these other television providers. giving you a front-row seat to democracy. >> now, a conversation from the american enterprise institute about whether the house of representatives, which has 435 voting members, should be expanded. this is an hour 15 minutes. >> hi. i'm jonah goldberg i'm a fellow here at the american enterprise institute amongst other things. and i'm delighted to invite you here to discuss one of my weird lifelong obsessions, expanding congress and the case for doing so. i will spare you, you know, why i'm obsessed with this for later in the discussion. and so let's just get started. i want to say thank you for joining this event hosted by the american enterprise institute and the american academy of arts and sciences. on december 9th, they published a report entitled the case for enlarging the house of representatives, and it was authored by lee drutman and yuval levin. it will expand on the ideas put forths in our project for the 21st century. our guests today are ruth rubin, an assistant professor at the political science department at the university of chicago. lee drutman is a senior fellow in the political reform program at new america. kevin kosar is a senior fellow and my colleague at the american enterprise institute. and yuval levin is the director of social and constitutional studies and editor in chief, and my direct supervisor. not only is he a handsome man, he's a powerful man. we're going to kick off. just some explaining why this is an obsession of mine. the first piece i ever got published in a mainstream publication anywhere was my argument for expanding the house of representatives which appeared in the "wall street journal" the day after the 1992 presidential election, and it's sort of been my white whale ever since. these guys have actually put real work into it, which i have not, and so we're going to begin with lee drutman walking us through the outlines in the case for why we might want to expand the house of representatives. i hand it to you, lee. >> all right. thank you, jonah. and i do hope that the fate of this quest doesn't wind up like most of the crew that went out for the white whale. that we're a little more successful, and i think we can be. briefly, the argument for expanding the house might be distilled down to three words. it's about time. it has been over 100 years since the house last increased its membership, which it had done previously after almost every census as the country got bigger and bigger. but for complicated reasons in the 1910s and 1920s, congress couldn't agree on a formulation for increasing the size of the house, so it fixed it at a totally arbitrary number of 435. the original congress was only 65 members. and the idea of the house of representatives was that we should have an institution of governing that is close to the people. in which you have members who represent smaller, you know, communities, constituencies in which they could actually kind of get to know those people and really kind of understand how they think, and also sort of offer themselves up as real ambassadors to government in washington so that people could feel somewhat connected to their government and the government could feel somewhat connected to the people. now, in 1911, there were about 200,000 constituents per representative. that was way up from the original 30,000 that madison had envisioned and implemented in the first congress. so now we are at about 750,000. which is really a lot of people. and it's very hard to envision one person as the tribune close to the people of so many people. and what we wind up with is a kind of abstracted and rather, i think, limited view of representation. and loses a lot of the richness and diversity of this rich and diverse nation. so i think we ought to take seriously the idea of increasing the size of the house of representatives to get it back more in line with what the purpose of a people's house ought to be. the u.s. has far lagged behind other comparable democracies in terms of the ratio of constituents to representatives. and i think that is contributing to some of the poor quality of representation we see in our contemporary congress. the proposal we put forward would increase the size of the house to 585 members from the current 435. i think that's a pretty reasonable increase and the way we come up with that formula is basically to say, what would have happened if the house had taken the following rule starting in 1911, which is that -- or really in 1911, which is to say that no state should lose representation. that's a pretty modest proposal. that basically we should expand the house as the census population counts increase so that no state has to give up a representative. and that would take us to 585 today. so again, i think it's a pretty modest increase, but it would bring a new generation of talented lawmakers. i think one advantage of expanding the house is it just expands the number of people who are able to get into government and bring their talents to washington. i think it would also probably create a way for some decentralization, although i know there's some debate over that point in which committees and subcommittees might be able to have more of a role in governing because as the size increases, it becomes harder for any one party leader to kind of dominate. but so those are kind of some initial thoughts, initial rationales, and i look forward to having a spirited discussion with my brilliant colleagues here. >> so yuval, one of the hallmarks, one of the central focuses of ai these days or at least your department, is to catalog all the different ways in which congress is broken. and all of the different dysfunctions that congress has. and you have written a lot about how people get elected to congress these days to be, you know, performative actors rather than institutionalists who are trying to work within the institution to yield positive results. would this touch any of that? is there any reason to believe that we would get fewer matt gaetzes and more, i apologize i can't right now conjure the name of a responsible, decent congressperson, but i'm sure they exist. run through the ways this would help. i take the point about representation and all that, and i agree with it, but as an institutional matter, what are the other factors -- what are the other dysfunctions that congress is plagued by and how would this affect some of them? >> you know, i would say a few things. first of all, i do think it's important to stress the point that lee made, basically, this is not a radical reform of the functioning of the constitution. this is more like constitutional maintenance. expanding the house as the population grows was something that the constitution envisions happening on a regular basis after every census. it's not stated in the constitution that that's what the census is meant to drive, but it certainly seemed like the assumption of the framers. madison says that's the purpose of the census, and the congress did grow that way every ten years until the 1920 census when it didn't. so the part of what we would want to do here is get back to work on that front. and in a sense, think of this as constitutional maintenance, as work that needed to be done. it's also part of the logic of 150, as the size of the expansion. this is where the house would be if we had continued to grow by basically the same formula it was growing in the 19th century. beyond that -- so that's to say this is not a radical reform and we would not suggest it by itself it would radically transform the culture of the house, but there are a couple ways it would help. first, part of what happened in the house now, is in the absence of relatively fine grain representation, we're seeing a decline in intraparty factions. and the breakdown of the house into two very broad and distinct party coalitions where each coalition is internally very coherent, and there is a way of seeing the kind of change that this could drive as enabling some more diversity within the party coalitions and therefore a more functional house, a house where there's more likely to be cross partisan pargening because there's more likely to be intrapartisan divisions. now, we're not sure, right? you can't really predict that that's exactly what would happen. there's certainly an argument, i think the strongest critique of the notion of increasing the size of the house, is that it would actually intensify centralization, that there would be more members and therefore each member would in a sense be worth less and leaders would have more power rather than less. i think the nature of centralization, the historical forces that have been driving it are such that that's the less likely outcome of this kind of change. but it is certainly possible. a further way to think about how this relates to other changes is this creates a moment of change in the house. 