Trump Sends Troops to Portland & Shootings Trigger Left-Right Blame Game | Jill Lepore

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This is the Daily Show with your host, John Stewart.

Speaker 7 Thank you so much. Wow.

Speaker 7 That is the rejection.

Speaker 7 That is...

Speaker 7 Oh, oh,

Speaker 7 I don't know what's happening.

Speaker 7 Hey!

Speaker 7 What? Say it!

Speaker 7 Welcome to the daily show.

Speaker 7 Honey,

Speaker 4 people think I'm Kimball. What's going on here?

Speaker 8 They're just trying to cheer up an old Mets fan.

Speaker 4 That's what's happening.

Speaker 8 Poor bastards. Welcome to the Dallas Show.
My name is John Stewart.

Speaker 10 We have a fabulous show for tonight.

Speaker 8 Historian and Professor Jill Lapore will be here later.

Speaker 13 She's going to be discussing her latest book to discuss the Constitution of the United States or what remains of it.

Speaker 14 Boy, we should have laminated that thing, huh?

Speaker 17 Because, well, as many of you know out there, we had another just blessed weekend in America of chaos and carnage.

Speaker 8 There were six mass shootings in 24 hours, two in North Carolina, two in Louisiana, one in Texas.

Speaker 8 The terrible scenes out of Michigan.

Speaker 8 But fear not, because the president is on the case.

Speaker 19 This morning, President Trump declares he's deploying troops to Portland, Oregon.

Speaker 20 Oh!

Speaker 20 Portland!

Speaker 21 You just missed it!

Speaker 8 You're gonna want a little to the, you're gonna,

Speaker 8 you've got the right country,

Speaker 11 but you're gonna wanna shift the resource.

Speaker 20 Why Portland?

Speaker 19 Trump posting, I'm directing Secretary of War Pete Hagseth to provide all necessary troops to protect war-ravaged Portland.

Speaker 4 Uncontrollable, these people.

Speaker 11 In the orgy of mass shootings in America,

Speaker 12 Portland?

Speaker 14 Did I miss Vancouver attacking Portland in a fierce battle of mellow artisans?

Speaker 23 Don't shoot till you see the whites of their code-form half-caflatte art.

Speaker 9 Not sure what that accent was.

Speaker 24 Here's the craziest part.

Speaker 11 The people of Oregon, Portland in particular, were also caught off guard by this.

Speaker 8 And the governor of Oregon tried tried to explain to the president that they were not in a state of war.

Speaker 10 And the president's response was, well, it was telling.

Speaker 26 President Trump, in an interview with NBC on Sunday morning, said a phone call with Governor Kotek showed him a different perspective.

Speaker 28 Saying, I spoke to the governor, she was very nice, but I said, well, wait a minute. Am I watching things on television that are different from what's happening?

Speaker 28 A,

Speaker 30 I don't think any of us know what you're watching on television,

Speaker 17 but if it's Game of Thrones, I'd say yes.

Speaker 17 Conditions in Portland may vary.

Speaker 30 And B, this explains so much about the governing philosophy of the Trump administration.

Speaker 33 There is reality, and then there's this.

Speaker 28 My people tell me different. They are literally attacking, and there are fires all over the place.

Speaker 16 And dragons.

Speaker 16 Better be dragons!

Speaker 16 So

Speaker 10 the President of the United States, alone in his bescreened bunker, sees reports of conflict in Portland on TV.

Speaker 8 His lackeys reinforce the chaos and rather than take a breath, rather than take a beat, rather than not acting rashly, rather than using the resources available to him as the President of the United States to find out what the realities on the ground are, he just goes, CO RED!

Speaker 4 Red team go!

Speaker 25 Because he sees it on fing TV

Speaker 4 and acts impulsively.

Speaker 22 He sends out the National Guard the same way you or I might make a late-night sham wow purchase.

Speaker 22 I saw it on TV!

Speaker 22 It looked, it was on TV.

Speaker 25 In reality, it's just a f ⁇ ing rag.

Speaker 17 But at three in the morning,

Speaker 17 it's magic!

Speaker 15 Meanwhile, the non-Portland area of the country is going through some shit.

Speaker 13 As we mentioned, there's a mass shooting now like every couple of hours.

Speaker 15 Previously, the routine would be we express our shock, we express our sadness, we offer our thoughts and prayers, we spend a day, maybe two, arguing about the appropriateness of bringing up guns at all, and then we do nothing until the next time.

Speaker 27 But as our politics becomes more polarized, even that learned cycle of helplessness has been replaced by by a new post-shooting pastime.

Speaker 30 That new pastime is, was this one of yours?

Speaker 42 The shooter was a radical leftist.

Speaker 1 The guy is a right-wing Trump-supporting evangelical Christian.

Speaker 19 He is a Biden supporter.

Speaker 1 Case closed.

Speaker 43 We know the suspected shooter is MAGA.

