The Right v. Claudine Gay

Calder McHugh at Politico:

Almost a month after a widely panned congressional hearing where she said it was context-dependent whether calls for genocide against Jews violated Harvard’s code of conduct, President Claudine Gay announced that she was resigning, a coda that followed a pronounced pressure campaign led by conservatives in Congress, prominent donors and right-leaning media and activists.

Gay’s departure marked the rare exit that occasioned widespread congressional comment. House Speaker Mike Johnson argued “the resignation of Claudine Gay is long overdue,” giving voice to the disdain held for Harvard and other elite institutions by an increasingly populist Republican Party.

Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), the Harvard grad whose line of questioning during the hearing produced the viral moments that doomed Gay — and led to University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill’s resignation — took a victory lap Tuesday.

“TWO DOWN,” wrote Stefanik in a post on X.

Yet it was the conservative media ecosystem, not Stefanik, that struck the crowning blow leading to Gay’s resignation. Gay managed at first to escape Magill’s fate with the support of the Harvard Corporation, the smaller and more powerful of Harvard’s two governing boards. But a sustained pressure campaign that focused on allegations of plagiarism in her scholarship ultimately led to her downfall.

It began Dec. 10, when conservative activists Christopher Rufo and Christopher Brunet published a newsletter on Substack titled “ Is Claudine Gay a Plagiarist?”

...

“The right has excelled at and outperformed the left when it comes to television and radio opinion … where the right has always lagged is in reporting,” Eliana Johnson, the editor-in-chief of the Free Beacon, said (Johnson formerly worked at POLITICO).

PR Fail: The Ivy Antisemitism Hearing

Hailey Fuchs and Michael Stratford at Politico:

The appearance of three elite university presidents on Capitol Hill this month to testify about campus antisemitism was a flamboyant debacle — prompting a national backlash and repercussions that forced at least one resignation and demands for more.

In certain circles of Washington and New York, the conversation is turning toward a less visible dimension of the controversy: Who got paid to give advice on one of the most disastrous public relations moments in modern memory?

The answer, in part, is that the university leaders were being advised by some of the most prominent legal and communications experts in the field of “crisis communications.” Now, the crisis communicators are in a PR crisis of their own: Rather than communicating, they are hunkering down in the storm. They’ve declined to comment publicly, even as critics say they share culpability for an episode that devastated the reputations of their clients.

University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill is out of her job. MIT President Sally Kornbluth, meanwhile, has withstood calls for her firing. So has Harvard President Claudine Gay, though she’s been engulfed by a plagiarism scandal that has only intensified in the wake of the hearing.

The moment that quickly proliferated on social media from the five-hour hearing was questioning from Stefanik, in which the New York Republican asked the university leaders whether calling for the genocide of Jews violated their universities’ codes of conduct. They each responded with qualified and conditional answers, telling Stefanik that it would depend on the context of the statements.

 High-profile Washington hearings that have the potential to become politically contentious usually involve some sort of mock hearing with the witnesses and their advisers. The team will plan for possible critical questions or lines of attack, and the witnesses may be hammered by people who they have not yet met. If they are available, former members of Congress — with experience in the hearing room — may ask the questions.

“The preparation and the result is tantamount to kind of political malpractice,” said a lobbyist in the higher education space, granted anonymity to discuss sensitive matters. “They did not do the things nor posture their response to what was [coming] for that hearing in any way to adequately prepare.”



Even amid the bipartisan momentum that had built earlier this year around banning TikTok, the chief executive officer of that social media app left Capitol Hill largely unscathed after his testimony before House lawmakers in March. A lobbyist with knowledge of those meeting preparations emphasized that the TikTok hearing lacked the same kind of breakthrough viral moment, “the definition of success, I think, when you are Daniel in a lion’s den.”

An Argument for Expanding the House

 Dan Balz at WP:

Dysfunction in the House has been a major political theme of 2023, with the ouster of former House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and constant infighting among Republicans. But the problems go beyond the power of a faction of the GOP to distort the workings of the chamber. What is known as the people’s House is seen by the public as more and more distant from the people.

