By Malcolm Lee Kitchen III | Margin Of The Law
America is not in political crisis because the system is broken. It is in political crisis because the system works exactly as designed. That distinction matters more than almost anything else being said about American politics right now. Our founding fathers has written and warned us about this extensively. Yet here we are, again.
The Politics Industry, written by Katherine M. Gehl and Michael E. Porter, makes this argument with the kind of precision that comes from applying rigorous competitive analysis to a subject most people treat as either a morality play or a personality contest. The book is short, under 200 pages. Its argument is not. What Gehl and Porter have produced is the most structurally coherent diagnosis of American political dysfunction in at least a generation, and they back it with evidence that is difficult to dismiss.
This piece is part review, part analytical outline. It follows the architecture of the book closely, because the architecture is part of the argument. The problem has a structure. The solution has a structure. Understanding one requires understanding the other.
Why This Book Lands Differently
Michael Porter is a competition economist. He has spent decades studying companies, industries, and entire nations through the lens of competitive advantage. His frameworks for understanding how industries operate have influenced business strategy worldwide. Katherine Gehl was president and CEO of Gehl Foods, a high-tech food manufacturer. She hired Porter as a consultant, and that relationship eventually produced this book.
The methodological choice they made is what gives the book its force. Rather than analyzing American politics through the familiar lenses of ideology, history, or political philosophy, they analyze it as an industry. They ask the same questions about American politics that a serious economist would ask about any commercial market: Who are the competitors? What is the structure of competition? Who are the customers? Who are the suppliers? What are the barriers to entry? How is competitive behavior constrained or enabled by the rules governing the industry?
This framing is not a metaphor. It is a methodology. And it produces findings that are both obvious in hindsight and genuinely alarming once you see them clearly.
For an antitrust lawyer with nearly five decades of experience in competition law, this book reads like a clinical diagnosis of a patient whose symptoms have been misread for years. The vocabulary of antitrust economics, monopoly, duopoly, market structure, barriers to entry, oligopolistic interdependence, customer harm, rules of competition, all of it applies with uncomfortable precision to the American political system. The authors did not borrow the framework loosely. They applied it rigorously.
The Basic Framework: Politics Is an Industry
Start with the structure.
The politics industry has competitors: the Republican Party and the Democratic Party. This is a duopoly. Two firms dominate the market, and the market is structured in ways that protect their dominance. There are near-identical substitutes in the form of Independent candidates and voters, but substitutes in this market face barriers to entry that make their competitive impact minimal.
Duopolies in commercial markets are problematic but not automatically fatal to consumer welfare. The concern depends heavily on whether the two competitors are genuinely competing to serve customers, and whether new entrants can challenge them if they fail. In the politics industry, neither condition holds.
The suppliers in this industry are candidates, campaign staff, political consultants, think tanks, lobbyists, pollsters, and advertising firms. These suppliers depend on the duopoly for their livelihoods. Their interests are aligned with the survival of the duopoly, not with the welfare of citizens.
The industry generates roughly $20 billion per year at the federal level alone. Include comparable state−level operations and the total across a full election cycle exceeds 100 billion. This is not a marginal political enterprise. It is one of the largest industries in the country, and it is structured to serve itself.
The buyers in this market are voters. But as Gehl and Porter demonstrate, not all voters are equal customers. The parties do not compete to serve the average voter. They compete to serve the voters and donors who deliver the two currencies of political power: votes and money. Those customers are partisan primary voters, organized special interests, and large donors. Together they represent a fraction of the fewer than 20 percent of registered voters who participate in primaries.
The 2014 Princeton and Northwestern studies examined congressional action on nearly 2,000 policy issues. Their conclusion was precise and damning. When the preferences of economic elites and organized interest groups are controlled for, the preferences of the average American have a statistically near-zero impact on public policy. That is not a rhetorical flourish. It is a finding with a methodology behind it. The average voter is not a priority customer of the politics industry. They are, at best, a bystander whose periodic participation is managed and contained.
