IVN is joined by Nate Allen, founder and Executive Director of Utah Approves, to discuss Approval Voting and his perspective on changing the incentives of our elections.
Podcast: Seeking approval in Utah
Site Navigation
Search
Latest Stories
Join a growing community committed to civic renewal.
Subscribe to The Fulcrum and be part of the conversation.
Top Stories
Read More
Painting from 1856 by Junius Brutus Stearns of George Washington at the Constitutional Convention of 1787.
The Enduring Illusion of Article the first
Aug 04, 2026
This is the second of a three-part series on the First Amendment proposed by Congress in 1789—often called “Article the first”—which was never ratified. Part 1 explained how a single inverted word in the text created a mathematical absurdity that has been misread for 237 years. This second part explores the untold history of how that defect affected the original ratification process in state legislatures.
Part 2 — The Untold History
An amendment proposed for the Bill of Rights that twice came within a single state of ratification should not simply disappear from a nation’s memory, but Article the first did. To understand why, we have to follow its inverted word from Part 1 out of the enrolled parchment and into the state legislatures that had to reckon with the resulting formulaic defect. That word — “more” where the House had written “less,” a change inexplicably introduced by the conference committee in the frenzied final days of the first session, in September 1789 — had turned an intended floor beneath the House’s size into a second ceiling. That reversal was no considered choice. Read literally, the new clause set a ceiling below its own floor — an impossible formula, as Part 1 showed — and the founders, having already approved a coherent version in both chambers, would not knowingly have put such an absurdity in its place.
This was an unintended defect, not a decision. And “less” was the word the era expected — the coherent version was the one the press had previously reported. It was up to the states’ legislators to detect the flaw and then contend with it.
The first Article came remarkably close to ratification. By the end of 1791, ten states had ratified it — one short of the eleven then required for three-fourths of the fourteen states in the union. The following June, Kentucky became the eleventh state to ratify — but its admission as the fifteenth state that same month raised the threshold to twelve, and the amendment fell one short once more. Then the ratifications stopped. The last ten proposals became the Bill of Rights; the first of the twelve — the one about the size of the people’s House — was left behind, and faded almost entirely from public memory.
The most remarkable reason it stalled is buried in its arithmetic. The defective clause capped the House at one representative for every fifty thousand people — which, for any national population between roughly eight and ten million, works out to fewer than 200 seats. Yet the same clause forbade any House smaller than 200. For that entire range of populations the nation was about to reach, the amendment set a maximum House size below its own required minimum. A ceiling beneath a floor is not a difficult formula; it is an unsolvable one. The defect did not merely make the amendment awkward to apply; it would have made implementation impossible three decades hence.
That contradiction did not go unnoticed at the time. The surviving legislative records are fragmentary, but our reconstruction of the state deliberations has turned up several statehouses where legislators recognized the formula was defective and could not make it work — the fullest surviving record among them from Pennsylvania.
When its lower house took up the first Article for a second time, in September 1791, the proposal found a formidable champion in Albert Gallatin — a young legislator later regarded as one of the sharpest analytical minds of his generation, and eventually the longest-serving Treasury secretary in the nation’s history. Gallatin argued for the amendment with a set of figures intended to demonstrate its viability. But his figures quietly smoothed over the very flaw at issue, assuming the clause behaved sensibly precisely where, read literally, it did not.
It fell to a far less celebrated colleague, Richard Wells, to read the words exactly as written. Wells took Benjamin Franklin’s well-known model of American population doubling and carried it forward: By about 1820, he reckoned, the country would hold some nine million people — a figure that landed squarely inside the impossible range. On that basis, he declared that the proposal “bore a contradiction and an absurdity in the very face of it.” He was right, and the arithmetic bore him out on schedule: The 1820 census counted 8,969,878. Had the defective amendment been the law, no valid apportionment of the House could have been derived from that census.
Stranger still, the illusion was not a modern phenomenon. It was already at work at the very moment of the amendment’s creation — the same quiet correction that the National Archives and today’s AI models would perform two centuries later was operating on the amendment’s own contemporaries. The mind restored “more” to “less” in 1791 exactly as it does in 2026. Wells, who had labored through the arithmetic, was the rare reader to break the spell.
