Zach Beecham

What I do want to extract from Brazil is this sort of general point about incentives, that we can change systems to give legislators more reason to act independently, better reasons to be jealous of their own power.

And I think there's a few of them that are compatible with the American system that can be done easily.

Think about partisan primaries.

That's not a thing that other countries do, right?

It's a really uniquely American system.

And the end result of these primaries that everybody has to go through is that you are subject to the most ideologically disciplined faction of your party.

And that's really not a great incentive.

And so what we can do when we're thinking about reforms, one of them, is to get rid of congressional primary elections.

Huh.

Another one that I really like, and I think this one's obvious and doesn't really need any explanation, is the national ban on partisan gerrymandering.

That could happen anytime Congress wanted it to happen.

There are proposals literally in Congress right now that are going nowhere because Republicans are stonewalling them.

But here's a sort of more direct lesson from Brazil, and you'll see how it relates in a second.

But it's to change the way executive orders work.

So in the U.S., the president issues executive orders and they just –

take effect and maybe there's some legal fighting about it, but that's it, right?

There's no other input.

In Brazil, their sort of rough equivalent of an executive order requires congressional input.

It expires actually without full approval after a certain period of time from Congress.

So we could do a version of that in the US.