The United States Constitution, with Amanda Nelson

Summary

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Zero to Well-Read

The United States Constitution, with Amanda Nelson

Podcast: Zero to Well-Read
Host: Book Riot (Jeff O’Neal and Rebecca Schinsky)
Guest: Amanda Nelson
Date: June 30, 2026

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Episode Overview

In honor of America's approaching 250th birthday, Book Riot’s Zero to Well-Read podcast devotes this episode to a close, accessible reading of the United States Constitution. Hosts Jeff O’Neal and Rebecca Schinsky are joined by historian and political organizer Amanda Nelson for a deep, irreverent, and insightful discussion—part literary analysis, part civics crash course—of the document most Americans haven’t read since middle school, but which frames every part of their life. The conversation explores the document as both a flawed product of human compromise and one of radical (if incomplete) vision, unpacks its enduring influence, and takes a whirlwind tour through its origin, structure, amendments, and continuing relevance, all with plenty of humor and personal insight.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Why Read the Constitution?

[05:05]

• It’s surprisingly short: 4,400 words without amendments, about 7,700 with.
• Most Americans have only glanced at it in school; its details are widely misunderstood or mythologized.
• “Part of being well read is understanding the greater context that the works that shape our lives exist in. This, if you live in the United States, this work shapes your life every day.” — Rebecca Schinsky [06:05]

Amanda’s Take:

• The Constitution is treated as civic scripture—deified, but rarely read.
• Actually knowing its contents is fundamental to understanding, participating in, and defending American democracy.
• “It is impossible to defend yourself if you don’t know what’s defensible.” — Amanda Nelson [45:51]

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2. How the Constitution Came to Be

[12:58]

• Drafted in 1787 after the failure of the Articles of Confederation—a system so weak it almost doomed the nation.
  • Congress under the Articles couldn’t tax, regulate commerce, or raise an army. It needed unanimous consent to amend.
• The Constitutional Convention was meant to "fix" the Articles but ended up scrapping them.
• Writing the Constitution was a messy, very human project—a bunch of sweaty, sometimes resentful delegates meeting in a sweltering summer, making up solutions as they went, with much of the drama “off-stage” at boarding houses or over dinner.
• Deliberations were secret to allow for open debate and to present a united front to the public.

Memorable Moment:
“It was very much a group project—like the worst group project you’ve ever been in with middle-aged men nailed into a room… Think of the chafing.” — Rebecca [31:19], Jeff [31:31]

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3. Trauma, Philosophy, and Pragmatism: Shaping the Document

[18:09]

• The framers were deeply “trauma-informed,” trying to prevent repeats of past failures as much as they were trying to build something new (see also: obsessive focus on avoiding tyranny).
• Influences included Enlightenment thinkers (especially John Locke), as well as a pragmatic desire to create a functional government, pay off war debts, address slavery, and prevent the country from falling apart.

Quote:
“So much of the best American literature is born out of the problems caused by this document… From Melville to Morrison, it is all a constitutional argument, or at least nodding to the constitutional arguments and the failures of our leadership to… live up to the promises in this or the Declaration of Independence.” — Amanda Nelson [06:59]

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4. Contradictions and Compromises

[20:04]

• Slavery and “states' rights” are baked in through multiple explicit compromises—the infamous “Three-Fifths Compromise,” delayed abolition of the slave trade, and enormous leeway left to states.
• The word “slavery” is never directly used, a testament to both creative legal acrobatics and moral evasions.
• Many of the document’s biggest flaws were obvious right away—notably by anti-Federalists, some of whom refused to sign.
• Voting rights: Not addressed at all, left to states, with the consequences still unfolding.

Quote:
“The Constitution’s not interested in voting. Like, at all. They would have preferred not to, actually.” — Amanda Nelson [44:01]

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5. Reading the Constitution: Literary and Legal Close Reading

[10:53]

• Parsing the Constitution or Supreme Court opinions is a meta-close reading exercise where each comma, “necessary,” or “high crimes” is subject to endless interpretation.
• Researching historical context, framers’ intent, and subsequent legal interpretations is essential to getting beyond surface reading.
• Document is full of useful vagueness: constrains government power in some ways but leaves a lot ambiguous.

Quote:
“Con law is essentially an extended close reading exercise with stakes, which really gets my little rabbit heart a-pumping.” — Jeff O’Neal [10:53]

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6. Structure and Function: Articles and Amendments

[36:36]

• The order and content of the articles reflect framers’ priorities: commerce/money, balancing power between large and small states, executive function, changing/amending process.
• Congress was meant to be supreme (Article I), but modern power has drifted toward the presidency and judiciary.
• The Bill of Rights (first ten amendments) was an afterthought insisted on by several states, especially Virginia.
  • Fear: enumerating rights could accidentally limit unenlisted ones (the “infinite” problem).

Quote:
“I am an Article I supremacist. Congress is supposed to be the most powerful branch of government. And a lot of the problems we have now are because it doesn’t function that way.” — Amanda Nelson [32:36]

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7. Ratification and Its Illegality

[14:27], [110:29]

• The Constitution itself broke the legal framework (Articles of Confederation) by changing how future changes would be ratified (from unanimity to 9 out of 13 states).
• Ratification was a knife-edge process—often won by just a few votes, with Rhode Island refusing until after the government was in full operation.
• Many notable founders refused to sign—or even attend (e.g., Patrick Henry, Elbridge Gerry).

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8. Relevance, Action, and “Civic Religion”

[45:51], [98:11]

• Understanding the actual text and its messy, human origins is both empowering and grounding.
• Real action—whether legal activism or political organization—starts from knowing the actual rules and language, not the “civic religion” myths.
• The constitutional system can channel both doomerism (“nothing can change”) and magical thinking (“what if we just impeach everyone?”) into focused, realistic engagement.

Quote:
“You can’t fight if you don’t know what the fight is… if you know the actual text, then you know what to push back on.” — Amanda Nelson [45:51], [46:44]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “It’s a document full of ampersands.” — Rebecca [24:32]
• “We take it as read for this, Rebecca, that this is art of a kind.” — Jeff [95:29]
• “Every criticism that the people who opposed the ratification of the Constitution had was correct.” — Amanda [71:24]
• “The Constitution’s not interested in voting… at all. They would have preferred not to, actually.” — Amanda [44:01]
• “If you raised your hand, you probably could have been a delegate.” — Jeff [115:30]
• “The rest of [the document] is… hard. Like, you’re talking about humans, right? …The gut punches of the three-fifths clause and the fugitive slave clause and things like that. That’s hard.” — Amanda [118:47]

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Important Timestamps & Segments

• Why Read the Constitution / Literary Approach: [03:24] – [07:00]
• Tragic Flaws & Legacies of the Articles of Confederation: [12:58] – [17:53]
• Structure (Articles, Commerce, States Rights): [36:36] – [41:42]
• Slavery, Voting Rights, and Race: [20:04], [42:03] – [44:41], [65:05] – [68:09]
• Ratification, Illegality, Who Didn’t Write It: [14:27], [55:54] – [58:03], [110:29] – [111:39]
• Why It Matters—Modern Relevance & Activism: [45:44] – [50:45]
• Straight Thoughts, Hot Takes, and Favorite Clauses/Amendments: [69:47] – [93:55]
• Tips for Reading, Further Recommendations: [116:11] – [117:58], [113:32] – [114:46]

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Stray Thoughts, Hot Takes & Potpourri

• The anti-Federalists were largely right about the document’s flaws (e.g., Senate as an aristocracy, dangers of standing army, lack of individual protections). [71:24]
• The original rules were “made up as they went,” with many crucial questions left to improvisation and luck.
• The “tyranny of the minority” was established early via the overrepresentation of small/slave states. [68:09]
• The pattern of amendments: dry spells punctuated by bursts (Reconstruction, Progressive Era, Civil Rights Era). Are we overdue for another?

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Favorite Clauses, Amendments, and Articles

• The Preamble (“We the People…”) — “revolutionary in its own way”; almost wasn’t included. [118:29]
• 13th, 14th, 15th (Reconstruction): Ended slavery, established birthright citizenship, sought to enfranchise Black men—“our second founding.”
• 17th: Made Senate elections direct.
• 18th–21st: Prohibition, women’s suffrage, and repeal—capturing the tension between liberty and societal harm.
• The Bill of Rights: Born out of state pressure, especially from Virginia.

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Notable Trivia

• The U.S. Constitution is the world’s oldest still-in-use written constitution—but its influence is declining globally as it is seen as too hard to amend and lacking in positive rights (like healthcare, women’s rights). [104:55]
• Women voted in New Jersey until 1807, when explicit language restricted voting to “free white men of property.”
• Thanksgiving was originally established to give thanks for the Constitution itself. [107:58]

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Should You Read the Constitution? Who Is It For?

• "It's short enough and important enough, with ample annotated editions and secondary sources to support any interested reader." — Jeff [95:29]
• For Americans: Essential for understanding your rights, limits, and the terrain of modern political disputes.
• For non-Americans: Essential for understanding American political influence and global legal traditions.

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Further Reading Recommendations

• Amanda’s America 101 Reading List (available on her Substack): Highly comprehensive, sortable by topic.
• Melissa Murray, The U.S. Constitution: A Comprehensive and Annotated Guide for the Modern Reader — Accessible, modern, with context.
• Jill Lepore, We the People — Sweeping, narrative history.
• Richard Freeman, Plain Honest Men — Deep dive into the nitty-gritty daily work and negotiations of the Constitutional Convention.
• Akhil Reed Amar, The Constitution Today and Born Equal — Top constitutional scholar with many accessible volumes, especially on amendments.

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Crib Sheet & Cocktail Party Takeaways

• If the Articles of Confederation had worked even a little better, the U.S. could have been a very different place.
• The framers assumed the Constitution would be changed and updated much more often than it has been.
• Slavery's place in the Constitution is explicit in both words and effect—don’t let anyone claim otherwise.
• Many “founders” didn’t sign or actively opposed the Constitution. The “consensus” is a myth; the document was nearly stillborn.

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Ratings (Zero to Well-Read Score)

Historical Importance: 10/10
Readability: 4/10 (higher if you listen to an audiobook and ignore 18th-century capitalization)
Book Nerd Cred: 9–10/10 (rarely encountered in full, shockingly potent for discussion)
Oh Damn Factor: Pre-amble (“We the People”) is the big one; much of the rest is gutting for its implications, rather than its rhetoric.

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Immortal Questions

• What is the good life? What do I owe my neighbor?
  The Constitution is ultimately about negotiating the boundaries of these questions at a national scale.
• What's the deal with good and evil?
  Embedded in its compromises around slavery and rights.
• What else might there be?
  The entire process is an experiment in new forms of government, with the delegates considering but ultimately discarding many radical alternatives.

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Final Takeaways

• The U.S. Constitution is vital, flawed, radical, timid, transformative, and reactionary—all at once.
• Its compromises and evasions, especially on race and representation, have shaped every subsequent battle for justice.
• Understanding its text and history is empowering, grounding, and sometimes infuriating—but always worthwhile.

“If you raised your hand, you probably could have been a delegate.”
— Jeff O’Neal [115:30]

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Transcript

[A]

This episode of Zero to well Read is sponsored by ThriftBooks.com Today on the show, we're talking about the US Constitution. Let me just say there are a lot of versions you can find on thriftbooks.com I particularly like this leather bound edition, the US Constitution, other writings. You get a bunch of founding documents in there. If you want, you can get the US Constitution for Dummies, which I hope we're going to exceed that kind of level with the discussion we have on this episode. But you, you never know. We also talk about we the People by Jill Lepore, her great book about the U.S. constitution. And we also talk about Melissa Murray's the U.S. constitution annotated edition where she gives you context and additional information about what you're seeing before you. So you can get just the facts, ma' am. Version of the U.S. constitution. You can find books about the U.S. constitution. Fill your [e-mail] all right, time for the show. Welcome to Zero to well Read, a podcast about everything you need to know about the books you wish you'd read. Maybe documents, parchment scrolls, vellum. I am Jeff o'.

[B]

Neill. I'm Rebecca Schinsky. And today, as we Prepare for America's 250th birthday coming up this July 4th, we are diving into one of the nation's most important foundational documents, the United States Constitution. And we have a special guest joining us. We are delighted, like thrilled to welcome dear friend and former colleague Amanda Nelson to the show. Amanda's a historical content creator, political commentator, and founder of Y' All Vote, an organization that is dedicated to flipping state houses in the South. Amanda, welcome to Zero to well Read.

[C]

The gang's back together.

[B]

Welcome back to Book Riot, baby.

[C]

Where it all started, where I learned everything I know.

[B]

I don't know about that.

[A]

I don't know about that. You've learned more.

[C]

When I, like, introduce myself to live audiences, I make the argument that my time in book media taught me how to speak to nerds, and then my time in big tech taught me how to speak to narcissists. And that combination has prepared me for politics like nothing else.

[A]

That's, that's heady stuff there, Amanda. So we're here today to talk about the US Constitution and, and in addition to your historical expertise and, you know, thinking about this stuff, modern politics, the other thing I'm super interested to hear from you is you are interacting with regular folks about how the US Government is put together. And I'm so curious to hear what people think, what they don't what they're misconstrued ideas about how this damn country came to be and is put together. Because I think one thing that struck me about this and Rebecca's notes, she'll be curious about Amanda's takes is there's not a whole lot to the US Constitution. It's like not Moby Dick necessarily. There's just not a lot there. And what is and isn't there is super important. But then it's taken on in our minds like this is like Mount Sinai. Like there's tablets that came down when really it was just a bunch of dudes in a hot Pennsylvania summer trying to figure it out and missing their family and also kind of hating each other. Amanda, what do people think of the Constitution and Gen Pop, as I've heard it sort of through telephone, you refer to people who are genuinely trying to understand how things are put together, but also don't know anything. Is that unfair?

[C]

Anything? No, I think that the, the thing you were referring to, the sort of civic religion that we have created for ourselves out of both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution has, has just, it's just deified. And as is often the case with any kind of religion, you don't have to read it if you are worshiping it or know anything about it or study where it came from or how it came to be or its impacts, because that, that makes it harder to be a participant in the civic religion. So I think gen pop, especially right now, at least my followers who lean to the left, really want to understand the Constitution so that they can understand what limits we can realistically put on the things that are happening to the country right now. I've not seen a Republican that cares to understand it, to be honest, at least not in my. They're not, they're not numerous in my audience.

