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.

Thank you so much.

Wow.

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Oh, oh,

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Hey!

What?

Say it!

Welcome to the daily show.

Honey,

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What's going on here?

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

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Welcome to the Dallas Show.

My name is John Stewart.

We have a fabulous show for tonight.

Historian and Professor Jill Lapore will be here later.

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

Boy, we should have laminated that thing, huh?

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

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

The terrible scenes out of Michigan.

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

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

Oh!

Portland!

You just missed it!

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

you've got the right country,

but you're gonna wanna shift the resource.

Why Portland?

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

Uncontrollable, these people.

In the orgy of mass shootings in America,

Portland?

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

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

Not sure what that accent was.

Here's the craziest part.

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

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

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

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

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?

A,

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

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

Conditions in Portland may vary.

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

There is reality, and then there's this.

My people tell me different.

They are literally attacking, and there are fires all over the place.

And dragons.

Better be dragons!

So

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

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!

Red team go!

Because he sees it on fing TV

and acts impulsively.

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

I saw it on TV!

It looked, it was on TV.

In reality, it's just a f ⁇ ing rag.

But at three in the morning,

it's magic!

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

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

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.

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

That new pastime is, was this one of yours?

The shooter was a radical leftist.

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

He is a Biden supporter.

Case closed.

We know the suspected shooter is MAGA.

The shooter, a leftist whack job?

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

Boom!

It's blue!

Ha ha!

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

The game is so ubiquitous.

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

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.

That's Kudlow's lock of the week.

Lock it up next.

Murder rate in Chicago next weekend.

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

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

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

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

The shooter reportedly voted in the 2020 Democrat primary.

The Butler, Pennsylvania shooter, was a registered Republican.

The suspect wasn't registered with either party.

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

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

He's a Republican, but cheap.

Republican, but donated to a Democrat.

Maybe he just wanted the PBS Ken Burns tote bag.

I don't know.

I don't know who to hate.

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

Social media photos show Mr.

Robinson shooting and posing with guns.

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

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.

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

I mean, I don't know.

It can be only,

I don't know.

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?

I mean,

especially if they had set for three days.

What would you use?

Club soda, lemon?

I'm just asking.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

That's right, boys and girls.

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,

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

They wouldn't do it.

They wouldn't.

Oh, dear Lord.

Oh,

oh, my God.

He could

He could have done so much good with those.

And yet he chose the dark side.

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

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

Social media is doing it crazier and faster than anybody else.

So the media is trying to keep up.

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.

And then the left got to celebrate.

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

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

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

But here's the thing.

Who the f

cares?

These mass shootings don't fit.

Who honestly cares?

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

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.

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

That's the system they built.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stop with the rhetoric.

You're getting people killed.

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.

I mean,

I'm only judging from the ratings.

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

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.

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

When you equate federal federal agents with literal Nazis, you're no longer offering an opinion.

You are giving permission to escalate.

Permission to escalate, right?

So dangerous.

So.

This is what Hitler did with the SS.

This is what Nazi Joseph Goebbels said about the Hitler youth.

Nazi tactics are progressive tactics first.

Permission to escalate, granted.

Look, in America, we disagree.

That's fine.

That's the democratic process.

But your political opponents are not Nazis.

Except when...

The Democrats.

They are authoritarians.

They are jackbooted thugs.

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

Sure, that's just a fashion critique.

Jack-booted thugs, I mean those boots.

And white pants in October?

Are you mad?

Only Hitler would pull something like that.

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

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.

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

One inscription

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

Tyler Robinson.

Oh, right.

No, it's very clearly anti-fascist.

Very clear.

Unless, was there anything written on the other bullets?

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

Okay, that seems kind of homophobic to me.

If you read this, you're gay.

I don't know what that means.

Well, read it again.

It means...

Yeah, it's got to mean something.

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

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.

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

If only there were

a man,

one man,

a man who looks square, but is hep

to what these kids are laying down, man.

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.

Kurt the cyber guy has shown up

fresh off of doing the weather in Sarasota.

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

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

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

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.

This was an individual motivated by anti-ice.

He wrote it on a bullet.

We saw the bullet yesterday.

Anti-ice.

Case closed!

He wrote anti-ICE.

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?

Anti-ice, nuff said.

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

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

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.

What kind of f ⁇ ing psychotic internet culture?

What's happening?

Can't we just go back to the cinnamon challenge?

Is that so hard?

What is wrong with you?

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

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

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

So what is this?

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

that prevented this kind of corrosive infighting and radicalization.

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.

A delicious dumpling indeed.

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

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Hey, we're not going to

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

Constitution.

Please welcome the program, Jillipore.

What are you trying to do to me?

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

It was 600 pages.

Look at the font.

What do you got?

I'm an old man.

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.

You know what?

Can I tell you why?

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

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

and it slowed me down.

I'm really sorry.

I'm really sorry.

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

Do not.

Because

what I learned,

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

was far, it was this 20-year

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

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

Right.

And by the way, not on Zoom.

Like these guys,

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

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.

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

Have you not read this?

No, I forgot about it.

How far did you get it?

I forgot it all.

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,

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.

It just takes a long time to get around.

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

and

all these different things.

But

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

it's a product of administration.

