May 1, 2026 • 52 mins
Margaret Hoover sits down with American Enterprise Institute Senior Fellow Yuval Levin and National Constitution Center CEO Emeritus Jeffrey Rosen to discuss the enduring ideals of America’s founding documents.
Levin and Rosen, who both contributed to the NCC’s new book “The Promise of America,” reflect on the shared principles and ideological differences between the nation’s founders and how those philosophical clashes have echoed through to the present.
Levin addresses the dysfunction of Congress in the modern era, how it became so polarized, and what can be done to bring it closer to what the founders intended. Rosen comments on proposals to increase the size of Congress and the difficulty of amending the Constitution.
The two constitutional scholars assess the state of executive power in the second Trump administration, and they look ahead to the challenges artificial intelligence may pose for American democracy.
Support for Firing Line with Margaret Hoover is provided by Robert Granieri, Vanessa and Henry Cornell, The Fairweather Foundation, The Tepper Foundation, Peter and Mary Kalikow, The Beth and Ravenel Curry Foundation, Pritzker Military Foundation, Cliff and Laurel Asness, The Margaret and Daniel Loeb Foundation, Katharine J. Rayner, Charles R. Schwab, Lindsay and George Billingsley, The Meadowlark Foundation, Jared Stone, Al and Kathy Hubbard, and Craig Newmark Philanthropies.
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(00:00):
There's a lot of talk about conflict, there's a lot of talk
about fighting, but the fact is,everything that members of
Congress complain about when they talk about what the
president does are things they could do something about.
That's American Enterprise Institute's senior fellow Yuval
Levin. In many ways, this would be
James Madison's nightmare, Madison's main fierce faction,
which he defines as any group animated by passion rather than
(00:24):
reason, devoted to self-interestrather than the public good.
And that's Jeffrey Rosen, CEO emeritus of the National
Constitution Center, reflecting on what's wrong with Congress.
I'm Margaret Hoover. This is the FIRING LINE podcast.
Yuvalovan worked for Newt Gingrich and George W Bush
(00:46):
before joining the American Enterprise Institute, where he
is director of social, cultural and constitutional studies.
The separation of powers is not just a structure, it's a
process. It only works if everyone
involved is pushing hard. It's only as a result of that
conflict that a kind of stability can be sustained.
Jeffrey Rosen is a law professorand author who served as
(01:08):
president and CEO of the National Constitution Center for
more than a decade. This central question is
President Trump, for example, Julius Caesar, or is he Andrew
Jackson? Is he?
Well, in the American populist tradition is one that goes back
to the very beginning. With the nation's 250th birthday
approaching, they join me to discuss the Center's a new book,
the Promise of America, and the challenges the country faces as
(01:31):
we look to the future. One thing that is so striking
about the AI revolution is that it substitutes A centralized
authority that has neither reason nor a moral sense with
the responsibility of citizens to examine primary sources and
make up their own minds. The founding generations
certainly expected that the world would change a lot, but
(01:54):
the fundamental character of human nature they did not expect
to change. Jeffrey Rosen, Yuvalovan,
welcome to Firing LINE. Thank you very much.
Great. To be here.
You have both contributed to a book that is published by the
National Constitution Center called The Promise of America,
(02:15):
Reflections on Our Enduring Bonds.
We near the 250th anniversary ofthe signing of the Declaration
of Independence. How well is America living up to
its promise, Jeff? Well, it was so exciting for us
at the National Constitution Center to identify the ideals of
(02:35):
the Declaration and the Constitution, and then to ask
how we're living up to it. So for the Declaration, liberty,
equality and government by consent, and for the
Constitution, separation of powers, federalism and the Bill
of Rights, It's so striking how much consensus there was among
the contributors about those principles.
(02:56):
Justice Gorsuch wrote the conclusion.
Justice Breyer wrote the introduction.
Both of them agreed that those are the principles of the
American creed. So the essayists conclude that
although there's disagreement about how to balance those
values of liberty and equality or separation of powers and
federalism, both liberals and conservatives agree that those
(03:18):
are in fact the principles of the American creed.
And there was something incredibly unifying and
inspiring about bringing together these people of
different perspectives and having them agree about what our
basic principles are. How well is America living up to
its promise? You've all.
I think we're living up to our promise, but one way to
understand the way that Jeff hasjust put this is that part of
(03:40):
what's distinct about the American promise is that we
started by asserting our principles and ideals.
And that means that we're alwaysin the process of holding
ourselves to account. And holding yourself to account
never can mean that we're doing great.
And I don't think anybody looking at 21st century America
would say we're doing great. That's not the issue.
(04:01):
The question is, is America aware of its ideals?
Do we understand where we're falling short, and are we
looking for ways to do somethingabout it?
Obviously, the country can disappoint us.
Obviously, in the 21st century, if we think about our
constitutional principles, if wethink about our commitments in
the declaration, there are a lotof ways in which we're
disappointing ourselves. That's been true in every moment
(04:23):
in America. But what stands out about our
country is that we can hold ourselves to account that when
we fall short, we know exactly how.
Because at the very beginning there are these documents that
say this is what it ought to look like.
And in every moment they can look at us and say, well, not
quite. And that's surely true now.
But I think having those ideals and principles to look to, to
(04:46):
ground ourselves in, remains a great strength for our country.
We do actually agree, for example, that we're all created
equal. We don't agree about what that
means. We don't agree about what it
demands of us. We don't agree about what it
requires in this moment. But beginning from that
agreement is still something really extraordinary.
And I do think that in the 21st century, for all of our many
problems, and they're very real,we have a lot to be grateful for
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in those founding ideals and documents, and having an excuse
to look to them in the 250th year is a very valuable thing
for a country in our situation. As we approach July 4th, the
signing of the Declaration reflect, both of you, please, on
what it was that made the idealsenunciated in the Declaration so
(05:33):
unique or distinct in that context and in that moment in
history. It's striking that in some sense
they weren't unique. Thomas Jefferson said that he
was merely distilling the principles of public writers
like John Locke and Cicero and Algernon Sidney and putting them
(05:55):
before a candid world. But what made them unique is to
take a philosophical consensus about what liberty means and to
write them down. It was the writtenness of the
Declaration that both gave future generations ideals and
creeds to live up to, and then inspire the rest of the world to
(06:15):
adopt declarations. There's a great essay in this
book by David Armitage about thefact that there were no
declarations of independence to speak of before ours.
But in the 19th and 20th century, almost all nations that
founded new democracies had a kind of declaration.
But what's most striking at all is how much consensus there was
(06:38):
among the delegates about the idea that personal self
government is necessary for political self government, That
government by consent is a fundamental principle of a
Republic, that people are morally equal, and that there
are certain unalienable rights that it is the government's duty
(07:00):
to protect. And when the government breaks
that deal, it's the right and responsibility of people to
alter and abolish it. So the right of revolution is
inherent in the social compact itself.
The idea of an unalienable rightthat you can't alienate or
surrender to government is crucial.
I can't give you the power to control my thoughts because my
(07:22):
thoughts of the connective reason and I can't surrender my
reason even if I wanted to. And that's why freedom of
conscience was the central unalienable right.
And it's expressed in the idea of the pursuit of happiness.
It's it's really striking that Jefferson had right next to him
the Virginia Bill of Rights drafted by his friend George
Mason. The preamble to that Bill of
(07:43):
Rights looks so much like Jefferson's declaration that you
could almost, you know, it almost looks plagiarized or
paraphrased. James Wilson had another
document that Jefferson had by his side.
So he's very modest about the fact that he's not doing
anything original at all. His great brilliance was to
synthesize the ideals more perfectly than anyone has ever
done. And as a result, he wrote what
(08:04):
Walter Isaacson in this volume calls the greatest sentence ever
written. Which, you know, was edited by
Adams and Franklin. But, but we'll take it.
Yuval, you said that the ideals in the Declaration appeared on
paper first, right? That we established our ideals
and then built a country around them.
(08:25):
How would you sort of take that question?
How did those principles and writing them down, why was that
distinct in human history? You know, to me what most stands
out about that extraordinary declaration is the premise that
we're all created equal. I I think we take it for
granted. We treat it as obvious.
It calls itself self-evident, but it's not at all
(08:46):
self-evident, not if you look athuman history.
It hasn't been obvious. It's something that we in the
modern world know that Plato andAristotle didn't know.
It's something we've learned thehard way in America too.
And there's a way that that fundamental commitment, the idea
that all human beings are morally equal, that that idea
(09:08):
contains almost the entirety of the American story.
Because our equality demands a couple of things.
On the one hand, it points to consent.
If we're all equal, then no one has authority over anyone else.
By nature, we can only really govern by consent, which
practically means we can only really govern by majority rule.
At the same time, our equality means we each have rights that
(09:29):
can't be taken away. And The thing is, those two
principles are in tension with each other, right?
Majority rule and minority rights are not the same thing.
And there are moments when. The founders themselves.
Exactly, right. And, and really at every moment
in American life, we are fighting over some tension
between the right of the majority to govern and the
(09:51):
rights of individuals that have to be respected.
And if if you're in a minority, you're still an individual with
rights, those can't be taken away from you.
So how in the world do you balance majority rule and
minority rights? Everything about our political
tradition is an attempt to answer that question.
Just about everything in the Constitution in one way or
another is an answer to that question.
(10:12):
It remains a question that we constantly struggle with.
And, you know, there's a way that we sometimes talk about the
kind of legal proceduralism of American life as if it's morally
neutral, right? It's just, it's just a kind of
legalism. That legal proceduralism emerges
exactly from this tension. How do you simultaneously
protect majority rule and minority rights?
(10:34):
That's why we have these rules. It's the furthest thing from
morally neutral. It's the most morally freighted
imaginable thing in the life of a society.
And the fact that that's just right there, that this principle
that demands 2 contradictory things and puts in place the
whole story is in our declaration at the first moment,
(10:54):
is just an extraordinary fact. And, you know, you can see all
of American history kind of rolling from that one little
phrase. Another way, Jeff, you often put
that competition of ideas is in the embodiment of Thomas
Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton, right?
That the views of Jefferson as aindividual who emphasized states
(11:15):
rights emphasize local control versus Alexander Hamilton, who,
of course agitated for strong federal control.
You are always keen to point outthat that debate, as you've all
said, over the course of 250 years, not only has it never
been settled, but it continues to rear its head in the course
of new Supreme Court rulings that have come out and the way
(11:38):
we interpret laws, legislation, different competing
philosophies. It is ultimately that original
and Seminole tension between thetwo and their competing
philosophies for how to secure liberty.
