Ill Literacy: Books with Benson

Heartland’s Tim Benson is joined by Yuval Levin, the director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he also holds the Beth and Ravenel Curry Chair in Public Policy, to discuss his new book, American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation―and Could Again. They chat about  the Constitution’s true genius and reveals how it charts a path to repairing America’s fault lines. They also discuss the Constitution’s exceptional power to facilitate constructive disagreement, negotiate resolutions to disputes, and forge unity in a fractured society.

Get the book here: https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/yuval-levin/american-covenant/9780465040742/?lens=basic-books

Show Notes:

The Atlantic: Yuval Levin – “What’s Wrong With Congress (And How to Fix It)”
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/06/congress-reform-filibuster-constitution/678604/

Commentary: Tal Fortgang – “We Are the Reformers We’ve Been Waiting For”
https://www.commentary.org/articles/tal-fortgang/american-covenant-constitution/

The Dispatch: Ben Rolsma – “The Constitution That Binds Us”
https://thedispatch.com/article/the-constitution-that-binds-us/

Law & Liberty: Charles C.W. Cooke – “A Roadmap—If We Want It”
https://lawliberty.org/book-review/a-roadmap-if-we-want-it/

Law & Liberty: John G. Grove – “The Latent Wisdom in Our Constitution”
https://lawliberty.org/book-review/the-latent-wisdom-in-our-constitution/

Law & Liberty: Mark Landy – “How the Constitution Unifies the Country”
https://lawliberty.org/book-review/how-the-constitution-unifies-the-country/

Law & Liberty: Scott Yenor – “Can Our Constitutional Order be Revived?”
https://lawliberty.org/book-review/can-our-constitutional-order-be-revived/

National Review: Matthew J. Franck – “The Constitution We Still Need”
https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2024/08/the-constitution-we-still-need/

Washington Examiner: Michael M. Rosen – “Yuval Levin’s constitutional glue”
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/premium/3064559/constitutional-lore/

Washington Free Beacon: - Robert P. George – “A Constitution, If You Can Keep It”
https://freebeacon.com/culture/a-constitution-if-you-can-keep-it-2/

The Washington Post: Ramesh Ponnuru – “The Constitution was supposed to be a uniter, not a divider”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/06/18/yuval-levin-american-covenant-review-essay/

Creators & Guests

Host
Tim Benson
Ill Literacy, the newest podcast from The Heartland Institute, is helmed by Tim Benson, Senior Policy Analyst for Heartland’s Government Relations team. Benson brings on authors of new book releases on topics including politics, culture, and history on the Ill Literacy podcast. Every episode offers listeners the author’s unique analysis of their own book release. Discussions often shift into debate between authors and Benson when ideological differences arise, creating unique commentary that can’t be found anywhere else.

What is Ill Literacy: Books with Benson?

The Heartland Institute's podcast discussing notable new works with their authors. Hosted by Tim Benson.

Tim Benson:

Hello, everybody. And welcome to the Illiteracy Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Benson, a senior policy analyst at Heartland Institute, a national free market think tank. We are in the episode 170 something range at this point, shockingly. Surprised they haven't, like, come up with a hook for me yet.

Tim Benson:

But, anyway, for those of you just tuning in for the first time though, what, what we do here on the podcast is, I invite an author on to discuss a book of theirs that's been newly published or recently published on someone, some idea, some event, something, etcetera, etcetera, that, we think you guys would like to hear a conversation about. And then, hopefully, at the end of the podcast, you go ahead and give the book a purchase and give it a read. So if you like this podcast, please consider giving Illiteracy a 5 star review at Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to the show and also by sharing with your friends since that's the best way to support programming like this. And my guest today, very excited for this one, my guest today is doctor Yuval Levin. And, doctor Levin is the director of social, cultural, and constitutional studies at the American Enterprise Institute, where he also holds the Beth and Ravenel Currie Chair in Public Policy.

Tim Benson:

He is also the founder and editor of National Affairs, one of my favorite journals, a senior editor at the New Atlantis, also one of my favorite journals, contributing editor at National Review, who everybody loves, and a contributing opinion writer at The New York Times. And besides those publications, you might have seen his work in The Wall Street Journal, Commentary, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The Free Press, The Weekly Standard, rest in peace, Law Law and Liberty, The Dispatch, SAFER Modern Age, Public Discourse, and the Claremont Review of Books among many others. He is the author of Tyranny of Reason, The Origins and Consequences of the Social Scientific Outlook, Imagining the Future, Science and American Democracy, The Great Debate, Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left, The Fractured Republic, Renewing America's Social Contract in the Age of Individualism, and A Time to Build from Family and Community to Congress and the Campus: How Recommitting to Our Institutions Can Revive the American Dream. And lastly, he is here to discuss his latest book, American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation and Could Again, which was published back in June by Basic Books.

Tim Benson:

So, doctor Levin, thank you so so much for coming on the podcast. I do appreciate it.

Yuval Levin:

Thank you so much, Tim. I really appreciate it. I'm a huge fan of Heartland, so this is great to do.

Tim Benson:

Oh, great. Thanks. Yeah. When I emailed you originally about this and I was, you know, trying to butter you up and, get you to come on, I mentioned that, you know, if I had one pick for someone to be president of the United States, it would be you. But then I had forgotten that you're actually, an immigrant.

Tim Benson:

So that's

Yuval Levin:

Constitutionally ineligible among other

Tim Benson:

reasons why I

Yuval Levin:

should never be president, of course.

Tim Benson:

Right. Yeah. But, so that bummed me out because now now now I don't have a guy. I gotta figure out another guy who's gonna be my guy because you can't be my guy. But, anyway but, I say that because, we're just to the listeners out there, it's because I I hold doctor Levin in in very, very high esteem.

Tim Benson:

I think, let's just put it this way. I think on the right, he's he's the best we've got. And, so very, very excited

Yuval Levin:

to a lot. Thank you.

Tim Benson:

To have to have you here. But, anyway, to the book itself, you know, the normal entry question to everybody that comes on the on the podcast. You know? What what made you wanna write this book? What was what was the genesis of it?

Yuval Levin:

Yeah. I mean, in in a sense, the why write it question, was relatively easy for me in this case. We're we're living in a time when we feel very divided in America, when we feel like we're at each other's throats a lot of the time, and, we often blame the constitution for some of those divisions. We feel like it frustrates us. It stands in our way.

