Citation Needed - Failed Constitutional Amendments

Episode Date: January 14, 2026

Hundreds of proposed amendments to the United States Constitution are introduced during each session of the United States Congress. From 1789 through January 3, 2025, approximately 11,985 measures have been proposed to amend the United States Constitution.[1] Collectively, members of the House and Senate typically propose around 200 amendments during each two-year term of Congress.[2] Most, however, never get out of the Congressional committees in which they were proposed. Only a fraction of those actually receive enough support to win Congressional approval to go through the constitutional ratification process. Some proposed amendments are introduced over and over again in different sessions of Congress. It is also common for a number of identical resolutions to be offered on issues that have widespread public and congressional support

Hello and welcome, citation needed. The podcast where we choose a subject, read a single article about it on Wikipedia, and pretend we're experts. Because this is the internet, and that's how it works now. I'm Eli Bosnick, and I'll be reading between the lines tonight, but I'll need some fellow patriots to help us wig out. Tom's unable to join us today because, come on, he only missed one show all year. But we've got three proud Americans who only stay erect when a bald eagle is around, Noah, Heath, and Cecil. you don't even want to know what I did to that apple pie. Fair enough.

And then I ate it. A lattice top is like a square glory hole. So I see what you mean. Absolutely. And also joining us tonight, a man who would have never given rights to people with cerebral palsy, Michael Marshall. Okay. This is all just one big misunderstanding. I actually said I disliked your know it all friends.

Your cerebral pals. Although, yes, I happen to dislike them because they're all disabled. And clip it. Clip it. That's the cell phone ring for Christmas, everybody. Little bells in the background. We're not going to carry on doing this. We're not going to have fun run, guys.

We did a great job. Before it again, I'd like to take a moment to thank our patrons. Patrons, without you, Marsh would be forced to follow the path of so many former skeptics. Of course, I do mean transphobia. Don't you like to learn how to join their ranks. Be sure to stick around until the of the show. But he doesn't have to because of you. He doesn't. He doesn't do it because of you.

But he will. He will. And with that out of the way, tell us, Cecil, what person plays thing, concept, phenomenon, or event? What we'll be talking about today? I realize that cut was jarring audience, but today we're going to be talking about failed amendments to the U.S. Constitution. And Noah, you apprehended these amendments. Are you ready to append them for our audience? I am. So tell us, Noah, what are some failed amendments to the U.S. Constitution? Yeah, okay. So when we won our freedom from Marcia's people, one of the first ways we differentiated ourselves from our tyrannical overlords after we got rid of all those superfluous use was to break with their, I swear there's a constitution around here somewhere.

No, no, you can't look at it, but it's around here tradition of governmental structure. unlike the UK, America would have a written constitution. Though, to be fair, that has not resulted in us spending any less time arguing about what's in it. Yeah, admittedly, our Supreme Court does have an oral tradition when it comes to billionaires, including our current president. Okay, your mistake was giving yourself a list of laws, but not an exhaustive list. So now you're being governed by the airbird standard of it. There's nothing in the rulebook that says a president can't do that. there is though

yeah there's so many rules to say I would so want a fucking golden retriever for president oh my god please give me a gold retriever like president bud god trust this guy okay but our forefathers in their grand wisdom that was somehow

unable to parse out the immorality of owning other human beings recognized that changing times would require a certain amount of flexibility in their founding documents and having deprived ourselves of the British ability to go, well, we forgot to tell you about paragraph 233B, they elected to build into the Constitution a process for amendment, a process so onerous that it's only been successfully used 27 times and one of those times was to unuse it. And given how many of those 27 are untested and

how many of them failed when tested, I suppose you're going to actually argue it's been successfully used way fewer times than that. Okay, I still don't understand how this is better. than the old system of this guy's great great grandfather was blessed by God and so he fucked his French cousin into an increasingly inbred cul-de-sac of a gene pool.

But a leader's family tree should only ever have Chekhov branches. You introduce a cousin in the first generation. You've got to marry them in the third generation. Exactly. Yeah.

