Ep. 39 - Uncapping the House: America's 250-Year Report Card

Gridlock isn't just a political buzzword; it's a structural failure costing us real progress. As the United States hits its 250th anniversary in July 2026, celebrating our history is only useful if we are willing to objectively audit our current dysfunctions. We sit down to examine the state of the union, focusing specifically on why the House of Representatives no longer reflects the American public and what historical mechanisms exist to fix it.

We get into the specific metrics of American success, like our massive annual GDP, the stability of our constitutional republic, and our insulated geographic advantages, before pivoting to the deep flaws within our current legislative branch. The conversation breaks down the 1913 Permanent Apportionment Act, the mechanics of gerrymandering, and the logistical nightmare of single representatives answering to 800,000 constituents. The turning point of the discussion hinges on the "forgotten" Congressional Apportionment Amendment and George Washington’s original vision for highly localized, 30,000-person districts.

Expanding the government is a tough sell, especially when confronted with the massive logistical costs of seating over a thousand representatives and a national debt exceeding $38 trillion. You will walk away with a clear understanding of why capping the House over a century ago fueled today’s extreme polarization, and why absorbing the financial cost of a larger Congress might be the only practical way to force moderate, localized representation back into Washington.

If you care about structural government reform, reducing political polarization, and the future of American capitalism, you’ll get a lot from this. Please remember to subscribe to the channel and share this episode with someone who is frustrated by the current state of politics. What is the most obvious structural change you think Washington needs right now?

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:07

Welcome back, everybody, to the Radical Moderate Podcast. I'm your host, Pat O'Brien, and today we're going to talk about America, the United States of America. This episode is dropping in early July of 2026, which happens to be on July 4th, happens to be the 250th anniversary of this great country. I've been doing uh kind of a quarterly update, state of affairs type of thing, and it occurred to me that this quarter is a momentous one. And I wanted to look back, you know, big picture on the history of the United States, and you know, then offer up something that I think could be a positive going forward, which is actually it's a it's an old idea that I'm making new again. So today we're gonna talk about America at 250 years old, why Congress no longer represents America. So I'm gonna come back to that. I'm gonna come back to why Congress no longer represents America in a minute. But let me start about, let me go back to the fact that I love this country. And to be a radical moderate, you've got to love this country, and I've talked about that in episode one and probably other episodes, but my father fought in World War II for this country. This country has created tremendous economic economic prosperity for the O'Brien family, certain for certainly for me personally, but I want to be objective and also say, you know, what is the if you look back at a 250-year history, how have we done? So think about this kind of as an audit of sorts. You know, so we want to celebrate the 250-year run, but you also, you don't want to be blindsided or stagnant about things. You want to also say, what can we do better? But let me start with the great stuff first. The first thing I want to say about the United States is we have created an economic system that for at least 250 years has kind of been the envy of the world. Our brand of capitalism has worked much more often than it hasn't worked. And when it hasn't worked, it has essentially corrected itself with proper government intervention. We had a Great Depression in the 1930s, and that's what the New Deal uh was designed to go after and fix. We, you know, for more recently, we had a Great Recession uh 2007 to 2009. We had to create legislation to fix the gaps, if you will, in regulation and that sort of thing. And we're coming out the other side stronger because of it. Uh but I would say, you know, I'm going to go back uh to cite a source here, Niall Ferguson, who talks about America's combination of property rights, entrepreneurship, and capital markets created unprecedented prosperity. You know, we've got 30 million uh or 30 trillion, excuse me, big difference, 30 trillion in annual GDP. That's the largest economy of the world. We're number one in terms of the largest economy. And in the thing that is probably most important to everyone in the world, how am I doing economically? What's my standard of living? We're number one, folks, and we've been that way for quite a while. And so we continue to attract capital. So we attract money flowing into this country, and we attract talent. People want to come here. I've talked so much about immigration in my podcast, but it's because people want to come here. They want part of that American dream. And so I'm all in on our economy. Could I critique it and say it needs to be modified? Of course I could. But if if you want to be, if you're going to have an honest conversation about America at 