For the first 125 years after the Constitution was ratified, the size of the House grew steadily, from an initial membership of 59 to 435 in 1913. Then it stopped growing, eventually restricted by a 1929 law to the current 435 members, even though the country’s population continued to grow. House members in the first Congress each represented roughly 35,000 people. Today the average member of the House represents about 768,000 people.

In 2020, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences issued a lengthy report called “Our Common Purpose: Reinventing American Democracy for the 21st Century.” The first of its recommendations called for substantially enlarging the House, noting that among the world’s democracies, the United States is an outlier in the size of its lower chamber.

The American Academy report proposed adding 150 members to the House, roughly the number of seats that have shifted from state to state due to reapportionment since 1931. That would reduce the number of people per district to about 566,000.

That’s just one of several ideas that would expand the House. However it’s accomplished, proponents say expansion would create a body that’s more responsive and more representative of the public it serves.

There are practical and political considerations involved in expanding the House. The law that limits the House to 435 members would have to be repealed. There is also the issue of space: The current House chamber likely could not accommodate a significantly larger body without substantial renovation, not to mention committee hearing rooms and office suites. But there is nothing sacrosanct about a 435-member House.

Congressional Productivity

 

🧵For all of my Congress nerds, the House Majority Leader's office has put out out Fun Facts about the 118th Congress. Let's begin: pic.twitter.com/23kiCFwuZN

— Michael Thorning (@ThorningMichael) December 18, 2023

And rounding it out with some membership info (just for @mollyereynolds), vacancies, votes, and vetoes: pic.twitter.com/u1RDtQ2IGb

— Michael Thorning (@ThorningMichael) December 18, 2023

House Bipartisan Lawmaking

Stef Kight at Axios:

Republicans may hold the House majority, but Democratic yeas outnumbered GOP votes on every major bill that landed on President Biden’s desk this year. … A divided government, slim congressional majorities and a fractured House GOP caucus forced significant bipartisanship on measures to raise the debt ceiling, keep the government running and set U.S. defense policy…. The House passed the sprawling National Defense Authorization Act on Wednesday, with 162 Democrats voting with 146 Republicans.

…

By the numbers: The bipartisanship is not a new dynamic. Every major piece of legislation to pass both chambers this year had a majority of House “yea’ votes coming from Democrats.

• It’s how Congress raised the debt ceiling in June and avoided a government shutdown — twice.
• Nine less-significant bills — not including resolutions — made it to the president’s desk this year with nearly half of votes coming from Democrats, according to data from Quorum. All were uncontroversial, with six receiving zero no votes.
• These bills declassified information related to the origins of COVID-19 and aimed to give veterans easier access to their benefits claims, among other measures.

"From the River to the Sea"

House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries:

Israel has an absolute right to exist as a Jewish, Democratic state and the ancestral homeland for the Jewish people who have faced pogroms, persecution and antisemitism for centuries. The State of Israel, a safe haven for Jews, was viciously attacked on October 7. Echoing slogans that are widely understood as calling for the complete destruction of Israel - such as from the River to the Sea - does not advance progress toward a two-state solution. Instead, it unacceptably risks further polarization, division and incitement to violence. There are millions of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza who legitimately aspire to peaceful self-determination and economic dignity. The continued presence of Hamas undermines that cause, further making clear that the ongoing effort to decisively defeat this brutal terrorist regime must succeed.

Congressman Brad Schneider (IL-10) Hillary Scholten (MI-03), Ritchie Torres (NY-15), and Norma Torres (CA-35) led a statement on the phrase “from the river to the sea” and the ongoing Hamas-Israel War.

