The Chuck ToddCast
Full Episode - Trump’s “Ends Justify The Means” Presidency + What’s Broken In Congress & How To Fix It
02 Mar 2026
Chapter 1: What is the significance of Trump's 'Ends Justify The Means' presidency?
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Chapter 2: How does Trump's foreign policy impact his domestic credibility?
Well, hello there. Happy Monday. Happy March. We made it to March. Not everybody can say that. So I, you know, it's one day at a time, right? So happy March. We are here. Here at the Toddcast, I'm always in this month looking around for my Ides. We're always looking for the Ides. I'm half teasing. Yeah. Well, I guess it was an impactful weekend.
Obviously, I already checked in with an initial response on Iran and what's happening. I've got a bit more to say and try to put it in context. Look, this is a monologue that is less about my opinion on what we did, more about my analysis on where I think this is headed. What is the unintended consequences? Where are they hearing?
And basically, I want to leave you with a lot of questions to think about.
Chapter 3: What are the proposed reforms to Congress discussed by Rep. Sean Casten?
Because let's be honest, we don't have definitive answers on what the fallout from this is going to be. I mean, one of the things I think I've learned in my 53 years on this earth and certainly my 30 plus years professionally is that when it comes to things like kinetic action, whether it's a piece of a war, airstrikes, whatever you want to talk about these things.
The initial response and where eventually this lands politically often change and change in ways that you don't expect. So the point is, is that, you know, we're going down a road that may seem familiar to those of us, to those of you that were around during Iraq and Afghanistan. But just because it looks familiar doesn't mean. we're going to be traveling the exact same road politically.
So I do want to get into that. I'll be honest, there were a couple other stories I was going to get deeper into that we're not going to get into specifically, I think.
you know, and I still think this is something I want to tackle a little bit later, but there's something about the fact that Anthropic and Netflix, we had our first two major companies say no to the president, say no to coercion efforts by the government. Clearly, Netflix walked away deciding that the coercion, that the
that the government was using, whether it was forcing them to fire board members or whatever it was, it was a bridge too far. Ditto with Anthropic, whatever deal it is. And I think our friends over at OpenAI are probably having a bit of a staffer revolt over the decision by them to essentially take the same contract that Anthropic couldn't sign and then claiming that they have the same
red lines that Anthropic did. So the point being is, I think it's a significant step that you've seen some companies for the first time publicly traded to say no to the government and government coercion. We have seen pretty much every other major publicly traded company essentially cave in. We are not seeing that there. But that is not
My focus for this episode, by the way, let me give you a quick rundown. All of the Iran fallout is coming up here in a minute. My interview is with Democratic Congressman Sean Caston, and I'll tell you why I booked him. I booked him a couple of weeks ago because he's the first member of Congress I've seen in some time who took a public hearing and decided not to be a performative jackass.
We know this, that this is what these members of Congress do. They just want to perform to just make an algorithm feel good. He actually asked some substantive questions that were very difficult for the Treasury Secretary to answer, and the Treasury Secretary had no answers.
And it was an example of how a member of Congress should be doing their job versus how we see so many of these members of Congress now who have no clue of what the job is, let alone do they have any clue about the actual Constitution, since none of them apparently realize that Congress is Article I. So that's the guess. My time machine today, let's just say it couldn't be more timely.
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Chapter 4: How do structural issues in Congress affect its functionality?
So we're talking about Iran, but this isn't just about Iran. I wanna talk about credibility, executive power, and something bigger than a single strike. Because if you zoom out from the battlefield details, from the political spin, from all the media framing of this, whether on cable news or other legacy media, or even here in the independent space, there's a pattern.
And the pattern can be summed up in one phrase. The ends justify the means. In many ways, this is the mantra of the Trump presidency, of the Trump era. Everything Donald Trump seems to do involves an outcome first and not caring about the process. And Iran may be the clearest test yet for that premise. So let's start with the basics. According to the administration,
And look, I'm gonna put this up here, up top. This administration's credibility with telling honest information to the public is quite low. They do not always tell the truth. We know it. They lie a lot. They lie regularly. I think the Pentagon lies less than other aspects of the administration. We know if you see a White House spokesperson speaking, that is the lowest level of credibility.
I don't mean to rag on this, but it's really problematic when you're dealing with war and peace. OK, but. All we have is the administration on this. And in this case, I think military and intelligence sources are less likely to lie to reporters and lie to us than someone. I'm not saying that they're not capable of it. I'm not naive.
