- As America approaches its 250th birthday, what are we celebrating?

This week on "Firing Line".

(bright music) The Declaration of Independence was signed 250 years ago this July.

Are we living up to the ideals that inspired it?

- In relation to the expectations of the founders, Congress is the most dysfunctional of the branches.

Congress is sitting on the sidelines watching it happen, and functioning as a kind of commentariat, rather than as the chief actor in the system, which is really how the Constitution sees it.

- [Margaret] Yuval Levin is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and contributing editor for the National Review.

- In many ways, this would be James Madison's nightmare.

Madison's main fear is faction, which he defines as any group, a majority or a minority, animated by passion rather than reason, devoted to self-interest rather than a public good.

- [Margaret] Jeffrey Rosen is an author, law professor, and CEO emeritus of the National Constitution Center.

What do they say about the nation's founding and its future?

- [Announcer 1] "Firing Line with Margaret Hoover" is made possible in part by Robert Granieri, Vanessa and Henry Cornell, The Fairweather Foundation, The Tepper Foundation, Peter and Mary Kalikow, The Beth and Ravenel Curry Foundation, Pritzker Military Foundation, Cliff and Laurel Asness, The Margaret and Daniel Loeb Foundation, and by the following.

- Jeffrey Rosen, Yuval Levin, welcome to "Firing Line".

- Thank you very much.

- Great to be here.

- You have both contributed to a book that is published by the National Constitution Center called "The Promise of America: Reflections on Our Enduring Ideals".

As we near the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, how well is America living up to its promise, Jeff?

- Well, it was so exciting for us at the National Constitution Center to identify the ideals of the Declaration and the Constitution, and then to ask how we're living up to it.

So for the Declaration, liberty, equality, and government by consent.

And for the Constitution, separation of powers, federalism, and the Bill of Rights.

It's so striking how much consensus there was among the contributors about those principles.

Justice Gorsuch wrote the conclusion, Justice Breyer wrote the introduction.

Both of them agreed that those are the principles of the American Creed.

So the essayists conclude that although there's disagreement about how to balance those values of liberty and equality, or separation of powers and federalism, both liberals and conservatives agree that those are, in fact, the principles of the American creed.

And there is something incredibly unifying and inspiring about bringing together these people of different perspectives, and having them agree about what our basic principles are.

- How well is America living up to its promise, Yuval?

- I think we're living up to our promise, but one way to understand the way that Jeff has just put this, is that part of what's distinct about the American promise is that we started by asserting our principles and ideals, and that means that we're always in the process of holding ourselves to account.

And holding ourselves to account never can mean that we're doing great.

And I don't think anybody looking at 21st century America would say we're doing great.

That's not the issue.

The question is, is America aware of its ideals, do we understand where we're falling short, and are we looking for ways to do something about it?

Obviously, the country can disappoint us, but what stands out about our country is that we can hold ourselves to account, that when we fall short, we know exactly how.

Because at the very beginning, there are these documents that say, this is what it ought to look like.

We don't agree about what it requires in this moment, but beginning from that agreement is still something really extraordinary.

And I do think that in the 21st century, for all of our many problems, and they're very real, we have a lot to be grateful for in those founding ideals and documents.

And having an excuse to look to them in the 250th year is a very valuable thing for a country in our situation.

- How did those principles and writing them down, why was that distinct in human history?

- To me, what most stands out about that extraordinary Declaration is the premise that we're all created equal.

I think we take it for granted, we treat it as obvious.

It calls itself self-evident.

- Yeah.

- But it's not at all self-evident, not if you look at human history.

And there's a way that that fundamental commitment, the idea that all human beings are morally equal, that idea contains almost the entirety of the American story because our equality demands a couple of things.

On the one hand, it points to consent.

If we're all equal, then no one has authority over anyone else by nature.

We can only really govern by consent, which practically means we can only really govern by majority rule.

At the same time, our equality means that we each have rights that can't be taken away.

And the thing is, those two principles are in tension with each other, right?

And the fact that that's just right there, that this principle that demands two contradictory things and puts in place the whole story is in our Declaration at the first moment, is just an extraordinary fact.

And you can see all of American history kind of rolling from that one little phrase.

- Another way, Jeff, you often put that competition of ideas is in the embodiment of Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton, right?

That the views of Jefferson as an individual who emphasized states' rights, emphasized local control, versus Alexander Hamilton who, of course, agitated for strong federal control.

You are always keen to point out that that debate, not only has it never been settled, but it continues to rear its head.

Give me some examples of how we see it today.

- It is remarkable how Hamilton and Jefferson's initial battles over, as you said, national power versus state's rights and also executive power versus congressional power, democracy versus rule by elites, and liberal versus strict construction of the Constitution, have defined all of American history, our political, our constitutional and our social history.