I mean, look, Marsh has to point, all systems that don't lead to two Trump residencies are definitionally. Yeah, we could get a third Trump presidency. Oh, no.

Hey. Trump could still become the prime minister, man. I don't know. He can figure it out. Yeah. So, okay, so quick civics reminder slash lesson here. To amend the Constitution, you have to start with a two-thirds majority in both the House and Senate.

So right there, we're already at functionally impossible in the modern day and through most of U.S. history, to be honest. Now, you can get around that if two-thirds of state legislatures apply for a special convention that Congress can call, but that's never fucking happened. even less possible. And that's just step one. Because once you get that, you have to get your proposed amendment ratified by the state legislatures of three-fourths of the states. And there are actually six instances where a would-be amendment made it through that first part only to fail in the ratification stage. Our constitution does not prevent ratification in government. Stephen Miller

is deputy cheapest staff. That proves it. Right. Yeah. And he's currently ratituing what's left from his brain into even more overt white nationalism. Sure as... It's most of that filet of fish sauce. I feel like that's going to cause the white nationalism. Before we actually get to the failed amendments, I want to make a correction that seems more pedantic than it is. None of the amendments to the U.S. Constitution

are actually amendments. They're legally binding footnotes, right? So amendments would imply that you go back and you amend the wording of the original document, But even when we use an amendment to literally strike out shit from the original document, like when the 14th Amendment negated the three-fifths compromise, we don't actually change the original wording. We just add new words to the end. And that matters because it promotes the view that the original wording is sacrosanct, which is, I would argue, the exact view the framers were trying to dissuade by adding an amendment process. So your official founding document essentially now reads, racism, asterisk. It could be more fun, right? It could be, you know, the slaves shall be three-fifths of a man. Nah. It's like the blockchain. It keeps track.

Yeah, it is. It's a pretty sweet. It's racist. It is right. Yes. Agree. Now, so I should note up front that as of the swearing-in of the latest Congress, there have been 11,985 constitutional amendments proposed in Congress. and assuming this is a fairly average Congress in that respect,

there's probably been about 100 more since then. We're obviously not going to talk about all 12,000 of them. We're going to highlight a few of the more noteworthy ones, but if you want a way more lengthy and much less dick-joki version of that discussion, I highly recommend Jill Lepore's We the People, a history of the U.S. Constitution. I'm not sure who that lady is, but I bet if you ever met her at a dinner party,

she would introduce herself right away before you started to regale her with facts you learned from hardcore history. okay 100% certain she's been well actuallyed about her very own book it was me by Eli by Eli yeah so okay so didn't know we're gonna go chronologically did you actually meet her yes and yes I did that yep she spreads with Eli's mom we're gonna go chronologically with these eventually but I want to knock out the two most commonly proposed amendments up front because one thing you learn quickly when you look at the history of failed amendments is that it's, like, just because an amendment failed before

doesn't mean a motherfucker ain't going to propose it again, unless it's the equal rights amendment. So over and over again, congressmen and senators have tried for the same two amendments, a good one and a bad one. And is one of those to bring back the three-fifth thing? As the bad one, too far as the bad one. No, no, the bad one, as I'm sure, most of my atheist colleagues will have already guessed, is an amendment to add Jesus or his. dad to the nation's primary document. Whether it takes the form of attributing American's

freedom to God's will, officially declaring ours a Christian nation, or just adding a thanks Jesus at the end, Christian zealots have tried no fewer than 121 times to put the amen in amendment. Nice. Nice. Thank you. That number, by the way, that comes from the amendments project for which we also have Jill Lippor to think. Probably too busy tracking amendments to mention into a stranger that she's a staff writer at the New Yorker and a professor at Harvard. If you wear a name tag. What do you do, Jill? All right.

So, but that 121 number is dwarfed by the number of proposals for the good amendment that keeps failing because on more than 700 occasions, members of Congress have submitted would-be rule changes to abolish the electoral college, a system designed to empower slave owners diminish the power of the poor and keep this will of the people thing from getting out of hand. Have they tried just right in the electoral bit in really small writing in the proposed amendment because a rule to abolish college more generally would definitely get so much support from the today's Republican Party.