250, you need to uh I think you need to acknowledge, you know, that our economy has become has been the envy of the world. The second thing I want to talk about, and I have a legal background, a trained attorney, but it's the rule of law. Not every country has what we have. A lot of them do. Let me say that. A lot of them do, but I think it's our unique combination of we've got a constitutional republic, a constitution which has withstood the test of time. To my knowledge, you know, we're basically the longest democracy experiment in the history of the world, certainly with the fact that we know on most things with certainty that the court system is going to live up to the Constitution. I could critique the Supreme Court in more recent decades, but I won't, because I'm looking back 250 years and saying this thing has worked really well. And if if you're in a car wreck or a contract dispute or any number of things, you know that you can go to a court of law and you can seek uh, you can get damages for that. Or in a criminal context, do you know that you could go and if you're to court and if you're wrongly accused, you can uh be judged by a jury of your peers. And again, I could anyone could critique this stuff. We could nitpick this stuff and say, well, I know you know the OJ verdict was a situation that wasn't justice. Like, I get it, and and you're probably right on that one case out of the millions of cases that get adjudicated. But in general, our legal system is pretty damn good. And I think that that's something we should be proud of, and I think it's a big achievement on our report card for the last 250 years. And then the third thing I want to point out, and it's not it's something that I think we all know, but I don't know that we take the time to acknowledge, and that is our geography. So just stick with me now. And remember, this is a 250-year look back, so there hasn't always been 50 states. We haven't, we have not always had Alaska and Hawaii in the mix. Very beautiful state if you've never been there. I've I spent a week there and I've thought to myself, why have I not been back to Hawaii since? But we've got it all, folks. So first off, think about it from the standpoint of what really is a problem for other countries. Well, in Europe, they would say, well, we're over a 250-year period, we're always getting attacked, we're always getting invaded, we're always getting into beefs with our neighbors. We really have very little of that since we've established the 50 states. We've got two big oceans, the Pacific and the Atlantic, that kind of guard our borders, and then we've got friendly neighbors to the north and Canada, and to the south and Mexico. Cuba doesn't love us, but we've kind of come to our separate peace with them. They're not a problem. So if you think about it, we're very insulated from attack, which has been a huge issue. Think if you're Ukraine right now, or think if you're France and Germany and all of those countries during World War I and II. They have war is big problems, and we really have not had that in a long, long time. But then going beyond that, just think of the ease in which people move from state to state in the United States. You know, people, uh, my family came from Iowa to Arkansas, and there was no, it wasn't that big of a deal. You know, they they just picked up uh some U-Hauls or that sort of thing and took all their stuff and moved, and economic opportunity was right there for us. But from a legal standpoint, they didn't have to become the citizen of Arkansas after they become the citizen of Iowa. It was very easy and free-flowing. And then just think about our agricultural footprint, like the farmlands of the Midwest that produce all of the staples. You know, we can feed ourselves and not with our own crops. And not every country can say that, you know, and we have so many natural resources, oil being one of them, coal being one of them. I somebody once said, I heard them say that we were the saw that we're the Saudi Arabia of coal. Now, a lot of people don't want to burn coal anymore. That's fine, but it didn't change the fact that over 250 years it was a massive advantage for us to have coal and all the rare elements and that sort of thing. And then that's before you even get to the beauty. I mean, let's, you know, let's give a big pat on the back to Teddy Roosevelt for creating the national park system and preserving so much of this beauty. And I mean, I know it's hard to put a price on that, but uh, you know, I've never been to the Grand Canyon or Yosemite, and they're absolutely on my list, but I've been to so many other places. You know, I've been to the Rocky Mountains, and I, you know, the oceans alone are just incredibly beautiful. But then the rural areas, I'm not a big hunter, fisherman, but I get it, and I've been in those rural areas and the pristineness of it and the being a part of nature. So, folks, we've got some amazing things happening. And I'll get off my my high horse now about how great we are, and I'll I'll talk about two things which will lead to the transition that are certainly have been some negatives, and I think that are fixable, but may or may not fix themselves. So the first is our national debt, and I've talked about had a whole episode about our national debt. It's too big, okay? It's over $38 trillion, it's growing, it's 120% of GDP. It's a problem. More recently than not, I've