Director of operations here and on behalf of our entire team thank you for being with us tonight. We are a nonprofit and by joining us you are supporting us at a time and we have been deeply impacted by a the cancellation of events and also help being authors during a challenging time to release about. Thank you. We are looking forward to this event. He has been a good friend over the years in the socalled my jewish life story telling show. Weve also been excited because of the accessible conversation democracy ahead of the 2020 election is one of the most important things we will be talking about right now. Said the new book is called democracy. And spells out how the democracy is different from the democracy were born into. The redesign system of government is responsible for the trouble america finds itself in. As he helps us to understand this new system of government he lays out solutions and with a wide range of domestic policy issues to serve as the lead joke writer and is currently developing a sitcom for abc. And tonight will be in conversation with comedian and actress and star and also the founder of a community of americans who share personal stories of they have been impacted by political policy to humanize policy and break that political barrier of entry. You can submit questions throughout the Program Using the q a button at the bottom of your zoom screen. So thanks again for joining us and welcoming us into your house spirit just to give context so as the youngest president ial speechwriter at age 24. That is so young. So i feel like the following i wonder if you do. Was that a dream . You have literally worked with him. I dont know if it feels like it was a dream or is a dream now. And then you say wait this is life . But my colleague might have been the youngest ever. She was 20 do they get younger and younger. And i am working on that. So me telling you and then to disable you are the expert. Some excited to get into that vibe now. I have a whopping total selling one book before this. Space and hopefully wilo back in the person one day in the nottoodistant future and politics and prose which is the bookseller tonight so all for one event. So lets get going. I cant wait to be there in person to check it out. So, david, how did you get into politics in the first place . Did you always have an eye towards . Guest not really. I grew up in the kind of household we talked about Current Events like others might have talked about sports, the people followed this stuff but i never thought that i was going to get into college, i thought i would work at college. But i was in an improv group and i kind of thought some of the work weve been doing like writing a script, hell did that work, i thought i would be doing that in my early 20s and then i saw barack obama gave a speech after the Iowa Caucuses in 2008 and he was talking to organizers in the crowd and said both represent ideals that is impossible odds that speech completely changed what i wanted to do so i had deal organizing and then when i moved to dc to a speechwriting firm west wing writers for a couple of years, an amazing place to learn the ropes, then i got lucky when valerie jarrett, the Senior Advisor was looking for a speechwriter and a chief speechwriter at the time and one of the cohosts of classic american now said if you apply youll be the only applicant for this job so i said okay i can do that. So i got a very lucky path to work in the white house and it was amazing. Host its like you were there and you did whatever it took and thats so cool and so exciting. So, you first wrote for obama and then you wrote democracy in one book or less, how it works. What did you mean by that and why did you write this book . Guest i think a lot of us, a lot of people i know on the Progressive Side of the spectrum or is the thing where you say if hillary had won maybe i would have gone into Something Else and for me, when trump was inaugurated, i had a moment where we all knew it. It wasnt a profound. The pick one person to be the president and yes we want one thing and got a different thing. What struck me is and how shocking that was how confident is when i was in the Obama White House it happened over and over again but issues like immigration, climate cut taxes on rich people. Its happening right now with our response to covid. In these issues surrounding systemic racism and because of the physical process these have taken to banks that change will be difficult or impossible. I think that is the most important question that the we e facing right now is how do we do some thing about the disconnect between what we want in our democracy gives us. Then i also thought about it like i want to write a book like that but also for people like me where it is too thick or depressing or technical im not going to get through it. I might have been on my shelf so you think i read it but im not actually going to. So why write a book about these issues somebody like me would read and now here we are. Host so cool. We were talking about prepping for this talk. Its important and exciting for us to talk about the connection between how democracy really works and the systemic racism that protesters around the can create and around the world specifically led by the blacklight is Better Movement are standing up against. My first question with that in mind is can you give me a brief overview of how they original lawmaking in the country, the constitution by how they were talking about democracy and policy, setting the