The electoral college is very literally college DEI. We could get lots of Republican voters on board to pull its funding, right? So there you go. And white people's suffrage. Yeah. So let's get to that chronological list. So starting in 1838, we have the proposed dueling ban amendment, which would have barred any person involved in a duel from holding public office. And for those hazy on the dates, I want to point out that 1838, that would be 34 years after rhythmically inspirational founding father Alexander Hamilton was shot to death in a duel, thus depriving us of God knows how many clever Lynn Manuel Miranda rhymes. but this one failed. It was seen as a bridge too far to ask that every single murderer be excluded from higher office.

And this is a shame for two reasons. One is that we were more than 50 years into this independence thing and still hadn't sorted out what we wanted to allow in terms of murdering each other. But the other is what a badass anachronism it would be to still have this shit in the Constitution, right? But be thankful it's still not banned because a jewel to the death might be your only. hope of preventing Trump from taking a third term. Oh, yeah, there you go. JD, stop shooting me in the back.

I'm on your side. Hill to theology. So there was a proposal in 1850 that would have tried to avert the Civil War by creating co-presidents, one to represent the free states, another to represent the slave states. This was the brainchild of John C. Calhoun, and it preceded the compromise of 1850. It would have required an equal number of free and slave states to be admitted to the Union, which is what that compromise did, and create a northern and southern president who would have had to agree on something before it could get done, which sounds like it would work.

Great. There was a nearly identical proposal a decade later right before the outbreak of the Civil War. Now, there was also a noteworthy effort in 1875 to pass the Blaine Amendment, which would have forbidden public funds from going to religious purposes. Now, admittedly, this was mostly born from anti-Catholic prejudice at the time, but it would have come in damn handy when the president. iteration of the Supreme Court had to find a way to pretend they weren't violating it. Incidentally, when the federal version of this failed, several states took up the torch on

their own, 37 states independently passed Blaine Amendments at some point or another, which is only one shy of the three-fourth majority we would have needed to ratify the amendment. See, I really hope the Blaine Amendment would be that religious groups can get public funds, but only if their leaders spend a month suspended over a river in a glass box. or under, like, whatever, whatever. There's, I don't know. So the first major congressional effort to extend suffrage to women

shows up in the form of a failed amendment in 1888. This one comes to us from Illinois Representative William Mason, whose proposal would have limited voting to people he dubbed widows and spinsters since, you know, they didn't already have men to vote for them. So not exactly enlightened, but better than what we had, which makes it all the more appropriate that it was championed by and eventually argued for in Congress by wildly problematic feminist for mother Elizabeth Cady Stanton. The amendment would fail and then it would take 32 more years for the 19th Amendment to give all women the right to vote in 1920.

Okay, that's a shame because the law in its original formation would have just incentivized women who want to divorce to first choose a guy to marry and then kill. Oh, yeah. Okay. That's going to add a few more steps, but I do think it gets America to a better place the lonely. Okay, the male loneliness epidemic is a very serious problem. Thank you, Mark. For saying that. There you go. There you go. Could have been averted. And so

I've only got one more failed amendment to talk about in the 1800s before we move on to 20th century stuff. And it's not particularly important or anything. I just, but I still, I love it to death. In 1893, Greek revolutionary and patron saint of Oshkosh, Wisconsin, Lucas M. Miller,

proposed an amendment that would have changed the name of our country to the United States of Earth, in an effort to bolster that growing national appetite for colonialism, right? We didn't want to limit itself just to America. But, hey, to make sure that everybody knew that this was an amendment all about love and compassionate colonialism, he proposed it on Valentine's Day. This is all going to start to make sense when we start hosting the Miss Universe pageant. And it's going to...

Okay, the Department of War is good. But can we call it the Department of Star War for the... All right. It looks like we were this close to being invited into the Federation, but negative Nancy's like my castmates ruined everything. So while I bitterly weep, we'll take a little break for some apropos of nothing. I'm telling you guys, this is a waste of our time. We're just being safe. Yeah, come on, John.