[A]

I'll say that they're not making cogent, well sourced arguments about, say, I don't know, states rights or something else.

[C]

No, they're out here saying the 4 13th amendment doesn't say the words birthright, citizenship or anything, you know, like the things that they're. But we're very literal around Amendment 2, but not so much the rest of the documents.

[A]

Rebecca, as a literary. So for our purposes here, right, like for the zero to well read sort of crowd, which this is really our first political document, we've sort of, we're moving out of the sort of straight up, you could study this in English or world lit class to words that matter in a different kind of way. Why are we doing this? Why are we interested in this outside of, like, the world and politics and all of our fates, like, as a literary document? Is there something that. Or what. How did you come into this? And think about this as let's read this with close reading English nerd glasses.

[B]

I mean, in addition to looking for an excuse to get Amanda back into the loop with us. Well, the 250th for America is really significant. And the Constitution is one of those documents that most of us encounter in school and never again. Like, spoiler alert for book nerd read cred. When we get to the bottom of the show, this is going to be really high. It's only 4400 words. The Constitution itself, if you add in the amendments, it's about 7,700 words. So this makes it the shortest document that we've discussed here by far and arguably the most important one. Citizens should always understand how their country is put. And the US Constitution is the oldest written Constitution in the world because the framers thought it was important for citizens to have access to how the country is put together, how laws work, how laws get made, what rights you have, what rights the federal government has. It's important that this document is written. It's important that citizens engage with it. And as Amanda was saying, most citizens just don't. We also just talk perpetually about we have constitutional rights to do xyz. And can you point to where in the Constitution most of those rights come from? Or have we just absorbed most of it from culture? So in the thesis of this show, that part of being well read is understanding the greater context that the works that shape our lives exist in this. If you live in the United States, this work shapes your life every day. Arguably, if you live outside the United States, this work shapes your life in many ways because of the United States influence around the globe. So we're talking about it here. For the 250th, we kicked around, or I kicked around, like maybe the Declaration, maybe some other things, but the Constitution is ultimately the one it's really like.

[C]

From the overlap of my book Nerdist and History, Nerdist thing here is just like, I'm having a good day. So much of the best American literature is born out of the problems caused by this document. For the people who live in this country, from like Melville to Morrison, it is all a constitutional art argument, in my opinion, or at least nodding to the constitutional arguments and the failures of our leadership to create an accepting culture, to in any way live up to the promises in this or the Declaration of Independence. So it's very important I agree with you for understanding American literature at least.

[B]

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[A]

As a reading exercise, one thing I've come to understand is that con law, constitutional law is essentially an extended close reading exercise with stakes, which really gets my little rabbit heart a pumping so far. So to think about, you know, the, the long term parsing of an ampersand or a comma or what does necessary mean and what does general welfare mean and why is it high crimes and misdemeanors? Certainly high crimes is a superset including misdemeanors. Like all of this stuff is so fascinating and you realize that again. And I think this is the thing. Let me back up just a second. This of all the things I think we've read and taken on, Rebecca, you will be rewarded more by doing research and doing reading behind this text than anything else. Because I think the story of how this document came to be, the actual moment of writing over 12 weeks is super. It's more fascinating sort of Melville scratching up Bartleby the script and everything else like that is where the drama is. And this is the sort of the result of that. This is the flower that this whole gnarly brambly thorny bush was trying to to produce. And understanding that and how the compromises and the blind spots and the hypocrisies and the contradictions makes it all the richer. And they identified, I think. And I'm going to pass the mic here to Amanda for what it's all about here in a second. But seeing the original contradiction, hearing and reading the original confusions, contradictions and questions is both terrifying and affirming in some way. Like it makes sense. Like they made a lot of mistakes, like a lot of mistakes. But also the mistakes sort of made sense at the time and we don't have answers to a lot of the Questions they were trying to wrestle with. So Amanda, with that said, what the hell is this document? How did this come to be? Like, what was the moment in time in which, like, you know, all right, guys, we're gonna get out a quill pen and some parchment and we're gonna give GW the gavel and we're going to lock ourselves in the room and figure this shit out where GW Is

[C]

never going to talk.

[A]

Never going to talk.

[C]

You have the convention. I just want to say, like the. Well, what is the document? It's a series of vampire sands. As you were saying? It's not terribly wordy. And you are so right. Like, if you read any Supreme Court decision of any substance, or listen to a constitutional law scholar, like I've met with Jamie Raskin, who's a con lawyer, a professor who's a representative in Maryland, and you listen to him to talk about the Constitution. And it's like being in a sermon. It's just that the Parse saying, and maybe it means this, and maybe it means that, and maybe the gods from 1776, you know, just like gave us this meaning or this other meaning. It is such a civic religion. But anyway, okay, why do we have it? To fix a screw up, which is the Articles of the Confederation. So if you are like blank slate, have no idea about the context of the Constitution. We ended the American Revolution, like 1783. Right. That's when the treaty was signed with England. We had a system of government. I'm using air quotes here. Called the Articles of Confederation before that, which was written in 1777 and ratified in 1781. And the articles of Confederation were, I mean, functionally like a set of treaties kind of between the colonies or the states. It was not a powerful system of government whatsoever. And from the jump, it was a disaster. It was a complete mother effing disaster. It did not get. They had a unicameral Congress. So, like one body. Everything that had to be changed had to be passed unanimously. So it was functionally unamendable.

[B]

Oh, my God. Unanimously unanimous.

[C]

All 13 colonies had nightmares which will give me my hottest of hot takes at the end, which is that the Constitution was illegal. It was.

[A]

It sort of was. Yeah, it was. I don't show. It was a hot take. Amanda. I think that's a one take.

[C]

But nobody wants to know about hot.

[B]

Listen, they say her takes are mild.

[A]

Right.

[C]

But they couldn't tax. Right. Congress had no power to tax.

[A]

No power of the purse. Yeah.

[C]

They could not raise any revenue, which meant at the Time, the states that were deeply in debt because of the American Revolution, including to their own citizens, soldiers whose pensions they were trying to pay out back pay they were trying to give, they couldn't raise money as a Congress to pay those people or to pay those debts. They had no commerce power. Like there was no governing of interstate money or how it flowed, which left the states to do things like tariff each other, which was going to inevitably lead to more war. Although fun fact, we do have some interstate commerce agreements that were signed under, under the Articles of Confederation that are still into effect today, mostly between Virginia and Maryland and how we navigate our, the Chesapeake Bay together. So those still exist. So that's one thing that we got. There was no war between Maryland and Virginia. That came later. And then there was no enforcement. Right. The Articles of Confederation had no teeth. There was no army. Congress did not have the ability to raise a national army. Laws were recommendations. There was no way to make the states do anything. Was functionally a series of suggestions. Right. No standing army. And it was a foreign policy disaster because, you know, in the treaty that we signed with Britain to end the American Revolution, they agreed to give up some of their forts on our border, which they just declined to do. We're actually solid right here. We're going to stick around. And since the Articles of Confederation did not give any sort of national government the right to raise an army, we could not defend ourselves or enforce that treaty in any way. And there was also stuff like, you know, Spain closed the Mississippi river entirely to American shipping. Could we do anything about that? No. The Barbary States were pirating American merchants. Could we do anything about that? No. We had no navy. No. And then there was Shays rebellion. So, you know, in Massachusetts at the time, Massachusetts farmers, especially in the western part of the state, were going bankrupt. They were being taxed really, really heavily by the state to try to pay the state's Revolutionary War debt. But they didn't have money, they didn't have any currency because there was no national currency, because the Erdos Confederation did not give Congress the power to that. So every state was minting their own currency. Some of it was based on minerals, some of it was backed on by nothing. So there was no exchange rate. It was complete and total chaos. But those farmers could not pay those taxes because they didn't have any currency. And so they were losing their farms. So Captain Shea, who was a Revolutionary War captain, gathered up like 1200 people and started storming courthouses and just like refusing to let, let the foreclosures happens. And it was, it was a mutiny, right? It was like a second revolution about taxes, just as the first one was. But the government had no power to stop it. The Boston privateers and private merchants had to raise money to hire private militia to go put down Shays rebellion, which ultimately, I mean, didn't amount to much except we got the Constitutional Convention because it was becoming increasingly obvious over time that the Articles of Confederation were not going to cut it were causing more problems than it was solving. So initially the Constitutional Convention in Philly was supposed to just amend the Articles of Confederation. Like we've just had this big rebel. We had to hang two people, two of our people, Revolutionary War people. Like, this is not working. So they were supposed to just amendment. Instead they burned it down and started over. So that's where it came from.

[A]

And Rebecca, so in your research about sort of getting up to speed, like, what stuck out to you is like, okay, why are we doing it this way? Like, what is your understanding? Amanda's got the detail. We're gen pop here. What is your sense of like, okay, what stuck out to you as being relevant? Relevant to putting this.

[B]

Melissa Murray, who's a wonderful constitutional scholar and a host of the Strict Scrutiny podcast, has a new book out about the Constitution. And I like, definitely did not pay enough attention in history in high school, despite having known Amanda for a million years, still had homework to do. And she talks about the Constitution as being a trauma informed document that like that to build on what Amanda was saying. These 55 guys, 39 who actually contributed and signed it, get together in this room and they're like, here's all of my damage from how the Articles of Confederation failed. And like, we don't want to do that again. Plus how do we revision a new kind of future? So like, to understand the Constitution as just as much, if not more about preventing a rerun of the past than. Or as it is about creating a new vision for how the country will function. Really critical that so much of it is addressing exactly how they're living at the time or the moment that they just came out of. And when you think about, yeah, when you think about that, that 250 years later we are still like governing ourselves based on responses to a really particular moment. That's illuminating for why it can be so frustrating and so confusing, but also just, wow, the compromises that they made for slavery, like that is. It is written into multiple articles of the Constitution. It required multiple amendments to correct it over time that they were concerned about getting everybody to agree to sign the damn thing. And the only way to do was to assure the southern slave holding states that the Constitution was not going to immediately nullify their ability to own slaves. So they guarantee it for a period of years up until what, 1808 is the original agreement.

[C]

20. 20 years plus one. Yeah.

[A]

Importation, right. I don't know if you said that. Importation, not just the practice, but yeah.

[B]

And they do it without saying the word slavery at all. So just the creative acrobatics to avoid talking about how this practice, the institution of chattel slave, is foundational to how the country was formed. It's foundational to how the economy had worked. And the only way to get the Southern states to sign the Constitution or the representatives from the Southern states was to allow them to continue it for at least a period of time. And then you start to see as the amendments come in, how we were responding to emancipation and how southern states attempted to hold on to the oppression of black people in one form or another, despite all of the amendments that have been attempted to reverse that, which

[C]

we are still doing, right?

[B]

Yes. I mean, Amanda and I like live in Virginia. We experience this every day. And how the laws of our state work. And in the position that Virginia and the rest of the south hold in national governance.

[C]

We have a constitution to our state constitution, constitutional amendment on the ballot in November that the referendum that the population's going to vote on to allow felons to get. Get their right to vote back. Or one of the few states where felons are automatically disenfranchised and we have to amend our Constitution to make that happen. And that law that felons were automatically disenfranchised. Here was a Jim Crow era voter suppression reaction to the 15th amendment. And that 15th amendment is there because of the failures of the constitutional convention. So 1787 and we are dealing with the fallout.

[A]

The thing that, I mean, maybe to go one step. So definitely the historical contingencies on the ground were probably number one with the bullet that shaped the way specifically. But there is, there are philosophical, you know, fountainheads here, headwaters. You know, it's essentially the Declaration of Independence via. Which is essentially John Locke and sort of the Enlightenment and everything that comes out of that John Locke. I mean, I didn't know this or I hadn't forgotten this. Right. That's where Jefferson like cribs. Exact language from John Locke in the decoration. Like long train of abuses like, like, come on, T.J. we don't need to do this like Just come up with something else.

[C]

Plagiarism. Just straight.

[A]

But yeah, John Locke. I mean this is important. We take it so for granted now. But I think it is important in this context if you're interested in understanding, to understand their understanding. Like why did we say stuff like all men are created equal. We shouldn't put to the side. We're going to keep in the halo of understanding. That didn't include women, that didn't include slaves, but within the people that they are thinking about this idea of the Taplerasa that you're born blank, that you are not good or bad or aristocracy or a God when you're born. So that if that is true, then democracy makes a lot more sense if everyone is equal. Where if you thought something other than that, then it's like, well then this class should rule or inherited wealth or whatever else should be. But if you have this idea of the tabul Rasa, then the democratic ideal makes a lot more sense because man exists in a state of nature and anything that happens to them after the fact is sort of ex post facto. And you don't really know, you can't really determine what's going to happen. So let's take it as red. Let's take it as something we hold to be self evident, which I always love that dodge like we're hold it like a baby rabbit and try not to crush it.

[C]

I always thought it was condescending in a fun way.

[A]

Yeah, okay. It's so condescending. And so then what do you do to protect that right? And that's where John Lock. That's where we get this separation of powers. There should be an executive, there should be a legislative branch, there should be a judiciary, where we should have a bill of rights. Like all this stuff kind of flows from that. But also at the same time in the person of Locke you get the central contradiction. Cause he was basically a hired pen and he helped write the North Carolina State Constitution which enshrined slavery. Like he did that for hire. Even at the same time he was coming up with this radical stuff. So like I think you just have to hold that there is no reconciling that. Like that's just a truth you have to hold in your heart about how this document came to be. And then from there, the other thing, they didn't have models like James Madison reading a bunch of books like, like what kind of governments ever exist. Like I guess we'll look at the Roman Senate. Like that's. That was the most proximal stuff. They had. So like, there was no real, like the English Bill of rights in 1689. And the Magna Carta is like, that's kind of. That's useful. But in terms of actually putting a state together that's supposed to run based on something, they didn't have a lot of precedent. So it's like a little bit of philosophy. Throw in some slavery, throw ins, we need to pay the army. And this it kind of made. It's like, these are the petri diss of life that you throw the stuff in there. And this is the sludge that walked out.