Speaker 28 The shooter, a leftist whack job?

Speaker 8 It's America's new gender-revealed tradition.

Speaker 32 Boom! It's blue!

Speaker 4 Ha ha!

Speaker 33 I'm so happy to blame the left for the violence.

Speaker 27 The game is so ubiquitous.

Speaker 13 Now we often play it before we even know who the perpetrator is.

Speaker 44 The killer's identity may be unknown, but his point of view seems pretty clear. That's why I'm calling it political and from the left.

Speaker 8 That's Kudlow's lock of the week.

Speaker 8 Lock it up next. Murder rate in Chicago next weekend.

Speaker 27 Well, it's getting cold there, so I'm taking the under.

Speaker 36 By the way, playing with this one of yours is also certainly a speculative endeavor.

Speaker 8 So we are treated in the aftermath of these horrific crimes to the news media's active politicized scavenger hunt.

Speaker 11 Which piece of inconclusive arcana proves which half of the country is to blame?

Speaker 47 The shooter reportedly voted in the 2020 Democrat primary.

Speaker 19 The Butler, Pennsylvania shooter, was a registered Republican.

Speaker 1 The suspect wasn't registered with either party.

Speaker 42 He grew up in an area of Utah that is mostly Republican.

Speaker 49 The shooter was a registered Republican, while election records show that in 2021 he gave $15 to a Democratic-aligned organization.

Speaker 8 He's a Republican, but cheap.

Speaker 8 Republican, but donated to a Democrat. Maybe he just wanted the PBS Ken Burns tote bag.

Speaker 21 I don't know.

Speaker 8 I don't know who to hate.

Speaker 13 Sometimes the clues aren't even expressly political, but live politically adjacent in the culture.

Speaker 42 Social media photos show Mr. Robinson shooting and posing with guns.

Speaker 43 There's his pickup truck, the huge American flagship.

Speaker 47 This person was a gay man who was in a relationship with another man who believed he was a woman, and they were both into a phenomenon that can only be described as furriness.

Speaker 30 I love that this dude has to to pretend like he doesn't know what furries are.

Speaker 20 I mean, I don't know. It can be only,

Speaker 20 I don't know.

Speaker 8 It can only be described as a sexual costume party with animals. I mean, I mean, if you were even to do something like that, how would you even get the stains out of the costumes?

Speaker 11 I mean,

Speaker 8 especially if they had set for three days.

Speaker 13 What would you use?

Speaker 23 Club soda, lemon?

Speaker 4 I'm just asking.

Speaker 50 Or do you just throw the costume out after each experience?

Speaker 10 Now call me old-fashioned, but I miss the good old days of mass shootings, when networks took a principled stance to not shower attention on acts designed to get attention.

Speaker 51 We will not say the gunman's name or show his photograph.

Speaker 19 Fox News will not show you his picture or give him any attention by repeating his name. We don't like naming the gunman because so often they do things just to get attention.

Speaker 43 We don't want to bring more undue attention that is absolutely necessary to the cowards that bring out, carry out these types of attacks.

Speaker 4 That's right, boys and girls.

Speaker 8 You know, when I was a boy, there was a brief period in American media where not only wouldn't they say the suspected killer's name,

Speaker 8 they wouldn't constantly show the suspected killer's only fans hot shots.

Speaker 12 They wouldn't do it.

Speaker 8 They wouldn't. Oh, dear Lord.

Speaker 8 Oh,

Speaker 8 oh, my God.

Speaker 8 He could

Speaker 8 He could have done so much good with those.

Speaker 52 And yet he chose the dark side.

Speaker 8 So why has the news media become obsessed with right-left framing of violence?

Speaker 17 Well, part of the reason is they are following the lead of social media.

Speaker 13 Social media is doing it crazier and faster than anybody else. So the media is trying to keep up.

Speaker 9 The fire in the church in Michigan was still burning when online influencers were inferring that the number of Muslims in Michigan are what obviously made this attack happen until police released the suspect's photo, which looked like it came from a Duck Dynasty fanfic account.

Speaker 32 And then the left got to celebrate.

Speaker 8 And then they found a Trump Vance sign on his house, case closed, except that sign was placed near a stop sign.

Speaker 11 So some on the right said, no, no, no, he's saying, stop Trump Vance.

Speaker 8 Like it's some leftist rebus that he was creating.

Speaker 10 But here's the thing.

Speaker 20 Who the f

Speaker 20 cares?

Speaker 16 These mass shootings don't fit.

Speaker 7 Who honestly cares?

Speaker 13 These mass shootings do not fit neatly into our left-right paradigm.

Speaker 8 Mass shootings are probably caused by a complex fusion of mental health and access to weapons and attention-seeking delusional nihilism married to an algorithmic underworld that set these horrific acts in motion.

Speaker 22 But unfortunately, right-left paradigm is the only way our narcissistic media ecosystem sees anything anymore.

Speaker 8 That's the system they built.