precedent for policymaking expresses systematic racism. First its like porn and orange people, black men were not people, women are nothing. It just feels so rooted in White Supremacy but is it just the playbook for White Supremacy in america, how to keep the power in that supports . Guest heres what i would say. I took ap government and worked for [inaudible] not to make too big a deal out of it but i did take ap government. I feel like you might have a future in politics. [laughter] i know all the words to schoolhouse rock. I thought i knew this stuff into the story we all learned which isnt true but isnt entirely true. It started in one place and had these great ideals and we are every year, every decade we are moving closer to realizing our ideas. The truth is more complicated because there is a lot of backsliding that takes place and also a lot of ways in which the power structures talking about systemic racism, they are the slaveowning power structures in the country influenced and embedded themselves in the political process and i think that is a fundamental contradiction. I write in the book about James Madison who had profound and enlightened ideas about who should participate in democracy. He was ahead of his time and yet he believed that it was acceptable to own human beings as slaves. I dont plan to know how to wrap ones head around that. All i know is those have been existing in parallel for some time and one of the things i think thats important is that is going to and because a lot of the elements in the political process but are rooted in systemic racism today are now being used by authoritarians, not just a game primarily to suppress the nonwhite voters also in general to try to corrode for democracy. So, we are going to have to either play the best version of the story and remove this stain that we started with or we are going to succumb to it. We are going to have to choose, and i think that is coming to a head. I think the bill is coming due. What gives me hope is to see what happened in recent weeks and the idea that people are fighting back against both systemic racism and authoritarianism coming and we are seeing how they appeared together. You have a president that is standing for both the confederacy, rather shockingly at this point in history, and also turning the military on peaceful protesters. He is performing both of these acts simultaneously. So i think it shows that those two things are hand in hand and fighting them needs to go hand in hand as well. Host with this truth we are relying on, i might just give up the idea that you are so dope and your ideas are so romantic. Its like this idea of wanting to be the better thing and pretending you are like me are not like the lowest common denominator behavior, which i think actually shows up in policy that you are talking about. Something i love that we are talking about [inaudible] guest yeah, im missing out on the line. Host it is like something hard to swallow that we have to signup [inaudible] what i love about you in our conversation as friends is when you say its coming to a head and democracy will either meet and will sustain, i wonder are you optimistic about peoples original goals in the country as it pertains to pursuing democracy or are you optimistic about democracy or the human spirit where another structure we are moving forward . Guest i guess what i would say host to coming to a head moment. Guest what i would say is im less optimistic about the human spirit frankly. I think if you look at the scope of history, generally speaking the tendency is for the power to concentrate in the justice of people and weve seen it in this country, too. Its not just something that happens in other countries. Its the same way we see economic inequality. In the book we have economic inequality and also power thanks to the campaignfinance law return one and into another as quickly as possible, but i think we talked about the bad side of the stories of what weve learned and i think there is no something where if you look at the founders like James Madison, they created a system that could improve itself and will to be a good person and own human beings, you cant get james madisocome and getJames Madisonm that gradually could transcend to some of thsome of the peopled it and i think that is something that gives me a lot of hope about our democracy is that even now this is the country debate the question i went through, gerrymandering, what is the latr processed, although schoolhouse rock stuff and a question i kept asking mysel myself is can we fe process using the process and the answer is yes. Its not easy. I cheated a little bit in the book title, its not easy but its easier than you think. We cannot trust this is going to go a long time but with the tools we have an outspoken as they are, we can make ourselves better and repair. Really going down the rabbit hole on this analogy that you get that idea and i think that is what is so important in writing the book is not trying to say we need a constitutional amendment to do this because that isnt going to happen, or we need mcconnell to decide that hes a good guy all of a sudden. Its just not going to happen. Host ewe guest i spent more time on Mitch Mcconnell than anybody except for jackie, my wife, and my cat. The host we were doing a call about the show and you said there was a party at Mitch Mcconnell sold frat house. Why are you stalking this guy committed you get to the party, what is your obsession, like how can you even look at him . Guest first in the first i talk about iran into Mitch Mcconnell and i did say hes more handsome in person, so lets start there. Start with a nice thing. And then say i dont think which mcconnell is solely responsible for everything thats happened to the country within our lifetime. One of the nice things talking to you about the book and politics in general, ive been thinking about the democracy change in our lifetimes and we are basically the same age as we have the same frame of reference for it. I do think that Mitch Mcconnell understood better than just about anyone thats one of the things about politics as opposed to other endeavors is the players right to rule and so while we were focused on the players on the field, whats everybody doing, who was waiting up for election, he was focused on rewriting the rulebook and his party have an easier time every time and so in the same way that if i was doing a beatles i might take a picture i dont think i needed to do a Mitch Mcconnell tried to crash a frat party and i would say to anybody if you are a man that is 30 or older and think of crashing a frat party, dont do it. I thought that it would be like hijinks but it was feared and i felt old and i didnt get into the frat house which is for the best but im glad i tried. I feel like i made the pilgrimage i needed. Host interesting about the players fighting the game versus playing the game. I see this regarding gerrymandering where i say republicans cheat because they cant win. If it were a fair fight, they are sore losers, they dont want to lose, so they each. But when i talk about achieving, would you say that its not cheating so much as it is in writing a rule . Guest theres an important distinction and its not like one i think in conversation is easy to say that it was stolen versus it was unfair. A lot are unfair but very few of them are stolen, to give one example. George w. Bush wa wouldnt haven florida and therefore wouldnt have one or 2000 election without these purchases that took 12,000 eligible voters off the roll and a disproportionate number were africanamerican. Without that in place, he he wod have become president. But i dont think that he stole the election. He took advantage of an unfair rule. Host its just shady. Maybe they did and they let at six guest it is in substantial but the reason i think it matters for the rest of us who you dont want to say they dont actually have a democracy unless that is the case but i dont think it is. Guest this is sort of a thing that needs to be said any time by two white people talk about racism. I am not an expert on most of this. The one thing i feel like i was really surprised to learn was the extent of the way, we talk about the way tha that would pet this point in the process, but i wanalongtime take the Senate Filibuster for example. There was this kind of agreement, and i dont think northern democrats were frankly any liberal republicans would have said they agreed this enjoyment. They would have said they had no choice. You have democracy and progress on these different issues and i would think about this golden age of the senate, eisenhower or kennedy, the beginning of the kennedy years or if they are. We did all these things in the country that we also had a filibuster which allowed southern segregationists to block every single piece of civil rights legislation. One of the things in the book, and its possible some of you watching maybe i should have known this, but i didnt is that antilynching bills kept coming before the senate so in many cases they had Popular Support and passed the house, they camee before the senate and the filibuster killed them and because of that the senate could pass antilynching bills. This happened over and over again and that was the price that essentially we paid for democracy working in so many other different facets is to say on this one issue thats important to the south which is maintaining a white supremacist structure were not going to be able to do anything about that with all the other ways. I think the difference now is even if they wanted to make that trade which i dont think you necessarily want to do it even if you wanted to, you couldnt because the choice is no longer between democracy and antiracism on the other hand soap we are in a moment where the stakes are higher but that should give us hopin us hope thl work because us hoping for word because if they hop into one of these things i do think it will help us accomplish the other. Host this bargain and trying to test these antilynching bills, we dont know how to pass it. Its connected and how bush won and georgia and long lines at the polls. People for hours and hours were not given a day off. Its covid time. But lets just talk about how it is embedded in the political process. Guest that is a good example what we saw in georgia last week. Its not just one state or one election. 