Give me some examples of how andwe see it today.
It is remarkable how Hamilton and Jefferson's initial battles
(11:59):
over, as you said, national power versus states rights and
also executive power versus congressional power, democracy
versus rule by elites, and liberal versus strict
construction of the Constitutionhave defined all of American
history, our political, our constitutional and our social
history examples. Today, what's the most contested
(12:19):
question that we're discussing? The nature of executive power.
Has the president become so powerful that he's become a kind
of Julius Caesar, an emperor who's subverting the American
ideal? Well, this is exactly the
question that Hamilton and Jefferson debated at the dawn of
the American government. There was this amazing dinner
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party, I call it the dinner party that defined America.
Where Hamilton and Jefferson meet with the rest of the
cabinet, Washington is away at At some point in the evening.
Hamilton looks at Jefferson's portraits and says who are those
guys on the wall? Jefferson says those are my
visions of the three greatest men in history, John Locke,
Francis Bacon, and Isaac Newton.Hamilton pauses for a long time
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and then he blurts out the greatest man that ever lived was
Julius Caesar and Jefferson writes in his diary that night.
This proves that Hamilton is notonly for a monarchy, but a
monarchy bottomed on corruption,and he goes on to found the
Democratic Republican Party in supposed opposition to the
monarchism and Caesarism of Hamilton and the Federalists.
(13:21):
And for much of the 19th century, the debate is has the
president become too strong? In 1912, Woodrow Wilson and
Theodore Roosevelt insist that the president is a steward of
the people who should directly channel popular will.
That creates what Arthur Schlesinger has called the
imperial presidency and has vastly expanded presidential
(13:44):
power. And then Fast forward to today.
We're debating both in the WhiteHouse and in Congress and also
in the Supreme Court. How strong should the president
be? This whole idea of the unitary
executive that the Supreme Courtis invoking is a phrase that
comes from Alexander Hamilton's Pacificus Letters.
And Hamilton believed that you needed an executive strong
(14:05):
enough to resist popular demagoguery.
In fact, his suggestion at the Constitutional Convention was
the president elected for life so that he could resist populist
temptations. Jefferson is the opposite.
He wants a term limit for the president so he won't be tempted
to install himself as a dictator.
So this central question, is President Trump, for example,
(14:26):
Julius Caesar, or is he Andrew Jackson?
Is he? Well, in the American populist
tradition is one that goes back to the very beginning.
Jeffrey Strong executives have often, throughout American
history, been accused of being authoritarians or dictators.
Andrew Jackson, Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, all
were accused of authoritarian impulses or being dictators.
(14:49):
So to what extent is the currentaccusations that Donald of
Donald Trump, the current administration a departure or an
extension of the same trend? Well, it really is striking, as
you say, that Franklin Rooseveltwas accused so often of being a
dictator, a Julius Caesar character, that he dressed up
like Julius Caesar for his birthday in 1934.
(15:09):
And he's wearing this Laurel crown in a toga, and Eleanor is
dressed like a Roman matron. So he was kind of making fun of
the charges of Caesarism, but itwas no joke.
I mean, he's not. Familiar with that in the day of
social media? No, it was content forever.
AI could do a version of it, butit's.
Not as good as there is. Completely.
But but it's it's not a joke because FDR, remember, tried to
(15:29):
pack the Supreme Court in a way that was so extreme that even
Democrats in Congress rebelled. He insisted in wartime that the
president could do no wrong. And the Supreme Court
essentially gave him a blank check to do things like intern
Japanese American citizens and some of the more shameful
moments of our constitutional history.
And he was so threatening that Congress, after he ran for a
(15:52):
fourth term, passed the 22nd Amendment, which forbade
presidents for serving more thantwo terms.
Lincoln also attacked as a dictator criticized for
suspending habeas corpus during the Civil War without
congressional consent. Andrew Jackson called King
Jackson or King Mob so the and and to go back to the very
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beginning, the one character that both Hamilton and Jefferson
agreed was a Julius Caesar was Aaron Burr.
Hamilton has this great line if we have a crypto Caesar tis Burr
and he rightly suspected that Burr was conspiring to lead a
secessionist movement in SpanishLouisiana and set himself up as
dictator of Mexico. And he sacrificed his life nobly
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'cause he preferred Jefferson toBurr in the election of 1800.
Burr gets wind of it, and that leads to the dual.
So the fears go back to the verybeginning.
The difference is that the office of the presidency has
expanded so much more vastly than it was at the time of the
founding. And as Yuval has pointed out so
powerfully in his important books, Congress has become
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supine. And the branch that the Founders
expected to be the most dangerous branch, sucking all
power into its impetuous vortex,as Madison says, has basically
rolled over and let the president do whatever he wants
at a time when the courts have become both more powerful and
more deferential to executive power.
But how much of a departure is the current administration's
(17:19):
expansion of executive power anduse of the executive power that
has expanded even over the last 40 years?
Is it aligned with previous president's use of the executive
power or is this a departure? It's the central question.
In terms of the numbers of executive orders issued, it's
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not wildly out of line. They've been increasing ever
since Roosevelt did about 3000, and they've been in the order of
hundreds for presidents since the post war era.
But the question is whether President Trump is using them in
unprecedented ways. And in some sense, we'll see
that this term, where the Supreme Court by many accounts
seems likely to repudiate President Trump's use of
(18:02):
executive orders to suspend birthright citizenship.
And we'll also see what they think of his effort to remove
people who had the Federal Reserve.
There are cases like Trump, the US, which the majority said was
creating a broad immunity for the president that Alexander
Hamilton would have favored. Justice Sotomayor and her
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dissent said this is a complete departure from what the founders
intended because the founders didn't want the president to be
a king. And for Justice Sotomayor, even
Alexander Hamilton wouldn't havegone that far in.
In a sense, it's too soon to judge whether President Trump is
within the historical power of the accretion of executive power
or whether he's something else. Much will turn on the Supreme
(18:46):
Court, but it is striking that more and more what presidents,
once they get into office, have been demanding powers that the
founders did not anticipate. In the books Forward, retired
Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer wrote that the core
principle of the American Spiritexperiment is that, quote, no
government, no part of government would become too
(19:07):
powerful. You've all your scholarship and
contribution to this collection focuses on separation of powers.
You have said, quote, the founders would not be surprised
by a president seeking Napoleonic powers.
They would have been very surprised, though, by a Congress
that allows that to happen and that let its own power flow to
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the president. That's the problem we face now.
Is Congress the branch of government that is working least
as the Founders anticipate it? Absolutely.
I think in relation to the design of the system and the
expectations of the founders, Congress is the most
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dysfunctional of the branches. It's very easy right now to look
at these Titanic struggles between the president and the
courts and say that's where the action is.
But it's very important for us to see that the absence of
action is a distinct constitutional problem.
The separation of powers is not just a structure, it's a
process. It only works if everyone
involved is pushing hard and theexpectation is that it would
(20:16):
take the form of continual conflict.
And it's only as a result of that conflict that a, a kind of
stability can be sustained. So that in the absence of
conflict, and strangely enough, I look at this moment and I see
an absence of conflict. In the absence of that conflict,
there is imbalance. And the absence is not a result
(20:37):
of a president who doesn't want enough.
This president wants a lot. And whether it's within the
bounds of prior presidential power struggles or not, there's
no doubt that he's after more executive power.
The courts are active, too, and they're assertive.
They're facing a very demanding situation.
I think they're rising to that challenge.
For the most part, Congress is sitting on the sidelines
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watching it happened and functioning as a kind of
commentariat rather than as the chief actor in the system, which
is really how the Constitution sees it.
And that absence of congressional action creates a
vacuum that presidential power rushes into, that the courts
rush into in ways that they certainly feel like they're
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getting dragged and are forced to act in the present tense in
ways they're not really built for.
A lot of that, almost all of it is a function of Congress
choosing to stay out of the game.
And I think that's our chief constitutional problem now.
So for for a layman or for the audience who just engages, they
(21:40):
would be hard pressed to understand how there's an
absence of conflict because the rhetoric is so high, because the
Twitter wars are very active. So unpack for the audience, what
do you mean by an absence of conflict in Congress?
There's a lot of talk about conflict.
There's a lot of talk about fighting.
But the fact is, everything thatmembers of Congress complain
(22:00):
about when they talk about what the president does are things
they could do something about. If they don't like the tariff
policy, Congress can direct and change tariff policy.
In fact, the Constitution gives that power to Congress.
They've given it to presidents, and they can take it back if, if
they're not happy about where the federal budget is going,
well, that's really their first and foremost job.
(22:22):
They should. They should act on that front.
And war powers. War powers, too.
They have a role to play. War powers do belong to the
president to a large degree, butthere's a role for Congress.
There's a role for Congress in declaring war, in providing
authorizations for military action, in controlling the
defense budget Oversight. Absolutely they can.
(22:43):
They can do a lot more of the kind of traditional oversight
that then the modern Congress has done.
There's a way in which Congress has come to see itself as a
secondary player in a fundamentally presidential
drama, so that the question theyalways face in their own minds
is a yes or no question about the president.
And actually the question Congress needs to answer is what
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ought to be the direction of ournational government.
That's the question That's up tothem.
The person who's empowered to answer yes or no questions is
the president. He has a veto power.
They send him something and he says yes or no.
It's a very strong power, but hedoesn't get to drive.
Only if Congress lets him does he have the kind of command of
the agenda that our modern presidents have had.
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I do think there's a tradition, there's a pattern in American
history where periods of presidential excess have been
followed by periods of congressional reassertion.
That happened after Andrew Jackson.
It happened after Woodrow Wilson, you know, a year after
Franklin Roosevelt died in office.
Congress sends to the states a constitutional amendment to
restrict the president to two terms.
(23:48):
A lot of Democrats voted for that amendment in Congress.
Those kind of moments do come, but they don't come on their
own. They require a kind of
reawakening of the sense that the role that members of
Congress have is an active role.It is not passive observation.
It's not commentary. They're not in the business of
hosting podcasts about the president.
(24:09):
They have a real job to do. You've worked in Congress.
You're a scholar of the Congress.
How, in your view, has the Congress come to abdicate its
authority, its power, its centrality?
I think there's a lot going on there.
It's an over determined dynamic,but one key thing to see is that
Congress has centralized power internally in the hands of
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leaders now for 50 years. Ironically, they did it actually
to strengthen the institution against the president.
They did it in the 70s to fight Richard Nixon, and then the
Democrats did, and then Republicans did it in the 90s to
fight Bill Clinton. The trouble is when you
centralized power in an institution with 535 people and
you have four people making all the decisions, that leaves 531
(24:54):
very ambitious men and women looking for things to do to gain
prominence, to build their career, to advance their
political interests. And if legislating is not
available to them, they're goingto do other things.