Examples today, what's the most contested question that we're discussing?

The nature of executive power.

Has the president become so powerful that he's become a kind of Julius Caesar, an emperor who's subverting the American ideal?

Well, this is exactly the question that Hamilton and Jefferson debated at the dawn of the American government.

And then fast forward to today, we're debating both in the White House and in Congress, and also in the Supreme Court, how strong should the president be?

This whole idea of the unitary executive that the Supreme Court is invoking is a phrase that comes from Alexander Hamilton's Pacificus letters.

And Hamilton believed that you needed an executive strong enough to resist popular demagoguery.

In fact, his suggestion at the constitutional convention was a president elected for life so that he could resist populist temptations.

Jefferson is the opposite.

He wants a term limit for the president, so he won't be tempted to install himself as a dictator.

So this central question, is President Trump, for example, Julius Caesar, or is he Andrew Jackson, is he well in the American populist tradition, is one that goes back to the very beginning.

- Strong executives have often throughout American history been accused of being authoritarians or dictators, Andrew Jackson, Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

So to what extent is Donald Trump and the current administration a departure or an extension of the same trend?

- In a sense, it's too soon to judge whether President Trump is within the historical power of the accretion of executive power, or whether he's something else.

Much will turn on the Supreme Court, but it is striking that more and more presidents, once they get into office, have been demanding powers that the founders did not anticipate.

- Yuval, you have said, quote, "The founders would not be surprised by a president seeking Napoleonic powers.

They would've been very surprised though by a Congress that allows that to happen, and that lets its own power flow to the President.

That's the problem we face now."

Is Congress the branch of government that is working least as the founders anticipated?

- Absolutely.

I think in relation to the design of the system and the expectations of the founders, Congress is the most dysfunctional of the branches.

The separation of powers is not just a structure.

It's a process.

It only works if everyone involved is pushing hard.

And the expectation is that it would take the form of continual conflict, and it's only as a result of that conflict that a kind of stability can be sustained.

So that in the absence of conflict, and strangely enough, I look at this moment, and I see an absence of conflict.

In the absence of that conflict, there is imbalance.

And the absence is not a result of a president who doesn't want enough.

This president wants a lot.

And whether it's within the bounds of prior presidential power struggles or not, there's no doubt that he's after more executive power.

The courts are active too, and they're assertive.

They're facing a very demanding situation.

I think they're rising to that challenge, for the most part.

Congress is sitting on the sidelines watching it happen, and functioning as a kind of commentariat rather than as the chief actor in the system, which is really how the Constitution sees it.

And that absence of congressional action creates a vacuum that presidential power rushes into, that the courts rush into in ways that they certainly feel like they're getting dragged and are forced to act in the present tense, in ways they're not really built for.

A lot of that, almost all of it, is a function of Congress choosing to stay out of the game, and I think that's our chief constitutional problem now.

- What do you mean by an absence of conflict in Congress?

- There's a lot of talk about conflict.

There's a lot of talk about fighting.

But the fact is everything that members of Congress complain about when they talk about what the president does are things they could do something about.

If they don't like the tariff policy, Congress can direct and change tariff policy.

In fact, the Constitution gives that power to Congress.

They've given it to presidents, and they can take it back.

If they're not happy about where the federal budget is going, well, that's really their first and foremost job.

They should act on that front.

- War powers?

- War powers, too.

They have a role to play.

War powers do belong to the President to a large degree, but there's a role for Congress, there's a role for Congress in declaring war, in providing authorizations for military action.

in controlling the defense budget.

- Power of the purse?

- In oversight.

Absolutely.

They can do a lot more of the kind of traditional oversight than the modern Congress has done.

There's a way in which Congress has come to see itself as a secondary player in a fundamentally presidential drama, so that the question they always face in their own minds is a yes or no question about the President.

And actually, the question Congress needs to answer is what ought to be the direction of our national government?

That's the question that's up to them.

The person who's empowered to answer yes or no questions is the President.

He has a veto power.

They send him something and he says yes or no.

It's a very strong power, but he doesn't get to drive.

Only if Congress lets him, does he have the kind of command of the agenda that our modern presidents have had.

The role that members of Congress have is an active role.

It is not passive observation, it's not commentary.

They're not in the business of hosting podcasts about the president.

They have a real job to do.

- You've worked in Congress, you're a scholar of the Congress.

How, in your view, has the Congress come to abdicate its authority, its power, its centrality?

- I think there's a lot going on there, but one key thing to see is that Congress has centralized power internally in the hands of leaders now for 50 years.

Ironically, they did it actually to strengthen the institution against the President.

They did it in the seventies to fight Richard Nixon and then, the Democrats did, and then Republicans did it in the nineties to fight Bill Clinton.