The Central Finding
The single most important proposition in this book is this: there is virtually no overlap between what a legislator needs to do to get re-elected and what a legislator needs to do to serve the public interest. In fact, for most legislators, serving the public interest actively threatens their electoral survival.
This is not a new observation in casual political commentary. What is new is the structural explanation for why it is true, and why it will remain true until the structure changes.
If a legislator represents a heavily partisan district and the primary electorate of that district is ideologically extreme relative to the general population, then voting for legislation that serves the majority of citizens may trigger a primary challenge from within the legislator’s own party. Being “primaried” has become the political equivalent of capital punishment for elected officials. The threat of it shapes voting behavior, committee behavior, and floor behavior on a daily basis.
This structural misalignment between electoral incentives and public interest is not an accident or a character flaw of current politicians. It is an engineered outcome of the rules governing competition in the industry. Change the rules, and you change the incentives. Change the incentives, and you change behavior. Leave the rules in place, and no amount of civic pressure, media criticism, or voter frustration will produce lasting reform.
The Rules of the Game: Elections Machinery
Rules governing who gets on the ballot and how votes are counted are what the authors call elections machinery. This machinery is not neutral. It was designed by the duopoly, is enforced by the duopoly, and functions primarily to protect the duopoly.
Two features of current elections machinery are particularly destructive.
Party Primaries
Party primaries concentrate decision-making power in the hands of the most ideologically committed partisan voters. Because most districts are heavily gerrymandered to favor one party or another, the primary is often the only election that matters. Winning the general election in a safe seat is automatic once you survive the primary. Winning the primary requires satisfying a small, ideologically extreme slice of the electorate.
Gerrymandering is one piece of this. But it is not the only piece. Ballot access rules and what are called “sore loser” laws are equally important and far less discussed.
Sore loser laws, currently in effect in 44 states, prevent a candidate who loses a party primary from running in the general election under any label. The practical effect is to prevent voters in the general election from choosing a candidate who would have had broader appeal but failed to satisfy the party’s primary base.
The Delaware example in the book is instructive. Senator Coons won his Senate seat in part because the Delaware sore loser law prevented the Republican primary loser from running in the general election under any label. Polls showed the primary loser would have defeated Coons by more than 20 points in a general election. The law did not prevent a bad outcome. It engineered one, in favor of the duopoly’s preferred candidates at the expense of what voters in the general election might actually have chosen.
Nothing in the Constitution mandates party primaries, sore loser rules, or gerrymandering. These are rules written by the parties, for the parties, to protect the parties. They function exactly as intended.
Plurality Voting
The second destructive feature of elections machinery is plurality voting. Most Americans assume that election rules are designed to produce winners with majority support. They are not.
In a three-way race, a candidate can win with 34 percent of the vote, meaning two thirds of voters preferred someone else. That is not an edge case. It is the predictable outcome of a voting system that was never designed to identify the candidate with the broadest public support.
The Maine governor’s race in 2010 illustrates this directly. Paul LePage won the Republican primary with 37.4 percent of the vote. He then won the governorship with 37.6 percent of the general election vote. Nearly two thirds of voters, Democrats and Republicans combined, did not vote for him. He became their governor anyway.
This outcome was partly enabled by the spoiler effect. An Independent candidate entered the general election and received more than 8 percent of the vote. Most of those votes, absent the Independent’s candidacy, would likely have gone to LePage’s primary rival. The Independent split the opposition vote, and LePage won.
Plurality voting does not simply tolerate this outcome. It incentivizes it. Candidates running under plurality rules have no reason to build broad coalitions or appeal to voters outside their partisan base. They need only a plurality, so their strategy is to consolidate their base, not to earn majority support. The rules shape the campaign, and the campaign shapes the governing.
Both parties work actively to prevent potential spoilers from entering races. They frame this as protecting voters from wasted votes. What it actually protects is the duopoly’s lock on competition. In every commercial market, more choice is understood to benefit consumers. The politics industry is the only market where the dominant players argue openly that less competition is better for everyone.
