- 20 hours ago
The Daily Show - Season 30 Episode 107 -
Jill Lepore
Jill Lepore
Category
😹
FunTranscript
00:00From the most trusted journalists at Comedy Central, it's America's only source for news.
00:10This is The Daily Show with your host, Jon Stewart.
00:15Man! Thank you so much! Wow!
00:45That is... Let me tell you something.
00:55That is... I don't know what's happening.
01:02Hey! What? Say it!
01:06Welcome to The Daily Show!
01:09How many people think I'm Kimmel? What's going on here?
01:12They're just trying to cheer up an old Mets fan. That's what's happening.
01:17You poor bastards. Welcome to The Daily Show!
01:19My name is Jon Stewart. We have a fabulous show for tonight.
01:21Historian and professor Jill Lepore will be here later.
01:28She's going to be discussing her latest book to discuss the Constitution of the United States, or what remains of it.
01:36Boy, we should have laminated that thing, huh?
01:38Because, well, as many of you know out there, we had another just blessed weekend in America of chaos and carnage.
01:49There were six mass shootings in 24 hours.
01:52Two in North Carolina, two in Louisiana, one in Texas.
01:56The terrible scenes out of Michigan.
01:59But fear not, because the president is on the case.
02:03This morning, President Trump declares he's deploying troops to Portland, Oregon.
02:07Oh! Portland!
02:10You just missed it!
02:13You're going to want a little to the...
02:15You're going to...
02:16You've got the right country.
02:20But you're going to want to shift the...
02:22Why Portland?
02:24Trump posting, I'm directing Secretary of War Pete Hegseth to provide all necessary troops to protect war-ravaged Portland.
02:32Hey, stop it!
02:36No, no, no!
02:40Uncontrollable, these people.
02:42And the orgy of mass shootings in America...
02:46Portland?
02:47Did I miss Vancouver attacking Portland in a fierce battle of mellow artisans?
02:53Don't shoot till you see the whites of their cold foam half-calf latte art.
02:58Not sure what that accent was.
03:02Here's the craziest part.
03:04The people of Oregon, Portland in particular, were also caught off guard by this.
03:10And the governor of Oregon tried to explain to the president that they were not in a state of war.
03:15And the president's response was, well, it was telling.
03:19President Trump, in an interview with NBC on Sunday morning, said a phone call with Governor Kotech showed him a different perspective.
03:26Saying, I spoke to the governor, she was very nice, but I said, well, wait a minute.
03:31Am I watching things on television that are different from what's happening?
03:34A, I don't think any of us know what you're watching on television.
03:58But if it's Game of Thrones, I'd say yes.
04:00Conditions in Portland may vary.
04:05And B, this explains so much about the governing philosophy of the Trump administration.
04:13There is reality, and then there's this.
04:17My people tell me different.
04:19They are literally attacking and there are fires all over the place.
04:22And dragons.
04:25Better be dragons!
04:26So, the president of the United States, alone in his bescreened bunker, sees reports of conflict in Portland on TV.
04:40His lackeys reinforce the chaos.
04:43And rather than take a breath, rather than take a beat, rather than not acting rashly,
04:49rather than using the resources available to him as the president of the United States to find out what the realities on the ground are,
04:58he just goes, code red!
05:01Red team, go!
05:02Because he sees it on f***ing TV.
05:06And acts impulsively.
05:09He sends out the National Guard the same way you or I might make a late-night shamwow purchase.
05:17I saw it on TV!
05:20It looked...
05:21It was on TV!
05:27In reality, it's just a f***ing rag.
05:30But at three in the morning...
05:34It's magic!
05:40Meanwhile, the non-Portland area of the country is going through some s***.
05:45As we mentioned, there's a mass shooting now, like, every couple of hours.
05:49Previously, the routine would be, we express our shock, we express our sadness, we offer our thoughts and prayers,
05:55we spend a day, maybe two, arguing about the appropriateness of bringing up guns at all,
06:00and then we, uh, do nothing until the next time.
06:04But as our politics becomes more polarized, even that learned cycle of helplessness
06:10has been replaced by a new post-shooting pastime.
06:15That new pastime is, was this one of yours?
06:18The shooter was a radical leftist.
06:20The guy is a right-wing, Trump-supporting evangelical Christian.
06:24He is a Biden supporter. Case closed.
06:27We know the suspected shooter is mega.
06:30The shooter, a leftist, whack job.
06:33It's America's new gender-revealed tradition!
06:37Boom! It's blue! Ha-ha!
06:39I'm so happy to blame the left for the violence.
06:42The game is so ubiquitous, now we often play it before we even know who the perpetrator is.
06:48The killer's identity may be unknown, but his point of view seems pretty clear.
06:54That's why I'm calling it political and from the left.
06:57That's Kudlow's lock of the week!
