it is my distinct honor here to introduce my colleague yuval levin. i'm ramesh ponnuru, by the way. you've all is the kind of person about whom people in my position usually say he needs no introduction. but that then raises an awkward

question about why i'm here. so i will introduce him. he is the director of social, cultural and constitutional studies here at aei, where he also holds the beth ann ravenel currie chair in public policy. the founder and editor of national affairs. he is also a senior editor at the new atlantis, a contributing editor at national review and a contributing opinion writer at the new york times. in his role as director of social, cultural and constitutional studies. i suppose i should point out he is, in some sense my boss. so i guess he will be reviewing my performance as i review his today, which is about as good an example of democratic citizenship as as we can find. we're here to discuss evolves new book and if in if i may say so i think his best book yet american covenant how the constitution unified our nation and could again it is.

it is a book that is, i should say, epistemic. modest but politically ambitious. it proposes that the cure for many of our modern discontents in the united states can be found by recovered the wisdom of our existing constitution. it could be said to elaborate on the constitution and theory of itself. and among the things that this book reminds us of is that the unity that we speak of and e pluribus unum is not a once and done accomplishment, but a constant achievement that needs to be renewed. it is pretty common for conservatives to suggest that we have forgotten some of the genius of our constitution. but it is at this point almost

countercultural in some precincts of the right, no less than of the left, to suggest that the genius of our constitution has not yet been exhausted, that is the bold proposal of this book. and i hope you'll join me in giving you all a warm round of applause as he elaborates on it. thank you very much, ramesh. i appreciate that enormously. and i think in my capacity as some kind of unofficial editor position and ah, you're my boss. so one way or another, there will be a report. it's really great to be here with you, ramesh. and really, i mean, what an amazing room of friends to talk about this book with. it's it's it's staggering to me. and i should say i'm particularly excited for the opportunity to say a few words about the book here at home.

i would say at aei with all of you, for one thing, this is a book about the constitution. and so it's a book about law and politics and policy. it's about political culture and institutional design and all of the things that we love to do here at aei, or at least in my little corner of aei. but more than that, speaking with all of you in particular about the book and doing it here, let's me say a little more personally than i normally might a bit about how i came to write this book. and i want to do that in two brief ways. and then to pull out just a couple of themes from the book for you. and then ramesh and i can chat, which is really what i'm here for, to begin with really. on one kind of personal note, i for me, this book is really a natural extension of work that i've been doing for a decade and more about the roots and the character of political division in america.

i wrote a book in 2012 about the sources of the left right divide, and then in 2016 about what you might call the up down divide, the the the ways in which the fracturing, the fragmentation of american life has opened a chasm between elites and the broader public. i wrote a book in 2020 about the breakdown of our institutions and of our trust in them. and as i say that, i do notice that all these problems have gotten worse over that time. so i should probably stop writing these books. but the path of these books for me has been a kind of path from diagnosis toward prescription, from thinking about how things have come apart to thinking at least some about how they might be brought back together. and this new book for me is a kind of natural next step on that path. it's about what it would mean to be a more unified society. now and how that might actually be brought about, at least in our political life, which is, of course, only part of our life together. and it also draws on an argument

that was central to the second of those books that i mentioned, a book called the fractured republic from 2016 that argued in part that we have moved in our public life in america from a long period that began in the middle of the 20th century, in which something like liberalization was the moving force of our politics, cultural liberalization for the left, economic for the right, in which the two parties wanted to, both claim the term freedom for themselves moves into a new phase where what people feel they lack is not just a kind of individual liberation, but a sense of belonging. what we hunger for, what a successful political movement would have to offer now is not just freedom, but also solidarity. and left and right in our time are both groping for ways of presenting their priorities in terms of solidary. it's going very poorly so far. it's looked like nationalism. it's looked like identity politics, which both, i think, are ways of trying to advance right or left ideas under the

banner of solidarity. we're going to need to do better than that, but a lot of our institutions and practices and priorities in the coming years are going to have to find ways to articulate the case for themselves, in part in terms of solidarity. and i think this is also true of the constitution. we're used to a case for it in terms of freedom and of individual rights. and that case is true. but we've lost sight of the case for it in terms of solidarity, of forming a more perfect union, which, after all, is the first kind of case that it makes for itself. i think we need to reacquaint ourselves with that case, and that's part of what this book tries to do. it is a case for the constitution in terms of solidarity. but for me, this case for the american system, in terms of holding us together, runs deeper than that to. and that's the second kind of personal path to this book that i would highlight for you. i am an immigrant to the united states. i was born in israel. my family moved here when i was eight.

so i mostly grew up here. but i'm a naturalized citizen. i became an american at the age of 19. in the federal building in newark, new jersey, in 1996, it was a big naturalization ceremony. lots of people from lots of places. and at the end of it, there, retired federal judge, as i remember him, he was ancient, but i was 19. so maybe he was like 40. he got up to speak and i thought he was going to talk about, you know, lincoln and the founders. and he didn't do anything like that. he gave a very short talk and he said, from today on, you have to think about america in the first person plural. that was the phrase that he used. and i'm quite sure that i was not the only new citizen there who did not know what that meant. and it was very glad that it wasn't on the english test that we just took. but he explained it. he said, from now on, we have to say we and us when we talk about america, not them. and they and that was it. that was all he said. and i remember being disappointed with what he said. but here i am, more than a

quarter century later now telling you about it, because in fact, it was profound. it was exactly what we needed to hear and what we still need to hear, not just we immigrants, but we americans. we have to work at finding ways to understand our country, not in terms of the day of those terrible people who are going to ruin everything if they win the next election. but in terms of we, all of us who in some ways share a future in common as americans, that's not a case for being nice. it's not a case for a truce or even for civility. you make a truce with enemies. citizens are not enemies. our options are not war or truce. we are meant to argue with each other precisely because we do share a future in common. we are arguing about that future and what it ought to be. and the stakes are high. exactly. because we are a we we is actually a very important word in the american political tradition. it's the first word of that amazing second sentence of the declaration of independence. we hold these truths to be

self-evident. it's the first word of the constitution. we, the people of the united states. and that's not a coincidence. both of those documents are expressed in the first person plural, because they are both examples of a people taking ownership of its common fate as a nation, acting together politically, the declaration expresses a common commitment to a set of ideals that then underlie a decision, an act of separation taken in common. the constitution builds on that premise, embraces those principles, but it does something that in practical terms, may be even more complicated. it establishes a political framework for a society that generally agrees about those fundamental principles, but doesn't agree about much else, doesn't even agree about exactly what those principles mean as a practical matter, in a lot of situations that disagrees about a lot all the time, the constitution is exactly about how to make that we a reality. as a practical matter, in the face of division and in a sense,