They're going to start those podcasts.
They're going to find ways to become prominent so that the
centralization of power is meantthat members don't have enough
to do day-to-day. That counts as real legislation.
(25:15):
That means that re empowering Congress would would require
decentralizing, allowing the committees to exercise real
power, finding ways to give members more work to do.
I think that's one important dynamic.
You mentioned the centrality of Speakers of the House beginning
in the 20th century, culminating, perhaps was when
(25:36):
Republicans centralized power around Newt Gingrich to
challenge President Bill Clinton's authority in 1997, as
Newt Gingrich was at the end of his first term as Speaker.
Beginning his second term, William F Buckley Junior hosted
a discussion about Newt Gingrich's leadership as Speaker
of the House. And I'd like you both to take a
(25:56):
look at the conversation then. Well, I think that all
Republicans in Washington are under the impression that they
went too far last in the last Congress and are as, as Kate
said, sort of shell shocked. They lack confidence in.
Their own went too far, went maladroitly.
Went too far, I think is the is the reigning.
(26:19):
We might believe that they simply chose the wrong issues,
but their own perception is theywere simply too bold and now
they've got to go along to get along.
So of course, that was Ramesh Ponnuru, who is currently the
editor in chief of the National Review, who was speaking to
William F Buckley Junior, who was then the editor of the
National Review, reflecting on what Newt Gingrich had gotten
(26:41):
right and wrong and and why it was becoming difficult for him
to govern the House of Representatives.
You've all you worked for Newt Gingrich in that time.
Yeah, I it was not obvious then what he got wrong.
And I think even in that clip wesee that the sense was maybe
they were pushing on different issues than they should be.
Maybe they were pushing too hard.
(27:02):
In retrospect, and I will say plainly, this was not obvious to
me in the 1990s. In retrospect, what Gingrich got
wrong was the over centralization of power in
leadership in Congress. The idea that the Speaker should
function as a kind of Prime Minister, that he should be able
to wield Congress as a weapon against the president of the
other party, ended up meaning that the rest of the members of
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Congress look to party leaders for direction.
More than that, they look to party leaders for protection.
They don't want to take hard votes.
They get upset with their leaders when they're forced to
put on the record views that might come back to haunt them at
election time. And the trouble is that's their
job. That is their job.
And if their job becomes just kind of playing along and being
(27:48):
good communicators, and in return they get protected from
taking hard votes, then they're not legislators.
And I think as that process continued and Gingrich
centralized power after that, itbecame further centralized.
Dennis Hastert, Gingrich's successor, decided that he would
never put a bill on the floor that didn't have a majority of
the majority party. It's very hard for Congress to
(28:09):
work that way. Nancy Pelosi further centralized
power when the Democrats took control, and we've reached a
point now where Congress is an extremely centralized
legislature in a system that requires a lot of cross partisan
bargaining in order for things to work.
You can't really do cross partisan bargaining when leaders
have all the power and there is now a need for decentralization.
(28:32):
I think this is actually something that happens often
with political reform in every era.
The solutions we need are solutions to problems created by
the solutions of the last era. We solve problems.
Maybe it works, but but we go too far or we or there are
unexpected problems and you end up having to pull back a little.
I think it's very much where we are.
Jeffrey, how do you see it? How do you see Congress's
(28:53):
failure to jealously guard its power from the executive branch?
In many ways, this would be James Madison's nightmare.
Remember, he thought that Congress is going to suck all
power into its impetuous vortex,but he also thought that it had
a crucial role in refining and enlarging public opinion.
Madison's main fierce faction, which he defines as any group, A
(29:16):
majority or a minority, animatedby passion rather than reason,
devoted to self-interest rather than the public good.
He thinks the two institutions are going to combat faction,
virtuous representatives who will look to the long term
interests of the country as a whole rather than the short term
interests of their own leaders or parties or constituents.
(29:40):
And then a press, in particular the broadside press that would
coolly dispatch and disperse reason across the land, read by
an enlightened class of journalists and representatives
that Madison called the literati, who he thought would
help citizens engaged with complicated ideas, listen to
differing points of view, and essentially make up their own
(30:02):
minds. That was the central Madisonian
hope, that unlike the medieval era where people got their
opinions from kings or popes or mobs, in America, in the
Enlightenment it was every citizen's responsibility to read
primary text, discuss them with their representatives, and make
up their own mind. Now of course, the party system
wasn't really up and running. When Madison wrote The
(30:23):
Federalist Papers, he was responsible, along with
Jefferson, for founding the Democratic Republican Party.
But for much of our history, party has functioned as groups
that amalgamated different interests and allowed the kind
of cross partisan bargaining that you've all describes.
Once we get so polarized that the parties are more determined
in supporting their guy in the White House and protecting the
(30:46):
parochial interests of their ownconstituents, even when they're
minorities, they're acting exactly as the kind of
passionate factions that Madisonmost feared.
Yuval, you pointed to one of thecauses of the polarization as
perhaps being the electoral system that is centered around
closed partisan primaries, whichto my way of thinking is
(31:09):
actually given the executive branch or the holder of the
executive office more power in congressional primaries than the
candidates themselves have or than the constituents who are
voting for them have. Is that how you see it?
So I would say one thing to see in this regard is a as an
important principle of politicalreform, which is that
(31:30):
prescription is not diagnosis inreverse.
You don't solve problems by undoing what caused them.
You solve problems by thinking about how we could change
incentives to drive different forms of behavior.
So I don't think primaries causepolarization.
We've had primaries for congressional races for more
than 100 years in a lot of the country.
So we had primers through periods of very low
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polarization. In the low 20s, partisan
primaries. Generally they were closed
partisan primaries until the 1970s.
And it it worked in a system that wasn't intensely polarized,
but in a system that is polarized for, for reasons of
cultural change of of of geographic sorting, of a change
in the media environment. In that system, primaries are
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poison. And that's because primaries,
although they're intended to be democratic reforms to empower a
broader portion of the public tobe powerful earlier in the
process to select candidates, not just choose among them.
Primaries have ended up being ananti democratic element of our
system because they empower a very, very narrow sliver of the
(32:38):
American people to make the essential first mover choice in
our system. In a sense, we asked the people
who are most intensely partisan in our country, what do you want
to see at the beginning of everyelection cycle?
And then we do what they want. And obviously that results in a
much more polarized political system than the general public
might want. It's bad for both parties.
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They both end up with candidateswho can't win general elections
that are otherwise winnable. And the reason is primary voters
don't want compromise and bargaining.
They want ideological purity. And I think the the key thing to
understand about our system and especially about Congress, is
that the underlying purpose is bargaining and accommodation.
(33:20):
The American Constitution is built to answer the question,
how can these divided people govern together?
And the answer is bargaining andaccommodation.
So when we think about Congress,you know, everybody agrees
Congress is dysfunctional. And you ask what do you think of
Congress now? It's approval rating is 8%.
And those people probably pickedthe wrong choice on the on the
form. But to say Congress is
(33:43):
dysfunctional is not to explain what function it's not
performing. I actually think we're in some
disagreement about that in our country.
The natural answer is what Congress is not doing is it's
not passing big legislation on the issue I care about most, and
it's not whatever it is you careabout most.
I guarantee Congress is not currently solving that problem.
But the underlying problem is that it's not facilitating
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bargaining and accommodation. That's why we're not passing big
bills. But it matters what you think
the deepest problem is, because if the deepest problem is we're
not passing big bills, then you want a more efficient Congress.
You want to empower party leaders, You want to get rid of
the filibuster. You want things to just go.
If, on the other hand, you think, as the framers of the
Constitution did, that the purpose of Congress is to
(34:28):
facilitate some accommodation ina divided society, and that's
what it's not doing, then you want a less efficient Congress.
You want to force members to deal with each other.
You want to decentralize power so there are all these weird
kind of coalitions that can form.
You love the filibuster as I do,because it's the only reason
we've had any bipartisan legislation now for 15 years.
And so I think it really mattershow we understand what the
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institution is intended to do and just what it is it's failing
at in this moment. The founders, Jeffrey intended
for representation to grow in the House of Representatives in
particular, and it did regularlyuntil the Reapportionment Act of
1929, where the representatives themselves held the number at
435, which is where it is today,even though the population has
(35:13):
tripled since the 1929 Reapportionment Act.
One solution that I have heard you've all advocate is to
increase the number of representatives in the House.
Would that help? The question of apportionment
was the central question at the end of the Constitutional
Convention, and the only substantive intervention that
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George Washington made at the very end was to support what
became the original First Amendment to the Constitution,
which would require one representative for every 30,000
inhabitants. But the framers are really
concerned with making enough representatives so that they can
adequately represent their constituents and not have to
travel too far to talk to them, while at the same time not
(35:58):
creating a body that's so unwieldy that it can't function.
Madison has this amazing line inall large assemblies of any
character. Composed Passion never fails to
wrest the scepter from reason. Even if every Athenian were
Socrates, Athens would still have been a mob.
They're really concerned about these impetuous mob like
(36:20):
decisions. They think that that happens
face to face when there's the liberation and big assemblies
like there was in classical times.
And that's why Madison is so keen on representation as the
solution to mob rule. But what's crucially important
for representatives is the question of time.
(36:40):
You've got to take time not to make impetuous decisions or else
they'll be mob like. So that's why the whole
Constitution is, as you've all suggest, is designed to put
speed bumps and roadblocks to protect impetuous decisions and
and and to require bargaining. So would we be better off if
there were more representatives today?
(37:02):
Not if there weren't more bargaining and slow
consideration of competing points of view.
The basis of the whole Enlightenment idea about how we
arrive at the truth is that it can only emerge when we hear
competing points of view. That is why Jefferson says that
truth has nothing to fear from error as long as reason is free
(37:25):
to combat it. And he thinks that both
representatives and their constituents have to listen to
points of view from diverse sources.
To that degree, the real problemis not the size of Congress, but
it's social media technologies and other media technologies
that result in instant decisionsthat prevent sober second
(37:47):
thoughts, that are based on a model of enrage to engage rather
than reason over passion, and that represent in so many ways
the founders nightmare. To rebuild those speed bumps to
prevent quick decision making isreally tough in an impatient age
where people want immediate answers and they want to express
themselves immediately and they want immediate feedback from
(38:08):
their representatives. But we have got to think about
ways of slowing everything down.Yuval How would dramatically
increasing the number of representatives in the House of
Representatives decrease the polarization and increase
bargaining and accommodation? This is one of the more peculiar
and counter intuitive Madisonianinsights, which is sometimes
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when you deal with a problem, you can solve it by making it
bigger rather than smaller. By increasing its internal
diversity, you create a little bit more of a chance for
coalitions to form, for agreements to be made, because
it's harder for a majority to think it can just roll over a
minority if things are more complicated.