Well, hey there, fellas. Hey, ain't you them fancy politicians that run the colony? Actually, we're a country now? What did I say? Did colony? calling you for what? He's perfect. Look, my fine chap,

we're creating a founding document for the country, and I'm a bit worried that it might not be clear as we were hoping it would be. How's that name? We want to make sure it reads clearly. Oh, sure, sure. Well? Let me take a look at this here.

Uh-huh. Uh-huh. No, I can't read. Right. Okay. So when we say all men are created equal, does that imply to you that women can vote? No, no, because you said man. See, I told you.

Okay, okay, hold on. What about when we say well-regulated militia? Well, that means the individual right to unrestricted death machines literally beyond my comprehension, I believe. Again. Okay, fine. Fine. We'll allow amendments. Thank you.

No problem. Hey, just real quick, when we sign this thing, if I write my name a little bit, bigger than everyone else. It will be literally the only thing I know about you no matter what else you do for the rest of your life. I mean, I just told you I helped write the Constitution. Big letters, man, make letters big.

Okay. Got it. Still going to do it though. Okay, brother. And we're back. When we left off, America was trusting itself to be alone for the weekend while your mother and I are out of town. What rage in party did we throw? Okay, so

before we get back to the list, I, you have to a bit of a sad part because you could make the argument, as Jill Lippoor does in her book that inspired this episode, that even some of the amendments that got their two-thirds approval in Congress and their three-force ratification in the states are still failed amendments if they failed to do anything or even failed to do what they set out to do, which the 14th and 15th amendment seem to have done. No illusions. Anti-14th Amendment. Right at now. No, no. Other opposite of that. So, okay. Sorry, did you read a book by Jill Lopold whore? I did.

She seems like she was great at explaining stuff to Noah. Seems like a nice person. It's such a nice person. Good communicator. Such a great communicator. Sure is. So, okay, so quick history reminder, when having thrown off the yoke of oppression from Marsh's people,

we put it on the enslaved black people for a further almost century and couldn't stop without fighting a war that killed 17,000 Hindenburg's worth of people. Well, if you want to to convert that number to metric, it's 0.62 Irish famines. Oh, okay. All right. Yeah, or it's 0.16 Bengal famines if we're talking British imperial. It's pretty cool that British people count

in tigers. So, so we finally decided to discard that oppression yoke altogether, sort of. When we crafted three constitutional amendments meant to settle the question at the heart of the civil war, the 13th, 14th, and 15th. And we made that. the rebel state sign on to them as conditions of rejoining the union that we were making them rejoin. The 13th ended slavery, but the 14th, which granted all persons born or naturalized in the U.S. equal protection, and the 15th, which guaranteed voting rights regardless of race, have both fallen way short of those lofty goals. So before we move on from the 19th century altogether, I just wanted to piss off shitty listeners with that extra bit of critical race theory.

Yeah. Our pro-slavery listeners have only heard Heath's Eugenics episode, and this one. So this is a real shocker for that. Listen, big tent. Don't be a dick. And speaking of horrible racism, in 1912, there was an anti-misogination amendment proposed by the

hoot-nano-fully named Seaborne Roddenberry. And if you guessed that he was from my home state of Georgia, congratulations on playing the odds. The year here is significant, by the way, 1912 was the year that boxer Jack Johnson, who loved to trigger racist snowflakes, announced

that he was divorcing his first wife to marry a white lady. And that bothered white racists to a proposed legislation level. Okay. To be fair, announcing your divorce with the race you plan to marry next. Doesn't feel like it's motivated by love exactly, right? You just so, the lady. Katanji Brown Jackson gets it.