Speaker 18 So it must fit into the right-left paradigm because that binary is the foundation of all of their programming.

Speaker 22 So that helps them pretend that the solution to this violence is a simple change in our right-left rhetoric.

Speaker 19 The violent rhetoric that is coming from the extreme right-wing Democratic Party.

Speaker 54 They are not just tolerating political violence, they are cultivating it.

Speaker 19 The right wing has gotten so incensed, so dangerously violent, at least in its rhetoric.

Speaker 55 Here's your message to your fellow Democrats of Congress.

Speaker 19 Stop with the rhetoric. You're getting people killed.

Speaker 13 I don't think the rhetoric is getting people killed. Honestly, I don't think any of these psychotic motherfuckers that are doing this are watching MSNBC.

Speaker 8 I mean,

Speaker 17 I'm only judging from the ratings.

Speaker 38 I'm almost positive they're not watching it.

Speaker 8 To suggest that we don't need to tackle any complex, deep-rooted issues haunting American society, we just need to stop saying a few choice bad words and all our mentally broken young men will be fine is not realistic.

Speaker 8 And I'm pretty sure that these people don't believe that either.

Speaker 42 When you equate federal federal agents with literal Nazis, you're no longer offering an opinion. You are giving permission to escalate.

Speaker 56 Permission to escalate, right?

Speaker 31 So dangerous.

Speaker 56 So.

Speaker 42 This is what Hitler did with the SS. This is what Nazi Joseph Goebbels said about the Hitler youth.

Speaker 53 Nazi tactics are progressive tactics first.

Speaker 56 Permission to escalate, granted.

Speaker 57 Look, in America, we disagree. That's fine.
That's the democratic process. But your political opponents are not Nazis.

Speaker 9 Except when...

Speaker 58 The Democrats. They are authoritarians.
They are jackbooted thugs.

Speaker 8 No, no, he's not calling them Nazis.

Speaker 13 Sure, that's just a fashion critique.

Speaker 13 Jack-booted thugs, I mean those boots.

Speaker 9 And white pants in October?

Speaker 48 Are you mad?

Speaker 33 Only Hitler would pull something like that.

Speaker 9 Look, getting our arms around why this is happening is maddening and scary.

Speaker 18 But the media's ability to memory hole mass shootings that they can't neatly fit into right-left is almost as maddening as not really knowing why these killings are really happening.

Speaker 8 Even when the suspected killers leave supposedly explicit cues on their bullets.

Speaker 46 One inscription

Speaker 46 hey, fascist, catch, giving some indication about the mindset of

Speaker 46 Tyler Robinson.

Speaker 50 Oh, right. No, it's very clearly anti-fascist.
Very clear.

Speaker 34 Unless, was there anything written on the other bullets?

Speaker 49 If you read this, you are gay, L-M-A-O.

Speaker 54 Okay, that seems kind of homophobic to me.

Speaker 43 If you read this, you're gay.

Speaker 27 I don't know what that means.

Speaker 4 Well, read it again.

Speaker 20 It means...

Speaker 20 Yeah, it's got to mean something.

Speaker 51 New York City college meme and digital culture researcher we spoke to said could refer to a video game called Helldivers 2.

Speaker 51 The same for other inscriptions found on an up arrow, a right arrow, and three down arrows, which is how you drop a bomb in that game.

Speaker 8 What the f ⁇ are we even, the world that these kids now live in is so cynical and impermeable, this online nether world.

Speaker 40 If only there were

Speaker 54 a man,

Speaker 54 one man,

Speaker 9 a man who looks square, but is hep

Speaker 33 to what these kids are laying down, man.

Speaker 19 There's a lot of talk about the chat platform Discord, and Kurt the Cyber Guy joins us now to tell us what Discord is. is.

Speaker 32 Kurt the cyber guy has shown up

Speaker 11 fresh off of doing the weather in Sarasota.

Speaker 8 Thanks for the lowdown Kurt the cyber guy you old cyber dog.

Speaker 8 Say hello to your partner in crime, Meme Maven Gary.

Speaker 23 Meanwhile, why are we all just taking the bait from these psychos?

Speaker 19 Authorities have not released the motive, but of course, here's the ammunition. The words anti-ice, that phrase hyphenated, written on one of the bullet casings.
We just had the facts laid out for us.

Speaker 19 This was an individual motivated by anti-ice. He wrote it on a bullet.
We saw the bullet yesterday. Anti-ice.

Speaker 4 Case closed!

Speaker 11 He wrote anti-ICE.

Speaker 8 Doesn't anybody think it's f ⁇ ing weird that these people just started writing on bullets all of a sudden? Like that's the most effective way to get out their deeply held political beliefs?

Speaker 13 Anti-ice, nuff said.

Speaker 11 Or is there the slightest possibility that these people are fing with us?

Speaker 19 According to his friends, the alleged gunman was not overly political and was mainly interested in video games and internet culture.