07:01Lock it up! Next murder rate in Chicago next weekend.
07:04Well, it's getting cold there, so I'm taking the under.
07:08By the way, playing with this one of yours is also certainly a speculative endeavor.
07:12So we are treated in the aftermath of these horrific crimes to the news media's active, politicized scavenger hunt.
07:20Which piece of inconclusive arcana proves which half of the country is to blame?
07:26The shooter reportedly voted in the 2020 Democrat primary.
07:29The Butler, Pennsylvania shooter was a registered Republican.
07:34The suspect wasn't registered with either party.
07:36He grew up in an area of Utah that is mostly Republican.
07:39The shooter was a registered Republican, while election records show that in 2021 he gave $15 to a Democratic-aligned organization.
07:48He's a Republican, but cheap.
07:57Republican, but donated to a Democrat.
07:59Maybe he just wanted the PBS Ken Burns tote bag.
08:02I don't know.
08:04I don't know who to hate.
08:06Sometimes the clues aren't even expressly political, but live politically adjacent in the culture.
08:13Social media photos show Mr. Robinson shooting and posing with guns.
08:16There's his pickup truck, the huge American flags.
08:19This person was a gay man who was in a relationship with another man who believed he was a woman,
08:24and they were both into a phenomenon that can only be described as furriness.
08:29I love that this dude has to pretend like he doesn't know what furries are.
08:45I mean, I don't know.
08:50It can only be described as a sexual costume party with animals.
08:56I mean, if you were even going to do something like that, how would you even get the stains out of the costumes?
09:01I mean, especially if they had set for three days, what would you use?
09:05Club soda?
09:06Lemon?
09:06I'm just asking.
09:08Or do you just throw the costume out after each experience?
09:12Now, call me old-fashioned, but I miss the good old days of mass shootings when networks took a principled stance
09:18to not shower attention on acts designed to get attention.
09:23We will not say the gunman's name or show his photograph.
09:26Fox News will not show you his picture or give him any attention by repeating his name.
09:31We don't like naming the gunman because so often they do things just to get attention.
09:35We don't want to bring more undue attention that is absolutely necessary to the cowards that bring out,
09:41carry out these types of attacks.
09:43That's right, boys and girls, you know.
09:47When I was a boy, there was a brief period in American media
09:51where not only wouldn't they say the suspected killer's name,
09:55they wouldn't constantly show the suspected killer's OnlyFans hot shots.
10:00They wouldn't do it.
10:01They wouldn't.
10:02Oh, dear Lord.
10:05Oh.
10:06Oh, my God.
10:07He could have so...
10:12He could have done so much good with those.
10:15And yet he chose the dark side.
10:18Oh.
10:22So why has the news media become obsessed with right-left framing of violence?
10:30Well, part of the reason is they are following the lead of social media.
10:33Social media is doing it crazier and faster than anybody else.
10:38So the media is trying to keep up.
10:39The fire in the church in Michigan was still burning
10:42when online influencers were inferring that the number of Muslims in Michigan
10:47are what obviously made this attack happen.
10:50Until police released the suspect's photo,
10:54which looked like it came from a Duck Dynasty fanfic account.
10:58And then the left got to celebrate.
11:02And then they found a Trump Vance sign on his house.
11:05Case closed.
11:06Except that sign was placed near a stop sign.
11:09So some on the right said,
11:11no, no, no, he's saying stop Trump Vance.
11:14Like it's some leftist rebus that he was creating.
11:19But here's the thing.
11:22Who the f*** cares?
11:25These mass shootings don't fit.
11:28Who honestly cares?
11:32These mass shootings do not fit neatly into our left-right paradigm.
11:38Mass shootings are probably caused by a complex fusion of mental health
11:42and access to weapons and attention-seeking delusional nihilism
11:45married to an algorithmic underworld that set these horrific acts in motion.
11:50But unfortunately, right-left paradigm is the only way our narcissistic media ecosystem
11:56sees anything anymore.
11:58That's the system they built.
11:59So it must fit into the right-left paradigm.
12:02Because that binary is the foundation of all of their programming.
12:07So that helps them pretend that the solution to this violence
12:10is a simple change in our right-left rhetoric.
12:13The violent rhetoric that is coming from the extreme right wing.
12:16Democratic Party, they are not just tolerating political violence,
12:20they are cultivating it.
12:22The right wing has gotten so incensed,
12:25so dangerously violent, at least in its rhetoric.
12:27What is your message to your fellow Democrats in Congress?
12:30Stop with the rhetoric.
12:32You're getting people killed.
12:33I don't think the rhetoric is getting people killed, honestly.
12:38I don't think any of these psychotic motherfuckers that are doing this
12:41are watching MSNBC.
12:44I mean, I'm only judging from the ratings.
