Michael Steel, spent years as a top aide to Republican leadership on Capitol Hill, namely House Speaker John Boehner, has worked on a number of presidential campaigns, and is now a managing partner at Hamilton Place Partners, a public affairs firm in Washington DC. 
We talked about how the current uproar among House Democrats pushing for impeachment proceedings to begin mirrors some of the challenges that Boehner faced with a restive Republican conference when the GOP was in the majority from 2010 to 2015, when Boehner resigned and handed the reins to Paul Ryan. 
We discussed what’s causing the dysfunction in Congress that is now the new normal over the past decade. His most provocative idea? Basically to get rid of the Speaker of the House by making it a ceremonial position, turning over real control of House leadership to the Majority Leader position. To understand why he thinks that would make such a big difference, you’ll have to listen to the rest of the episode, or you can read my write up of this interview, which is linked to here.
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Let's Get Rid of the Speaker of the House, Says Former Aide to John Boehner

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It is the 80th anniversary of D-Day. I just finished watching the ceremony in France, where they honored WWII vets who still live, and those who never came home. It was incredibly moving.   But we can't just look back and grow emotional during inspiring video montages. We must think about how to avoid the paths of division that could send future young men and women to similar fates. We can honor those brave WWII vets further — now — by listening to those who are trying to help us remember how to resolve our differences peacefully, rather than through violence or force. Yuval Levin is one of those people. My interview with him about his new book, out next week, "American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation -- And Could Again." Yuval's argument is that our Constitution is more than a legal document, though it is that. The Constitution is also a blueprint, a map, which lays out how our nation was intended to solve problems and resolve disagreements. James Madison, the nation's fourth president, was one of the chief architects of our constitutional system. And our system has a psychology of sorts, Yuval's book says. This system defines unity as acting together even when we don’t agree. Madison and others designed an architecture of checks and balances and disparate power centers that are intended to pull and push us into engagement with those who are different and think different. It is that action together which creates common purpose and cohesion, a unity of "peace but not quiet," as Yuval writes. "Politics is haggling, or it is force," he quotes Daniel Bell as saying. He adds: "We have forgotten that the only real alternative to a politics of bargaining and accommodation in a vast and diverse society is a politics of violent hostility." Many Americans despair that we can repair our divisions. But Levin rejects that despair. He calls his book "hopeful" but says that does not mean he is necessarily optimistic. "Optimism and pessimism are both dangerous vices, because they are both invitations to passivity," he writes. "Hope is a virtue, and so it sits between those vices. It tells us that things could go well and invites us to take action that might help make that happen and might make us worth of it happening." The way we move toward this unity of "peace but not quiet" is by thinking more carefully about how our system is structured, and what kind of behavior it incentivizes: cooperation across difference as the Constitution intended, or pulling apart, demonizing the other side and fearing those who disagree, and performative outrage.

Yuval Levin's "American Covenant" is a blueprint for peace-making and effective governance

John Inazu's new book is Learning to Disagree: The Surprising Path to Navigating Differences with Empathy and Respect. John teaches on criminal law, law and religion and the First Amendment at Washington University in St. Louis. He is an expert on religious freedom. And he is a senior fellow with Interfaith America. He is also a former Air Force officer who was working in the Pentagon on 9/11 when a hijacked airliner hit the other side of that massive building. And finally, he is the son of Japanese-American father who was born in an internment camp during World War II, where his American citizen grandparents were incarcerated for three years simply because of their ethnic heritage.  John's book is structured around the rhythm of a law school year. The reason, he says, is because he thinks the law has something to teach us about how to approach disagreement. We talk here about why he thinks his book has surprising advice. We also spend a lot of time talking about the protests on college campuses about the war in Gaza, which have reached a fever pitch over the past week, and what his book offers to that incredibly intense disagreement. We actually kept coming back to the issue of American universities and their purpose and mission.

Higher ed has lost sight of mission and purpose, John Inazu says

We keep looking at our broken political system — the politicians who show up on our TV's and our phones, the lawmakers who end up in Congress, and the general lack of solutions to our biggest problems — and we shake our head. We promise to vote the bums out. We vow to drain the swamp. We pledge to overturn the plutocracy. But we don't think about our assembly line, the system that gives us the choices we are presented with. Remember Lee Drutman's line? "Who chooses the choices?" That's the right question. When we show up to the toy store, and don't like our choices, we're not asking who is making the decision to limit us to these options. We simply keep buying from their limited selection, hoping for a different outcome. The point of Nick's Troiano's book,  The Primary Solution, is that we have to change the way we choose our choices. This means getting rid of party primaries, which have become a weapon used by ideologues and zealots to turn our politics into a bloodsport rather than something that serves its citizens. Nick's book is an explanation of how that came to be, why it should be changed, and how we can change it.  You can also read a series of four Substack posts on the book  here. 

We Are Not Powerless: American Politics is "Entirely Fixable" says Nick Troiano in his new book "The Primary Solution"

Break the system.   That's what one New Hampshire voter, a 58-year old retired Army officer, said he wants the president to do, in an interview with Politico Magazine.   It's only the most obvious example of many of us tend to do from time to time. We pretend, or actually believe, that politics is a form of magic.   In other words, we think we can elect a person, or pass a law — as if we were waving a wand — and this will fix our problems.   But Michael Wear argues in The Spirit of Our Politics that a politics of magic is like trying to take a shortcut, and it won't work.   "Our society, politics, and churches are hampered by a technological conceit — that we can attain the kind of society we seek without coming to terms with the kind of people we are and without becoming a different kind of people," (147) he writes.   "Our society produces mass shootings at an unparalleled rate and scale, for instance, not in spite of the kind of people we are, but because of the kind of people we are."   What is needed, Michael argues, is a resurrection of spiritual formation.   "Spiritual formation is not a question for Christians alone," (137) he says.

What is a Christian politics? Michael Wear's new book argues it's mostly about who we are

The 1950's and 60's were an age of widely shared prosperity in the U.S. — across class and economic lines — that have never quite returned. Things were improving for all parts of society during the post-war period, and for all groups including Black Americans, despite the real presence of racial bias and discrimination against them. And things have not improved equally in recent decades. Things have improved since then. But the rate of steady and ongoing improvement and progress has slowed in many ways, and stalled in some. All this is the subject of today's episode, an interview with journalist David Leonhardt of the New York Times. You may know David from the daily newsletter for the Times that he writes, which is the Times' flagship newsletter, The Morning. David's new book is called "Ours Was the Shining Future: The Story of the American Dream." It was recently named one of the year's top 10 books by The Atlantic magazine. "The economy has grown more slowly than it did in the postwar decades," Leonhardt writes, "producing less bounty for the population to share." And, he adds, "the economy has become more unequal, with a declining share of that bounty available to most Americans, because it is flowing to a relatively small percentage of affluent households" (xxiii). This is a problem for democracy, Leonhardt writes. His book is one of several recently that are, together, sending a loud signal to Democrats that they have become too strident and purist in ways that alienate large numbers of voters who they need to win elections. These books are imploring Democrats to focus on helping working class voters economically and to cast a wider and more tolerant tent on social and cultural issues. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Let's Get Rid of the Speaker of the House, Says Former Aide to John Boehner

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