The Rules of the Game: Legislative Machinery
The legislative machinery is less visible than elections machinery but equally consequential. It governs how Congress operates once legislators are in office: who controls the agenda, which bills reach the floor, how committees function, and how legislation gets written. This machinery has been systematically captured by the parties over the last half century.
The Hastert Rule
The Hastert Rule is not a constitutional provision. It is not a statute. It is not even a written rule. It is an informal norm that has become standard practice for Speakers of both parties. It holds that the Speaker will not allow a floor vote on any bill unless a majority of the majority party supports it, regardless of whether a majority of the full House would pass it.
The implications of this rule are severe. A bill with broad bipartisan support, one that would pass if it reached the floor, can be permanently buried by the Speaker if it does not first clear the threshold of majority support within the Speaker’s own party. One person, elected by a small number of primary voters in a single congressional district in a single state, can block legislation that most of the country wants.
The 2013 government shutdown demonstrates the cost. The shutdown lasted 16 days and cost the country $24 billion. Approximately 90 percent of Americans opposed the shutdown. A majority of the full House would likely have voted to end it. The Hastert Rule kept the vote from happening.
The media covered the shutdown extensively. What received almost no coverage was the structural mechanism that enabled it: a made-up rule that gave one person veto power over the democratic process. The rule itself was treated as normal. That normalization is, in many ways, more troubling than the rule.
The Partisan Capture of Congress
The partisan capture of the legislative machinery was not sudden. It unfolded over decades, beginning in the 1970s, with changes that each appeared modest and each drew little attention.
From the end of World War II through the mid-to-late 1970s, congressional committees were the functional heart of the legislative process. They were largely nonpartisan in their operations. Professional staff economists, lawyers, and investigators worked for committees, not for individual members or parties. Bills went to committees to be negotiated and refined by legislators genuinely attempting to serve their constituents and the country. Conference committees, where House and Senate versions of legislation were reconciled, were common and productive.
The shift began when House Democrats, who had held the majority for more than 40 years, became frustrated with conservative committee chairs using their positions to block liberal legislation. Their response was to use the party caucus as an organizing mechanism. Beginning in 1969, Democrats held monthly caucus meetings to set agendas, develop legislative strategies, and coordinate messaging so that members spoke with a unified party voice. What had been a loose organization of independent legislators began functioning more like a party apparatus.
The second step was attacking committee independence. Democrats restructured committee chairs, limiting their control over agendas, and transferred to party leadership the authority to appoint subcommittee heads. Committee chairs who ignored party directives did so at considerable personal risk to their own positions. Loyalty to party leadership became a prerequisite for career advancement.
The third step transferred committee assignments from the Ways and Means Committee to a newly created Steering and Policy Committee chaired by the Speaker and dominated by party leadership. Committee placement was now a party reward, distributed based on loyalty and withheld based on independence.
The fourth step went further: Democrats began bypassing committees entirely, creating partisan task forces staffed by members selected by the Speaker to advance the party’s agenda on high-priority issues. The committee system, the deliberative core of the legislative process, was being circumvented by design.
The fifth and final step was the capture of the Rules Committee. The Rules Committee had traditionally functioned as a neutral referee, making impartial decisions about which bills would reach the floor, in what order, and under what terms of debate. Under the new regime, nothing reached the floor without the Speaker’s approval. The Rules Committee became an instrument of partisan control rather than an independent procedural authority.
When Republicans took control of the House in 1994 for the first time in more than 40 years, there was no dismantling of this partisan machinery. Speaker Gingrich embraced it, expanded it, and amplified it. He placed freshmen loyalists on prestigious committees based on party allegiance rather than seniority. He also cut committee professional staff by one third, eliminating exactly the economists, lawyers, and investigators whose independent expertise had historically provided the substantive backbone of serious legislative work.
None of these individual steps attracted sustained media attention. Each one seemed procedural, technical, or minor in isolation. Viewed together across four decades, they represent the systematic conversion of a deliberative legislative body into a partisan combat zone.
