Civics In A Year
What do you really know about American government, the Constitution, and your rights as a citizen?
Civics in a Year is a fast-paced podcast series that delivers essential civic knowledge in just 10 minutes per episode. Over the course of a year, we’ll explore 250 key questions—from the founding documents and branches of government to civil liberties, elections, and public participation.
Rooted in the Civic Literacy Curriculum from the Center for American Civics at Arizona State University, this series is a collaborative project supported by the School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership. Each episode is designed to spark curiosity, strengthen constitutional understanding, and encourage active citizenship.
Whether you're a student, educator, or lifelong learner, Civics in a Year will guide you through the building blocks of American democracy—one question at a time.
Civics In A Year
Debunking Constitutional Myths With A Historian’s Lens
Think you know the Constitution’s greatest hits? We pull back the curtain with Andrew Porwancher, a constitutional historian and Hamilton biographer, to test common “truths” against the record the founders left behind. We start with power: why Madison and Hamilton expected Congress to predominate, why the judiciary was “the weakest,” and how modern presidents and courts grew in strength, often with Congress’s blessing. Then we follow a surprising breadcrumb trail to the First Amendment, where an accident of ratification made those liberties “first,” and Jefferson’s famous “wall of separation” grew from a thank-you letter inspired by a 1,200-pound “mammoth cheese.”
From there, we dig into religion and the law. Everson’s embrace of Jefferson’s metaphor, the Lemon test’s fits and starts, and the overlooked Article VI ban on religious tests show how abstract rights become real only when civil disabilities are removed. We revisit the Bill of Rights’ rocky path after Philadelphia and the Ninth Amendment’s warning not to shrink liberty to a list. Impeachment gets a clear-eyed treatment: Hamilton’s “POLITICAL” offenses versus the trial-like safeguards that suggest a narrower legal frame. The Second Amendment also gets the full arc—from militia clauses and conscientious objectors to Heller and McDonald—clarifying that the right is individual while regulation remains a live battlefield.
We also weigh how much the Federalist Papers should matter. Written to sway New York’s razor-thin ratification, they reveal the authors’ thinking but don’t always capture original public meaning across the states. What emerges is a Constitution designed less to end debate than to house it—legislatures, courts, and executive offices turning conflict into process instead of violence. If you care about constitutional law, civic education, or teaching history, this conversation gives you usable context, case names, and a better map for today’s arguments.
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School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership
Hello, listeners. We are so excited today to have one of our SQDL professors here, Andrew. He is going to talk to us about some myths in the Constitution, some stuff that maybe we learned we need to unlearn. So, Andrew, I'm going to have you introduce yourself for our listeners.
SPEAKER_01:Thank you so much, Liz, for having me on the podcast. Thank you to the listeners for tuning in. It's really such a privilege to be able to talk about my favorite subject, the Constitution. I am a professor of constitutional history here at Skettle. I'm new. This is my first year. I spent the first 12 years of my career teaching constitutional history at the University of Oklahoma. And in the process of that, I discovered that a lot of enduring myths that we have about the Constitution don't really line up with the historical record. And so I'm really excited to delve into some of those fallacies and get to the work of debunking with you today.
SPEAKER_00:Yay. And I do want to point out you have written a book about one of our founding fathers. Do you want to talk a little bit about that?
SPEAKER_01:Sure. I'll just I'll say briefly that I had a book come out a couple years ago called The Jewish World of Alexander Hamilton about his relationship with the Jewish community and really about his relationship with the birth of religious freedom in America more broadly. And so that was a really fun book to work on. And I'm now going to turn to another Federalist and try to bootstrap a book on George Washington. So stay tuned for that. Maybe we can do a podcast on Washington later.
SPEAKER_00:Yes. And spoiler alert, we are going to do a podcast on Alexander Hamilton because Hamilton is coming back to gamge. So that is going to come later, though, because it's not until the summer. But we're going to talk about some myths that we've heard. So the first myth, maybe, that people think is true is that all three branches are coequal. They have the same amount of power, right? We've heard separation of powers, checks and balances, but are they coequal?
