Roy Blunt served two terms as Missouri’s U.S. Senator from 2011-2023. During his tenure, Blunt chaired the Senate Republican Policy Committee and the Senate Rules Committee. He also spent 14 years in the House of Representatives representing Missouri’s 7th Congressional District, where he was elected to Republican Leadership as Majority Whip. This semester, Blunt joined the Harvard IOP as a visiting fellow, where he led a study group for students and appeared in the John F. Kennedy Jr. forum to discuss his work on mental health policy. Blunt joined the HPR to discuss his collaborative approach to politics, his accomplishments in improving mental healthcare access, and his perspective on proposed changes to Senate procedure.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Harvard Political Review: You come from a very politically engaged family. Your father, Leroy, served in the Missouri state legislature. Your son, Matt, served a term as governor of your home state. And your other son, Andy, managed both your first successful Senate run and his brother’s gubernatorial and secretary of state races. What do you think has drawn your family so much to politics? Do you think there’s any common trait that is shared across each of you that’s led to so much political success?
Roy Blunt: I was actually an elected official before my dad. My dad actually was elected to the legislature from one of the six legislative districts in the county that I was the county official for when I was the county clerk and the chief election authority. He would say if he was here — and he’s gone now — that I was the first Blunt elected in politics. But, I would say, my house growing up — my mother’s father had been a county official in a neighboring county. Politics was always sort of part of the table talk of our house. And then, certainly, when my kids were growing up, it would have been discussed because I was either a county official, or, when they were relatively young, I became the first Republican to be elected secretary of state in Missouri in 52 years. And they were always part of that and understood and benefited from that, I think.
HPR: Has there been anything that you’ve tried to teach them or have you tried to instill any sort of ethos about what it means to be in office or serve in and around politics?
RB: I don’t know that I’ve tried to do that. I always hoped that by example they gained a sense that public service was important, and that policy was more important than politics. And that you shouldn’t be focused on politics as the reason to have a job, but as the reason to get something done. And I think they’re all pretty reflective of that.
HPR: You were regarded by your colleagues in the Senate as a pragmatic dealmaker. You were part of that coalition at the end of your tenure that was responsible for the passage of many of the largest pieces of President Biden’s agenda, including the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which was the first major piece of gun safety legislation passed through the Senate in over 30 years. Today, commitment to bipartisanship in Congress appears to be increasingly in decline. Your former colleague Mitt Romney just announced that he is retiring from the Senate largely due to frustration with the way the institution works in its current form. What do you think is at the root of this rise in polarization within Congress?
RB: I think a lot of it is that voters are unsatisfied with the results of the government that they have in place. And candidates detect that in the campaign and often make pledges in the campaign that don’t produce real results. They say things like, “If you elect me, I’ll never vote for anything except exactly what I’m telling you I’m for.” Almost nobody in life gets exactly what they want. And certainly in democracy, almost by definition, you don’t get exactly what you want.
I think the best way to do lasting things in our system, and particularly in the Senate, is create policies that have bipartisan support. One of the things I said in my last speech on the Senate floor is that, to get things done with your colleagues on the other side, you don’t need to agree with them on everything; you just need to agree with them on one thing. And when you get that one thing done together, I guarantee that both you and your staff begin to look for the second thing you could agree on.
And actually, there was one Senate when there were 48 Democrats and 52 Republicans, and my staff came to me one day, and said “We’re just checking to see how many of these 48 Democrats you have been the principal sponsor of a piece of legislation with.” Not just a co-sponsor, but the principal sponsor. And the answer was 44. Now, maybe not in just that Senate, but in my Senate career, of the 48 people there, I had been the principal sponsor of a piece of legislation with 44 of them, most of which became part of a law. Maybe they didn’t pass a specific bill, but the two of us would work and we’d get that included in some bigger bill, and do it in a bipartisan way.
When the parties change, those are the laws that they don’t immediately go back to redo. They look at them and say “No, that was something that Senator Sherrod Brown and Senator Roy Blunt were for. It has to be pretty agreeable, or the two of them wouldn’t have agreed on it.” And so those things, I think, last in our system better. And I hope we see more of that kind of legislating go on.
HPR: You did a lot of work in the Senate on mental health. You’re speaking about it in the forum tonight. What is the significance of this issue to you? What do you wish that more Americans understood about it?
RB: Well, I think the key here with mental health is to begin to approach mental health like we approach all other health. Part of that is changing the public attitude, and I think we’re seeing attitudes change on this. And part of it is being sure that people who go into the mental health profession have a way that they can make a living doing that, which means that you need to honor the importance of mental healthcare as part of the overall health picture.
The real key to getting done what we got done on mental health was, Senator Debbie Stabenow, a Democrat from Michigan, and me, a Republican from Missouri, worked together for over 10 years to get to where we are today. And we’re in a substantially different place than we were 10 years ago.
HPR: Going forward, what progress on this issue would you hope to see?