Oh, God. She got announced as a DEI hire ahead of time. That was such bullshit. She deserved it. And she got announced that way. That was horrible. Big Katanji Brown Jackson Not fan Heathenwrights. I'm a huge

fan. He's a big extractor. Hates her. His impersonation rushing. I think you're misunderstanding my words that I said. Yeah, mine too. Can you imagine? Now, so this amendment failed as to it turns out that Al Marsh actually loves people

with cerebral prophecy. Too much. Not all of them. No. No. You don't have to tell the truth about everything, man. All right. So this amendment failed, as did similar amendments proposed in 1871 and 1928. But of course, many states made their own laws against interracial marriage. And it wouldn't be until 1967 that the Supreme Court's decision in Loving v. Virginia overruled them. And the fact that I'm not bracketing that with the year that they overturned it is probably going to date this episode for anybody listening in our...

Oh, shit. Thomas should just get a divorce instead of ruining it for everybody else. Man, come on. Yeah, yeah. Like, normally in cartoons, when someone starts sowing off the branch that they're sitting on, it's because they don't realize the repercussions. With Clarence Thomas, he's looking us dead in the eyes why Harlan Craw hands him a bigger sword to do it.

Yep, yep. And speaking of failed attempts to tell people how to marry, there was a failed amendment to ban polygamy in 1914. This was mostly aimed at Mormons, but despite its firm grounding and hating those who are unlike us, it still failed to pass. That's because everyone secretly. knows that Mormons and board game weirdos are right.

Okay, but the 13th Amendment banned slavery, it would have been redundant, right? Thank you. So there were a couple of good ones that failed to get through in the first half of the 20th century. There was the Ludlow Amendment, which would have required a national referendum before the country could declare war, which sounds great until you consider how easy it was for George W. to drum up a call for war based on nonsense and how easy it's been for every president since Eisenhower to just start and fight wars without declarations of war of any kind. Yeah, like to the point now where you can just take pot shots at Venezuelan fishermen as long as

Pete Hegseth first yells, they're coming straight forward. Also, you can apparently bomb random farms in Nigeria just to make sure ISIS don't get access to tractor technology. Jesus Christ. Double steps for war crime now. It's a war crime. Just put it on the front of the missile. It says like stop resisting or whatever.

Yeah, right. Yeah. So one of my favorite felt- First tap was a war crime. I feel like we're losing sight of that because we keep talking about the top part, which was also a war crime. It's a war crime-eer, I guess. Yeah. So one of my favorite failed amendments came in 1933 when Washington Representative Wesley Lloyd

proposed a maximum wage that would have limited wealth accumulation to $1 million. This was, of course, proposed in the wake of a Wall Street crash that led to the Great Depression, a crash largely caused by obscenely rich people, chasing dumbass schemes with other people's money. So you can see how he was able to drum up a bit of support for it. But it failed, of course, as did another 1933 amendment proposed by Pennsylvania representative John Well Snyder that would have limited investment income specifically. Oh, but if only that had gone through, have you ever seen Logan's run where people have the

crystal in their palm that turns black when you're over a certain age, like to show that it's time for you to be killed? I want that, but for net well. Yes, yes. guys you joke but if we took all of Elon's money and we just gave it out to everyone below the poverty line in America that would be like $20,000 which would immediately raise all those people above the poverty wait no wait that eliminate poverty sounds too good come back to me I'm gonna do okay even just an eat the rich charity dinner would raise so much money right like I'd pay a bunch for

homeopathic amounts of like a musk. Yes. So another in the category of repeat failures comes in the form of the school prayer amendment, which would establish that, quote, the people retain the right to pray and to recognize their religious beliefs, heritage, and traditions on public property, including school. End quote. This, you can only read it in this, that way. You have to read it. You can't read it. You can't read any other. Yeah. Happen. Your voice won't do it. This amendment failed even though it was already legal to do all that shit, right? But it didn't just fail once. West Virginia's Robert Byrd proposed it in 1962, 1973, 1979, 1982, 1993, 1993,

1995, 1997, and 2006. And the list ends there because he died in 2010, not because he realized he wasn't going to win that fight. Man, in the 90s, they really treated it like they're trying to find the right circuit breaker for the kitchen outlets. It's trying to go! Okay, wait, I got it. If you redistributed the wealth of everyone who has over a million dollars in America to everyone else in America, then all those people would just have like half a million dollars.