This history corrects a reflex that has since hardened into conventional wisdom — the assumption that the states, in declining the first Article, were rejecting the very idea of a much larger House. The record shows nearly the reverse. Many of the state ratifying conventions had demanded a House guaranteed to grow with the population; it was among the assurances they had wanted in exchange for the Constitution itself. What they later refused was not a larger House, but a text that failed to deliver one — a proposal whose only binding promise was a feeble floor of 200 representatives, and whose formula was mathematically broken. The states were not rejecting a bigger House. They were rejecting a broken promise of one.
What the founders actually intended is not in doubt. The surest proof that perpetual growth was widely embraced is the vote it took to advance it: Proposing a constitutional amendment requires the concurrence of two-thirds of each chamber, and the House and the Senate each gave that supermajority to its own version of the first Article — both versions coherently worded to guarantee a House that expands proportionately with the population in perpetuity. The House’s version set a floor of one representative for every fifty thousand people. The expectation behind that design was explicit. Federalist 55 anticipated that the House would roughly double each generation, reaching four hundred members by the 1840s and, following the same “computed rate of increase,” further out, “six or seven thousand” eventually. And for half a century the government behaved accordingly: From 1790 through 1830, Congress sized the House as the intended, floor-bearing version prescribed — treating the coherent proposal, in practice, as though it were the law the defective text had failed to become.
But then the founding generation passed from the scene, and their design went with them. By the founders’ own arithmetic, the 1840 census should have produced a House of at least four hundred. Instead, Congress apportioned 223 seats — a decrease of seventeen from the previous decade. The chamber would not exceed four hundred for another seventy years, reaching 435 in 1913; in 1929, Congress froze it there, and there it has remained.
The point worth holding onto is this: A House that grows with the people was never a fringe proposition or a modern reform-movement invention. It was the founders’ documented design — drafted twice, in both chambers, and honored in practice for the republic’s first five apportionments — abandoned not by the people or the states, but by later Congresses with their own reasons for keeping the chamber small. Recognizing that the growing House was the original plan, and not a radical departure from it, is the first step toward reclaiming it.
Which leaves the question that the final part will answer. If the founders wanted a House that grows with the nation, and the one amendment written to guarantee it is a dead end — defective beyond rescue even if it were somehow revived — then what, today, can actually enlarge the House? The answer, as explained in Part 3 of this series, requires no constitutional amendment at all.
Second of three parts, condensed from a fuller treatment, “The Enduring Textual Illusion of “Article the First,”” at Thirty-Thousand.org.
Keep ReadingShow less
Recommended
Happy 230th birthday, Bill of Rights
leezsnow/Getty Images
The Enduring Illusion of Article the first
Aug 03, 2026
This is the first of three parts exploring “Article the First,” the forgotten proposal in the original Bill of Rights. For 237 years, a single, inverted word has created a “semantic illusion,” leading historians and policymakers to misread the founders' intended guarantee of a growing House as a ceiling. This series uncovers the error, tracks its consequences, and explores why reclaiming the founders’ original vision is the path to meaningful representation reform.
Part 1 — The Inverted Word
Rep. Darrell Issa recently introduced a resolution to sunset, by the end of 2026, the only proposal in the original Bill of Rights that was never ratified. He fears that its ratification would swell the House of Representatives to thousands of members. He is right that the amendment is about the size of the House — but, like nearly everyone for 237 years, completely wrong about what it says.
We are taught that the Bill of Rights opens with the First Amendment with its protection of speech and worship. In fact, when Congress sent the Bill of Rights to the states in 1789, it consisted of twelve proposed amendments, and the one we now call the “First Amendment” was actually listed third. The true first — labeled simply Article the first — was never ratified. It wasn’t about liberty or religion at all; it was about arithmetic: How many citizens each member of the House should represent. It was placed first, ahead of speech and worship, because the founders treated the size and closeness of the people’s House as the most basic structural guarantee of all.
Hidden in that amendment is a single word, altered during the waning days of the hectic first session, that turns its whole purpose on its head, and which almost no one notices. And significantly, that unnoticed alteration is the very thing that doomed the amendment’s ratification.