The consequences are measurable. In the 114th Congress, there were eight conference reports. In the 104th Congress, a decade earlier, there were 67. Conference committees, where genuine legislative negotiation happened, have become nearly extinct. Today, when one party controls both chambers, majority leadership meets privately, reaches internal agreement, and presents the outcome to the minority as a fait accompli. The deliberative process exists on paper. In practice, it has been replaced by partisan announcement.
What Healthy Competition Looks Like, and What This Is Not
In a well-functioning commercial market, competitors improve their products and services to attract customers. Customer preference drives innovation. Poor performance drives exit. New entrants challenge incumbents who fail. The rules governing competition are established and enforced by independent regulatory bodies, not by the competitors themselves.
None of this applies to the politics industry.
The politics industry sets its own rules. It enforces those rules when convenient. It modifies them to prevent new entry. It blocks competition from Independents and third parties through ballot access requirements, debate thresholds that require visibility to be achieved before visibility is possible, and legal structures that make it nearly impossible for non-duopoly candidates to mount credible campaigns.
Commercial antitrust law exists precisely because markets left entirely to dominant incumbents tend to serve the incumbents rather than customers. The antitrust laws do not apply to the politics industry. There is no equivalent external enforcement mechanism. The duopoly polices itself, which is to say it does not police itself at all on matters where its interests are at stake.
The result is a market structure that any antitrust economist would recognize as deeply problematic: high concentration, near-impossible entry barriers, supplier dependence on incumbents, buyer capture, and a set of rules written by competitors in their own interest. In a commercial context, this would attract regulatory attention. In politics, it attracts almost none.
Five Consequences of Unhealthy Competition
Gehl and Porter identify five major consequences of the current structure. Each one is measurable. None is inevitable.
1. Absence of Problem Solving
Under the current system, a legislator who solves a problem eliminates a source of partisan energy and fundraising. Keeping problems alive, immigration, health care costs, gun violence, infrastructure decay, serves the parties by sustaining the emotional engagement of their respective bases and the financial engagement of aligned donors and interest groups.
Landmark legislation historically passed with strong bipartisan support. In this century, major legislation passes only along party lines. The Affordable Care Act, Dodd-Frank, and the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act each passed without meaningful cross-party support. The legislative machinery ensures this outcome. Bills that might attract genuine bipartisan support rarely reach the floor.
2. Action Only Under Crisis, Paid for With Debt
When action is unavoidable, when a security crisis demands response, a natural disaster demands relief, a debt ceiling breach looms, Congress acts. But the action is almost never paid for with current funding. It is financed through deficit spending, adding costs to the national debt and deferring consequences to future generations.
Neither party has a structural incentive to pursue fiscal responsibility. Ross Perot in 1992 demonstrated that the issue could attract significant voter support, roughly 19 percent of the popular vote in that election. Since Perot, no candidate has mounted a comparably credible challenge on fiscal grounds, and without that competitive pressure, both parties have abandoned the issue. The national debt grows because there is no electoral cost to letting it grow.
3. A Society That Fragments on Schedule
Competition in the politics industry is not primarily about serving voters better. It is about differentiation and coalition maintenance. The parties benefit from emphasizing differences and stoking conflict between groups. The identity-politics framework, in which fellow citizens on the other side are characterized as enemies rather than fellow Americans with different priorities, is not a regrettable byproduct of intense competition. It is a strategic tool.
Social media amplifies this dynamic but did not create it. The political industrial complex was already structured to produce division. Social media provided a faster and cheaper delivery mechanism.
4. Political Disillusionment at Scale
Public trust in the federal government sits near a 60-year low. In 1958, roughly three in four Americans trusted the government. By 2017, that figure had fallen to approximately one in five. The percentage of Americans identifying as Independent has risen to 41 percent, compared to 30 percent identifying as Democrat and 28 percent identifying as Republican.
More troubling is the generational dimension. Only about one third of Americans born between 1980 and 1996 believe living under democratic governance is essential. Support for authoritarian alternatives is measurably higher in this cohort than in preceding generations. This is not a cultural abstraction. It is a data point about the sustainability of self-governance.