150 new members all at once creates a situation where members are simply more likely to think about how else the house needs to change. the house of representatives in a couple of historical moments we can think of, particularly two in the 20th century, in 1946 and in 1973 and '74, members reached a point where they thought this is not working and we need fundamental changes. they changed the committee system, the role of leadership, the budget process in the '70s. it's time for a moment like that because the house is dysfunctional in ways that are distinct to this moment, to a time where the house is closely divided, control swings back and forth, which was not the case in the 1970s or in the 1940s. and it's time to think about how the house should work now. i think one reason for me to support this kind of change is that it's a modest step that could lead to those greater steps. it could create a moment where 150 new members enter all at once and members in general think, what else needs to change right now? maybe this is the moment to think about how the house could work better. so i don't think it's a magic bullet. i don't think by itself would it transform all of the problems we see or the incentives that face members, but if we ask why are those not changing now, the sense that members have that things can't change, you talk to members at this points, none are very happy with the status quo. no one says this place is great. i want to stay here forever. yet you say what don't you like? they talk about the schedule and the budget. you can change the schedule and the budget. that's up to you. that's not a thought that has occurred to a lot of back bench members. you stand a better chance if reformers are prepared for it, to enable other changes to also happen. it's a change that's good in itself but might also drive others. >> so ruth, yuval is nobody's idea of a jacobin, but what are some of the reservations you might have and do you agree with yuval's case that the sharpest critique of this is that we would -- it would just increase centralization, or are there sharper critiques to be found? >> well, not everyone has a problem with centralization, so i would say that's a complicated pitch, but certainly one that i think would be a concern for individual lawmakers in actually getting a reform like this off the ground. one of the most compelling features of the report is simply pointing out at the quality of representation has declined precipitously over the course of the past 100 years and that's, i think, something that should upset every american. and the amount of work we're asking members of congress to do has increased exponentially as a result. so that just simply stating the problem in those terms is i think incredibly important. i think political scientists are famously bad at predicting how institutions will respond to institutional changes of this sort, so we're all flying by the seat of our pants somewhat. i do think it's clear that when you see more centralized decision making in legislative bodies that are larger, for some people that's going to be a problem. for others, you might say having stronger leaders would insure that party discipline and that the kind of rambunctious, to put it kindly, behavior of individual members is not given as free reign, as it is currently. so actually strengthening the hands of leaders might be a productive consequence of this reform. i think it's interesting to think about what the effects on the committee system would be. certainly, you might imagine that there's a ceiling on just how much power leaders are able to hold in their hands, so i think the report suggests that some decentralization might flow to committees and you might get more expert policy making and all of that sounds super appealing, whether in fact that's a possibility is a different question altogether. i think the strongest critique of this proposal and one that i personally don't find all that satisfying but i think is one that people might reasonably have is why start with the house? when you think about the dysfunction in congress, i think folks often look to the senate. its malapportionment, its rules that clearly favor minoritarian politics and say why are we starting with the house. the house has shown it can get things done and really the problem is the senate. there are many reasons why targeting reform in the senate is perhaps more difficult. certainly more difficult and maybe not feasible at all, and so for that reason, i think the claim that we should start with the senate simply because it is the worst of the two chambers of congress is not particularly persuasive. i think one of the things that's interesting is whether the report makes the case that expanding the size of the house doesn't have an obvious partisan valence. i guess my concern is that very little that is at all important doesn't come to take on a partisan valence, whether it is deserved or not. just in terms of thinking about the feasibility of a reform like this one has to worry that members will come to see that there are winners and losers. and that that in and of itself is going to make something like this really difficult to achieve, even if the problem that the report identifies is a grave one and one that we should all be concerned about. >> ruth raises an interesting point, kevin, i was thinking about this in the context of the recent supreme court commission that biden put together and that our colleague adam white was on. and when i was reading through it, it seemed to me the only way i could get behind some of the changes, and i'm not necessarily saying i'm in favor of them, is if you did it far enough out that you couldn't predict a partisan available one way or the other. you know, if you said, okay, in ten years the size of the court is going to be x, or in ten years we're going to implement term limits on judges. that at least doesn't allow for immediate game playing and that kind of thing. when i was listening to ruth, i thought maybe one of the chief advantages of this is that you can't identify a clear partisan advantage for one side or the other in doing this, and that might make it more possible to happen. and then you realize, i think ruth makes a good point, which is that if they can make wearing masks so partisan, they can make anything really partisan. and so it's entirely possible that somebody -- it would be fun to listen to the populists in the house talk about how we don't need any more people here. but what are the chances -- what are the actual obstacles to getting this thing done? is it this partisan calculation? is it this sort of a public choice self-interest thing that they don't want to dilute their power? how would you do it? >> well, i think there's a few challenges that immediately come to mind. first, i'm not sure present chamber leadership wants to hear anything about this. it's more cats to wrangle. you know, they tend to prefer stasis. don't