Event details

Now that the 2022 Midterm elections are (mostly) behind us, let’s have a bipartisan conversation about civil discourse: Why are we so polarized as a nation? How did we get here? Why don’t people on either side of the aisle seem to know how to disagree without being “disagreeable”? And what does all of this mean for the future of American politics and democracy? Join us to discuss!

A bi-partisan dialogue between Congressman Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL) and Congressman Glenn Thompson (R-PA)

Lunch will be served. Registration is required and PU ID must be shown at the door.

This is a closed event, open only to Princeton University students, faculty and staff.

Congressman Raja Krishnamoorthi

Congressman Raja Krishnamoorthi represents the 8th District of Illinois, which includes Chicago’s west and northwest suburbs. He serves on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis, the Committee on Oversight and Reform and as Chairman of its Subcommittee on Economic and Consumer Policy, Vice-Chair of the LGBTQ+ Equality Caucus, Co-Chair of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus Immigration Task Force, and as an Assistant Whip for the Democratic caucus.

He also is the founder and Chairman of both the bipartisan Congressional Caucus to End the Youth Vaping Epidemic and the bipartisan Solar Caucus.

Raja previously served in Illinois state government on the board of the Illinois Housing Development Authority, as a Special Assistant Attorney General in the office’s anti-corruption unit, and as Deputy State Treasurer, before becoming president of small technology businesses in the Chicago area. He earned a bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from Princeton University, and received his Juris Doctor from Harvard Law School.

Congressman Glenn 'GT' Thompson

Congressman Glenn 'GT' Thompson represents Pennsylvania’s Fifteenth District in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Prior to being elected to Pennsylvania’s geographically largest congressional district, GT spent 28 years as a therapist, rehabilitation services manager, and a licensed nursing home administrator. Through his professional experiences, GT has touched the lives of thousands of individuals facing life-altering conditions. As a result, he has learned firsthand the importance of access to quality healthcare and has become a strong advocate for increased access, affordability, quality of care, and patient choice.

GT is also a former member of the Bald Eagle Area School Board, past vice-chair of the Private Industry Council of the Central Corridor, and a former Workforce Investment Board member. Because of these experiences, he was appointed to the House Committee on Education & Workforce in 2009. Rep. Thompson is also serving in his fifth term as Co-Chairman of the bipartisan Congressional Career and Technical Education Caucus. In the 115th Congress, Thompson introduced the Career and Technical Education for the 21st Century Act which passed the House and Senate unanimously and was signed into law.

As Republican Leader of the Agriculture Committee and a senior member of the Education & Labor Committee, GT is in a unique position to bring his expertise and knowledge to bear on the issues facing rural businesses, communities, and families, in order to improve the lives of the citizens of the Fifteenth District.

GT has been the No. 1 speaker on the House Floor for the past five years. He views this as a responsibility to be a strong voice for the citizens of the Fifteenth District and an opportunity to influence the Washington legislative agenda.

Susan Marquis, moderator

Susan Marquis is the Charles and Marie Robertson Visiting Professor at Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs. She teaches and writes on new approaches to public policy and policy analysis with the intent of affecting change in our communities through the combined efforts of the government, nonprofit, philanthropic, and private sectors. Marquis’s work has had unusual breadth to include influential books on the Coalition of Immokalee Workers and the Fair Food Program as new models for agricultural labor and social justice movements and on rebuilding U.S. Special Operations Forces.

Prior to joining the graduate school and RAND, Marquis served as corporate vice president at LMI (Logistics Management Institute), a nonprofit consulting firm supporting the federal government, leading one of three business divisions, consulting to the federal government in the areas of acquisition and grants, resource and financial management, technology assessment/modeling and simulation; enterprise architecture and IT analysis, and custom system and application development. Before entering the nonprofit private sector, Marquis served at the highest levels of the U.S. Navy and in senior leadership positions in the Office of the Secretary of Defense’s Program Analysis and Evaluation Directorate for fifteen years, including Assistant Deputy Chief of Naval Operations and acting Deputy Chief of Naval Operations, the first civilian to serve in this 3-star admiral role.

Marquis earned her Ph.D. and Master of Public Policy and International Affairs from Princeton University, School of Public and International Affairs (formerly Woodrow Wilson School) and her BA in History from Rutgers College, Rutgers University.

Charles Cameron, moderator

Charles Cameron is jointly appointed in the Department of Politics and the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs. He specializes in the analysis of political institutions, particularly courts and law, the American presidency, and legislatures.

The author of numerous articles in leading journals of political science, he is also the author of Veto Bargaining: Presidents and the Politics of Negative Power (Cambridge UP 2000) which won the American Political Science Association's Fenno Prize, for best book in legislative studies, and William Riker Award, as best book in political economy.

A recipient of multiple grants from the National Science Foundation, he has been a Research Fellow at the Brookings Institution, a National Fellow at the Hoover Institution, a Visiting Scholar at Princeton's Center for the Study of Democratic Politics, and has a recurrent visiting affiliation as Professor at New York University School of Law.

Before joining the faculty of Princeton, he taught for 15 years at Columbia University. He holds the M.P.A. and Ph.D. (Public Affairs) from Princeton University.