Yuval Levin:

It doesn't allow, majorities of Americans to get their way, and so it leaves everybody frustrated. And I I think that's just about the opposite of the right diagnosis of our situation. I think that, actually, the American constitution is, a great potential source of cohesion and unity. If we allowed it to work properly, it's intended to bring us together, and it's capable of it too. And a lot of the reasons why we're divided now have to do with the ways in which we aren't abiding by the constitution in our politics.

Yuval Levin:

And I thought that was an argument worth making in this moment when we need to be reminded of why we should value the constitutional inheritance that we have and when we need to think practically about how to have a better politics. I think the constitution is the place to start. So that's really what the book is about. It's about how to think about unity and how to think about the constitution.

Tim Benson:

Mhmm. So so what does unity mean in the political context? So, you know, what does it mean to be unified, or or how do you mean it?

Yuval Levin:

Yeah. I think that that's actually a very important question to start with because, there's a there's this, an obvious way to answer that question, which is unity means we agree. So we're all on the same side of all the questions that matter in our politics, and we're unified. We're we're moving together because we all think alike. I I think that kind of unity is not really possible in politics.

Yuval Levin:

A society that had that kind of unity wouldn't really need politics. The purpose of politics is to address differences, and to deal with disagreements. And there is no society that answers to that description, where everybody thinks like, I think there's no community that does, there's no you can't get 10 people together and not very quickly find yourself dealing with some kind of disagreement. And so, it can't be that what unity means is just agreeing with each other. And that's an understanding that you find very deep in the thinking of the, of the framers of the American constitution too.

Yuval Levin:

So that you find James Madison famously in Federalist 10, just saying very frankly, as long as the reason of man continues fallible and he's at liberty to exercise it, different opinions will be formed. Period. That's the premise. And yet they also believe that we can be unified as a society. And that's because unity in politics doesn't mean thinking alike.

Yuval Levin:

Unity means acting together. And the difference between thinking alike and acting together, I think, is very, very important to understand in thinking about a free society, and in thinking about the American constitution. It's a distinction that points to a question that I think is valuable, which is just how? How can we act together when we don't think alike? And the constitution in a lot of ways is an answer to that question.

Yuval Levin:

How can we act together when we don't think alike? The answer looks like the the separation of powers, the system of competition, the emphasis on negotiation that are really at the core of the American constitution. And I think that understanding of unity is important to recover too. Because in order for us to understand how we can be a less divided society, we have to see that disagreeing with each other is not exactly why we're divided. It's our failure to disagree in a constructive way that is the problem, and the constitution can help us see how to do that better.

Tim Benson:

Yeah. As you write, more unity doesn't mean less disagreement. It just means better disagreement, you know, more fruitful, disagreement, and that, you know, multiplicity does not imply disunity. You know, other Americans and their ideas are not, you know, problems to be solved.

Yuval Levin:

Right. Right. We need a system, a political system, that lets us work through that and, that at the same time doesn't simply empower majorities. You know, there is a kind of simple minded way to say, well, when we disagree, we just take a vote. And Right.

Yuval Levin:

That's generally true. The the American system is certainly democratic at at its core, but majorities can be despotic too. Majorities can be oppressive too. Anybody who looks at democracy, anybody who looks at American history can see that. And so our system tries to find a way to let us act together when we don't think alike while also balancing majority rule and minority rights.

Yuval Levin:

And that's no simple matter. So the system is no simple system.

Tim Benson:

Right. And you also write that our biggest obstacle in our understanding of the constitution is our familiarity with it. Or what what do you mean by that?

Yuval Levin:

Yeah. You know, we we think we know the constitution because we constantly if we if you care about politics and are engaged with it in any way, you're always talking about the constitution. But we're almost always talking about it as simply a legal framework. And the constitution is a legal framework. It is law.

Yuval Levin:

It's the it's it's the supreme law of the land as it says of itself, but it's very important to see that the constitution is more than that. It's really in structuring a regime. It creates the basic character of American political life. So it has to be understood not only as a legal framework, but also as a a policy making framework, as a an institutional framework, and ultimately as a political framework. And I think that's a path towards seeing that the constitution exists to a very important degree to help us be more unified.

Yuval Levin:

It's not necessarily obvious on its face, but when the constitution describes its own purposes in the preamble, the first one it offers is to form a more perfect union. And in arranging and shaping every one of its institutions, it's concerned with how to keep a diverse divided society together. To see that requires seeing that it is more than just law, and not to think in too lawyerly a way about the constitution. Most of our constitutional thinking now is done by lawyers. Lawyers are great.

Yuval Levin:

They have their uses, but they're not the only kind of citizen we have. Mhmm. And this is not a lawyerly book. I'm not a lawyer. I'm a I'm a recovering political scientist.

Yuval Levin:

And this book really follows in a tradition that barely exists anymore of political scientists who think about the American system, and who don't hate the American system. Those are hard to find in American contemporary political science. And it tries to seek out the strengths and weaknesses, the character of the system by thinking about it as a way of life for a nation, and that is more than lawyerly thinking.

Tim Benson:

Yeah. As as you were just talking about the, you know, this the constitution is this, you know, sort of 5 part framework, and then, you know, most importantly, it's a framework for union and solidarity, and that all the other facets of the constitution contribute to that unity framework. And, you know, the idea of solidarity and union was something the framers, as you mentioned earlier, were were particularly worried about, you know, Madison, especially. Yeah. What kind of cohesion did he emphasize?

Yuval Levin:

Yeah. Madison is really the distinct figure here in thinking about the constitution's potential for national unity. Madison is an unusual thinker in the American political tradition. You can find familiar types among the generation of the founders and the framers. Alexander Hamilton, for example, thinks a lot about threats to American dynamism and social order.

Yuval Levin:

Thomas Jefferson thinks a lot about threats to equality and social justice. They're broadly recognizable as as right and left figures. Madison is most concerned about threats to unity and social cohesion. He worries about faction. He worries about the instability of the laws.

Yuval Levin:

He worries about the injustice of majorities. These are themes that are just absolutely central to the American political order, and they're very Madisonian in character. And his sense of what it meant to worry about these things is rooted in low expectations of politics. He doesn't think that politics can arrive at an ideal society. He doesn't think that it can arrive at perfect social peace.