But the ones without political skin in the game are usually the ones that lie the least. So it is important. So here's what we think we know. The U.S. parts of the strikes targeted three categories of assets, the nuclear enrichment facilities, related infrastructure, more missile and weapons production sites, select Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, command and control nodes.
And then, of course, Israel, we know, struck many of the regime and may have been the ones that actually took out the Ayatollah. Now, what was the stated objective? This has been a moving target to degrade around nuclear breakout capability, reestablish deterrence and prevent what officials describe as a narrowing window before we cross the threshold.
That was that was the rationale for those July strikes. Right. And so we don't know what the real rationale is. In fact, it changed a bit right at the State of the Union. We got a rationale. First, we completely obliterated their nuclear program. Then, of course, they've said we're fearing them trying to steal reestablishment. And they had some red lines in negotiations.
Second, we added Marco Rubio did this added ballistic fear of ballistic missiles reaching the United States. Now, the intelligence assessment says that was probably 10 years away from being true. It certainly was true that Iran could ballistic missiles could hit Europe. So maybe we do care about the security of Europe at the moment.
But the bottom line is, in this decision to go, there was really no smoking gun, right? There was no drone strike on U.S. soil. There was no Pearl Harbor moment. There was no dramatic inciting incident laid before the American people. Instead, in some ways, officials described it as a strategic clock that ran out. And this matters.
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Chapter 5: What reforms could Congress implement to regain authority?
And they're sitting there and Tom Carper gets this big frown on his face and all of us House members start cheering. There's sort of an acknowledgment that that structure – and I say this on the judges because the Senate always is going to skew conservative – and again, in the lowercase c sense because it always overly represents –
rural areas, people closer to the land, or sort of traditional, all that sort of stuff. And maybe that made sense in 1789, but it means that the swing vote in the Senate is always very far to the right of the median American voter.
Look, the national senators, because I have a founding father historian, and she runs the George Washington Library right now at Mount Vernon. And her fix for the Senate is to essentially carve out... You know, you basically, you take the top six, get five senators. The top six most populous state gets five senators. The next, say, six get four senators.
The next five or six get three, and then everybody else gets two. I don't know if that passes Article 5 muster.
Only it does, because it says that you can't amend the Constitution in any way that would change the proportional representation in the Senate.
But in some ways, what you're describing of 12 national senators is potentially one thing. Let me get something that I'm obsessed with, because I think it solves a couple of problems without touching the Constitution. And that is uncapping the House. I've got a bill to do that, too. It is. We are, you know, when we shut it down in 1930,
When they locked in at 435, we were at about one per 350,000 each district. We're now one per 800. And as I like to remind people, 800,000 is the population of the 15th largest city in America. I don't think the founders meant for 435 congressional districts to be all the size population-wise of one of the 15 largest cities in America.
So if you go back to what it was in 1930, because we were doing it every decade, expanding the House with the size of the population, I think you might need a constitutional amendment to put a numerator in there and say that no congressional district can be bigger than 0.03% of the... Right now, that would make it 0.03% of the population if we went to one per, say, 350, one per 400, right around there.
Right.
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Chapter 6: How does Sean Casten envision changes to the Senate?
We'd have about 850, 870 members of Congress. But what it really does is it allows the electoral college to basically become a level playing field. Wyoming goes from being six times more advantage on a presidential vote over a Californian. They still have an advantage, but it's two and a half.
So it's what I would argue it keeps in what the founders always wanted, which is at the small stage should get a little more influence, but not a lot more influence, right? Two and a half to one feels better than six to one. And I think it would make gerrymandering just less necessary. You're going to have it in some places, but it's less and in some ways harder to do.
And you probably diversify Congress just by sheer numbers in ways, and you'll get different walks of life. And it will be the people's house again. But try making the case that the problem in Washington is not enough politicians.
Well, number one, it's worth reminding people that for all the people who work in Washington, only 537 of them won an election. If you're concerned about size of government, the elected folks are not the problem. So we've got legislation to do that. The way we did ours is say we will –
Um, on every going forward census, you expand the members of the, you expand the number of members in the house rather than expanding the number of people who represent and you lock a district at, at 500,000.
