The Daily Show: Ears Edition - Trump Sends Troops to Portland & Shootings Trigger Left-Right Blame Game | Jill Lepore

Episode Date: September 30, 2025

After a string of mass shootings across the U.S., America swaps out “thoughts and prayers” for a left vs. right blame game, Republicans hypocritically criticize the Democrats' “violent rhetoric,” and Trump escalates a nonexistent problem by deploying troops to Portland. Harvard law professor and staff writer at The New Yorker, Jill Lepore, joins Jon to discuss her new bestselling book, “We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution.” She points to the years-long process of trial and error that went into writing the Constitution as an example of how the document was designed with the intention to be changed and improved upon, and emphasizes the foundational right to amend the document as Americans see fit. Lepore also explains how the conservative “originalist” movement has discouraged the addition of any new amendments since the 1970s, how conservatives continue to use originalism as a way of bending the Constitution to their political will through the courts, rather than going through the much harder amendment process, and how this dynamic has put issues like abortion rights and environmental protections at risk. Go to https://www.Strawberry.me/daily to connect with a certified career coach today! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Conditions apply, visit your local Volvo retailer or go to explorevolvo.com. You're listening to Comedy Central. From the most trusted journalists at Comedy Center, it's America's only source for news. This is The Daily Show with your host, John Stewart. Man, thank you so much. Wow! I don't know what's happening.

Hey, what, say. Welcome to the Daily Show. I don't know you f***ing people think I'm Kimmel. What's it going on here? They're just trying to cheer up an old Mets fan. That's what's happening. Poor bastards. Welcome to the Daily Show.

My name is John Stewart. We have a family of the show for tonight. Historian and Professor Jill Lippoor. We'll 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 going to want a little to the... You're going to... You've got the right country. But you're going to want to shift the resort. Why Portland? Trump posting, I'm directing Secretary of War Pete Hegseth to provide all necessary troops to protect war-ravaged Portland. Oh, stop it.

No, no, no. Uncontrollable, these people. And 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 cold foam, half-calf latte art. Not sure what that accent.

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 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, set a phone call with Governor Kote. 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. 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, Code Red! Red Team Go! Because he sees it on fucking 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 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 mega. 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 Cudlow'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 was 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. 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 showed 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 back. 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, American flags. 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 as furiness. I love that this dude has to pretend like he doesn't know what furries are. I mean, I mean, I can be only...

I don't know. It can only be described as a sexual costume party with animals. 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 government 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 killers

only fans hot shots they wouldn't do it they wouldn't oh dear Lord oh oh my God he could have he could have done so much good with those and yet he

chose the dark side. Oh. 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 fuck 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 mulching. 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 of 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. Is your message to your fellow Democrats in 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 M.M.

NBC. 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 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 jack mooted thugs no he's not calling them nazis uh sure that's just a fashion critique jackbooted 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 is not really knowing why these killings

are really happening. Even when the suspected killers leave supposedly explicit cues on their bullets. One inscription read, 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 Hell Divers 2. The same for other inscriptions found on an up arrow, right arrow, and three down arrows.

which is how you drop a bomb in that game. What the fuck 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 times. talk about the chat platform discord and kurt the cyber guy joins us now to tell us what discord is oh kurt the cyber guy has shown up fresh off of doing the weather in sarasota thanks for the low down kirt the cyber guy you old cyber dog say hello to your partner in crime Meem 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 question. He wrote anti-I. Doesn't anybody think it's fucking 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, enough said. Or is there the slightest possibility that these people are f***ing with us? According to his friends, the alleged gunmen was not overly political and was mainly interested in video games at 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 infight, 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, when we come back, Jill Lippoor will be joining us. Don't go away. Today's video is sponsored by Strawberry.m.E. If you're feeling stuck in your career or if you're unsure about your next move,

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to provide tips and insights on business banking to entrepreneurs, no matter the stage of business you're in. Visit td.com slash small business advice to find out more or to match with a TD small business banking account manager. Hey, what about that show? Harvard professor, staff writer, the New Yorker and bestselling author, whose latest book is called We the People, History of the U.S. Constitution. Please welcome to the program, Jillipur.