Yuval Levin:

He thinks its purpose is to avert the worst rather than to achieve the best, and that the dangers of political failure, the dangers of of social chaos and disorder, of the breakdown of law, these are really the reasons why the constitution was necessary to avoid the the worst kinds of political failure. And for that reason, Madison has relatively low, not easily achievable, but relatively low expectations of the system. He wants it to establish a framework for resolving disputes. And what will come out of that is not ideal policy. It's not technically perfect.

Yuval Levin:

It's not political engineering. What he hopes will come out of it is legitimacy. Laws and policies that a a maximally broad range of the public thinks are appropriate and legitimate and reflect their concerns and priorities. And you see over and over in our system that the American Constitution prioritizes legitimacy over administrative efficiency, prioritizes legitimacy over technocratic prowess. It's not all about getting the the best outcome most quickly.

Yuval Levin:

It's about making sure that at the end of the day, as many Americans as possible see the system as serving them. I think a lot of the problem we have now in American political life has to do with a sense of illegitimacy, with a sense that this system is here to serve other people. And again, I think it is because we have strayed from constitutional practice that we've arrived at this place where Americans feel like our government is not for them, it's for somebody else, where there's tremendous mistrust of elites. I actually think the constitution is very alert to that danger and properly understood could help us deal with it.

Tim Benson:

Yeah. So how have we weakened the constitution's capacity to unify us and and purposely so in in many instances?

Yuval Levin:

Yeah. I mean, I I would say that the the the way in which the constitution approaches that challenge has always been controversial, because what it does is refuse to empower narrow majorities and instead insist on coalition building. So if you barely win an election, you don't really get all the power of the state in our kind of system. In in in many democracies, you do. If you think about the parliamentary systems in Europe and and and the Asian democracies in some of Latin America, those are systems where the party that wins an election or the coalition that follows an election, has all the power of the state until it loses its majority.

Tim Benson:

Yeah. They can go whole hog.

Yuval Levin:

Exactly. As long as they want a majority, they can do whatever they want. The American system does not work that way. Nobody can do whatever they want. Everybody's restricted.

Yuval Levin:

Everybody's constrained by opposing, forces and powers in our system. And what you win when you win an election is you win a seat at the table. And what happens at the table is bargaining and negotiation with other people who also want a seat at that table. And very often, if you win a narrow majority in congress, you still have to work with the minority to get anything done because of various super majority requirements, but also because of the basic structure of the system, the the way the two houses interact, the way the three branches work together. And so that, it can be very frustrating to narrow majorities.

Yuval Levin:

And especially in the 21st century, narrow majorities are basically all we've had. So it's been very frustrating. And the response to it is often, well, this just stands in the way of majority rule. It's not legitimate. We need to get rid of these constraints and just let majorities govern and have all the power.

Yuval Levin:

It's a desire to push in the direction of parliamentary government. And it's not new. This has been the essence of the progressive, critique of the American constitution from the very beginning. And you find by the middle of 19th century, and especially in the latter decades of 19th century with Woodrow Wilson and others, people making the case that the American system is just too inefficient. It's too chaotic.

Yuval Levin:

They can't stand federalism, which is just messy, and everybody pulls in different directions. They don't like the centrality of Congress. They think that the president should be more central because the president can be a more efficient administrator and decision maker. And so in looking at every one of our institutions, they reject the Madisonian case for it and insist on a different way of understanding it that would allow for better administrative efficiency. They want the national interest to win out over state concerns and differences.

Yuval Levin:

They want the presidency to be central in our system. They want Congress to be more accountable and answerable to party leaders so that it's more organized and capable of advancing a coherent agenda. And the fact is, we have moved in that direction on all of these fronts for more than a century now. We have centralized our mode of government, and the national government is much more powerful in everyday governance than it used to be. We have centralized power in congress in the hands of party leaders to a much greater degree than was intended to be the case.

Yuval Levin:

And we have centralized power in our system in the hands of the president. And the the administrative apparatus that surrounds the president, the what we call the administrative state to a much greater degree than was originally the case. The reason for this over and over was a desire for greater administrative efficiency, to some extent also greater accountability to narrow majorities. These aren't crazy priorities, but they underestimate the danger of of, of disunity and the necessity of social cohesion and legitimacy, they miss Madison's insight. And I think for that reason, they make it difficult for our system to achieve what the Madisonian system could achieve, which is a degree of unity in a vast diverse society.

Yuval Levin:

I think we forget, the progressives forget at least, that the United States is a massive democracy. There's a tendency in among political scientists now to say, well, look at Norway. Norway has an accountable system and a foundation.

Tim Benson:

Like 7 dudes. You know?

Yuval Levin:

Yeah. Norway the United States is just not like Norway. Yeah. United States is much more like India, Mexico, Argentina.

Speaker 1:

Mhmm.

Yuval Levin:

But the difference is we're better governed than they are. And the reason for that is that we have a constitution that recognizes the complexity of our political life. So the fact that we can even imagine that we could compare ourselves to Norway is actually, I think, a testament to the effectiveness of our constitution. But, unfortunately, we use that argument as an argument against the constitution.

Tim Benson:

Yeah. Yeah. You're right. You touched I wanna get back to Congress in a second. And you touched on this a little bit, but federalism occupies a really central place in the book and in your thinking in how it comes out in the book.

Tim Benson:

But what is it about federalism in the constitution that is so important, and why has federalism always really struggled to maintain its place?

Yuval Levin:

Yeah. I think federalism is an enormously important part of the achievement of the constitution. The question of balancing federal and state power was really the question of the constitutional convention. It was the most controversial and complicated of the questions that they had to resolve. The basic issue was, are they creating a national state, which is gonna have, you know, at that time, 13 administrative districts in the way that the counties are in our states?

Yuval Levin:

Or are they creating a confederation? Something like the United Nations, where there would be some decisions made together on a national level on behalf of the states, but the governing would be done by the states. Would the national government govern the people directly, or would the states govern the people directly? The convention could not come to an answer to that question, and they arrived at a novel idea, which had never really been tried before, which is what I think of as a kind of parallel federalism. So often when we think of federalism, we think of it as layered.

Yuval Levin:

Right? There's the states, and above them, there's the national government. That's not actually how federalism is structured in the constitution. The structure is 2 parallel governments. They both govern the people directly, but regarding different subjects.

