn this around, if we apply ourselves to the task.

First, we should aggressively come to the defense of the Constitution, that ingenious structure designed for the purpose of holding America together.

Second, politics is important, but when it becomes all important it is divisive and unworkable. We have blown it out of proportion, and we should put it in its proper place.

Third, we should appeal to the highest values of our people, when so much in our politics and our culture appeals to the lowest.

Let’s consider them in order.

Defense of the Constitution. This is the special obligation of lawyers. When we were admitted to the bar, we took an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States.

Our oath isn’t to a person or a party or a policy. It’s to the Constitution, and that alone.

The operative words are “support” and “defend.” These are action verbs. They call on us to do something: to support the Constitution actively. To defend the Constitution actively. What does that mean?

Well, today, “defend” seems obvious because the Constitution is so obviously under attack. Witness January 6, 2021.

The attack on the peaceful transfer of power was an assault on the Constitution. So was the baseless charge that the election was stolen. There was no evidence to change the result in a single precinct, much less in the election as a whole. We should say so.

To assert that elections are rigged undermines the consent of the governed on which our democracy depends.

Then there’s the broader assault on the rule of law. Here’s a broadside by a Republican senator attacking the administration of justice:

“The Department of Justice has been fully weaponized not just against President Trump but the American people….We cannot allow our country to descend into a banana republic.”

When the constitutional order and the administration of justice are under attack, as they have been since 2020, it’s our duty as lawyers to come to the defense.

Let’s turn now to what it means to support the Constitution. A dictionary definition of support is to “bear all or part of the weight of,” to “hold up,” as to support a structure that would otherwise be unstable or collapse.

In his important new book, American Covenant, Yuval Levin argues that Congress is where the constitutional structure most needs support. He writes, “Reviving Congress in accordance with the framers’ understanding of its purpose must be the single most important goal of any champion of the American constitutional order today.” Levin’s point is that the framers intended Congress to be the place where, through negotiation and compromise, competing interests would hold together. But, says Levin, Congress has become dysfunctional.

In the past, rank and file members of Congress had meaningful roles in making public policy by offering amendments in committee and on the floor of the House or Senate.

Now, congressional leadership drafts legislation, eliminating any significant role for committees and blocking the possibility of amendments.

Absent policy-making roles, members have become little more than media personalities where their most outrageous statements are most likely to draw attention. It is a recipe for demagogy.

With vanishing ability to affect policy and singular focus on self-advancement, members of Congress duck responsibility for controversial issues, for example the pending insolvency of Social Security and Medicare.

How then to restore Congress as the place to negotiate our political divisions? Primary elections now push candidates to ideological extremes, and there are interesting proposals for reform. But reforming primaries would be extremely challenging.

Here’s a simpler approach.

We citizens could become pests. We could attend town halls and get in the faces of members of Congress.

We could insist that they take responsibility for being legislators. We could insist that constant threats to shut down the government and default on the debt don’t serve the nation. We could make the dysfunction of Congress our cause. And in so doing we would be supporting the Constitution.

To support and defend the Constitution, then, should be our first order of business. The second should be to restore politics to its proper place. That is not where it is today.

We know of Thanksgiving dinners that have been ruined, friendships that have been ended over politics. We can’t let that happen. Politics is important, but it isn’t all important, and we can’t let it take over our lives.

When functional, politics isn’t the realm of absolutes. It’s a place of negotiation and compromise.

But from the left and right we hear that politics isn’t a matter of opinion; it’s a battle of good and evil.

It’s Armageddon. This is ridiculous. We need to cut politics down to size.

That process can start with a strong dose of realism. Even with our best intentions, politics often falls short of our hopes. This was a lesson I learned long ago. Trying to combat employment discrimination, I spent months negotiating the Civil Rights Act of 1991. Since then, no one has told me it has made a difference. One columnist claimed that it is counterproductive. I’m proud that I made the effort, but politics isn’t the realm of perfection.

Healthy skepticism would be our gift to the country. Its product would be realism about politics and its limits.

There’s truth to the old adage that the legislative process is sausage making. And here’s the point: the framers designed it that way. It is a system that forces compromise and prevents the dominance of any interest, including the tyranny of the majority. In America, legislating is supposed to be sausage making. And sausage making is worth doing, and worth doing well.