that is what this book is about. it's about how the constitution can function as a framework for unity and for cohesion in a divided time. we are obviously short of unity and cohesion now in america, and the notion that the constitution could help might seem strange. at first, americans are very divided and polarized, and among other things, that's made us frustrated with our system of government, because that system forces us constantly to deal with people who disagree with us. so too many americans are persuaded that our constitu ation is just not suited to our contemporary circumstances, that it's a relic of a past age, or that it's undemocratic, that it makes it too difficult to adapt to changing times so that in this divided era it can only make our problems worse. this book argues that that is roughly the opposite of the truth. the constitution is not the problem we face. it is much more like the solution. it was intended precisely to address the problem that we

have. the challenge of how a divided society can hang together and govern itself. it was designed with an exceptionally sophisticated grasp of the nature of political division and diversity, and it aims to create common ground in our society. it's there in part to unify us. the book lays out what that means by first helping you see what the constitution actually is and what is characteristic kinds of modes of operation look like, how it shapes the public, and then by working through the purposes and history of its various institutions, federalism and the congress, the presidency, the courts also the extra constitutional institution of the party system it considers all of those in light of the constitution's prioritizing of national unity. and finally, in its last chapter, it tries to think about what unity actually means in light of all of that. now, i'm not going to march you through all of that here, and we are here for a conversation. but let me instead offer you

five quick propositions that i think emerge from considering the constitution in this particular peculiar or light propositions that are some of the pillars of the argument of the book, and all of which are now contested, or maybe just unfamiliar. the first proposition is really about the nature of unity itself in a free and diverse society, it emerges from what seems to be a kind of contradiction in the thinking of james madison, in particular. madison is the figure among the framers who i think thought most about division and cohesion and faction and unity. he values unity enormously, and he thinks it's an essential purpose of the constitution. and he wasn't alone in that forming a more or more perfect union is, as i said, the first stated purpose of the constitution, the first third or so of the federalist papers are all about the need for union. and yet madison also thinks that unanimity what we would think of as just agreement is impossible in a free society. on any subject of real

significance, he says it very bluntly. in federalist ten, he says, quote, as long as the reason of man continues fallible and he's at liberty to exercise that different opinions will be formed, period. so unity is not only possible, but essential. and yet a free society is always going to be the scene of intense disagreements. so then what does unity mean in that kind of circumstance? this is the first proposition i want to put to you. the constitution is rooted in the premise that in a free and therefore diverse society, unity does not mean thinking alike. unity means acting together, thinking and acting are different alike and together are different. and unity means acting together. this distinct notion of unity is really essential to understanding our constitution because it's an idea that invites the question to which the constitution is ultimately an answer. i say unity means acting together, not thinking alike, and that forces us to ask, how is that possible? how can we act together when we don't think alike?

that, i think, is the foremost question to which the constitution is an answer. all of its modes of action, every one of the institutions it creates are intended among their other purposes. to answer that question, a lot of what is mysterious and frustrating to many americans now. but our system is a function of its being an answer to that question, of it's being designed to enable people who don't fully agree to. nonetheless act together and how does it do that again and again in its various institutional forms, in especially in some of those that we now find most frustrating, the constitution offers ways of compelling the constitution and negotiation of forcing differing factions into common action, into engagement with each other, into bargaining and deal making. the common action is not always cordial. it's contentious, it's confrontational. it requires dealing with people. we disagree with, which can be slow and unpleasant.

but it is directed to finding mutually acceptable accommodations exactly by recognizing that we do disagree. yet do belong together. that is not simply a matter of counting heads. some contemporary critics of the constitution argue that factional divisions should just be resolved by simple majority votes, and they dismiss our system's bizarre, complex arrangement of overlapping institutions as undemocratic as pointless. but the constitution is a lot more sophisticated than these critics are. it's much more sensitive than they are to the dangers of social division. it accepts the premise that only majority rule can legitimate public action, but it also embodies the countervailing insight which is unavoidable to anybody familiar with the history of democracy and the history of the united states, that majorities can sometimes act oppressively to. and it recognizes that narrow majority is in particular are

often just ephemeral artifacts of the election systems that created them. they don't tell us something real about society, so it demands that popular consensus, as be demonstrated by multiple durable will reasonably broad majorities that present themselves in institutions that are elected by different constituencies in different ways and that points to the second proposition that i put to you in our system meaningful policy victory requires broad coalitions, not narrow majorities. now, you would think that would be obvious, but if you actually look at our politics for 5 minutes today, you'd see that it's not obvious at all. in fact, everybody seems to have forgotten it. building coalitions through negotiation and competition is now taken to be a betrayal. a betrayal of party, a failure of nerve. politicians promise to fight for their voters as they should, but too many politician and voters have forgotten what it means to fight in our system. what it means to fight is to

bargain effectively, and so to gain advantage by building a broad coalition that advances your priorities. politicians now behave as though fighting means refusing to negotiate, but in fact, that's what losing looks like. refusing to negotiate means giving up the only power you have, because what you win when you win an election in the american system is a seat at the negotiating table. to refuse the seat is to refuse your will. it is to lose. the fact that we've forgotten that is a big part of why our practice of constitutionalism is now so out of whack and a big part of why our politics feels so broken and divided. that problem is particularly evident in congress, which is the first and foremost institution of our system. exactly, because it's the primary venue for bargaining and for accommodation at the federal level. congress is where the fundamental work of acting together when we don't think alike is supposed to happen. that's why it's particularly disturbing to find in congress the attitude that negotiating

with the other side is a betrayal or a failure. it's actually the job description and that attitude has really seeped into a lot of how we now think about fixing congress, too. there is a lot of agreement that something is wrong with congress. it's not hard to find people who think that. and there's even a kind of bipartisan community of congressional reformers in washington. phil warlick and kevin koester and i are often the token conservatives in a lot of these conversations. but beneath what seems like agreement that the beginnings of those conversations, agreement that congress is dysfunction, there's actually a very profound disagreement about what function it is failing to perform. what is congress not doing? most people would answer. i think that it's not passing the legislation that they think is essential. it's not acting on entitlement reform or climate change or whatever you take to be the crucial challenge of the moment. that is the common view. but i think that it's a mistaken view of what's wrong with the institution. it seems to me that what congress is failing to do is not so much advance my policy

agenda, but enable cross partizan accommodation. what it's failing to do is enable us to act together when we don't think alike. and that difference over diagnosis actually has some enormous implications for prescribing remedies. people who are frustrated with congress's failure to move legislation rather in with the failure to advance some idea of cohesion, tend to call for things like eliminating supermajority requirements like the senate filibuster or for further empower ing and centralizing power in the leaders in both houses. they have in mind something more like parliamentary government as a model of what it is that we're missing. but that kind of model, i think, is not ultimately likely to lead to durable legislation in the american system. and more important, it would undermine the capacity of our politics to engage in common work toward reconcilable goals. reforms should point in the opposite direction. things like empower in committees and intraparty factions, not the leadership.