12:49I'm almost positive they're not watching it.
12:53To suggest that we don't need to tackle any complex, deep-rooted issues haunting American society,
12:59we just need to stop saying a few choice bad words and all our mentally broken young men will be fine,
13:05is not realistic.
13:07And I'm pretty sure that these people don't believe that either.
13:10When you equate federal agents with literal Nazis,
13:14you're no longer offering an opinion.
13:16You are giving permission to escalate.
13:19Permission to escalate, right.
13:21So dangerous.
13:24So.
13:24This is what Hitler did with the SS.
13:29This is what Nazi Joseph Goebbels said about the Hitler youth.
13:33Nazi tactics are progressive tactics first.
13:37Permission to escalate?
13:40Granted.
13:41Look, in America, we disagree.
13:43That's fine.
13:43That's the democratic process.
13:45But your political opponents are not Nazis.
13:50Except when.
13:52The Democrats, they are authoritarians.
13:55They are jackbooted thugs.
13:58No, no.
14:00He's not calling them Nazis.
14:02I'm sure that's just a fashion critique.
14:06Jackbooted thugs.
14:07I mean those boots.
14:08And white pants in October.
14:09Are you mad?
14:12Only Hitler would pull something like that off.
14:15Look, getting our arms around why this is happening is maddening and scary.
14:23But the media's ability to memory hole mass shootings that they can't neatly fit into right-left
14:28is almost as maddening as not really knowing why these killings are really happening.
14:33Even when the suspected killers leave supposedly explicit cues on their bullets.
14:40One inscription read, hey fascist, catch.
14:44Giving some indication about the mindset of Tyler Robinson.
14:50Oh right, no.
14:51It's very clearly anti-fascist.
14:53Very clear.
14:53Unless was there anything written on the other bullets?
14:56If you read this, you are gay.
14:58L-M-A-O.
14:59Okay, that seems kind of homophobic to me.
15:01If you read this, you're gay.
15:03I don't know what that means.
15:11Well, read it again.
15:17It means...
15:18Yeah.
15:22It's got to mean something.
15:23New York City College meme and digital culture researcher we spoke to said could refer to
15:28a video game called Helldivers 2.
15:31The same for other inscriptions found on an up arrow, right arrow, and three down arrows,
15:36which is how you drop a bomb in that game.
15:40What the f*** are we...
15:42Even the world that these kids now live in is so cynical and impermeable.
15:47This online nether world.
15:49If only there were a man, one man, a man who looks square, but is hep to what these kids
16:02are laying down, man.
16:05There's a lot of talk about the chat platform Discord, and Kurt the Cyber Guy joins us now
16:10to tell us what Discord is.
16:20Oh.
16:22Kurt the Cyber Guy has shown up.
16:25Fresh off of doing the weather in Sarasota.
16:30Thanks for the lowdown, Kurt the Cyber Guy, you old cyber dog.
16:33Say hello to your partner in crime, Meme Maven Gary.
16:39Meanwhile, why are we all just taking the bait from these psychos?
16:44Authorities have not released the motive, but of course, here's the ammunition.
16:50The words anti-ice, that phrase hyphenated, written on one of the bullet casings.
16:56We just had the facts laid out for us.
16:58This was an individual motivated by anti-ice.
17:00He wrote it on a bullet.
17:01We saw the bullet yesterday.
17:03Anti-ice.
17:05Case closed!
17:06He wrote anti-ice!
17:08Doesn't anybody think it's f***ing weird that these people just started writing on bullets
17:13all of a sudden?
17:14Like, that's the most effective way to get out their deeply held political beliefs?
17:21Anti-ice!
17:22Nuff said.
17:23Or is there the slightest possibility that these people are f***ing with us?
17:29According to his friends, the alleged gunman was not overly political and was mainly interested
17:34in video games and internet culture.
17:36Clearly it's anti-ice, right?
17:37And his friends say, I wouldn't interpret it that way.
17:40He was never a sincere guy.
17:41Everything he said was laced with irony and sarcasm.
17:44What kind of f***ing psychotic internet culture?
17:48What's happening?
17:49Can't we just go back to the cinnamon challenge?
17:52Is that so hard?
17:54What is wrong with you?
17:56Look, we would definitely have a healthier political discourse if we weren't constantly
18:02calling each other fascists and communists and Nazis.
18:04But we are the only place in the world where this s*** happens all the time.
18:12But we're not the only place in the world that name calls.
18:15So what is this?
18:17Perhaps we need to look back at our founders who, through their infinite wisdom, designed
18:23and operated a more mature system with checks and balances and a respect for all that prevented
18:31this kind of corrosive infighting and radicalization.
18:36John Quincy Adams taking aim at Jackson, asserting that Jackson didn't know how to spell,
18:41was too uneducated to become president, while newspapers portrayed his wife, Rachel,
18:45as a short, fat dumpling.