The following members co-signed that statement:  Bera, Ami; Boyle, Brendan; Brownley, Julia; Brown, Shontel; Budzinski, Nikki; Carbajal, Salud; Carter, Troy; Casten, Sean; Cherfilus-McCormick, Sheila; Cohen, Steve; Correa, J.; Costa, Jim; Courtney, Joe; Craig, Angie; Davis, Danny; Deluzio, Christopher; Doggett, Lloyd; Golden, Jared; Goldman, Daniel; Gonzalez, Vicente; Gottheimer, Josh; Hoyer, Steny; Huffman, Jared; Ivey, Glenn; Jackson, Jeff; Keating, William; Kilmer, Derek; Landsman, Greg; Lee, Susie; Levin, Mike; Manning, Kathy; Menendez, Robert; Meng, Grace; Moulton, Seth; Mrvan, Frank, Nadler, Jerrold; Nickel, Wiley; Norcross, Donald; Panetta, Jimmy; Pappas, Chris; Peters, Scott; Pettersen, Brittany; Plaskett, Stacey; Porter, Katie; Ruppersberger, C.; Ryan, Patrick; Salinas, Andrea; Schiff, Adam; Schneider, Bradley; Scholten, Hillary; Schrier, Kim; Scott, David; Sewell, Terri; Sherman, Brad; Sherrill, Mikie; Sorensen, Eric; Soto, Darren; Stanton, Greg; Stevens, Haley; Strickland, Marilyn; Sykes, Emilia; Thanedar, Shri; Titus, Dina; Torres, Norma; Torres, Ritchie; Trone, David; Vargas, Juan; Veasey, Marc; Wasserman Schultz, Debbie; Wilson, Frederica.

The text of the statement reads:

We reject the use of the phrase “from the river to the sea”— a phrase used by many, including Hamas, as a rallying cry for the destruction of the State of Israel and genocide of the Jewish people. We all feel deep anguish for the human suffering caused by the war in Gaza. Hamas started this war with a barbaric terrorist attack on October 7, 2023, and neither the Palestinian nor Israeli people can have peace as long as Hamas still rules over Gaza and threatens Israel. 

This war is tragic and deeply painful for everyone, especially those who identify with the land and the people—Christians, Jews, and Muslims alike. Every civilian killed, every family torn apart, Palestinian and Israeli, is a tragedy. Every human being deserves dignity and respect, and each of us must do all we can to always see the humanity of the innocent people caught in the middle of this war.

We support Israel’s right and obligation to defend itself — to protect its citizens, secure its borders, and rescue its people held hostage in Gaza. Israel also has the obligation to, as best as possible, protect civilians, and in all its actions adhere to international humanitarian law (notwithstanding Hamas’ complete disregard for the same).

We also recognize the desperate needs of the civilians in Gaza, and fully support doing everything possible to expand safe zones, provide transit corridors, and deliver life-sustaining humanitarian aid. A humanitarian pause of limited space and time, the release of the more than 240 hostages held by Hamas in Gaza, the cessation of rockets fired by Hamas at Israel from civilian neighborhoods in Gaza, and the release of all Palestinian civilians being detained by Hamas as human shields in Gaza would go far toward achieving these goals.

We are grateful for President Biden’s extraordinary leadership, for his steadfast support of our ally Israel, and for his unwavering commitment to pursuing a lasting solution to the conflict.

Speaker Johnson and Christian Nationalism

 Many posts have discussed the role of religion in American life.  

Some observers say that House Speaker Mike Johnson is a Christan nationalist.

Thomas Edsall at NYT:

Robert Jones, the president and founder of the Public Religion Research Institute, described Johnson in an email as “the embodiment of white Christian nationalism in a tailored suit.”

What is Christian nationalism? Christianity Today described it as the “belief that the American nation is defined by Christianity, and that the government should take active steps to keep it that way. Popularly, Christian nationalists assert that America is and must remain a ‘Christian nation’ — not merely as an observation about American history, but as a prescriptive program for what America must continue to be in the future.”

Johnson’s election as speaker, Jones went on to say, “is one more confirmation that the Republican Party — a party that is 68 percent white and Christian in a country that is 42 percent white and Christian — has embraced its role as the party of white Christian nationalism.”