Speaker 55 Clearly, it's anti-ice, right? And his friends say, I wouldn't interpret it that way. He was never a sincere guy.
Everything he said was laced with irony and sarcasm.

Speaker 8 What kind of f ⁇ ing psychotic internet culture?

Speaker 20 What's happening?

Speaker 8 Can't we just go back to the cinnamon challenge? Is that so hard?

Speaker 7 What is wrong with you?

Speaker 36 Look, we would definitely have a healthier political discourse if we weren't constantly calling each other fascists and communists and Nazis.

Speaker 13 But we are the only place in the world where this shit happens all the time.

Speaker 22 but we're not the only place in the world that name calls.

Speaker 8 So what is this?

Speaker 30 Perhaps we need to look back at our founders, who through their infinite wisdom designed and operated a more mature system with checks and balances and a respect for all

Speaker 30 that prevented this kind of corrosive infighting and radicalization.

Speaker 1 John Quincy Adams taking aim at Jackson, asserting that Jackson didn't know how to spell, was too uneducated to become president, while newspapers portrayed his wife Rachel as a short, fat dumpling.

Speaker 34 A delicious dumpling indeed.

Speaker 8 When we come back, Jill Lapore will be joining us.

Speaker 30 Don't go away.

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Speaker 61 Hey, we're not going to

Speaker 8 staff writer of the New Yorker and best-selling author whose latest book is called We the People, History of the U.S.

Speaker 36 Constitution.

Speaker 4 Please welcome the program, Jillipore.

Speaker 45 What are you trying to do to me?

Speaker 8 This is, yeah, I'm going to show you something.

Speaker 10 It was 600 pages.

Speaker 9 Look at the font.

Speaker 48 What do you got?

Speaker 4 I'm an old man.

Speaker 54 I had to pour over this with a magnifying glass and a microscope just to be able to see, and I only got up to reconstruction.

Speaker 14 You know what? Can I tell you why?

Speaker 54 Normally, I get the books from the authors that are coming on the show, and they're dry, and I can skim them.

Speaker 31 Your writing is so so vivid and so interesting that I actually had to pay attention

Speaker 4 and it slowed me down.

Speaker 4 I'm really sorry. I'm really sorry.

Speaker 19 I could do an alternate account that's just the dry version.

Speaker 16 Do not.

Speaker 34 Because

Speaker 14 what I learned,

Speaker 31 it's fascinating to me, the process of just writing the Constitution

Speaker 13 was far, it was this 20-year

Speaker 9 meeting after meeting meeting after meeting after meeting which I we think of it as something that is almost divine inspired on Mount whatever and handed down to people it's not it was a series of like zoning board meetings

Speaker 19 yeah it really was it took a long time to figure out the whole premise of constitutionalism.

Speaker 19 I mean we we think you know next year we're celebrating the nation's 250th anniversary because we're marking the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence 1776, but that's also the year the first constitutions were written in what was the United States.

Speaker 19 And it's not until 1787 that we get the Constitution that we haven't inherited as the federal constitution. But all those years in between are just people like, what if we didn't have a governor?

Speaker 19 Or, you know, what if we elected our state Supreme Court? Or what if we granted the right to vote to everybody? Like, people are just debating and trying out different things.

Speaker 19 Or what if we let the people write the constitutions? What if we wrote them ourselves but told them they had to agree to them? No, that's not going to work. Like, it's just a series of experiments.

Speaker 19 Right.

Speaker 54 And by the way, not on Zoom.

Speaker 4 Like these guys,

Speaker 33 like everything is like, what if we did this and then they put in 50 amendments and did it?

Speaker 34 And then like they'd send a guy in a wagon and it would take him like eight weeks to go like, yeah, they said no.

Speaker 19 There was one time, there was a constitution, maybe it was Pennsylvania, where there was a draft.

Speaker 32 Have you not read this?

Speaker 20 No, I forgot about it.

Speaker 4 How far did you get it? I forgot it all.

Speaker 19 There was a state constitution that was written, and then it went into the towns for ratification, but by the time they called for the vote,

Speaker 19 the printed copies of the constitution hadn't reached the towns yet. Like, it's actually just really hard to travel.
Like, think of western Pennsylvania or western Massachusetts. Sure.

Speaker 19 It just takes a long time to get around.

Speaker 35 And also, there was a discussion, as you lay out, of who was even allowed to weigh in, and should it be property owners or just white gentry or people who paid enough in certain taxes

Speaker 25 and

Speaker 41 all these different things. But

Speaker 39 what it does is it, I don't want to say humanizes, but

Speaker 29 it's a product of administration.

Speaker 31 And it was almost a bureaucratic process,

Speaker 56 whereas I viewed it more as a moral process previously.

Speaker 33 And I think it was infused with morality. But even then, boy, they're very aware of slavery's shadow.

Speaker 18 And they make no bones about it.

Speaker 19 Yeah.