Now there has to be a limit the the the House has to be a face
(38:53):
to face legislature and so you can't have thousands of people.
But when the idea of apportionment through a census
every 10 years was proposed, theassumption was what would happen
is the house would grow after each census.
And it did. It grew through the entirety of
the 19th century and into the 1910 census.
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That was ended for a reason verypeculiar to the 1920s, which
doesn't really apply anymore. And to me, when you think about
how much to grow the house if wewere to engage in that kind of
constitutional maintenance, I don't think this is a
revolutionary idea. It's just a way to recover, to
restore the logic of the system.If the House had kept growing by
the same formula that it was growing by in the 19th century,
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it would now be larger by 149 members.
So I think we should just grow it by 150 members.
I think it needs to have an odd number of members, so I would go
to 150. The House has always had an odd
number. There's no way to resolve a
dispute about a tie in the House.
But if you grow it by 1:50, that's not crazy that the House
would still be smaller than the House of Commons in Britain.
(39:57):
It would be smaller than many European legislatures, a little
larger than others. It.
It's a perfectly plausible imaginable size and then grow
slowly by that same formula every 10 years so that it has
some chance to keep up with the growth of the country.
Members are still representing Asomewhat more manageable
constituency size, and I think the moment of growing by 150 all
(40:21):
at once, of introducing that many members into the
institution, would be an openingfor reforms of other sorts.
You have 150 new members coming in.
You're going to rethink the budget process.
You're going to rethink the committee system.
You're going to think again about how the House rules should
work. And we need that shot in the
arm. There are a lot of changes that
are needed now that in the normal order of things would be
(40:43):
made in Congress. But we've gone through 50 years
with rules made in the 1970s, especially the budget process,
and members have lost the sense that they could even change
these things. They'll complain about budgeting
and you just say, well, it's totally up to you.
That's not in the Constitution. You could on your own just
change how this works. They don't think that way.
And it seems to me that the kindof shot in the arm you could
(41:05):
deliver through what is also just a good idea in itself and
and constitutional maintenance would really help us get to a
point where Congress can rethinksome of its operations.
So to me, growing the House is not a silver bullet, but it's
part of a larger effort to help Congress help itself.
This idea has been introduced, an act has been introduced.
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It hasn't gotten very far. There's a sense that members
feel that they would be deludingtheir power, so why would they
be acting against their self-interest?
It's also a a, a tough thing to argue for.
Not a lot of people look at the House now and say, Gee, I wish
there were more of these people.It's just not our natural
reaction. And I think members think, well,
if there were more than my vote would matter for less.
But they need to think about thelogic of legislative action
(41:48):
where if there were more, there would be more members like them,
right? And like them doesn't just mean
Republican or Democrat. There are more than two types of
people in America. And so you could have more
internal diversity within the party coalitions.
And so allow each of the internal factions to have a
little more power and to matter a little bit more.
I think the the idea that a legislature can work better if
(42:11):
it has more internal division doesn't come naturally to people
who work in the legislature. But it is undeniable that
ultimately Congress works best when there are more than two
sides to every question. And you have to bargain, you
have to negotiate. You can draw some people from
the other party by offering themsomething, and it's not
unimaginable that they would vote for your bill even though
(42:32):
they're not of your party. That requires a kind of internal
diversity that I think, in this moment, require a change in how
the House works. Jeff, you have pointed out that
there is widespread belief that the Constitution itself is
unamendable, that Article 5 setsthe bar way too high, and people
who advocate this position pointto 12,000 amendments that have
(42:55):
been suggested over time, thoughwe have only ever passed 27
amendments to the Constitution. Did the Founders intend for it
to be so difficult? Of course they intended it for
it to be difficult. But did they intend for it to be
this difficult to amend the Constitution?
They disagreed on this question.Jefferson wants a constitutional
(43:17):
convention every 19 years because he thinks that no
generation should impose its deaths on another.
Madison thinks that another constitutional convention would
be a nightmare because it was a miracle the first one succeeded,
and you just don't want to risk a second one messing everything
up. Certainly the the polarization
that's making amendments difficult is 1 they couldn't
(43:39):
have anticipate. But really, we've had waves of
constitutional amendment reconstruction.
Obviously after the Civil War, the Progressive Era, and the
1960s and 70s. It's remarkable how fast some
amendments nearly passed that couldn't today.
The Electoral College Amendment was supported by both parties in
the 1970s and would have passed had it not been for the
(44:01):
opposition of a few Southern Democrats.
So much of it is contingent. It's not like there's not
agreement about what reform should be.
The National Constitution Centersponsored a great project called
the Constitution Drafting Project, where we asked liberal,
conservative and libertarian teams to come up with
constitutional amendments. What blew our minds is that
(44:23):
these very diverse scholars agreed on five amendments and
they included making amendment alittle bit easier, making
impeachment a little harder in the House and easier to convict
in the Senate. 18 year term limits for Supreme Court
justices, resurrecting the legislative veto and eliminating
the requirement that the president be a natural born
(44:45):
citizen. And for all the ways that we've
been talking about to reinvigorate Congress, our multi
partisan teams thought that thiswould be a great way to go.
The problem is that although these have broad support, they
are so geeky, so technical that it's hard to get people to March
in the streets. And one thing we've learned from
American history is you can't pass amendments without national
(45:07):
movements for them. They're they're not top down.
They're from the bottom up. You've got to have the civil
rights amendment, the women's rights amendment and more.
Coming up with the legislative veto movement is sort of hard to
imagine. As we approach the 250th
anniversary of the Declaration, we look back through 250 years
(45:29):
of pretty extraordinary challenge to self governance.
We've endured an industrial revolution.
We've endured and and representative democracy has
endured challenges from competing philosophies of
government. Through the 20th century,
representative government was challenged with a slew of isms
from Bolshevism to Marxism to fascism to communism.
(45:52):
As we approach the next major technological revolution, which
is of course artificial intelligence, how did the ideals
of the Declaration from 250 years ago stand to hold as we
face a future that is almost unimaginable to this to us as we
(46:12):
sit here today? The American Revolution is based
on a claim about how people makeup their minds about truth.
When Jefferson said we hold these truths to be self-evident,
as Walter Isaacson points out inour Promise of America volume,
he was reflecting an Enlightenment distinction
between self-evident truths and factual truths. self-evident
(46:34):
truths are axiomatic 2 + 2 = 4. You can discern them purely
through reason. Factual truths are contested,
people disagree about them, and you need to have empirical
observation and evidence and contestation before you can
agree about whether people's opinions about religious or
political or factual truth are true.
(46:55):
That requires debate between human beings of differing points
of view. One thing that is so striking
about the AI revolution is that it substitutes A centralized
authority that has neither reason nor a moral sense with
the responsibility of citizens to examine primary sources and
(47:19):
make up their own minds. And in that sense, it poses A
fundamental challenge to the whole Enlightenment premise of
the Declaration, that people will take the time to make up
their own minds and not get their opinions from centralized
authorities. Now, you could create a kind of
Madisonian AI which would slow down deliberation, which would
(47:39):
provide questions rather than answers, which would give you
primary texts that citizens would have to evaluate before
they could make up their own minds.
The challenge there is who woulduse it?
I mean, you really have to slow down to use a Madisonian AI.
But what's so striking is that problem went back to the very
beginning. And ever since Madison himself
proposed this enlightened class of a literati sort of elite that
(48:02):
would mediate people's opinions,it's been very hard to get
Americans to defer to institutions or experts.
And communications technologies from the Telegraph to television
to the radio to social media to AI favor instant decision making
rather than slowing things down.So we're it's the oldest problem
(48:23):
of the founding. It is not a new problem.
How can citizens achieve that personal self government that
will require them to make up their own minds, to take the
time to examine primary sources and to think for themselves.
The the hope though, is that as you said, we've we've suffered
and endured amazing challenges. The the bloodiness of the Civil
(48:46):
War, an election of 1800 where the Constitution nearly failed,
the extraordinary violence in response to Reconstruction,
Southern redemption which deniedAfrican Americans the the right
to civil rights for nearly a century.
And of course all the challengesof the post war era.
And yet we haven't do it. And yet the arc of justice does
(49:07):
bend upward, as Martin Luther King said, quoting Jefferson
himself. And what's so inspiring is that
we are a creedal nation, as so many scholars have said in this
book. And it's the ideals that hold us
together. The point is not agreement about
how to balance the ideals. Hamilton and Jefferson disagree
themselves about that. Disagreement is not a bug in the
(49:31):
system. It's a feature.
It's respectful debate. It's deliberation.
I love the fact that after Hamilton dies in the duel,
Jefferson places a bust of Hamilton across from his own bus
in the central entrance hall of Monticello.
Anyone can see it there today. It's really moving.
And when he passed it and he wasold, Jefferson would smile
faintly and say opposed. In life as in death, and it's
(49:54):
really significant for Jefferson, Hamilton is not a
hated enemy to be opposed or destroyed, but a respected
opponent to be engaged with. And as long as we get back to
that spirit, we will continue tothrive as a Republic.
Yuval, how do you see the idealsof the Declaration transcending
the next major technological revolution that humanity will
(50:15):
have to endure? I think one key thing to see
about those ideals is that they're fundamentally rooted in
a view of human nature and in the sense that that is not
something that changes the worldchanges the the founding
generation certainly expected that the world would change a
lot and that we would live through a lot of progress and
also a lot of challenges. But the fundamental character of
(50:37):
human nature they did not expectto change.
And I think that's one very important thing to think about
in seeing where we stand now, because the there is a way in
which the the principles of the declaration, as Calvin Coolidge
said exactly 100 years ago in the 150th anniversary of the, of
the declaration, he gave a wonderful speech in
Philadelphia. And he said these words are
(50:58):
final. If you believe that all men are
created equal, that's final. That's not going to change.
And So what they said, there is not something to improve upon or
rethink. It's something to build on as a
foundation because it is final. I think that's still true.
And whatever technological change we see, it's worth our
seeing that the reason our country is endured the way it
(51:19):
has is that those principles areand were final.
And you know, America is an old country.
We like to think of ourselves asa young people.
We're forward-looking and we are.
But our government is essentially the oldest
government in the in in today's world.