Jones argued that “while Johnson is more polished than other right-wing leaders of the G.O.P. who support this worldview, his record and previous public statements indicate that he’s a near textbook example of white Christian nationalism — the belief that God intended America to be a new promised land for European Christians.”

In a long and data-filled analysis posted on Substack on Oct. 29, “Hiding in Plain Sight: The Sources of MAGA Madness,” Michael Podhorzer, a former political director of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., argued that the election of Johnson reflects the success of the Christian right in a long-term struggle to wrest control from traditional Republican elites, in battles fought out in Republican primary elections.

Speaker Johnson and Christian Nationalism

Mike Johnson (R-LA) has become speaker of the House. His inaugural speech mentioned religion and the Declaration.

 Kastelyn Fossett at Politico interviews Kristin Kobes Du Mez:

DU MEZ: As he understands it, this country was founded as a Christian nation. And he stands in a long tradition of conservative white evangelicals, particularly inside the Southern Baptist Convention, who have a distinct understanding of what that means. And this is where evangelical author and activist David Barton comes in.

Johnson has said that Barton’s ideas and teachings have been extremely influential on him, and that is essentially rooting him in this longer tradition of Christian nationalism. Christian nationalism essentially posits the idea that America is founded on God’s laws, and that the Constitution is a reflection of God’s laws. Therefore, any interpretation of the Constitution must align with Christian nationalists’ understanding of God’s laws. Freedom for them means freedom to obey God’s law, not freedom to do what you want. So really, Christian supremacy and a particular type of conservative Christianity is at the heart of Johnson’s understanding of the Constitution and an understanding of our government. 

....

Fossett: Tell me more about David Barton.

Du Mez: Barton is a very popular author in conservative evangelical spaces, and he is the founder of an organization called Wallbuilders. It is an organization that for decades has been promoting the idea that the separation of church and state is a myth. He is a self-trained historian. Some would call him a pseudo-historian. He’s not a historian — I can say that, as a historian. He’s an apologist. He uses historical evidence, cherry-picked and sometimes entirely fabricated, to make a case that the separation of church and state is a myth, and it was only meant to protect the church from the intrusion of the state but that the church is supposed to influence the government. He’s the author of a number of very popular books.

Back in the early 1990s, Jerry Falwell, Sr., started promoting his teachings. I noticed that Johnson said he was — I think about 25 years ago —introduced to David Barton’s work, and it has really influenced the way he understands America. And that would be around that same time.

It’s really hard to overstate the influence that Barton has had in conservative evangelical spaces. For them, he has really defined America as a Christian nation. What that means is that he kind of takes conservative, white evangelical ideals from our current moment, and says that those were all baked into the Constitution, and that God has elected America to be a special nation, and that the nation will be blessed if we respond in obedience and maintain that, and not if we go astray. It really fuels evangelical politics and the idea that evangelicalism has a special role to play to get the country back on track.riday. Sign up for the newsletter.

I should also add that Barton’s Christian publisher back in 2012 actually pulled one of his books on Thomas Jefferson, because it was just riddled with misinformation. But that did not really affect his popularity. And again, these are not historical facts that we’re dealing with. It really is propaganda, but it’s incredibly effective propaganda. If you listen to Christian radio, you will hear them echoed. It’s just this pervasive understanding of our nation’s history that is based on fabrication.

Speaker Mike Johnson

Mike Johnson (R-LA) has become speaker of the House. His inaugural speech mentioned religion and the Declaration.

Newly elected House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA): "Scripture, the Bible, is very clear: God is the one that raises up those in authority. All of us ... [Marxism and Communism] begin with the premise that there is no God." pic.twitter.com/VCh4kKHdQC

— Heartland Signal (@HeartlandSignal) October 25, 2023

The republic, not a democracy thing and the separation of church and state

Mike Johnson in 2016: "What’s happened, Alex, over the last 60 or 70 years, is that our generation has been convinced that there is a separation of church and state. Most people think that that’s part of the Constitution, but it’s not.”