18:54A delicious dumpling indeed.
18:57When we come back, Jill Lepore will be joining us.
18:59Don't go away.
19:15Hey, what about Jackson?
19:17My guest tonight, Harvard professor, staff writer, the New Yorker, and best-selling author
19:23whose latest book is called We the People, History of the U.S. Constitution.
19:26Please welcome to the program, Jill Lepore.
19:27Professor.
19:28Professor.
19:29Mrs. Stewart.
19:30What are you trying to do to me?
19:55This is, yeah, I'm going to show you something.
19:59It was 600 pages.
20:00Look at the font.
20:01What do you got?
20:03I'm an old man.
20:05I had to pour over this with a magnifying glass and a microscope just to be able to see,
20:10and I only got up to reconstruction.
20:14You know what, can I tell you why?
20:16Normally, I get the books from the authors that are coming on the show, and they're dry,
20:19and I can skim them, your writing is so vivid and so interesting that I actually had to
20:26pay attention, and it slowed me down.
20:31I'm really sorry.
20:33I'm really sorry.
20:33I could do an alternate account that's just the dry version.
20:37Do not, because what I learned, it's fascinating to me.
20:43The process of just writing the Constitution was far, it was this 20-year meeting after
20:52meeting after meeting after meeting, which I, we think of it as something that is almost
20:59divine, inspired on Mount whatever and handed down to people.
21:05It's not.
21:06It was a series of, like, zoning board meetings.
21:09Yeah, it really was.
21:10It took a long time to figure out the whole premise of constitutionalism.
21:15I mean, we think, you know, next year we're celebrating the nation's 250th anniversary because
21:19we're marking the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, 1776, but that's also the year
21:24the first constitutions were written in what was the United States, and it's not until 1787
21:29that we get the Constitution that we have inherited as the federal Constitution, but all those
21:34years in between are just people like, what if we didn't have a governor, or, you know,
21:39what if we elected our state Supreme Court, or what if we granted the right to vote to
21:43everybody?
21:44Like, people are just debating and trying out different things, or what if we let the people
21:48write the constitutions?
21:49What if we wrote them ourselves but told them they had to agree to them?
21:52No, that's not going to work.
21:53Like, it's just a series of experiments.
21:55Right.
21:56And by the way, not on Zoom.
21:58Like, these guys, like, everything is like, what if we did this, and then they put in 50 amendments
22:04and did it, and then, like, they'd send a guy in a wagon, and it would take them, like,
22:08eight weeks to go, like, yeah, they said no.
22:11There was, there was one time, there was a constitution, maybe it was Pennsylvania, where
22:15there was a draft.
22:16Have you not read this?
22:18No, I forgot about it.
22:19How far did you get in this book?
22:20I forgot about it.
22:21There was a state constitution that was written, and then it went into the towns for ratification,
22:25but by the time they called for the vote, there hadn't, the printed copies of the
22:30constitution hadn't reached the towns yet.
22:31Like, it's actually just really hard to travel.
22:33Like, think of western Pennsylvania or western Massachusetts.
22:35Sure.
22:36It just takes a long time to get around.
22:37And also, there was a discussion, as you lay out, of who was even allowed to weigh in,
22:45and should it be property owners, or just white gentry, or people who paid enough in certain
22:53taxes, uh, and, and all these different things.
22:57But it, what it does is it, I don't want to say humanizes, but it's a product of administration.
23:07And, and it was almost a bureaucratic process.
23:11It, whereas I viewed it more as a moral process previously.
23:16Mm-hmm.
23:17And I think it was infused with morality.
23:19But even then, boy, they're very aware of slavery's, uh, shadow.
23:26And, and, and, and they make no bones about it.
23:30Yeah.
23:31I think it's, it's far more sort of contingent and accidental than we probably carry around
23:37in our head the idea of, you know, there was this bunch of guys in knee breaches in Philadelphia,
23:42and the sun came through a window, and George Washington said, ta-da, and there was the
23:47Constitution.
23:48And it's, like, there is that moment, right?
23:50There's famous speeches at the end where, you know, Franklin says, like, I consent to
23:53this Constitution, sir, because although I don't think it's the best, it's the best that
23:57we have.
23:58And, you know, there is that.
23:59There are a lot of, like, iconic moments in the history of the Constitution.
24:03Right.
24:03But there's just a mess all before it that involves a lot of things, like, like, people
24:07who are enslaved sending petitions to their state legislature saying, oh, when you're
24:11writing the Constitution, by the way, please end slavery, it is completely inconsistent with
24:15the philosophy on which this country is being founded.
24:17So, like, just, I wrote the book because I just wanted to recover this, like, much messier,
24:22more contingent, like, a lot of agitation.