As the House wrote it, the amendment was a guarantee of small districts, and it worked by completing a design the Constitution had left half-finished. The Constitution already set the ceiling: no more than one representative for every thirty thousand. The first Article was intended to supply the matching floor: No fewer than one representative for every fifty thousand, so that a district could never grow too large. Together, the two would have ensured that the House grew with the nation, after each census, so that no representative would ever speak for too many people.
But the enrolled version sent to the states reads “nor more than one Representative for every fifty thousand persons.” When less became more, the floor became a ceiling — a single, inexplicable inversion converted the guarantee of a growing House into a ceiling no one had sought. This left two ceilings, thereby defaulting the minimum House size to what was intended to be a transitional minimum of 200. And for a range of the populations the nation was about to reach, the enrolled text would have imposed a formula so self-contradictory that no apportionment solution would have been mathematically possible — which is why we call it the “defective” version. Yet nearly everyone misreads that defective ceiling as a floor — the very floor the founders intended, the one that would have forced the House to keep growing.
Read literally, the defective clause would let Congress seat anywhere from 200 representatives to roughly 6,600 at today’s population — while requiring nothing beyond the 200. Yet for two centuries, readers have seen its opposite: a floor compelling the House to grow. And not careless readers — the careful ones.
When the National Archives marked the Bill of Rights anniversary in a 2010 press release, it declared that had this amendment passed, there would be “far more than 435 members of Congress — nearly 6,000” — reading the bill’s ceiling as a floor, despite the defective text being reprinted directly above its own words. In 2021, four distinguished scholars, under the imprimatur of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, made the case for a larger House and cited the amendment as a formula for steady expansion — quoting its “nor more than” language accurately in a footnote while interpreting it as though it read “nor less than.” The constitutional historian they leaned on had read it the same way. So does Rep. Issa’s office today.
What makes the persistence striking is that the correction has never been hidden. Thirty-Thousand.org has been pointing to the inverted word for more than two decades, in pages indexed by every major search engine; the Archives’ statement, the Academy’s report, and Issa’s resolution all came afterward. The illusion survives the correction sitting one click away. It is now so woven into the written record that today’s leading AI models, trained on that record, reproduce the error on request — until the arithmetic is spelled out for them.
This isn’t a failure of intelligence; it’s a quirk of how we read. The amendment builds a drumbeat of floors — “not less than one hundred… nor less than one for every forty thousand… not less than two hundred” — training the eye to expect one more. The final clause arrives in the same cadence, the next ratio in the sequence, with a single four-letter word swapped for another. By the time you reach it, expectation has taken the wheel, and the mind quietly restores “more” to “less.” Psychologists have a name for this — the semantic illusion — but the plain fact is that the sentence reads just as we expect it to, so we never see the word that is actually there.
Why should a 237-year-old wording error matter now? Because the proposal is being read to mean the opposite of what it plainly says — a ceiling mistaken for a floor — and almost no one realizes it. That misreading has hardened into a damaging piece of conventional wisdom: Since the states declined to ratify Article the first, and everyone assumes it mandated a vastly larger House, the larger House itself must be the thing they rejected. It wasn’t. What the states declined was its broken formulation — and mistaking the one for the other has quietly turned an inexplicable defect into an argument against enlarging the House. Yet that long overdue reform is more within reach than two centuries of neglect would suggest.
Investigating the first Article’s defect reveals a real mystery. The amendment twice came within a single state of ratification — and then was abandoned, fading from American memory for two centuries. An amendment that came that close, twice, doesn’t simply vanish. This one did. In Part 2, we’ll follow that defective clause into the state legislatures that had to reckon with it: the hidden arithmetic that made the amendment impossible to implement, the debate in which a little-known state legislator caught what one of the era’s finest minds had missed, and why a reform the country actually wanted was allowed to fail.
First of three parts, condensed from a fuller treatment, “The Enduring Textual Illusion of ‘Article the First,’” at Thirty-Thousand.org.
Keep ReadingShow less
Children watch a July Fourth Parade along the Walkway of Heroes and Independence Avenue on July 04, 2026 in Tappan, New York.
(Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)
The Great American Grumpfest
Aug 02, 2026
Our nation’s 250th birthday party didn’t feel especially patriotic and wasn’t as much fun as the 200th anniversary was.
President Trump, who did his best to co-opt our holiday for his personal aggrandizement, was a major reason. The party he threw in Washington, D.C., was crankier than uplifting, and less about celebrating our shared past and a promising future than about reminding us how far we have strayed from our founders’ plan to create a republic that future Americans would keep in good working order.
Credit Trump this much. He has a singular gift for picking at scabs that other politicians would rather ignore and pushing us into reckonings we don’t need.
The thing is, Americans have seen all this before. Sometimes the makeover we were encouraged to undertake was more conservative, sometimes more liberal. Whatever direction we were pushing, however, the reckoning we had in mind this time had to be more forthright and the conclusion more definitive than it was the last time.
Our current discontents, the ones behind the reckoning President Trump has been trying to inspire, are not trivial. Included among them are immigration, birthright citizenship, exploding healthcare costs, election rigging, a gag-inducing national debt, how we educate our children, too many genders, racial differences we can’t move past, a lopsided economy that favors more well-off Americans, and historic levels of political corruption and graft. Add to these the several foreign adventures he has pushed us into or is anxious to undertake, and you have the makings of a national headache the likes of which we haven’t had in half a century.
All the elbow-throwing and overheated rhetoric we’re using today have begun to look almost normal in all the ways that bickering neighbors and feuding family members appear normal. But they have also made us look mean-spirited and have portrayed our differences as irreconcilable. To ourselves, of course, but also to many people outside the United States who might be forgiven for turning their heads and not looking at the national car wreck we Americans show no interest in avoiding.
The good news, as I suggested above, is that Americans have had a great deal of practice dealing with challenges and national car wrecks like these.
This essay begins to lay out the reasons why.
By way of illustration, we have our seemingly insatiable demand for more bad news about race in America.
Sixty years after being released from the legal constrictions that bedeviled both white and black Americans, many white people have come to believe the color that used to make them unassailable is now a sign of a moral inferiority born of a racial animus they can never wash off. Many black people, on the other hand, are insisting that America is as hopelessly stacked against them as the formerly unassailable white people’s ancestors used to tell their black ones.
The result is that many people today are buying into racist nightmares and mumbo jumbo that their black and white ancestors worked hard and effectively to put in each other’s heads.
This might be dismissed as crazy behavior if it weren’t so important to rituals Americans have long used to express their deepest fears about each other while figuring out what move they can make that won’t end with their world crashing down on everybody’s head.
Unfortunately, the kind of cultural sleight of hand we have used to ramp up our racial differences has been appropriated by people who have many other cultural fears and unresolved differences with each other. Their clumsy but culturally prescribed missteps are making all these other issues look as irremediable as our racial problems.
A good place to start an answer to how we back away from ledges is Alexis de Tocqueville’s writing on early-19th-century American democracy. He had an optimistic take on Americans’ unscripted displays of public bravado, recrimination, and payback.
For him, these were occasions when people tried to mitigate the effects of the unfair hand they were dealing someone else or had themselves been dealt by behaving in ways quite at odds with how they would otherwise be expected to act. These inversions of what Tocqueville called “the natural order of conscience” presented themselves as a loud but culturally muted challenge to the hypocrisies that people had built into the world they’d made together.
One of his favorite illustrations of early-American hypocrisy involved slave masters sleeping with their less-than-worthy slaves. To the best of my knowledge, he didn’t pick up on all the ways that slaves messed with their owners. Their well-chronicled and quiet resistance showed that even severely ill-treated people can exercise more control over their lives than outsiders appreciate.
Be that as it may, such inversions of a people’s “natural order of conscience” make a good public show of them wrestling with demons they can’t or may not want to shake off, but in any case, are nowhere close to figuring out how to cast out.
Implicit in these disruptions was the discomforting idea that people might flip the entire script and turn the world on its head in more permanent ways. That kind of flipping worked out better for us in our revolution against England than in our Civil War. These events taught us the value of stepping back from historically unprecedented ledges.
Americans of late have been giving loud expression to a long list of things they don’t like about each other and the last makeover they started but didn’t finish a half-century ago. The outcome of our fights today will be as revealing as they are embarrassing to everyone who imagined they could recast our country in a way that privileged their favorite kind of Americans.