2012, which i looked into when i was writing part of the book, there was a wavelength similar and it turns out actually you cant find one that is as long as the longest people had to wade into those. Its not just because they have a lot of money at disney world. They are being linked and potentially and those long lines are affecting nonwhite voters more so than white voters, so on average in 2012, black voters waited 23 minutes to cast a ballot and white voters waited 12 minutes. Nearly 50 rights after. To exercise their democratic rights on average. So, we think about these things and again, it goes back to how i learned the story of america. I learned that racism and segregation, these were things we had kind of take have kind oa couple of decades before i came along. And we are still working on obviously, but we have done the hard work and now we are just kind of taking care of the details. Clearly that isnt true. And again, i dont mean this on all the features. I didnt think enough about this stuff. But when you look at it over and over again, that ends up being part of the answer and one of the things we see in American History in this process, and i know that she just did a sixth i book come and im paraphrasing but she said attacks on democracy never only affect the target, Something Like that. And i think i was als there wasa good point. These things go handinhand where the long voting lines that are disproportionately affecting the nonwhite voters make it miserable for all sorts of people and so, what we are seeing here is this deliberate attempt to mismanage. I think thats the most important thing we can take away from what happened in georgia in particular because in some states they are trying their best but are not doing very well. Georgia is doing a bad job and thats something we are seeing across the country and its scary because people are trying their hardest. If you try to mismanage an election maybe they will succeed also and that isnt so good. Host im going to jump around a little bit with my questions because this relates to we were talking about how democracy abuse in one place leads to abuse on the whole. Paraphrasing of this agency. Just for example, if the black population is disproportionately affected by police brutality, we are all less safe because of that. That means we are less safe and less protected. Regarding voting, there are tactics used to disenfranchise black voters and also attack the rights of other people like jews, you have this example in connecticut. Guest whats interesting about this, thats kind of a euphemism, is you see attacks on Voting Rights and they tend to target groups of people in an attempt to target nonwhite voters. What that means in practice often as people who live in cities have a harder time voting and those that live outside of cities. Or in some cases, in cities their votes count less. So, we have one person one vote in this country. I didnt realize this but one person one vote is a new idea. Its not like a bedrock principles the founders had. Its younger than george clooney. [laughter] and what that meant practically speaking is that connecticut, if you live in or around hartford near the cities, either elected one state legislator or in a rural area fewer people elected one, now we have it in the senate where states like wyoming elected to senators in california or new york elect to. That used to be true on a state level all across the country. And again, the reason we had that in so many cases was as black people migrated to the city, rural legislators stopped redrawing the districts to maintain power. Something that was originally targeted along racial lines that kinandkind of had this additionl effect of reaching a lot of voters delivered in cities, again, regardless what race they were. It isnt to say who has it worse witthat my point is they were al connected. You cant say this isnt my problem, because its all of our problems. Host you know, we are jews and sixth i and i want to talk about today white is and how most jews have an advantage persecuted groups in america didnt and dont have while being perceived as white. White jews are perceived as white after a certain point. I wonder how you view this as having shaped the white jewishamerican perspective of american democracy. Sometimes i think jews tend to be progressive and other times you are going, come back we need to fight. How do you think of that . Guest i think its a really important question because you mentioned this to me on the phone as we were talking about this conversation. And i will say whats interesting to me about, or whats important to me about the American Jewish experience, which is multifaceted and includes a lot of jews of color and whats important is we are seeing more and more of the conversation centering jews of color, which matters a lot. In my family for example, you know, my grandparents could swim in the Swimming Pool where they grew up because they were jewish. In a way that is true of a lot of groups, you know, jackies grandparents who came from ireland, they were like in and out of orphanages and were again, pushed to this society. Whats interesting about these immigrant groups as they then had the chance to become white. That is a chance that obviously isnt afforded to everybody in america. And part of the tragedy based on some of the research im doing for the buck in writing the book is that question of are you theu allowed to become white is synonymous with the question are you allowed to become fully american men have the same democratic rights, are you allowed the same convenience and exercising and then also argue a loud that sense of the link between working hard and being rewarded, that sense of acting responsibly, all of these connections. So to me, the way that i think about it, and this isnt in the book, is that when i think about my family story is a reminder that the American Dream is possible that when i look at americas story is also the American Dream is impossible for everybody right now. And the thing that surprises me or the thing we need to realize, and this goes back to the democracy issue that when i was a kid i