Richard Burr represented North Carolina in Congress for nearly three decades, spending five terms in the House of Representatives and three terms in Senate. While in the Senate, Burr served as chairman and senior member of the Senate’s Select Committee on Intelligence, and as the ranking member of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions. After retiring from his seat, Burr joined the Harvard Institute of Politics as a visiting fellow in Spring 2023. He sat down with HPR to talk about his reflections on polarization in Congress as well as the impeachment of former President Donald Trump.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Harvard Political Review: You served in Congress for nearly 30 years, spending five terms in the House of Representatives, and three terms in the Senate. I was interested to learn that you actually lost your first race for a House seat in 1992. What did you learn from the experience of losing an election? And what made you decide to run for office again after that and go on to serve a long career?
Richard Burr: Well, what drove me to run the second time was the deal that George H. W. Bush and Tip O’Neill cut on raising taxes. President Bush at the time broke the number one pledge that he ran on. And to me, common sense played no part of the process in Washington about how bills become law and we lacked the trust that you need in your elected officials, so I decided to run the second time. I think the motivating factors to what was different between the second campaign and the first one was that losing is not fun. So there is a competitive nature to it. But, I don’t know too many people who start a business that goes bankrupt, and start another one with the intent of it going bankrupt. I really searched to find out why I was unsuccessful the first time, and what it was I needed to do the second time.
And, for politics, two years is an eternity. In 1992, the landscape was that George Bush didn’t know what a loaf of bread was, or a gallon of gas, and all of a sudden his numbers went from 60% approval to about 38. It wasn’t a great year to be a Republican and run when your president had that. In 1994, it was totally different. It was the first two years of Clinton. So, I can’t tell you whether I won my second run because I was that much smarter, or that much luckier.
HPR: You served for nearly 30 years; that would be under five presidents, six speakers, six majority leaders. You just said two years is an eternity in politics. How has Congress as an institution changed from when you were first elected to now? And is there anything that you would wish to bring back from when you started or that you’re glad to have seen change?
RB: Oh, if I could wave a magic wand, what do I think would be helpful to a functional Congress? Kick the TV cameras out. I think that the politicization of the process became much more emphasized with TV coverage. It drives when people talk, how long people talk — and I’m speaking more toward the Senate than I am toward the House. But this still requires people who are there for the right reasons. And that means that the public has to take a much more active and educational role in the political process.
HPR: Did you feel that pressure to perform for the cameras when you were in the Senate?
RB: No. I think the blessing was that for 22 years, I was a member of the Intelligence Committee. So, I hid behind the curtain of “I shouldn’t be out there because I might say something that breaches the secrecy of what I’m doing.” I just let that carry over to every other issue. When I spoke, it was almost like the E.F. Hutton commercial; people knew I had something to say if I was out there. But I still believe that the longest speech I ever gave was my farewell speech.
HPR: You spent time, as you mentioned, on the Senate Intelligence Committee, and so I’m assuming that you probably spent time handling classified documents and being briefed with classified intelligence. There has been a large amount of controversy recently as classified documents have been found in President Trump’s home in Mar-a-Lago, President Biden’s home in Delaware, and Vice President Pence’s home as well. What should be our takeaway about these classified document problems?
RB: There’s a procedure in place for classified documents. Classified documents never leave a secure SCIF, or sensitive compartmentalized information facility, except when they are accompanied by an individual with a locked bag who is solely responsible for where those documents are at all times. So, if a document found its way into my hands or my house, there’s somebody who was in charge of that document who should have never let me take it. I can’t get into President Trump or Vice President Pence or President Biden or anybody else.
But there’s somebody who didn’t do their job at securing and inventorying documents that they had to have taken there. I made it a personal commitment to myself: I never left the Intelligence Committee with any paper I didn’t take in. And I tried never to take any papers in so I couldn’t be accused of taking something out. By the same token, I strongly suggest to members of the committee that they adopt the same philosophy, and that they do what I do, which is not get in front of the camera on the issues. I failed on that with a lot of the members.
HPR: Switching gears, you appeared last night in John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum to discuss healthcare and life sciences policy, which is a set of topics that you became a leader on during your tenure in the Senate. What made you interested in this specific area of policy? And what do you wish that more Americans understood about it?
RB: Well, let me answer it in reverse if I can. What I wish that Americans would understand is that the development of new drugs, biologics, devices, is a very lengthy process and a very expensive process. Probably one in 100 actually succeed. So there’s a tremendous amount of money lost by individuals, companies, and entrepreneurs that are out there really stretching the limits of what science and technology allows them to do.
Why did I do it? One, North Carolina is one of the largest health care footprints in the country. So that was a convenient field for me to focus on. In hindsight, it would have been much easier for me to have gone to med school than it was to learn healthcare policy in the fashion that I did it because to really understand policy, you have to understand the delivery of medicine, which means that you have to go experience a lot of the things that people do to get their M.D. I can’t tell you the countless hours I’ve spent at a research bench talking to scientists. I can’t tell you the countless hours I spent in an operating room actually being in there for a bypass surgery or a lung removal.