Yuval Levin:

And so when it comes to economic policy and to foreign and defense policy, the national government governs the people directly. When it comes to everything else, just about everything else, the states are meant to govern the people directly. And the the promise of the system, the power of the system, is that these powers are not intertwined. They govern separately. And in that way, it's possible for different states to govern themselves in different ways on key policy questions at the same time, so that not every question has to be resolved at the national level.

Yuval Levin:

But the way in which we've responded to the progressive critique of this system, especially of the chaos that results from this system, we're Our country just doesn't have one answer to the question, of how should we govern on this issue or that issue. That struck the progressives as untenable and unsustainable. They wanted the power to control interstate commerce to basically mean that the national government governs the country. And as a result of that, we have a lot of intertwining of state and federal power now, especially in some key governing areas, health care, education, welfare. You find federal priorities being channeled through state institutions, federal money flowing to the states in ways that come with strings that ultimately make the states accountable to the national government.

Yuval Levin:

All of this makes it very difficult for for federalism to do its job, for federalism to allow us to disagree, while being one nation. And so I think the the any agenda of federalism reform would have to be an agenda of untangling state and federal powers, of separating them out so that only one is responsible for each, policy domain. That's not generally how we think about federalism. And I think it's very important that we see that the core of the promise of federalism is really that separation. So that if we wanted to help this work better, we would have to think about how to distinguish state and federal responsibilities, rather than how to tie them together.

Speaker 1:

Right.

Tim Benson:

Okay. Now onto, Congress. Well, I wanna spend a little bit of time on this just because it seems to me I'm not sure if you agree. I think you'd probably be with me on this, but it seems to me the 2 biggest problems we have right now are, a weak Congress that is basically throwing up its hands on doing its job. And then, the weakness of the parties themselves.

Tim Benson:

Absolutely agree

Yuval Levin:

with that. Yeah.

Tim Benson:

Yeah. But so, you know, contrary to popular belief that the three branches are coequal, you know, as written in the book, Congress is actually the predominant institution. It's the primary institution. And as you say, whether it behaves that way or not, the centrality of Congress is essential to the legitimacy of our regime and its claim to republicanism.

Yuval Levin:

Right.

Tim Benson:

You know, when the system works well, it's as you say, it's usually because Congress is doing its job, and, I'm a deadhead, big you couldn't figure that out by looking at me. So in Grateful Dead circles, there's this phrase, about Phil Lesh, their bass player. Basically, you know, you know, go to a concert, and it was, you know, when Phil is on, the band is on. Right? So that's sort of like, you know, if Phil's having a good night, like, the whole band is having a good night.

Tim Benson:

That's, you know, basically how it works. But that seems to be the case too with our Republican system when Congress is working, and doing what it's supposed to do under our structure, then we're okay. But, you know, but Congress is failing, and it's not because it isn't passing Democratic proposal X or republican policy prescription y, but for another reason. What what is that reason?

Yuval Levin:

Yeah. I think it's very well put, and it's very important to see that the the character of the system is given to it by Congress. Congress is the institution where we do the fundamental work of acting together when we don't think alike, which is the work of negotiation and bargaining. That's the essential action of American political life. And when Congress isn't functioning, isn't doing that, nothing else works.

Yuval Levin:

This can be hard to see sometimes, because we're inclined to emphasize what we have too much of when when we think something is broken. So we look at the constitutional system and we say, the the the executive branch is just doing way too much, or the courts are much too active. I think that's true. But the reason for that has to do with what isn't happening, which can be harder to see. And what isn't happening is the basic work of congress.

Yuval Levin:

And as you say, sometimes when people think that that congress isn't working because everybody more or less thinks congress isn't working. There are not a lot of people who would say it's doing a great job. But when you ask, what is it not doing? The natural answer might be, well, it's just not passing big legislation. So whatever it is we care about, whether it's fiscal policy or immigration or the environment or whatever it might be, you can say, well, Congress just isn't doing anything about this.

Yuval Levin:

And that's the the failure of our system. I actually think that the underlying problem is different. What Congress is failing to do is it's failing to facilitate cross partisan bargaining and negotiation. That's the purpose of the institution. Now that's also why we're not passing big legislation.

Tim Benson:

Right.

Yuval Levin:

But it's the underlying reason. It's really what's missing. And the diagnosis really matters. Because if you think what Congress isn't doing is just passing big bills, this is basically the progressive diagnosis, Then you think congress should be more efficient. And so more powered leadership, get rid of the filibuster.

Yuval Levin:

The various things that slow things down should be pushed aside, and congress should be given the room to move.

Tim Benson:

Well, not now.

Yuval Levin:

Yeah. Well, exactly. They just changed their mind. Last week, what happened? Well, the the if you think the purpose of Congress is to facilitate cross bargaining cross partisan bargaining and negotiation, then you actually think congress should be less efficient.

Yuval Levin:

You think that majorities and minorities should be forced to work together. And that's what happens when things are slowed down by things like the filibuster, which I think is enormously important. It's almost the only reason why we've had any cross partisan negotiation in congress in the 21st century. And, you know, of course, the Democrats now are gonna learn to love it, being in the minority. It's very important to see that it's valuable even when you're in the majority.

Yuval Levin:

It helps you to avoid political mistakes. It helps you to avoid policy mistakes. And it's enormously important to facilitate the kind of legitimacy that is essential for coming out of the, of the crisis that's led us into this populous moment. And for Congress to work, it has to be in the business of bargaining, negotiation, coalition building. The 21st century Congress has not been good at that.

Yuval Levin:

And so I think when we think about how to reform Congress, we have to look for ways not to make it easier for narrow majorities to get their way, but to make it necessary for those majorities to bargain and negotiate with minorities. You wanna make cross partisan bargaining more necessary, not less necessary, but you also wanna make it more likely, make it easier. I think that's that's achievable by empowering the congressional committees rather than party leaders. It's achievable by changes to these nature of the budget process, and other kinds of structural reforms that encourage members to invest themselves in the core work of legislative bargaining. Right now, the way to succeed in congress is to have a big following on social media and get on cable news and be the talking head.

Yuval Levin:

The way to succeed should instead be to get legislative bargaining and negotiation done. And changing those incentives is really the key to thinking about how to reform the institution.

Tim Benson:

Yeah. There's too many show ponies and not enough workhorses. You know, there's too many members, not enough legislators. You know, there's not enough institutional pride Yeah. Or institutional loyalty.