Note: You should never trust your government and the people you “vote” for. Politicians spend millions parading across the country, competing for your vote with recycled promises. The script never changes. Only the words do. New language carries different meaning. Different meaning shifts your understanding without your consent. It happens quietly, incrementally, and by design. The English language has absorbed and discarded hundreds of words across two centuries. Each replacement serves a purpose. That purpose is not yours. Your government operates this way because redefinition is easier than accountability. Change the vocabulary and you change the debate. Change the debate and you control the outcome. You live in a Constitutional Republic. The government answers to you. Start holding it to that standard.
-MK3
5. No Accountability Without Competition
In any commercial market with the level of customer dissatisfaction present in American politics, new competitors would enter. The gap between what customers want and what the market delivers would attract investment and innovation. The duopoly survives not because it delivers what voters want but because the rules it has written make effective new entry nearly impossible.
When the only two competitors in a market are guaranteed survival regardless of performance, there is no accountability mechanism. Dissatisfied voters have two choices: support the incumbent party, support the other party, or not vote. None of these choices creates meaningful pressure for improvement. The duopoly benefits from all three outcomes.
Specific Policy Failures
The structural consequences above manifest in specific, identifiable policy failures.
Immigration
Immigration policy has been on the edge of legislative resolution multiple times. It has failed not because the policy problems are insoluble but because partisan incentives favor sustained conflict over resolved problems. The McCain-Kennedy immigration bill is a specific documented example. Then-junior Senator Obama helped derail it, not because the policy was bad but because providing a policy victory to the likely opposing presidential candidate was electorally unacceptable. The public interest was secondary to the competitive calculus.
Economic Competitiveness
Gehl and Porter define national competitiveness precisely: a nation is competitive when businesses operating within it can compete effectively in global markets while simultaneously lifting the wages and living conditions of average citizens. By this definition, the United States currently meets only half the standard. Large and mid-size companies are globally competitive. Working and middle-class Americans are not prospering comparably.
Since the beginning of the century, productivity growth has declined, business formation rates have slowed, and the likelihood that American children will earn more than their parents has fallen from a near-certainty to roughly a coin flip. Economic vitality concentrates in a handful of coastal urban clusters. Outside those clusters, economic decline is widespread and deepening.
The diagnosis of required policy action is not contested. Infrastructure investment, regulatory streamlining, trading system reform, and fiscal stabilization attract broad consensus across ideological lines. The problem is not that people disagree about what needs to be done. The problem is that the political machinery cannot execute on consensus because doing so does not serve the interests of the parties.
Quality of Life Decline
The statistical record on quality of life is, to use the authors’ framing, chilling. The United States ranks 26th overall in social progress among OECD countries. It ranks near the bottom of 36 OECD members on education outcomes, environmental performance, health, personal safety, and access to justice. Maternal mortality places the United States 35th out of 36 OECD countries. Child mortality places it 33rd.
On access to safe drinking water, the United States ranks 31st. On homicide rate, it ranks 35th out of 36 OECD members. Secondary school enrollment places it 22nd within the OECD, comparable to Serbia on a global basis. Overall health outcomes are comparable to Jordan or Panama.
These are not abstract statistics. They represent the lived conditions of American citizens in the wealthiest country in the world. The gap between available national resources and actual population welfare is not explained by lack of knowledge about what to do. It is explained by a political system structurally incapable of acting on what it knows.
The political industrial complex, meanwhile, continues to grow. Political advertising revenues increase each cycle. Lobbying revenues increase each cycle. The industry that is supposed to solve these problems is thriving precisely because the problems persist.
We Have Been Here Before
This is not the first time the American political system has been captured by concentrated private interests operating through structural manipulation of democratic processes.
The Gilded Age of the late 19th and early 20th centuries featured comparable dysfunction. Political machines controlled by industrial trusts and their allied politicians dominated the system in ways that served private interests at the expense of the public. The parallels to the current moment are specific and documented.