The trouble is when you centralize power in an institution with 535 people, and you have four people making all the decisions, that leaves 531 very ambitious men and women looking for things to do to gain prominence, to build their career, to advance their political interests.

And if legislating is not available to them, they're going to do other things.

They're going to start those podcasts.

They're going to find ways to become prominent.

So that the centralization of power has meant that members don't have enough to do day to day that counts as real legislation.

That means that re-empowering Congress would require decentralizing, allowing the committees to exercise real power, finding ways to give members more work to do.

- You mentioned the centrality of Speakers of the House beginning in the 20th century, culminating perhaps when Republicans centralized power around Newt Gingrich to challenge President Bill Clinton's authority.

In 1997, as Newt Gingrich was at the end of his first term as Speaker, beginning his second term, William F. Buckley Jr.

hosted a discussion about Newt Gingrich's leadership as Speaker of the House, and I'd like you both to take a look at the conversation then.

- Well, I think that all Republicans in Washington are under the impression that they went too far in the last Congress, and are, as Kate said, sort of shellshocked.

They lack confidence in their- - Went too far or went maladroitly?

- Went too far, I think is the rating.

I think we might believe that they simply chose the wrong issues, but their own perception is they were simply too bold, and now they've got to go along to get along.

- Of course, that was Ramesh Ponnuru who is currently the editor-in-chief of the National Review who was speaking to William F. Buckley, Jr., who was then the editor of the National Review, reflecting on what Newt Gingrich had gotten right and wrong and why it was becoming difficult for him to govern the House of Representatives.

Yuval, you worked for Newt Gingrich in that time.

- Yeah, it was not obvious then what he got wrong.

And I think even in that clip we see that the sense was maybe they were pushing on different issues than they should be.

Maybe they were pushing too hard.

In retrospect, and I will say plainly, this was not obvious to me in the 1990s.

In retrospect, what Gingrich got wrong was the over centralization of power in leadership in Congress.

The idea that the Speaker should function as a kind of prime minister, that he should be able to wield Congress as a weapon against the president of the other party, ended up meaning that the rest of the members of Congress look to party leaders for direction.

More than that, they look to party leaders for protection.

They don't want to take hard votes.

They get upset with their leaders when they're forced to put on the record views that might come back to haunt them at election time.

And the trouble is, that's their job.

That is their job.

And if their job becomes just kind of playing along and being good communicators, and in return they get protected from taking hard votes, then they're not legislators.

And I think as that process continued, and Gingrich centralized power after that, it became further centralized.

Dennis Hastert, Gingrich's successor, decided that he would never put a bill on the floor that didn't have a majority of the majority party.

It's very hard for Congress to work that way.

Nancy Pelosi further centralized power when the Democrats took control.

And we've reached a point now where Congress is an extremely centralized legislature in a system that requires a lot of cross partisan bargaining in order for things to work.

You can't really do cross partisan bargaining when leaders have all the power.

And there is now a need for decentralization.

I think that's very much where we are.

- Jeffrey, how do you see it?

How do you see Congress's failure to jealously guard its power from the executive branch?

- In many ways this would be James Madison's nightmare.

Madison's main fear is faction, which he defines as any group, a majority or a minority, animated by passion rather than reason, devoted to self-interest rather than a public good.

Now of course, the party system wasn't really up and running when Madison wrote the Federalist papers, but for much of our history, parties functioned as groups that amalgamated different interests and allowed the kind of cross partisan bargaining that Yuval describes.

Once we get so polarized that the parties are more determined in supporting their guy in the White House, and protecting the parochial interests of their own constituents, even when they're minorities, they're acting exactly as the kind of passionate factions that Madison most feared.

- The founders, Jeffrey, intended for representation to grow, in the House of Representatives in particular, and it did regularly, until the Reapportionment Act of 1929 where the representatives themselves held the number at 435, which is where it is today, even though the population has tripled since the 1929 Reapportionment Act.

One solution that I have heard Yuval advocate is to increase the number of representatives in the House.

Would that help?

- The question of apportionment was the central question at the end of the constitutional convention, and the only substantive intervention that George Washington made at the very end was to support what became the original first amendment to the constitution, which would require one representative for every 30,000 inhabitants.

But what's crucially important for representatives is the question of time.

You've got to take time not to make impetuous decisions.

So would we be better off if there were more representatives today?

Not if there weren't more bargaining and slow consideration of competing points of view.

The basis of the whole Enlightenment idea about how we arrive at the truth is that it can only emerge when we hear competing points of view.

That is why Jefferson says that truth has nothing to fear from error as long as reason is free to combat it.

And he thinks that both representatives and their constituents have to listen to points of view from diverse sources.