(It is: See The Establishment Clause). pic.twitter.com/yP0vsl7rC1

— Ashton Pittman (@ashtonpittman) October 26, 2023

The Fall of Speaker McCarthy

  Zachary B. Wolf at CNN:

Kevin McCarthy is House speaker no more. After angering GOP hardliners with a spending bill to keep the government funded last week, McCarthy was voted out of power on Tuesday.

Rep. Matt Gaetz, a Florida Republican, filed what in the House is known as a “motion to vacate” and Democrats declined to rescue McCarthy’s speakership. The Californian lost the support of eight Republicans, becoming the speaker with the third-shortest tenure. He said Tuesday evening he wouldn’t run again.

The first “motion to vacate” vote in more than 100 years and the first to succeed, it leaves the House in chaos

Joseph Postell of Hillddate:

WOLF: Why is this the first time this happened since 1910?

POSTELL: Strictly speaking, this is the first time the so-called motion to vacate or motion to declare the speakership vacant has been brought up … to get a vote on the floor since 1910. … So in that way, this is only the second time this vote has actually proceeded.

WOLF: But Cannon (unlike McCarthy) was never in danger of losing his job, right?

POSTELL: In fact, Cannon actually called for the vote. He was the one who asked for it. That’s the big difference here is that Cannon brought the vote on himself to make the point that the people who opposed him were playing opportunistically. In that way, he actually did it as a sort of principled show of leadership, whereas, obviously, this has been more forced on to (McCarthy). So that is a significant difference.

The broad outlines of what happens in 1910:

There’s a Republican Party, internally divided between progressives and conservatives. So similar, except the lines of division today are obviously very different.

Joseph Cannon was a conservative speaker who basically thwarted the progressive wing of his party, and that wing really couldn’t move to the Democratic Party because in 1910, the Democratic Party was no more progressive than the Republican Party and, in fact, was probably less progressive. So really, all they could do was fight their party from within.

In 1910, the speaker was basically a czar. So really, the difference here, I would say, is that Cannon was a czar and McCarthy is not.

Women in Congress

A number of posts have discussed the growing number of women in office.

 Katherine Schaeffer at Pew:

---

Women in the U.S. Senate, 1965-2023

% of U.S. senators who are women

Note: Percentages are the share of women senators at the outset of each term of Congress.

Source: Pew Research Center analysis of Congressional Biographical Directory data.

PEW RESEARCH CENTER

At the start of the 118th Congress in 2023, there were 25 women serving in the U.S. Senate, just shy of the record 26 women senators sworn in on the first day of the previous Congress. (The count for the previous Congress includes Vice President Kamala Harris and former Georgia Sen. Kelly Loeffler. Both were sworn in on the first day and left the Senate shortly after.)

Of the 25 women senators:

• 16 are Democrats and nine are Republicans.
• 22 are White, two are Asian American and one is Hispanic. No Black women currently serve in the Senate, nor do any American Indian or Alaska Native women.

The first-ever woman in the Senate was Rebecca Latimer Felton, D-Ga., who was appointed to the seat as a political maneuver in 1922 and served just one day. Nancy Kassebaum, R-Kan., who served in the Senate from 1978 to 1997, was the first woman senator who was elected for a full term without having a spousal connection to Congress.

U.S. House

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Women in the U.S. House, 1965-2023

% of U.S. representatives who are women

Note: Percentages are the share of women representatives at the outset of each term of Congress.

Source: Pew Research Center analysis of Congressional Biographical Directory data.

PEW RESEARCH CENTER

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On the first day of the 118th Congress, 124 women were voting members in the House of Representatives, making up 28% of the chamber’s voting membership. In addition, four women serve as nonvoting delegates to Congress, representing American Samoa, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Of the women voting representatives sworn in on the first day of the session:

• 91 are Democrats and 33 are Republicans.
• 26 are Black, 18 are Hispanic, seven are Asian American, two are Native American and one is multiracial.