[B]

It really is a collection of ampersands in that way, because you get like, here's the legislative branch, here's the executive branch, here's the judicial branch. Here's what they're allowed to do, by the way. Here's how taxes can work, by the way. Maybe it's something resembling an electoral college. Like, it is a whole bunch of like, you can sort of imagine, you know, like a. Like a Hollywood scene of a startup where they've got their whiteboard and all their post its and somebody's like, oh, shit, we also need to talk about this thing. And that at some point they're like, okay, either that's an article on its own, or we can add that clause to this other article. Some of them make sense together. A lot of them, you're like, why are these two things in these articles together, Amanda? Are there reasons that those things are grouped in articles together that we mere mortals don't know, or is it a mystery?

[C]

A lot of it has to do with the trauma that you were talking about. Like, this isn't just a petri dish of Locke and Athens and all of that. It's also a good bit of like, oh, but parliament really screwed this up. And also that one British soldier was really mean to me when he was quartered in my home. So there's a lot of that. And there's a, you know, the nitpicky way that the committee wrote a lot of the actual text of it. Like, you've been on committee, you've been to Dem committee meetings. Like, do we have a quorum? How do we feel about this word? How do we feel about that word? All in favor? Aye. Okay, start over. So, like, it's just a mess because it's human. It's a human piece of paper that 55 dudes just like, got together. And I do want to say the halo of understanding that you were talking about is so important because, I mean, there's the example of the president. Right. There were proposals at the convention that an amendment be included later after ratification to clarify that the president could only be a white man. And the quotes from those notes are like, what if we get an old lady? Literally, what if we get an old lady? Or, you know, a word for a black person that I'm not going to repeat here. And then those were dismissed because they were so outside the realm of possibility. Like, the delegates were like, it's explicit in the document that it's a white man. It's super. Not nowhere does it say that anywhere. That's why homeboy was suggesting it, that we amend it. But it was just not. It didn't occur to them that any of the people who were not specifically in that room, other than some of the native tribes who they had to deal with for, like, tax and war purposes, were worthy of consideration. If you weren't property or someone who was going to be attacking us, you weren't really going to be in this document represented in any way. And at the same time, we're going to say all men are created equal. It's kind of a. It's hard to wrap your head around.

[A]

It's really hard. And in the. In the. So another thing that's interesting about the document construction that affects things that happen later that I think I'll throw the mic to Amanda a little bit later about the ratification process is. I don't know. I don't remember where it was agreed. Maybe Amanda, you remember, but that the deliberations would be secret. Like, the documents couldn't get out. Like, they didn't want leaks to the press about, you know, Ben Franklin. This is something I think Ben Franklin actually did propose, which is that the Supreme Court would be elected by the country's lawyers, which is just a wild idea. Which is just there were some wild ideas thrown around and like that. And so. And then what happened is they presented on hold to the states to ratify, and they determined in the. They got to make up the rules of the ratification in the document, which is a wild thing to do, too. They needed nine of the 13 states, but what they didn't want people is to, like, adjudicate it and stuff to come out and have to litigate it. And it was kind of an. A genius in terms of a negotiation tactic to present it whole cloth. And it's a straight up yes or down to the states. You don't get to attach amendments or vetoes or riders like some of the states, like, well, here's New York did up all these conditional stuff, and they're like, we're just not going to pay attention to some stuff you're attacking to it. But then it could be presented as you have to say yes or no to this whole cloth. And I don't know how else they would have done it, because then you get the state legislatures, which are all. The reason we're here is because they're inept, they cannot have input on this. But they did have a shared secrecy around the deliberations so that they could. They even say this, speculate, come up with dumb ideas, raise their hand and do something wild. And some of that stuff existed. We had to change them, and some of this stuff is still there. But I also think that's important to remember is, like, they were making stuff up. They were trying to come up with ideas like this stuff about what percentage of what you need to pass something, or three fifths compromise, or all this stuff really, we didn't have statistics or probability. Like, it really didn't exist, as they were just making stuff up at the same time. Like, we're living in this world of people that are doing the best they sort of understood. And some of it was just, like, wildly wrong and sort of stupid, but they didn't have a whole lot of precedent. I don't know. That's the thing that really got to me. Amanda, what do you think about this? The whole, like, how they presented it to the country and, like, how they put the thing together, like, the structure of it.

[C]

There it was. There was a lot of secrecy, but there was also a lot of machinations beforehand. Like, Madison arrived a few days early so that he could meet with other delegates who were also there early so that they could set up the Virginia plan as, like, no, we're going to start with this. This is going to be the foundation of the thing. So there were machinations, and then, yes, it was. I actually have this weird. I like to do these mental exercises about, like, what if this one thing that's completely outside of our control and is totally mundane was different? Like, what if instead of the sweltering Philadelphia summer with all the doors nailed shut or the windows nailed shut, they were literally nailed shut. They had had the convention over the winter when they had been, like, in as much of a hurry because they wouldn't have been so hot and sweaty and disgusting and uncomfortable the whole time and, like, literally scared of the plague, because that was always in a big city, a threat, like some fever was going to sweep through. So everybody wants to get in and out of town as fast as possible. Also, Congress was supposed to be meeting, so some of them were like off doing that job while they were. Also, it was chaotic and most of them weren't paid.

[A]

Like the government, like, the legislatures wouldn't pay them. And like, some of them wrote their own ticket. Like, this was a real. If you raised your hand, you could like showing up as half the battle. Like some of these people, like Benjamin Franklin's nephew, little nepotism just kind of showed up and took bad notes and you got to do the thing. Like. Like that's a really good thought. I hadn't thought about the winter time. I was thinking about what if it was in Maine or something more balmy at something like that at the same time.

[C]

Or in New York, like, where Congress was. Because part of the reason why the attendance was so low, they never had the full contingent of delegates in the room at any day ever. Because people were coming and going and some of them were going to New York because Congress was in session. So they had other jobs to do. So, like, why would you not just have this. This in New York? Because they wanted the symbolism of doing it in the same hall where they signed the Declaration. And like, that's cute, fine. But like, you would have had more help if you had just gone where the people were.

[B]

Like, it's helpful to me to just remember it's a group project.

[A]

Yes.

[C]

Like as you were saying, middle aged men. Right.

[B]

Like, this is a human document produced by a group project of a bunch of guys, as you were saying, nailed into a room in the middle of like, I call this the original wet hot American summer.

[C]

Like, you're just.

[A]

Think of the chafing. Think of the chafing.

[B]

Just the smells alone would have been by me.

[C]

You've probably got yellow fever, you freak.

[B]

Like, we all do creative work. Everyone listening to this has been part of a group project of some kind. And you know how that goes. Like this guy gets his pet thing that like, has to go in there or he's not gonna be cool with anybody else's stuff.

[A]

So you gotta get a way for Eldridge Jerry to shut up for a little while before he can get anything done. Yeah.

[B]

Somebody else is worried about this other pet project. These two guys have the same princip, but they can't agree on how it should be written down.

[A]

Oh, New Hampshire, nice of you to join us. 60 days late. Live free or die or show up. Pick two of the three.

[B]

Like just a nightmare of a group project assignment and humility, like it helps me with the humility because it can be so frustrating to be like, what were, what were they thinking? Why is it written this way? Oh my God, like that failure of imagination in some of these places. But like, like we've, we know how group projects go.

[C]

It can be. The structure of it makes sense. Like what they ultimately came up with as far as like the articles in the order that they're in has it tells a story. I think, like, I think Article 1 is about Congress on purpose. I have to have this later on in the notes, but I am an Article 1 supremacist. Congress is supposed to be the most powerful branch of government. And a lot of the problems we have now are because that is not what is happening. It is not functioning the way that it was intended to. And then the President and then the judiciary are right now we're almost in the exact opposite, opposite order of power balance in the country. And then also here's what the states do and then also here's how we ratify this thing. And then the amendments are everything we forgot. So like it does make some sort of logical sense the way that they did ultimately lay it out. But the process to get there was Bunny. I mean, and then you even had like Hamilton who was the most obnoxious of the founders, full stop. The most obnoxious person. I'm sorry, Lin Manuel, but like such an annoying guy who's just in the corner like, well, what if we had a king actually. Dude.

[A]

Yeah, I know. Seriously, we just, we are greedy on that. Alex.

[B]

We're moving. And they did wisely write that in. It is written in. I think it's also usefully vague. And they even sort of get at this in the document itself, which is one of the both real benefits of this. It's incredibly helpful to the framers and to us today that it's usefully vague. It's also incredibly challenging. Like a real double edged sword of the Constitution that we get to see their focus on constraining the federal government, but it left a lot of, of openings for questions about what individuals could do. And so in that story you're telling Amanda, like as I read it this time, the thing that really stuck with me was how focused they were because of the trauma on here's what the federal government can and can't do and how much the enumeration of individual rights was a like, oh shit, we didn't mention that originally. Let's write some amendments. We create the Bill of rights from those first 10amendments and then we're continuing to adjudicate that at today what individuals are allowed to do and whether it should just be assumed that if it doesn't say the federal government's in charge of it, that means individuals are in charge of it or do do those individual rights need to be stated as

[A]

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[B]

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[B]

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[C]

I mean it's an interesting, again, like an interesting thought experiment. If we didn't have the Bill of Rights or an amendation process at all, and there was a lot of opposition to the idea of an individual Bill of Rights, especially the ones that we ended up getting the 10 first, first 10amendments. Because the fear there was if we start listing them, then the assumption will be if we don't list it, it's not included. Right. Like you shouldn't have to enumerate a thing that is infinite was the idea.

[A]

Yeah. It's like saying I'm gonna list of ways I promise not to kill you.

[C]

Exactly.

[A]

Right? Yeah. It's like, wait a minute, hold on. You don't have to say chainsaw and flamethrower, just take them all.

[C]

So if we didn't have a Bill of Rights, I mean I lean on the idea that we would be worse off. But. But there's Also an alternate universe where, like, those were just never questioned because you don't. The government maybe wouldn't have had. Or the men who ran it wouldn't have had. You know, I'm coming after the First Amendment because it protects people from doing X, Y, Z. If it didn't exist, did they feel the need to come after it? It's just like a weird. I don't know.

[A]

Yeah. Would the standard of proof be higher if it was more nebulous? Right. Like we did? I think that is a real Rebecca. And I always say you can't a B test the universe, but I'd put that one in the old time machine. If I could just sort of let the Monte Carlo simulation, a version of the universe that takes.

[B]

It does reveal wisdom here among the framers. Like, it's the ideal that you could just assume that individual rights are infinite and that you wouldn't need a specific list of them. But they were aware of how humanity functions and that you did need some list of at least, like, the big, broad, basic ones that you could point to and be like, well, actually, we do have this one. We do have this other one.

[C]

Yeah. And also, like, the most popular, wealthiest state was Virginia, and Virginia was never gonna let a federal government get away without a Bill of Rights. That's kind of our shtick.

[A]

Yeah. Thomas Jefferson, I think on his tombstone, it's like, declaration of Independence, Revolutionary War. And I wrote the Virginia Bill of Rights. Like, those are the three things on there.

[B]

Yeah. We have the state flag with the sixth emperor Tyrannus on it. Like, this is in. As Amanda's saying, it's in Virginia's DNA.

[A]

To go back to Amanda's point about the order of the articles, I think maybe that's a helpful way of framing, like, the order of sort of of the thing. Like, what did they. What were they worried about that informed the way they put the thing together. I kind of have a loose list here. Maybe we can power rank them, but something in this order, they're both what they cared about, but also obstacles or, like, just the realities of the maze they were trying to get through. Something to do with states rights.

[C]

Right.

[A]

Like, states rights, especially how to deal with small states, I guess, is really the question within that question how to deal with the problem of. This should be a government for the people, but we sort of don't trust the people. Like, this fundamental historical thing of like, okay, but can we. How can we make sure they're adults of the room? Even if people in these territories are going to be voting for these things, that's one. The problem question of slavery, the question of trade, and especially international relations in the form of the executive. And then I think maybe lastly is like how to change things. Like those are sort of four things that I have, Amanda. What did I miss? Or how would you sort of power rank them or slice them into a pie of, you know, how this thing was weighted and how they were.

[C]

Yeah, I think that the first, I think the first consideration was money. I think that it was because that was the main driver behind all of the contemporary issues that they were dealing with at the time especially.

[A]

And what do you mean by. I mean. I think I know what you mean. But money specifically being like the, like

[C]

the currency problems, it was causing so many issues both for like every day. I'm using scare quotes here, Farmer. Every class that existed, which is not the same as the class based classes we have now, but every class that existed in colonial America or early America was struggling because of the lack of a national currency, the inability to pay off the debt of the, of the states individually and then later of the nation. Because without, without and this like Fine Hamilton, you were right about that one thing. Without a history of paying your debt correctly, you're not going to be able to trade with other countries because do

[A]

we owe the French like a whole bunch of money at this point? Like for the, like this. One of the things we were worried about is like we got to pay the French or we're really going to be screwed here.

[C]

Yes, paying, paying your soldiery. Like obviously Shay's rebellion was a cautionary tale that if we don't pay these people and make their lives a little bit easier when it comes to financial situation, then the people who we trained to kill will probably do that.

[A]

You got to pay the people with guns that they're more likely to do what you say they want them to do, you know.

[C]

Yes. And like, so the, the, I think the main, the main weighty thing was we call ourselves a nation. Right. We are brand new. And the things that immediately make a nation. What's the word? Not real, but like valid. We can't access any of those things. And almost all of those have to do with commerce, international, interstate and between consumers, like business people. So I think that was the first thing. And then like the individual rights kind of were. Maybe it's just those two books like how do we fix the commerce stuff? How do we create a government that fixes those commerce things without making people in the individual states in this federalist System that we really like because we read a lot of books too mad. And then also, Virginia's gonna yell at

[A]

us without a bill of Frank. Yeah, yeah. That's something that's important to remember. It's, like, how powerful Virginia was at this moment. I think you said it before, but, like, I wanna put a double button on, like, the seat of power. You have Washington, there's just, like, the biggest state they've got agrarian. Like, they're at the port. Like, it's just so important at the same time that, you know, frankly, Rhode island and some of these other places worried about getting swallowed up by Virginia

[C]

if they did well, Rhode island didn't even go well.

[A]

Rhode Island. I've got some words from Rhode Island a little bit at the same time.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

Rhode island as a reader. Rebecca, what did you feel like reading the document? What did you feel coming to the fore is like, man, these guys really care about X more than I would have thought. I thought they were caring about it or less a lot Y than my own sort of extant understanding was.