24:26Like, there's a bureaucratic part of it.
24:28But then, you know, these guys are meeting in conventions, and, like, at the time they called
24:32everybody who is agitating who's not in the constitutional conventions in the states
24:36and in Philadelphia, the people out of doors.
24:39And it's like, we are, we are the people out of doors.
24:41We are all out of doors.
24:42We are the outdoors people.
24:43And the other thing is, there are a lot of women's conventions.
24:46Yeah.
24:46Who get together, and they draw up their own things.
24:51And they talk about how this Constitution, I thought there's a really interesting area
24:56in here where you talk about the protection of women.
25:00And sort of they discuss it as literal rape, as though, because British soldiers who had
25:05been in there and had been quartered in Americans' houses would.
25:11And so they viewed this as a way of protecting women and viewing the country in that same way.
25:17Yeah.
25:18Yeah.
25:18There's this whole, I mean, the reason we have, like, Lady Liberty or, you know,
25:21there's also Britannia, right, that we have these allegorical women that represent the nation.
25:26There is a way in which in the revolutionary era, women were always figured as the victims
25:32of British oppression, allegorically, like the rape of America by parliament is this,
25:37like, the most popular woodcut of the time or engraving of the time.
25:40But there also was a lot of rape that women dealt with during the revolutionary war,
25:44as is the case in all wars.
25:46Right.
25:46As a weapon of war that they would use.
25:48As a weapon of war, right.
25:48And so when you read, okay, so there were no women at the Constitutional Convention,
25:52but all those guys had wives and sisters and mothers and daughters who were writing
25:55to them and expressing their views.
25:57Like, one of my favorites is Benjamin Franklin's sister who writes to Franklin and says, like,
26:03I hope while you're down there in Philadelphia with those wise men, she's being a little bit
26:06ironic.
26:07Right.
26:08I hope you remember to turn the swords into plowshares.
26:13Like, I'm not down with, like, celebrating war in your new code of laws.
26:19Right.
26:19I thought Adams writes to his wife.
26:24Yeah.
26:24He gets a little cheeky.
26:27Yeah.
26:28He's a bit of a get.
26:29He's a bit of a get.
26:30But he does, he almost, in some ways, because she's very clearly pushing for, I guess,
26:37what you would imagine to be, maybe not the rights of women.
26:40I don't know.
26:41Yeah.
26:41Well, she says, look, like, all men would be tyrants if they could.
26:43That's the principle on which the country's founded, right?
26:45That's right.
26:46Like, power corrupts.
26:47That's right.
26:48So we have to have checks and balances.
26:49We have to write down our laws that limit the role of government and document the rights
26:53of the people, because left to nature, all men would be tyrants if they could.
26:58So she's like, also, husbands are also going to be tyrants.
27:01So we need to have rights.
27:03Please don't forget to grant rights to women.
27:06And he writes back, you know, as to new code of laws, madam, I cannot but laugh.
27:12Yeah.
27:13Yeah.
27:13I bet she wanted to hit him in the face with a frying pan.
27:17She writes to her friend, Mercy Otis Warren, who's like, let's, what about if we wrote a
27:21petition to Congress?
27:22Like, let's do this together.
27:23Right.
27:24And I, I found that really tantalizing.
27:26I'd never come across that letter.
27:27I always, everybody knows the kind of Abigail Adams letter to John that exchanges.
27:31Everybody, no, Harvard professors know that.
27:33No, here's, here's what everybody knows.
27:35The founders created three co-equal branches of government, and then there was Vietnam.
27:41Like, nobody has any idea about any of this.
27:44That's, I think that's the point.
27:46And the point is, there is a danger in not knowing this.
27:50Mm-hmm.
27:51Because it allows us to make presumptions and assumptions that, that lessen the work that
27:59we have to do to make change.
28:01You know, you talk a lot about this in terms of amendments that the founders put into place
28:09through, uh, article five, the idea that this was not the end all be all document, that it
28:18was going to have to be changed.
28:21And, and by not understanding the, what their thought process was leading up to it, I think
28:27we've lost sight of what that amending process should be.
28:30Yeah.
28:31And just the commitment to it.
28:32I mean, I was really struck.
28:33I hadn't thought that much, honestly, about amendments.
28:35I, I like most people to the degree that I had a kind of history of the Constitution in
28:39my mind.
28:39It's really a succession of Supreme Court cases.
28:41Oh, well, there was Dred Scott.
28:43I know about that one.
28:43Mm-hmm.
28:44You know, there's Lochner, uh, Brown v. Board of Education, Roe.
28:47Oh, my God.
28:48I could teach at Harvard.
28:49Right?
28:49Like, those are, you're like, okay, I got that.
28:51I know those, too.
28:52That's right.
28:52That's what you kind of think.
28:53Yes.