The Progressives of that era, who bear no ideological relationship to political movements currently using that label, responded with a specific set of structural reforms. Ballot reform changed how votes were cast and counted. Direct primaries were introduced in many states. Several states adopted direct democracy mechanisms including ballot initiatives and referenda. The 17th Amendment established direct election of U.S. senators, removing them from appointment by state legislatures that were often controlled by industrial interests. Legislative machinery was changed to strip the Speaker, then the powerful Joseph Cannon, of unilateral control over the Rules Committee. The seniority system decentralized committee control and created a measure of independence from party leadership. Campaign finance regulation was introduced.
These reforms worked. For several decades, they produced a political system capable of governing. The country emerged from World War I as a serious global power. It mobilized unprecedented government capacity during the Great Depression. It won World War II. It built the postwar infrastructure, contributed to the reconstruction of Europe and Japan, and created the conditions for the most broadly shared prosperity in American history.
Then, slowly, the duopoly rebuilt its machinery. The structural protections the Progressives had installed eroded. The partisan capture of the legislative machinery that began in the 1970s was the most recent phase of a long reversion to Gilded Age dynamics.
Today there is no equivalent of the muckraking journalism that helped expose Gilded Age corruption to public view. There is no Theodore Roosevelt figure with the political standing and institutional base to drive systemic reform. What there is, potentially, is a motivated and informed citizenry and a credible reform blueprint. The Politics Industry is an attempt to provide that blueprint.
The Solution: Final Five Voting
The structural reform Gehl and Porter propose is called Final Five Voting. It has two components that must be adopted together to function as intended. Each component alone is insufficient. Combined, they would change the fundamental incentives of electoral competition.
Top-Five Nonpartisan Primaries
Under the current system, voters participate in either a Democratic primary or a Republican primary. Each party controls its own process, determines who appears on its ballot, and limits participation to registered party members in many states.
Top-five nonpartisan primaries replace this system with a single unified primary in which every candidate, regardless of party affiliation or independent status, appears on the same ballot. Every registered voter participates in the same primary. There are no separate party processes and no gatekeepers determining who qualifies for party support. All candidates receive equal access to the primary ballot.
The top five finishers in this unified primary advance to the general election. Those five could be all members of one party, a mix of parties, or some combination of party members and Independents. The point is that the selection is made by the full electorate, not by partisan primary voters representing a fraction of registered voters.
California and Washington have implemented versions of this system using a top-two format. The results in California are measurable. The number of competitive races doubled immediately following the change. Landslide victories declined. Incumbents began losing general elections at higher rates. The California state legislature’s approval rating went from 10 percent in 2010 to 50 percent in 2016.
The response from party leaders was revealing. House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, a California Republican, said “I hate the top-two.” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, a California Democrat, said the top-two system “is not a reform. It is terrible.” The two leaders of the duopoly agreed on almost nothing else during this period. Their shared hostility to an electoral reform that voters benefited from is precisely the data point that tells you the reform was working.
Gehl and Porter argue that top-two does not go far enough. Top-five is the target for three reasons. First, it makes it unlikely that any single party will capture all five general election slots, ensuring genuine competition in the final election. Second, five candidates give more voters someone they genuinely support in the general election rather than forcing a choice between the lesser of two perceived evils. Third, more candidates mean more competition for votes and ideas, which means more accountability to citizens rather than to party structures.
Ranked-Choice Voting in General Elections
The second component replaces plurality voting in the general election with ranked-choice voting. The mechanism is straightforward. Voters receive a ballot listing all five general election candidates. They rank them in order of preference: first choice, second choice, third choice, and so on. They are not required to rank all five, but they may.
After polls close, first-choice votes are counted. If any candidate receives more than 50 percent of first-choice votes, that candidate wins. If no candidate clears 50 percent, the candidate with the fewest first-choice votes is eliminated. Voters who selected the eliminated candidate as their first choice have their ballots transferred to their second choices. This process continues until one candidate crosses the 50 percent threshold.
The result is a winner who has majority support from the full electorate. More specifically, a winner who was acceptable to, or preferred by, a majority of voters rather than one who simply had more passionate support from a plurality of partisan voters.