[B]

I mean, this. It had been a long time since I had read the whole Constitution. Like, you know, my first exposure was in middle school, probably like everybody else. And I've dipped in and out since then. Usually, like, what's going on in the news and what do I need to revisit? But as I was saying earlier, like, really, how deeply slavery is threaded through the compromises to continue allowing it and the ways that the framers had to kowtow to the representatives from Southern states. When we look at what's going on politically right now, when we look at what's like, the battle over redistricting and gerrymandering all through the American South. It all has roots in things that come from the Constitution. And we have to. And we have to understand that there's no way around it. And it's incontrovertible because they, like you can point to it in black and white, that this is what they're making exceptions for, which is validating to see and also increasingly maddening given what the political discourse around that, like having. Amanda's a lifelong Southerner. I've been here for almost 20 years, like states rights was, is and always has been about defending the institution of slavery and the commerce that surrounded it. And it's written into the country's foundational documents. And that should not be a radical statement because it is right there in black and white, that that's what they were doing. And the only way for us to do anything Differently is to amend. And that Constitution, it's in there. And just really seeing that and seeing how repetitive it is, it's in so many of the articles and so many of the clauses that come back around. And I started kind of. I wish that I had tallied, you know, like, oh, here it is again. Here it is again. But that was really the thing that struck me because it's underneath all the conversations that we're having right now about how voting can and should work. And there's just a lot of folks that don't want to acknowledge it here, here.

[C]

And the Constitution's not interested in voting, like, at all. There's nothing about enfranchising literally anyone. They would have preferred not to, actually. So, yeah, there was certainly nobody sitting there thinking, like, what happens when.

[B]

If.

[C]

If slavery, the importation of slaves goes away in 1808, the first time we let them do it, which is what happened. Congress immediately outlawed the importation of slaves because it made them wealthier. Side note, there's no concept of, like, if those folks become citizens or what do we do with them then? If they become citizens, how would we let them vote? How would. How is anyone here allowed to vote or thinking about voting? Like, it was very much left up to states.

[A]

States. Yeah. And so there was some. There was some, I guess, practical thinking about these, like, especially new states. You know, we. We have all this unincorporated territory that are eventually going to become states. There's thinking ahead to the future, battles about are gonna be slave or free, but also, how are you gonna vote you if. If your polling place is 20 miles away? I think it's helpful to think about the technological deficit that they couldn't imagine in all kinds of ways. But the practical realities of voting were concerns. They couldn't figure it out. And it was one of those things, like in negotiating, too, you kind of let go of things you don't care about as much. Let's let that be a sot to the state. Let that be sort of a. The states can decide how they're going to vote for themselves. Not understanding, not thinking, not caring about. Oh, my God, we just gave them a hornet's nest of stuff that's going to be stinging us for the next 250 years at the same time. All right. Our favorite part of this generally, Amanda, is our stray thoughts. And I want to give us a lot of time because we have a lot of them here. But before we leave, the. How it was made, why it's important. What do you enter. Enter into the zero to, well, read, record about, like, why people should care, what they should know about the document itself.

[C]

Why people should care. Oh, God. Like, in this country or outside of

[A]

this country, wherever you want to go, whatever's top of mind for you.

[C]

All right, I got to put my pen down for this. Why you should care. It is impossible to defend yourself if you don't know what's defensible. It is impossible. I'm speaking mostly to people in this country here. It is impossible if you are an American, to understand where you are legally allowed to push back if you don't know what the legal framework is in the first place. And this is something I've been saying for a year and a half, you know, like, since the inauguration, since I started making political content, I would talk about, about, well, Trump is doing that. It's unconstitutional. Or this. Desantis is doing this, it's unconstitutional. And the response I would usually get is like, well, they don't care about the Constitution, so what does it matter? It matters because you can't fight if you don't know what the fight is. You cannot push if you don't know what you're pushing. If you don't know what the First Amendment says. How are you ever to possibly understand when your rights are being violated? Like, you can have this vague, like,

[B]

I don't know, this feels bad.

[C]

Like, how dare you? But if you know the actual text, then you know what to push back on. And you know, this is your despite. I'm going to get on a high horse here, but, like, despite what the administration is currently trying to do around redefining what a citizen is, your birthright or your naturalization, right, if you were born here or became a citizen, is this document. And even not that, even if you were just on the soil, there are portions of the Constitution that are protective of people regardless of whether you're a citizen or not. Not all of them. In Second Amendment, there's stuff that's like, if you're here, illegal, whatever, but if you are on the soil of this place, then these are the rights that apply to you. And I understand that, like, the Constitution was written in language that was closer to Shakespearean English than our English. It can be different.

[A]

It's a great point. It is, like, literally and temporarily closer to Shakespeare.

[C]

Yes, yes. So it's like, it can be a little heady. The sentence structure is a little weird. There are versions out there that are, like, annotated, like the Murray book. Or, like, you can even get kind of translations into, like, Simpler English, if that's helpful for you. The other thing is that like so much of our understanding of the Constitution as it, as it exists now in our daily lives has more to do with Supreme Court rulings or the way that states have interpreted the rights of the Constitution. So all that is true. I'm not saying you read the Constitution, you're suddenly a con law lawyer. That's not real. But you should have a basic understanding. And it's just like, you know, as we were talking about civic religion in the beginning, it's just like the, the idea that if you are a church going person, you should probably read that book.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

If you are a person who lives in this country and like wants to be, be politically or civically engaged at all, you need to know of what you speak. Like, you need to understand the foundational text. And you could just get that from the Declaration of independence, which is 10 page, you know, very short. It's like a cool introduction and then a whole bunch of bitching. Vote for Thomas Jefferson and the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. Also I will plug is very enlightening because the list of grievances which comprise the majority of the document could be read right this second like this.

[A]

I, I didn't go back and read the Declaration. I should, I should have, I didn't think to do that. That's fascinating.

[C]

Yeah, I've done a lot of videos about that are like, and then Here are the 14 grievances from the Constitution or from the Declaration that we leave it against the king that Trump, you

[A]

don't even have to play Mad Libs. It's just to directly put it right on top of it this.

[B]

Yeah, to build on that. Like it's empowering to understand how this country works. And not just as Amanda was saying, like what your rights are and how you can push back on things, but just fundamentally that the greatest antidotes to anxiety of any flavor are information and action. So you can come here to your source material and get information and then start to understand. Like, I know that one of the things you get Amanda all the time is like, well, how can he do that? Or why do they think they can do that? And the answer to most of those questions, it's either in the foundational documents or in the Supreme Court rulings that come out of them. Like, here is the crack in the way that this article is written. Or here's the like open space, the ambiguous part of some Supreme Court ruling that makes them think that they can legally defend whatever it is that they're doing. Like, it looks like a lot of spaghetti is being thrown at the wall. But there actually is some kind of legal theory behind a lot of things that the administration attempts, behind what any administration attempts, like, not just the one that we're in, but all presidents try stuff, all Congresses try stuff. Understanding, like, what that is, coming from, what your own reading of it is, but then also how it's been interpreted over time is really helpful for like, okay, okay, these are the arguments that are being made. How do I grasp it? And then if there's action to take, some of that action flows from there. Oh, this is a thing that Congress can address. Maybe I should call my rep. Oh, this is a thing that comes out of this thing. Maybe I should. I don't donate money to the aclu. Like, there are just like, that is a really great starting place for developing your understanding of yourself as an active citizen, which is again, the whole point of having written foundational documents that citizens can refer to too.

[C]

I also think that the. Sorry, no, no, you go beyond just reading the deck, like the actual text of it.

[A]

It's.

[C]

It's we.

[B]

Yeah, it's thin.

[C]

This includes the articles. So it's like half that. Coming to understand. You can just read a Wikipedia page. I don't care. But if you come to understand the ratification process and how, how long it took the arguments that the states had, some of them, pa, you know, Delaware passed in day one, plus Delaware sure sounds great, whatever, you know, but Virginia, New York, like North Carolina and Rhode island didn't ratify the Constitution until we had already had a Congress and a president and then they were fine. Rhode island had to be threatened with terror.

[A]

Yeah, they did.

[C]

Before they were like, fine. God, you know, like we had to threaten them with military action before they would come along. And North Carolina just kind of didn't feel like it. They were good. Like more solid. So understanding. Not just that they had to lock themselves in a room to make this happen in the first place, that the arguments about it were heated and contentious and really personal. That they hated each other, a lot of them. But also even coming out of it, once they sent it to the states, the arguments there, the thing barely happened. Like we, we passed the Constitution by the skin of our teeth. And getting into, like, the arguments in the state conventions where they were, you know, the Federalists and the anti Federalists were arguing with each other about whether or not they were going to pass it, if they were going to attach stuff to it, whatever. Sometimes it's by one vote, to vote, 10 votes. Like, we barely got this document. And it's also where we got partisan politics. As much as people like to quote, quote, George Washington and his farewell address and his, like, parties are bad guys, in reality, the argument over the Constitution birthed the first two American political parties. And we have been fighting with each other in basically the same lanes ever since over states rights, like, from the jump. So this really is. It's like Genesis. You sit down and you read Genesis, and then you read all the stuff behind it and, like, the scholarly information about where Genesis came from, who wrote it, what tribe, et cetera, and you get a much fuller understanding of where a story like that would be, would come from or be born. And I think it's the same thing here. And, like, one of my biggest theories of politics based on American history is that they're all just dudes. Like, they're, you know, they're dudes with itchy butts because they never bathed and they were wearing really scratchy wool all the freaking time. And then they died at 45. Like, you know, it's just so human and messy and dirty, the whole thing.

[A]

Yeah. I think the other thing that struck me about looking at it again and thinking about, you know, what the use might be for sort of a civilian, someone who's interested in politics and interested in the war world, but not in the Scrabble of every day or following each individual bill or whatever is. I think it can help funnel you away from either doomerism of like, nothing can ever be done, and away from magical thinking. Like, what if we just Xed? Right? Like, neither of those is very helpful. It's like, okay, here are the rules of the game now. Not all people are. I know Amanda's a Jurassic park fan. A lot of it is Raptors hitting the fence and seeing which one's electrified. Like, what can I get away with? You know? And then how can I strain the system? And that has certainly happened, happening. But the system is kind of all we have, right? Like, these are the rules. And if you play quote unquote by them, I think more things can actually happen and change. But also you can have a different understanding and not just, like, fly into the lands of flights of fancy about other ways of being in the world. There's nothing out there for it. There's nothing out there for us, Amanda. There's nothing there.

[C]

Please read it. Like, the number of people in my comments who do. Why don't we 25th amendment them? Because the creator on TikTok was like, I think the 25th Amendment says you can impeach everyone all at once or move an entire administration. Administration. Read it. Yes, one page. That is not what it says.

[B]

I made so many notes going through this time. All of the places that are like this requires 2/3 of the Senate or 2/3 of both houses. And because like in our political landscape, the fantasy that we see people have most often is the impeach and remove. Like if we just win the midterms, we can impeach and remove everybody. And like theoretically. But that's a really, really big win that's flipping all the things 2/3 of both House.

[C]

Like, there's a reason we've never removed a president. No, even the ones we have successfully

[A]

impeached though really, we could do so for any reason. I mean that's the other thing. It's like there is no, like high crimes and misdemeanors is nothing like you could say just whatever. And like Supreme Court justice. What is it? The term good behavior. Have fun figuring what that means out at the same time. So like it's both more rigid and more open ended than I think most people understand understand. And most people don't deal well with that kind of collision of, you know, firm rules. But also we could change it if we want. Like people don't like that.

[B]

I mean, there's that usefully vague thing again, also a great argument for limiting Supreme Court justice terms because how the country functions is so subject to interpretation of the Constitution that any person having extended like decades long influence on that interpretation can meaningfully shift things for centuries.

[A]

I'm completely off our docket. I think we've covered what's it like to read this. I think we've covered who wrote it. I think we could mostly say we've covered why it's important here before we move into a potpourri of idiosyncratic takes, which is like what I like to call it. Straight thoughts, Rebecca or Amanda, Anything you want to enter into the record before

[B]

we get into Amanda's eyes. Just got really big.

[C]

So I want to know whatever reminded me.

[A]

Okay, yes.

[C]

Of something we all know, Hubert. Whatever. I. But I do think it is worth pointing out who did not write it. Not just obviously enslaved people, obviously women were not included. Obviously the native tribes who lived on this land before we even got here, not included. Although it is funny that when, when the Constitutional convention was convened, leaders of several native tribes were coming to New York to meet with Congress to negotiate some treaty and none of the people Were there because they were all at the con, the convention. So these. The. These, like, kings of these tribes showed up and they. And they. Well, Congress is gone. We're so sorry. Like, it was just such a nightmare anyway. None of those people wrote it. But also a lot of the founders didn't. Like, there were people who signed the Declaration of Independence who, like, okay, intervening year, some of them were dead, whatever. But who refused to sign the Constitution, who came to the convention and would not sign it because they did not appreciate X, Y, Z parts of it. You brought up Elbridge Jerry earlier. I love this guy. He's such a wanker. He's like my favorite founder. He did everything. He fought in the war. He signed the Declaration of Independence. He was a Mass. He was the governor of Massachusetts. He was Madison's vp. But while he was governor of Massachusetts, he signed a gerrymandering bill. That's where we get the word. Albert, Jerry, Gary, whatever. Doesn't matter. But he did not. He wouldn't sign the Constitution because he didn't like the three fifths clause. He didn't like the way that it empowered slave states. Patrick Henry, probably Virginia's, one of Virginia's most famous founders, right? Wouldn't even go to the convention because he thought it was illegal. And then once the. Once it was, once it came to Virginia to be ratified, he. He spoke for day, literally for days against it. Like, hated it. Just hated it. So again, it goes back to this idea, this mythology that we had, that the founders, like, had this vision for a city on a hill and passed it together and handed us this fully formed democracy or democratic republic or whatever. They wanted to murder each other most of the time.

[A]

Well, and to that point, too, Amanda, you know, it mattered that George Washington was there, even if he didn't say anything. Like, that's the game. That they. The whole thing, legitimacy. That he sitting there with a gavel and that Benjamin Franklin was, like, living. He was 81 years old and had gout. Like, if it wasn't in Philadelphia, I don't know.

[C]

He's not a minister.