would have said maybe thats true but the scope of the American Dream is expanding. More and more people get to live the dream every year and is a when i was 13 and 7933, its going to make way more people. Sometimes in some cases that is true, but in so many cases, we see this in so many ways, we are actually moving backwards and its really interesting when you have a democracy decade after decade seems to be moving backwards rather than the four words into gaslighting seems to be really easy. And when they lose faith they turn to authoritarians. These are existential issues right now. They are not just kind of curiosity of history. It really matters and its going to shape the future that we live in for the rest of our lives. Host with that, i have been seeing a lot of conversations among white people and you know, both the education forming which is good and how to connect that action because there is such urgency with systemic racism people are dying of enhanced systemic racism every day. I wonder what you see, how you see jews meeting at this moment what our job is here. As american jews, what has our community done for the black wives Matter Movement, have we done enough and where are we headed . Guest i cant really speak to everything weve done because i just dont know. Its weird having written a book where you do a lot of research im now more aware of how many things i dont know much about and thats one of them. Have we done enough the answer is clearly no. We can answer that. Definitively. I do think that to me and the way that i think about it as a jewish person and an american jew is that while all of us have some responsibility just as people to stand up to racism and do something about the fact people are treated differently in this country just because of who they are and because of the color of their skin. I do think that jews have a special obligation. I think that is true and also not just because of our history but also because of our tradition. The amount that all of our most important talk about reaching out to the stranger, talk about welcoming the stranger and the idea you should care for people that are not just in your family and your neighborhood and community but that you have an obligation to care for everybody. My friend who was a speechwriter for Michelle Obama and wrote a book called here all along about her own journey, she is done a sixth i event more than once and some of you watching our typically familiar with her work and thought you should be. She talks about just basic profound ideas in judaism that were at the time pretty revolutionary that all of us are in and at the time it wasnt a common idea. Ive gone so far out of my lane so you should too know about this stuff. The idea that all of us just by being here have this innate worth and value. Host i need more time to read it. Thats cool. I think our connection to persecution, paired with our whiteness comes at the safety and privilege iem seeing how they suspend event and their connection to their history and exile its like here we are so primed to make this moment and to help in this black wives Matter Movement and also with voting. Can we talk about the dc statehood and how that relates to racial equality that we are talking about dc statehood. What i thought was interesting as i look through the history of statehood is that its always been a political question. When america started the great divide is between regions so every time a state was a slave state there was the idea to balance out. It might have had a habit of killing each other. Statehood has always been a political question. We have the dakota territories but we have to decod have to dod region because region because they wanted more senators to come from the territory rather than just you. And so we bring this to the statehood is the idea that we might make a place a state even though we know that dc is extremely blue, thats not violating, that is keeping with our history particularly because the senate is so skewed right now. When hawaii was admitted to the state, southern segregationist said to have met a nonwhite majority state into the country is a communist plot, and today Mitch Mcconnell calls as many dc and puerto rican he called it pure socialism. We are kind of moving it through this American History and theres no question. So many of those are related to racism and they have affected the political process. They vote on this next week and i think it is finally becoming the kind of priority that it should. Maybe it took this occupation to realize if you are not a state people walk all over you but whatever the reason, it is trying and hopefully that is one of the things i write about in the book as a solution that would make a change in the democracy and hopefully something we can get done. Host so you said fixing democracy is easier than we think. What do you mean . Guest what i mean by that at the end i dont know how star warsy you are, but theres this thing called the star wars movie and at the end of epside four, there is a tiny opening in the death star and theres only a few seconds you can make the shot and in those few seconds everything can change really quickly. For those of us that have seen over decades our democracy backslide and every year it feels like our democracy is less democratic than it was the year before to how can we get all this changed quickly in the next 30 to 40 years to get this back. But things can change really fast and one of the ways that can happen if lets say january, 2021 