Congress debates Artificial Intelligence

 

19th century Thomas Nast cartoon

Congress has been holding a lot of committee hearings on AI technology and thanks to my spring term posting in DC for the past five years I’ve been able to sit in on a few of them, including a House hearing earlier this month on AI’s “impact on workers and employers.” 

It's a complicated issue.  Yet all the Republicans on the committee seemed to agree with each other about the likely impact on workers and what Congress should do about it. Ditto for the Democrats.  

As with all the hearings on AI that I’ve watched, Democrats’ statements and questions were driven by fear of harms while Republicans view it as a potential source of economic benefits for everyone.

Democratic committee members and their one witness are worried that artificial intelligence will lead to catastrophic job loss (“20% unemployment”) and give employers tools to more efficiently control and exploit their employees: to steal wages, for example, and to gather and sell personal data. Even worse, “AI billionaires” are buying influence and undermining democracy with massive political spending. Democrats support policies at both the state and federal level that limit the power of employers and empower employees by, for example, making union recruitment easier. They criticized Republicans for assuming AI will solve problems with the health care industry instead of addressing those problems directly.

Republicans and their three witnesses worry about America falling behind China in AI-tech leadership and want Congress to assist AI development rather than regulate and restrict it. They disparaged state regulations for creating a complex regulatory landscape that complicates compliance and raises costs, especially for small businesses operating across state lines. They want federal policies aimed at developing physical and human infrastructure (data centers, worker training) that will boost development. Republicans think AI will boost productivity, liberate workers from drudgery, raise wages and solve a labor shortage in health care and that regulation would hinder that progress. They cited the history and theory of economics to argue that it will create more jobs than it kills. 

If I looked more closely at the views of various Dems and Reps, I'm sure I could find some areas of agreement.  Hearings seem to be used for the parties to signal their differences and to create viral moments for the C-Span cameras to be used in the next election. 

But lawmakers' comments at such hearings reflect a fundamentally different view of the relationship between corporations and people, the few and the many, employers and employees, labor and capital that runs through the history of the American two-party system.

The ranking Democrat on the committee, Ilhan Omar, echoed Democratic assumptions of a conflict of interest between the classes going back to Jefferson and Jackson when she concluded her opening statement:

At the end of the day, AI is a tool. Whether this tool will benefit corporations and their wealthy executives or the working class and the middle class is a policy choice.

Republicans echoed Hamilton and Lincoln and Thomas Nast when he depicted a unity of interests between capital and labor. Sean Wilenz summed up the class theory of the conservative Whig Party in the 1830s:

It is moneyed capital which makes business grow and thrive, gives employment to labor, and opens to it avenues to success in life …. The blow aimed at the moneyed capitalist, strikes over the head of the laborer, and is sure to hurt the latter more than the former.

This distinction between the two major parties has persisted across many upheavals and the death and rebirth of two conservative parties.  MAGA populism, though, seems to be threatening the unity of the conservatives on AI and other issues.

According to a Pew poll in March, Republican voters fear AI’s potential harms more than they are excited about its potential benefits by 50 to 10—in lock step with Democrats and Independence.

That sentiment does not jive with the Congressional Republicans' pro-market faith in the unity of interest between business and labor and economists’ faith in the benevolent effects of new technologies. A hallmark of Trump’s populist appeal has always been his willingness to challenge elite experts’ assumptions.

That skepticism about “Economics 101” and congressional Republican’s opposition to regulation is articulated by Oren Cass, the most credible anti-orthodox economist of the MAGA movement. Whether or not AI technologies “work out well for workers, for communities, for labor versus capital,” he said in a podcast interview, will “depend upon the conditions into which you introduce them. Industrial technology of the 19th century “was a disaster for workers” until Congress enacted employment laws like banning child labor.

Likewise, he says, whether AI “accrues to the benefit of workers or not” will depend on government policies and

whether we insist on preserving power for workers… If we get those conditions right, then I think AI will be very beneficial. …. But if we continue on the path that we've been on, which says, well, just cut costs as fast as you can and outsource what you can, and profits will go up, and then we wave our hands and say somehow that will end up being good for everybody, that undoubtedly will not be good for everyone.

 

For a deeper dive: 

Video of the hearing

Republican recap

Omar’s opening remarks 

Oren Cass interview, "The World Unpacked" podcast, Feb. 6, 2026.  

There's a lot more to worry about regarding AI than the impact on workers.  Here's a list complied by this year’s recipient of the Kennedy/Trump Center’s Mark Twain Prize for American Humor.

Polling on Americans’ feelings about AI.

In Bob Woodward, Fear: Trump in the White House (2018), 134-138, Trump is shown to defy the conclusions of "99.9999 percent of the world's economists" on the benefits of free trade among nations.