[A]

Yeah, he's just like. He's giving people wine at the same time. But the other thing that's so fascinating about that point, the human. I agree with both of you. We cannot hammer the humanness enough. They're all staying together at boarding houses. Like, what a weird idea. Like, what are the ultimate, like, proto corporate retreat. It was very like, they're in these boarding houses and they're having these. And the record about the debates they'd be really contentious about something. And next day they just pass it by acclamation because they figured it out over dinner the night before. Like all this sort of stuff happens. And like, I mean, that's just a reality. And I'm not sure what to do with that, except to think that we can make it up too. Right? Like this. Like, to Amanda's point, this is not a fully formed, you know, platonic ideal of a government. It's sort of the best they could come up with at the time, given what they wanted and who they hated and what was going on on. But they built into it the idea to change. And here's the other thing that's important, I think, to think about. They had no idea that we'd be still talking about this document250. There's a bunch of if clauses, like if this thing is still around, we don't know. They were sort of just trying to get away. They were trying to get to the next stage of the United States not going away or whatever they thought of it. I think they assumed that they would be radically altered. And how little it's been shown changed, I think might be the biggest surprise to them about the document 100% at all.

[B]

Well, they made it so damn hard

[A]

to change it, but I don't think they knew that. No, my sense of it, they didn't know how hard it was going to be that hard. They didn't know it was going to be hard.

[C]

The amendation clause is based on a lot of the different state constitutions. States had constitutions before the country had a constitution, obviously. And a lot of the state constitutions had struggled with this already had struggled with no amendation process or a really difficult amendation process. And so they were cognizant of that. That like the article 5 is, was probably the most agreed upon article in, in the whole thing. Like, yes, we do need to have a way to change this. And sort of famously, Thomas Jefferson said this isn't in the, in the Constitution, obviously, but he said in letters to Madison throughout the process, because he was in France, he was not there. And neither was John Adams, he was in England. That governments should be burned down and started over every generation. And to him that was every 20 years. So if Jefferson, you know, appeared behind me then I hate that guy. But if Jefferson appeared behind me right now, he'd be like, you haven't. It's still this. I expect this thing to be rewritten every five fricking seconds. But he wasn't there. And so that's another fun thought experiment. What if Jefferson had been, instead of being in France, had been in Philadelphia for this?

[A]

Yeah. What if you got some, like, anti. Federalist. Federalist papers being printed during. Like, what if he was leaking it to himself, like, during the convention? Like, be a whole different kind of gossipy piece of shit idea at the same time.

[C]

And him and Hamilton, who famously hated each other later, they never. They didn't meet until Washington convened his first cabinet. They had never met in person. If they had met in person in Philadelphia during the Constitutional Convention instead of later when the government was already convened and they were secretary of whoever the fuck, what different document would we have gotten out of those two personalities?

[A]

There's a couple of principles. Not principles like, I don't know, rubrics or heuristics. Like the three fifths compromise, the two thirds. Whatever. I was thinking about Rebecca, us just doing the company and thinking of external principles. Principles like, okay, what principle do we have that we can base anything on? And then sometimes like, like I was thinking about Kahneman, Tversky a lot during this behavioral economics and behavioral psychology, because they thought two thirds was a lot more lenient because they were coming from unanimity in the Continental Congresses. Like, it's much easier than everybody, and they're right, but still really damn hard. And the three fifths compromise about, you know, how to apportion representation with slavery waves that they. They were sort of stuck with an external principle because that's the same formula they used to determine how the states would fund the Revolutionary War. So, like, neither side had any leg to stand on to renegotiate some of these things. Like, okay, it's easier than that. We're going to do that. But it doesn't come from anywhere. And they didn't know anything, so they sort of picked numbers. It's so wild.

[B]

I mean, it's that. I think that's helpful to remember. And it's also interesting, though, that they come to the Constitutional Convention with the like, oh, we've got to burn this all down. The Articles of Confederation don't work. We have to burn it all down. And yet they're not willing to burn down some of other existing principles and create a new way forward for it, which it's human again. Like, you can only foresee the things that you can foresee based on the things you've already seen and how you think things might go wrong or could be expanded or abused going forward. But those, like, those limitations, what they were and weren't willing to Question I think is really fascinating.

[C]

I mean, it was to the south, right. Like the north was absolutely. The delegates from the Northern states were absolutely willing to ask the questions about apportionment and, you know, like Madison's Virginia plan. What that. The. That the convention kind of opened on as like the. The foundational starting point for argument was to a bicameral legislation apportioned by population, both Senate and the House, or what would become the Senate and the House, and with counting slaves as fully. Fully as a person. And then the small states didn't like that. Jersey didn't want. Jersey wanted a unicameral legislation where everybody Senate with no House of Representatives and no counting of enslaved people. And then the kinetic compromise mushed it together. But while we were having arguments about the New Jersey plan, which weren't very long, where the enslaved states would lose a lot of power and the populous states would lose a lot of power, South Carolina threatened to leave. There was just no. They were apt that we will leave.

[A]

Yeah. Georgia and South Carolina were unnegotiable with. When it came to slavery. They would even talk, Amanda, like it would come up in the thing and they. They would just sit there. They just wouldn't even say anything.

[B]

It feels to be so much like that principle of don't negotiate with terrorists. Like that there were just a couple of these states who had like, pretty, in my reading, unreasonable takes on things and unreasonable demands that were financially motivating for them, but that the framers were allowed themselves to be held hostage by those guys. And in some ways, maybe, maybe it was unavoidable, but just the degree to which getting the thing passed hinged on not freaking out the Southern states so much that they all would bail and walk away from the table.

[A]

Well, I think you're right. I mean, I think it's not the worst way to think about. Amanda can correct me if and how much I'm wrong about this, but you could do worse than a simplified understanding that a lot of the states just wanted to form a union and then the slave states wanted to uphold slavery. And that was kind of the battle lines to some degree. Right. Like, and so a lot of the. Maybe all of the concessions about slavery where we just want to get something done. Georgia and South Carolina and North Carolina aren't going to play ball if we do this. We want a union. And a lot of them were railing against slavery, easing the enslaved. I think there's really interesting to look at the language around. There was a lot of people that were against slavery, like Benjamin Franklin joined the anti abolitionist movement in 1789. He only emancipated his own slave in 1787. Like, we're right. A lot of these people, like, right on the cusp and really eloquent feeling. Modern speeches against slavery. But I think the thing that's hard to feel now. It's hard for me to feel now is they cared about it, but not enough. Not enough.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

They cared about it using language we would understand, but they didn't care about it enough to be like, we're gonna die on this hill. Screw you, Georgia. And so that's why the Civil War. 80 years later. I have a hot take about all this a little bit. There's more of a warm take.

[C]

Elbridge, bless him, he didn't sign it. You know, and there were Delta delegates who did not come to the Constitutional Convention, but were delegates of the state conventions that were the ratifying conventions who. Absolutely. Especially in the north, Massachusetts, places like that, who just wouldn't. Wouldn't broke it. Like, absolutely not. We are not.

[A]

They didn't want their name on it, even though they didn't know, but they literally didn't want their name on it.

[C]

Exactly. A document that legitimized the slave trade. They didn't want to be associated with it. So, like, the idea that it was inevitable or that it was just the times or whatever. Completely false. Also just the times where abolitionists who wouldn't sign it because. Because it was a moral stain on their name and they turned out to be right.

[A]

Yeah. My take on that is sort of. It was pragmatic and wrong at the same time. Like, history bore out that they just screwed that like the chickens were going to come home to roost. They were just sort of fluttering them into the distance for a little while longer.

[C]

And it made it harder. Like, if they had abolished the slave trade at the Constitutional Convention or even put into place a gradual abolition of it over the next however many years. Years. I think they could have gotten there. Like, I think they could have gotten to a place where, like, the founders, even the ones who owned enslaved human beings, most of them were like, this ain't right. You know, like. And you can read their letters. They knew. They knew.

[A]

They knew they had Mark Ruffalo in Spotlight. They knew and they did nothing.

[C]

But after we get cotton later in the early 1800s, then they stop giving.

[A]

That's such a great point that people think that we kind of smush our historical understanding of slavery to, like, this is what slavery was like from the beginning to Then. But it wasn't that way.

[C]

No.

[A]

Those things really did change when we had.

[C]

When our. When the South's primary exports were tobacco and wheat and rice. The slave trade was on its way out.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

Once it became cotton and cotton and enslaved human beings became worth more than the land that the south inhabited. They were never going to let that go. Never. So if the Constitutional Convention had done something about it from the jump, even a gradual abolition of it, I think we could have prevented the civilization war without this massive stain on our, you know, our original sin.

[A]

Yeah. I wonder if they got it backwards by eliminating the slave tribe by 1808. Because all that really did is make it more valuable to get people up soon. Like if they said if they had an open ended thing. I don't know that Georgia and everyone gets. As many people as many slaves were brought. As many people. Let me put it the way I want to put it. As many people were brought from Africa to be enslaved. From the signing of The Declaration to 1808 is the complete history of slavery up to that point in America. America. Because they were trying to get in before the circus shut down. Right. So like if it's more open and the Civil War happens, you just get less slave years per person because they're not trying to pack it all in at the same. But they. That was a comprehensive. You don't know. This is an unintended consequence. They were trying to negotiate something but they just, you know, unintended consequences are real. But they just didn't fight for it. I think that's an important thing to know. It wasn't that they didn't know. They knew. They did say things about it. But when push came to show of. They really didn't fight. They just really didn't. I'm not intending to soften it. They just didn't care.

[C]

Like what Rebecca was saying about negotiating with terrorists. There were fewer slaveholders at the convention than there were people who were not slaveholders. Like this. This really did turn into a tyranny of the minority. And it's one that we still have.

[A]

It's so. That's so great. Because they didn't see that. That even in this moment of voting, they didn't see, like, oh, we really need less of a minority to hold things up. Because what's happening to them right there at that moment, like maybe 51% would be enough for something like this at the same time. All right, Rebecca, anything else for you before we get to the most fun part, which is straight thoughts.

[B]

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[A]

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[B]

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[A]

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[B]

No, let's do it.

[A]

All right, then you get to lead off. We just have stuff here. I don't. We have no order. We're just gonna have to kind of like Hungry Hungry Hippos are straight.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

Amanda.

[B]

Name checked Patrick Henry earlier. And I was reading, I think it was in Melissa Murray's book, that one of the reasons Patrick Henry Henry wouldn't participate was he was concerned that the Constitution assumed that leaders would always be honest and selfless. And he said, show me that age and country where the rights and liberties of the people were placed on the sole chance of their rulers being good men without a consequent loss of liberty. You know, famously the give me liberty or give me death guy. But that feels very present, continually applicable today, like that. The framers didn't want the country to be dependent on any one thing. We have the three branches. We have checks and balances and the balance of power. But it does assume that the leaders are. It assumes good faith from the leaders. And that assumption, critical error.

[A]

I've got one for you for both. I saw this and I was thinking about this and reading some of the transcripts and notes, I almost wonder if Washington was a little bit too good of a leader. Leader in the Revolutionary War, too selfless. Because it gave people a false sense of, we're gonna have generals that are like Washington. Like, what if he was a little bit more of an asshole? Right? Because they were. They just assumed he was gonna be the first president. Look what's possible with Washington. He was like, very stoic on his demeanor. He didn't really get in the mix. If he was more like Hamilton or one of these other, like, pugilistic bastards, they're like, all right, we need an Executive but we need more checks because what if just wait until Alexander Hamilton is probably president. They couldn't really see that at the same time. Anyway. That's. That's my sort of semi hot take in that. Amanda, why don't you pick up a stray thought anywhere you want to go.

[C]

My stray thought is that the anti Federalists were right. Every criticism that the people who opposed the ratification of the Constitution had was correct. There was no Bill of Rights. That was a big sticking point. It is not protective enough of individual liberty liberties. The standing army is dangerous. They were right about that. As we have seen in Minneapolis especially a standing military force by a federal government is a dangerous thing. We are probably too large to be a functional occupy like Republic functioning in federalism. That was probably true. And the Senate is an aristocracy. That was one of the biggest criticisms of anti Federalists was that the creation of the Senate through the three fifths clause and by that that the creation of the electoral college just empowers aristocrats and turns the federal government into a class war against the middle and lower classes. And they were right. So like far be it for me to agree with Patrick Henry who had 17 children and locked his wife in

[A]

a basement and enslaved and several hundred slaves. I think if we're doing a body count on slaves.

[B]

Yeah, nobody wants to be on Patrick Henry's team. But yet here we all are today.

[C]

You know there were a ton of anti Federalists in Massachusetts, Massachusetts and Rhode island. And I'll, you know, so fine. I will align myself with the Yankees, whoever. It doesn't matter. They were all right.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

The problem was obvious about the Constitution were obvious from the jump if I

[A]

remember right to the central sort of locuses of support for the Constitution after it came out of the committee were sort of the mercantile class because their number one concern was the money stuff which it did fix. I mean like it did plug those particular holes. Like let's just do this. I need to move some tiny baby. Like I don't. The rest of this stuff really doesn't matter. And I think too something within that. You said Rebecca, the stacking nature of the electoral college and the Senate. I don't think they quite saw how those two things on top of each other would make it less representational because they. I think I said this before but they really wanted to be a democracy without doing democracy because like okay, we. It needs to come from the people. But how. So could. How we. How could we have it before then by the people but also not at the same Time.

[B]

I mean, notably, democracy does not appear. That word is nowhere in the United States context.

[A]

No. And they, I think they just, they hedged. And that hedge has been painful. Probably the most vociferous argument I ever got in a classroom was when I was in college. You guys know that I'm labeled just to go off on people. It's in my nature to do. This was about the Senate. Cause I grew up in Kansas. I'm loving the Senate. I said, you know, know the senate. This is 1994, like, or 1997. The Senate seems like a really bad idea. And I remember everyone in the class looking at me going, what are you talking about? And I was like, that was my first sort of sense. Like, people thought of it as like the Bible. It's like, what? You can't. The Senate's. The Senate. You do the Senate. And we had Bob Dole and everyone loved the Senate because you're Kansas, you're a small state. But I was like, look at, look at this man. I'm like in this blue dot Lawrence, Kansas, this college town, like trying to vote for Bill Clinton like an idiot, like in 1880 year old. And the Senate seemed so bad to me then. And now all the people I get an argument with that are liberals, all think the same thing. But like, it was obvious to me as an 18 year old. But then the same thing it showed me is like the, the ex. That it exists already. It's again, it's kind of in Tversky. Rebecca. Like, it's such an impediment to doing any kind of change because it's there already at the same time, in the

[C]

defense of the Senate.