When citizens think of politics in absolute terms, as existential, a battle between good and evil, then two results follow. First, politics becomes intensely disruptive, setting neighbor against neighbor, sibling against sibling. Second, it just doesn’t work. Absolutism leads to stalemate in our government. That is where America is today.

So, our second mission is to be more realistic about the limits of politics and more humble about the righteousness of our positions. Nobody has a monopoly on truth, certainly not politicians, not cable news pundits, and not social media influencers. All of these have combined to turn politics into something it is not—a nonstop battle between good and evil.

Our third mission, and perhaps most important, is to make a direct appeal to the highest values of Americans when so much of politics does just the opposite.

The simple truth is that the real power in America isn’t in some exalted person or in some new governmental policy. It’s right here. We the people are responsible for our country. The buck stops with us. And we can’t delegate that responsibility to someone else.

This is true today as it has been true forever. James Madison, the principal architect of the Constitution said as much. How proud he must have been of his magnificent creation, yet at the Virginia Convention to ratify the Constitution, he acknowledged its limits, and affirmed the responsibility of citizens. He said,

“Is there no virtue among us? If there be not, we are in a wretched situation. No theoretical checks—no form of government can render us secure. To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea.”

“Virtue” was a word used repeatedly by our founders. For them virtue meant more than personal deportment. It meant the commitment of all of us to the public good. Here’s what John Adams said about virtue:

“There must be a positive passion for the public good, the public interest, honor, power and glory, established in the minds of the people, or there can be no republican government.”

The future of America would depend on a positive passion for the public good established in the minds of the people.

After the Supreme Court decided that presidents have broad immunity from criminal prosecution, many claimed that there are now no guardrails against abuse of presidential power.

But until very recently we never thought that fear of going to prison is what keeps presidents within bounds. Nor is fear of removal after impeachment.

The ultimate guardrail against the abuse of official power is fear of the opprobrium of virtuous citizens and resulting electoral consequences. We the people are the guardrail. Ultimate responsibility for America resides in us. We are the custodians of virtue. We set the standards for ourselves and for all who serve in public office. The question before us in the 21st Century is the state of our virtue, our passion as a people for the public good.

The idea of virtue largely disappeared from political discourse after our first four presidents. It reemerged briefly in Kennedy’s inaugural address, then it vanished again. Now politics is the opposite of a call to patriotism. It’s a parade of promises of what government can do for you.

America is badly divided today. But there was a time when it was more so.

It was March 1861. Seven states had already seceded from the Union, and our bloodiest war would break out a month later. At his inaugural, Abraham Lincoln pleaded for the nation to hold together. He famously said, “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies.” Words for then. Words for now. Even at that desperate time, Lincoln was confident that America would hold together when the “mystic chords of memory” would be touched by “the better angels of our nature.”

After long decades in politics, let me share what I think is most important. It’s not politicians or policies. They come and go. Rather, it’s what is in the heart of our people, our virtue or the lack thereof. This is where you come in. Everyone with any kind of public platform has the power to evoke a response from fellow citizens for good or ill. This includes politicians and civic leaders, and, of course, you. By the choices of public leaders like you, we can create a culture that defines the nation. We can evoke ugliness. We have seen this all too recently. Or we can model virtue and evoke the best in us. We can touch our better angels.

Madison, Adams, all of our early presidents spoke of the importance of virtue. Each of us with any public platform can take responsibility for a more virtuous country. Each of us can be a leader in the best possible sense.

In this challenging time, you and I aren’t helpless. We can turn this around if we make the effort.

We can support and defend the Constitution.

We can promote realism about the proper place of politics.

And can touch the better angels of our nature.

This could be, this should be, the mission of all of us. Let’s make it so. Let’s get on with it.

 

Sen. John C. Danforth (R-MO) served in the United States Senate from 1976 to 1995. In 1999, Danforth was appointed Special Counsel to investigate the federal raid on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. In 2001, he was appointed as Special Envoy to Sudan by President George W. Bush. Later, he was appointed U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. An ordained Episcopal priest, Senator Danforth presided over the funerals of President Ronald Reagan and Katharine Graham among others. He is the author of three books: Resurrection (1994), Faith and Politics (2006) and The Relevance of Religion (2015). Danforth was Attorney General for the State of Missouri from 1968-1976. He graduated with honors from Princeton University and then earned a Bachelor of Divinity degree from Yale Divinity School and a Bachelor of Laws degree from Yale Law School.