Tim Benson:

Yeah. But that's also

Yuval Levin:

pride, by the way, is really important. I think you can see it now. In this early period after the election, we've had, for example, the president-elect saying the senate should, allow me to have more recess appointments. Mhmm. They should just go on vacation and let me appoint people.

Yuval Levin:

Now whatever you think of the appointments, and whatever you think of the president, whatever you think of the parties

Tim Benson:

I like most of them so far.

Yuval Levin:

Yeah. The congress should have the pride to say no. Right. We have a job to do, and we're not gonna go on break so the president can run things on his own. And especially a congress of the same party as the president, as we're going to have, should have the pride to say, no.

Yuval Levin:

We have to do this together. This can't just be a matter of turning things over to the president.

Tim Benson:

Yeah. And just back to that on coalition building. You know, as you write in the book, to have a congress that gives up on meaningful coalition building, you know, is on is basically having a nation that, you know, gives up on forging any sort of national cohesion. It's we might as well pack it in. We're just giving up the game altogether practically.

Yuval Levin:

That's right. And and the only alternative is a kind of back and forth where whoever wins a presidential election just gets to govern on their own. And the administrative state substitutes for congress, and we just swing back and forth. The only way to have durable policy change happen is through congress, is through bargaining and negotiation. And if congress is not willing to do that job, then our system cannot work.

Yuval Levin:

And we also can't be can't have the kind of unity and cohesion that the constitution could make possible.

Tim Benson:

Yeah. Would you prefer, just sort of, off topic, but would you prefer to go back to the original framework of Congress where senators were chosen by their respective state legislatures instead of, you know, the population at large? And also, sorry, and, a house question too. Do you think we should increase the size of the house?

Yuval Levin:

Yeah. So I would. I I think, you know, I I think that the original way of selecting senators allowed the house and senate to be a little more different from each other than they are now. And there's that's a that's a useful thing for forcing some, different interests to be represented and and compelling some negotiation and bargaining. I don't think it's the end of the world that the senate is directly elected.

Yuval Levin:

I wouldn't spend a lot of political capital trying to change that.

Tim Benson:

Mhmm.

Yuval Levin:

But I do think it was a mistake to change the way senators are chosen. On expanding the house, I think that is important. And I do think that we should, allow the house to grow with every census. And that was absolutely the assumption of the framers of the constitution was that the way in which the the census would apportion representation would involve the house of representatives growing some modestly after each election. And the way that was done, and it happened throughout the 19th century.

Yuval Levin:

After every census, the house would grow a little. It was done in a way that prevented any state from losing seats in the house. So that as reapportionment happened, the places where there was population growth would be where the house grew.

Tim Benson:

Right.

Yuval Levin:

No state would lose members. I think that was a good formula. The house stopped that that growth in 1920 for its own momentary political reasons. Just by statute, they said from now on, apportionment is gonna mean reapportionment. So some states lose, some states gain, but the size of the house doesn't change.

Yuval Levin:

By this point, every member of the house now represents almost a 1000000 people. That's a very different idea of representation than, was intended by the constitution. I think that if if we return to the same formula so if if the house had kept growing the way it did in the 19th century, in 20th 21st centuries, it would now be bigger by about a 150 members. I think that's what we should do. We should grow the house by a 150 members.

Yuval Levin:

And then after each census, let it grow more slowly, according to the old formula. That would help it be a little more representative. It would also, by the way, balance the, electoral college a little better

Tim Benson:

Right.

Yuval Levin:

Since each state's delegation is just the size of its congressional delegation. And it would create a moment now with that larger growth of a of a 150 members all at once, in which Congress could think about institutional change in a way that's now very difficult for members. So I do advocate for growing the house in the book, and I think it's an important. It's not a it's not a radical reform. It's constitutional maintenance, and I think it's, it would be valuable for us.

Tim Benson:

Alright. So that means eventually we're gonna have to get a new building.

Yuval Levin:

Yeah. Maybe. There's there's room at the moment, but over time, that might happen. You know, the capital building grew in the 19th century. Maybe it needs to grow again.

Tim Benson:

We can do it like we do with, like, public schools. We can just, you know, put the the new guys out

Yuval Levin:

That's right. Trailers.

Tim Benson:

Trailers out on the lawn. Now, anyway, you brought up the electoral college, and, thank you for this nice segue, because the, you offer a full throated defense

Speaker 1:

Yes.

Tim Benson:

Of the electoral college in the book. And I was like, you're speaking my love language here. You know? And it's

Yuval Levin:

That's another one that used to be unpopular until last week, I think.

Tim Benson:

Yeah. Exactly. So explain the important why should we support the electoral college, and, you know, how does the electoral college offer, you know, some really crucial protections against the the risks of factional polarization?

Yuval Levin:

Yeah. You know, I think we whenever we think about any political reform, we have to ask ourselves, compared to what? If you say the system we have is inadequate, you have to say, what would be better? So no political institution is perfect, and the electoral college certainly isn't perfect. It doesn't work exactly the way it was intended to either.

Yuval Levin:

But compared to what? And very often, the alternative that's offered is just a direct national popular vote for president. I think that would be a disaster on a lot of levels. And by the way, just about no democracy chooses its chief executive that way. In most of the democracies of the world, that choice has made it an even less democratic way than the electoral college.

Yuval Levin:

Yeah. So, you know, in Britain, who chooses the prime minister? The the the prime minister is chosen by the majority of a of the majority party in parliament. They have elections, but there's often a change in prime minister between elections. And that choice is made, by a small group of people.

Yuval Levin:

It can be 260 people who all went to the same 2 universities and have the same political interests. That's much less democratic than the electoral college. What we have is a system of now 50 separate popular elections, the results of which are then weighted by population. I think it's a way to avoid some of the dangers of mass election, the dangers of demagoguery that come with, a massive national popular vote while still allowing for the voice of the people to be represented in exactly the way in which it is represented in congress. Because remember, as I just said, the the the each state's delegation in in the electoral college is exactly the size of its congressional delegation, which means the way in which the people are represented in congress is also the way in which they are represented in the selection of the president.

Yuval Levin:

And yet the president isn't chosen by congress, which would create a strange kind of relationship between the branches. I think that if we had a national popular vote in this moment, in a in a divided time of kind of 5050 period in American political life, what you'd find is the party is focusing on getting people out where they're strongest. The Democrats would focus on California where they can get a lot of voters out. Republicans maybe would focus on the South. They wouldn't talk to each other.