Speaker 19 I think it's far more sort of contingent and accidental than we probably carry around in our head the idea of, you know, there was this bunch of guys in knee breeches in Philadelphia and the sun came through a window and George Washington said, ta-da, and there was the Constitution.

Speaker 19 And it's like there is that moment, right?

Speaker 19 There's famous speeches at the end where, you know, Franklin says, like, I consent to this Constitution, sir, because although I don't think it's the best, it's the best that we have.

Speaker 19 And, you know, there is that. There are a lot of like iconic moments in the history of the Constitution.
Right. But there's just a mess all before it that involves a lot of things like...

Speaker 19 like people who are enslaved sending petitions to their state legislature saying, oh, when you're writing the Constitution, by the way, please end slavery.

Speaker 19 It is completely inconsistent with the philosophy on which this country is being founded. So like just, I wrote the book because I just wanted to recover this like much messier, more contingent

Speaker 19 like a lot of agitation like there's a bureaucratic part of it but then you know these guys are meeting in conventions and like at the time they called everybody who was agitating was not in the constitutional conventions in the states and in Philadelphia the people out of doors and it's like we are we are the people out of doors we are all out of doors

Speaker 15 the other thing is there are a lot of women's conventions yeah who get together and they draw up

Speaker 31 their own things and and they talk about how this constitution, I thought there's a really interesting area in here where you talk about the protection of women and sort of they discuss it as literal rape, as though because British soldiers who had been in there and had been quartered in

Speaker 27 Americans' houses would,

Speaker 15 and so they viewed this as a way of protecting women and viewing the country in that same way.

Speaker 19 Yeah, yeah, there's this whole, I mean, the reason we have like Lady Liberty or, you know, there's also Britannia, right? We have these allegorical women that represent the nation.

Speaker 19 There is a way in which in the revolutionary era, women were always figured as the victims of British oppression, allegorically, like the rape of America by

Speaker 19 Parliament is this, like, the most popular woodcut of the time or engraving of the time.

Speaker 19 But there also was a lot of rape that women dealt with during the Revolutionary War, as is the case in all wars. Right.

Speaker 24 As a weapon of war.

Speaker 4 As a weapon of war, right.

Speaker 19 And so when you read, okay, so there were no women at the Constitutional Convention, but all those guys had wives and sisters and mothers and daughters who were writing to them and expressing their views.

Speaker 19 Like one of my favorites is Benjamin Franklin's sister

Speaker 19 who

Speaker 19 writes to Franklin and says,

Speaker 19 I hope while you're down there in Philadelphia with those wise men, she's being a little bit ironic. Right.

Speaker 19 I hope you remember to

Speaker 19 turn the swords into plowshares. Like, I'm not down with

Speaker 19 celebrating war and your new code of laws.

Speaker 56 I thought Adams

Speaker 56 writes to his wife. Yeah.
He gets a little

Speaker 25 cheeky.

Speaker 19 Yeah. He's a bit of a get.

Speaker 39 He's a bit of a get, but he does, he almost in some ways make, because she's very clearly pushing for, I guess, what you would imagine to be

Speaker 34 maybe not the rights of women. I don't know.

Speaker 19 Yeah, well, she says, look, like, all men would be tyrants if they could. That's the principle on which the country's founded, right? Like,

Speaker 19 like, power corrupts. So we have to have checks and balances.
We have to write down our laws that limit the role of government and document the rights of the people because

Speaker 19 left to nature, all men would be tyrants if they could. So she's like, also, husbands are also going to be tyrants.
So we need to have rights. Please don't forget to grant rights to women.

Speaker 19 And he writes back, you know, as to your new code of laws, madam, I cannot but laugh.

Speaker 56 Yeah.

Speaker 19 Yeah.

Speaker 39 I bet she wanted to hit him in the face with a frying pan.

Speaker 19 She writes to her friend Mercy Otis Warren is like, let's, what about if we wrote a petition to Congress? Like, let's do this this together. Right.
And I found that really tantalizing.

Speaker 19 I'd never come across that.

Speaker 19 Everybody knows the kind of Abigail Adams letter to John that exchanges.

Speaker 24 Everybody, no, Harvard professors know that.

Speaker 13 Here's what everybody knows.

Speaker 33 The founders created three co-equal branches of government, and then there was Vietnam.

Speaker 32 Like, nobody has any idea about any of this.

Speaker 40 I think that's the point.

Speaker 45 And the point is, there is a danger in not knowing this

Speaker 31 because it allows us to make presumptions and assumptions that

Speaker 33 lessen the work that we have to do to make change.

Speaker 50 You know, you talk a lot about this in terms of amendments that the founders put into place through

Speaker 33 Article V, the idea that this was not the end-all-be-all document.

Speaker 31 that it was going to have to be changed.

Speaker 39 And by not understanding understanding what their thought process was leading up to it, I think we've lost sight of what that amending process should be.