Their disappointment with the accommodations they strike will be palpable, but the middling results they achieve with all their pushing and shoving won’t be anything they can’t live with.
Anthropologists who have written about such moments in other cultures less “advanced” than our own show that people find ways to work around their seemingly irreconcilable differences without ever fully resolving them. Indeed, the patches and repairs people make have the unheralded effect of reinforcing rather than undermining the legitimacy of the practices and values they thought were fundamentally flawed.
For example…
White guilt and black pessimism do more good than putting cash into the pockets of professional shamers and handwringers. They give the rest of us who don’t feel guilty or powerless more time to make the world less racially unequal. Good news.
Regarding illegal immigration, the entrance requirements for future immigrants will remain stringent. Americans will applaud the continued detention and deportation of the few illegal immigrants who commit serious crimes. Good news.
All the people who came to the United States without being legally vetted and were locked up for a time will be released in numbers small enough to avoid serious media attention. Along with the several million other good people who snuck in but avoided capture, the former detainees will go to school, find gainful employment, pay their taxes, and stay out of trouble. Many will eventually become citizens. Good news.
Investigations into election tampering and Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential loss will come to an unceremonious conclusion the day after his second term ends. Many Americans will grumble about this, but there will also be some quiet partying, too. Good and bad news.
Congressional hearings into all the grifting accomplished by people tied to the Trump administration will end without anyone having to pay a dime back to the American taxpayers. Bad news, we’ll learn to live with.
New laws and regulations will be created in the hope that the kind of corruption practiced by President Trump will not be repeated for another 250 years. Good news, I hope we’ll live long enough to enjoy.
Show trials for people who allegedly vandalized the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, if they happen, will get big television viewer ratings. Good news.
Trials for pardoned Capitol insurrectionists who committed serious crimes after their release should get more attention, but won’t. Bad news.
We will continue to hear nothing from most of the people who were pardoned for crimes they committed in the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. They will keep their mouths shut and their heads down for the rest of their life. Good news.
The gold-gilded ornaments that Donald Trump had plastered all over the White House will be shipped to Mar-a-Lago, where the former president will sell them on eBay. Fun news.
American taxpayers end up paying for most of the new East Wing, the removal of the miniature gladiatorial arena that was built behind the White House, and the restoration of the White House rose garden. Bad news.
The Triumphal Arch was never built. Good news.
Trad wives and gay couples raise perfectly lovely children. Good but unsurprising news.
Trans men and women learn that most Americans can’t figure out who they used to be. No one gives a second thought to their use of “family bathrooms” or “unisex bathrooms” in public settings, businesses, and schools. Communities will sponsor athletic teams that have trans boys and girls just to show they can. Good news.
Budget deficits will be kicked down the road for someone else’s children to pay down. Bad news.
Federal agencies that had their budgets and employee ranks slashed during President Trump’s second term are getting some of the money and lost positions back. Good news.
Elite universities will buy their way out of DEI purgatory by competing for conservative scholars whose inflated salaries dwarf those of their liberal colleagues, who will think about suing their institutions for reverse discrimination but won’t be able to figure out who would pay for it or care. More fun news.
Okay. I’ve probably missed some ways that Americans will step back from the ledges they have been making noises about leaping off. But to the extent that my predictions pan out, the best and most important moral of the stories about us stepping away is this: everything we lost and took back, or had returned to us, will have happened without our government collapsing, civic traditions crumbling, or our people beating each other up.
The reason why is that the differences Americans have with each other really weren’t as irreconcilable as we made them out to be. The empty-sounding bromide that Americans have more that unites us than divides us turns out to be true, not just metaphorically but in fact.
Now that is really something to celebrate.
Daniel J. Monti (danieljmonti.com) is Professor of Sociology at Saint Louis University and the author of American Democracy and Disconsent: Liberalism and Illiberalism in Ferguson, Charlottesville, Black Lives Matter, and the Capitol Insurrection.
Keep ReadingShow less
U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) speaks to members of the media as she arrives for the last votes of the week at the U.S. Capitol Building on May 21, 2026, in Washington, D.C.