And it was almost a bureaucratic process,

whereas I viewed it more as a moral process previously.

And I think it was infused with morality.

But even then, boy, they're very aware of slavery's shadow.

And they make no bones about it.

Yeah.

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.

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

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.

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...

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.

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

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

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

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

Americans' houses would,

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

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.

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

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

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

Right.

As a weapon of war.

As a weapon of war, right.

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.

Like one of my favorites is Benjamin Franklin's sister

who

writes to Franklin and says,

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

Right.

I hope you remember to

turn the swords into plowshares.

Like, I'm not down with

celebrating war and your new code of laws.

I thought Adams

writes to his wife.

Yeah.

He gets a little

cheeky.

Yeah.

He's a bit of a get.

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

maybe not the rights of women.

I don't know.

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,

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

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.

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

Yeah.

Yeah.

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

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.

I'd never come across that.

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

Everybody, no, Harvard professors know that.

Here's what everybody knows.

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

Like, nobody has any idea about any of this.

I think that's the point.

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

because it allows us to make presumptions and assumptions that

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

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

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

that it was going to have to be changed.

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.

Yeah, and just the commitment to it.

I mean, I was really struck.

I hadn't thought that much, honestly, about him.

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.

I know about that one.

You know, there's Lochner, Brown v.

Board of Education, Rowe.

Oh, my God.

I could teach at Harvard.

Right.

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

I know those too.

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?

In law school, that's how it's taught.

Like, it's just a list of cases.

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

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.

If you're going to write it down,

that's great.

Then everybody can read it.

Like, that's really important.

But

you have to have a way to change change it.

And there really was no provision that the Supreme Court would be changing it.

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.

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?

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

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

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

Do you think that we

have grown to use the Supreme Court as a moral crutch

because the process of amending

is so

arduous.

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

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

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

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

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

what it takes to organize in a

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.

An amendment is different.

Is that what we've lost?

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.

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,

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.

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.

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.

Like those were not constitutionalized.

They're really important laws, and they had really important consequences.

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

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.

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

It probably goes both ways.

I mean, I would imagine

that, you know,

look, we could argue Roe v.

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,

the Supreme Court here.

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.

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

you know, the

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

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

I don't care for it.

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

Well, I think you know.

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.

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.

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.

Are we all originalists?

when we're not holding the power?

Is that how originalism works?

No.

Oh, okay.

All right.

I wasn't sure.

No.

All right.

No.

We can be intellectually inconsistent without being originalists.

Oh, okay.

All right.

Those are two different forms of.

Because that's

what the originalists would say, is it not?

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

Yeah, so the original, so originalism is not original.

It's not the original method

of interpreting the Constitution.

It's a political product of the 1970s and 1980s.

Right.

The term, maybe.

The term, no, but also the idea.

Even the thought process.

Yeah, even the thought process.

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.

So they understood themselves as

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

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.

There's different kinds of competing theories, and they change over time.

But the originalism that dominates the Supreme Court today

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

we've devised this new judicial interpretation that

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

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

disguising it as restoration.

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.

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

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

Even that was compromised for a variety of different reasons.

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

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.

So

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

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

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.

Yes, fair enough.

Good night.

For real?

Did I just get a B?

No.

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

I don't know.

Oh, that's right.

I forgot.

I forgot about that.

That's where the parents come in.

How dare you?

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

I don't know the letter B anymore.

My outfit stops with A.

It's really, you know what?

It's awful, isn't it?

It's awful.

Yeah, it's embarrassing and inexcusable.

Can you even write C Me on the thing?

Or no,

even that's over.

No.

That's sort of suggestive, I think, is the problem.

It is, right?

And you can't do anything anymore.

Oh, poor Democrats.

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

of the roadmap and the inconsistencies so that we no longer

view things through a more orthodox or fundamentalist lens?

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

And is that instructive for people as we move forward?

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

And I think we have really, I would say, most Americans don't even know the U.S.

Constitution can be amended.

It hasn't really happened lately.

And even state constitutions, like we don't hold conventions anymore.

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.

Like, I think we just need

a better account of that to get our bearings.

In the same way, like, you know,

in a marriage, you kind of need to know, like, your family history.

Like, you just, you have, like, an account of the.

Wow, that took a weird turn, Jordan.

Okay.

That took a super.

Is there anything else you want to talk about?

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

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

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

Okay, maybe that failed.

I'm sure.

I love it because it reminds people that

democracy is a participatory sport.

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

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.

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

because they thought the nose looked too big.

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.

I love it.

The book is called We the People.

It's available now.

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

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

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

And it is fantastic.

And I thank you for even taking our time.

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

Jeff,

back to Titus.

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Hey, everybody, left us over tonight.

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

Ronnie Chang.

Ronnie!

Ronnie!

Talk to us!

What's on deck for the rest of this week, Ronnie?

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.

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

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

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

It's a lot.

What about the like government, like Social Security and cleaning national parks?

The government does stuff other than Epstein files.

Okay.

Okay.

I'll put on my tinfoil hat and talk about all the things the government does.

Grow up, John.

It's Epstein Files.

Ronnie Chang, everybody.

Here it is.

You're over again.

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.

This is like one of the motivations.

Who knows?

But I want to know.

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