change the rules, don't change the structures because i know the rules. i have mastered them, and i can work through these structures. you move part and that makes my life harder. you have leadership as a problem. second issue is that you're going to have to not only educate the kind of influencers in d.c. about the merits and the challenges of this enterprise, but also the broader american public. you know, the sales pitch here could be misconstrued as, hey, america, we can make governance better. we're going to give you more politicians. that's not going to please or sell particularly well out there in the heartland. so i think we need to get past that sort of stuff so you can help folks see why this is actually a populous thing to do, and how this benefits members, not just members, it benefits the members of the public. and i would think that in part, we would want to frame this in terms of congressional capacity. you know, your average member of the public does not feel particularly well heard by their member of congress. not surprising. if you're one of 750,000 or whatever it is, how likely are you to be heard? you're just not. so the idea is that, you know, this is going to up the odds that your voice could actually be heard. second thing is that the public should be better informed about a key role of members of congress. which is to serve as a kind of citizen ombudsman to the executive branch. americans often find themselves frustrated with government. what they're frustrated, first and foremost with, is some good or service or situation involving the executive branch. social security check that didn't show up, you know, what have you. members of congress frequently are the ones going to bat for the public to try to solve these things. constituents service is a huge enterprise that's carried out by every member's office in the house of representatives. and we only got 435. and you have an executive branch that's 180 agencies, and the budget of it is $4 trillion, $6 trillion, i'm not sure how many trillions we're up to. 435 people to directly go after the executive branch and fight on behalf of members of the public is not a whole lot. you know, it's the same amount as it was 100 years ago when the government was a lot smaller. so those things are up front things that i think really need to be tackled in order for this to become a serious governance reform conversation more broadly in the country. >> all right, i want to encourage everybody, you know, what is the line from dr. strangelove, there's no fighting in the war room. you guys are free to go after each other as much as you see fit. that said, i would like to hear from lee a little bit about this point that ruth makes about tackling the house first instead of the senate. i mean, part of my response to that is that the house is actually the more directly democratic majoritarian institution, so making it more majoritarian and democratic has a certain appeal. but what do you make of that point? is the senate really where the dysfunction is? and is it just that it's just too hard to fix so you go for the low hanging fruit with the house? >> that's a good question. i mean, there's a lot that needs to be fixed about our politics. but the house has historically been an institution in which change is easier. also the constitution gives the house more leverage to change things. at least when it comes to elections. but i think historically, you know, the house has just kind of been more on the cutting edge of reforms. and you know, i don't know. there's a lot i would like to change about the senate, too. and maybe if we have a different composition of senators and different leadership in the senate, we might think about that. so, you know, there's a lot we should do, but i think we should start where change is most possible, and as yuval says, once we inject some new organization into one institution, that will probably have ripple effects, and it will lead to a new class of folks coming in with new ideas. it will -- you change one thing and maybe other things change from there. it's rare that you change a bunch of things at once in a complex political system, but sometimes even a small change at a moment in which the system is really stuck, and i think our system is really stuck, can have important downstream effects that help to unstick other aspects of the political system. >> you know, john, i think there's also a constitutional reason to do it that way, which is basically that what we're talking about here is a way of returning to how the constitution seems to envision the house functioning and changing rather than altering the way the constitution envisions the chamber working. there may be arguments for making changes to how the senate works, but the case that the house should stop growing even as the country keeps growing has never really been made. that's not a -- the fact is we haven't done this in a century, and we should have. and that makes for a somewhat easier case. i also think if you look at the history of congressional reform and the 46 reforms are an exception to this. they did begin in the senate. generally speaking, the house changes itself, and then the senate is forced to change so that it can get legislation through that can make it through both houses. the budget reforms in the '70s began in the house. the committee reforms in the 1920s began in the house. the tremendous change in appropriations and budget policy at the end of the 19th century began in the house. it's easier to enivation change in the house. everybody is up for election every two years. there's a new rules package every two years. the senate is just by its nature a more permanent body. and in a way that makes this kind of structural change a little harder to imagine. so even if we think about changes that might ultimately drive some change in the senate or change in the process by which the two work together, generally speaking, it's a lot easier to imagine this kind of change starting in the house. >> yeah, to use a cliched metaphor, in a logjam, you don't necessarily have to remove the biggest log. you remove one that just checks up the whole dynamic. i want to take a brief moment and say we're going to start taking questions around 1:45. it depends how scintillating things get. and if you have questions, you can tweet them with the hashtag #expandthehouse. all one word, expandthehouse. or email them to michael -- [email protected]. or the #expandthehouse. so i'm sorry, i have just been told it's expandthehouseaei. people will be flogged. appropriate punishmented will be meted out. expandthehouseaei. so one question, you know, when i talk about this with people, one of the points i emphasize is we have now trained a lot of people to think gerrymandering is in and of itself very, very bad. and i think you can make that argument that it is very, very bad. but the more members of congress that you have, the harder it is, it seems to me, to make the truly ridiculous districts just because you're diluting this -- you're shrinking the sizes of the slices of the pie, and so it's just harder to make crazy districts. is that -- is that actually a benefit that would come from this? because i have heard people have pushed back on me on that. and is that maybe a way to sell it? kevin, you want to jump in on that? >> realizing that the redistricting process is often driven by algorithm software, et cetera, these are the tools people have to work with these days. i think it's fully possible that somebody could come up with an absolutely ridiculous map even if you had, you know, 50 representatives from the great state of ohio or something like that. but i think i would rather turn this question over to lee. lee drutman, who has been deep in the weeds on this stuff and see what he has to say. >> yeah. so i don't think you can sell this as an anti-gerrymandering measure. i wish we could. but i think it's