Yup, this is very much part of it.  But overall, it's the tightening of a thousand screws rather than One Weird Trick.  

In the House, in addition to the tradition changes that MondSemmel mentions, successive speakers over time have modified the formal House Rules iteratively to (generally) consolidate more power under the Speaker in a bunch of bureaucratically technical but important ways.  (E.G., the Federalist Society on the right argues that Gingrich's decision to cut committee staff sizes and impose term limits for committee chairs nerfed the power of committees relative to the Speaker https://fedsoc.org/commentary/fedsoc-blog/navigating-the-rules-of-the-people-s-house).  Note that some view the current Speaker as intentionally choosing to begin to reverse this trend as part of commitments he voluntarily made to his side of the aisle to somewhat empower individual Members, but this is seen even by his biggest fans as only a first step, and certainly not universally agreed upon even within his own Party. 

In the Senate, similar trends are combined with a slow but fairly steady erosion of the scope of the filibuster (as well as the maximization of procedural hacks around the filibuster, such as how to use reconciliation), which de facto increases the power of the Senate Majority Leader in closely-divided Senates (most have been for the past 20 years).  But this is not as far along as in the House, and various Senate Majority Leaders have approached this question differently, even within the same party, so bright line conclusions are harder to draw here.  (E.G., Reid and Schumer had somewhat different approaches from each other, as do McConnell and Thune)

This is a good summary by Vox, which in turn points to a bunch of deeper writeups if helpful https://archive.is/o6qj8 

Congressmembers do have power, but it's...weirdly distributed at the veto points?  There is some horse trading, but it's maximally in the "you gotta trust me it's there" black-box aspects of the system (e.g., the famously opaque negotiation inside the NDAA process).  

But power has definitely drained away from individual members; the standard account is roughly that a combo of 0) Increased transparency into Congress via things like C-SPAN and cable news generally, 1) leadership of committees and the parties consolidating more role-based power (especially in the House), 2) reduction in earmark-like things that enabled side deals to get bigger deals done, and 3) increased party polarization due to nationalization of party identities (measured through such things as DW-NOMINATE scores) were the key drivers,

(Looks at half completed pitch deck titled "Starcology: A Lighthaven Managed Residence" and hits delete)

Obvious implication is obvious: Lighthaven should seriously consider ways to capture a share of value form "I have a flow of people moving to the Bay Area".  (Dumb version: find a realtor adjacent to this community, capture a share of referral fees.  Other more sophisticated options are left as an exercise to the reader.)

I'm not making a one-time donation to Lighthaven, because I already have a recurring donation set up to Lighthaven. I encourage doing this as a general best practice for those donating ordinary USD or similarly boring funds, especially if your donation approach isn't set up for a lump-sum approach.  

While obviously less valuable in net present value terms than donating the full value upfront, having a predictable recurring fundraising flow from donors is quite useful for nonprofits.

Indeed, the traffic for AI 2027 in 2025 has been similar to the traffic for all of LessWrong in 2025, with about 5M unique users and 10M page-views, whereas LessWrong had 4.2M unique users and 22M page-views. 

While my inner consultant loves this approach to impact sizing, I think another approach is to ask how much various political efforts would pay to get the Vice President (which on rough historical odds has ~50% chance of being the next President, in addition to his current powers) to read and publicly say that he'd read a document and had a positive opinion of it.

It is, uh, more like the think tank number than the paid ads number.

"in December 2024, Jack Clark tried to push Congressman Jay Obernolte (CA-23) for federal preemption of state AI laws" is a very strong claim, and one that I think is impossible for me to evaluate without context we don't have.  

I would encourage you to give context on what kinds of advocacy he was purportedly engaged in and what your sources allege to have believed the Congressman's preferences on preemption were already at that time.  I would not, for example, be especially surprised if the Congressman was already thinking hard about pushing for preemption at that time and Jack Clark was engaging him in a conversation where he had been made aware of (hypothetically) Congressman Obernolte's plans. For example, I would be very dubious if you were claiming that Jack Clark came up with the idea and pitched it to Congress.

(I personally have no strong public opinion on preemption being good or bad in the abstract; the specific terms of what you're preempting at the state level and what you're doing at the federal level are most of the ballgame here.)

For anyone reading this: if you're ever in a situation where you wore a suit when others are less formal, Do Not Panic.  

Remove tie (if wearing tie) and place in inside jacket pocket.  Remove jacket and place out of view. Unbutton top button of collar, if buttoned.  Roll up sleeves. Sit in a way that pants aren't visible, if possible. 

Boom, you're now down to something much less formal in under 30 seconds.

One thing to consider is a strategy used in Jewish singing contexts (which I see relatively rarely done in other contexts -- but maybe it's super common and I just don't know the word to describe it!)  Before singing the first verse or the chorus, you do a wordless verse where you're just using nonsense syllables like "lai-dai-lai" or "yai-dah-dai-dai" that matches the song.  This enables folks to pre-load the music before having to learn the words, and gives implicit social permission to, if you forget the words, to just do nonsense syllables that match the words.  (A common problem if it's a Hebrew text you're unfamiliar with and you fall behind in reading it!)

(These are sometimes called niggunim, from the Hebrew for "tune" or "melody" for those wanting to google; for what should be fairly obvious reasons about a false cognate, I didn't lead with that vocabulary term)

So for example, for The Circle, you'd start with something:
"Yah dai dai dai daiiii?
Dai dai, daaaai dah daaaai. 
Yah dai dai dai daiiii?
Dai dai, daaaai dah daaaai. 

Yah dai dai dai daiiii
Lah dah dai lai lai
Bah dah baiiih bah bah
Bah da bah baii bah
Bah da baiiii da baiii

Dai dai, daaaai dah daaaai."

To presage the beat of verses like:

"So will we bring our families in,
Circle, grow and grow.
those whom Nature made our kin?
Circle, grow and grow.
Countless likenesses we find,
by our common blood bestowed.
What a debt of care is owed;
what a blesséd tie that binds!

Circle, circle, grow and grow."

(The Circle is a little tricky in that the first verse starts slightly different, but trust me, this social technology extends to that use case as well, it's not uncommon to have that in Jewish songs)