and theres someone else in the white house and the senate you can end this and enfranchise formerly incarcerated people. You dont need everybody to agree that its a good idea because politicians dont like giving up power. All you have to do is have the commitment to do Something Big and bold at the right time. Those windows do not stay open for very long. So, do we have the kind of foundation, do we have the commitment to doing this well before hand . One of the reasons i wanted to do the puck an book and put it s we need a plan. We also need a plan for things to go wrong in these days that is obvious. What is the most important thing we can do as americans what can we do to protect the democracy this year . Guest ive worked there for a long time and this is the most important election of our lifetime, but it is true again this is the most important that we will vote in and i feel very confident if trump isnt the presidenpresident in 2021, our y has a good shot. I dont feel nearly as confident about that if he is reelected. I just dont. More importantly, if he is reelected where people cant vote because its been made too difficult or unsafe or because the traditions of fraud are discarding them a ballot vote, i think that would be particularly tragic and something that we need to do everything we can to fight against, all of which leads to what can we do. One thing you can do is theres a Great Organization out on the frontlinefront lines about thess and some of them are nonpartis nonpartisan. As i sai said its about increag the turnout and making the voting safe for everybody. Thats a Great Organization. What is the registration deadline and how does the mail in ballots work in your state. Every state has different. Then theres organizations like him for something, which im proud to be doing a bunch of stuff with in the runup to the book and they are helping young people run for office for the first time. That leads me to another thing you can do. You can care a lot more about local offices. So much of this stuff weve beee been talking throughout the evening about pleasing and its ofteoften described as a decidel level, but then you also have the way that they are run decided at the local level, so they are in charge of your election process for the county commissioner or in texas, so these are really important people and as democrats we often focus a lot on the president but it drops the ball when it comes to the lowerlevel offices. Things that you are doing this for destroying those. Its very specific if youre in a blue group you can volunteer to work the polls. We have a worker shortage in america and we have one well before. Hopefully it any people vote by mail in november but some will vote in person, and over half of the polling workers at the moment are over 60, which means a lot of them are not going to want to work because they are worried about their health. If you are at low risk group, signing up to be a poll worker extends the number of polling places available, and it means we will not see as many of these wines that are not just bad, but they are also discriminatory. So, that is a very concrete thing anyone can do. So thats a bunch of different things. Host that is awesome. When we go to vote. Org, i want to shout out to something thats an organization you pointed me to. Its exciting and i love this email. They are so uplifting. Local politics is so uplifting and i think being a polling worker is a great cold. You are my friend but i ask specifically that understands politics really well, but as they were researching for this but you realized how much you dont know. I wonder what did you learn in this process of writing about . Guest i learned a lot of things. You know, i was never like a student in college, i was technically, but i would do the introduction and then pretend i knew the conclusion and it made me a good speechwriter. If you are somebody that wants to go into speechwriting and youre good at talking for five minutes but you know something, there might be a job for you. As i went in and tried to learn about actual stuff, every so often i walk around in my kind e kind of stuff this is cool, and as i got to know these things, what i learned thailearned thaty fascinating list of how everything has happened before and also how at the same time the more you learn the more it feels like everything is unique. I dont know if it is a contradictory thing but they are both true. I will give you an exampl one ef each farrago, so one of those examples is i learned the number of times people falsely claimed voter fraud as an issue in order to disenfranchise voters that are knowledgeable to vot food ia new thing. It isnt some in that is just new to the last 20 years. Its been happening since new jersey disenfranchised because women could vote for a little while in new jersey and when they disenfranchised they didnt say its because they dont want women to vote, they said its to prevent fraud. In some ways we keep finding ourselves in these loops and it is at the same time is also the things i never would have expected. One of the most surprising things i learned in about, as the number of states at some point or another allowed noncitizens to vote the answer is 38 states. So at one time or another, not i should say in the last hundred years or so, but in the beginning of American History, noncitizens could vote and it wasnt a big deal. I dont think a noncitizen should be able to vote all the time, but i do think that it makes you realize how these things