probably neutral on this. basically, the problem with gerrymandering is that we have single-member districts that allow a redistricting commission, partisan legislature, whoever decides the lines, to come up with, you know, 10,000, 100,000, however many simulations of, you know, maps and then run simulations on them and then come up with the map that helps their side the most. and basically, as long as we have partisan legislatures drawing lines and as long as we have single-member districts where democrats live in the cities and republicans live outside of the cities and the populations are distant from each other, we're going to have mostly uncompetitive districts, lots of opportunities for gerrymandering, the problem is going to get worse. speaking of reforms that pair well with expanding the size of the house, moving to multi-member districts with some proportional method of allocating seats would work extremely well. i just don't think we're going to solve the problem of gerrymandering until we get rid of single-member districts which are kind of a historical an akronism that the framers never discussed or debated. we have multi-member districts in many states for the first 40, 50 years of our house selections. >> can i just ask lee, for listeners who are not familiar with the concept of a multi-member as opposed to what we have now, just to briefly explain that difference and how it feeds into this expanding the house. >> sure. so right now, we all vote in districts in which we elect one representative. now, you could imagine combining five districts and rather than you electing then just one person representing a district, you have five representatives. so you know, maybe you have three republicans and two democrats. and what it means is that everybody gets a vote that counts in those districts. and also becomes harder to gerrymander. this is what most democracies do, is they have larger multi-member districts in which there's multiple representatives representing a single larger district. votes are allocated proportionally so that if 60% of the people in the district want a republican to serve them, to represent them, then, you know, 3 out of the 5 seats go to republicans. and 2 out of the 5 seats go to democrats. on the other hand, we have crazy things like the state of massachusetts, in which it's two-thirds democrat, but the entire state of massachusetts does not have a single republican representative. so if you made the entire state of massachusetts one congressional district, you would have a third republicans, two-thirds democrats. maybe you would the more factions emerging, and the liberal republicans who are like, you know, charlie baker republicans, would have some representatives in congress. take that to a state like oklahoma, maybe 40% democrat, so we would have more conservative democrats in congress. i think that would contribute to a much more functional congress with the kind of cross partisan, you know, factions that used to make congress work. that's another recommendation of our common purpose report, although not the focus of this particular report, by the way. >> i will find someone else to moderate that panel. but yuval, picking up on what lee was saying, can you talk for a second, and i agree with you, but i think you're smarter than me in talking about this stuff, why having intraparty factions would benefit congress? which i assume you would also get, i mean, lee's multi-representative districts would clearly contribute to more intraparty factions, but what are intraparty factions and why are they something we actually want? >> i think if you look at american political history, we had two parties for most of our history. almost any moment you look in on, you have two large parties. but in most of those moments, you would have clearly discernible factions within the parties that create coalitions that reach across party, over distinct issues. a lot of the kinds of differences that are worked out through multi-party coalitions in european legislatures are worked out through factional coalitions in the american congress. and the role that these factions play has been enormously important in advancing legislation over the course of our history. they're the reason why things don't just break down in two on every issue at every point all the time. we now live in a time when those kind of factions seemlong unfamiliar, unnatural to us, and the parties are very cohesive. members tend to understand themselves through a partisan identity, and party leaders are the only people who are kind of empowered to negotiate across party lines. there are exceptions to that. we saw one with the infrastructure bill in the senate, which was a great example of how this could work, where you have ten members of the republican party, ten members of the democratic party. they work out a deal. the rest of their parties don't love it, but enough people vote for it, and that's now the law. i think that kind of work, which is the way that congress can do its job. its job is to address public problems by reaching accommodations across lines of difference. and in that sense, congress is different from a european parliament. its purpose is not just to empower the majority to do whatever it wants until it gets thrown out. its purpose is to allow for the durable resolution of divisive issues through compromise, through bargaining, through accommodations. and that kind of thing requires cross partisan coalitions which means they require intraparty factions. i think when we think about how to reform congress, we have to think in this moment about how to make it more likely that those kind of intraparty factions will come into being around particular issues or broadly, regionally, and other ways they have in our history. the absence of them now is a big part of what we consider the dysfunction of congress as a legislative body. >> so ruth, i want to get you back in here. and feel free to take shots at anything you have already heard, but i want to get back to one thing you said earlier about how some people think centralization is a plus and that the house tends to get things done, and it's the senate that doesn't, and all that. i take your point. i think observationally, objectively, you're right. at the same time, though, and i'm giving up my -- i'm revealing something about my youth and my age. if you watch the old school house rock cartoon about how a bill becomes a law, and you try to -- if you use that as a study guide for a civics test today that actually reflected how bills become laws, you would fail because that's just not how it works anymore. bills come from leadership and they don't come out until they have all the votes done. the mere fact that the house gets things done without getting the sort of democratic buy-in that bubbles up from below isn't that in and of itself a sort of very abstracted, idealogical benefit? wouldn't you rather have the rich, you know, argy barge and hurly-burly of american democracy where things coming through the general order and that way there's more buy-in from the actual constituents and all that stuff? >> i'm happy to answer that question. i want to touch on one thing that yuval was stressing. i think it's worth flagging since we have made reference to political history. i think and thinking about intraparty factions of which i think yuval and i are on the same page, in general, they're incredibly important for democracy, but i think we risk painting them as solely a force of good, and in particular, cross party coalitions are always an impetus for productive change or productive conservative change, however you want to think about that. but that, you know, for the sort of heyday of cross party coalitions, the textbook congress, the 1950s and 1960s where you saw a lot of collaboration between democrats and republicans, a lot of collaboration was to maintain the status quo. that was particularly