Speaker 19 Yeah, and just the commitment to it. I mean, I was really struck.
I hadn't thought that much, honestly, about him.

Speaker 19 And I like most people to the degree that I had, a kind of history of the Constitution in my mind. It's really a succession of Supreme Court cases.
Oh, well, there was Dred Scott.

Speaker 19 I know about that one.

Speaker 19 You know, there's Lochner, Brown v. Board of Education, Rowe.

Speaker 24 Oh, my God. I could teach at Harvard.

Speaker 10 Right.

Speaker 19 Like, those are, you're like, okay, I can do that.

Speaker 13 I know those too.

Speaker 19 That's right. That's what you kind of think.
Like, okay, the Supreme Court just decides, and that's what the Constitution is. That's kind of how it's taught, too, right?

Speaker 19 In law school, that's how it's taught. Like, it's just a list of cases.

Speaker 19 But when I went back and did this research, I was like, wow,

Speaker 19 the philosophy of amendment, the idea that we can make our lives and our government better and more responsive to the needs of the people, is actually the foundational principle of written constitutionalism.

Speaker 19 If you're going to write it down,

Speaker 19 that's great. Then everybody can read it.
Like, that's really important. But

Speaker 19 you have to have a way to change change it. And there really was no provision that the Supreme Court would be changing it.

Speaker 19 I mean that's a practice that evolved and is now considered standard and part of our constitutional tradition. But the philosophy of amendment is the thing that we abandoned.

Speaker 19 And it's, you know, it's hard, but even if you didn't have like a list of amendments you wanted, the idea of it is actually so beautiful. That is the moral idea, right?

Speaker 19 That is like this commitment to mending. Like the word itself, kind of the 18th century meaning of it, is like inseparable from mending, like repairing a textile, like and convening, like

Speaker 19 making amends, mending your ways, like these kind of deep ways of thinking about shouldn't we be able to make things better?

Speaker 19 Just because we've written them down, does that mean we can't still aspire to make things better?

Speaker 31 Do you think that we

Speaker 56 have grown to use the Supreme Court as a moral crutch

Speaker 39 because the process of amending

Speaker 35 is so

Speaker 56 arduous.

Speaker 50 You know, it took the Civil War for them to decide that black people should be able to vote.

Speaker 52 And then certainly, you know, Jim Croce pulled that all back.

Speaker 39 You know, and women at the time were like, wait a minute, so

Speaker 39 black men get to vote, but women don't get to vote.

Speaker 56 And then it took till the 20s, till that happens with the suffragette movement, have we lost sight of

Speaker 52 what it takes to organize in a

Speaker 39 meeting, meeting-to-meeting, grassroots, relentless effort to create a lasting, because an amendment, you can pass a law, but a law can be repealed.

Speaker 59 An amendment is different.

Speaker 25 Is that what we've lost?

Speaker 19 An amendment is different. And many of our amendments overrule Supreme Court decisions.
That's why, that's what they were for in the first place.

Speaker 19 Like the Supreme Court strikes down a congressional law to establish a federal income tax, says that's not in the Constitution, Congress doesn't have that power,

Speaker 19 ultimately we get the 16th Amendment in 1913 that says, okay, Congress can have this power. And without an amendment, many gains are just reversible.
They can be overruled by the Supreme Court.

Speaker 19 Like if you think about like environmental protection, right? 1970 Nixon says it's the environmental decade. I'm going to be the environmental president.

Speaker 19 And we get the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, Endangered Species Act, In Species Act, National Environmental Protection Act. All those things are being ruled back.

Speaker 19 Like those were not constitutionalized. They're really important laws, and they had really important consequences.

Speaker 19 But there was a proposal for a constitutional amendment guaranteeing environmental protection as a constitutional right.

Speaker 19 And it isn't getting where this time, that's sort of the last moment when we really were able to still amend the Constitution.

Speaker 19 So you think about that, like it would be a different world if that had been constitutionalized.

Speaker 4 It probably goes both ways.

Speaker 15 I mean, I would imagine

Speaker 38 that, you know,

Speaker 33 look, we could argue Roe v.

Speaker 39 Wade did a similar thing, which is why I think people now view those, what they might have considered to be rights, as being vulnerable. Because I think they're realizing, oh,

Speaker 36 the Supreme Court here.

Speaker 54 I mean, look at the shadow docket that they're literally like on one-page thing going, like, yeah, the president can just take billions of dollars, and as long as it's for like foreign money, he can just take it.

Speaker 19 I mean, it's a little bit like you're,

Speaker 19 you know, the

Speaker 19 reductionism of the mass shooting analysis where you're going to just say, was it a red shooter or a blue shooter?

Speaker 30 I'm sorry, I don't watch this show.

Speaker 9 I don't care for it.

Speaker 9 So I don't know what you're referring to.

Speaker 38 Well, I think you know.

Speaker 19 No, it's reductive. It's reductive.
It's like, okay, so it's just generally the case, sadly, people aren't as principled as you'd wish.