There are the British can say they had institutions with the
same names in 1800. They didn't do the same things
(51:41):
they do now. They the United States has had
the same government for longer than any other society in the
modern world, and that's becausethat government was built to
endure through challenges and changes, and it is still built
for that. The premise of your answer is
that artificial intelligence andthe robots won't change human
nature. That's right, they won't.
(52:03):
OK. Like it or not.
Good or. Bad.
That is my expectation. There it is.
Yuvalovan Jeffrey Rosen, thank you so much for joining me.
Thank you. Thank you.
There's a lot of talk about conflict, there's a lot of talk
about fighting, but the fact is,everything that members of
Congress complain about when they talk about what the
president does are things they could do something about.
That's American Enterprise Institute's senior fellow Yuval
Levin. In many ways, this would be
James Madison's nightmare, Madison's main fierce faction,
which he defines as any group animated by passion rather than
(00:24):
reason, devoted to self-interestrather than the public good.
And that's Jeffrey Rosen, CEO emeritus of the National
Constitution Center, reflecting on what's wrong with Congress.
I'm Margaret Hoover. This is the FIRING LINE podcast.
Yuvalovan worked for Newt Gingrich and George W Bush
(00:46):
before joining the American Enterprise Institute, where he
is director of social, cultural and constitutional studies.
The separation of powers is not just a structure, it's a
process. It only works if everyone
involved is pushing hard. It's only as a result of that
conflict that a kind of stability can be sustained.
Jeffrey Rosen is a law professorand author who served as
(01:08):
president and CEO of the National Constitution Center for
more than a decade. This central question is
President Trump, for example, Julius Caesar, or is he Andrew
Jackson? Is he?
Well, in the American populist tradition is one that goes back
to the very beginning. With the nation's 250th birthday
approaching, they join me to discuss the Center's a new book,
the Promise of America, and the challenges the country faces as
(01:31):
we look to the future. One thing that is so striking
about the AI revolution is that it substitutes A centralized
authority that has neither reason nor a moral sense with
the responsibility of citizens to examine primary sources and
make up their own minds. The founding generations
certainly expected that the world would change a lot, but
(01:54):
the fundamental character of human nature they did not expect
to change. Jeffrey Rosen, Yuvalovan,
welcome to Firing LINE. Thank you very much.
Great. To be here.
You have both contributed to a book that is published by the
National Constitution Center called The Promise of America,
(02:15):
Reflections on Our Enduring Bonds.
We near the 250th anniversary ofthe signing of the Declaration
of Independence. How well is America living up to
its promise, Jeff? Well, it was so exciting for us
at the National Constitution Center to identify the ideals of
(02:35):
the Declaration and the Constitution, and then to ask
how we're living up to it. So for the Declaration, liberty,
equality and government by consent, and for the
Constitution, separation of powers, federalism and the Bill
of Rights, It's so striking how much consensus there was among
the contributors about those principles.
(02:56):
Justice Gorsuch wrote the conclusion.
Justice Breyer wrote the introduction.
Both of them agreed that those are the principles of the
American creed. So the essayists conclude that
although there's disagreement about how to balance those
values of liberty and equality or separation of powers and
federalism, both liberals and conservatives agree that those
(03:18):
are in fact the principles of the American creed.
And there was something incredibly unifying and
inspiring about bringing together these people of
different perspectives and having them agree about what our
basic principles are. How well is America living up to
its promise? You've all.
I think we're living up to our promise, but one way to
understand the way that Jeff hasjust put this is that part of
(03:40):
what's distinct about the American promise is that we
started by asserting our principles and ideals.
And that means that we're alwaysin the process of holding
ourselves to account. And holding yourself to account
never can mean that we're doing great.
And I don't think anybody looking at 21st century America
would say we're doing great. That's not the issue.
(04:01):
The question is, is America aware of its ideals?
Do we understand where we're falling short, and are we
looking for ways to do somethingabout it?
Obviously, the country can disappoint us.
Obviously, in the 21st century, if we think about our
constitutional principles, if wethink about our commitments in
the declaration, there are a lotof ways in which we're
disappointing ourselves. That's been true in every moment
(04:23):
in America. But what stands out about our
country is that we can hold ourselves to account that when
we fall short, we know exactly how.
Because at the very beginning there are these documents that
say this is what it ought to look like.
And in every moment they can look at us and say, well, not
quite. And that's surely true now.
But I think having those ideals and principles to look to, to
(04:46):
ground ourselves in, remains a great strength for our country.
We do actually agree, for example, that we're all created
equal. We don't agree about what that
means. We don't agree about what it
demands of us. We don't agree about what it
requires in this moment. But beginning from that
agreement is still something really extraordinary.
And I do think that in the 21st century, for all of our many
problems, and they're very real,we have a lot to be grateful for
(05:09):
in those founding ideals and documents, and having an excuse
to look to them in the 250th year is a very valuable thing
for a country in our situation. As we approach July 4th, the
signing of the Declaration reflect, both of you, please, on
what it was that made the idealsenunciated in the Declaration so
(05:33):
unique or distinct in that context and in that moment in
history. It's striking that in some sense
they weren't unique. Thomas Jefferson said that he
was merely distilling the principles of public writers
like John Locke and Cicero and Algernon Sidney and putting them
(05:55):
before a candid world. But what made them unique is to
take a philosophical consensus about what liberty means and to
write them down. It was the writtenness of the
Declaration that both gave future generations ideals and
creeds to live up to, and then inspire the rest of the world to
(06:15):
adopt declarations. There's a great essay in this
book by David Armitage about thefact that there were no
declarations of independence to speak of before ours.
But in the 19th and 20th century, almost all nations that
founded new democracies had a kind of declaration.
But what's most striking at all is how much consensus there was
(06:38):
among the delegates about the idea that personal self
government is necessary for political self government, That
government by consent is a fundamental principle of a
Republic, that people are morally equal, and that there
are certain unalienable rights that it is the government's duty
(07:00):
to protect. And when the government breaks
that deal, it's the right and responsibility of people to
alter and abolish it. So the right of revolution is
inherent in the social compact itself.
The idea of an unalienable rightthat you can't alienate or
surrender to government is crucial.
I can't give you the power to control my thoughts because my
(07:22):
thoughts of the connective reason and I can't surrender my
reason even if I wanted to. And that's why freedom of
conscience was the central unalienable right.
And it's expressed in the idea of the pursuit of happiness.
It's it's really striking that Jefferson had right next to him
the Virginia Bill of Rights drafted by his friend George
Mason. The preamble to that Bill of
(07:43):
Rights looks so much like Jefferson's declaration that you
could almost, you know, it almost looks plagiarized or
paraphrased. James Wilson had another
document that Jefferson had by his side.
So he's very modest about the fact that he's not doing
anything original at all. His great brilliance was to
synthesize the ideals more perfectly than anyone has ever
done. And as a result, he wrote what
(08:04):
Walter Isaacson in this volume calls the greatest sentence ever
written. Which, you know, was edited by
Adams and Franklin. But, but we'll take it.
Yuval, you said that the ideals in the Declaration appeared on
paper first, right? That we established our ideals
and then built a country around them.
(08:25):
How would you sort of take that question?
How did those principles and writing them down, why was that
distinct in human history? You know, to me what most stands
out about that extraordinary declaration is the premise that
we're all created equal. I I think we take it for
granted. We treat it as obvious.
It calls itself self-evident, but it's not at all
(08:46):
self-evident, not if you look athuman history.
It hasn't been obvious. It's something that we in the
modern world know that Plato andAristotle didn't know.
It's something we've learned thehard way in America too.
And there's a way that that fundamental commitment, the idea
that all human beings are morally equal, that that idea
(09:08):
contains almost the entirety of the American story.
Because our equality demands a couple of things.
On the one hand, it points to consent.
If we're all equal, then no one has authority over anyone else.
By nature, we can only really govern by consent, which
practically means we can only really govern by majority rule.
At the same time, our equality means we each have rights that
(09:29):
can't be taken away. And The thing is, those two
principles are in tension with each other, right?
Majority rule and minority rights are not the same thing.
And there are moments when. The founders themselves.
Exactly, right. And, and really at every moment
in American life, we are fighting over some tension
between the right of the majority to govern and the
(09:51):
rights of individuals that have to be respected.
And if if you're in a minority, you're still an individual with
rights, those can't be taken away from you.
So how in the world do you balance majority rule and
minority rights? Everything about our political
tradition is an attempt to answer that question.
Just about everything in the Constitution in one way or
another is an answer to that question.
(10:12):
It remains a question that we constantly struggle with.
And, you know, there's a way that we sometimes talk about the
kind of legal proceduralism of American life as if it's morally
neutral, right? It's just, it's just a kind of
legalism. That legal proceduralism emerges
exactly from this tension. How do you simultaneously
protect majority rule and minority rights?
(10:34):
That's why we have these rules. It's the furthest thing from
morally neutral. It's the most morally freighted
imaginable thing in the life of a society.
And the fact that that's just right there, that this principle
that demands 2 contradictory things and puts in place the
whole story is in our declaration at the first moment,
(10:54):
is just an extraordinary fact. And, you know, you can see all
of American history kind of rolling from that one little
phrase. Another way, Jeff, you often put
that competition of ideas is in the embodiment of Thomas
Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton, right?
That the views of Jefferson as aindividual who emphasized states
(11:15):
rights emphasize local control versus Alexander Hamilton, who,
of course agitated for strong federal control.
You are always keen to point outthat that debate, as you've all
said, over the course of 250 years, not only has it never
been settled, but it continues to rear its head in the course
of new Supreme Court rulings that have come out and the way
(11:38):
we interpret laws, legislation, different competing
philosophies. It is ultimately that original
and Seminole tension between thetwo and their competing
philosophies for how to secure liberty.
Give me some examples of how andwe see it today.
It is remarkable how Hamilton and Jefferson's initial battles
(11:59):
over, as you said, national power versus states rights and
also executive power versus congressional power, democracy
versus rule by elites, and liberal versus strict
construction of the Constitutionhave defined all of American
history, our political, our constitutional and our social
history examples. Today, what's the most contested
(12:19):
question that we're discussing? The nature of executive power.
Has the president become so powerful that he's become a kind
of Julius Caesar, an emperor who's subverting the American
ideal? Well, this is exactly the
question that Hamilton and Jefferson debated at the dawn of
the American government. There was this amazing dinner
(12:40):
party, I call it the dinner party that defined America.
Where Hamilton and Jefferson meet with the rest of the
cabinet, Washington is away at At some point in the evening.
