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them. how do you know it is great internet? because it works. we are sparklight and we always working for you. >> sparklight along with these television companies supports c-span2 as a public service. >> it is my distinct on here to introduce my colleague yuval levin. i am ramesh ponnuru by. the way. yuval levin is an a person about whom people in my position usually say he needs no introduction, but that then raises another question of why i'm here. so will introduce them. he is the director of social culture constitutional studies here at aei were also holds the chair and public policy. the founder andal editor nationl affairs, he's also seen editor at the new atlantis, the contribute editor of "national review" and contribute 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 performs as i review his today, which is about as good an example of democratic citizenship as we cann find. we are here to discuss yuval's new book, and if i may say so i think his best book yet, "american covenant: how the constitution unified our nation - and couldt again." it is a book that is i should say epistemically modest but politically ambitious. it proposes that the qr for many of our modern discontents in the united states can be found by recovering the wisdom of our existing constitution. it could be said to elaborate on

the constitutions theory of itself. and among the things that this book reminds us of is that they unity we speak of in e pluribus unum is not a once and for a a constant achievement that needs to be renewed. it is pretty common for conservatives to suggest that we the forgotten some of genius of our constitution. but it is at this point almost countercultural some precincts of the right no less than left to suggest that the genius in her constitution has not yet been exhausted. that is a bold proposal of this book, and i hope you will join in giving yuval and warm round of applause as he elaborates on it. [applause] >> thank you very much, ramesh.

i appreciate that enormously. i think in my capacity as some kind of unofficial editor position, you are my boss, so one way or another there will be a report. 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 senateter 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 but it may notes be quite the pt we imagine. it's not really their ability to result disputes. courts do results disputes that's what the duke wetherington to resolve disputes over what the law is not what it should be. so they are not the right venue for mediating among competing visions of the public good. our great public disputes need to be resolved to the work of the legislature above all and the most valuable service the

courts provide to the cause of national unity is in their policing ofna the rules and boundaries of constitutionalism, chey're restricting of the power of majorities and that public officials, to pursue various kind of in runs around the structure of our system. the courts of an improvement on this front and unlike the elected branches they are closer now to serving their constitutional purpose than they were a generation ago. they do need more of a a focun constitutional structure rather than the policing of personal rights but the translation of the courts in this century has been an. extremely thing to see. when it comes to the courts a final proposition i would offer you is a function of that transformation. .. 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 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 real >> first, before we get to the israel and iran, also lebanon, i just want to do the daily flight update. >> sure. so