Speaker 19 Like, if conservatives are not in power in the court, then they seek constitutional amendment and they think the court shouldn't be making decisions.

Speaker 19 If the liberals are not in power in the court, they suddenly want to talk about constitutional amendments and they don't think the court should be making decisions.

Speaker 54 Are we all originalists? when we're not holding the power?

Speaker 33 Is that how originalism works?

Speaker 32 No.

Speaker 12 Oh, okay. All right.

Speaker 3 I wasn't sure.

Speaker 4 No. All right.

Speaker 19 No. We can be intellectually inconsistent without being originalists.

Speaker 4 Oh, okay. All right.

Speaker 19 Those are two different forms of.

Speaker 18 Because that's

Speaker 45 what the originalists would say, is it not?

Speaker 33 Is that the amendment, because they placed it in there, if you don't use the amendment, you can't do anything.

Speaker 19 Yeah, so the original, so originalism is not original. It's not the original method

Speaker 19 of interpreting the Constitution. It's a political product of the 1970s and 1980s.

Speaker 38 Right. The term, maybe.

Speaker 19 The term, no, but also the idea.

Speaker 27 Even the thought process.

Speaker 19 Yeah, even the thought process.

Speaker 19 Earlier courts didn't really say, let's go back and consider what Madison's notes on the Constitutional Convention said in order to understand whether there could be achieved.

Speaker 45 So they understood themselves as

Speaker 54 living in a time and being politically part of the moment.

Speaker 19 Yeah, they were working. I mean, they're a lot, again, like, it's brand new.
Like, they're working out, well, how are we going to interpret this thing? Like, they're working it out.

Speaker 19 There's different kinds of competing theories, and they change over time. But the originalism that dominates the Supreme Court today

Speaker 19 really begins around 1971, and it is fiscal and social conservatives who oppose to the decisions of the Warren Court, like starting with Brown View Board of Education in 1954.

Speaker 19 And they've said, oh, that's judicial. This is like...
Judicial activism. Judicial activism there, legislating from the bench.
You should never do that. You should never do that.

Speaker 19 If you want to change the Constitution, you should try to amend it. And they try to amend the Constitution, but they don't have the votes.
They want a right-to-life amendment.

Speaker 19 They want a balanced budget amendment. They don't have the votes.
So then they were like, oh, you know what? We do want to change the Constitution. We're going to take over the federal judiciary.

Speaker 19 But we've been saying for decades that you can't legislate from the bench.

Speaker 19 So we have to have a way to have our new judiciary appointment, our new judiciary appointees, be able to change the Constitution without seeming to be changing the Constitution.

Speaker 19 So they say, well, what we're doing is,

Speaker 19 we've devised this new judicial interpretation that

Speaker 19 we're not changing the Constitution, we're restoring it to its original meaning.

Speaker 19 So it's a way to change the Constitution while pretending that you're not,

Speaker 19 disguising it as restoration.

Speaker 33 What's so interesting about that too, it seems, is, so if you say, well, there is an amending process, right, that allows us to change the Constitution, so you have to use that because that's what the founders put in there.

Speaker 39 But as you show in the book, the amendment process wasn't something that they held sacrosanct.

Speaker 39 Again, the amendment process was born of a very messy, sometimes conflicting administrative and bureaucratic process.

Speaker 14 Even that was compromised for a variety of different reasons.

Speaker 41 So I don't even know that you can point to the amendment process.

Speaker 39 It seems like the Supreme Court, Marbury versus Madison, was the moment they went, there is no originalism, because in the Constitution, there is no, only the Supreme Court gets to interpret constitutionality, and there certainly is no amendment in the Constitution that suggests that.

Speaker 13 So

Speaker 37 didn't we leave that ship in 1803, or is that the wrong way of thinking of this?

Speaker 19 Yeah, I mean, I think there's no pulling back judicial review.

Speaker 25 I don't, like, there's maybe I just mean by doing judicial review, you've removed yourself from originalism because that's not in there.

Speaker 19 Yes, fair enough.

Speaker 39 Good night.

Speaker 4 For real?

Speaker 32 Did I just get a B?

Speaker 21 No.

Speaker 19 You know, no one gets B's anymore, John.

Speaker 38 I don't know. Oh, that's right.

Speaker 4 I forgot.

Speaker 4 I forgot about that.

Speaker 8 That's where the parents come in.

Speaker 4 How dare you?

Speaker 8 I spent $300,000 a year at this stupid college.

Speaker 19 I don't know the letter B anymore.

Speaker 20 My outfit stops with A.

Speaker 31 It's really, you know what? It's awful, isn't it?

Speaker 19 It's awful. Yeah, it's embarrassing and inexcusable.

Speaker 37 Can you even write C Me on the thing? Or no,

Speaker 59 even that's over.

Speaker 19 No. That's sort of suggestive, I think, is the problem.