Professor. Mr. Stewart. 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 magnified. glass in a microscope just to be able to see, and I only got up to reconstruction. You know, 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 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 this 20-year meeting after meeting after meeting after meeting, which 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 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 them 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 graph. Have you not read this? No, I forgot. How far did you get in this? 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 there hadn't the printed copies of the constitution hadn't reached

the towns yet. 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 and also there was a discussion as as you lay out of who was even allowed to weigh in and should it be uh property owners or just white gentry or people who paid enough uh in certain taxes uh and all these different things but it 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 breaches 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, there are a lot of, like, 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 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 convention. and like at the time they called everybody who was agitating who's 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 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

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. 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 his rights to Franklin and says like 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 like a celebrating war in your new code of laws I thought Adams writes to his wife he gets a little cheeky yeah he's a bit of a he's a bit of a get but he does he he almost in some ways make because she's very clearly pushing for uh i guess what you would imagine to be maybe not the rights of what 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 power power corrupt so we have to have checks and balance we have

to write down our laws that limit the role of government and document the rights of the people because left to now the 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 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. It's like, what about if we wrote a petition to Congress? Like, let's do this together. Right. And I found that really tantalizing. I'd never have come across that letter. Everybody knows the kind of Abigail Adams letter to John that exchanges.

Everybody, no, Harvard professors know that. No, 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 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 5 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 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 amend.

I, like most people, to the degree that I had, a kind of history of the Constitution in my mind, is 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, Roe. Oh, my God. I could teach at Harvard.

Right. Like, those are, you're like, okay, I got that. I know those two. 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.

In law school, that's how it's taught. Like, just a list of cases. But when I went by and did this research, it's like, wow, like, no, 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 it. And there really was no provision that's the Supreme Court. court will be changing. I mean, that's a practice that evolved and it's now considered standard and part of our constitutional tradition. But the philosophy of amendment is the thing that we abandoned. And 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. And convening. 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 Crowe's out 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, until 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've got 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. They can rip, 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, 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 there's a 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. And 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, 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. As long as it's for like foreign money, you can just take it. I mean, it's a little bit like your, 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. Well, I think, you know, it's reductive. It's reductive. It's reductive. It's reductive. It's

It's like, okay, so it's just generally the case, sadly, people aren't as principles 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. When 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? Okay, no. Oh, okay. All right. I wasn't sure. No. No. No. We can be intellectually inconsistent with that.

being originalists. Oh, okay. All right. Those are two different forms. They are. Because that's what the originals 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 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 18... So they understood themselves as living in a time and being politically part of the moment. Yeah, they were working. I mean, again, it's brand new. Like, they're working out, well, how are we going to interpret this thing? They're working it out. That is different kind 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 opposed to the decisions of the Warren Court,

like Carter McBrown v. Board of Education in 1954. And they've said, oh, that's judicial. This is like... Judicial activism. They're 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 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 a 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 v. 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 don't 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 did i just get a b you know no one gets bees anymore john i don't know that i forgot i forgot about that that's when 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 are they it's it's really you know what it's awful isn't it's awful yeah it's embarrassing and inexcusable do you can you even right see me on the thing or no that even that's over no that's so suggestive i think is the problem

it is right and you can't do anything anymore oh poor democrats uh is the idea of putting this out there then to 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 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, right? 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 want to uphold it,

we shouldn't want to hold our leaders accountable to it, but 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. Like, 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, I think, 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 your memory.

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 to know 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 love it because it reminds people that democracy is a participatory sport. And that when you go through that, you see this is about, and 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 he 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 you. Even taking a lot of time. Jill LePoor. We're going to take a big break and be right back after this. Jill. This episode is brought to you by Square.

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and hit play on your next adventure this fall get double points on every qualified stay life's the trip make the most of it at best western visit bestwestern.com for complete terms and conditions Hey, everybody, that's our show for tonight. Before we go, we're going to check in with your host for the rest of the week, Mr. Ronnie Chang. Ronnie! My man!

Talk to us. What's on deck for the rest of this week, Ronnie? Well, big news out of D.C., 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.

Oh, 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. Your moment is. 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 motive. Who knows? But I want to know. Explore more shows from the Daily Show podcast universe by searching The Daily Show, wherever you get your podcasts. Watch the Daily Show weeknights at 11, 10 Central on Comedy Central, and stream full episodes anytime on Paramount Plus.