To that degree, the real problem is not the size of Congress, but it's social media technologies, and other media technologies, that result in instant decisions, that prevent sober second thoughts, that are based on a model of enrage to engage rather than reason over passion, and that represent, in so many ways, the founders' nightmare.

To rebuild those speed bumps, to prevent quick decision-making, is really tough in an impatient age where people want immediate answers, and they want to express themselves immediately, and they want immediate feedback from their representatives.

But we have got to think about ways of slowing everything down.

- To me, when you think about how much to grow the House, if we were to engage in that kind of constitutional maintenance, I don't think this is a revolutionary idea.

It's just a way to recover, to restore the logic of the system.

If the House had kept growing by the same formula that it was growing by in the 19th century, it would now be larger by 149 members.

So I think we should just grow it by 150 members.

That's not crazy.

The House would still be smaller than the House of Commons in Britain.

It would be smaller than many European legislatures, a little larger than others.

It's a perfectly plausible, imaginable size.

And then grow slowly by that same formula every 10 years, so that it has some chance to keep up with the growth of the country, members are still representing a somewhat more manageable constituency size.

And I think the moment of growing by 150 all at once, of introducing that many members into the institution, would be an opening for reforms of other sorts.

You have 150 new members coming in, you're going to rethink the budget process.

You're going to rethink the committee system.

You're going to think again about how the House rules should work, and we need that shot in the arm.

There are a lot of changes that are needed now that, in the normal order of things, would be made in Congress.

But we've gone through 50 years with rules made in the 1970s, especially the budget process, and members have lost the sense that they could even change these things.

So to me, growing the House is not a silver bullet, but it's part of a larger effort to help Congress help itself.

- As we approach the next major technological revolution, which is, of course, artificial intelligence, how do the ideals of the Declaration from 250 years ago stand to hold as we face a future that is almost unimaginable to to us as we sit here today?

- The American Revolution is based on a claim about how people make up their minds about truth.

When Jefferson said, "We hold these truths to be self-evident," he was reflecting an Enlightenment distinction between self-evident truths and factual truths.

Self-evident truths are axiomatic.

Two plus two equals four.

You can discern them purely through reason.

Factual truths are contested.

People disagree about them, and you need to have empirical observation and evidence and contestation before you can agree about whether people's opinions about religious or political or factual truth are true.

That requires debate between human beings of differing points of view.

One thing that is so striking about the AI revolution is that it substitutes a centralized authority that has neither reason nor a moral sense with the responsibility of citizens to examine primary sources and make up their own minds.

And in that sense, it poses a fundamental challenge to the whole Enlightenment premise of the Declaration, that people will take the time to make up their own minds and not get their opinions from centralized authorities.

So it's the oldest problem of the founding.

It is not a new problem.

How can citizens achieve that personal self-government that will require them to make up their own minds, to take the time to examine primary sources, and to think for themselves?

And what's so inspiring is that we are a creedal nation, as so many scholars have said in this book, and it's the ideals that hold us together.

The point is not an agreement about how to balance the ideals.

Hamilton and Jefferson disagreed themselves about that.

Disagreement is not a bug in the system.

It's a feature.

It's respectful debate, it's deliberation.

I love the fact that after Hamilton dies in the duel, Jefferson places a bust of Hamilton across from his own bust in the central entrance hall of Monticello, anyone can see it there today.

It's really moving.

And when he passed it and he was old, Jefferson would smile faintly and say, "Opposed in life as in death."

And it's really significant for Jefferson, Hamilton is not a hated enemy to be opposed or destroyed, but a respected opponent to be engaged with.

And as long as we get back to that spirit, we will continue to thrive as a republic.

- Yuval, how do you see the ideals of the Declaration transcending the next major technological revolution that humanity will have to endure?

- I think one key thing to see about those ideals is that they're fundamentally rooted in a view of human nature, and in the sense that that is not something that changes.

The world changes.

The founding generation certainly expected that the world would change a lot, and that we would live through a lot of progress, and also a lot of challenges.

But the fundamental character of human nature, they did not expect to change.

And I think that's one very important thing to think about in seeing where we stand now.

And, you know, America is an old country.

We like to think of ourselves as a young people, we're forward looking, and we are.

But our government is essentially the oldest government in today's world.

The British can say they had institutions with the same names in the 1800s, but they didn't do the same things they do now.

But the United States has had the same government for longer than any other society in the modern world, and that's because that government was built to endure through challenges and changes, and it is still built for that.

- The premise of your answer is that artificial intelligence and the robots won't change human nature.

- That's right.

They won't.

- Okay.

- Like it or not.

- There it is.

- Good or bad.

- There it is.

- That is my expectation.

- There it is.

Yuval Levin, Jeffrey Rosen, thank you so much for joining me.

- Thank you.

- Thank you.

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