And that's so much more money than I thought. I'm going to make it worse with more numbers. The top one percent owns about $52 trillion in wealth. Seems like a lot, bud. That represents about 1.4 million households of rich people. we could leave them all with $10 million each and still take away $38 trillion. And if you spread that across the 99%, we could give each household about $274,000 right away. Also, I don't know why I said that before.

We're taking that $10 million, too, for spite. I don't know what I'm going to leave them with $10 million. It's crazy. Grand total, the 99% gets about $375,000 per household. and only 1% of Americans are poor at that point. It's win-win, right? We'll set up those poor people with some socialist bootstraps or whatever. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

No, that's all they need. A nice government job. Yeah. All right, but perhaps no proposed amendment has failed with quite as much flair as the Equal Rights Amendment. First proposed in 1923, the ERA reads, in its entirety, quote, Equality of Rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States, tour by any state on account of sex, end quote, which would seem uncontroversial if you knew

nothing whatsoever about American or human history. Yeah, thanks again from having me in the show, no, I know nothing about American history. Now, the ERA did manage to pass through both houses of Congress because very few people were willing to publicly oppose it at first, but when they passed it in 1972, they did manage to sneak in a sunset clause. States only had seven years to ratify it. If it failed to achieve the required three quarters of the states in that time, it would expire. Now, that's fairly typical of constitutional amendments. Other amendments passed with the same seven-year deadline.

And the deadline on the ERA was extended by three years at one point. But that wasn't enough. Over that 10 years, only 35 of the needed 38 states managed to pass it. This is an objectively stupid rule, though. It's like, okay, so we've agreed now that men and women are equals. As long as we collect enough signatures by this ars, arbitrary deadline. Otherwise, boys rule, girls' rule. That's not as I'm afraid. Sorry guys, Mississippi didn't get our letter, so I guess it's legally bros before.

Yeah, we kneeled on the ball, we ran out the clock, so now it legally is. I'm a mediocre white man with no value, and despite all my privilege, I can't succeed in equal meritocracy for hose. in cells before women cells. So at first there was a ton of momentum behind this thing, right? When it passed in 1972, a bunch of states ratified within the first year, and it looked destined to find its way into the constitutional footnotes. But then along came future citation-needed essay topic and possible future recipient of America's first posthumous restraining order if Eli doesn't get more subtle with his threats. Phyllis Schlafly.

She founded the Stop ERA movement, which is possibly the world's worst acronym. It stands for Stop taking our privileges. Equal Rights Amendment. Shut the fuck up. Oh, my God. The first word of her stop ERA acronym

is stop. The S stands for stop. She gave herself a recursive acronym. Okay. Maybe the recursive acronym was part of her plan to wait out the deadline on the amendment because you knew that saying the full name of our organization

would just eat up all of the time. Exactly, yeah. Phyllis Schlafly lived to be 92, eventually evolving into that stuff that leaked down Gary Oldman's face in the fifth element. It was crazy. And for the record,

despite what Noah says, I offered to return her body to her family, where I drew the line was rinsing it out. That's not my job. That's not my job. She's dishwasher safe. You're fine. No, she is.

So, Bottom rank, you are going to need heat and pressure. You don't want that heated, dry. She's well-seasoned, you'll be fine. So, okay. Just rubbing her with olive oil and salt. Just rubbing it in there. That power spray stuff?

Just throw her on the stove for a couple of minutes. She'll burn all that right off. No worries. So the chief weapon in Schlafly's corner was disinformation. In a precursor to modern trans debates, a lot of it focused on public restrooms. But the argument that shook labor unions support loose was that there were a lot of laws limiting what female employees could be required to do at the time. And this amendment would have gotten rid of those, which would be great in that like they literally limited women's chances to get promoted and shit. But since they weren't going to get promoted anyway because sexism, the union's rightly.

