Rep. Brian Baird

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, t