reinforcing the supermajority requirements that are really the only reason that there's any cross-party isn't in work at all in congress. now. so that's the third proposition i'd give you. reforms of congress should make cross partizan bargaining more likely. rather than making it less necessary, which is how they often work now. that kind of approach to the problems with our institutions of government asking what's the purpose of the institution? and so what is it that it's now failing to do? could also inform how we think about the modern presidency, because i think we're almost as confused about the presidency as about congress, like our sense of congress's purpose or understanding of the executive is dominated by a kind of progressive prioritization of policy action over the madisonian prioritization of political order and social cohesion. in fact, we think about the presidency now in very legislative terms. we think it's a representative institution and that its purpose is to advance the policy agenda of the party that won the last election. but the presidency is a unitary

office. it can't be representative of a diverse society of 300 million people. and it's an administrate of office. certainly the president is intended to have a role in driving the agenda of our politics and putting some questions on the table, setting some priorities. but the kind of bargaining and accommodation that is supposed to move policy can't really happen within the office of the president. that means that the president can't advance unity by assertive policy action. the distinct role the president has in advancing national cohesion, along with his other important roles in our system. his particular role in advancing unity has to do not so much with energetic policy advocacy, but with what alexander hamilton called steady administration. contemporary presidents because they value their ability to drive policy action, essentially claim to do the work of the legislators when legislators won't do it. they've dramatically, under emphasize steady administration. when every president starts his term with undo ing everything

that his predecessor did and then spends the rest of his term doing everything that his successor will undo. we're left in a place where the kind of steadiness that is necessary to the work of the executive is no part of the job. and the effect of that is not just been bad for administration, but also for national cohesion. it dramatically raises the stakes of our elections and the temperature of our politics, because it means that key questions don't get resolved by bargaining and coalition building, but by sharp turns, by hard stops. everything depends on who the president is. and so my first proposition to the fourth implication of looking at the constitution through the lens of national unity is that reforms of the executive should prioritize a steady administration, not assertive policymaking. finally, when it comes to the third branch to the courts, i don't think an agenda of reform is exactly the way to think about what's needed. the courts obviously have a crucial part to play in advancing unity, too, but it may

not quite be the part that we imagine. it's not rooted in their ability to resolve disputes. courts do resolve disputes. that's what they do. but they're intended to resolve disputes over what the law is, not what it should be. and so they're not the right venue for mediating among competing visions of the public good in america. our great public disputes need to be resolved through the work of the legislature above all, and the most valuable service that the courts provide to the cause of national unity is in their policing of the rules and boundaries of constitutionalism and the restricting of the power of majorities and of public officials to pursue various kinds of end runs around the structure of our system. the courts have actually been improving on this front. i think, and unlike the elected branches, they're close there now to serving their constitutional purpose than they were a generation ago. they do need, i think, more of a focus on constitutional structure rather than the policing of personal rights. but the transformation of the courts in this century has been an extraordinary thing to see.

so when it comes to the courts, the final proposition that i would offer you is a function of that transformation. it is that the lesson of conservative success in the courts is that we should be fighting for the constitution, not against it. conservatives and constitutionalists had every reason to give up on the judiciary in the second half of the 20th century. but rather than give up on it, they set about renewing its commitment to its proper purpose through a project that began as intellectual work, much of it done here at aei, and then evolved into institution work at the federalist society and elsewhere, supported by political action that enabled a genuine transformation of the judiciary. it was a kind of labor of love, love of the constitution, love of the country. and that's exactly how we should think about the constitutional challenges that we face now. we are, with regard to congress in particular, roughly where the right was with regard to the courts in the mid 1970s, the idea that we could reform

congress to do its job seems hopelessly naive right now, but it is not more naive than the notion that antonin scalia and robert bork and lauren silverman had when they were scholars 50 years ago, that we could have originalist judges dominating the judiciary. strategic naivete is actually crucial to successful reform work. you have to be a little bit naive about what you love the most. you're not a cold eyed realist about your spouse or your friends, and you should be just a little naive about our country, too, and about its prospects. not so naive as to be optimistic. don't do that, but just naive enough to be hopeful. and so to fight for our constitution and not against it. there are a lot of people now, including some on the right, who are ready to give up on the constitution or to dismiss it as inadequate to a society that is as divided as ours. but i think they are exactly wrong. the constitution was intended exactly to address the problem we have now. the challenge of governing ourselves despite deep

divisions. and in a way that might heal those divisions just a little, might bring us a little closer together and help us understand ourselves better as one society engaged in common work despite a diversity of beliefs and desires and interests that is not going away helping the constitution do that requires understanding how it was meant to do that and transforming that understanding into an agenda for reform and for action. that's what i've tried to offer in this book. it's also what a lot of you do every day. and so thank you for that. and thank you for being here. all right. thank you for that talk. we are going to have a whole conversation here and then we're going to open it up for questions from you and from our remote audience, which i believe is going to be submitting questions under the hashtag a i american covenant.

so get your questions ready. i want to start by talking about they and them. yeah. instead of we and us. and that is talking about sort of comparative constitutionalism, the there's, there's so much praise for our constitution in this book that it raises the question for me, are other constitutions as just inferior or the or is ours just better suited for us? yeah, it's a great question. i think that there's there's a little bit of both. the united states, you know, our system in a sense is so effective that it allows us to compare ourselves with democracies that have much simpler problems than we do. so you find political scientists saying, you know, the belgian system is more representative norwegian system is more democratic. the fact is the united states is not like belgium or norway. the united states is like brazil and mexico and india. it is a mass vast, insanely huge

and diverse democracy. and yet it works about as well as the european systems. and that is because our system is so well suited to our situation. i do think it's distinctly well suited to our situation. i'm not suggesting that the belgians should adopt our system. i don't know. they seem to be doing fine, but i do think that we should not adopt their system because their system is not nearly as well adapted to dealing with the complexity of a mass vast democracy like this. the core difference is that the parliamentary systems really do empower narrow majorities. if you have a majority coalition, you get all the power until you lose the coalition. so the mandate means the government is yours. the united states does not work that way. it does not empower narrow majorities. it tells those narrow majorities you have to grow if you want to do anything that endures, that

that is very frustrating to narrow majorities every recent president has found himself in some meeting thinking, why the hell am i talking to these people? i just won the election and the constitution answers well. so today the system just works that way. and unless you have a very large majority and i think the democrats learned in the obama years that even having a full ambassador proof majority does not actually exempt you from this challenge. you don't just get to do whatever you want majority power is the source of legitimacy. it is also the source of very great trouble and danger. and our system is especially alert to that. second problem. and so i think that it is particularly well suited to our situation as a result of that. you know, i'd recommend it to others, too. i think it's i think it takes account of human nature and of some of the challenges of political life in ways that are probably objectively superior to the parliamentary systems.