Jeannette Rankin, R-Mont., was the first woman to be elected to Congress, taking office in 1917. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., is the only woman to have served as speaker of the House. She was speaker from 2007 to 2011, served as the minority leader in the Republican-controlled House from 2011 to 2019 and was elected speaker again from 2019 to 2023.

Congress and the NRA

 Mike McIntire at NYT:

Long before the National Rifle Association tightened its grip on Congress, won over the Supreme Court and prescribed more guns as a solution to gun violence — before all that, Representative John D. Dingell Jr. had a plan.

First jotted on a yellow legal pad in 1975, it would transform the N.R.A. from a fusty club of sportsmen into a lobbying juggernaut that would enforce elected officials’ allegiance, derail legislation behind the scenes, redefine the legal landscape and deploy “all available resources at every level to influence the decision making process.”

“An organization with as many members, and as many potential resources, both financial and influential within its ranks, should not have to go 2d or 3d Class in a fight for survival,” Mr. Dingell wrote, advocating a new aggressive strategy. “It should go First Class.”

To understand the ascendancy of gun culture in America, the files of Mr. Dingell, a powerful Michigan Democrat who died in 2019, are a good place to start. That is because he was not just a politician — he simultaneously sat on the N.R.A.’s board of directors, positioning him to influence firearms policy as well as the private lobbying force responsible for shaping it.

And he was not alone. Mr. Dingell was one of at least nine senators and representatives, both Republicans and Democrats, with the same dual role over the last half-century — lawmaker-directors who helped the N.R.A. accumulate and exercise unrivaled power.

Gerontocracy

April Rubin at Axios:

American leadership is getting older.

Why it matters: With baby boomers making up half of Congress, the conversation on aging and health in public office from the Capitol to the White House isn't going away.The 118th Congress is one of the oldest in U.S. history — and drives debates about fitness for office, term limits and ageism.

The big picture: Top House Democrats stepped aside late last year to make room for a younger generation of leaders — a shift that's been less apparent in the Senate, particularly among Republicans.Those Democrats, including former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, "made way for a younger generation of leadership," John Mark Hansen, a political science professor at the University of Chicago, told Axios. "And that's pretty unusual and pretty striking."

...

By the numbers: The average age of members of Congress is 58 years old.

Earmarks

Kevin McCarthy in Young Guns (2010):

KM: On the flight in this week, it just happened that sitting next to me was Gary Hart. We were having a kind of generational talk about Washington. And one of the things he pointed out that was wrong with Washington was earmarks. He said Republicans and Democrats had both been poisoned by earmarks.

2016 Republican Platform: 

Our Republican majority ended the practice of earmarks, which often diverted transportation spending to politically favored projects. 

Peter Cohn and Herb Jackson at Roll Call:

House Republicans have so thoroughly stacked the earmarking deck in their favor in appropriations bills for the upcoming fiscal year that the top Democratic recipient doesn’t even appear in the top 60 among lawmakers in that chamber.

In their first year in the majority since Congress in 2021 brought back the practice Republicans banned a decade earlier, GOP lawmakers are spreading nearly $7.4 billion among 4,714 individual projects tucked inside the fiscal 2024 appropriations bills.

While Democrats requested 65 percent of those earmarks, they are receiving less than 38 percent of the dollars at nearly $2.8 billion, a CQ Roll Call analysis found.

Republicans argue that’s only fair; Democrats gave themselves roughly the same percentage when they were in charge. But Democrats allowed Republicans the largest individual hauls in that chamber last year, and eight out of the top 10 earmarkers in initial fiscal 2023 bills were GOP members.

Beating a Rule

David Lerman, Laura Weiss, and Avery Roe at Roll Call

Hard-right House conservatives derailed legislation scheduled for floor votes Tuesday in a rebuke to GOP leadership.