[A]

All right, let's fight.

[C]

I've defined, I've defended Patrick Henry and now I have to defend the Senate. And I hate both of these things. So that's weird. But just like the context here, there was no America. Okay? So people and their concept of themselves was based on their state. I'm a Delawarean, I'm a Virginian. There was no, I'm an American. So the fear that the small states had going into the Constitutional Convention was that the larger states, who had no ties to them whatsoever, most people never left their county, much less their state, had never been met. Someone from another state was that the larger states would swallow them up violently economically, by force if necessary. That was not outside the realm of possibility that if you're Delaware, one day New York is going to be like, you know what? We would, we would love that port. And we're just going to go take it. So they had, I think both. They had practical reasons for wanting more power in representation in Congress that were like, kind of physically physical that culturally made sense at the time because there was no, like the idea of I'm an American and I'm part of this. This unified cultural thing that doesn't have anything to do with England because that was the big question of the early republic. If we're not British, what are we? That was made by this document. This is what. This is how we got. You're not a Delawarean, you're an American.

[A]

Yeah, you're right. I guess the, the thing inside of that thing is they had no sense of like the internal heterogeneity of any state population, how they would vote. Like, they, they thought all Delawareans had sort of similar interests and would vote as a block because we didn't have any voting records. They didn't really know necessarily that they were going to have these like, urban rural divides, class divides, education divides, because they just didn't know. You're absolutely right. It's just like Rebecca said earlier, it was a failure of imagination because they didn't have any data. They didn't have any sense. Like we're. It's going to be. It's. They would be surprised that say Oregon and Delaware basically vote is the same thing. They're across the size of the country. They have totally different historical records, but they sort of vote for the same kind of. Of things. They had no sense of that at the same time. So you're right. If I were a Delawarean, then I would have voted for the Senate and I would have been wrong. So there you go.

[C]

Well, they also assume that if we didn't like it, eventually we would change it.

[A]

Right? Well, that's fair.

[C]

We have an entire. Like for so many reasons, we're probably not in my lifetime ever going to change the bicameral nature of the. Of Congress. We can't even uncap the House. But we should. We should.

[A]

Yeah. The double gating function of the hardest thing to change is the thing that makes it easier to change things. Like, it's very tough stuff. I don't know where we were. Anyone wants to do one.

[B]

Oh, I got another straight thought I thought was thinking a lot as I was reading this time is that it's really interesting and weird how states rights started and continues to be this way to maintain oppression, and it continues to be used that way today, especially with voter suppression. But also states rights, at least here in Virginia, are the only bulwark that we have in defense of women's rights because of the Dobbs decision. Like Virginia is the only state in the south that still has abortion access. And all of our local organizations have really felt the squeeze of that local clinics and healthcare providers. I don't know what the framers are envisioning there. Certainly I don't think they made the concessions to states rights in support of oppression, but it allows oppression. It's so interesting and strange that it also. Now is this like the one defense that we have. So it's functioning the way that the framers intended it, that the federal government has made decisions that impinged on individual rights. And some states are still, because of the way the Constitution is put together, able to defend and provide those rights. It's ridiculous, of course, that it's state by state now. Like, let's enshrine the right to choose in the Constitution. Let's get her done. But fascinating to think about because like most of the time that I think about states rights, I'm mad about it. And when I think about this is

[C]

I think where we maybe just because I've lived here for. Well, so you've lived here forever. I, I am. I think this is maybe down in the hot takes part where I defend the second Amendment. Please don't cover me. But I, I don't hate states rights as a concept, despite the, the way that it was born. Because the south certainly envisioned states rights as a defense of slavery, but the north had its own, like Massachusetts had its own version of states rights. That was like my port access and you know, born out of like the court, the third. The third Amendment quartering and things like that. Like the federal government should not be allowed to. To force troops into a state's, you know, the citizens of a state, the homes of the citizens of the state. So like in different states, it means different things. I don't think that's bad necessarily. But the thing that is making it so painful for us now is the, is the hyper partisanship. And while that certainly existed in the early republic, especially between Jefferson and Hamilton and like their factions, the way that we have like foreign governments influencing it, we have social media. Like, it's just not an environment that they could have possibly imagined. No, think about Thomas Jefferson learning about large language models. Like, I think,

[A]

well, even the, like the paper, like the newspapers that existed just to do like these little tiny things. They didn't come out that often. They were often anonymous. Like, think about the. We talk about a weird disinformation environment. There was a, a completely unsourced story that at the time of this Constitutional Convention that, that it was leaked that they were going to consider bringing in like King George's nephew over to because we couldn't find anyone to lead the country like all this weird ass shit going on at the same time. I think that's as hard as anything to like get into the like frame of mind of these kinds of people and how they see the world. Because my sense of it too is like they were each individual state was more afraid of theoretical federal abuses than specific ones. Which is maybe makes sense but in hindsight it's like all right Massachusetts, what do you care about? It's like states rights because of the port and whatever. But, but what's the third and fourth thing? It was a little more fuzzy than that, which is pretty interesting.

[C]

Commerce is the answer.

[A]

Commerce. Yeah, commerce. Commerce.

[C]

That's always the answer.

[A]

I'll blast off a few and you can stop me if you want to respond. Cared way more about the high seas than I was expecting. I forget about the Navy. I was at the US the USS Constitution Museum last summer and the amount of the federal GDP it took just to do one warship was enormous. They had like three battleships ships and we really cared where they were because that's all we had. And so like the Navy and the high seas and like Amanda said the like pirates were a real problem. Which is a wild thing to say.

[C]

I love it. No, it's great.

[A]

It never occurred to me that the federal government might try to tax individual states differently before. I was looking at this again and I was like if this wasn't in there, this would definitely happen today. I'll leave that unsaid. At this particular moment. I don't know if this is a hot take. I think the north middle states certainly could have called Jordan urges et al's bluff about not joining the Union under more restrictive slavery positions. In hindsight, the Civil War in 1791 would have been way less destructive than the actual Civil War. Plus the fact as I said as many slaves were brought in from the beginning of the signing till the end of the legal import slave. So a less destructive war, fewer slaves and fewer decades of actual slavery if they just would have saddled up and said we are not going to do this now let's fight about it. Let's see there where it's weird that the first Amendment jams a bunch of stuff together and then amendments 6, 7 and 8 which are all related get their own amendments like the right density per amendment is completely nonsensical. Like, I don't get it at all.

[B]

I love that you paid attention to that.

[A]

I don't know why. And in doing the research about it, I think they sort of just get jammed in there together. I don't really know. Because freedom of the press and freedom of speech and freedom of religion like ours related to. But like more just as related as 6, 7 and 8 are, which are about, you know, legal stuff or that people know in that matter. But like, that could have been one amendment anyway. There we go. Rebecca, you have Rebecca, what else do you got? You got some more hot takes here?

[B]

Oh, let's see. Are we down in or.

[A]

Straight thoughts. Pardon me? Straight thoughts. Straight thoughts.

[B]

Oh, my gosh. Well, I mean, we can yell about uncapping the House in office hours.

[A]

Oh, I don't think we've said this. We haven't said, said this in office hours. We're going to talk about what we would change, like amendments, other things we would do. We're really going to let it fly there. We're not going to do much of that here.

[C]

I'm not in your office hours. I'll give the thing that I would change. The first Amendment that I would pass would be overturning Citizens United. I think we uncapping the House is my pet issue. And a lot of problems would be solved by uncapping the House. But we can do that with regular legislation in Congress. We don't need a constitutional amendment. The House is capped where it is now because of a piece of legislation. Uh, but yeah, over to Citizens United I think will go down as one of the worst Supreme Court decisions in American history. In hindsight. Not even in hindsight. People were telling them, yeah, yeah, they knew. They knew. But it was. I feel like people don't really remember this, but that case is about Hillary Clinton and the Republicans. Hatred for Hillary Clinton knows no bounds to the point that they are now willing to put themselves in a position where they have to spend billions of dollars with a big free to win like state supreme Court seats anywhere they were willing to pay literal billions of dollars to dunk on Hillary Clinton. So that's why we have Citizens United.

[A]

Yeah, that one sucks especially hard. At the same time, we're moving notable quotes, we're moving on to favorite articles, clauses and amendments. I will start here. 18, 19 and 21. I always find interesting. So this is the sequence that's Prohibition, women's suffrage, then repealing Prohibition. Just kidding with. Which is amazing to me. Because it happens in a relatively short order. And women were at the vanguard, were the vanguard of prohibition. So they got that through, then they got the right to vote and then we repealed it. So there's a couple things. One is just like, how do you expand suffrage? How that happened, that whole story is fascinating. But one of the central questions to me about democracy at all is how much should you let other people hurt themselves, right? This idea of prohibition, it's bad for you, you want to do it, but we're going to say you can't. Where does that line go? And I see this all the time in my home city of Portland, Oregon, around drugs, right? There's people that are addicted to industrial grade narcotics. That literally is not about being a good person or having enough willpower to get themselves off it. What most of them probably need is involuntary admission to a rehab facility. And we're very uncomfortable with that. And I am very uncomfortable with that. And we are very uncomfortable in the democracy. We're like, at what point does someone's personhood, are they not able to make a decision that is sort of free will or whatever that stuff is? We don't know. We don't know. And this in these sort of back and forths about Prohibition, I think really the first time we were having that conversation about the limits of an individual's autonomy at one point, like where we should let the individual do something. So I think, you know, about, you know, marijuana or other kinds of drugs or different. Just all the things that we think about, about, like the thing I think about now is like, I think Internet gambling is very bad and we should not allow it. That's my opinion. I'm not interested in doing this because there's a lot of reasons for it. Like cigarettes, like Fentanyl, it triggers parts of your brain that are beyond rationality and corporations exploiting your extra rational desires that you cannot control. I think is bad. But should I do that? Other people don't want to do that. I'm very surprised we're gonna do that. Are we gonna look at it like Big Tobacco? Fifty years ago, maybe, but everyone's vaping now, so what do I know? So that's where I come back. Like that knot is very hard to find.

[B]

That dance of liberties around where does your right to do what you want, even if it hurts you, stop because you hurting yourself actually hurts other people or hurts the nation in some way. And that central tension of wanting people to have freedom, but understanding that there may need to be limits on the freedom when Someone's exercise of freedom impinges somebody else's exercise of freedom or creates a harm to the community or the nation. That's a greater like, that's a greater harm than the value of your individual expression. That's sort of, that's like the central question of what we're trying to do here.

[A]

And then of course, like the Ron Swanson argument is like, I should be allowed to do things I want if I know, like the consequences thereof. Right. Like I'm totally on board with, with that. But there are some things that are beyond that that aren't just like, you know, I like to have a glass of red wine with dinner every night, even though I know short term it's going to shorten my life. That's different than. Yeah, that's shorter than oxycodone laced with hash or something.

[C]

I love the sequence of 18, 19 and 21 so much because that was like the height of the progressive era when we were doing all these reforms and making government better and expanding the franchise. And then we just got so up our own asses about like moralizing and all. And we're doing it now. We're doing it again.

[A]

Yeah. Prohibition was the woke of the 1930s. Like it really in the really bad version of it.

[C]

And we spoke all the way back out of it and now, yeah, the left, you know, it's a bit of a signpost, I think. Like you can be for improving and you know, equality and civil liberties and all that, but sometimes we just swing so far into like.

[A]

Okay, yeah, I know what's better for you than you do is a real anti pattern of the left and I'm guilty of it. The same thing.

[B]

Time.

[A]

So that's me. Any other favorite ones you want to shout out?

[C]

Oh man, I. Yes, yes.

[A]

Okay, so go Amanda, go.

[C]

Like peak favorite amendment is 17, which changed the election of the Senate. Senators used to be elected by state legislatures and it changed it to direct popular vote. Why are you laughing at me?

[A]

No, that, that the original version is such bananas.

[C]

So dumb.

[A]

Like they were trying to figure out some crazy stuff. Like they were. The longer the article, the less they were sure about what was going to what they wanted to happen.

[C]

But you know what's funny about the 17?

[A]

You know what's funny about the 17th? Yeah, I got the finger right there. No one could see that, but I got the finger.

[C]

It was the last time that we have passed an amendment that structurally changed the operation of government. And that was in 1912. That's the last time We've done anything meaningful to update state how our government functions was the 17th amendment. Also one of the reasons why it was passed was because of rampant corruption. You could be a senator and you could just straight up bribe members of your state house to keep you in your chair for your entire which they

[A]

talked about at the Constitutional Convention. They knew that was anyway they knew I'm going to do a bunch of I should have like a button for

[C]

the Mark Ruffalo like just like you know the 1819, 21 was a bit of a signpost. I think this could be as well like we are right now. The thing that I hear the most from members of Congress I talk to about what do you think is like would be the lowest hanging fruit of a constitutional amendment. It's like stock trading bans, it's insider trading ban term limit. It's anything that puts some guardrails around the just you get into office, you use it to enrich yourself and then you never leave. Like everyone hates that. It is a completely bipartisan hatred.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

Of course 80% of the country would be in favor of term limits just for that to decrease corruption. So the fact that we got that amendment because of the same sentiment we have right now is really interesting to me. I also really love the Reconstruction Amendments. I mean I think again talk about a vibe. The moment in history we're in right now is the mo mirrors a lot of the worst, most disruptive moments of history from our 400 years but all at once. Which is why everyone is exhausted and everyone has a little bit of a drinking problem. But after the Civil War, for those who do not know, the Reconstruction amendments are 13, 14, 15 outlaw slavery except as punishment for a crime. Which is why people who are in prison right now can still be used for slave labor. That includes immigrants and is why we are continuing to build all these ICE detention facilities facilities by the way 14 which establish birthright citizenship and due process. States rights have to be all the states have to protect your federal rights. And then 15 gave black men the right to vote. And that chunk of amendments which the southern states after the Civil War were required to ratify as a condition of coming back into the to the Union completely changed what it is to be an American. Completely changed it. So we have done this before. Right. Our first founding was one definition of what it is to be a citizen citizen. Our second founding rewrote it and that that like Lincoln's term is generally considered a second founding. And I think we are at a third one right now. We don't know what the Supreme Court's going to say about birthright citizenship. A lot of people are very optimistic that we'll get a 90 and that the 14th Amendment will be upheld. Whatever. If they don't uphold it, then the Trump administration gets to decide legally what a citizen is and we will be in a third founding. And what we do with that will say a lot about what we are as a country moving forward. But the Reconstruction Amendments give me a lot of hope because we at a certain point, I mean it costs so much death and I obviously do not want to see a repeat of how we got these amendments. But then you get to these people who are really scared, like if we get to the midterms, what if the red states refuse to hold their elections? What if the red states refuse to even have midterms? Cool. Then there are no Republicans in Congress. Democrats in Congress will do exactly what that that's exactly what happened during the Civil War. There were no southern representatives in Congress. So the north got to pass whatever they to wanted wanted. So like fine, you don't want to have your election.

