July 4, 2026, Post II: A Roadmap to Fix America’s Political System…15 Years Later
As part of my three blog posts to celebrate the 250th anniversary of America’s founding this long weekend, this is the Medium (yesterday’s was the Small).
I’ve written about two intersecting topics on this blog over the years. In 2011, I wrote what I called “the beginnings of a roadmap” to fix America’s badly broken political system — a short list of structural reforms framed, as I noted at the time, as “a typical entrepreneur’s approach.” And in 2021 and 2023, I wrote twice about whether CEOs should wade into politics — moving gradually from “only when it directly affects your business” to “also when it indirectly affects your business, including the health of democracy itself.”
Fifteen years later, I want to combine those two threads. Consider this Part III of both series at once.
Fair warning: this post is longer than my usual. The topic warrants it.
What I got right — and wrong — in 2011
My 2011 post called for five things: nonpartisan redistricting, public financing of campaigns, a presidential line-item veto, auto-expiration of major tax and spending bills, and simpler single-issue legislation. I also floated the idea of a new Constitutional Convention.
On redistricting, I was cautiously optimistic. California had just created an independent commission, and a handful of other states followed. It looked like slow but real progress.
Then 2026 arrived. Trump pushed red states to redraw their congressional maps mid-decade to boost Republican chances of holding the House. Democrats in California and Virginia responded in kind. The Supreme Court effectively gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, greenlighting discriminatory maps and setting off a redistricting frenzy. What started as an unprecedented round of mid-decade redistricting in Texas became a gerrymandering arms race that has produced — in the spring of 2026 — arguably the worst gerrymandering environment in modern American history. On both sides of the aisle. Each party justifying its abuses by pointing to the other’s.
I got the diagnosis right in 2011. I got the trajectory badly wrong.
What I also missed was the nature of the threat. I was diagnosing a system that was inefficient and gridlocked. What emerged was something more corrosive: a faction that decided the rules themselves were the enemy. That winning by any means necessary was preferable to losing with integrity. That decades of unwritten norms were actually just undefended ones. I didn’t see that coming clearly enough.
Why my business experience shapes all of this
I’ve spent my career building companies — four of them, across three decades. The thing I’ve learned over and over is that bad incentive structures produce bad behavior. Not because people are bad, but because rational actors respond to the incentives in front of them.
You don’t fix a broken organization by finding better people. You fix the incentive structure, and behavior follows.
Gerrymandering doesn’t produce extremists because extremists seek out gerrymandered districts. It produces extremists because the incentive structure of a safe seat rewards moving to the poles and punishes compromise. Closed partisan primaries don’t select for the best candidate — they select for the most ideologically pure one. The same logic applies to campaign finance, the debt ceiling, confirmation proceedings, emergency powers. In every case, rules designed for good-faith actors have been stress-tested by bad-faith ones — and have failed.
The fix isn’t to appeal to better angels. It’s to redesign the system so bad-faith behavior is structurally penalized.
A word on why I’m focused on structural reform rather than hot-button policy issues: it’s not that I don’t have views — I do. It’s that I’ve come to believe the country can’t productively resolve the 80% common-sense reforms that most Americans actually agree on — a durable, legislated, uniform national abortion framework; sensible gun legislation; codifying DACA alongside a serious legal immigration overhaul; transparency and limits on dark money; improved voter access and security; basic civil liberties norms like not deploying masked federal law enforcement against American citizens; meaningful action on housing affordability, healthcare costs, antitrust, mental health, childcare, and workforce training — because the machinery is so broken that even obvious compromises collapse.
We swing from one wild end of the pendulum to the other, never landing near the sensible middle where most Americans actually live.
Fix the machinery first, and the policy conversations become possible.
Section 1: Fix the rules of the game
Nonpartisan redistricting, nationwide. What’s happened in 2026 — the mid-decade arms race, the gutting of the Voting Rights Act, both parties drawing maximally self-serving maps — is exactly what happens without a structural guardrail. Independent commissions with nonpartisan mandates are the answer. The fact that California and Virginia abandoned their own commissions in response to Republican gerrymandering doesn’t make the principle wrong — it makes the case for a constitutional mandate rather than a state-by-state patchwork.
Electoral College and House representation reform. The House hasn’t grown since 1929. Each member now represents roughly 750,000 constituents. The body is too small for genuine deliberation. We should expand it significantly — and crucially, it should automatically expand and contract with the population. This matters for the Electoral College too: a properly sized, properly apportioned House would go a long way toward ensuring presidential elections reflect the actual will of the national electorate. Whether that’s sufficient or whether more direct Electoral College reform is needed — including the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact — is worth serious debate.
Open primaries and electoral reform. Safe seats combined with closed partisan primaries are a machine for producing unaccountable extremists. Open primaries — and potentially ranked-choice voting — force candidates to compete for a broader electorate. This single structural change might do more to restore the incentive for moderation than almost anything else on this list.