perceived those rights as like a potential casualty of the amendment. And a union was never ineffective in the face of cautiousness again. Now, another big knock on the ERA at the time was that of abortion, right? So this amendment passed through Congress in 1972. One year later, Roe v. Wade temporarily enshrined the rights to abortion into American jurisprudence, right? Abortion was a huge issue and there was a lot of, well, not as big as it is now, but it was a big issue. And there was a lot of scaremongering about how the ERA would strengthen the hand of the pro-abortion faction. Anyway, all of this was enough to leave the ERA just a hair short of ratification by the time the 1982 deadline came around. Okay. So ironically, the right to abortion

meant the ERA was dead by its delivery date. Really? Yeah. Right? Okay. By the way, another argument against the ERA is that it would be redundant because equal protection is already covered in the 14th Amendment and no self-respecting jurist would ever fail to honor the 14th Amendment. But, you know, no self-respecting jurist would have a calendar that says Friday, booffing with squee and not raping today. Yeah. Yeah.

Here we are. Here we are. Now, there is actually still some amount of, like, litigation peripherally around this thing. because eventually three more states did ratify it. And some people argue that the expiration date on the original law can't be legally binding. But to further complicate issues, five of the states that ratified it early on decided later to go on the record as being more sexist than that and unratified it. And there are also questions about whether you can legally unratify.

Either way, here we are 54 years later and still unwilling to put, yes, women can have all the rights in writing. Okay, but if I'm being honest, right now doesn't seem like the best time to ask, right? Maybe we wait till we're a generation or two out from double-electing Hitler before we run this one past the people. Or, or the moment decent human beings have power again, Zoran Mamdani makes New York City into nine entire states. We have DC and Puerto Rico. We drop out of the fucking electoral college and we pack the court with, nanobot clones of Katanji Brown Jackson. Let's...

Do you hate her? I want... He's trying to dilute her influence. I thought it was so clear that she very much deserved everything that happened, but it was announced ahead of the time. It was stupid to do that. Don't do the voice. What is she having her doctor?

I don't know. That's the key. Regular voice. She boof with squea on Thursday like a squeam gentleman. Okay. Just want to check. I'm saying I want, I want fascism for our stuff. Like, I know not really, but kind of really.

I can't walk, let him go. Fascism. I'll allow it. You got to get shit done. Yes. Thank you, Cecil. Make it hurt. What I was going to say next.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's the good part. I will admit, that's the strongest argument on your side. Yeah. So, okay, so in the modern day, since amending the Constitution is functionally impossible in the polarized environment, we now have, amendments are mostly proposed as publicity stunts.

So name a highly politicized issue and somebody has failed at amending the Constitution about it. Gay marriage, term limits, campaign finance reform, the debt ceiling, foreign election interference, whatever. Another common theme of proposed amendments is we really don't like the decision the Supreme Court just made since constitutional amendment is the only way to directly nullify one of their proclamations. And that leads me to the last failed amendment I wanted to talk about. Joe Biden proposed an amendment called the No One is Above the Law amendment that would say, supersede the impossibly careless and monarchical decision by the Supreme Court to grant presidential immunity for all crimes a former president committed in office, which, to be clear, never even got close to step one.

Yeah, continuing the theme of Biden's presidency of tripping over on the step. To be fair, I do love that he proposed that, though, and he was like, okay, if you guys say so, and pardon myself, right before I walked out with that. And one final failure to close on, which is the entire premise of Laporte's book on the subject, the biggest failure in this story is the amendment process itself. We like to talk about the Constitution as a living document precisely because it can be amended, which means that if the process is too onerous to actually use, the Constitution is dead, or at least paralyzed. And if you had to summarize what you learned in one sentence, what would it be?

Noah reads very erudite books by people like Joe LaPore. I don't know if you... Bad communicator. Are you ready for the quiz? I read a David Foster Wallace book recently. No, no you didn't. I did. Well, Anne read one and I married Anne.

She's smart. Oh, wait, do we get credit for all the books? Our wives read? Yes. Fuck yes. Oh. It's like money. I'm pretty gay.

I am ready for the quiz, Eli. Thank you. I just quiz. All right. So we did Bros before Hose, but we didn't get to flip it. So which of the following is my favorite Hose before Bros. Variation. Oh, oh, okay.