thought to myself, we're gonna have a reckoning, and that reckoning will kind of take care of it. It'll suck for a lot of people, especially if you're over-levered at that point. But I think there will be a reckoning and that the economy will self-correct itself and maybe I think it'll lead to government reform. I want to be clear, I don't think that the citizens of the United States are gonna do it. I don't think that we're gonna rise up and say, let's attack the natural national debt and fix this thing. I really don't think that's what's gonna happen, but I do think it will fix itself because of the natural progression of things. I mentioned the Great Depression earlier. We with legislation and some safety programs, we fixed that. We made some tweaks after the Great Recession. We can do it again, and and quite frankly, we'll probably have to do it again. No, the thing I want to talk about that is so dysfunctional and so in our way from the progress we need to make, is our federal government. And let me, before I get to the federal government, let me say I think there's a lot of positives with local government. Most city governments work pretty well. I think one of the reasons they do is the leadership of that city government, particularly a mayor, is closer to the people. Like, I mean, you depending upon where you live, and I live in a town of 100,000 people, I see my mayor sometimes. Now, I had my mayor on a podcast, and you don't have to start a podcast to see your mayor, but many times in moderate-sized cities, you could make an appointment with the mayor of the city. You can certainly go to a city council meeting, so it's pretty open. County government. I think most county governments work pretty well. And I'll even say state governments, by and large, I think work pretty well. I think a big part of that is they have balanced budgets. So all 50 states have a balanced budget, and that means people have to figure it out. You can't just kick that can down the road. Which brings me to the federal government, which is the king of kicking that can down the road. And specifically, and I won't even talk about the presidency right now. I could take issues with the presidency, Democrat, and Republican alike. I won't in this episode. I really want to focus on Congress. And I'll even give the Senate a pass right now and say that uh, you know, the Senate was always designed, you know, similar to what we what happened in Britain, is to be the higher chamber and the more thoughtful chamber. I could quibble with that over the 250-year history a lot, but it's worked more than it hasn't. Like the Senate, I don't think it while uh it certainly was a huge impediment to getting civil rights faster, there's no question about that. In general, the Senate has not been the thing that stopped our country from moving forward. More recently, in more recent decades, it's the House of Representatives. So I want to take a quick pause here. Let's reflect back. What's Pat saying today? What's he talking about? Well, I love the country, and there's a lot to love. Got a great economy over a 250-year horizon. Uh our system of law and courts works pretty damn well. And then our geography, which is so beautiful but has also been fueled part of that economic prosperity, we've got some big advantages. And I think we need to acknowledge that. But let's talk about that geography for a second. So we have 50 states, and we have a House of Representatives. And I could I could go on a long diatribe about times that good legislation didn't even get a vote in the House of Representatives. Would wouldn't even come up for a vote, which is ridiculous. Just completely ridiculous. And we should probably we need structural reform to that. But that's not even where I'm gonna go. That's not even where I'm gonna go right now. Where I'm gonna go is I want you to picture Congress right now, right? And the House of Representatives specifically, in your mind. How many United States House members do we have? Hopefully you didn't have to Google it, but it's 435. So I want you to sit with that number for a second, all right? And go back to what I said this show is about Congress not representing us anymore. So I want to tell you a quick story. When I was a freshman at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, and I was, you know, get a political science major and really caring about how government works and all that, I was renting an apartment, and one day a survey showed up in the mail, and it was from the office of John Paul Hammerschmidt, who was a Republican representing the 3rd Congressional District. At that time, I think the only Republican in the entire state of Arkansas in the federal delegation. And this thing was like four or five pages long. There was probably a hundred questions, but it was questions about what do you as a constituent want? And there was a lot of questions about roads, there was a lot of questions about taxes and all the things that you can imagine. But what I filled the whole thing out. I don't know how many people did, especially in my age bracket, 21 years old, but I filled the whole thing out, and only a year, decades later, do I now realize how powerful that is. I had a United States Congressman's office send me, one individual, a survey of like, what do you think? And think about that. Think about how powerful that is. Now, today, I mean, they had to mail that to me. I I had to fill it out, somebody had to, you know, tabulate the results. Think how quickly we could do that with uh, you know, the technological capabilities we have right now, but that's not really my point. The point is someone cared enough to ask, which got me to thinking. We're at 435 house members right now. Care to guess when that happened? Like when that number was set? Well, it wasn't in 1776, it wasn't in 1789, it was in 1913. 