Wait, Uncapping the House is Bad?

Now, I really like Mr. Beat, but in this particular video, he made a bunch of arguments where I think the research literature and political science gives you a different perspective. How dare you? How dare you, huh? I'm Mr. Beat, and you may be aware that I'm trying to raise awareness about expanding the size of the U.S. House of Representatives. Yes, Matt, we are all aware. You won't stop talking about it. I really do think that these Uncap the House videos are starting to hurt your channel. You're probably right, but I don't care. And Matt, why are you wearing a banana costume? At least your hair isn't wet. Anyway, so Uncapping the House is the single most important reform right now in my opinion, so who does this fella think he is critiquing it, huh? Huh? Well, as it turns out, power politics is an excellent channel, and the dude who runs it, Christian Fong, a political science professor at Johns Hopkins University, clearly knows what he's talking about. I'm finally being challenged. Finally being challenged. A guy who has a doctorate, I believe, in political science, so understands political science much better than myself. But I do think his video reacting to me promoting Uncapping the House simply didn't convince me that Uncapping the House is a bad idea. No cap. So in this video, I'm going to react to his reaction, and I hope that you react to my reaction to his reaction, and then I also hope that someone reacts to you reacting to my reaction to his reaction. We could do this all day. So let's hear him out. Uncapping the House is one of the most popular reform proposals on the internet. There are tons of articles and videos that make all kinds of interesting arguments for why this would be a good thing. Are there really? Like, I'm a little surprised that he would say that. I don't think this is very popular at all. Whenever I bring it up in real life, for sure, no one's heard of it. But maybe on the internet, yeah, maybe for us who don't touch grass that much. But I guess that's kind of flattering that he says this is becoming popular. That's cool, though, that the people that watch this fella are aware of it. So let's go ahead and dive right into his analysis of the problem. So when districts get too large, access declines. And when access declines, accountability weakens. Typically, we don't think of access as an important ingredient for accountability. Talking to politicians is usually not a great way to learn about their record, because they're trying to get reelected. They're going to tell you whatever it is they think you want to hear. Instead, when we think about accountability, we're typically focused on the media. And there's some interesting research that suggests that uncapping the house might actually make it harder for the media to do that job. So imagine you live in Redding, California, and your local TV news station is KRCR. And if you watch KRCR, you almost certainly live. Did I just see mermaids? I'm sorry, I was not expecting the mermaids. In California's first congressional district, which means that your representative is James Gallagher. It's a large district, by the way. So if you're a producer at KRCR, and you're thinking about running a story on James Gallagher, you can be confident that that's going to be relevant to basically everyone watching. Okay, now imagine that you live in my hometown, Sacramento, California. In Sacramento, the local TV news station is KCRA. Your congressman might be Kevin Kiley, or Tom McClintock, or Doris Matsui, or Ami Berra, or Josh Harder, or maybe even Adam Grant. So whose voters do you think are going to be better informed about what their congressman is doing? James Gallagher's or Doris Matsui's? Well, obviously, James Gallagher's because he gets basically his own private TV station. I do have a lot to say about this. But for starters, like, why just assume people are watching the local news? My father-in-law watches the local news. My father-in-law is about 65 years old, and that's kind of the typical audience, I think. I think we are assuming old media habits here. People just don't watch TV anymore. But I'll go more into this. Here's a study he's going to bring up. Research that supports this is a paper by Jim Snyder and David Stromberg. What they show is that as you jam more congressmen into a given media market, the amount of coverage that newspapers in that media market devote to each of those congressmen decreases. And then the really interesting part is that they show that this undermines accountability. Congressmen in crowded media markets do not work as hard and are more likely to vote the party line than congressmen in less crowded media markets. Yeah, media is a big reason why we're so disconnected from our members of Congress and why we're so polarized. Again, I can't get over, like, people just don't watch local television anymore. They don't. Ratings have been declining for years. We don't get our news from traditional news anymore. When was this study? Let me double check when this study was from. Yeah, 2010. So it's about 16 years old. It's outdated, I'd say. We have moved over the last 50, 60 years from a media ecosphere in which we get large amounts of news from local newspapers and local TV stations to a media diet in which we get almost all of our news from big national cable news channels and from the internet. And you can think of this transition. Most of us actually get our political news from influencers, folks like myself. I mean, you're all watching me. You're not watching CNN. Often we're watching people react to CNN, but even then, like, who are they trusting more, the influencer or CNN? Often CNN is the least trusted. I think influencers have more clout these days. There's a reason why the Democratic Party is focusing so much on propping up a lot of these influencers because they know they have a lot more. I mean, that's how Trump was able to get so much support in 2024. I actually am in touch with other YouTubers, Instagram, TikTok. They exclusively cover local politics. This kind of job did not exist 10 years ago, you know? I mean, I've been doing that a lot lately. I've been attending campaign events. I've been in that world. There's a reason why I got to interview Gavin Newsom and Mark Kelly because they understand this is how the world is now. Influencers have more clout. Let's get to Mr. Beat's next argument. And when access declines, accountability weakens, which shifts power away from us, the people, right, and toward leadership structures, bureaucracies, and the executive branch. I am very excited to talk about congressional party leaders because that's actually what I wrote one of the chapters of my dissertation about. So if you look to the history of the House of Representatives, the Senate would tell you the exact same story. If we expanded the House, it sure seems that that would tend to increase the power of party leaders over the rest of the chamber. I just don't see it. So what he's saying basically is that a larger House forces power to concentrate to top leadership like the Speaker of the House, the committee chairs, in order for anything to get done, in order for there to be