The strategic implications for candidates are significant. Under plurality rules, a candidate who attacks opponents risks alienating only their core supporters, who may stay home but are unlikely to defect. Under ranked-choice rules, a candidate who attacks opponents may lose second-place votes from supporters of those opponents, and those second-place votes may determine the outcome. The optimal campaign strategy shifts from base mobilization to coalition building. Candidates who want to win need to be acceptable to voters who prefer someone else first.
Both major-party leaders historically opposed this system. Both John McCain and Barack Obama, before they became presidential rivals, publicly supported ranked-choice voting. McCain recorded a robocall in 2002 urging voters to support a ballot measure adopting ranked-choice voting. Obama, then an Illinois state senator, sponsored legislation in 2002 to establish ranked-choice voting in state and congressional primaries. Neither proposal passed, but their support for the idea from across the partisan divide suggests that the opposition now is structural and self-interested rather than principled.
Maine became the first state to adopt ranked-choice voting in 2018. Several municipalities have used it to elect city officials, with consistent reports that candidates focused on substantive issues rather than personal attacks on opponents. The incentive structure the system creates is producing the behavior that incentive structure should produce.
Combined, top-five nonpartisan primaries and ranked-choice general elections would break the stranglehold that partisan primary voters currently hold over the selection of elected officials. They would make it possible for candidates with broad public appeal to compete and win rather than requiring candidates to clear partisan litmus tests that most voters would fail.
Reengineering the Legislative Machinery
The authors are more cautious about prescribing specific legislative reforms, partly because they believe that changing the electoral machinery will change the composition of the legislature, and a differently composed legislature will have different incentives when it comes to legislative rules.
Nevertheless, they offer one foundational principle: zero-based redesign.
In commercial organizations, zero-based budgeting requires that all expenses be justified according to anticipated value rather than historical precedent. Nothing is preserved simply because it has always been done. Every element must earn its place.
Applied to legislative machinery, this means setting aside the accumulated rules of the House and Senate, the Rules Committee procedures, the informal norms and customs that physically separate the parties in dining rooms, cloakrooms, and chamber seating arrangements. All of it is placed to one side. Then the question is asked: if you were designing a legislative body to solve the problems of the American people with maximum effectiveness and accountability, what rules would you create?
Some existing rules would be retained. Many would not. The point is that nothing survives simply because it is established. Everything must justify itself against the standard of producing effective democratic governance.
This approach will not work if the electoral machinery is unchanged. A legislature full of legislators elected through the current hyper-partisan machinery will not voluntarily redesign the rules that protect them. The sequence matters: electoral reform first, legislative reform second.
The Civic Responsibility This Creates
The founding structure of this Constitutional Republic rested on a premise that power belongs to citizens, not institutions, and that institutions exercise only the authority citizens delegate to them. That premise has not changed. What has changed is the degree to which institutional structures have been manipulated to redirect power from citizens to the operators of the political industrial complex.
The solutions Gehl and Porter propose require no constitutional amendments. They can be implemented state by state. Several states are already moving toward components of the system. The barriers to implementation are political, not legal or financial. The duopoly opposes these reforms because the reforms threaten the duopoly’s control. That opposition is the most honest argument available in favor of the reforms.
What is required is a citizenry that understands the structural nature of the problem clearly enough to support structural solutions rather than channeling frustration into partisan conflict, which is exactly what the duopoly wants and what the current system is designed to produce.
The book ends with optimism. Not optimism rooted in sentiment or hope, but optimism rooted in historical evidence that structural reform of this kind has worked before, in structural solutions that are specific and achievable, and in the observation that no constitutional revision is required to implement them.
The system is not broken. It works precisely as designed, in the interests of the designers. The task is to redesign it in the interests of citizens.
That task is achievable. The blueprint exists. The question is whether enough people understand the problem clearly enough to pursue the solution rather than the conflict the current structure keeps manufacturing.
Margin of the Law publishes constitutional analysis, civic research, and legal education for people who want to understand the system they actually live in. Read the Full Constitutional Analysis Library at marginofthelaw.com.
© 2026 – MK3 Law Group
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