right in terms of thinking about delaying the passage of civil rights legislation, so i think we run the risk of overstating the value of cross party coalitions to democratization in general. i think a lot of -- the sort of flip side to that is to say that oftentimes in american history, you have gotten productive prodding from the fringes of a party that are also well organized. so thinking about the democratic study group and the analogous organizations which exist today, regardless of your politics. i think it's hard to deny that groups like the congressional progressive caucus and the house freedom caucus have forced lawmakers to think about politics differently, and that provides an important representative angle. i think in thinking about centralization, factions matter quite a bit, too. i think the convectional wisdom is the more divided the party, the weaker its leaders will be. the more factions and idealogical heterojanayty you have, the better it will be. when you look at history and leaders who governed deeply divided coalitions, you often observe exactly the opposite. thinking of famous speakers like sam rayburn who governed coalitions that were both instanchated both conservative and liberal members, you saw someone who wielded a great deal of influence in a variety of ways and was responsible for an important institutional reform which was at the time to expand the size of the house rules committee. i think it's worth thinking, and i think this just goes to say it's really hard to know what effect increasing the strength of factions will have on both the sort of pressure to change congressional institutions and also the effect it will have on leader power. i mean, i wonder actually whether the leaders who seem to exert the least influence today is where there's insufficient activity on both side of the party equation. thinking about the influence that conservative republicans wield as compared to moderate republicans, the few that remain. they're not on equal footing, and so perhaps by increasing the ranks and encouraging their organization, it would be possible to provide a counterweight both for those members and for leaders. to address the schoolhouse rock question, i think it's a lovely cartoon that tells a useful story. one only sees the bill, but one doesn't know what's in it. so there are arguments surely that you get better bills drafted when it's a joint process between members and leaders. i think in a different time, people would be worried if you were talking a great deal about drafting legislation in committee that this would open up the opportunity for undue influence from organized interests. you would hear reference to iron triangles, kg-bureaucrats and lobbyists which lee can tell us more. committee drafting isn't necessarily substantially better. or needn't be, so how that would actually play out is i think very difficult to predict. if you have read committee testimony, it doesn't necessarily fill you with a great deal of confidence that better legislation would be drafted in that format. >> so, it had not even occurred to me that we never know what the actual bill is proposing. and it could be a lot of fun to do a very dark sort of alternative history about what that bill actually is about. but we'll get to that another time. but in the schoolhouse rock vein, kevin, you know, in terms of committee work and the assumption that at some point committees should actually do committee work, how would they benefit or not from expanding the house? >> so really old saying, a couple thousand years ago, that to be everywhere is to be nowhere, and i guess the modern analog is if you're musk tasking three different things you're not doing anyway of them well. inevitably in my conversation with people who work on committees in the house, it's very clear to me that they are way overtaxed doing way too many different things. and that naturally flows from the sheer size of the executive branch. you know, the bigger the executive branch gets, the more the oversight responsibility, the more issues that crop up, et cetera, et cetera. you would have to talk to committee staff, and you know, they do a deep dive on some topic and they pound away at it for a few days, but then they have to drop it and move to something else. so their ability to stay locked in to something and to work on something, to say nothing of their bosses. their bosses are even in a worse position because their time is divided between running for re-election, doing constituents outreach. things other than policy making and oversight. so it's just a pure numbers play if you have more members of congress, you're going to be able to have more committees or at least you should have more committees. and hopefully that will lead to the people being stretched a little less thin, and perhaps being able to do a little bit better. it's no guarantee they will actually do better. people do have to have an incentive to do the job. and we know that some members of congress think the whole point of an oversight hearing is to polish their brand and to act up and basically fund-raise. so it's no guarantee, but if you're going to have any chance at oversight being done and done well, you need to put more bodies on it one way or another. >> okay. i'm going to -- i was checking out the expand the house aei hashtag. and lorilei, i won't give the last name, i don't know why, it just feels like a better course of action. how might the concept of an expanded house intersect with the recommendations of the modern -- what is it, the select committee on the modernization of congress which will focus on implementation in 2022? devolving functions, not necessarily decentralizing, is tantalizing in a digital evolution, especially with covid rules. thanks. why don't we go to lee? i'm not sure i understand the question, but i feel like there's a real question in there. >> yeah, i'm not sure i entirely -- there's a lot in there. somewhere there's a pony in there. no, just teasing. but sing the praises of the house committee on modernization, which has been doing, you know, yeoman's work on trying to think about how the house can function better. and you know, i don't know. i would guess if you have 150 new members that are setting up offices for the first time and are looking for guidance, so it's probably more likely to see some of those types of recommendations for how members should run their office and how congress should operate from people who are new as opposed to people who have been there for a long time. so i don't know. my sense is, you know, there's a lot of low-hanging fruit in terms of how congress could operate better as an institution. but a lot of the challenges flow from the fact that in a highly centralized leadership driven institution on top of highly partisan polarized zero sum scorched earth politics, it's s it's really hard for the house to work as a functional institution or congress more broadly to work as a house of one institution in a broader ego system of complicated and layered government. so -- >> okay, so we got a couple questions about campaigns and the costs of elections. not sure i agree with the premises of some of these, but i'll read two of them and you guys, i'll just drop a hockey puck. myriam asked if we expand the house, cost of elections will also expand. can house members have four year terms to keep this from costing a fortune? and then george asked, i appreciate the comment that the work of congress has increased exponentially in the last hundred years, but wouldn't expanding the house increase the number of people spending their time raising money for their next campaign rather than governing? so clearly, campaign costs are something that this is a concern for people. anybody want to jump in on either of those? >> well i guess i would just say this could easily cut both ways. smaller districts could lead to less costly campaigns per