Yuval Levin:

They wouldn't talk to the same voters.

Tim Benson:

Right.

Yuval Levin:

They wouldn't have to deal with the concerns of people in the middle of the country. The electoral college says no. You can get as many people out in California and the south as you want. But if you didn't win Michigan, if you didn't win Georgia, you didn't win the election. And what's distinct about those states is that they could go either way, which means you have to talk to people who make you uncomfortable.

Yuval Levin:

You have to talk to people who are not already on the team. And that forces you to think about how you can broaden your appeal, how you can broaden your reach, how you can represent people who are not already gung ho for you. I think that's a very, very important factor in driving the character of our presidential politics, and that it's very healthy for a diverse society like ours. So I am a full throated defender of the electoral college.

Tim Benson:

Yeah. You have to under the electoral college, you have to appeal to the middle, not to the ideologues that make up your base, and you have to figure out positions that are Again, it's trying to find that cohesion and that coalition of what positions do the majority of people everywhere in the country you know, seem to agree on, or for the most part, instead of just like, you know, what's gonna really, you know, pump up my, you know, my side, and how do we get them out? And that's the problem with the primary system. I will get to that in a minute. Yep.

Tim Benson:

But, I guess, I yeah. So I guess let's go to the presidency. And as you mentioned, sort of every problem you know, the problems we have with the presidency and the judiciary sort of stem from Congress's abdication of its constitutional role. And now we have the presidency that is, you know, where the president is now seen as some sort of a national tribune, and we have this massive growth of this 4th estate, this administrative state that essentially acts as a substitute legislature with very few checks on its authority and on its power.

Yuval Levin:

Yeah, that's right. A lot of this has do with Congress's dereliction of its responsibility. It creates a vacuum, and, presidents are naturally ambitious, and they seek to fill that vacuum. But I think it also has to do with a long running critique of the American constitution. Again, largely driven by a kind of progressive argument about its, inefficiency and and, inadequacy to modern life.

Yuval Levin:

An argument that is not, attuned enough to what the constitution can really do. And an argument that says what we need is concerted leadership. We need technical expertise, and we need clear direction. And those things can only really come from the executive branch. And so the progressives have long been focused on empowering the executive branch to set the direction and, drive our policy debates and our politics.

Yuval Levin:

The effect of that, I think, is a profound distortion of the character of the American system. We come to think of the president in all the wrong ways. The president, it does not stand in for the country. No single individual could represent a society of 330,000,000 people. That could only be done by a plural institution, by Congress.

Yuval Levin:

What the presidency is for is administration. And administration does have to be done by 1 person. It does require a decision maker. But administration has to be accountable to the decisions and frameworks set out by Congress. If we empower the president directly to play the part both of the legislature and of the executive, then we end up with a much less accountable government.

Yuval Levin:

We end up with, much less stability in our laws. I think, frankly, we end up with worse administration, and not only, a less accountable and democratic regime. And so I think that that mistake, which we've been now making for more than a century, has a lot to do with the character of our political moment. When we empower the presidency this much, we raise the stakes of our presidential elections in a way that makes our politics way too overheated, and leaves people with the sense that everything is at stake in the presidential election. And that means that if the wrong person wins, the country's doomed, which is implicitly the argument made by both sides of every presidential election now.

Yuval Levin:

I think to lower those stakes, to lower that temperature, to allow ourselves to have not only a a a more functional politics, but a clear sense of what we're looking for in a chief executive. We have to recover some sense of the nature of administration, which has really been lost to us. The difference between administration and legislation, and the role of the president. You know, if you go to Mount Vernon, where George Washington lived, you could they have on display his copy of the constitution, where he actually wrote the word president next to every item that had something to do with the role of the chief executive so that he would have a sense of what his job is. I think every elected president should be required to go through that process.

Yuval Levin:

Work through the constitution. What is your job? Mhmm. It's not an obvious question. And I think our contemporary chief executives have really lost sight of the answer, and the rest of us generally have too.

Yuval Levin:

Right.

Tim Benson:

Alright. I'd love to talk more about that, but, running out of time, so I wanna get to a couple other things. So, obviously, I think we should, you know, move on to the the 3rd branch, the judiciary.

Yuval Levin:

Yeah.

Tim Benson:

And, why is it critical to grasp the role of the of the judiciary in enabling greater national cohesion. You know, what is that role, and how has the judiciary strayed from it?

Yuval Levin:

Yeah. I think it's easy to mistake that role because, courts are in the business of resolving disputes. That's what they do. And so we think, well, their role is to resolve disputes, to make us more unified. But courts are in the business of resolving disputes about what the law is, not what it should be.

Yuval Levin:

And so they can't actually resolve our deep disputes about the proper vision and direction for American political life. That has to happen in Congress. What the courts can resolve disputes about is what the legislative frameworks congress creates actually mean, and whether our government is abiding by them. That means the role of the courts is to police the boundaries of our system, and that the part they play in facilitating national unity is in that work of policing the boundaries, of making sure that people don't do end runs around those elements of our system that are meant to keep us together, that are meant to facilitate unity. There are a lot of end runs now.

Yuval Levin:

A lot of the work of the administrative state is a kind of way around how our system is meant to work. A lot of times now legislation is written in a vague way that, delegates power to the executive branch rather than having congress do its job. The courts have a role to play in containing that, in preventing that. And we should see that that constrained role is their vital part in our system. And that means that we should want them to understand their constraints and their proper place.

Yuval Levin:

Now I actually think the courts are better at this than they used to

Speaker 1:

be. Mhmm.

Yuval Levin:

We've just said, congress and the executive branch are in a worse place now than they were half a century ago. I think that's undeniable, but the courts are in a better place than they were. And especially thanks to the courts of the 21st century, and especially of the last, half decade. We have a court now that does recognize its proper role. And that I think is in the process of rebalancing the constitutional framework containing the power of the administrative state, pushing congress to take on its proper role.

Yuval Levin:

So when it comes to the courts, I'm actually quite hopeful, and I I feel pretty good about the direction they've taken.

Tim Benson:

Well, speaking of hopeful, Do you have any hope with this, with Donald Trump's I mean, the people he's named so far? I I last night, I saw that he named, you know, whatever this co headed, you

Yuval Levin:

know Yeah.