Speaker 17 It is, right? And you can't do anything anymore.

Speaker 56 Oh, poor Democrats.

Speaker 39 Is the idea of putting this out there then to give give us a sense

Speaker 31 of the roadmap and the inconsistencies so that we no longer

Speaker 54 view things through a more orthodox or fundamentalist lens?

Speaker 39 Like, it is this, as opposed to, no, it became that because of all these other tributaries.

Speaker 56 And is that instructive for people as we move forward?

Speaker 19 Yeah, I think it's, first of all, it's important to have a more democratic past if you want to have a more democratic future.

Speaker 19 You have to see, like, there's a world of people who are agitating for different kinds of change. Like, not like all change is great.

Speaker 19 Like, a lot of the people that I write as character sketches in this book have constitutional ideas that I think are horrible.

Speaker 19 But they really worked hard on them and they really influenced the court in doing so, even if they didn't get their amendments through, or maybe they did. Some of them they did.

Speaker 19 We just actually need a more complex and richer account of how Americans have viewed the Constitution so that it doesn't seem immutable.

Speaker 19 Not to say we shouldn't care about it, we shouldn't value it, we shouldn't want to uphold it, we shouldn't want to hold our leaders accountable to it, but that at the end of the day, it is actually our Constitution.

Speaker 19 And I think we have really, I would say, most Americans don't even know the U.S. Constitution can be amended.

Speaker 19 It hasn't really happened lately. And even state constitutions, like we don't hold conventions anymore.

Speaker 19 I think that the things that people fought and died over a revolution for, and you know, the 750,000 Americans who died in the Civil War were fighting a constitutional argument too.

Speaker 19 Like, I think we just need

Speaker 19 a better account of that to get our bearings. In the same way, like, you know,

Speaker 19 in a marriage, you kind of need to know, like, your family history. Like, you just, you have, like, an account of the.

Speaker 9 Wow, that took a weird turn, Jordan.

Speaker 38 Okay.

Speaker 13 That took a super.

Speaker 30 Is there anything else you want to talk about?

Speaker 19 Just in your daily life, like, you think historically all the time about how did, like, how did I get there with this friendship?

Speaker 19 Like, oh my god, this person, you know, 20 years ago, we had this fight and we're still fighting over that.

Speaker 17 Sure, no, yep, we all think that way.

Speaker 20 Okay, maybe that failed.

Speaker 21 I'm sure.

Speaker 39 I love it because it reminds people that

Speaker 56 democracy is a participatory sport.

Speaker 9 And that when you go through that, you see this is about...

Speaker 39 The more people that participate, we won't always be pleased with the outcome, but you have to be invested in the process. And boy, what a valuable thing.

Speaker 39 Although still my favorite piece of information in this entire book is that the Federalist Society, which are generally the legal theory of originalism, altered the logo of James Madison that is their logo

Speaker 56 because they thought the nose looked too big.

Speaker 19 It's kind of awesome. Also, it was Robert Bourke's son, I think, who was like, this silhouette, he's a fairly unattractive man.

Speaker 13 I love it. The book is called We the People.

Speaker 39 It's available now.

Speaker 29 And again, I can't tell you, just the writing is so vivid and engaging and wonderful.

Speaker 56 It would have been so much easier to skim this bad boy

Speaker 54 if you were a lesser writer, but you are not.

Speaker 56 And it is fantastic.

Speaker 24 And I thank you for even taking our time.

Speaker 20 Jim McClure, we're going to take this break and be right back after this.

Speaker 11 Jeff,

Speaker 24 back to Titus.

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Speaker 3 Hey, everybody, left us over tonight.

Speaker 8 Before we go, we're going to check in with your host for the rest of the week, Mr.

Speaker 10 Ronnie Chang. Ronnie!

Speaker 10 Ronnie!

Speaker 8 Talk to us! What's on deck for the rest of this week, Ronnie?

Speaker 26 Well, big news out of DC, John. The federal government might be headed towards a shutdown, which means all of us have to step up.
This is not a drill.

Speaker 26 We need all hands on deck to fulfill the vital government job of shredding all the Epstein files.

Speaker 9 Wait, you said you need everyone to step up to help shred the Epstein files?

Speaker 26 Yeah, yeah, it's a lot of files, John. It's a lot.

Speaker 8 What about the like government, like Social Security and cleaning national parks? The government does stuff other than Epstein files.

Speaker 48 Okay. Okay.

Speaker 26 I'll put on my tinfoil hat and talk about all the things the government does. Grow up, John.
It's Epstein Files.

Speaker 34 Ronnie Chang, everybody.

Speaker 34 Here it is. You're over again.

Speaker 42 That's not true. I have no idea what is going on.
This cartoon is very significant in the community. So I found another guy to explain the whole situation.
Again, this is on the side of the bullet.

Speaker 42 This is like one of the motivations. Who knows?

Speaker 25 But I want to know.

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