district. if you've got to cover less ground, you're likely to have fewer medium markets, likely to need less out reach so you can imagine -- i don't think i would confidently predict on the whole a larger house would predict the cost of election to the house. but i don't think that it would necessarily change it in any dramatic way. the second question just says, aren't we just going to have more house members and aren't house members just the worst people in america and that's certainly a concern. in some ways, they plainly are and we would have more members of the house, so that if the problem is just these damn people then fewer of them might be better than more of them but i think you have to think about the incentive to drive their behavior, these are ambitious men and women, smart men and women behaving the way they for a reason and that has to do how they can channel their ambition and direction to lead to success and the answer to that question is, in part, the structure of the constitution. what is success in the house? how do you make your name? how do you advance? that has to do with the broader media culture this couldn't change but also the way the house works, with what members spend their time doing, whether committee work makes any difference. with how you advance down the lines, and on that front, i do think institutional reforms like this could make a difference so the part of the reason for thinking about them is how do we create incentive that is can help members of the house just be better legislatures if not, if fact, better human beings, and for me that's part of the appeal at least thinking of changes like this and maybe this particular reform, too. >> anyone else want to jump in on that? >> kevin, go ahead. >> yeah, no, i think inevitably this expanding proposal of house of representative is isn't it just going to exacerbate what we currently have, and why do we have legislature so polarized on issues, a legislature where so many members feel like their job is to raise money and just follow leadership's lead as opposed to feeling like they actually have the significant stake in governing and so on down the line. and, you know, so it is a danger on say if we just expand the house. we did nothing else, this could, you know, simply exacerbate the situation. but, you know, if you're going to bring in a whole bunch of new members i think you would, of course, want to think about the incentives how to make them more likely to do the things the public wants and less likely to do the things that put us all off. >> craig asks, can the panelists comment on lessons learned from the u.s. state legislature which from 20 to 400 across, what is the difference with power and sieszs there? and i think of new hampshire with like 400 reps in its public house and considerably smaller than the united states in total, they manage to make it work. is there a lesson to be learned about, you know, if the point is making federal congress more representative and more, a bit more able to deal with constituent services, has that been born out by how state legislatures work? >> you know, john, i think this kind of question puts a real clear point on something we ought to be clear about, which is that there's two kinds of effects the size of legislature can have. one is on the legislature as a body, just a group of several hundred people working together, and the other is on its ability to represent its larger constituency which can range from a small state like new hampshire to the entire country which is much larger and more vast. part of the problem to be addressed by this kind of reform is members represent too many people and in that sense, for example a small state with lower house, the joke is that everybody has their turn serving in the lower house of legislature, but the fact is people have a lot of contact with their member. they're likely to know their state legislature, which is not the case in most places. and in that sense, you can certainly say a larger number can improve representation, the question is whether it becomes unwieldy. you couldn't have that ratio for the house of representatives where you would end up with 10s of thousands of members and that kind of body just couldn't really function to enable face to face bargaining and negotiation, the things you want at least some of in a legislature, so i think the question is finding a balance between being representative of a larger society and yet still being functional as a body of human beings who have to negotiate with each other and work together somehow. >> i would also, i mean, i think it's a fascinating question and you're right there is a trade-off there between the size of legislature and connection to constituents and the u.s., as we all know, is an extremely large country. but there's another important variable here which is the professionalization of the legislature and the issues that legislature is dealing with so new hampshire is really a citizen's legislature, you know, extremely low pay, not a lot of resources, you know, whereas california, new york, pennsylvania, some other states are highly professionalized legislatures, particularly california. now is the outcomes of the california state legislature better than the new hampshire state legislature? i mean, depends on your politics i suppose. to some extent. but it's also the case that the california state legislature is probably dealing with a much wider range of difficult questions because, you know, how california's economy is regulated, often winds up being the de facto way in which a lot of regulations work in the u.s. because a lot of companies make products, if they're making for the california market, might as well use those same manufacturing processes. so, i mean, the u.s., i mean another problem of u.s. legislature and this is something kevin and i have been beating the drums on since we first met over coffee many years ago about the fact the u.s. congress doesn't invest enough in its own policy making capacity. so, and that's one question is whether, if you base the number of numbers but don't increase the expertise and staff capacity, you know, you may not be solving the problem. now, the hope is if you had more members you would also have more investment, capacity, and if you had more focus on committees and subcommittees, would have more investment in staff capacity until you have higher quality hearing than the one ruth is going over the transcripts for which the reality is a lot of what passes for hearings in congress today is just the democrats line of their experts and tell them what to say, republicans line up their experts and tell them what to say. nobody pays attention other than to get their zinger they hope will wind up on youtube or, you know, wherever and then we all move on and nobody changes their opinion. so, you know, this is i mean in some ways, it's a question of, you know, it's not a kind of "just add water" and the spongy dinosaur will keep growing and growing. there's a, it changes the way the institution functions and has a bunch of other downstream consequences so it is kind of the, as you're saying, jonah, if we're in a logjam, you don't have to, you know, remove all the logs. you just remove a of them and the water starts flowing and it's easier to remove others. politics is a complex system and we all have to have some humility here about what these changes are going to lead to and we can, you know, make our zoom panel predictions but we have to accept that things will always play out somewhat differently than we expect them to, but at the same time, i think it's pretty clear that what's happening now is a fundamental disaster for the long-running experiment of self governance in the united states. >> so, jerome asks a question that i think is a good one and i think it feeds into how you could possibly sell, at the very least, segments of the democratic party on this