28:54Like, okay, the Supreme Court just decides, and that's what the Constitution is.
28:57That's kind of how it's taught, too, right?
28:58In law school, that's how it's taught.
28:59Like, just a section, a list of cases.
29:02And, but when I went back and did this research, it's like, wow, like, you know, the, the philosophy
29:06of amendment, the idea that we can make our lives and our government better and more
29:10responsive to the needs of the people, is actually the foundational principle of written
29:14constitutionalism.
29:15If you're going to write it down, there's, that's great.
29:17Then everybody can read it.
29:18Like, that's really important.
29:20But you have to have a way to change it.
29:23Right.
29:23And there really was no provision that the Supreme Court would be changing.
29:26I mean, that's a practice that evolved and is now, you know, considered, uh, standard
29:31and part of our constitutional tradition.
29:32But the philosophy of amendment is the thing that we abandoned.
29:35And it's, you know, it's hard, but even if you didn't have, like, a list of amendments
29:39you wanted, the idea of it is actually so beautiful.
29:42That is the moral idea, right?
29:44That is the, it's like this commitment to mending.
29:46Like, the, the word itself, kind of, the 18th century meaning of it is, like, inseparable
29:51from mending, like, repairing a textile, like.
29:54And convening.
29:55Like, like, making amends, uh, mending your ways.
29:58Like, these, these kind of deep ways of thinking about, shouldn't we be able to make things
30:03better?
30:03Just because we've written them down, does that mean we can't still aspire to make
30:07things better?
30:07Do you think that we have grown to use the Supreme Court as a moral crutch because the process
30:19of amending is so arduous?
30:24You know, it, it took the civil war for them to decide that, uh, black people should be
30:31able to vote.
30:32And then certainly, you know, Jim Crow's out, pulled, pulled that all back.
30:36Uh, you know, and women at the time were like, wait a minute.
30:40So, black men get to vote, but women don't get to vote?
30:44And then it took till the, the 20s, till that happens with the suffragette movement.
30:49Have we lost sight of what it takes to organize in a meeting, meeting-to-meeting, grassroots,
31:01relentless effort to create a lasting, because an amendment, you can pass a law, but a law
31:07can be repealed.
31:08An amendment is different.
31:10Is that what we've lost?
31:11An amendment is different.
31:12And many of our amendments overrule Supreme Court decisions.
31:15That's why, that's what they were for in the first place.
31:18Like, the Supreme Court strikes down a congressional law to establish a federal income tax, says
31:23that's not in the Constitution, Congress doesn't have that power, and ultimately we've got the
31:2716th Amendment in 1913 that says, okay, Congress can have this power.
31:31And without an amendment, many gains are just reversible.
31:35They can be overruled by the Supreme Court.
31:37They can, like, if you think about, like, environmental protection, right?
31:401970, Nixon says it's the environmental decade, I'm going to be the environmental president,
31:44and we get the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, Endangered Species Act, National Environmental
31:49Protection Act.
31:50All those things are being ruled back.
31:52Like, those were not constitutionalized.
31:53They're really important laws, and they had really important consequences, but there was
31:57a proposal for a constitutional amendment guaranteeing environmental protection as a constitutional
32:02right, and it doesn't get anywhere.
32:04There's time, that's sort of the last moment when we really were able to still amend the
32:07Constitution.
32:08So you think about that, like, it would be a different world if that had been constitutionalized.
32:12But it probably goes both ways.
32:14I mean, I would imagine that, you know, look, we could argue Roe v. Wade did a similar thing,
32:19which is why I think people now view those, what they might have considered to be rights,
32:24as being vulnerable, because I think they're realizing, oh, the Supreme Court, I mean, look
32:30at the shadow docket that they're literally, like, on one page thing, going like, yeah, the
32:33president can just take billions of dollars, and as long as it's for, like, foreign money,
32:37you can just take it.
32:38I mean, it's a little bit like your, you know, the reductionism of the mass shooting
32:43analysis, where you're going to just say, was it a red shooter or a blue shooter?
32:46I'm sorry, I don't watch this show, I don't care for it.
32:50So I don't know what you're referring to.
32:52Well, I think, you know...
32:53No, it's reductive.
32:53It's reductive.
32:54It's like, okay, so it's just generally the case, sadly, people aren't as principled
32:57as you'd wish.
32:58Like, if conservatives are not in power in the court, then they seek constitutional amendment,
33:03and they think the court shouldn't be making decisions.
33:04When liberals are not in power in the court, they suddenly want to talk about constitutional
33:08amendments, and they don't think the court should be making decisions.
33:10Are we all originalists when we're not holding the power?
33:15Is that how originalism works?
33:17Okay, no.
33:18Oh, okay, all right, all right.
33:20I wasn't sure.
33:21No, all right.