SPEAKER_01:According to most any judge, most any scholar, most any person you talk to on the street, they would tell you that we've three co-equal branches of government. It has become axiomatic, but it is not at all supported by the evidence that we have in the historical record about the Constitution. What is striking when you look at the language of the framers themselves is that they wanted three unequal branches. That's not to say that they wanted one branch to dominate the other two, but they did not believe that all branches should be equal. And to make this argument, I want to turn to the Federalist Papers, which I'll briefly remind readers what the Federalist Papers were. When the delegates of the Constitutional Convention finished their work in September of 1787, the Constitution is just ink on parchment. It has no legal force. Only if at least nine of the 13 states ratify the Constitution will it take legal effect. And so the Federalist papers were authored by James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay, although Hamilton did most of the work. I have to say that as a Hamilton biographer, in a bid to persuade New Yorkers specifically to send pro-constitution delegates to the New York State Ratifying Convention. And these papers are among the most commonly used tools that judges rely on in interpreting various provisions of the Constitution. And James Madison in Federalist 51, one of the most famous Federalist papers, says, and I'm quoting here, in Republican government, the legislative authority necessarily predominates. In other words, Congress is the most important branch of government, the most powerful. And Hamilton says in Federalist 78, and again I quote, the judiciary is beyond comparison the weakest of the three departments of power. And so if Congress is the most powerful and the judiciary is the least powerful, then that puts the presidency somewhere in the middle. So this begs the question: why would the framers want three unequal branches of power? And we have to look back at our colonial era history. During the colonial era, the American colonists were electing the local legislative assemblies themselves, but the judges were being imposed on them by the crown. They were seen as symbols of royal power. And so Americans had been primed through 150 years of colonial experience to see legislatures as uniquely protective of their interests. And so there was much greater comfort in endowing Congress with wide authority. And one of the more striking features of the last couple hundred years of American history has been to see the great expansion of both judicial power and presidential power at the expense of congressional power. And that's often happened with Congress's willing consent. Whether that's a good thing or a bad thing is a debate I'll let my colleagues who do political theory stress about. I'm just a historian. I'm just telling you how it is. But I think that the historical record is clear that the co-equality that we take as a maxim today was not the intent of the framers.
SPEAKER_00:And that's so interesting because, you know, when I was teaching, I kind of looked at it as article one, two, and three, right? From most important because article one is is quite long. And then article three is quite short. So that's a very, very interesting. So speaking of the you know, format of the Constitution, the First Amendment, right? The first freedoms, First Amendment is the first because it's the most important myth or fact.
SPEAKER_01:That is a myth. So we when we think about the First Amendment, we think about these cardinal liberties that we cherish as Americans: freedom of the press, freedom of religion, separation of church and state, freedom to assemble. And there is this assumption, sometimes tacit, sometimes explicit, that these rights were put in the First Amendment almost symbolically because they are first and foremost freedoms. But the truth is it's just an accident of history that those particular liberties became enshrined in the First Amendment. Initially, there were 12 amendments, but only 10 of them got ratified. The actual First Amendment had to deal with a formula for determining the size of congressional districts. It had nothing to do with freedom of speech or freedom of religion. And the original Second Amendment, it didn't have to do with guns. That was the Fourth Amendment. The original Second Amendment had to do with the conditions under which members of Congress could vote to increase their own salaries.
SPEAKER_00:Doesn't that become an amendment later?
SPEAKER_01:That does. That does. I can tell you were a civics teacher who knew her stuff. That becomes an amendment much later, one of our most recent amendments. But it at the time in the 18th century, the states only ratify 10 of those 12 proposed amendments. And so what was the third amendment gets bumped up to the First Amendment. And so it's a nice rhetorical flourish to talk about the particular freedoms as our first freedoms because they're in the First Amendment, but that is actually historical happenstance, not part of the intentional design.
SPEAKER_00:That is super interesting. Now I want to like go look at the Lost Amendment. So speaking of the First Amendment, now we're looking at the separation of church and state. And let me tell you, being on any kind of social media, just hearing any kind of discussion on religion, government, people are saying separation of church and state, it's in the Constitution. Like that needs to happen. Is that true?