Remove dark money from politics. Political spending should be transparent, and its ability to dominate outcomes should be limited. Getting there could mean enhanced disclosure requirements, tighter individual and corporate contribution limits, public financing of campaigns, or some combination. Citizens United has made some of this harder, and a constitutional amendment may be required. But “we can’t do everything” is not an argument for doing nothing.
Age limits — for all three branches. Not just the courts. Elected and senior appointed officials alike. We have a gerontocracy problem and everyone knows it. A reasonable maximum age for assuming or continuing in federal office — with a grandfather clause (pun absolutely intended) for current officeholders if needed politically — is long overdue.
SCOTUS rotation and term limits. Eighteen-year terms on a rotating basis is the most widely discussed and sensible proposal. Life tenure made sense when life expectancy was 50. It doesn’t now. Justices are openly gaming their retirement timing to maximize ideological influence, and sudden vacancies — strategic retirements, untimely deaths — have swung the Court’s balance in ways that have nothing to do with democratic legitimacy. That’s not how the highest court in the land should work.
Recall, initiative, and referendum. Giving citizens a meaningful check between election cycles has real merit — and real risks, as California’s experience shows. A federal framework would need significant safeguards against demagoguery and well-funded manipulation, but the concept deserves serious exploration.
Section 2: Codify the norms
The past decade has revealed that much of what we thought was constitutional protection was actually just tradition — unwritten rules that depended on good-faith actors. Bad-faith actors have exposed every one of them.
The fix is straightforward in concept: write them down, give them teeth, and stop relying on the goodwill of whoever happens to be in power.
Pardon reform. The president’s pardon power is essentially absolute and unchecked — and we’ve seen it abused in ways the Founders almost certainly didn’t anticipate. Eliminate the possibility of self-pardon. Establish transparency requirements, limitations on pardoning co-conspirators, and some form of congressional review for pardons involving federal officials or the president’s associates. The goal isn’t to eliminate the pardon power — it serves legitimate purposes — but to ensure it can’t be weaponized or sold as a get-out-of-jail-free card.
Presidential immunity — codify it properly. Some degree of immunity for official acts is reasonable. But the Supreme Court’s recent ruling went too far and left the doctrine dangerously vague. Congress should codify the boundaries: what constitutes an official act, what doesn’t, what’s categorically excluded. Too important to leave as judge-made law that shifts with each new Court majority.
Emoluments, self-enrichment, and conflicts of interest — with teeth. The constitutional prohibition on presidents profiting from office has no meaningful enforcement mechanism. Neither do the norms against elected officials enriching themselves through their positions. Fix both: require comprehensive financial disclosure, genuine blind trusts, prohibition on acquiring stakes in private companies through official actions, and real penalties for violations. The insider trading rules that apply to corporate executives should apply at least as strictly to members of Congress and the executive branch. What should be obvious needs to be law.
Independence of critical executive functions. The DOJ, the Federal Reserve, Inspectors General, and independent regulatory agencies cannot function as political instruments of the Oval Office. Codify the independence of the AG in criminal matters. Enshrine the independent agency concept with genuine structural guardrails. Clarify rules around special counsels and Inspectors General so they can’t be fired for doing their jobs. Give the minority party in Congress real executive oversight power — oversight that functions regardless of which party controls both branches. On a related note: the Presidential Succession Act hasn’t been seriously updated since 1947, and the current line raises real constitutional concerns worth addressing.
War Powers reform. Presidents of both parties have effectively ignored the War Powers Resolution for decades, committing military force without meaningful congressional authorization. Today’s realities — cyber operations, drone warfare, special operations, proxy conflicts — bear no resemblance to what a formal declaration of war was designed for. The framework needs a complete update that reflects modern warfare while restoring genuine congressional accountability.
Executive order limits. The executive order has become a substitute for legislation — reversible with each new administration, subject to no democratic deliberation. Some framework — whether a sunset provision or a lower-threshold congressional override mechanism — is needed to prevent governance by presidential decree from becoming the permanent default.
Confidential impeachment votes. This one is admittedly not fully formed, and it would need serious guardrails and design thinking. But the core idea is worth exploring: senators voting on impeachment casting confidential ballots, at least in the deliberative phase, to break the loyalty-test dynamic that guarantees tribal outcomes regardless of facts. The risks of secrecy in accountability proceedings are real. So are the risks of a system where no senator can ever vote their conscience. Worth a serious national conversation.
Section 3: Fix the broken machinery
End government shutdowns. If Congress fails to pass a budget by the deadline, the prior year’s budget continues automatically with a 1% across-the-board reduction for each month of delay — and congressional pay is suspended until a new budget is enacted. The incentive structure currently rewards hostage-taking. Flip it.
Eliminate the debt ceiling as a weapon. It doesn’t limit spending — that’s done in appropriations. What it does is create recurring opportunities for legislative terrorism. Abolish it, or make raising it automatic upon passage of spending that requires it. If we want a genuine fiscal discipline mechanism — and we should — build it into the budget process itself: a constitutional framework requiring supermajority votes for deficit spending above a defined threshold, with real enforcement.