33:21No, we can be intellectually inconsistent without being originalists.
33:25Oh, okay, all right.
33:26Those are two different forms.
33:27They are.
33:28Because that's what the originalists would say, is it not, is that the amendment, because
33:34they placed it in there, if you don't use the amendment, you can't do anything.
33:37Yeah, so the original, so originalism is not original.
33:40It's not the original method of, of, of interpreting the Constitution.
33:43It's a political product of, of the 1970s and 1980s.
33:48Right.
33:48When...
33:48The term, maybe.
33:49The term, no, but also the idea.
33:51Even the thought process.
33:52Yeah, even the thought process.
33:53Oh.
33:53Earlier courts didn't really say, let's go back and consider what, you know, Madison's notes
33:58on the Constitutional Convention said, in order to understand whether there could be 18,
34:01So they understood themselves as living in a time and, and being politically part of
34:07the moment.
34:08Yeah.
34:09Yeah, they were working.
34:09I mean, they're a lot, again, like, it's, it's brand new.
34:12Like, they're working out, well, how are we going to interpret this thing?
34:14Like, they're working it out.
34:15There's different kind of competing theories.
34:16And they, they change over time.
34:18But the originalism that dominates the Supreme Court today, uh, really begins around 1971.
34:25And it is, it is fiscal and social conservatives who opposed to the decisions of the Warren
34:30Court.
34:30Right.
34:31Like, starting with Brown v. Board of Education in 1954.
34:34And they've said, oh, that's judicial.
34:36This is like...
34:37Judicial activism.
34:37Judicial activism.
34:38They're legislating from the bench.
34:39You should never do that.
34:40You should never do that.
34:41If you want to change the Constitution, you should try to amend it.
34:43And they try to amend the Constitution, but they don't have the votes.
34:45They want a right to life amendment.
34:46They want a balanced budget amendment.
34:47They don't have the votes.
34:49So then they were like, oh, you know what?
34:51We, we do want to change the Constitution.
34:53We're going to take over the federal judiciary.
34:54But we've been saying for decades that you can't legislate from the bench.
34:58So we have to have a way to have our new judiciary appointment, our new judiciary appointees
35:03be able to change the Constitution without seeming to be changing the Constitution.
35:07So they, well, what we're doing is...
35:08Right.
35:09We've devised this new judicial interpretation that it's, we're not changing the Constitution.
35:14We're restoring it to its original meaning.
35:16So it's a way to change the Constitution while pretending that you're not, disguising it
35:21as restoration.
35:22What's so interesting about that, too, it seems, is, so if you say, well, there is an amending
35:27process, right, that allows us to change the Constitution, so you have to use that because
35:31that's what the founders put in there.
35:32But as you show in the book, the amendment process wasn't something that they held sacrosanct.
35:39Again, the amendment process was born of a very messy, sometimes conflicting administrative
35:47and bureaucratic process.
35:49Even that was compromised for a variety of different reasons.
35:53So I don't even know that you can point to the amendment process.
35:57It seems like the Supreme Court, Marbury v. Madison, was the moment they went, there is
36:03no originalism, because in the Constitution, there is no, only the Supreme Court gets to
36:10interpret constitutionality, and there certainly is no amendment in the Constitution that suggests
36:15that.
36:15So didn't we leave that ship in 1803, or is that the wrong way of thinking of this?
36:22Yeah, I mean, I don't think, there's no pulling back judicial review.
36:26I don't, like, there's maybe...
36:28I just mean by doing judicial review, you've removed yourself from originalism, because that's
36:34not in there.
36:35Yes.
36:35Fair enough.
36:36Good night.
36:38Oh, okay.
36:39For real?
36:40Yeah, for real.
36:41Did I just get, did I just get a B?
36:43No.
36:45You know, no one gets B's anymore, John.
36:47I don't know.
36:47Oh, that's right.
36:48I forgot.
36:48I'm paying attention.
36:49I forgot about that.
36:50That's when the parents come in.
36:51How dare you?
36:52I spent $300,000 a year at this stupid college.
36:55I don't know the letter B anymore.
36:56My outfit stops with A.
36:59It's, it's really, you know what?
37:00It's awful, isn't it?
37:01It's awful.
37:02Yeah, it's embarrassing and inexcusable.
37:04Do you, can you even write, see me on the thing?
37:07Or no, that, even, even that's over.
37:10No.
37:10That's sort of suggestive, I think, is the problem.
37:12It is, right.
37:13And you can't do anything anymore.
37:15Oh, poor Democrats.
37:16Uh, is the idea of putting this out there, then, to give us a sense of the roadmap and
37:27the inconsistencies so that we no longer view things through a more orthodox or fundamentalist
37:36lens, like, it is this, as opposed to, no, it became that because of all these other
37:44tributaries.
37:45And, and is that, um, instructive for people as we move forward?