(Andrew Harnik/Getty Images/TNS)
Democratic socialists pose no real threat to America’s free markets
Jul 31, 2026
I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but it’s almost like the GOP is secretly promoting the Democratic Socialists of America, which is now producing a lot of the energy and excitement within the Democratic and Republican parties.
The DSA champions many views that exist wildly outside the mainstream of American politics, including the abolition of the police, prisons, the Pentagon and the U.S. Senate.
This is all, to borrow a term from social science, bat guano insane. Even if you think such proposals make sense on the merits — I don’t! — politically, this stuff is nuttier than a pool party at Mr. Peanut’s pad. For one, the Constitution effectively bans abolishing the Senate, even via amendment. So expending any political energy on eliminating it is like demanding 2+2 equal 5.
But, man, do some people eat this stuff up. Specifically, fringe left-wing political activists, young and mostly white progressives with useless college and graduate degrees, and the Republican Party. Now, the first two groups eat it up because they love it. The Republicans eat it up because they’re eager to run against it.
Republicans are increasingly insisting that the only way to stop a takeover by “godless communists” is to vote Republican.
“Communism is a mortal threat to American liberty,” President Trump said during a July 3 speech at Mt. Rushmore. “It is the greatest threat to our country, including World War I, World War II, Pearl Harbor or even 9/11.” (I agree! Barring some time machine shenanigans, Communism is a bigger threat than Pearl Harbor and many other past events.)
“We’re fighting right now in Congress over whether we’re going to maintain our status as a constitutional republic,” House Speaker Mike Johnson insisted. “Or we’re going to trade that in, dismantle the foundations and go down this dark road of death to communism. That is the question on the ballot this fall.”
There’s a “bootleggers and Baptists” dynamic here. The DSA benefits from the attention, and the GOP benefits from the perception that Democrats are either too radical or too cowardly to confront the radicals in their ranks.
“It’s going to be a hate election,” a Republican working for Trump’s political operation told Axios earlier this month. “Voters have to hate the Dems more than they hate us. And we have material to work with.”
That might be right, but I’m not too worried, even if the GOP fails to weaponize the Red Menace. If you tune out the noise and simply look at the more mainstream question of socialism’s alleged rise in popularity, fears of a socialist takeover of America are absurdly overblown.
Polls do show, particularly among young Democrats, increased support for socialism and a rising distaste for capitalism. But this isn’t a new story. For the last couple of decades, dissatisfaction with the economic status quo has increased support for socialism. That’s because people equate the status quo with “capitalism.” As slaves to binary thinking, poll respondents think, “What’s the opposite of capitalism?” Answer: socialism.
A 2014 survey by the Reason Foundation found that millennials favored capitalism to socialism by a meager 10 points (52%-42%). But when asked if they favored a “free-market economy” to a “government managed economy,” the free market won 2-1 (64%-32%).
Fast forward to 2026. A recent Echelon Insights survey found that among Democrats under 50, the favorability of “capitalism” is minus 31 points (it’s popular with every other group). When asked their view of a “free market economy,” support jumps 41 points to +22 (it jumps up with every other cohort as well).
In other words, “capitalism” means something very different than “free markets,” even to many socialists. And that’s fair enough. I wish our economy was more free market than it is. But the point is that a ton of people think “capitalism” is an adjective describing things they don’t like about the economy, not a synonym for “free markets” or “free enterprise.”
Oh, yeah: Net favorability for Communism is -40.
The same applies for socialism, which means many different things to different people.
Once you get beyond the labels and the quirks of polling, reality suggests that socialism is a much heavier lift. For example, according to Echelon, 74% of Medicare for All fans think it can be paid for solely by raising taxes on billionaires. This is a lie. Medicare for All would cost an estimated $32 trillion over 10 years. The total combined net worth of America’s billionaires is around $9 trillion. Forget taxes; you could confiscate everything the “billionaire class” owns and it wouldn’t cover a third of the cost.
In other words, even if the “socialists” win, they’ll lose at governing. And so will the popularity of socialism.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.
Keep ReadingShow less
Load More
Odysseus Reimagined: Nolan’s Epic Explores What Makes a True Hero