but it's not superior in every way. it is in some ways less representative and my advice to friends abroad is a little bit like edmund burke's advice to the french make the most of your tradition and let us do the same for god sake. so you dealt a glancing blow at people on the right who you suggest consider our constitution to be inadequate today. but i wonder if it isn't truer to say that they think that is it is sort of lost beyond hope of recovery, that it's a great constitution. but we now have i mean, you yourself in your book document all the ways in which we have a kind of wilsonian spirit inhabiting the shell of a madisonian system. and and they don't think of themselves, i think, as anti-constitutional. so much as post constitutional. so why are they wrong? why should they not give up hope on the constitution? is a dead letter?

well, i'd say a few things. i think, first of all, any time conservatives find ourselves saying that we're post something, we should we should just stop. we don't. i don't think that that the fundamental political questions are different from one time to another. i really don't. i think the basic durable questions, how do we create a world worthy of our children are always the questions we have to ask. and that the answers to those questions more or less look alike all the time. there are ways to improve. there are ways that we fall back to. but the core political questions do not change fundamentally. secondly, i think that there every american generation would have had the temptation to say, well, yes, but now in our time, things are really bad. these people are really awful and they've really broken things and if the generation that lived in the 1860s didn't see that, and the generation that lived in the 1960s didn't say that, i

don't think we have a very good excuse as the generation living in the 2020s to say that that kind of a view that this is so broken that we don't have to try anymore is a form of escapism. it's an excuse for not trying anymore. the work is hard and the work of preservation and conservation in a in a forward looking country like this of preserving our capacity to renew ourselves and therefore to make progress, is hard work. and it would be very hard work now to do what what i'm suggesting and what we do here at a but the fact that it's hard is not an excuse for not doing it and there is no excuse for not doing it because the alternative to sustaining the system is not that we get to win and we just don't have to deal with those other people anymore. if you look around the country, i don't think that's what really would happen and i would say the same thing to people on the left. if you eliminate the protections for minority rights in our system, you will discover that

progressive law professors and traditionalist catholics are not a majority. you may love them, but they are not a majority, and they will not control the future. they will find themselves in very grave trouble as we all would, so that doesn't mean they're wrong. i think some of them are very wrong, but it doesn't mean that it just means that all of us should understand ourselves as belong sometimes to minorities, and sometimes to majorities. and therefore we should. a system that empowers majorities in a way that is also protective of minorities. i think we have such a system and i think it's worth fighting for, even though it's very hard. the book, i would say, is deep conservative, but not insistently. so it operates on conservative premises about human nature, which are the same really as those of the founders. it quotes the federalist papers more than most non-conservative books that i think you come across more references to burke

than to rawls in it. but if you are the sort of conservative who who is interested in policy victories in a smaller government. yes. and a smaller federal government in particular. what's in this vision for you? well, i think that if we understand the system in the way that i've described it here, and then that i describe it in the book, we do end up with a system in which the role for the national government is smaller and more constrained and more focused. it's not this is not a libertarian book and it's not a book about how to spend less. i think that would be nice, but i don't think that at the moment the highest priority for conservatives ought to be thinking about the size of government. in that sense, we are in a moment when the basic form of our government, the basic character of our politics, is the table in a way that should worry us. and that means that we have to be making the argument for the basics and remind people why

their inheritance, not a burning pile of garbage, but an extraordinary prize. the fact that we get to live in this country, that we did not create and that we get to make the most of the kinds of freedoms and possibilities and institutions that we have is something we should begin by being grateful for. and i do think that part of what is required us in doing this responsibly is thinking about the role of government in a responsible way. but that's what i would do within a working system that's what i would do in a congress that is functioning. i think in a funny way, the kinds of debates that we think of traditionally as policy debates, debates about how to reform medicare or how to or how to think about the defense budget. those debates are not happening in the right way at this point. they're not happening the right way because our political culture is broken and we have to think about why that is to and

maybe first before we can even get to a place where we're having a constructive about how to restrain the size of government or think about the role of government. so i think traditional policy debates matter enormously. i know where i stand in those, but this is a book about infrastructure. it's a book about how to get to the place where we're even having that debate in a way that could turn out well. i suggest this is a book about infrastructure should not be a big part of your. fair enough but you know better than the one of the suggestions that you make in the book is for an expansion of the house. yes. and i wanted you to briefly sketch your case for how that would improve things. but then also explain why you think an existing house member or an existing house majority might actually be interested in doing such a thing. this is a this is a counterintuitive idea, and in some respects, i think most of us, when we look at the house, we don't really think i wish

there were more of these people, but it is first of all, i, i think of it as a form of constitutional maintenance. the house was intended to grow after every census so that it remains somewhat connected to the growth of the population. it also did grow after every sentence, after every census, until the until the 1920 census and it would make sense for it to continue to grow by the formula that was used in the 19th century. i think that would allow our national legislature to work better. but i also think that it's a way into a set of other reforms of congress in a way, you know, when you talk to members about changing the rules of the house and senate, it's especially true in the house that they all will. they're right with you. while describing the problems. they all think there are big problems and none of them are happy with their lifestyle. as members of congress. but it doesn't really occur to them that things could change.

it's very hard for them to imagine that there could be changes in the committee system or the or the budget process. i think a kind of infusion of new members in the house would create a moment where a lot of other change is possible too. and if we're ready for that moment, i think we are with other ideas for how the congress could be improved to better do its constitutional work, creating moment could be useful. and so since it's it's a way of bringing congress into line with the intention of the framers and a way of of helping it be better representative and a way of creating an opportunity for those other kinds of reforms. i think it's a it's a plausible way for now. look how does it appeal to the average member to say your importance should be diluted by adding 150 more members, which is what i would do, 150 and then growing much more slowly after that every ten years. i think the the argument to members is that the house is meant to be more representative than it is the average member of

the house now represents more than 800,000 people at the at the time of the ratification of the constitution in the first house, every member represented about 30,000 people. we can't get to that level, but we can do a little better. and i think members do see the logic of that. and i would say in general, members are open to this idea. the leaders are not leaders of both parties are very skeptical that a lot of people too with. yeah. that more members would make the place work better and i think that's a good sign to. that i mentioned that you have a lot of quotations in some ways the book is a kind of commentary on the federalist papers, but it's not uncritical. and it's it it struck me that the two federalist papers that are most familiar to us, number and number 51, are ones that actually come in for the most criticism in your book and it's one of them you might want to

talk a little bit about that. that's really interesting. yeah. i mean, you know, those are the our colleagues in white coats. those are the big city federalists and the flyover country federalists get ignored. and this book really tries to think some about the flyover country federalists that have a lot to say to us about some of the questions that we're talking about here. this is very much a madisonian book. it is in the spirit of james madison more than anybody else. his voice certainly is heard more than anyone else's voice in the book. and i think madison stands out in our political tradition for worrying about division. there are voices that worry about social order and dynamism. like hamilton. there are voices that worry something like social justice s and equality like jefferson. those voices are there in our political tradition. they are at their best. the right and the left. madison worries about social cohesion and unity in a way that