[A]

Well, it's not dissimilar from this where the states suddenly like once they saw that the Constitution was going to be ratified, they started jumping on the rats, started jumping onto the ship because they wanted once they even the thing they didn't want to have happen, like, well, we got to get involved with it now at the same I think also Amanda, something you just said made me look if you look at the cadence of the amendments, they do happen in clusters. You know, there's reconstruction retarded 30s and then the 60s, you know, with the Civil Rights Amendment LB so you get these long sort of dormant periods. One of my miscellaneous things, we're in the second longest fallow period between amendments. The longest was 1870 to 1913, the one you just said. But then once you once like that dam breaks, you can get a cluster of them and I wouldn't be surprised to see a cluster in like 2031 or whatever that are related to a whole bunch of things that I don't, I daren't predict. But they do. That's how they do happen. They happen these little a moment happens and then a lot of change happens and then we don't do anything for a long ass time.

[C]

I would argue that the drought is even LONGER because the 27th Amendment was written intentionally or originally as part of

[A]

the Bill of Rights.

[C]

It was ratified 200 years later. So even before that it's been decades

[A]

Yeah, I don't know what we got. Rebecca, you have something about no Kings in Article 9. Do you want to say anything there?

[B]

Oh, I mean, just interesting, given the prevalence of those no Kings protests this year, to actually See in Article 9 the origin of that right there, along with the emoluments clause, which is the thing that a man and I yell about in voice memos. Like a surprising. With a surprising frequency. Like, here we are yelling about the emoluments clause again. Here we go. I mean, in terms of, like, favorite quotes or notable clauses and amendments, obviously, all of us doing the work that we do have a lot invested in the First Amendment, personally and professionally as a woman, the 19th Amendment. And just also seeing that the 25th is so freaking weird. Like, getting into the details, tales of the 25th Amendment and then being like, this is the thing that people are pinning their hopes on like bananas.

[C]

Y' all just read it. It's not.

[A]

It's like reading spaghetti. It's. I don't know what to do with that. At the same time, Rebecca, we're going to shift into one of our standing segments. Is it for you? Is it not for you? Why might it be for you? If you're. If it's not? I don't know. How are we going to convince people with all this? We're not gonna do it.

[B]

I think Amanda made a very good case for this earlier.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

So I. We don't need to reissue that too much. But, like, if you did not pay attention in history or it's just been a while, it is not too late to go back and pick up these documents and read information around them and educate yourself and learn. If you live in the United States and you want to be informed and engaged, or if you live outside the US and you want to know, like, what the fuck is going on over here and how, like, how they're allowed to do that or what the. What the argument is behind a thing that seems banana. You can usually find the underpinnings somewhere in the Constitution or the Supreme Court decisions around it. Like, almost all of those questions can be answered by this document or how it's been interpreted. Especially if you're calling for impeach and remove. Like, please remind yourself, you gotta put the.

[A]

You gotta put the impeachment how things actually function. We've tried it twice already with this. It's just not happening.

[B]

I think you'll be surprised again by how short and how relatively bare bones the document is. That really so much of what we're talking about when we talk about constitutional law is the law that's written afterwards, the Supreme Court cases and the precedent that interpret what the Constitution means. Most of how we think about what our rights are come from those interpretations and not the Constitution itself. And even just understanding that is really critical. But seeing what is in this document and then understanding that anything that's not explicitly written into it is open for interpretation. And we can still have those kinds of conversations.

[A]

Maybe not if you know what we're not allowing. Maybe not if on this particular document we usually try to give people an out. This one, it's short enough, it's important enough. There's plenty of supporting documents to help you get a foothold on getting your head around it. You don't have a good excuse to to not get with this one. We've taken as read for this, Rebecca, that this is art of a kind, because our next segment is the immortal questions that are asks. I'm not going to argue about what art is, but I'm going to say that these questions still are applicable in determining what is interesting to think about, connecting it to other things that we've read and talked about. These are. Some of these questions are transcend time and space and as we have gone through in I think, entertaining, specific and frustrating detail, how many of them are peccadillos of history and individuals and being at the ground a certain time and temp and garment, even to some degree, here are questions. What is the good, good life? What do I owe my neighbor? How do I know what I know? Is this all there is? How to deal with the certainty of death? What else might there be? What's the deal with good and evil and free will, real or no? Amanda, you're welcome to jump in here, but usually I give Rebecca the first crack at the question. Which of these is going to fall out if you give it a good whack about what question the Constitution is about?

[B]

It's primarily the first two. What is the good life? And what do I owe my neighbor? And how do we create a nation out of this cluster of states that allows us to live this life that we've defined together as good and ideal, while also living with each other, dealing with each other as neighbors, having a functioning, a functioning nation? How do you deal with these people who you know, when it's the middle of summer and you're smelly and itchy and sweaty because you've been in a locked room trying to work things out, you do ultimately have to work them out. How? How do we build a framework that lets us do that. It's primarily those two. But I think we also get like a little what's the deal with good and evil? As they're trying to understand where they have come from, how to not go back there again and what it would look like to envision a different way forward. What's going to give this country the best shot that they can think of to be something that's not just not a rerun of the past, but that is new and productive in general narrative.

[A]

Amanda, does any of these jump out to you that's different than that? I agree. I think for me, those two and maybe nested within. What do I owe my neighbors? Who is my neighbor? Native people, slaves, Delaware, Europe. How am I negotiating my relationship to this whole. I am this new entity. How am I going to have a relationship with these various stakeholders even if I don't recognize them as people or not? Any of these questions strike out to you. That's interesting, Amanda.

[C]

I agree with the first two also, the good and evil one. I think there is also a little bit of what else might there be?

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

When you're constructing a new way to be, you have to have arguments about what else there might be. Do we want to go back like a Hamilton? Do we want a king? Functionally, we want an executive who's in place for life. The Jersey plan. Envision an executive branch that was a committee and not a single person. That's interesting. What else might. What? You know, blank slate. Right, Right. What else could we paint here? Turns out it's just going to be the same shit we read about last week.

[A]

I mean, they were so hilariously wrong about their hypotheticals and subjunctive clauses. Like, that's like I say at work all the time, like, let's not get two ifs down the road. They do a lot of two ifs. They're like four and five. Well, what if there's a rebellion here and then there's a bribe thing and it's like, oh, my God. I mean, yeah, that. What else might there be? Is really interesting to think about at the same time. Time. Rebecca, are we sure this isn't about art and writing?

[B]

This one actually is not.

[A]

Yes, it is not. We don't have to dwell on that. Could you get most of the gist from watching the signal adaptation? Rebecca?

[B]

I would devour a Ken Burns miniseries. I don't know who which of you in the notes, but I would also be down for that about the Constitutional Convention. And Amanda's got A note here that it's got to be Lin Manuel Miranda.

[C]

It's got to be Lynn. We need singing. Like, there's things. Because Ken Burns. There's a reason why when you go into imovie to edit, the Ken Burns shot is just like the slow zoom in. Like, it would just be a lot of maps and pictures of paintings and stuff. You need.

[A]

Wait, you're saying things against it. You're arguing against it? Is that what I'm saying?

[C]

I am arguing against it.

[A]

You're saying those are bad things, Amanda. That's what you're saying to me.

[C]

Okay, I want the cabinet rat battle again. I'm sorry. I'm an elder millennial. I want, like, arguments. I want to see the fighting. Ken would have to get real chill with directing human beings. I'm just saying.

[A]

What about, like, the Lincoln. Like the Lincoln Spielberg or that John Adam HBO thing? Would you be down for one of those kinds of deals?

[C]

Yes. I love the John Adams miniseries. I've actually never seen the Lincoln movie.

[A]

Oh, really?

[B]

They shot it in Richmond.

[C]

I saw Tommy Lee Jones at a restaurant when I was.

[A]

That counts as seeing the Lincoln movie. Is that where your eyes were arguing it?

[C]

Because I did. It's sad. I don't do.

[A]

Yeah, it is sad. It is sad. All the Lincoln stuff is very sad.

[B]

I know.

[A]

Whoever got the John Adams miniseries, whatever develop development official at HBO got the John A.D. adams. God bless you, sir, or ma'. Am. Because why? How I don't understand John Adams, like, number 14th on the founding Father's depth charts for, like, name for Q rating. And yet you got it made at the same time.

[B]

I think it's a case for Muppets, though.

[A]

Yes. Okay. So Amanda, if you don't know the Muppets is everyone is a Muppet except for one human, is how we think about.

[C]

So who's the person?

[A]

So who's the person?

[B]

I was going to toss that to Amanda, who is the one human?

[C]

Madison.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

I think it has to be Madison.

[B]

All right. So we can catch up.

[A]

And who would play in that? And so, Amanda, tell people why Madison

[C]

was the only person who took notes. He was also, as I said earlier there early with, like, a foundational plan. He set the tone for the conversation. His notes are the only reason we understand anything that happened behind those doors. They were not released until after his death in 1836. So there's a lot. Oh, and now we have even more scholars scholarship based on the stuff he erased from his notes. Because now we could take, like, X Rays and stuff.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

And we know the things that he, like, crossed out Madison's hand. Great book about that. Anyway, so I think he's the. He's the voice, right? Like, he's the, The, The. The people's eyes in the room. So he's got to be the human.

[B]

All right.

[A]

He's pretty young at this point. He's. He's introverted. Right. Like, he's not a great states person, even though he's like, we have Madison doctrines, all this. Things that come later. But I think he would be a really good way in for most people because he's an observer. But he also did that homework, which I relate to on a very fundamental label combination of things.

[B]

All the squabbling, like the Muppets just squabbling with each other would be so much fun.

[A]

Yes, it would be. There would be. The Muppet arms would be wild, though. I don't think I could handle, like, Beaker and Miss Piggy arguing about slavery. Something would do something to me on a fundamental level. I don't think I would rearrange my molecules.

[B]

I think it's south park where when people are getting worked up about something, all the little characters in the background just go, rabble, rabble, rabble, rabble, rabble, rabble, rabble. Like, that's what I want is just the moment Muppets like, waving their arms and sort of yelling, you know, where you can't quite tell what they're saying. But everybody's just having a fight and you get one human. I don't know who I want to play Madison, but we can worry about that later.

[C]

He was short.

[A]

He was short. Well, luckily, most of Hollywood is short. Yeah, I don't know. I should have thought about this. Nothing comes off the top of my head. Miscellaneous trivia adaptation rumors misattributed quotes. I don't know if you guys got fatigued because this is all Jo here. Feel free to. Oh, there's some RGs. Sorry. At the bottom. We got some. All right, I guess I'll do my chunk first. So many of the actual compromises came from fatigue. For example, the fugitive Slave clause didn't really get much discussion because everyone was gassed after the main slavery provisions. And the in the south sort of just sat there. It's like, can you believe we're getting

[C]

away with this one?

[A]

And they just sort of sat there. I do think they would have acted differently if they had game theory what the state ratification conventions would actually how it happened, happened once four or five of the states Ratified. It was a bull rush to ratify states did not want to be left behind except for Amanda's caveats there which again we only needed 9 out of 13. Sorry Rhode island, sorry North Carolina. We didn't need you to make the country. You would have jumped on board. I said the three things about the three fifths compromise being an established clause that like I guess that's what we're going to use because we already agreed upon it. We don't want to fight anymore. I did the habit like how many exact rights were in the enumerated in the Bill of Rights because you know, people know how many clauses there are but by my count there are sort of 35ish specific rights enumerated. It depends if some of them are like specific examples of 1. I had never thought about that. I thought it was interesting. I said the New Hampshire delegation showed up 60 days late. That was. That's just one of the people moving in out of town because I've got a new wife and I'm tired and I owed a bunch of debts and there's a credit collector that might nab me right now if I don't go back to some somewhere. It's wild. There was a debtors rebellion in Rhode island which a bunch of people owed money, got elected and wiped out all the debt. Tyler Durden style. The framers were not a fan of this. This was like the Shays rebellion underneath the Shays Rebellion. Like they saw what populism could do and like no sir, we are not doing that.

[B]

Those like Godfather memes and he did not like this.

[A]

He did not like this. Yeah. Alexander Hamilton technically was ineligible to sign the document since not enough New York delegates showed up to a approve but he just butted in and signed anyway. And I said the thing about the gap between amendments 34 the long list, 1870, 1913. That's what I had to bring to the table. Rebecca, what do you got rabbit holes

[B]

about constitutional trivia even when Amanda is not present could take us all day. So just a couple highlights. As we said at the top of the show, it's still the oldest still or it is the oldest still in use written constitution in the world. It's inspired or influenced the constitutions and more than 150 other countries countries. But a 2012 study from NYU Law Review shows that the influence is declining because our Constitution guarantees relatively few rights and is so hard to amend and has been amended so infrequently. It contains fewer than half of the provisions that a generic bill of rights that the study also presented to folks contained, such as women's rights or healthcare, and the US Constitution being rooted in this libertarian constitutional tradition that is anti antithetical to the notion of positive rights. That study also found that the idea of adopting a constitution may still trace its inspiration to the U.S. but the manner in which the constitutions are written in other countries increasingly does not trace to the US and Ruth Bader Ginsburg was on this tip in 2012. She said that if she were doing it from scratch, she would not look to the US for a model to draft a new constitution. But she cited examples from South Africa's constitution, which was written in 1997, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms from 1982, and the European Convention on Human Rights from 1950. So interesting to think about, and it makes sense. Yeah.

[A]

First pancake, right?