are connected that when we think about immigration its not just in an accretion or economic issue its also a democracy issue because we can provide people a pathway to success in chip or Voting Rights. The combination of things everything will be new again and then at the same time there are these things we just never learned in school and it turns out there are so many of them. [inaudible] guest i dont know literally if you showed up you could cast the votes, but there was this idea if you paid taxes, you could vote and taxation without representation of the flip side is if you pay taxes, you should be represented, so that is one reason. In a lot of places didnt say every noncitizen can vote, but they said that the early version of green card holders. If you say i am an american and plan to stay here, im building my life here and pay my taxes here, then you can vote. I should point out before you go, we have green card holders to serve in the military and cant vote even in local elections in many cases. Then i do think green card holders should absolutely be able to vote because again, this is their country. We have said this is your country. So the idea that we have a second class of americans, the reason is it benefits one Political Party over another. The last thing i would say is thank you again. Im glad we got to have this conversation. Host its so good. I like talking with you, david. Im glad we are friends and collaborators. I will turn over now for qanda. And i just want to say to people watching good job, thanks for the intro and david, congratulations. Thank you for being part of tonights program and conversation. I encourage you all to buy a copy of davids book if you havent already. The link to purchase the autograph copy is in the chat box and we will email everybody the link as well. We are a little bit past, but we have a couple of Great Questions from the audience. If you would indulge us, the first one is from another david asks the number of reps in the house hasnt changed in about a hundred years despite population growth. Should it be her or the current deletion and if so, how can that change the enacted ta . Guest the short answer is yes and before that, before we get into it, i think i understand this, but i did just have today and one last time politics and processing if you are interested in this and found this talk if they want to hear more about it i hope youll pick up the book of politics and at d prose and get it signed. Everyone in dc there is just a terrific institution and its exactly the kind of place that we should be supporting especially now. So, buy a book from there and if you want to make it my book, i wouldnt be upset. They are terrific and i hope you support them. Back to the question. The reason we have 435 representatives is not that anyone decided it was a number that makes sense. So the short answer is yes. The long answer is we used to expand the house every ten years when we reapportion i figure out how many representatives each state gets, then we would expand the total number to fit that roughly. What happened was in 1920, it was a very important year because that was the first where the majority of americans were in the city. And so, the rural representatives from both parties, instead of re apportioning and redrawing of the districts, they didnt reapportion the house so that meant the rural states have the advantage even though the population have moved to the city. We see this a lot in the history of the rural and urban divide. The population moved to the cities, but the power didnt move with it. So thats why they did not reapportion in 1920 and as a result, they kept 435 members. Ten years later it seems like a tradition. And also, all the members were already there said the ideas that we have the power to appeal to us within 435 . No question, even within my lifetime, 200,000 people per house district. And im not particularly old. Right now, we are ever so slow that aiming for a Million People and at some point we will have to agree. And we have to figure out a way to have more local representation. Host thats great. Thank you. A somewhat related question, amy asks what do you think about the Electoral College or what is the point of it and argue in favor of keeping its . Guest in the book i try to be evenhanded and is a every idea we can engage with i dont agree with everything, but i try to offer some type of a counter argument. The Electoral College is stupid. And the reason that its a stupid istupidis that it doesnh very much. I grew up thinking that it trumps the small states and it does a tiny bit, but unlike the senate, wyoming has two senators. Wyoming has three electoral votes in california has 55. In terms of the Electoral College if they were there to keep them from turning over, but it isnt working. You think about arkansas, vermont, blue or red, canada and the only thing that it does is affect the things they didnt does tend tdid wastend to be ras republicans and 2012 obama could have lost the popular vote and won the Electoral College to reaat allits done is create ths and it erodes the state in the democracies of it is time to get rid of it. In the book right talk about ways we can do that without passing a constitutional amendment as positive as possible within the next few years we could do away with the Electoral College. We will see. Host this one might hit close to home. Caroline asks as a former president ial speechwriter was is it like to hear the official speeches, and how do you think