Hamilton looks at Jefferson's portraits and says who are those
guys on the wall? Jefferson says those are my
visions of the three greatest men in history, John Locke,
Francis Bacon, and Isaac Newton.Hamilton pauses for a long time
(13:01):
and then he blurts out the greatest man that ever lived was
Julius Caesar and Jefferson writes in his diary that night.
This proves that Hamilton is notonly for a monarchy, but a
monarchy bottomed on corruption,and he goes on to found the
Democratic Republican Party in supposed opposition to the
monarchism and Caesarism of Hamilton and the Federalists.
(13:21):
And for much of the 19th century, the debate is has the
president become too strong? In 1912, Woodrow Wilson and
Theodore Roosevelt insist that the president is a steward of
the people who should directly channel popular will.
That creates what Arthur Schlesinger has called the
imperial presidency and has vastly expanded presidential
(13:44):
power. And then Fast forward to today.
We're debating both in the WhiteHouse and in Congress and also
in the Supreme Court. How strong should the president
be? This whole idea of the unitary
executive that the Supreme Courtis invoking is a phrase that
comes from Alexander Hamilton's Pacificus Letters.
And Hamilton believed that you needed an executive strong
(14:05):
enough to resist popular demagoguery.
In fact, his suggestion at the Constitutional Convention was
the president elected for life so that he could resist populist
temptations. Jefferson is the opposite.
He wants a term limit for the president so he won't be tempted
to install himself as a dictator.
So this central question, is President Trump, for example,
(14:26):
Julius Caesar, or is he Andrew Jackson?
Is he? Well, in the American populist
tradition is one that goes back to the very beginning.
Jeffrey Strong executives have often, throughout American
history, been accused of being authoritarians or dictators.
Andrew Jackson, Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, all
were accused of authoritarian impulses or being dictators.
(14:49):
So to what extent is the currentaccusations that Donald of
Donald Trump, the current administration a departure or an
extension of the same trend? Well, it really is striking, as
you say, that Franklin Rooseveltwas accused so often of being a
dictator, a Julius Caesar character, that he dressed up
like Julius Caesar for his birthday in 1934.
(15:09):
And he's wearing this Laurel crown in a toga, and Eleanor is
dressed like a Roman matron. So he was kind of making fun of
the charges of Caesarism, but itwas no joke.
I mean, he's not. Familiar with that in the day of
social media? No, it was content forever.
AI could do a version of it, butit's.
Not as good as there is. Completely.
But but it's it's not a joke because FDR, remember, tried to
(15:29):
pack the Supreme Court in a way that was so extreme that even
Democrats in Congress rebelled. He insisted in wartime that the
president could do no wrong. And the Supreme Court
essentially gave him a blank check to do things like intern
Japanese American citizens and some of the more shameful
moments of our constitutional history.
And he was so threatening that Congress, after he ran for a
(15:52):
fourth term, passed the 22nd Amendment, which forbade
presidents for serving more thantwo terms.
Lincoln also attacked as a dictator criticized for
suspending habeas corpus during the Civil War without
congressional consent. Andrew Jackson called King
Jackson or King Mob so the and and to go back to the very
(16:14):
beginning, the one character that both Hamilton and Jefferson
agreed was a Julius Caesar was Aaron Burr.
Hamilton has this great line if we have a crypto Caesar tis Burr
and he rightly suspected that Burr was conspiring to lead a
secessionist movement in SpanishLouisiana and set himself up as
dictator of Mexico. And he sacrificed his life nobly
(16:36):
'cause he preferred Jefferson toBurr in the election of 1800.
Burr gets wind of it, and that leads to the dual.
So the fears go back to the verybeginning.
The difference is that the office of the presidency has
expanded so much more vastly than it was at the time of the
founding. And as Yuval has pointed out so
powerfully in his important books, Congress has become
(16:57):
supine. And the branch that the Founders
expected to be the most dangerous branch, sucking all
power into its impetuous vortex,as Madison says, has basically
rolled over and let the president do whatever he wants
at a time when the courts have become both more powerful and
more deferential to executive power.
But how much of a departure is the current administration's
(17:19):
expansion of executive power anduse of the executive power that
has expanded even over the last 40 years?
Is it aligned with previous president's use of the executive
power or is this a departure? It's the central question.
In terms of the numbers of executive orders issued, it's
(17:39):
not wildly out of line. They've been increasing ever
since Roosevelt did about 3000, and they've been in the order of
hundreds for presidents since the post war era.
But the question is whether President Trump is using them in
unprecedented ways. And in some sense, we'll see
that this term, where the Supreme Court by many accounts
seems likely to repudiate President Trump's use of
(18:02):
executive orders to suspend birthright citizenship.
And we'll also see what they think of his effort to remove
people who had the Federal Reserve.
There are cases like Trump, the US, which the majority said was
creating a broad immunity for the president that Alexander
Hamilton would have favored. Justice Sotomayor and her
(18:23):
dissent said this is a complete departure from what the founders
intended because the founders didn't want the president to be
a king. And for Justice Sotomayor, even
Alexander Hamilton wouldn't havegone that far in.
In a sense, it's too soon to judge whether President Trump is
within the historical power of the accretion of executive power
or whether he's something else. Much will turn on the Supreme
(18:46):
Court, but it is striking that more and more what presidents,
once they get into office, have been demanding powers that the
founders did not anticipate. In the books Forward, retired
Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer wrote that the core
principle of the American Spiritexperiment is that, quote, no
government, no part of government would become too
(19:07):
powerful. You've all your scholarship and
contribution to this collection focuses on separation of powers.
You have said, quote, the founders would not be surprised
by a president seeking Napoleonic powers.
They would have been very surprised, though, by a Congress
that allows that to happen and that let its own power flow to
(19:31):
the president. That's the problem we face now.
Is Congress the branch of government that is working least
as the Founders anticipate it? Absolutely.
I think in relation to the design of the system and the
expectations of the founders, Congress is the most
(19:52):
dysfunctional of the branches. It's very easy right now to look
at these Titanic struggles between the president and the
courts and say that's where the action is.
But it's very important for us to see that the absence of
action is a distinct constitutional problem.
The separation of powers is not just a structure, it's a
process. It only works if everyone
involved is pushing hard and theexpectation is that it would
(20:16):
take the form of continual conflict.
And it's only as a result of that conflict that a, a kind of
stability can be sustained. So that in the absence of
conflict, and strangely enough, I look at this moment and I see
an absence of conflict. In the absence of that conflict,
there is imbalance. And the absence is not a result
(20:37):
of a president who doesn't want enough.
This president wants a lot. And whether it's within the
bounds of prior presidential power struggles or not, there's
no doubt that he's after more executive power.
The courts are active, too, and they're assertive.
They're facing a very demanding situation.
I think they're rising to that challenge.
For the most part, Congress is sitting on the sidelines
(21:00):
watching it happened and functioning as a kind of
commentariat rather than as the chief actor in the system, which
is really how the Constitution sees it.
And that absence of congressional action creates a
vacuum that presidential power rushes into, that the courts
rush into in ways that they certainly feel like they're
(21:20):
getting dragged and are forced to act in the present tense in
ways they're not really built for.
A lot of that, almost all of it is a function of Congress
choosing to stay out of the game.
And I think that's our chief constitutional problem now.
So for for a layman or for the audience who just engages, they
(21:40):
would be hard pressed to understand how there's an
absence of conflict because the rhetoric is so high, because the
Twitter wars are very active. So unpack for the audience, what
do you mean by an absence of conflict in Congress?
There's a lot of talk about conflict.
There's a lot of talk about fighting.
But the fact is, everything thatmembers of Congress complain
(22:00):
about when they talk about what the president does are things
they could do something about. If they don't like the tariff
policy, Congress can direct and change tariff policy.
In fact, the Constitution gives that power to Congress.
They've given it to presidents, and they can take it back if, if
they're not happy about where the federal budget is going,
well, that's really their first and foremost job.
(22:22):
They should. They should act on that front.
And war powers. War powers, too.
They have a role to play. War powers do belong to the
president to a large degree, butthere's a role for Congress.
There's a role for Congress in declaring war, in providing
authorizations for military action, in controlling the
defense budget Oversight. Absolutely they can.
(22:43):
They can do a lot more of the kind of traditional oversight
that then the modern Congress has done.
There's a way in which Congress has come to see itself as a
secondary player in a fundamentally presidential
drama, so that the question theyalways face in their own minds
is a yes or no question about the president.
And actually the question Congress needs to answer is what
(23:05):
ought to be the direction of ournational government.
That's the question That's up tothem.
The person who's empowered to answer yes or no questions is
the president. He has a veto power.
They send him something and he says yes or no.
It's a very strong power, but hedoesn't get to drive.
Only if Congress lets him does he have the kind of command of
the agenda that our modern presidents have had.
(23:27):
I do think there's a tradition, there's a pattern in American
history where periods of presidential excess have been
followed by periods of congressional reassertion.
That happened after Andrew Jackson.
It happened after Woodrow Wilson, you know, a year after
Franklin Roosevelt died in office.
Congress sends to the states a constitutional amendment to
restrict the president to two terms.
(23:48):
A lot of Democrats voted for that amendment in Congress.
Those kind of moments do come, but they don't come on their
own. They require a kind of
reawakening of the sense that the role that members of
Congress have is an active role.It is not passive observation.
It's not commentary. They're not in the business of
hosting podcasts about the president.
(24:09):
They have a real job to do. You've worked in Congress.
You're a scholar of the Congress.
How, in your view, has the Congress come to abdicate its
authority, its power, its centrality?
I think there's a lot going on there.
It's an over determined dynamic,but one key thing to see is that
Congress has centralized power internally in the hands of
(24:31):
leaders now for 50 years. Ironically, they did it actually
to strengthen the institution against the president.
They did it in the 70s to fight Richard Nixon, and then the
Democrats did, and then Republicans did it in the 90s to
fight Bill Clinton. The trouble is when you
centralized power in an institution with 535 people and
you have four people making all the decisions, that leaves 531
(24:54):
very ambitious men and women looking for things to do to gain
prominence, to build their career, to advance their
political interests. And if legislating is not
available to them, they're goingto do other things.
They're going to start those podcasts.
They're going to find ways to become prominent so that the
centralization of power is meantthat members don't have enough
to do day-to-day. That counts as real legislation.
(25:15):
That means that re empowering Congress would would require
decentralizing, allowing the committees to exercise real
power, finding ways to give members more work to do.
I think that's one important dynamic.
You mentioned the centrality of Speakers of the House beginning
in the 20th century, culminating, perhaps was when
(25:36):
Republicans centralized power around Newt Gingrich to
challenge President Bill Clinton's authority in 1997, as
Newt Gingrich was at the end of his first term as Speaker.
