Welcome to constitutionally speaking, a podcast about the United States Constitution,

Early American History and Political Philosophy.

My name is Jay Koss, and with me is my co-host, Luke Thompson. And this

week, we are talking about a house party, specifically party politics in the United States

Congress, which usually inevitably leads to a conversation about the parties in the House of Representatives.

So how are you doing this week, Luke?

Jay, it's going to be back with you.

It's been too long.

I'm excited to dig in and to talk Turkey about some relatively recent history,

mostly the last 50 years, I guess we can say, last half century and some stuff that I think people will see has real bearing, real and immediate bearing on the things they see in the news.

Yeah, so we had talked a little bit about, we've talked at various points about the parties in the House of Representatives.

We had talked about them during our historical overview of Congress, which was at the beginning of this miniseries.

And then a couple episodes ago, we had talked about the party theory of congressional organization, which...

Yeah, that's episode 73.

If people... episode 73.

Episode 73. Just to briefly recapitulate that idea is the function of political parties in the House

of Representatives and to a lesser degree in the United States Senate is to serve as a kind

of cartel, to limit the options that the how limit the policy options that the house

can choose from so you can imagine right now for instance with a house basically being split 50 50

maybe better put 51 49 between the democrats and the republicans you could imagine in theory

republican policy initiatives could

win a majority on the floor of the House of Representatives if the members voted their

...