almost nobody else does. lincoln does. and you can see why. but madison does it without without a civil war. it's what he worries about, above all, when he thinks about politics. in the era of the framing of the constitution. and so the book a lot from him. but i think there is a way that at at certain times madison is dismissive of the need for civic virtue. he thinks that the system can work as a kind of machine that resolves the problems of bad citizenship by the operation of the institutions. madison isn't always like that, and you can almost see him kind of correcting himself when he goes too far in these directions. but i think that both throws ten throws 51 examples of is going too far in these directions is he's dismissive of republicanism and dismissive of a certain kind and he basically says the system is a sub attitude for the absence of virtue. now the best counterarguments to

this in the federalist are also from madison, and the book emphasizes those because i think those counterarguments are correct. it is absolute utterly essential that the citizens in our society have a certain idea of their responsibilities and that there be a kind of of responsibility, of virtue. the word responsibility actually is very madisonian word. it used to be the case that the oxford english dictionary said that, that madison's notes in the constitution was the first place responsibility was ever used in english. and then they found an earlier example, which i'm very upset with them for, and i want an earlier that was a really useful thing to be able to say. apparently it was wasn't true, but the word was not in general use and it was really both madison and hamilton use it in the federalist. and i think it describes the role of the american citizen as someone who takes ownership of the society they live in. it's a very republican concept,

and i think it is absolutely essential for citizenship in our kind of republic. so you know, the madison who says that is preferable to the madison who doesn't. the i want to maybe push back a little bit on your thoughts about. the courts, policing, the structure of our government. and i wonder if there's there's a lack of some of the institutional realism that you praise when it comes to the founders in that. do we really think that the courts can play this intensive role in keeping congress and the presidency in their place, which historically, you know, they didn't really do it wasn't, you know, as you know, it wasn't it wasn't the court that kept the congress from delegating its powers. it was a certain kind of institutional self respect. yes. i mean, congress didn't want to part of the problem we have is this peculiar fact that the problem we're trying to solve really when it comes to congress, is that the institution doesn't want the

power that it has, which is not a problem, that the framers really thought about. it is is not it did not occur to them that congress just wouldn't want to have the power to set the direction of our of our national politics, of our government. i think the role of the courts is very distinct. the courts are reactive. i this way and i put it this way in the book, congress frames legal frameworks for the future. it is a forward looking institution. the president operates in the present and lives in the present tense. always. and congress looks back and reviews actions. the courts look back, i'm sorry, the courts look back and review actions in the past. and so the role of the courts is constrained by that fact to begin with. they have to respond to complaints. they don't act of their own accord. generally speaking, and they can only review past actions.

but they do have an essential role in reviewing past actions, in making sure that the structure of the system, the integra ity of the system, is maintained. some of the role they have is in restraining the public right, as in restraining majorities from doing things you're not supposed to do there. all kinds of things that constitute takes out of the reach of majorities. but some of the roles in restraining the other branches and i do think that the situation created by the willful under action of the congress does two things at the same time. it invites overreaction by the executive, which the courts need to restrain, and in itself creates a problem that the courts need to address now addressing under actions very hard. and we're finding this now in the current term. and when the court looks at at chevron deference and thinks about how to handle kind of delegation of authority to regulatory agencies, it needs to

find a way to compel congress to do its own job and, ultimately to write laws that are clearer and more distinct and precise than congress tends to do this. it's not simply possible for the court to tell congress to do that. it does not have a mechanism for solving the problem that way. but i do think that by shifting the balance of delegation some, by putting more of the power to to interpret the law in its own hands where it belongs, that is what judges do. it can create some pressure on congress to do its. i don't think it's a perfect solution to this. the courts are not going to solve this problem. congress has to want the power to legislate, and that's going to require changes in the incentives. the members of congress face more than action by the courts. which brings us to the topic of political parties, a very common critique of our founding design is that the founders didn't want

to have parties and parties sprung up almost immediately on the creation, the constitution. but it's you argue in the book that development of the modern parties system, particularly martin van buren, ended up actually helping the constitutional design. absolutely. my great hero, martin buren. i think i do love martin van buren and don't get me started on him. but you did get me started a little bit, so i'll tell you a little bit about him. martin van buren is a politicians politician. he ran for everything and he won everything. he never lost an election. he was a mayor. he was a county commissioner. he was a state legislator. he was the state attorney of new york. he was the governor of new york. he was a member of the house and the senate. he was vice president and president had just one term, though. fair enough. he knew a lot about electoral

politics and the extraordinary thing about van buren is that he saw the party system collapsing in front of him. there was a kind of pseudo party system in in the wake of of the washington presidency. so at the beginning, in framing the constitution, there was a sense really that parties might not be necessary. the constitution was written in a very peculiar time, a pure time in england, where the the structure of the party system was changing from a party of the king and a party of parliament to basically parties of left and right. and a peculiar time in the united states when there was a kind of agreement about the american revolution that crossed what we would think of as the left and right and it seemed like durable parties might actually be avoidable. and then the constitutional system got going and immediately it became obvious that parties were necessary, that there needed to be some way to organize electoral politics

before people got elected. the the parties through the work basically, of jefferson and madison and the they came to be organized into two parties for a very distinctly american reason, the electoral college, which is a very strange thing, requires an absolute majority of electors for someone to be elected president. if no one gets a majority, then congress, the house decides who will be president. that means that if there are more than two candidates that reelection is basically going to go to the house almost every time. and this happened in 1800. it happened again in 1824 in a particularly bad way where the party system was totally vitiated 1824 election. there were four major candidates. they were all democrats and the difference between them were just personality differences that became a kind of policy differences and so martin van

buren is a senator at this point. the election goes to the house among the many odd things about that election were that the two leading candidates had the same running mate and that person was elected vice president. when no one was elected president. so the senators had nothing to do. they were sitting in the gallery of the house, watching the house choose the president. and martin van buren, you describe as this in his memoirs was was sitting there thinking this should not be happening in congress. this should be happening inside of a political party. these people are just deciding who should be the leader of our party. and he proceeds to offer a set of ideas for how the parties can become the mechanism for selecting candidates for office, party conventions, local party offices is all kinds of processes for nomination and selection that could help the american system work better as a two party system to broad, permeable, messy, incoherent

party coalitions that on paper make no sense whatsoever and that allow the system to be a system where people bargain and negotiate and build coalitions. big, broad parties, train people to build coalitions and then those people are ready to build coalitions in congress. it's a system that is a kind of missing piece of the puzzle of the constitution, and that has worked well for us for most of american history. and in a lot of ways was the brainchild of of of martin van buren. the challenge we face today has a lot to do with the fact that the was such a good fit for the constitution that the progressives who got tired of the constitution also got tired of the party system. and for the same reason, because it's just about coalition building. it's not about clear, decisive policy action. and woodrow wilson and others over the court from the end of the 19th century through the 20th century came to the view

that the party system needed to be much more responsive and accountable to policy agendas. and so, in a sense, our party should be much more ideological and through various mechanisms have made our party system more ideological, all but also much more polarized and much less of a perfect fit for the constitutional system. our parties as institutions of candidate selection, are now very, very weak. partizanship is strong. when parties are weak, and i think that's a lesson, a kind of ironic lesson we have learned over and over for the last 50 years, and it's time to rethink the way our parties choose candidates. i think it would be good to rethink in the in a martin van buren direction. i don't think we can really do that. conventions and back rooms and ways of choosing candidates that don't involve voters. no is going to get up before primary voters and say, you know, you people are the problem. you need to let us choose the candidate for this office because you're choosing witches and stuff.