the world may be different under trump . Guest hell do i think it may be different under trump . All sorts of reasons most of which involve i like speechwriting as a writer, but you ultimately have to believe in what you are doing. So i think more than the experience of being a writer, if you had anybody who sees what is going on in this i want to help make more of that happen, i think that is different but that is a mindset you have to have if you are working for obama or by the way a lot of republican president s. I know speechwriters for george w. Bush and other president s. They may not agrei may not agret they share the public service. Host guest more to the point is interesting about it chomps speeches, some of them are kind of rambling to put it mildly but yesterday he did a rose garden speech where he stuck to the script, and its really just it feels like somebody whos going to get a b. Or b on a paper in college. All the words are there but they dont mean anything. Thats what i almost find more offensive in those moments as a writer. The use of words that have no meaning is just really gets under my skin. Its not the worst thing, not even on the top thousand plus, but its bad. I dont like it. Host adam asks what do you think about expanding the Supreme Court . Guest i think we should expand the Supreme Court, and i will tell you why. I think when we supported this, the Supreme Court in particular had never had more power, and the act of nominating a justice is a bigger deal than its ever been. The way that i talk about it is like the difference of nominating a regular judge like scoring a few points in basketball and two goals in soccer. One of them is completely game changing. And if you look at the way the court has functioned, particularly that is true because just as lifetimes get longer and longer, nominating a Young Justice like that kavanagh or neil gorsuch, they wont search for just the next few years but probably more than a generation. So, it matters more than it used to matter. We will start with that. Then there are a few sets of norms we should step in and violate, but rather step in and say if you violate them we should do something about it. One of those is if theres a vacancy you should be allowed to appoint a Supreme Court justice. Mitch mcconnell that seat open. I do think that is the way of deterring future Mitch Mcconnells from pulling the same kind of stuff, should you do that they wont get away with the longterm. We will balance that out. Then the second thing is, and i really believe this, though we know whats pretty, my view is if you commit a crime to win the presidency which thankfully doesnt come up often but if you commit a crime to win the presidency, we should be able to do something about the judges that will last for life because if we do something with the president we can go out or put r impeach the judges on the bench for life. I think the fact president of trump seems likely he committed crimes in order to win his office, that should change how we view the judges on the regardless whether they are principle or not and how they rule, the fact that they are only there because of movies and affects everything they do. Whether or not they wanted to. Host thanks. Super interesting stuff. The last question is from heather, and she asks in the spirit of obama, how much hope and optimism do you have for change . Guest i have a lot of hope, and i have a lot of longterm optimism. I dont want to be pollyanna ish, and i thought that was an important thing as i was writing. I wanted to be honest but also optimistic. I dont think that things are now will be substantially better, probably not bitter at all than they are today. And i think that even if, for example, democrats win big in november, i dont think that the country is going to change overnight. We will have Serious Problems for years from now. That is just a fact. But i keep going back to the basic subject, the words presented obama said that it changed my life and to be involved in politics when he looked at the crowd in iowa and said people who love this country can change it. That is such a rare thing to be able to say about your country. Its certainly not true in many places around the world today. As i was writing the book, we saw protests in hong kong, iran, lebanon. People would really die and in some cases did give their lives for a chance of having a at hava democracy as broken as ours. We shouldnt lose sight of that. So, the idea that if we love this country, we can change it, people are trying to take it away from us but havent succeeded yet, and i dont think they will. The goal here, and i think it is an achievable goal, as i think if we do the things i talked about in the book and some other stuff, we can shatter Mitch Mcconnells dreams within Mitch Mcconnells lifetime, and i think that is a worthy goal in achievable. Host well put. Thank you so much. Thanks for the virtual book tour. Sixth i has a lot of great events coming up so check that out on the website, sixthandi. Org. We look forward to having you all back into the building at sixth i. Thanks for joining us and have a great night. Cspan welcome steve the first time he may have sat together we are both working at newsweek in the company canteen. As you know i am a big fan of yours i was a huge fan of your first book on google and now to come back at this particular moment and talk about facebook could not be more timely. I will just start off we have a lot of places to go with this but i want to stait