Hello and welcome to the political orphanage, a home for plucky misfits and problem solvers.

I'm your host Andrew Heek, and I've been thinking a lot about systems of late.

Not necessarily policies, although I am interested in policy, but what are the systems in place to create policies?

Because from where I'm looking, our political system doesn't seem to work very well, or at all.

How do we redesign the equation

to deliver better outcomes?

Last month I spoke with Catherine Gale

about her book, The Politics Industry, and specifically about primaries and electoral

reform, but we didn't so much get into the internal mechanisms of Congress, which is a very big

part of this puzzle.

Since then, I've been on the lookout to find someone who knows Congress and has ideas

about fixing it as an institution.

So I called Justin Amash, former Michigan congressman from 2011 to 2021, over his decade in the

House, he periodically then increasingly butted heads with leadership until eventually leaving the GOP altogether.

He joined the Libertarian Party last year and remains a member, although he decided against running

for re-election in 2020.

I wanted to talk to him because he's put in a lot of thought

about why Congress is dysfunctional and the rather grim and unsettling

implications of that dysfunction long-term, but also what steps we can take to fix the institution.

So today, we're not going to talk to the former congressman about the laws he'd like to

promulgate or the philosophy he

helps to spread. We're going to speak to him as if he's a plumber, fixing a lot of

...