Beginning his second term, William F Buckley Junior hosted
a discussion about Newt Gingrich's leadership as Speaker
of the House. And I'd like you both to take a
(25:56):
look at the conversation then. Well, I think that all
Republicans in Washington are under the impression that they
went too far last in the last Congress and are as, as Kate
said, sort of shell shocked. They lack confidence in.
Their own went too far, went maladroitly.
Went too far, I think is the is the reigning.
(26:19):
We might believe that they simply chose the wrong issues,
but their own perception is theywere simply too bold and now
they've got to go along to get along.
So of course, that was Ramesh Ponnuru, who is currently the
editor in chief of the National Review, who was speaking to
William F Buckley Junior, who was then the editor of the
National Review, reflecting on what Newt Gingrich had gotten
(26:41):
right and wrong and and why it was becoming difficult for him
to govern the House of Representatives.
You've all you worked for Newt Gingrich in that time.
Yeah, I it was not obvious then what he got wrong.
And I think even in that clip wesee that the sense was maybe
they were pushing on different issues than they should be.
Maybe they were pushing too hard.
(27:02):
In retrospect, and I will say plainly, this was not obvious to
me in the 1990s. In retrospect, what Gingrich got
wrong was the over centralization of power in
leadership in Congress. The idea that the Speaker should
function as a kind of Prime Minister, that he should be able
to wield Congress as a weapon against the president of the
other party, ended up meaning that the rest of the members of
(27:27):
Congress look to party leaders for direction.
More than that, they look to party leaders for protection.
They don't want to take hard votes.
They get upset with their leaders when they're forced to
put on the record views that might come back to haunt them at
election time. And the trouble is that's their
job. That is their job.
And if their job becomes just kind of playing along and being
(27:48):
good communicators, and in return they get protected from
taking hard votes, then they're not legislators.
And I think as that process continued and Gingrich
centralized power after that, itbecame further centralized.
Dennis Hastert, Gingrich's successor, decided that he would
never put a bill on the floor that didn't have a majority of
the majority party. It's very hard for Congress to
(28:09):
work that way. Nancy Pelosi further centralized
power when the Democrats took control, and we've reached a
point now where Congress is an extremely centralized
legislature in a system that requires a lot of cross partisan
bargaining in order for things to work.
You can't really do cross partisan bargaining when leaders
have all the power and there is now a need for decentralization.
(28:32):
I think this is actually something that happens often
with political reform in every era.
The solutions we need are solutions to problems created by
the solutions of the last era. We solve problems.
Maybe it works, but but we go too far or we or there are
unexpected problems and you end up having to pull back a little.
I think it's very much where we are.
Jeffrey, how do you see it? How do you see Congress's
(28:53):
failure to jealously guard its power from the executive branch?
In many ways, this would be James Madison's nightmare.
Remember, he thought that Congress is going to suck all
power into its impetuous vortex,but he also thought that it had
a crucial role in refining and enlarging public opinion.
Madison's main fierce faction, which he defines as any group, A
(29:16):
majority or a minority, animatedby passion rather than reason,
devoted to self-interest rather than the public good.
He thinks the two institutions are going to combat faction,
virtuous representatives who will look to the long term
interests of the country as a whole rather than the short term
interests of their own leaders or parties or constituents.
(29:40):
And then a press, in particular the broadside press that would
coolly dispatch and disperse reason across the land, read by
an enlightened class of journalists and representatives
that Madison called the literati, who he thought would
help citizens engaged with complicated ideas, listen to
differing points of view, and essentially make up their own
(30:02):
minds. That was the central Madisonian
hope, that unlike the medieval era where people got their
opinions from kings or popes or mobs, in America, in the
Enlightenment it was every citizen's responsibility to read
primary text, discuss them with their representatives, and make
up their own mind. Now of course, the party system
wasn't really up and running. When Madison wrote The
(30:23):
Federalist Papers, he was responsible, along with
Jefferson, for founding the Democratic Republican Party.
But for much of our history, party has functioned as groups
that amalgamated different interests and allowed the kind
of cross partisan bargaining that you've all describes.
Once we get so polarized that the parties are more determined
in supporting their guy in the White House and protecting the
(30:46):
parochial interests of their ownconstituents, even when they're
minorities, they're acting exactly as the kind of
passionate factions that Madisonmost feared.
Yuval, you pointed to one of thecauses of the polarization as
perhaps being the electoral system that is centered around
closed partisan primaries, whichto my way of thinking is
(31:09):
actually given the executive branch or the holder of the
executive office more power in congressional primaries than the
candidates themselves have or than the constituents who are
voting for them have. Is that how you see it?
So I would say one thing to see in this regard is a as an
important principle of politicalreform, which is that
(31:30):
prescription is not diagnosis inreverse.
You don't solve problems by undoing what caused them.
You solve problems by thinking about how we could change
incentives to drive different forms of behavior.
So I don't think primaries causepolarization.
We've had primaries for congressional races for more
than 100 years in a lot of the country.
So we had primers through periods of very low
(31:51):
polarization. In the low 20s, partisan
primaries. Generally they were closed
partisan primaries until the 1970s.
And it it worked in a system that wasn't intensely polarized,
but in a system that is polarized for, for reasons of
cultural change of of of geographic sorting, of a change
in the media environment. In that system, primaries are
(32:16):
poison. And that's because primaries,
although they're intended to be democratic reforms to empower a
broader portion of the public tobe powerful earlier in the
process to select candidates, not just choose among them.
Primaries have ended up being ananti democratic element of our
system because they empower a very, very narrow sliver of the
(32:38):
American people to make the essential first mover choice in
our system. In a sense, we asked the people
who are most intensely partisan in our country, what do you want
to see at the beginning of everyelection cycle?
And then we do what they want. And obviously that results in a
much more polarized political system than the general public
might want. It's bad for both parties.
(33:00):
They both end up with candidateswho can't win general elections
that are otherwise winnable. And the reason is primary voters
don't want compromise and bargaining.
They want ideological purity. And I think the the key thing to
understand about our system and especially about Congress, is
that the underlying purpose is bargaining and accommodation.
(33:20):
The American Constitution is built to answer the question,
how can these divided people govern together?
And the answer is bargaining andaccommodation.
So when we think about Congress,you know, everybody agrees
Congress is dysfunctional. And you ask what do you think of
Congress now? It's approval rating is 8%.
And those people probably pickedthe wrong choice on the on the
form. But to say Congress is
(33:43):
dysfunctional is not to explain what function it's not
performing. I actually think we're in some
disagreement about that in our country.
The natural answer is what Congress is not doing is it's
not passing big legislation on the issue I care about most, and
it's not whatever it is you careabout most.
I guarantee Congress is not currently solving that problem.
But the underlying problem is that it's not facilitating
(34:05):
bargaining and accommodation. That's why we're not passing big
bills. But it matters what you think
the deepest problem is, because if the deepest problem is we're
not passing big bills, then you want a more efficient Congress.
You want to empower party leaders, You want to get rid of
the filibuster. You want things to just go.
If, on the other hand, you think, as the framers of the
Constitution did, that the purpose of Congress is to
(34:28):
facilitate some accommodation ina divided society, and that's
what it's not doing, then you want a less efficient Congress.
You want to force members to deal with each other.
You want to decentralize power so there are all these weird
kind of coalitions that can form.
You love the filibuster as I do,because it's the only reason
we've had any bipartisan legislation now for 15 years.
And so I think it really mattershow we understand what the
(34:51):
institution is intended to do and just what it is it's failing
at in this moment. The founders, Jeffrey intended
for representation to grow in the House of Representatives in
particular, and it did regularlyuntil the Reapportionment Act of
1929, where the representatives themselves held the number at
435, which is where it is today,even though the population has
(35:13):
tripled since the 1929 Reapportionment Act.
One solution that I have heard you've all advocate is to
increase the number of representatives in the House.
Would that help? The question of apportionment
was the central question at the end of the Constitutional
Convention, and the only substantive intervention that
(35:35):
George Washington made at the very end was to support what
became the original First Amendment to the Constitution,
which would require one representative for every 30,000
inhabitants. But the framers are really
concerned with making enough representatives so that they can
adequately represent their constituents and not have to
travel too far to talk to them, while at the same time not
(35:58):
creating a body that's so unwieldy that it can't function.
Madison has this amazing line inall large assemblies of any
character. Composed Passion never fails to
wrest the scepter from reason. Even if every Athenian were
Socrates, Athens would still have been a mob.
They're really concerned about these impetuous mob like
(36:20):
decisions. They think that that happens
face to face when there's the liberation and big assemblies
like there was in classical times.
And that's why Madison is so keen on representation as the
solution to mob rule. But what's crucially important
for representatives is the question of time.
(36:40):
You've got to take time not to make impetuous decisions or else
they'll be mob like. So that's why the whole
Constitution is, as you've all suggest, is designed to put
speed bumps and roadblocks to protect impetuous decisions and
and and to require bargaining. So would we be better off if
there were more representatives today?
(37:02):
Not if there weren't more bargaining and slow
consideration of competing points of view.
The basis of the whole Enlightenment idea about how we
arrive at the truth is that it can only emerge when we hear
competing points of view. That is why Jefferson says that
truth has nothing to fear from error as long as reason is free
(37:25):
to combat it. And he thinks that both
representatives and their constituents have to listen to
points of view from diverse sources.
To that degree, the real problemis not the size of Congress, but
it's social media technologies and other media technologies
that result in instant decisionsthat prevent sober second
(37:47):
thoughts, that are based on a model of enrage to engage rather
than reason over passion, and that represent in so many ways
the founders nightmare. To rebuild those speed bumps to
prevent quick decision making isreally tough in an impatient age
where people want immediate answers and they want to express
themselves immediately and they want immediate feedback from
(38:08):
their representatives. But we have got to think about
ways of slowing everything down.Yuval How would dramatically
increasing the number of representatives in the House of
Representatives decrease the polarization and increase
bargaining and accommodation? This is one of the more peculiar
and counter intuitive Madisonianinsights, which is sometimes
(38:30):
when you deal with a problem, you can solve it by making it
bigger rather than smaller. By increasing its internal
diversity, you create a little bit more of a chance for
coalitions to form, for agreements to be made, because
it's harder for a majority to think it can just roll over a
minority if things are more complicated.
Now there has to be a limit the the the House has to be a face
(38:53):
to face legislature and so you can't have thousands of people.
But when the idea of apportionment through a census
every 10 years was proposed, theassumption was what would happen
is the house would grow after each census.