stability. And so I think if you do look at history, there... And actually, if you look at states across the country who have larger legislatures, larger legislatures make strict party discipline harder to enforce, not easier. So if anything, party leadership is undermined. Yeah, would it be chaotic? I would concede that. That is a concern. Then again, I don't know if that's necessarily true either, because there's going to be more pressure from constituents instead of special interests. So if you have more pressure from constituents, I mean, the mob is at your door, then I feel like there's more pressure to actually get popular things done, as opposed to if you're just only getting pressure from special interest corporations. And it's like, okay, well, you know, you're mainly just obstructing progress. If I'm going to concede this argument, that yes, a larger House forces power to concentrate in top leadership. If that is a concern, you can still pair this with other reforms in the House. As for the balance of power between Congress and the president, every time the president makes a power grab, the only way for Congress to reverse it is to pass a law. But the president can veto that law. And in order to override the president's veto, you need a two-thirds majority in each chamber. Yeah. That means you're going to, as a practical matter, have to get some members of the president's party on board with undermining the president. Not just any law, though. They can pass a law withholding money. That's a pretty big deal. Also, they can impeach. I mean, just because they don't have the courage to do that doesn't mean that it's not a big power. They can literally remove a president from office. Just because they haven't done it doesn't mean it's not something that's impressive. Now, there is an offsetting benefit, which is that if you reverse a presidential power grab, that makes Congress more powerful. And you're a member of Congress, so that makes you more powerful, too. But the problem is that in the House of Representatives, there are 434 other congressmen. So you only have a one 435th share of that power. It's the people's house. Like, stop thinking about this in terms of, like, you have the power. No, it's the people's power, dude. The House of Representatives is the people's house. Now let's talk about polarization. Polarization intensifies with scale. When districts become very large, elections reward confrontation over cooperation and emotion over reason. The most relevant stuff is from Joey Chen and Jonathan Roden. And what they show is that a big part of the reason why we get really lopsided districts where it's like four Republicans for every Democrat or 10 Democrats for every Republican is not because of partisan gerrymandering, but because Republicans tend to live near other Republicans. Democrats tend to live near other Democrats. And simply in the process of trying to draw compact— I just don't like that argument. Democrats tend to live next to other Democrats. Republicans tend to live next to other Republicans. Well, who gets to pick where they get to live first? I mean, nah man, the fact is that people choose where they live mostly based on their ability to make money there. Economic reasons are by far the main driver determining where someone lives. It is gerrymandering, because if you look at how the districts are drawn, often they take a little sliver of an urban area and then they reach it out into the far depths of rural America to make it either more competitive or red in these red states. And then with these blue states, like what happened in Illinois infamously, you have a very large urban area that dominates the state, Chicago, and then they are just stripping them out into rural areas to weaken rural areas in Illinois. Smaller districts incentivize pragmatism. I mean, you don't have to worry about whatever the talking points of the national media are. You can ignore that when you are mobilizing toward your base, not towards the national party. We have gridlock right now. We have polarization right now. What are you going to do, just keep things the same? And it's not going to get any better if we don't do anything. I say we try it. Now, there is a sense in which I think that polarization increases with scale, but it's not the scale of the district, it's the scale of the legislature. Personal relationships between legislators are such an important ingredient for breaking through gridlock and building bipartisan coalitions. So what does this have to do with uncapping the House? Well, uncapping the House makes legislature even bigger. So now instead of those 10 people around a conference table representing 3% of legislature, you represent one and a half or 1% of a legislature. It makes it even harder to engage in this sort of bottom-up relationship-based style of legislating that is so essential to breaking through gridlock and reducing partisan polarization. That clip is many, many years old. You just don't see that as much as you used to either, like that camaraderie between Democrats and Republicans in the Senate. Camaraderie with your colleagues in the House is less important. You should have more camaraderie with your constituents. Right now, we have so many members of the House of Representatives who are so out of touch with their constituents. They don't hold town halls. They don't respond to letters. They don't respond to phone calls. They have a staff that doesn't even do that anymore because they're swamped or they're underpaid. Now, the Senate, yeah, I get it. Camaraderie is more important. They're supposed to represent the entire state. It's a different dynamic there. There's fewer of them. I just think comparing the Senate and the House here is not that compelling to me. Thank you, Power Politics, for making this video. The guy clearly knows his stuff, and he's trying to be as nonpartisan as possible. And even at the end there, he's just like, you know, I'm not here to make value judgments. You decide for yourself. I think the most compelling argument that he said, I think it was his second argument, a larger House forces power to concentrate on top leadership. I can kind of see what he's saying there. I don't know. We can also pass other reforms. And that's the main thing I want to say. This is not meant to be the only reform we pass. Hopefully it's one of many, and it will lead to many others. That's why I call it a first reform. So that's it. I'm glad Christian made this video. I'm glad he was critical of uncapping the House, and I hope that people continue to critically think about this issue of uncapping the U.S. House of Representatives. Again, it's not a perfect reform. No reform is. And we must continue to scrutinize any new proposals to change, especially the structure of government itself. But what do you think? What do you think about Christian's arguments? Let me know by sending me a telegraph. If you are still a fan of uncapping the House, please check out projectnocap.com, where you can join a local chapter. There's a Discord server. There's a petition you can sign. We've got a growing movement going on right now, for real. So check it all out, and thank you for staying curious.