We keep changing the drivers and wondering why the car still pulls toward the ditch.
Every few years we hold an election, and every few years we are surprised - that the new majority governs like the old one, that the "battleground" district was never in play, that the thousand-page bill nobody read did the thing nobody wanted. The problem, this book argues, isn't the party in power. It's the machine.
A Republic, If We Maintain It is a non-partisan citizen's platform of seven structural repairs: a ban on congressional stock trading, competitive districts, term limits, transparent influence, one-subject readable bills, a leash on runaway executive power, and a citizen-funded trust to retire the national debt. Each repair is stress-tested in the open - failure modes and all - and each ends in the exact bill or amendment it would take to do it.
You don't have to agree with the author about anything else to want the wiring fixed. Two hundred and fifty years in, a republic survives by maintenance. Here is the toolkit.