1913 is when somebody made a decision, I'll get to that in a second, that we should have 435 House members. In 1789, there were 65 House members. Now remember, population's much smaller, less states and all that. But I'll read off some quick stats here. It changed in 1793, it went to 105. 1813, it went to 182. 1833, it goes up to 240, 1883 goes up to 325. You can see it's it's moving up quite frequently, and then in 1913, it stops at 435. Why is that? Well, it's called the Permanent Apportionment Act, and it happened in 1913. Think about how much has changed. Think about how much bigger we are now than we were in 1913. Right now, a U.S. Congress person represents maybe 750 to 800,000 constituents. That needs to sit with you a second. Because I'm gonna tell you about something that quite frankly I didn't really know, I didn't really fully understand, and what has now become known to a lot of people as the Forgotten Amendment. And that is the Congressional Apportionment Amendment. I'm just fascinated with this thing, okay? So going back to the Bill of Rights, the Ten Amendments that made the Bill of Rights, this was one of the twelve that were proposed to be ratified into the U.S. Constitution, the Congressional Apportionment Amendment. And its purpose, the whole reason it was put out there was to prevent representation from becoming too diluted. One of the first three things that uh Congress worried about was Congress becoming too small. So you might say, well, that's fine, Pat. I mean, it's just an amendment, it didn't get passed. I believe like 11 states ratified it. It was like this close, and I'm I'm the inch. I'm I'm making the with my fingers, I'm making the inch mark there. It was like this close. But do you remember even that being taught? I don't. I don't. And I've got uh a minor in history, and and I made A's in high school. I don't remember this. So what was this all about? Who was for it? Well, the first person who was for it and who had this who apparently was a big deal to was George Washington. I am not kidding you folks. So this is kind of a a fascinating historical fact here. At the time of the Constitutional Convention, Washington only spoke about one substantive issue, and it was how many people uh there was per house district. So the Constitutional the Constitution originally proposed one representative for 40,000 people. Washington stood up and said it should be 30,000. So he literally he wanted it to be even smaller, and and that's where we ended up from an original standpoint. But this amendment, this amendment that I referenced earlier, is all about tying the number of House members to the population. So in other words, if this amendment had passed, or theoretically it could still pass, it really could. It's just been on the books pending all this time. We might have thousands of House members. Literally, I'm probably blowing your mind here, but we could have thousands of House members. James Madison, um, you know, Federalist number 55, he argued that representation must expand as the nation grows. He was concerned that the representatives would become disconnected from the constituents. Does that sound familiar? Uh this um this amendment, folks, it fails. It doesn't make it part of the, you know, the Bill of Rights and that initial thing, but it was specifically designed to keep representation from becoming too diluted. There's a lot of literature out there. There's there's a lot of, is I didn't know all this until I was preparing for this episode, but there's a lot of literature out there in support for the position that this should be a thing, that this is something that should be done. Let's just say it's a thousand members, though. Let's just let's just run with that for a second. Now, I can already hear the objections, and quite frankly, I would have had the same objection, which is we can't afford it, right? So if we've got 435 House members, you're talking about more than doubling it, so it's going to double the cost. Okay, true. Let's just sit with that for a second. But think about it this way: what is the cost of our Congress being completely dysfunctional right now? I would say it's pretty high. What is the cost of our Congress, specifically the House, not being very representative representative of our interests? I would say it's pretty high. What is the cost of the polarization that we have that we can't even talk to each other and that the Congress people that if I were to take a poll among the general public and say, who, you know, who do you know? And I won't name anybody on this episode, they're going to probably name the most extreme members of the House. Why is that the case? Why are they the most popular? Well, I think it's the way that our social media has developed and the way that our cable TV, news, and I'm putting that in quotes, has developed, that those people have become so popular and to some extent have such a big say in how things go. You know, um Robert Dahl, who's a Yale