i think we can do better than that ad campaign trying to refute that. yeah well didn't persuade me. i do think we need to find ways of moving forward so that the question we are asking when a party its candidate is not, what do the craziest people at the fringes of our party think we should be saying on election day, but rather, how do we win the biggest possible majority election day? that's the party's job. i think there are ways of doing that. but it requires reforms of the primary system which are not going to be easy. i think not being easy seems to be a recurring theme. yeah, i need lifetime employment in your in your answers. we just got a few minutes before i'm going to open it up for questions. i do want to you though in a book that is so devoted to the possibilities of the constitution, are there any parts of the constitution? and i want to leave aside the parts that have been, you know. yes. amended by reconstructions. right. but any parts of the

constitution that you think are ill considered or or you if we were starting over, we would get rid of. yeah, look, if we were starting over i think there are things we probably would do somewhat differently. i think we would probably want to think a little differently, for example, about presidential selection. i can imagine ways that the balance of federalism could work better if we were over. it's very important to remember that we are not starting over. we have, in fact, here the the longest enduring and most successful democratic republic in the world. there's a there's a tendency, i think, for us as americans to think of our country, as a young country. but we are not a young country. we are the oldest of the existing democracies. we have had the same essentially the same institutions of government for 230 years. that's absolutely amazing. and that's what stands out about us. well, you know, americans still sort of think and you see this in some of the catastrophizing that we were talking about before.

we always have a sense that this thing is just about to fall apart, that it's an experiment, it's not really working. you know, you listen to the founding generation. they certainly thought so. abraham lincoln, the 1830s, he had good reason for thinking so, and he did think so. but every generation of americans, you know, our our national anthem is a song about barely survive the night. there is no other country like this. and so we do really tend to think that, that we are on the verge of collapse, but we are not on the verge of collapse. we have a lot to work with here and i think the secret to doing that well is really to begin from what we have and see where it can be helped to work better. so i don't really think in terms of starting over and i don't pretend that i could do better than a system that's evolved for 230 years in a complicated world at choosing the president or at. framing the two houses of congress. i think if we were starting

over, we would do it differently. i'm not sure we would do it better, and i'm sure we're not starting over. so i think we should think about incremental reforms and see where they really are. problems we're not always good at seeing where the problems really are. you know, in some ways this book is is an exercise in chesterton fencing that, you know, g.k. chesterton said a few he had a couple of ways of saying this, the one i like best is an analogy for this. you said if you inherit a piece of property and there's a fence on the property and and you think it's useless, you want to take it down, make sure you understand why it was put up. you might still want to take it down, but if you don't understand why it was put up, you're probably making a mistake because somebody did the work of putting this there, and it's really essential to see why that is and what it was a solution to. i think it's very important for us to approach our institutions of government in this way. we may need to change them, but it's really crucial that we understand why they are the way they are before we do that. and that's what the book tries to do. all right.

i'm going to open it up to you lots if anybody has a question, please raise your hand. i'll call on you and then a microphone will come your way and there's a mic for right by you. so you can go first. i thank you so much for that. you've all this has been fantastic. so the most dysfunctional aspect or one most important aspect of our system is that you touched on the book is the relationship state and federal powers. yeah. and it seems as if a, an attempt to restore our constitutional system will require an aggressive such as we're seeing some red state governors attempting. that's going to get pretty messy and contentious is how basically scott jenner a review of your book they kind of push this point saying, you know, you're saying we need to be incrementalist. we need to be coalition building, but what does that look like in a situation where

the federal government doesn't recognize the rights of the state governors to function as they were meant to constitutionally? yeah. first of all, i do think that and scott's review is great, it's worth reading. i, i certainly agree that federalism is very often the scene of the most significant constitutional contentions in our system. and it always has been. federalism was what a lot of the most intense debates at the constitutional convention were about. it was a kind of innovation. you know, there was they faced the question of whether to have a strong national government, the states essentially as administrative units or whether to have strong states in the national government, essentially as a kind of confederation like the united nations. and they decided to do neither of those things. and instead to have strong states and a strong national government, each governing the people directly, but in different domains.

they that set things up for a lot of fighting and a lot of the most significant disputes in our history have ultimately worked themselves out as disputes between the states and the national government. i think that part of what it would take for us to recover something of the balance of the american constitution now is to have more arguments and fights about the balance of power between the states and the national government. the federal government is involved in a lot of things that it is very hard to justify its involvement in, and in many ways states have invited that involvement because the federal government makes it convenient for the states to benefit from services and money while also claiming all kinds of authorities. every governor will tell you, well, here we balance our budget and we have a balanced budget amendment. and the only reason that's true is because the federal government doesn't balance its budget.

they could never do that if they didn't have the borrowing power of the national government behind them, especially in times of crisis. so i think the the core concept that has to guide the future of federalism is, is that federalism, not layering federalism involves two channels of power, one federal, one state. we can argue about what belongs in each one it may be that today we should think about whether health care financing should be a federal responsibility. and we nationalized medicaid. that's a debate to have. what we can't do is intermix them in the way that we do. so that the federal government, in the state government are involved in the same work as happens in welfare, as happens in health care, as happens in education. and neither of them is really accountable for it. neither of them has any incentive to constrain itself because whenever there's pressure on that front, they can just it off to the other one. i think we have to find ways to

pull them apart again. you know, ronald reagan in 1983 proposed the kind of deal to the states, i think sort of half seriously that the that the federal government would entirely fund medicaid. and in return, the federal government would entirely step funding education. and at the time the math kind of worked out in such a way that it would have bounced out. that certainly wouldn't be true today. i think that's that's the logic of how we actually ought to think about reforming federalism. we to find ways to separate these authorities. and as i recall, the governors were big spenders in defeat adamantly against this. there was one governor lamar alexander, who said, i'll take that deal. and it didn't happen. you cite in your book, michael grievous the upside down constitution, which is a really thorough and excellent explication of those, a wonderful book.