I had to try to figure out what actually happens if you cut back the reimbursement and eliminate one person in the operating room. Would I be comfortable laying on the table with my chest cut open? And what I found was, getting down from three people to two would not be a comfortable feeling for me if I was laying on the table. Experiences like that would make me alter and go back, and I became a defender of some things only because I took the time and made the commitment to go understand the practical realities of what would happen if we did.
HPR: The entire healthcare landscape really changed during your tenure because of reforms such as the Affordable Care Act. What do you wish to see in terms of health care policy in America in the future?
RB: I think our mistake is that we’ve been totally focused on access and not on outcome. Policymakers and the healthcare system itself has to get focused on outcomes. How do we produce a better outcome for an individual who has an illness? How do we produce a different outcome for a healthy American who doesn’t get exercise, over eats, and becomes a patient? These are all things that can be influenced by how we look at the system and where we place the incentive.
But today, we don’t place the incentive on wellness. We’re beginning to do it in Medicare. Annually, a Medicare beneficiary gets one preventative care visit that costs nothing, zero. So you can’t look at it and say that there’s any senior in America that’s disadvantaged with preventative care. It’s now free. And, I think that if we looked at things from the outcome standpoint, the areas that we would fund more heavily are areas that we might not fund as much as we do. But we wouldn’t be so focused on where somebody or how somebody gets covered because outcome would drive us to those things that work the best.
HPR: You were a strong supporter of gun ownership rights during your time in Congress, and you sustained a strong relationship with the NRA. But, in 2022, you were also one of only 10 Republicans in the Senate who voted to support the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which strengthened background checks and closed loopholes regarding gun purchases. What is it about that specific piece of legislation or the time in which it was passed that led you to put your vote behind it? And is there anything we can learn from it when thinking about fostering future bipartisan efforts on gun violence prevention or any of these other deeply polarized issues that we so rarely see movement on?
RB: Well, the first thing you have to realize is that the Senate rules haven’t changed. And the process for getting a bill out of the United States Senate hasn’t changed. It doesn’t matter about the topic. It requires 60 votes. And rarely — only once in my lifetime — has one party held 60 votes in the Senate. So, for a legislator to adopt legislation that they intend to become law, the first thing they’re going to do is reach across the aisle and have a partner on the other side. So, you know, over 20 years, I’ve lost my best partners — Ted Kennedy, Barbara Mikulski: folks who I could count on when people started shooting on both sides at me to defend me on their side so I could take the defense on my side. And, I think that’s because it’s become so divisive.
When I go out and partner with Kyrsten Sinema, Republicans look at me and go, “What do you think you’re doing?” By the same example, when she goes out and she partners with me on something, she gets attacked from the left. This is the first time I can ever remember that there’s an active attack for trying to solve problems. Bipartisanship is the only way to accomplish legislative remedy in the United States Senate. And if that’s what’s going to be the target on both sides of the aisle, then we’ve got to get used to nothing getting done.
HPR: Do you think that there is a way forward while maintaining the current procedural rules of the Senate with a 60 vote filibuster? Or do you think that some sort of institutional change is required if we want to continue to have an effective Congress that can pass legislation?
RB: Well, I’m going to leave it up to the Congress of the future, because I’m not gonna be back in. But I think that if you asked me what would be the single worst thing that the United States Senate could do, it would be to change the rules. The rules are there for a reason, and they’ve passed the test of time. It may be more convenient to change the number. But convenience is not what our founders saw as the problem. Our Founders recognized the challenge: How do you achieve things that a majority of the American people support and that benefit a majority of the American people?
We also always have to remember that behind every issue is a human face, or faces. We don’t focus enough on who’s impacted by what we do. In many cases, a lot of the legislation that comes up is really for political points. And even for the things that people suggest are real policy, if you look at the human face behind it, it’s really not getting impacted by the solution. And that’s a sad thing.
HPR: You made a really difficult vote when you voted for the removal of President Trump, and you were one of seven Senate Republicans to make that choice in the wake of the January 6 insurrection. What went into that decision, and what do you think prevented other Senate Republicans from making that choice?
RB: I’m not proud of the fact that I’ve lived through 75% of all of the impeachments in the history of the United States, either in the House or the Senate. People shouldn’t find what I did a shock. When Bill Clinton was up for articles of impeachment in the House, I voted in favor of two of them and I rejected three of them. I judged it based upon the facts that were presented.
With the first Trump impeachment, the House didn’t make their case. In the second Trump impeachment, I voted to impeach the president for one reason and one reason only: because I know for a fact that the president knew the vice president was there with a limited security detail, with a nuclear football. And yet the president did nothing to send additional security to protect not only the vice president, but also the national security implications that that football might have presented. That’s a breach of his oath of office. That’s an impeachable offense.
I still believe everybody had the right to judge the trial based upon what they saw. That’s why the average person who’s tried for something faces 12 members of the jury who all have to agree. In this case, it’s structured differently and there’s a threshold. The threshold was not met. And I think that people will continue looking at this for decades until the next impeachment. Hopefully there never is another one. But if there is, then the precedent was set. People will look at that and say “Why did they do what they did?” And that’s going to be really, really important to the individuals who have to make that decision.
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