A group of House Republicans bucked their party to vote against a rule devised by GOP leaders to take up legislation that included measures to rein in the federal regulatory process and the Biden administration's ability to restrict gas stoves in particular. The rule was defeated on a 206-220 vote, as 11 GOP defectors joined all Democrats in opposition.

Another GOP "no" vote was Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., though he switched his vote in a procedural ploy to be able to bring the rule up again for consideration at a later date.

The dissenting Republicans said the vote was intended to signal their frustration with GOP leadership for cutting a deal last week on the debt limit they opposed. They also said leaders backtracked on a pledge to schedule a floor vote on gun rights legislation.

"We got rolled. It was a bad deal," said Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, referring to the debt limit package. "We warned them not to cut that deal without coming down and sitting down and talk[ing] to us. So this is all about restoring a process that will fundamentally, you know, change things back to what was working."

Roy said the Republican conference headed by Speaker Kevin McCarthy must now decide how it will operate. “Is it going to be by consensus or is it going to be fiat?” he asked.

The surprise defeat of the House Republicans’ rule, typically adopted on a party-line vote, underscored the threat to McCarthy’s speakership as he tries to govern with a razor-thin majority.

It was the first defeat of a House rule on the floor since 2002, according to C-SPAN's Howard Mortman. At that time, anti-abortion Republicans rebelled against bankruptcy overhaul legislation over language Sen. Charles E. Schumer, D-N.Y., helped author that would bar protesters at abortion clinics from declaring bankruptcy to avoid paying court-ordered fines and judgments.

Enlarging the House: Practical Considerations

Danielle Allen at WP:

A system requiring one person to represent the interests of almost 1 million people would have troubled Washington — as it should us. But let’s set his ratio aside for a moment. In a previous column, I argued for a bill put forward by Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.) that would bring us to 585 seats. And after that initial step up, we could transition to “a cube root rule” — pegging the number of House members to the cube root of the national population — for growth in subsequent census years. In this way, the size of the House would increase continually with the population but at a steady and manageable rate. Based on population projections, this would put us on track for a Congress that would grow from 435 to 585 to 736 over the next 40 years.

But what would happen to the Capitol? Wouldn’t we need a new building? Doesn’t that make this impossible?

The Capitol has already undergone multiple extensions. In 1850, growth in membership led to a major renovation project. By 1869, the work delivered the Capitol that we know now. But even after the Capitol was complete that year, the House continued to grow. In the 1870s, it grew from 243 to 293 members, continuing up to the current 435, established in 1929.

And here’s the extraordinary thing: It still has room for more growth — quite a bit of it.

I engaged architect Michael Murphy to explore what is possible. Murphy is a visionary designer committed to architecture for the public good. He designed Bryan Stevenson’s National Memorial for Peace and Justice — the memorial for lynching and racial violence victims, as it’s better known — in Montgomery, Ala.

Murphy and his team took the current dimensions of the House and halls, shown in this image, as a starting point.

The chamber now comfortably accommodates about 450 people on the floor, along with more than 400 in the gallery on the second level.

The team’s first idea was to create a new elevated section that could easily allow seating for up to 904 members.

Class Inversion and House Districts

  Stef Kight at Axios:

Nine of the top 10 wealthiest congressional districts are represented by Democrats, while Republicans now represent most of the poorer half of the country, according to median income data provided by Rep. Marcy Kaptur's (D-Ohio) office.

Why it matters: The last several decades have ushered in a dramatic political realignment, as the GOP has broadened its appeal to a more diverse working class and Democrats have become the party of wealthier, more-educated voters.

• "Republicans were the party of the country club, and they're increasingly the party of country," lobbyist and political analyst Bruce Mehlman told Axios.
• "We have seen an inversion of Democrat and Republican shares of the highest- and lowest-income districts — and the highest and lowest college degree-holding districts," Cook Political Report's Dave Wasserman told Axios.

By the numbers: 64% of congressional districts with median incomes below the national median are now represented by Republicans — a shift in historical party demographics, the data shows.