other questions. so. you've all you said earlier that we're in a position with regard to congress that's similar to the one conservative is written with to the court in the seventies and to me and this may be sort of you know present just thinking and and let me know if you think that but to me it makes sense that the conservative legal movement was able to have the success that it's had. you know, you establish federalist society chapters at law schools where there are people who are becoming lawyers and going to enter that field and that doesn't seem to exist for, you know, whoever it would be that would be reforming congress. i'm wondering what you think the. yeah, you know, i guess i think that actually what what they succeeded in doing was much crazier and more impressive than what i'm suggesting. the idea that you could transform the federal judiciary

in the way that we have seen over the last 50 years was not obvious. and i think anybody who would have said that we will get to a place where there is a supreme court majority that is originalist in the sense in which originalism began to emerge here in the seventies, would have rightly been thought nuts. there was really no reason to think you could do that. what they found was both a very compelling way of thinking about the role of the judge and, as you say, a very practical way to inject that way of thinking. the profession of the law. now, there's no such profession for changing congress, but there is an advantage when it comes to changing congress, that they didn't have, which is all it really takes to change. congress is for most of congress to want to change. right. so that's not that many people. we we know them. we go to them with phil wallach's book and we give them the book and say, this is what you should do. now, tell me what you think

about that. why don't you do that? it's still going to take time. and i think that the the kind of socialization of a set of ideas about what congress is for is going to be the work of the coming years on that front. but i do think it is achievable and i actually think that socializing, that kind of idea, you know, i wouldn't overestimate what you could do on that front in two years, but i would not underestimate what you can do in ten years because congress changes fast for good and bad. there's almost no one there now who was there in 2000. and so all the people who are there now probably not going to be there in 20 years. and with the work we have to do, if we know what we're trying to persuade them of, is persuasive work for a couple of hundred people. i think we should try. i think the takeaway there is that congressmen change fast, but read slow.

yes. in the back there. yes. i agree. we might have a clog their whole. sure. yes. choice of convenience. exactly. really appreciate all your work and the talk today. very inspiring for us. you know, working here in washington, dc. i wanted to just quickly push back on one point you made a couple of times during the talk, which is that if past generations did not reform the system, fundamentally, we have no right to question it here in our modern age. and that just brings me back to the original reason why this constitution was necessary was to manage facts means in a new age of enlightenment and an informal really a new science of politics based on social and

cultural factors which the founders were acutely aware of. and i see in our generation in the formation of faction and science and, you know, modernism being complete lately, different than the late 18th century. i mean, you look at social media, you look at the internet, you look at how factions form. i mean, you can have millions of people and we have march on dc in a matter of days. i mean, it took the civil rights movement months and months get to that point. but we see the women's march to that point in just a matter of weeks. so yeah, the, the, the formation of faction and and our modernism seems very different to me. so my question is, do we not deserve a new science of politics now to deal with that versus simply reiterating maybe the incremental reforms of a 250 year old system? yeah, great question. first of all, i wouldn't say we don't have the right to do this. i think we do have the right to

do this. i think that we should think about what we want and need. and i think that we would find that the constitution we have is a tremendous resource in answering that question. this is not an argument from authority. and i don't think that we should do things. james madison did because he was james madison. i think we should ask ourselves if we persuaded by what he did and we are, then we should work to preserve it. and i am and i think we ought to be. and part of the reason for that is that in some important respects i think their science was less new than they said. i, i think madison's political science was very rooted in a kind of classical political and a lot of things we attribute madison, you know, the notion that resolve the problem of factions by increasing their number. you know you read book four of aristotle's politics you would you would see that there that's not that was not an invention of the princeton faculty in the

1840s. they they it as such and and you know the phrase new science of politics is in the federalist hamilton does claim that that's what they're doing. and then he lists a series of ideas that are just not new. and i think it's important for us to see that, too. but by all means, we have to think about what we need now, and we have to think realistically about what we need and what we have and what we achieve about where the intersection is, between the things that we could do and the things that we should do. and i think that in a lot of ways that would point us in the direction of improving on the constitution. we have not starting over. i think the example of of the of political action in the 1960s, in the 2020s is a good example. the on washington that that's created by 18 hours of social media has no effect whatsoever. the women's march came and went and nothing happened.

the civil rights movement understood what political action actually was and a march is only the little tip of the surface of what happens in in a real political movement, much of which is organizing over time to allow citizens to act in durable ways, to make change in their society. and we have a lot to learn from them and a lot of what we do now is very ephemeral, very careless. it's very impressed with social media. i tend to be a little less impressed with social media because i think that there is a way that it distracts us from what political action actually advances an idea of justice would look like. that kind of action requires a durable commitment and a sense of how people change their mind and how society moves works. and so i think movement for justice has to take its bearings from the nature of politics that doesn't mean we do everything james madison did. there are many things james madison did that i would not do and that we should never do. and there are some james madison did that were outright evil.

he did own slaves. that's not something we should ignore. but we be able to learn from our tradition by asking ourselves what we need, what it offers us, where there is a gap, where there is alignment? and i do think that lead us to an approach to politics that takes its bearings from the constitution. yes, i agree. because you're building groups are. yes. thank you very much. i was able to glance to first few pages of your book, and i just want to comment the writing was so had such elegant clarity that i look forward to reading it. i really appreciate that. i, i worry that the rest is not like the introduction, but thank you. i'm comforted it is from having listened to this afternoon i just want to ask quickly interested in why your title says american covenant rather american constitution.

thank you. thank you very much. i titles are hard is my first answer. this was not first title. um i. i try to defer on titles to people who are better at this than i am. um, there are a number of people in room who know that i had in mind several much worse titles than this for this book. but ultimately, i think this title does make sense for. the argument i offer, which is the constitution, you know, it's not a covenant in any religious sense. obviously but the distinction between a covenant and a contract is that a covenant is understood as describing a relationship rather than simply as this kind of sets of countervailing obligations and in terms the violation of which means the thing is broken, i think the american constitution really describes the shape of

the american polity by now. um, and it describes a way in which we hang that is more than simply a set of institutions, that is more than law. and that in that sense is a little covenantal. um, but the idea of thinking of constitution as covenant i owe an essay of irving kristol's called the spirit of 87 that he wrote for the 200th anniversary of the constitution a really wonderful essay and i'm grateful to have run across it after going through seven or eight titles that i didn't like. thank you. we've got time for some more questions in the in the very back, i can barely see you because of the lights. it strikes me that. oh, i know that voice. constitutional it's not jumping over to is that. during major constitutional moments we have these of amendments beginning with bill