37:49Yeah, I think it's, first of all, it's important to have a more democratic past if you want
37:53to have a more democratic future, right?
37:56You have to see, like, there's a world of people who are agitating for different kinds
38:00of change.
38:00Like, not like all change is great.
38:02Like, a lot of the people that I write as character sketches in this book have constitutional
38:06ideas that I think are horrible.
38:08Right.
38:08But they really worked hard on them, and they really influenced the court in doing so,
38:12even if, you know, they didn't get their amendments through, or maybe they did.
38:15Some of them they did.
38:16Um, we just actually need a more complex and richer account of how Americans have viewed
38:22the Constitution so that it doesn't seem immutable.
38:25Not to say to, we shouldn't care about it, we shouldn't value it, we shouldn't want to
38:30uphold it, we shouldn't want to hold our leaders accountable to it, but that at the end of the
38:34day, it is actually our Constitution.
38:35And I think we have really, I would say most Americans don't even know the U.S. Constitution
38:39can be amended.
38:40Like, it hasn't really happened lately.
38:42And even state constitutions, like, we don't hold conventions anymore.
38:46I think that the things that people fought and died over a revolution for, I think, you
38:50know, the 750,000 Americans who died in the Civil War were fighting a constitutional argument,
38:55too.
38:55Like, I think we just need a better, a better account of that to get our bearings.
38:59In the same way, like, you know, in your, in a marriage, you kind of need to know, like,
39:04your family history.
39:04Like, you just, you have, like, an account of the past.
39:06Wow, that took a weird turn, Jill.
39:08No, I was, okay.
39:09That took a super, is there anything else you want to talk about?
39:14Just in your daily life, like, you think historically all the time about how did, like, how did I
39:19get there with this friendship?
39:20Like, oh my God, this person, you know, 20 years ago, we had this fight and we're still
39:25fighting over that.
39:26Sure.
39:27No.
39:27Yep.
39:27We all think that way.
39:30Okay.
39:31Maybe that failed.
39:31I'm sorry.
39:32I love it because it reminds people that, uh, democracy is a participatory sport and
39:42that when you go through that, you see this is about, and the more people that participate,
39:49we won't always, uh, be pleased with the outcome, but you have to be, uh, invested in
39:54the process.
39:54And boy, what a valuable thing.
39:56Although still my favorite piece of information in this entire book is that the Federalist Society,
40:01which are the, generally the legal, uh, theory of originalism, uh, altered the logo of James
40:08Madison that is their logo.
40:11Yeah.
40:11Because they thought the nose looked too big.
40:16It's kind of awesome.
40:18Also, it was Robert Burke's son, I think, who was like, this silhouette, he's a fairly
40:22unattractive man.
40:23I love it.
40:26Uh, the book is called We the People.
40:28It's available now.
40:29And again, I can't tell you just, the writing is so vivid and engaging and wonderful.
40:33It would have been so much easier to skim this bad boy, uh, if you were a lesser writer,
40:38but you are not.
40:39And it is fantastic.
40:41And I thank you for that.
40:42Even taking the time.
40:43Jill Lepore.
40:44We're going to take a quick break.
40:45We'll be right back after this.
40:46Jill.
40:52Hey, everybody.
41:07That's our show for tonight.
41:08Before we go, we're going to check in with your host for the rest of the week, Mr. Ronnie
41:11Chang.
41:11Ronnie!
41:14My man!
41:15Uh, talk to us.
41:17What's on deck for the rest of this week, Ronnie?
41:18Well, big news out of D.C., John.
41:20The federal government might be headed towards a shutdown, which means all of us have to
41:25step up.
41:26This is not a drill.
41:27We need all hands on deck to fulfill the vital government job of shredding all the Epstein
41:34files.
41:34Wait, you said you need everyone to step up to help shred the Epstein files?
41:45Yeah, yeah.
41:46It's a lot of files, John.
41:47It's a lot.
41:48What about the, like, government, like Social Security and cleaning national parks?
41:52The government does stuff other than Epstein files.
41:56Oh, okay, okay, I'll put on my tinfoil hat and talk about all the things the government
42:03does.
42:04Grow up, John.
42:05It's Epstein files.
42:07Ronnie Chang, everybody.
42:09Here it is.
42:10Your moment is in.
42:11That's not true.
42:12I have no idea what is going on.
42:14This cartoon is very significant in the community.
42:16So I found another guy to explain the whole situation.
42:20Again, this is on the side of the bullet.
42:22This is, like, one of the motive.
42:23Who knows?
42:24But I want to know.
42:33Sorry.
Recommended
41:31
|
Up next
43:01
42:37
56:02
1:20:14
57:30
1:08:45
43:44
45:40
22:08
24:49
44:05
43:49
43:45
Be the first to comment