[B]

That is the first pancake. Sparks a lot of other. Has a lot of influence, but eventually is going to fade as other countries start to realize what the flaws were and that they can do it different, differently.

[C]

Is it my turn?

[A]

Yes. Like the federalist peoples. All of. All of Amanda's trivia is unsigned.

[C]

I'm just gonna do two.

[A]

Yes.

[C]

Because I had. I had a lot. My first one. And one of my favorite parts of the story of the Constitutional Convention is how the native leaders responded after it was ratified and we had a functioning government. They sent letters, some to Washington, some to Congress or. Or whatever. Various leaders that were like, like, good for you guys. You finally got it together. Like, aren't you cute? It was all very respectful, but, like, a little bit condescending in a tone that I really, really appreciated because they were just like, finally we can talk to a freaking adult. You know, like, we've been having to deal with all these children in these

[A]

thirds, and it turned out so well now that they got.

[C]

I know, right? But just their attitude of, like, these frigging guys. These frigging guys is really, really good. Also, fun fact. Women had the vote before the 19th Amendment in many states, but my favorite is in New Jersey, where they had it until 1807. Women had the right to vote in New Jersey from the founding of the state until 1807, when it was explicitly made to be free white men of property when they updated their state constitution. But before that, they didn't specify gender in their state constitution at all. So women were just like, sweet. I'm gonna. I'm just gonna. I know what stopped them.

[B]

Oh, I want to layer on just one. One more while we're Puncturing sort of the halo or like the. The aura of American traditionalism that a proclamation by President George Washington and a congressional resolution established the first national Thanksgiving Day on November 26th in 1789. And the reason for the holiday was to give thanks for the new Constitution. I was yesterday years old when I learned that so strong is the mythology of pilgrims and Puritans.

[C]

Sentence.

[A]

We have a lot of hot takes. Amanda kind of stepped on mine. James Madison is underrated.

[C]

I just had to. I was being a contrarian.

[A]

Yeah. Shouts to all my introverts who did the reading and took good notes. I see you, Amanda. Take the con case, which you're going to probably destroy me with, but there you go.

[C]

I feel like James Madison was overrated.

[B]

Like he.

[C]

He's called the father of the Constitution. He started being called that from the jump and he even did not like it. But the Virginia plan is not what we ended up with. Like the. The foundational framework that he came to Congress trying to make happen. Didn't.

[A]

Let me put this differently. James Madderson is overrated. If you're Amanda Nelson. If you're a normal person who. I said tell me something about James Madison. And the response would have been a really eloquent. I think James Madison is underrated. Is that fair, Rebecca? Adjudicate.

[B]

Have you not known us long enough to know that? I'm just going to take Amanda.

[A]

Take Amanda's side. Okay, great.

[B]

I know who's bailing me out. If I.

[A]

Maybe we should have Kings are kings a bad idea? Maybe kings are a good idea.

[B]

Can the women be kings? Let's do it that way.

[A]

I guess. Relatedly, Shays rebellion has the greatest delta between people knowing what is and how important it was. They were scared of Shays rebellion. They were also scared of George Washington going to the unpaid army and being like, maybe a military government could actually get some stuff done at the same time. Because they will all follow George Washington. Washington into the Potomac and beyond. Hot take. We should have left Georgia hanging and get their ass whipped by the Creeks and the Spanish. How do you like them peaches? Is what we should have said to Georgia at that particular moment. There was no real philosophical rationale for protecting the rights of small states. It was mostly being afraid of Virginia. Again, this is hot take corner. This is not Constitutional scholar. This is all picking up on vibes. We're just afraid of big states. There's really no philosophical, theological, humanitarian. This is not something in. Montesquieu and Locke were like, you know what we really need to protect Delaware from Maryland because of reasons.

[B]

All right, I would like to hear Amanda's case about the ratification of the Constitution being flatly illegal. We got to talk about that.

[C]

The Articles of Confederation was the legal framework that governed the country and it required unanimity. Unanimous. Unanimous.

[A]

That is definitely how you said that. You nailed it first try, Amanda. Good job on that.

[C]

Thank you. To change it, to amend it. The Constitution is an amendation. I know. We, they like to argue. We're just burning down, starting over. Sure. It is still an overriding of the existing legal framework. We did not get unanimous ratification of the Constitution. They decided. They gave themselves permission to make it 9 instead of 13. They gave it to themselves. So, you know, I, sometimes I get a little frustrated with people who are like, well, Trump just gave himself permission to do anything thing. Yeah. That's what they do. That's what people in power do. They give themselves. They mix up to give themselves a structural framework for being allowed to do whatever they want, but in reality, illegal. It was illegal.

[A]

Yeah, but Amanda, you're right, technically. But once the states ratified it 9 out of 13, then it was legal. Like, it was like a lot of things, it is illegal. Till it wasn't. Like the moment they put pen to paper, it wasn't.

[C]

But a lot of the anti federalist arguments in the state convention intentions around ratification were you didn't have the right to do this to begin with.

[A]

Right.

[C]

Whether what you gave us was good or not, the fact is you did not have the right.

[A]

But then there was no court to go to because the article containers are too weak. You did it to yourself.

[C]

Yes. My other hot take that always gets me in trouble is that the Second Amendment. Second Amendment is fine. Actually. It's fine. Like it's. It's fine. We do need that. I don't know if I should get into any more, like, detail around it.

[A]

Yeah, I'm not sure that they were thinking of F22 Raptors, but we can. We can disagree about that.

[C]

Absolutely. In the same way that the First Amendment did not consist are social media misinformation campaigns run by bots financed by Russia. Like, there's. There's just things. There are. There are statutes that should be enacted to put guardrails on almost every piece of the Constitution or direction even, or amendments to adjust our. Our understanding of what it meant originally to what it means now. And the Second Amendment is no different. And also an armed populace is essential to a free democracy. I'm so sorry. I'm sorry. You can email me. Don't email these two. Email?

[A]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You can email Amanda. We look forward to forwarding those to you. Rebecca, do you have anything else here you wanted to get off?

[B]

We're ready to wrap.

[A]

Let's do further reading.

[B]

All right. Well, Amanda's got a Great America 101 reading list that's available on her sub stack. It is incredibly comprehensive, like friends, if you like. A spreadsheet broken down by Here is civics, here's political science. Here's why you should read this thing. Here's a cell that you can toggle to, like completed, in progress, whatever. It's just going to give you a lot of dopamine. So check that out. We'll have a link to it in the show. Notes. Melissa Murray's book The U.S. a Comprehensive and Annotated Guide for the Modern Reader, which I talked about earlier, is a wonderful resource. We the People by Jill Lepore. Also incredible big chunky boy history of the Constitution and mostly of our failures to be able to change it because it is so unexpectedly difficult to do change. Jeff, you talked to me about Plain Honest Men by Richard Freeman.

[A]

So when I was at the Pennsylvania State House last summer, I was like, I want to know more about these dudes sitting in a room trying to do the greatest writing assignment of all time. And I in my research, I did Plain Honest Men by Richard Freeman, which is really just the writing, like literal writing of it in that room at that time. It is apolitical in terms of like it's trying to narrate and look at broader picture. It really ends with the Constitution, the state's constitution. There's nothing about the amendments or subsequent things that that go on. But I, but just in terms of the TikTok of the sausage being made, I found it fascinating, riveting. It'd be a wonderful book for dads and dads at heart who are interested in this kind of stuff. So Plain Honest Men by Richard Freeman. Did you mention anything by Khilrid Amar or did you.

[B]

I think that might be Amanda's.

[A]

Okay, Amanda, you want to say something about that?

[C]

Kilrid Amar is a constitutional law scholar out of Yale who has written a floppity jillion books about the Constitution. I actually this one is my favorite, Born Equal. It's about the amendments that we talked about that are done in the spurts between the Civil War in 1920 and how those happened and why and how they expanded the concept of what it is to be an American and all of that.

[A]

So yeah, there are no Short books about the Constitution. That's one thing I found. There's just. You just have to, like, blast off 700 pages like, it's the law.

[C]

That's the thing you're doing that month.

[A]

Yeah. Cocktail parody, crib sheet. This is just. If you want to talk to something and talk to someone about it and it comes up and you want to have a few interesting things to say, here are a few that I put together together. Feel free to disagree or add Rebecca and Amanda. If the Article of confederation were, like, 23% better, the US would be a much different place. No value judgment. I have no idea. But, like, it was pretty close. Like, I think it's just a little bit different, and we're in a radically different world. The framers would be shocked. The Constitution is still largely in effect. We're probably surprised about how little it has been amended. Not only was the Civil War obviously incontroverted about slavery, so was the US Constitution. Do not let them move the goalposts, baby. This thing was there from the beginning. And if you raised your hand, you probably could have been a delegate.

[B]

If you were a man.

[A]

Yes. If they were allowed you to raise your hand. Yes.

[B]

Jeff, Are we getting, like, time travel cosplay fantasies of Jeff o' Neill as a delegate? Is that what's happening here? Jeff, you want to be in the room?

[A]

An Oregon editor in King Arthur's Constitutional Convention, like Mark Twain style.

[B]

While you've thought about it, One of the last dates.

[A]

Well, I said my toxic trait is I would have rocked this. I would have done amazing at the Constitutional Convention. Zero to well read score. Each one gets a score from 1 to 10, with 10 being the highest. Amanda. Usually I let Rebecca tell me how I'm wrong about these historical importance. 900 out of 10.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

Yeah. Readability. 4 out of 10.

[B]

I think. I think if you're just looking at the written language, it's easy to get tripped up because they're like random capitals or what appear to us to be random. Like randomly capitalized proper nouns that are things that we don't think of as proper nouns. But if you read it out loud and you just hear the language rather than getting stuck on what the sentence structure looks like, that's really helpful and I think could bump it up to a 5, but I don't know if we can go above a 5 for readability.

[A]

What are you gonna say? Amanda?

[C]

It's just like Shakespeare. Like, it's.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

Because it's written closer in that form of language than ours. It's easier to understand when you hear

[A]

it and just pretend the capitalization schema doesn't exist. Just don't pay any attention to it whatsoever.

[B]

I mean, find a free audiobook version of it. They're everywhere and a lot of them are included. Like Spotify Premium has the Melissa Murray. Just listen to somebody read it out loud to you. Follow along in the text. Just try not to get hung up on where the punctuation is and which letters are captured capitalized.

[A]

I, I think Rebecca said at the top the book nerd read cred factor is sneaky high. Sneaky high for this. Just people don't look at it, they don't pay. Yeah, I think it's a little hard to understand. To get anything below a surface understanding, you have to do quite a bit of secondary research. Like why is it this way and what the hell does this mean? It takes a lot, I think. Rebecca, what do you think?

[B]

I'm totally willing to go like 9 or 10 here.

[A]

I agree. I agree.

[B]

I just don't think that most adults that we have just in our, in our society or folks that I just bump into in casual conversation would be like, oh yes, I have recently read the Constitution. Anybody who says that to me, I'm going to have mad respect and be impressed and glad that you did it because we're just not doing it. Most of us haven't touched it since middle school and like I hadn't either in reading it in a whole chunk until this.

[A]

Yeah. If someone said, you know, I spent the weekend looking at the Constitution just because I was curious and boy, the stuff I learned, I would be like, you are the coolest person I've ever met. Also, James Madison. Get back in the delay DeLorean and go back. We don't need you here.

[B]

Also, are you single?

[A]

Are you single? Right. Oh, damn factor. This is a tough one.

[C]

What does that mean?

[A]

Just this is. This is our catch all for Holy. This part was amazing. I didn't know you could do this. This was moving. Stirring is an art grand kind of situation.

[C]

Preamble. I think much.

[A]

We'll say more about that.

[C]

Amanda. The pre. The we the people, yo.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

I mean it's like the a. It's. It is in its own way revolutionary. The preamble and it, the language is very stirring. It was completely novel for its time. It still applies. You know the rest.

[A]

It almost wasn't there if I remember exactly the preamble for this stuff.

[B]

Well. And the we the people was almost not there. Like some of the Original language referred to the states and there was pushback that it was.

[C]

And then they changed it. Yeah. But the rest of it is. I mean, there's no real unless until you get to the stuff that's like, fuck, you're talking about human. Like, you're talking about humans, right?

[A]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[C]

The gut punches of the three fist clause and the fugitive slave clause and things like that. That's hard. But that. But in a different way. Like if that's. I'm in a different direction. Yeah, yeah.

[A]

It's interesting because, like, we usually think of Rebecca Tomey from the O Dam being the pinnacle of the achievement of this. This thing. And the pinnacle of the achievement of this thing is like, it's a mishmash of stuff. Like, it's like Locke and Jefferson rolled. Like there wasn't. I don't know, Amanda, maybe you feel differently, but there wasn't one of these things. Wow, that was really innovative. And they came up with a really clever solution to this thing. Mostly it was sort of backwards. Most of the things were sort of wrong.

[B]

I have. I'm more likely to have an O Dam reaction to a Supreme Court opinion about constitutional questions and like, look at how they've done this piece of logic or wound up this argument than I am about the text of the Constitution itself other than the preamble.

[A]

That's a really great point. Who. I think that brings us to the end. Patreon.com jill2 well read for guided read alongs and membership options, follow us on the socials at 02 well Read podcast email us 02 well Read a book. Riot.com you can find Amanda's Miles takes on the Internet. You could just find Amanda. You can Google and get a lot more of Amanda in a lot of different ways. Being awesome Amanda. Entertaining, outrageous and informed all at the same time. Thanks to Thriftbooks for sponsoring this season of Zero to well Read. Zero to well Read is a proud member of the Airwave Podcast network. We didn't go nine hours. We went a full two. How are we all feeling? We feel okay.

[B]

This is exactly what I expected us to do with this. And man, it's good to get the gang back together.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

I was like, are we gonna take up the whole two hours?

[A]

Oh. Oh, you sweet summer child. Yes.

[C]

Welcome to the show. I know how long y' all can yap, and I of course, am a professional yapper, but here we are still.

[A]

Yeah, we'll have to think about some other excuse to have you back for something. A Supreme Court case Amanda's favorite book? I don't know.

[B]

I mean, we've got a list. Amanda and I have a short list of this. She will be back for Jurassic park someday.

[A]

Oh, nice name. Checking Jurassic park during the show. It's amazing.

[B]

Oh, my gosh.

[A]

Amanda, thank you so much. A pleasure, A treat, an honor.