Tim Benson:

Elon Musk, Vivek, government efficiency department or whatever, which someone on Twitter, you know, said, you know, nothing screams government efficiency like, you know, a department with, you know, 2 heads. Yeah. Exactly. Do you do you I mean, obviously, they're not gonna have any sort of I mean, there's they're not an actual department. Congress would actually have to create that, and Right.

Tim Benson:

You know, we're actually creating another department. But so they're just gonna be a, you know, sort of like a they they don't have any authority. They're just like, here's a guide. Like, here's what we think you should do.

Yuval Levin:

Uh-huh.

Tim Benson:

Do you have any hope that, you know, you know, Elon's talking about cutting $2,000,000,000,000 from the budget, and, I just don't see that happening. Do you have any do you have any hope that they're gonna be able to achieve anything more than just, you know, nibbling at the margin?

Yuval Levin:

Yeah. I mean, my my expectation of that particular idea is very low. I I don't think that you're gonna make government more efficient, first of all, by creating a new department, and secondly, by, by by focusing on, you know, waste and abuse. Of course, there is some of that, but there's not $2,000,000,000,000 of that. And by the way, we already have an office like that.

Yuval Levin:

It's called the office of management and budget. Right. It's part of the White House. And its purpose is exactly to, keep government true to its budgetary constraints and to find greater efficiencies. I think if the president wanted to name a particularly good person to run that office, that person could really make a difference.

Yuval Levin:

It would still be a relatively marginal difference. Because the challenges we face, the both the inefficiency and the fiscal challenges that the government faces are much more a function of core government functions right now. They're about how we spend money, particularly on our entitlement programs. That has to change. Only Congress could really change that.

Yuval Levin:

Although, if the president were in favor of such change, that would help. It doesn't seem to be the case right now. So I think on that front, my expectations are pretty low. I do think that there's reason to expect some some significant and constructive deregulatory work under this administration, in in a variety of areas in in in terms of the government's relationship to education, and in the health care system and in other places, there I do have some hope. Absolutely.

Tim Benson:

Alright. Okay. Well, now onto, my big bug there, and that's the parties and their lack of or their how institutional control they've given it away and had had it taken away, some things. But how have we largely lost sight of how the parties can contribute to the functioning of the constitutional order and the cause of greater cohesion?

Yuval Levin:

Yeah. You know, the parties are not an original piece of the constitutional system. The constitution doesn't talk about them, and some of the framers had some hope that there might be a system here without the need for parties. But as soon as it got going, they all realized that they needed political parties. And the reason for that is that you need some way to organize collective action, in in political life.

Yuval Levin:

You need way you need a way of, of gathering together coalitions of voters. You need ways of choosing candidates. You need ways of facilitating governance through the political system. Political parties do all of those things. And the American system, generally speaking, has been pretty well served by our 2 party system, which is fairly distinct in the world.

Yuval Levin:

The 2 party system means that each of our parties is internally a coalition, and that means that the work of coalition building is central to political success and then also central to governing success. But in the course of the last half century in particular, our parties have given up their core functions. They've given up candidate selection, turned it over to the primary system without really enough thought about what the implications would be, And they've given up their work of facilitating collective action around elections too. They don't they're not where money is raised. They're not how candidates are chosen.

Yuval Levin:

I think that the primary system is a very bad fit for the American political system and for the contemporary political culture. It's ridiculous. Yeah. They they try to create democracy inside the parties.

Speaker 1:

Mhmm.

Yuval Levin:

But the result of that is that the parties have handed over their most important work, choosing candidates to an essentially random collection of people. Right. In a lot of states, just about anybody can vote in a party primary. And the people who do turn out are the people who are most intensely engaged, which tend to be the people who least want coalition building and negotiating and, and bargaining. What they want is ideological purity.

Yuval Levin:

And they punish candidates for, building coalitions and negotiating. And so essentially, we start every election process now by asking the people who least want the system to work well what they want and who they want. And that leaves us with candidates who are not well suited to the jobs they get elected to. I think the parties have got to rethink what their job is, and how they participate in candidate selection. We've seen some examples of that in recent years, where because they failed to win elections, some of the state parties take control a little and try to choose better candidates.

Yuval Levin:

We saw that with the governor's race in Virginia in 2021. In my home state of Maryland, after losing miserably for generations, the Republican party just went about selecting its candidate for governor in a different way. And we had a Republican governor in Maryland for 8 years. He he he ran for senate this last time and didn't win. But I think the the the idea that we have to pick someone who could win the general election has to be at the center of how the parties work.

Yuval Levin:

And I think it is time for, party process reform. These processes are not in the constitution. They're not written

Tim Benson:

in stone.

Yuval Levin:

They can be changed, and they really need to be.

Tim Benson:

Yeah. I mean, the parties are private organizations. I mean, like I said, they're not part of the constitutional structure, so, you know, they can choose their representatives, however they want to. You know, so, you know, they could tomorrow or today come out and say, yeah. We're we're junking the primaries.

Tim Benson:

You know, we're just gonna basically you know, party officials, party leaders, you know, people who who have an institutional loyalty to the party who has spent, you know, years of their lives trying to build this party or in this certain state or this certain county or what have you into, you know, a majority party, we're gonna be the ones picking, you know, who our representatives are, not, you know, people who just signed up yesterday. No. I mean, there's no there's no skin in the game really for, you know, the voter, when it comes to, you know, who to choose. And in a lot of these primaries, you know, granted the problem we have, which is basically the the most ideologically pure people, the ones that, you know, vote in primaries the most. So you have this, like, cadre of

Speaker 1:

Exactly.

Yuval Levin:

You

Tim Benson:

know, ideologues are the ones picking you. But in, like, certain states, you don't even have to be a member of the party Yep. To vote on who is the party's representative. Like, you can, you know, you can be a Democrat and just you know, or a republican and go, you know, vote, you know, in the other party's primary and just, you know, throw your vote to some, you know, weirdo just to, you know, throw throw a, you know, a stick in the spokes of what's going on. And that's you know, the smoke filled rooms, you know, for all their, you know, people sort of disparagement of them, you know, they did a pretty good job, you know, on the whole picking candidates.

Tim Benson:

And they seem they certainly seem to have a better track record, you know, than the voters Yeah. Themselves. I think

Yuval Levin:

that's right. You know, there's a way that, I mean, first of all, these things could be combined to some degree. You could find some middle ground. Mhmm. But also, the the parties need to see that they have been failing to do their basic work for 25 years and more.

