Igor Birman is Chief of Staff for Congressman Tom McClintock of California. The Washington Hillsdale Internship Program brought Mr. Birman to campus to speak about his experiences growing up in the Soviet Union.
How are things on the hill right now?
Volatile. Very volatile. You saw that the speaker has submitted his resignation, and that portends some unpredictable times ahead.
Is the feeling in Washington that Rep. Kevin McCarthy will be the next Speaker of the House?
You can never make predictions in politics — it’s so volatile. Today, that appears to be the likeliest outcome. Much of it remains to be seen. Political alliances shift fairly rapidly. I think McCarthy becomes the next speaker. I think he knows how to forge relationships better than Speaker Boehner, but we’ll see. Politics is the art of the unpredictable.
The roots of Boehner’s downfall were in the lack of trust that developed between him and a number of members of his own conference. McCarthy has been, from what I’ve seen of him, more adept at developing trust even in disagreements. And in a leadership position, that trust is everything.
How do you think that trust dynamic will affect the 2016 Republican primary?
I don’t need to tell you that the outsiders in the Republican primary are far in the lead. The last time I saw, the outsiders had a combined total of 54 or 55 percent. They get a clear majority of the electorate. The people outside of Washington want their liberty back. There has not been an effort to listen. One of the most important services a statesman can render is to listen — not always agree — but listen and absorb. You’re a servant. You serve. When the people whom you serve lose the perception that the servant is listening, a lot of bad things happen and things go downhill really quick, and that’s what we’re seeing.
What was it like growing up in Soviet Moscow?
We hear now of people who have lost their doctors or who have lost their health care, or who have lost insurance plans, or lost jobs as a result of intrusive, overbearing government. But go further down that road and it gets very bad very quickly. Basic goods and services were impossible to find for the ordinary person. Lines were everywhere for basic things like bread, toilet paper, basic staples of life.
But imagine all of the major decisions in your life being controlled by government: where you go to school, what you study, where you work, what you can read, with whom you can meet. Those were all controlled by government. You had no say on where you worked — you reported after graduation to a certain place in a certain city. And that decision was already made for you. You could go where the government was sending you or you could go to prison. You didn’t have another option.
That’s in the past: the Soviet Union is no more. But the scary thing is looking my parents in the eye now, and trying to explain that the forces at work in this country, many of which are espousing the same policies that we got to know very well in the Soviet Union? That’s tough. Because they lead down the same road. There is only one destination there, and it’s complete and utter misery.
Many students at Hillsdale aspire to live in Washington and work on Capitol Hill. When you’re hiring an intern or new staff, what are you looking for?
Interns and staffers come in all shapes and sizes, and with their own knowledge base. Ultimately, they come to Capitol Hill to learn. And Hillsdale interns learn all of the basics of legislating, and they learn the jargon, and they learn how to tell a Joint Resolution from a Motion to Recommit. But the remarkable thing is they teach the rest of us something far more important than the jargon and the mechanics of legislating. They teach us what the founding principles of America are all about.