And it did. It grew through the entirety of
the 19th century and into the 1910 census.
(39:13):
That was ended for a reason verypeculiar to the 1920s, which
doesn't really apply anymore. And to me, when you think about
how much to grow the house if wewere to engage in that kind of
constitutional maintenance, I don't think this is a
revolutionary idea. It's just a way to recover, to
restore the logic of the system.If the House had kept growing by
the same formula that it was growing by in the 19th century,
(39:36):
it would now be larger by 149 members.
So I think we should just grow it by 150 members.
I think it needs to have an odd number of members, so I would go
to 150. The House has always had an odd
number. There's no way to resolve a
dispute about a tie in the House.
But if you grow it by 1:50, that's not crazy that the House
would still be smaller than the House of Commons in Britain.
(39:57):
It would be smaller than many European legislatures, a little
larger than others. It.
It's a perfectly plausible imaginable size and then grow
slowly by that same formula every 10 years so that it has
some chance to keep up with the growth of the country.
Members are still representing Asomewhat more manageable
constituency size, and I think the moment of growing by 150 all
(40:21):
at once, of introducing that many members into the
institution, would be an openingfor reforms of other sorts.
You have 150 new members coming in.
You're going to rethink the budget process.
You're going to rethink the committee system.
You're going to think again about how the House rules should
work. And we need that shot in the
arm. There are a lot of changes that
are needed now that in the normal order of things would be
(40:43):
made in Congress. But we've gone through 50 years
with rules made in the 1970s, especially the budget process,
and members have lost the sense that they could even change
these things. They'll complain about budgeting
and you just say, well, it's totally up to you.
That's not in the Constitution. You could on your own just
change how this works. They don't think that way.
And it seems to me that the kindof shot in the arm you could
(41:05):
deliver through what is also just a good idea in itself and
and constitutional maintenance would really help us get to a
point where Congress can rethinksome of its operations.
So to me, growing the House is not a silver bullet, but it's
part of a larger effort to help Congress help itself.
This idea has been introduced, an act has been introduced.
(41:26):
It hasn't gotten very far. There's a sense that members
feel that they would be deludingtheir power, so why would they
be acting against their self-interest?
It's also a a, a tough thing to argue for.
Not a lot of people look at the House now and say, Gee, I wish
there were more of these people.It's just not our natural
reaction. And I think members think, well,
if there were more than my vote would matter for less.
But they need to think about thelogic of legislative action
(41:48):
where if there were more, there would be more members like them,
right? And like them doesn't just mean
Republican or Democrat. There are more than two types of
people in America. And so you could have more
internal diversity within the party coalitions.
And so allow each of the internal factions to have a
little more power and to matter a little bit more.
I think the the idea that a legislature can work better if
(42:11):
it has more internal division doesn't come naturally to people
who work in the legislature. But it is undeniable that
ultimately Congress works best when there are more than two
sides to every question. And you have to bargain, you
have to negotiate. You can draw some people from
the other party by offering themsomething, and it's not
unimaginable that they would vote for your bill even though
(42:32):
they're not of your party. That requires a kind of internal
diversity that I think, in this moment, require a change in how
the House works. Jeff, you have pointed out that
there is widespread belief that the Constitution itself is
unamendable, that Article 5 setsthe bar way too high, and people
who advocate this position pointto 12,000 amendments that have
(42:55):
been suggested over time, thoughwe have only ever passed 27
amendments to the Constitution. Did the Founders intend for it
to be so difficult? Of course they intended it for
it to be difficult. But did they intend for it to be
this difficult to amend the Constitution?
They disagreed on this question.Jefferson wants a constitutional
(43:17):
convention every 19 years because he thinks that no
generation should impose its deaths on another.
Madison thinks that another constitutional convention would
be a nightmare because it was a miracle the first one succeeded,
and you just don't want to risk a second one messing everything
up. Certainly the the polarization
that's making amendments difficult is 1 they couldn't
(43:39):
have anticipate. But really, we've had waves of
constitutional amendment reconstruction.
Obviously after the Civil War, the Progressive Era, and the
1960s and 70s. It's remarkable how fast some
amendments nearly passed that couldn't today.
The Electoral College Amendment was supported by both parties in
the 1970s and would have passed had it not been for the
(44:01):
opposition of a few Southern Democrats.
So much of it is contingent. It's not like there's not
agreement about what reform should be.
The National Constitution Centersponsored a great project called
the Constitution Drafting Project, where we asked liberal,
conservative and libertarian teams to come up with
constitutional amendments. What blew our minds is that
(44:23):
these very diverse scholars agreed on five amendments and
they included making amendment alittle bit easier, making
impeachment a little harder in the House and easier to convict
in the Senate. 18 year term limits for Supreme Court
justices, resurrecting the legislative veto and eliminating
the requirement that the president be a natural born
(44:45):
citizen. And for all the ways that we've
been talking about to reinvigorate Congress, our multi
partisan teams thought that thiswould be a great way to go.
The problem is that although these have broad support, they
are so geeky, so technical that it's hard to get people to March
in the streets. And one thing we've learned from
American history is you can't pass amendments without national
(45:07):
movements for them. They're they're not top down.
They're from the bottom up. You've got to have the civil
rights amendment, the women's rights amendment and more.
Coming up with the legislative veto movement is sort of hard to
imagine. As we approach the 250th
anniversary of the Declaration, we look back through 250 years
(45:29):
of pretty extraordinary challenge to self governance.
We've endured an industrial revolution.
We've endured and and representative democracy has
endured challenges from competing philosophies of
government. Through the 20th century,
representative government was challenged with a slew of isms
from Bolshevism to Marxism to fascism to communism.
(45:52):
As we approach the next major technological revolution, which
is of course artificial intelligence, how did the ideals
of the Declaration from 250 years ago stand to hold as we
face a future that is almost unimaginable to this to us as we
(46:12):
sit here today? The American Revolution is based
on a claim about how people makeup their minds about truth.
When Jefferson said we hold these truths to be self-evident,
as Walter Isaacson points out inour Promise of America volume,
he was reflecting an Enlightenment distinction
between self-evident truths and factual truths. self-evident
(46:34):
truths are axiomatic 2 + 2 = 4. You can discern them purely
through reason. Factual truths are contested,
people disagree about them, and you need to have empirical
observation and evidence and contestation before you can
agree about whether people's opinions about religious or
political or factual truth are true.
(46:55):
That requires debate between human beings of differing points
of view. One thing that is so striking
about the AI revolution is that it substitutes A centralized
authority that has neither reason nor a moral sense with
the responsibility of citizens to examine primary sources and
(47:19):
make up their own minds. And in that sense, it poses A
fundamental challenge to the whole Enlightenment premise of
the Declaration, that people will take the time to make up
their own minds and not get their opinions from centralized
authorities. Now, you could create a kind of
Madisonian AI which would slow down deliberation, which would
(47:39):
provide questions rather than answers, which would give you
primary texts that citizens would have to evaluate before
they could make up their own minds.
The challenge there is who woulduse it?
I mean, you really have to slow down to use a Madisonian AI.
But what's so striking is that problem went back to the very
beginning. And ever since Madison himself
proposed this enlightened class of a literati sort of elite that
(48:02):
would mediate people's opinions,it's been very hard to get
Americans to defer to institutions or experts.
And communications technologies from the Telegraph to television
to the radio to social media to AI favor instant decision making
rather than slowing things down.So we're it's the oldest problem
(48:23):
of the founding. It is not a new problem.
How can citizens achieve that personal self government that
will require them to make up their own minds, to take the
time to examine primary sources and to think for themselves.
The the hope though, is that as you said, we've we've suffered
and endured amazing challenges. The the bloodiness of the Civil
(48:46):
War, an election of 1800 where the Constitution nearly failed,
the extraordinary violence in response to Reconstruction,
Southern redemption which deniedAfrican Americans the the right
to civil rights for nearly a century.
And of course all the challengesof the post war era.
And yet we haven't do it. And yet the arc of justice does
(49:07):
bend upward, as Martin Luther King said, quoting Jefferson
himself. And what's so inspiring is that
we are a creedal nation, as so many scholars have said in this
book. And it's the ideals that hold us
together. The point is not agreement about
how to balance the ideals. Hamilton and Jefferson disagree
themselves about that. Disagreement is not a bug in the
(49:31):
system. It's a feature.
It's respectful debate. It's deliberation.
I love the fact that after Hamilton dies in the duel,
Jefferson places a bust of Hamilton across from his own bus
in the central entrance hall of Monticello.
Anyone can see it there today. It's really moving.
And when he passed it and he wasold, Jefferson would smile
faintly and say opposed. In life as in death, and it's
(49:54):
really significant for Jefferson, Hamilton is not a
hated enemy to be opposed or destroyed, but a respected
opponent to be engaged with. And as long as we get back to
that spirit, we will continue tothrive as a Republic.
Yuval, how do you see the idealsof the Declaration transcending
the next major technological revolution that humanity will
(50:15):
have to endure? I think one key thing to see
about those ideals is that they're fundamentally rooted in
a view of human nature and in the sense that that is not
something that changes the worldchanges the the founding
generation certainly expected that the world would change a
lot and that we would live through a lot of progress and
also a lot of challenges. But the fundamental character of
(50:37):
human nature they did not expectto change.
And I think that's one very important thing to think about
in seeing where we stand now, because the there is a way in
which the the principles of the declaration, as Calvin Coolidge
said exactly 100 years ago in the 150th anniversary of the, of
the declaration, he gave a wonderful speech in
Philadelphia. And he said these words are
(50:58):
final. If you believe that all men are
created equal, that's final. That's not going to change.
And So what they said, there is not something to improve upon or
rethink. It's something to build on as a
foundation because it is final. I think that's still true.
And whatever technological change we see, it's worth our
seeing that the reason our country is endured the way it
(51:19):
has is that those principles areand were final.
And you know, America is an old country.
We like to think of ourselves asa young people.
We're forward-looking and we are.
But our government is essentially the oldest
government in the in in today's world.
There are the British can say they had institutions with the
same names in 1800. They didn't do the same things
(51:41):
they do now. They the United States has had
the same government for longer than any other society in the
modern world, and that's becausethat government was built to
endure through challenges and changes, and it is still built
for that. The premise of your answer is
that artificial intelligence andthe robots won't change human
nature. That's right, they won't.
(52:03):
OK. Like it or not.
Good or. Bad.
That is my expectation. There it is.
Yuvalovan Jeffrey Rosen, thank you so much for joining me.
Thank you. Thank you.
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