Supermajority requirements for emergencies. Emergency and disaster declaration powers have become general-purpose mechanisms for bypassing Congress. Require a 60% supermajority in both chambers to declare and sustain a national emergency, disaster, or national security emergency, with automatic expiration and mandatory reauthorization.
Legislative process reform — filibusters, thresholds, and leadership power. Here’s the framework: the threshold should match the stakes and the reversibility of the decision. Routine legislation: majority rule. Lifetime appointments: real consensus required — which means 60% Senate confirmation for federal judges and senior cabinet officials. The filibuster in its current form enables minority blockage of routine governance, and that’s a problem. But so is the outsized, increasingly dysfunctional power of majority and minority leaders to single-handedly control what reaches the floor. That concentration of power is itself a form of minority rule that’s strangling the legislative process.
Single-subject legislation, complexity limits, and congressional capacity. No more 2,000-page omnibus bills stuffed with unrelated riders inserted at midnight, which no one has read and fewer understand. Single-subject bills. Meaningful page limits. And — less glamorously but just as importantly — restored funding for congressional analytical capacity: the CRS, the GAO, and member staffs have been systematically defunded, leaving Congress unable to effectively evaluate what it’s legislating and increasingly dependent on lobbyists who fill the vacuum.
Auto-expiration of major tax and spending bills. Major entitlements, tax structures, and industry subsidies should require periodic renewal rather than running on autopilot forever. Forces current deliberation rather than holding today’s politics hostage to decisions made under completely different circumstances decades ago.
Presidential line-item veto. A more granular veto power could help curb wasteful spending and the barnacle-accumulation that makes every major bill a Christmas tree. Constitutionality has been challenged; a constitutional clarification may be required.
Tax Code Cleanup. One more item worth naming: tax reform. Not the slogan kind — not “billionaire tax” or “fair share” or “death tax.” Those phrases are designed to win news cycles, not fix anything. The real problem is simpler and less glamorous: Congress has spent decades quietly selling loopholes and carve-outs to whoever could afford the best lobbyists, while everyone else pays taxes out of every paycheck. The wealthy don’t need to cheat — they just need accountants who know where the exits are. The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that closing the full universe of tax expenditures — the loopholes, the preferences, the exemptions buried in the code — is worth trillions. That money is already there. We don’t need a new idea. We need a Congress willing to close the old ones.
Section 4: Invest in the foundation
The Friedman-Mandelbaum framework I wrote about in my 2021 post still holds: America’s historical formula for competitiveness has rested on excellent public education, modern infrastructure, openness to legal immigration, government investment in basic R&D, and sensible regulation of private economic activity. We’ve underinvested in all of these for decades.
I’d add national service — some form of meaningful civic engagement that rebuilds shared identity and the sense that we’re all in this together, even if the design requires careful thought about individual liberty.
This is also why I’ve been involved with Citizens & Scholars as a board member. Their work at the intersection of civic education, free inquiry, and opportunity is precisely the long-term foundational investment that healthy democracies depend on. Fix the incentive structures and you change behavior. Cultivate citizens who understand and demand accountable institutions, and you change the culture. Both matter.
Finally — a word on the economic pain that’s fueling so much of our political dysfunction. I haven’t addressed it directly enough here. The legitimate grievances of people left behind by globalization, crushed by housing costs and healthcare bills, locked out of a system that seems to work for everyone but them — those are real, and they deserve real policy responses.
Common-sense fixes to housing supply and zoning, drug pricing and hospital billing transparency, antitrust enforcement against concentrated corporate power, mental health as a public health priority, childcare and eldercare costs, workforce and skills training for a changed economy — these are all on my 80% list. They’re not in the structural reform sections above because they’re policy outcomes, not machinery fixes. But the machinery reforms I’ve argued for here are, in large part, the prerequisite for finally being able to have productive conversations about them — and actually passing something.
A final word on CEOs and politics
The data I cited in my 2023 post is sobering: majorities across all demographics view corporate political engagement unfavorably. I take that seriously.
But there’s a meaningful distinction between a CEO taking partisan sides on divisive social issues — risky, often counterproductive, probably not the CEO’s place — and a CEO advocating for the structural health of the system that all commerce depends on.
The reforms above aren’t partisan. They don’t favor one party’s policy agenda. They’re about the plumbing — the rules of the game, the integrity of the process, the functioning of institutions that everyone, left and right, depends on to build things, hire people, serve customers, and plan for the future. That’s not a political position. It’s an operational one. Same instinct that makes me, as a CEO, more interested in building durable systems than in winning any particular argument.
Fifteen years on from my first roadmap, the problems are more severe, the urgency is higher, and my conviction that structural reform is the right place to focus is stronger than ever.
I’d genuinely love to hear where you agree, where you think I’ve got it wrong, and what I’m missing.