and maybe, possibly the republican party. he asks, do you agree that expanding the house would result in a greater probability of electing more minorities, including more women and younger folks without long histories of presidential election -- of previous election success, i.e. professional politicians, in other words, would you have a more representative congress in the demographic sense and also would be more truly new blood in terms of people from outside the usually channels? which i think could be a mixed blessing, but could be a way to sell it. have you run through, i mean, do we know that would be the case or would it just create a little more band width for the same professional politicians climbing the greasy poll that tend to go to congress anyway? >> i'm happy to weigh in on that question. i think there would be more diverse group of people running for congress because you would draw from people who are younger and, you know, congress right now is not very representative, first of all, much, much older. there's some extent to which congress should be a little older and wiser but variable people in congress, it's much more male. if you look at the classes, particularly on the democratic side, they tend to be a lot more diverse, in terms of a lot more women, people of color, people of different backgrounds, so i think it would absolutely make congress more representative of the american people. you know, that's where the professional politicians, i mean politics is a skill so the idea we're going to have amateurs coming in and figuring things out, but there are people who have different life experiences. people get into politics for different reasons. i think we need to stop sort of trashing the idea that politicians are all bad because it is a skill and it is a profession and i want professional doctors if i'm going in for surgery, i want professional pilots if i'm going in a plane, so i would like professional politicians, you know, making tough compromised decisioned in governing this country. >> i thought we just wanted people really good at tiktok videos, i thought that was the whole point. >> yeah, i think your reading of the federalist papers may be different than mine. >> more seats is obviously more possibilities for diversity, but i think the bigger issue is it gets back to what you all highlights earlier, which is if this was rolled out t would create a moment, and create a systemic disruption moment, not the least, you would have to create new districts or have to start creating multimember districts in which case, that takes the chess board and politics and kind of flips it and that means people who may not have thought previously about getting into a race suddenly decide to do it. and, you know, so i'm pretty confident you would have a congress that looks a little different than the current one we have. >> i would just add to that, too, that we know that in districts where there is not an incumbent running that you typically track more quality candidates to run. it's perceived as, you know, there's a fair shot at this, so if we think about the increase in size just opening up the number of, quote, open seats, where there isn't an incumbent who is stifling competition you might imagine you're just going to get, you know, i take lee's point and fully endorse it, you want good, professional politicians, but the best ones are not going to run in races they think they're going to lose, so if you have more open races you may actually increase the number of truly qualified candidates, whether that necessarily goes down the benefit of greater diversity, the ways we think about it and congress is i spoiz more of an open question. i think there is some evidence at least when it comes to ses that you would get more of a representative who is more likely to be well-funded on their own. one of the things that's of particular concern is members of congress just not representative of the constituents when it comes to sort of their own personal wealth, so we think that leads to problematic policy making then, you know, certainly, increasing the number of candidates coming from a variety of different quarters would certainly, certainly would be hard to see how that would be a bad thing and probably would be ultimately a good thing. >> so, at the beginning of this, you made the point that we had these moments of reform in congress, sort of spontaneous, effervescent reforms in some area, it seems to me most of those areas you had one party decisively dominating house of representatives and also had much more regular order type things going on. given where the house is right now, can you actually imagine a kevin mccarthy coming in as the new speaker and saying okay, this is what we're going to do? or if, for some reason, nancy pelosi holds on, i mean not to descend into -- it seems like this is not the most capicious time to get the nation to heal itself or am i missing something? >> well, you know, the times you need to heal are the times you are sick, and i do think there's a very broadly shared dissatisfaction with the status quo among members. there is not, at the moment, a broadly shared sense of how to improve things and i think the reason to be talking about ideas like this now is to try to help members see that some of the dissatisfaction they feel could be addressed by reforms of the institution. for some, that would look like reforms of the budget process which i think is really at the heart of what's now wrong in the house. for some, it might be reforms of the committee system, might be ways of thinking about the roles of leadership and other things, but there aren't a lot of members who are very happy with the status quo, and so i do think it's incumbent upon those of us who think about congress institutionally to be offering ideas at this point for how things could be changed. that's not to say that members are ready to go or that you can easily imagine a cross partisan coalition that unites around changes like this. i think that it is an advantage for reform like this that would not have an obvious partisan appeal, butte it's also a disadvantage because it doesn't have obvious appeal to either party. it's not a way that you can say to them you're just more likely to win if you do this. i think that this reform, the way it's structures takes seriously some of the concerns and incentives members would face, for example it doesn't eliminate existing seats. it doesn't take seats away from states, which means it's more likely the existing congress would be open to this because members wouldn't think they would, themselves, lose their own seat under it. they're only expanded -- >> also gain seniority immediately. >> and you gain seniority immediately. i think we have to take the incentives they confront seriously. and, you know, it's also always easy to say congress used to be much more collaborative, you know, there was a -- i hear that said now about the 1990s, when i was a staffer in the house, and let me tell you, that was not a golden age, but a lot of people say back then, you know, the chairman and ranking member would go to dinner all the time. that's great, but there are always problems. always problems and at any moment the ways you think about how to change the system have to be geared to the problems. it's not we're trying to return to some age of perfection. it's that we're trying to deal with what's wrong now and in that sense, i think we got to start from a realistic assessment of what you say, this is not an obvious moment for bipartisan reforms to strengthen the institution, but also this is when they're needed so need to think about how to make them more appealing to the existing congress. >> i would add something else, and i agree with you all. i mean there is a group of members of congress that calls themselves problem-sufblers caucus, i know, sorry, i want to hear what she has to say about this who