RB: One of the things we did in October of 2013 is we went to the floor together to go through the last bill that President Kennedy signed, which was the Community Mental Health Act. And the Community Mental Health Act was designed to do two things. One was to close the asylum-like institutions that weren’t serving anybody very well. And two is to replace them with high-quality, 24/7, community-based behavioral health centers. As a result of the legislation we introduced that year, we created a 10 state pilot program. 23 states applied to be part of the pilot, 19 went through the whole process, and 10 were selected. States as big as New York and as small as Oklahoma participated, so we had a variety of states.
Six years later, all of the states that participated in the pilot believed that they were saving more money on other health and they were spending on mental health. When you’re going to your doctor appointment, if you’re going to dialysis, if you’re taking your medicine for your other health issues, if you’re eating better, sleeping better, feeling better about yourself, your other health issues are so much more easily dealt with. So one of the things we did with our pilot was try to keep track of the other physical health concerns that people had, while also dealing with their mental health concerns. And I think there’s no state that doesn’t believe that dealing with their residents’ mental health has positively impacted the cost of dealing with their other health issues. And about one in five adult Americans has a behavioral health issue that’s diagnosable, and almost always treatable. That doesn’t mean one in four Americans gets either diagnosed or treated. This is a big part of our population. And my guess is that the juvenile and young adult population is every bit as big in terms of the percentage of individuals with issues.
So when the Public Safety Act came along that you mentioned, after the Uvalde tragedy, Senator Stabenow and I decided almost immediately that mental health is part of the problem and we’re not dealing with it adequately. We didn’t want it to descend into a bunch of pilot projects when we had six years of experience and knew about the decline in emergency room visits by people with mental health problems when they received treatment, and knew how we could change how law enforcement dealt with those problems. So we were able to put in that package a way that the other 40 states could join the program by having 10 states every two years also have an experience with what we initially called “excellence in mental health” that later became known as Certified Community Behavioral Health Centers — CCBHCs. And so HHS is about to announce the next 10 states that will start in 2024. Then, they’ll give planning grants to however many states want to be part of that effort that starts in 2026. So only 60 years after President Kennedy signed that bill, we have a plan.
So democracy is sometimes not rapid, particularly under our constitutional system. But I feel like we made some real progress there. And I also think societally because of COVID and isolation and so many problems that high school and college students have, and families see, there’s a much greater willingness to talk about this as a health issue.
And let me say this, too: when we did this, I said, and I believe Senator Stabenow said this almost as many times as I did, “Even though we’re doing this as part of a public safety bill, you shouldn’t feel that people who have a mental health problem are somehow dangerous.” People with behavioral health issues are much more likely to be victims of a crime than perpetrators of a crime. But it happened to be a moment when we could make the most of the pilot we had in place. We need to continue to emphasize that you shouldn’t think that because the program is part of the public safety bill that people with behavioral health issues are unsafe. But it’s clearly true that on tragic occasions, people can spiral to a different place because we’ve got a mental health system that isn’t providing the basic services that are necessary to keep them safe and others around them.
HPR: I interviewed former Senator Richard Burr, R-N.C., when he was in the same position that you are: shortly retired after a long career in the Senate. And I asked him: “If there was one thing you could change about the institution, what would that be?” He answered that he would take the cameras out of the Senate. For you, I have the same question. After spending 12 years in the Senate, you’ve probably become fairly familiar with both the advantages of it as a body as well as its detractions. Is there anything that you would recommend changing about the institution?
RB: Well, first of all, I worked a lot with Senator Burr and he makes an interesting point. If you could undo something like the cameras, I think that probably would be helpful. But that’s not happening. There’s lots you can say about today’s media and how broad, and in many ways, how shallow it is. But I don’t have a great sense that there’s any way to turn that around.
I think one thing I wouldn’t change are the rules of the Senate. I think the fact that the rules of the Senate in almost all instances require you to find somebody on the other side to successfully pass a piece of legislation is a good thing. There have never been 60 popularly elected Republican senators, for instance. So never, if Republicans were in control, did you have enough senators that just the Republicans by themselves could get something done. And there have almost never been, there’s seldom been, more than 60 Democrat senators.
So I actually think while the filibuster rule is decried a lot, it is generally a good rule. It is not a good rule for confirming people, and that rule is not used for that purpose anymore. But for legislating, a rule that requires you to go out and find somebody from the other side to work with is really an important thing and it allows for a level of stability, as I mentioned earlier, that you wouldn’t have without that rule.
I chaired the committee that was responsible for the daily operation of the Senate. And the Senate is a Senate of talented people. One time, I spent some time trying to figure out how my 99 colleagues got there. And with a couple of exceptions, you actually could figure out what it was about each person, besides just good luck and timing, that allowed them to rise through a competitive political system to the job that most people see as near the very top of that system. And you could see that some people just had extraordinary personal skills, others were able to explain difficult things and make them understandable. Other people were just great legislators and could go home and explain when doing the job was actually more important than how angry you could be.
HPR: What do you think was your skill?
RB: Probably being able to come to conclusions and understanding that you didn’t have to have a perfect product to have had a big step in the right direction. Somebody once said, “Legislating is not really about the best possible bill. Legislating is about the best bill possible.” And there’s a difference between the best possible bill and the best bill possible.
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