A. Angola Merkel's before Estes Percles. Oh, nice. Nice. Barbies and Stacey's before Dawson's and Pacey's. Dawson's Creek people. And thank you. Did somebody say they really love to Dawson's Creek? No, nobody said it.

I thought I saw somebody. I thought I thought I heard somebody. Is someone in your house? I don't know. Maybe. Nobody? Okay. See.

Nope. Shut up. See. It's a delightful show. See. Russian Zarina's before sex crime subpoenas. That is. Holy shit, dude.

That is so good. Holy shit. You rhyme subpoena as well. Amazing. Fucking amazing. See? Melinda French Gates and McKenzie. Scott before Bill Gates

and Jeff Bezos sure. Sure. Yeah. All right. Yeah. I just don't, that's not, that wasn't one of them. I just, I like those two women better than those two men. Or E.

They them, she, hers before Gamergate streamer. All right. That's so good. Good job, man. I'm sorry. Great. Like, I will.

spend the rest of the week jealous of Russian Zarina before sex crime subpoena. So it has to be so good. That's amazing. That was correct. Okay, Noah, given that you proved with prohibition that even your successful amendments aren't permanent, which of the following amendments will Trump not try to overturn? Is it A, the 24th Amendment because no Trump has ever paid their taxes?

Is it the 19th Amendment, but only because he thinks the right to vote based on sex, is some kind of prima nocta but for elections? Is it the 22nd Amendment? But only because he doesn't want to be president for a third time, he prefers the title Emperor God. Oh, Jesus. Or the 26th Amendment, because Trump is all about encouraging teen participation.

Oh, God. Oh, man, that does all hit me to my core. But I think the correct answer is B, because it's the fuckiest one. Yeah. Well, you're assuming D isn't the fuckiest one. That's all I'm saying. Ivanka was at soccer.

All right, Noah. The listeners who don't listen to the bonus episodes of scathing atheists might be confused as to why I am so hostile towards historian Jill Lepore. Why is that the case? Hey, I was introduced to Jill Lepore at a dinner party where she said she was at Harvard and I thought she meant a student because she looks all young. B, when she told me

that she did history stuff, I proceeded to regale her with all my fun history facts that I learned from her to her. C. She listened politely all night long and only on my way out was I informed

when I spent the evening history explaining to the most well-known historian I would ever in my entire life. See her book's too long. And finish it. A secret answer, E, is all of the above.

Is all the of the fullest. What did you do when you were leaving? Did you try for one more swing? No, I ran. I ran so far away. Marie was like, oh, you and Jill got along, and I was like, yeah, who? She was like, that's Jill's part of the New Yorker.

And I was like, right now we know the best counter to anything in the constitution is the super villain team running the supreme court what's the movie about this era's supreme court what's going to be called a the jim crow b jacky brown versus board of education c citizens united ninety three D. Judge Dred Scott or E. Olympus has Oberga fallen. I like the implications of Citizen United 93 the best.

So let's go with C. I'm going to go with C. Correct. I think. Yes. Correct. All right. Well, that means Noah. Nobody stumped you. So you were this week's winner. All right. I want a CISO essay next. And you shall have one. All right, well, for Cecil, Heath, Noah, and Marsh, I'm Eliab.

Thank you for hanging out with us today. We'll be back next week, and by then, Cecil will be an expert on something else. Between now and then, you can listen to Marsh be skeptical about a variety of topics over at Skeptics with a K and the No Rogan Experience available wherever you get your podcast. And if you'd like to help keep this show going, you can make a per episode donation at patreon.com slash citation pod, or leave us a five-star review everywhere you can. And if you'd like to get in touch with us, check out past episodes.

Connect with us on social media or check the show notes. Be sure to check out citation pod.com. So you get all the wonder seeds? No, not yes, no. Oh, dude, the wonder seeds are the best part. Okay, so if you took just the money from the billionaires and you gave it to the bottom half of the country,

then those people become the top half, which... Stop trying to do this, man. There's one that makes sense. Good.