We picked 500,000 for sort of arbitrary reasons, but there's been a number of political scientists who look at this cube root law that if you look at all the parliamentary democracies of the world, you put population on one axis, how many members. It kind of follows a cube root and it's about 500. So at least you say, well, we know this works because other governments kind of run on this formula.
I'll just tell you my math. What I went to, I went to the 50th largest city in America, which happens to be Arlington, Texas. They have a population of 400,000. Fair enough. I thought, you know what? That's pretty, they are one community of interest, right? A suburban, you know, small city from Dallas is a community of interest. And I thought, so it felt fair, but I take your point at 500.
I mean, I think at this point, four to 500 isn't a huge distinction.
There are people smarter than me who have argued that you increase the odds, the chance for gerrymandering shenanigans here.
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Chapter 7: What are the implications of uncapping the House of Representatives?
You're going to skew more votes that way. We added a provision that said if any state has more than two districts allocated, they can, at their choice, go to multi-member districts with ranked choice voting because there's some really interesting analysis that if you –
If you have a multi-member district, it's really hard to gerrymander so that the top two are of the same race and same party all the time. You can do that for the top one, but it's hard to do it for the top two.
And so if you get a situation where, you know, me and whoever comes in second are representing the same communities, you should, in theory, get rid of some of the polarization in Washington. But put it that way. And we're open to other ideas, but that's the way that we've structured it.
Look, you're one of the few members that engages on this conversation. There aren't many members that are thinking about this. You know, is it a caucus of 20, 30? Who's the group that you're working with that are animated on this?
So I would say there have always been a number of members. You know, Don Beyer from Virginia is very thoughtful on this. Earl Blumenauer was great, still is, but not a member of Congress anymore. Jamie Raskin's very thoughtful. I think the challenge that all of us get in, we're elected every two years. We got to stay focused on things that the public cares about.
And I think the number of members who think about this stuff and care about it is much higher than the number of members who are willing to say, I'm going to prioritize this over all the things that the voters are telling me to prioritize at any given time. And so- I was I did a thing about this with some various other podcasters recently.
And when everybody said, what's the most important thing we can do to drive this forward is just make noise about it. You know, the more that voters care, the more that those of us in elected office have to do something about it.
Now, I've made it a huge part of any time I do a speaking gig. I talk about this all the time, like. There are things that we can do, and you don't even have to pass a constitutional amendment. And this to me is one of the biggest small-D democracy reforms you can make without a constitutional amendment. Because then there's a bunch of after-on effects that are interesting.
And I would also say that whether it's 500,000 or 400,000 – The barriers are more construction. Like we probably need another office. We could do that. There's space on the mall.
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Chapter 8: How does the Texas Declaration of Independence relate to current politics?
And this current era, it began Basically, it began with the rise of Gingrich. And the rise of Gingrich happened because of a partisan decision by Democrats back in 86 in an Indiana congressional district. It's known as the Bloody Eighth. It's got sort of this... There's a sort of mythical status to it. But it gave rise to Newt. And then Newt, when he became the leader...
basically got rid of he didn't want any more. He wanted all his members to be in the you know, he stopped people working Mondays and Fridays and everything became about, you know, only be in Washington Tuesday through Thursday and be in the district. And that prioritized not bringing your family. And then, you know, that had all sorts of and frankly, both parties now have accepted that schedule.
Mm hmm.
And so, yeah, I'd love to see you guys two months here, one month, not here, two months here, one month, you know, something like that.
What I'm curious, Chuck, as you think through that, I've only served obviously in the post Gingrich era. There are members who stay in D.C. through the weekends and there are those of us who go home. Broadly speaking, you don't stay in D.C. over the weekend if if you're not in a really safe seat.
And so I would worry a little bit about that because since so much of this job is relationships, wouldn't that concentrate power in sort of the senior safest seat members who could stick around? Because you've got to go back to your district if you don't know whether you're going to win your next election.
Well, it could. But if you're changing the way Congress works. Right. And it's sort of everybody has to work two months on. Right. And it's sort of then that's that's evening out a little bit. Look, I think the fact that, you know, you could the other idea that sits out there is.
If you're going to do term limits for House members, and I'm not a huge fan of term limits, I don't think they've worked in the state legislative level. I think they've only made lobbyists more powerful. They've made governors more powerful. They've made state legislatures less powerful. Just generally, I mean, I could do in a broad stroke.
But the best idea I've heard, if you do institute term limits, which would need a constitutional amendment, is to make the House four-year term.
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