of rights reconstruct the progressive era kind of stop and i'm wondering in whether it you address the amendment in the book or how you think about the the amendment process today i recall a decade or so ago levin, your namesake, proposed a series of the bad in these a series of liberty amendments. yes. when the rise of the tea party that didn't go anywhere. now we're this moment where instead of thinking about how we might amend the constitution to make it work, thinking about living either post-concert notionally or yeah, some type of living constitution. how do you think about the amendment process and what would the lavinia amendments? yes, well, i think that the amendment process is appropriately challenging. it should be hard to amend the constitution. that's what makes a constitution. i think you in some of the state

constitutions that making it too easy kind of makes a mockery of the constitution, um, you know, the, the maryland constitution runs to, you know, 300 pages. um, it's got all kinds of stuff that has nothing to do. constitutional realism. the american is 7500 words with all the amendments it's readable, it's accessible, it makes sense. it's all about the same subject. it's about the character of our regime and i do think that it should be difficult enough to amend the constitution that we only do. so when there is a kind of regime moment like that and part of what that means is that in a in divided time, in a 5050, america is very hard to amend. the constitution in a way. you know, the 27th amendment was adopted in the 1990s in 1982, but but not really. it was sort of a it there for the for the 200th anniversary of the constitution.

it actually part of the original bill of rights that didn't get ratified. and it just says congress can't raise its own salary if to wait for the next election. it was almost symbolic as a wonderful story that it was the student who came up with this idea in an essay and it caught on and and he got a better grade after it passed. yes he actually that's right he originally got a pretty bad grade. it wasn't realistic. other than that, the less the less sort of surge amendments was in the 1970s. and wasn't much of a surge. i mean, you know the the the post-civil war amendments, the progressive era amendments did come in bunches. and i think they were connect to to a kind of moment of reform that had gained steam for some time and that had broad public support behind it. um, i guess i would say this to

matt. i don't think that there a, there is a problem we confront in this moment with our system. the solution to which would be a constitutional amendment. um, and i'm conservative. i like the constitution. i'm not inclined to think that what we need is to change it, but i think that some of the movements we've seen and some of them have been on the right, a kind of constitutional convention for opening things up, for making it much easier, to amend. i think all of those would very likely in very, very bad ideas being enacted into the constitution. and that the the logic of wearing s of such change that informs the nature of the amendment is right. i can certainly be of the need for one kind of change or another, can imagine ways in which you could advance all kinds of ideas that i like and just put them in the constitution. but i don't really think that's how our politics work.

these should be regime ideas should be about the structure of the system, the infrastructure of the system, not about policy. and so at the moment, i'm not really eager to see a constitutional amendment. other questions? oh, yes. in the in the very back there, because i did pick you in the past. you over there we go. thank you so much. this has been great. dr. levine, one thing you've mentioned, this talk is kind of the inertia that exists in congress specifically. and so i think i'm adjourned. i've not read your book, but i imagine it has package of reforms in it that you would like to see enacted. but what do you think would be the marginal reform, maybe the most doable reform that would have the most purchase in terms of kind of setting us back at a right course like the most imaginable, but actionable reform? yeah, i talked a little bit about the expansion of the house, which i think in some ways would open the path to

other reforms. but i think that if we if we look for the most plausibly doable kind of reform would also have a real effect. i think the key for changing some very bad incentives the house if we put aside electoral changes which you can't really do just in congress is to empower the committees. i think for congress to take its lead from the state legislature that let committees floor time would make a drama and a difference in the operation especially of the house in some respects also the senate about a third of the state legislatures do this the way it's done, for example, in virginia is that a committee that passes a bill of committee with at least one vote from the minority party, gets floor time for that bill. that is very much not how congress works. and at the moment, most of the work that's done in committees in congress is just a waste of time. because eventually, if there's a move to pass legislation on, the

issue, it's just going to get written by a leadership team. it might include the committee chair, it might include some committee staff, but it's not going to be what the members negotiated it. i think if you let members fire with real bullets, if you say this negotiation is actually going to matter, there will be a vote on the floor if we get this done, they would care more about their committee work. i mean, the problem the problem right now is simple. these are ambitious. they want to succeed and working hard in committee contributes nothing to their success. getting on cable news contributes much more to their success. and so that's what they do. they're not crazy that that's what you would do if you were an ambitious trying to succeed so that to change the incentives need to change and i think the committee system is place to start dead center here. thank you.

amazing book in ink. gratz eyeball i question because i think this is you know defending the constitution obviously is not popular as maybe it was ten, 20 years ago. there's been some, i think, real s on the part of, you know, largely progressive left that we haven't seen, at least in my lifetime, is, i think, a desire to literally, you know, blow up the system and started with, you know, harry reid watering down the filibuster ten years ago. now expanding the court now it's adding more states. obviously some of those things, you know, could backfire here on the left, you know, if there was, you know, donald trump, you know, a new president, donald trump could add more supreme court justices. he could it would happily do so. but this is know this desire to blow up the system seems very myopic. i'm curious what your thoughts are on that. you know the that there are now people in close to power that

are happy to change the system kind of regardless of what the consequences are even if they ultimately backfire on them. yeah. i mean, i think they know what the consequences would be. i just they're probably wrong about that and i wouldn't say it's all that new. i mean, the idea of packing the court is not new. that's that one much further. the last time it was tried in the 1930s and you know, by by a democratic party with very similar views. what was wrong with the constitution? so we've seen these kinds things before. the the impatience with the filibuster is certainly not new. i what it runs into is that the ideologically marginal senators, the majority party, actually always love the filibuster even if they're democrats and it survives the the general attitude that the constitution doesn't serve us well that we put up with it because we have no choice. but if we had a choice, we would blow it up. is not a new idea it at least as

old as woodrow wilson. and of course, in some ways it's older than that. and so i think it's something that that friends of the constitution have had to contend with for a long time. i think it's fortunate that major change requires much broader majorities than we're likely to see now. i mean, in a funny way, you know, both parties now are terrified of each other. they think if the other party wins it's the end of the republic. but in if the other party wins, it's going to barely win. we've had a 5050 politics for 30 years. the stakes are not as high as they say, because if the wrong person gets elected, they're just going to spend their time banging their head against the wall because they only have a three seat majority in the house. and so i think the parties should spend their time thinking about how to broaden their majorities if they want to change things rather than about how to blow things up, you know, being seen to talk about blowing things up is why you have small majorities or minorities so it's

it's politically nutty. i certainly think there are real risks to it. there has to be answered. people have to see why the restraints, democratic power in the system are important. it's true the american left has turned against all of those restraints. now the courts, the bill rights one by one, the freedom of speech, then of religion, and then of speech and the restaurant in the way the senate, the electoral college, that's why the argument for them has to be made it has to be made in terms that are constitutional. and that's not political. that's simply political. but i don't think it's necessarily a new problem. it's a serious problem, but it's one that generations have had to deal with. all right. well, thank you. these have been excellent questions, but our time has to an end. so please me in. thank you all for his book and for a stock