have been, you know, i think trying to find a way to make the institution work and sort of coming up sort because there's not a lot of support for their efforts in a centralized party-driven congress, but i could envision a scenario in which republicans win a majority in a house, but there's an action of republicans that refuses to endorse kevin mccarthy as speaker and there's a fair amount of interrepublican fighting and in that moment, problem solvers step up and say okay, here's another way to run congress, and finds a kind of cross partisan coalition to do that, especially if, maybe, there's some independent senators, moderate republicans who win some elections in 2022. this is sort of, there's been a kind of longstanding attempt among some folks to find this fulcrum of moderates who find the balance of power in either senate, house, or both and use that organizing moment at the beginning of congress to say look, we're going to vote for whichever speaker will agree to these demands. as long as they're a small group, it's very easy to pick them off and, you know, it's hard to be a dissenting member, you know, it's much nicer to be a good team player on the party in charge, but if that number grows and if there's, you know, more organization and determination, you know, i could see a situation in which we wind up with something unpredictable and to you all's point, not a lot of members are thinking about how to make the institution work better, but i think they're eager to hear from folks who are in that moment in which they're reaching for something to do. and some way, and so, you know, in politics, change happens slowly and then all at once. and, you know, the future belongs to those who are willing to think hard about what that future ought to be. >> so ruth, are the problem solvers the cavalry in this situation? >> i mean, i think you need more than the problem solvers. i think they've certainly put on the record that they're not happy with the status quo and our willing to be in the same room with members of the other party and talk about policy in a productive way, but i don't think that they're enough. i mean, i think the good news from both what lee and you all said is the best news for everybody is no one seems to be all that happy with the status quo, and so ideally, one could find, you know, a lot of institutional reforms have passed in congress through strange coalitions, common carriers where everyone finds enough of what to like in a change that you bring together odd groups of people you wouldn't otherwise imagine collaborating and i think that's the best case for this kind of reform. i think the bigger problem is actually just the amount of cynicism members have anytime a change is possible that there's something better out there, so i think to lee's point, you know, one hitch for this report is just that it starts a conversation about things that people may not have thought about that are more, you know, both grander in scale and seemingly easier to understand than, say, small tweaks around the edges that i think would require an incredible amount of political capital, but probably wouldn't really materially change the experiences of individual members or, you know, voters so here, the best thing you can say about this plan is it's just crazy enough it may actually be inspiring people to do something about it, right? like that it's not just another small tweak to improve capacity or the functioning of email on capitol hill or office base, all of which are incredibly important, but not particularly inspiring in the way that, you know, something like this might be. so i think, you know, it's this sort of changing of a conversation that i think could yield coalition building that we haven't seen and so it's possible that this is the kind of -- that you wouldn't see small scale changes. that if you were going to see changes it would be big or nothing so that may be where we are. >> yes, i mean i come from a school of conservatism that thinks most new ideas are bad and throwing out reforms to see what shakes loose is a bad approach to things, but one of the nice things about expanding the house is it's in fact a very old idea. it comes out of the constitution, it's debated at the constitutional convention, and if you're going to take a flyer on an idea that only seems radical because of lethargy in the status quo bias but is actually, in fact, not, this seems like a great one to do. but that's just me. kevin, you want to sort of wrap this up for everybody? our in-house congress guy? >> oh, yeah, sure, just to build off what lee was observing and ruth was pointing out, the house has in it a sort of natural reset button that can, you know, be pushed to lead to structural changes and that's the fact that every two years you have to create a new house and adopt new rules and involves a whole lot of bargaining and one of the chief points of bargaining is who gets to be speaker, the reason we have select committee on modernization of congress now is we have new members who didn't feel beholden to speaker pelosi and said look, we'll who would our votes unless we get reforms, one was the select committee of congress so one can see you can bring about change just by saying look, we got a bunch of new members and we want to have a vote on this schedule at some point this year about expanding the house or a select committee set up on this and that can kind of get the ball rolling on this sort of thing so eventually you can enact a statute that can lead to the house being expanded. >> so, we need to wrap up in a minute, but i feel bad that i have not asked this question at the very beginning, because i think it's actually one of the questions that a lot of normals have. and one of the problems that we have in our democracy now is the normals don't have enough representation so what i've been talking about expanding the house for a long time, i often make jokes about it's the tyranny of the fire marshal that limits the number of seats in the house but that's not actually right. robert asks, the house chamber is a finite physical size, if we return to regime which more members are added every ten years after the census, at what point will they exceed the maximum safe capacity of the chamber? so like literally, like how many people can it hold? i don't think it really matters that much, but an interesting question and i think a lot of normal people want to know, like how many people can you fit in the room and what do you do once you go past it? >> you know, congress has faced this question before and had to expand the house chamber. the house used to meet in what's now statuary hall, it was expanded in both directions, created into you senate chamber and house chamber, house chamber now is built in benches, you could fit more people, but not a lot more people, i think you'd have trouble fitting 150 more people on a regular basis in the house. you very rarely see all the members in the house at any one time. the house of commons chamber in britain is actually built to house fewer than the number of members, have 650 members and by definition, and that is intentionally, the house chamber seats fewer members than the house has so that those very rare occasions when everybody is there it feels crowded and intense and like an important moment and there are people standing. maybe the fire marshal wouldn't allow that but i don't think congress should let the size of the existing room determine for itself how to represent the public, if there's a need to expand, you know, they know where to find architects. >> okay. well with that and you all just callous disregard for fire safety, we're going to conclude this. i want to thank everybody for doing this, starting again, ladies first, with ruth from chicago, lee drutman, duvall and of course our own kevin cosar. thank you all for tuning in. >> 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