political scientist, Uh scientists and a you know kind of an influential scholar in the 20th century, he believes that the house has become disconnected from ordinary citizens. And he he generally advocates for about a thousand members. To me, it's a nice even number. But you know, the cost, folks, I think the cost is minuscule. Like literally, it's a it's it's like a lot cheaper than the war in Iran. And by the way, in a different episode, but the you know, the Congress has really not even bothered to deal with that. Like they might make a statement about it, but they're barely, barely holding hearings, barely voting on uh war powers, etc. And I think part of it is there's not enough of them that that their voice looks like it would make a difference. They don't have enough credibility to even uh have a say so. But part of why I wanted to bring this to your attention, part of why I wanted to make such a big deal out of this, is I think that it could help solve a different problem. So more representation is good. I think just ask yourself, do you know your United States Congressperson? Could you run into them at the grocery store? When they represent 750,000 people, the odds of that happening are not very high. If they were representing 250,000 people or 300,000 people, that means the districts would have to, in some sense, become more compact. You know, there's a district in Arkansas that's got like 30 counties in it. I mean, it's it's it's to drive from one end to the other would take five hours, probably. Like it's not, it's not very, it doesn't represent everybody's interest, but be that as it may, I'll bring it back to this point. And I'll as I move toward kind of a conclusion on this big idea. If we had a thousand members, it's my belief it would be a lot harder to gerrymander. Because, and I think we could, I think we could create some other laws to complement this, to really bolster that position, but it would really expose gerrymandering and it would create more. So in a in a Democratic state like California, you would have more Republicans. They wouldn't necessarily be representing a bigger area. Their votes wouldn't be as impactful even as they are right now, but there would be more of them, and the the Republican voice in California could be more heard. Same thing for Democrats in Texas. There would be more Democrats. There just would be. America is great. That's the good news. We've had a wonderful 250-year history, and I want to accentuate the positives. But I think if we're going to continue to be great, I think if we're going to continue to be number one in the economy and, you know, I mean the military is part of that. I didn't mention that earlier. We've got the best military in the world. We just, I wish we didn't need to use it as much and didn't need to get involved in as many places as we seem to. But if we're going to keep that uh that record going, I think we need structural changes, and this is just the fastest way to do it. I could give you 10 other things I think we could do to change the country. This one is something that I think could actually work. But my final point will be this. It was people thought, and were good with the idea, that in 1913 we would have 435 House members. We are more than a century past that. We're 113 years past that mark. That doesn't make any damn sense. We need to get with the times. We need to recognize that things change. That's the beauty of our constitutional republic. We've had many more amendments pass the Bill of Rights. I mean, for God's sakes, we had prohibition. That was stupid, but we fixed it. We fixed it. We realized how bad it was, and we fixed it. We need to get an amendment. At a minimum, we need Congress to do this. Let me say, I don't think that they're gonna, somebody's gonna hear this podcast and they're immediately gonna jump up and say, well, Pat O'Brien and this podcast says we need to go to a thousand members, let's do it. There'll be a million objectives, uh objections, I should say. Here's my challenge. If you think I'm wrong, reach out to me, come on this podcast and tell me why this is a terrible why this is a terrible idea. Because I really don't see the flaws, and I'll I'll rest my case on 1913, 435 members, no changes. After changing it uh six or seven different times, we've had no changes in the last hundred years. I don't think that makes sense. Radical moderation means you look at a problem and you say to yourself, what have we not tried? And if there's something that makes common sense, you do it. So let's pull the trigger. Let's have a bigger U.S. House than we've ever had, one that's more representative of the people. And I think what'll happen is more moderate people will end up running for office because the districts will end up being more moderate just by the way, the way that that works. And and I I'd love to have a historian come on the podcast to talk about it. But I bet my guess is in the 1800s they were more moderate because the representatives were closer to the people, and they were thinking more about I just want to make sure I represent my area and that I'm doing the best for it. Whereas now everything's become so nationalized, and that is not what the people's house was supposed to be. Folks, we're at the end of this episode. I hope somebody can take this big idea I have and run with it. I appreciate you listening, and for this week, that is the POV of P.O.B.