Yuval Levin:

They need to grasp that winning an election by 50% plus one vote is actually not a big victory. Right. That's a failure to build a winning coalition. And both parties, when they've won, have been winning that way in the 21st century. And they need to see that they should have higher ambitions.

Yuval Levin:

They should look to really win and build broad majorities, in the states and at the national level. And to do that, they need to think about general election dynamics. And not only to think about their primary voters, interest. And, yeah, at the moment, they are failing to do their core work. Both of them

Tim Benson:

are. Mhmm. How do you how do you come where do you come down on ranked choice voting? Either for for Heartland, I know I don't work on any of this stuff, but Heartland is generally anti Yes. Or not not generally, but but they're anti general election

Yuval Levin:

Yes.

Tim Benson:

Primary voting. And

Yuval Levin:

I am too. I in the general election, I think prime I think, rank choice is a bad idea because it weakens the parties, and the parties are important for all the reasons we just talked about. So rank choice makes parties irrelevant. I think rank choice could have a role to play in candidate selection within the parties. So that if they wanted to experiment with rank choice primaries, which is what the Virginia Republican party did in 2021 to get a winning candidate in a purple state.

Yuval Levin:

I think there's room to experiment with that in primaries, but I would not support ranked choice in general elections.

Tim Benson:

Okay. Gotcha. Alright. Well, we're coming up on an hour, and that's as as long as I said I'd keep you. So, start to wrapping things up.

Tim Benson:

So, you know, you touched on some prescriptions to how we can fix, you know, fix this problem or all these problems that we have in our constitutional order. But, you know, how how do we fix everything? You know? Make make us whole in the next, couple minutes here. What do we do?

Yuval Levin:

You know, I think the first step really is to see what we're fixing, to understand what the constitutional system is intended to achieve, to think about why it is now not achieving that in many respects, and therefore, what needs to be changed for it to work. I think recognizing that what it aims to achieve is what a lot of Americans are looking for is really crucial. So that we have to be reacquainted now with the American constitution. We have to see that it is the answer to the question we're constantly asking ourselves, and then to to see where reform is most necessary. And I think the two areas where it is most necessary are the ones you've pointed to, which are congress, first and foremost, and the party system.

Yuval Levin:

And significant reforms in both those areas that are aimed at allowing the system to facilitate a politics of coalition building would get us to a much more functional American politics, especially in a divided populous time like this. I think those are the places to focus our attention and our energy at this point. And that's a lot of where my work is on congressional reform in particular. It's a lot of where I think reformers, on the right, that is reformers who care about the constitution and who want to see a Madisonian system restored, need to be focused.

Tim Benson:

Alright. Well, alright. You might have answered the the normal exit question with that last answer, but I'll I'll ask it anyway just in case there's anything else you, you can think of. But, you know, like I said, normal exit question, You know, what would what would you like the audience to get out of this book or or what's the, you know, if there's one thing you want the reader to take away from having read it, but, you know, what would that be?

Yuval Levin:

Yeah. I think really an appreciation of the complexity of the intentions of the original constitution. This book is intended to be a reacquaintance with the constitution. People who know it, but who would benefit from knowing it a little better in a different light. And so the, the fact that the constitution is the answer to the question that our politics is now constantly driven to ask is what I hope people are left with.

Tim Benson:

Alright. Great. Well, once again, the name of the book is American Covenant, How the Constitution Unified Our Nation and Could Again. This is a fantastic, fantastic, fantastic book. I so enjoyed reading it.

Tim Benson:

You know? If it were up to me, I would hand it over to the Gideons and have them place 1, you know, in every hotel room from the the Waldorf in New York to a Motel 6 in, you know, Ashtabula or something like that.

Yuval Levin:

Thank you very much.

Tim Benson:

Actually, you know, I don't think I've ever met or, like, seen a Gideon before. Like, you've ever, like, seen No. Or ever you know, there's all these Gideons putting some Bibles everywhere.

Yuval Levin:

Right. Right. Who are these people?

Tim Benson:

Who are the Gideons? Never seen one. Never you know, just, like, in passing, just, like, messing. Oh, I happen to be a Gideon or what? I don't know.

Tim Benson:

Anyway, but, no. It's, there's just, so much to dig into here with this book, and there was so much stuff, you know, to talk about that we didn't get a chance to. But, I think this is a very, very important work. And I think everybody who has an interest in, in, in our constitution, in, you know, who notices how things are sort of not quite on the right track and how things could be our our political system could be more functional and less acrimonious and, take the temperature down a whole heck of a lot. There's just a lot of food for thought in this book, and I highly, highly recommend it to everybody everywhere out there.

Tim Benson:

Make sure you get it. It's called American Covenant, How the Constitution Unified Our Nation and Could Again, and the author, doctor Yuval Levin. So, doctor Levin, thank you so, so much for, you know, coming on the podcast and talking about the book, and thank you so, so much for, you know, actually sitting down and writing the sucker and letting us, you know, enjoy the, fruits of your labor.

Yuval Levin:

Thank you very much. I appreciate it.

Tim Benson:

No problem. And again, if you like this podcast, please consider leaving us leaving us a 5 star review and sharing with your friends. And if you have any, questions or comments or any suggestions for books you'd like to see discussed on this podcast, you can always reach out to me at tbenson@heartland.org. That's tbensohn@heartland.org. And, for more information about the Heartland Institute, you can just go to, heartland.org.

Tim Benson:

And, we have our Twitter slash x, whatever you wanna call it, account, here, for the podcast. You can also reach reach out to us there. Our, Twitter handle is at illbooks@illbooks, so make sure you check that out. Oh, before we go, is there anything, doctor Levin, you'd like to like to plug? Any appearances coming up or, you know, you know, shout out to National Affairs or, anything like that you want people to, know about?

Yuval Levin:

Well, people can find out everything I'm doing at, the American Enterprise Institute, which is ai.org. You can also find National Affairs there. AI publishes the journal and, so that's

Tim Benson:

And the public interest too.

Yuval Levin:

That's right. You can find the whole archive of the public interest too.

Tim Benson:

Yeah. I downloaded it all. Anyway, Yeah. So alright. That's pretty much it.

Tim Benson:

So, Yeah. Thanks for seeing, thanks for listening, everyone. We'll see you guys next time. Take care. Love you, Robbie.

Tim Benson:

Love you, mom. Bye bye.