SPEAKER_01:I'm sure if you polled Americans on the street and asked, does the language separation of church and state appear in the text of the Constitution? Probably large numbers would say yes. And the truth is it appears nowhere in the Constitution. The Constitution says Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion. So that begs the question, well, does that mean that we have to have separation of church and state? And if it doesn't, how did we come to this idea that separation of church and state is conflatable with the language we actually do have in the text of the First Amendment? And to delve into that history, I want to share a brief story about the mammoth cheese, as it was known in 1802. This is and you know, some listeners might be thinking, you know, I've seen some pretty big pieces of cheese. I don't think you've seen a piece of cheese like this. It was 17 feet in circumference. It weighed over 1200 pounds, and emblazoned on its crust were the weighty words rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God. And this mammoth cheese was gifted to Thomas Jefferson as a thank you for his commitment to religious liberty. And actually, a local newspaper at the time published a poem about this mammoth cheese. And the poet writes, But muse, you'll not forget to squeeze a word about the mammoth cheese. Such cheese no man before set face on, 'tis bigger than Don Quixote's base on. Such cheese, my stars would make one swoon, to view tis bigger than the moon. This cheese is surely honored more than ever any cheese before. To feel the weight and force forsooth and crash of presidential tooth. Ye maggots that dwell in the cheese with horror, how your limbs will freeze, how you will kick and squirm and claw beneath the Jeffersonian jaw.
SPEAKER_00:I would like everybody to know that he did not read that. He just recited it. That was amazing.
SPEAKER_01:This is that poem is burned indelibly and into my memory. It is perhaps my favorite poem from American history. And you might be wondering, well, what does a mammoth wheel of cheese have to do with constitutional history?
SPEAKER_00:I'm very curious.
SPEAKER_01:The short answer is everything. The the cheese, as I mentioned, was a gift to honor Jefferson for his commitment to religious liberty. Now, at the time that he gets this cheese, Jefferson had previously received a letter from the Danbury Baptists in Connecticut who were worried that their religious liberty was susceptible to state encroachment and they wanted some sign of affirmation from the president. And Jefferson hadn't responded to them. But when he gets this wheel of cheese, he is so moved by the cheese and all that it represents that he is inspired to take pen to paper and he finally writes back the Danbury Baptist and what is one of the most important letters in the history of the Constitution. And he says, and I quote here, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, thus building a wall of separation between church and state. This is where we get the language separation of church and state. Jefferson, more than a decade after the ratification of the Establishment Clause, is looking backwards and he is saying that the First Amendment means you have to have separation of church and state. That is the necessary implication of the Establishment Clause. So is Jefferson right? Well, like almost everything else, the founders had very vivid and heated debates about what the proper relationship between church and state was. Certainly, Jefferson is not a total anomaly. Folks like James Madison largely agree with him. But on the other side, you have folks like George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, who were equally committed, as were Jefferson and Madison, to religious liberty and religious pluralism, but they saw a greater role for religion in American civic life than did the likes of Jefferson or Madison. So for instance, in the 1780s, there was a bill that was proposed in the Virginia State Legislature, where George Washington was, of course, from, that would allow tax dollars to fund Christian schools. And Washington says, well, I'm not opposed to using state money to fund Christian schools, but only Christians should be subjected to that tax. Jews or Muslims or anyone else who's not Christian should get exempt from paying any taxes like that. And this was Washington's way of wetting a commitment to religious pluralism with government support for religion. And to be clear, I'm not endorsing the Washingtonian view or the Jeffersonian view necessarily. Again, I have my historian hat on. And what I'm hoping to bring to life here is that there was genuine debate about what the proper relationship between church and state was among the founders. What we find is that in the mid-19th century, we have a wave of Catholic immigrants who come to America to work in a lot of the factory jobs that were created by emerging industrialization. And there were some established Protestants who feared that these Catholic immigrants were the front lines of a papal invasion, that they would be loyal to the Pope over their adopted homeland of America. And so some of these Protestants started touting the separation of church and state, not as some liberal secular ideal, but as a reactionary, xenophobic, anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant disposition, that the separation of church and state, they hoped, would box out Catholics from shepherding in some sort of presumably nefarious papal influence in American politics. It is only later in the mid-20th century, when the Supreme Court takes up the issue about the meaning of the establishment clause, that the language of separation of church and state gets recast not as some sort of xenophobic sentiment, but rather as the secular ideal that's more well known today. So in a famous 1947 case, the Supreme Court, looking to Jefferson's Danbury letter, writes, and I quote, in the words of Jefferson, the clause against establishment of religion by law was intended to erect a wall of separation between church and state. That wall must be kept high and impregnable. We could not approve the slightest breach.
SPEAKER_00:What case is that?
SPEAKER_01:So that was Everson.
SPEAKER_00:Okay.
SPEAKER_01:And so this was a case about whether you could have government dollars being used to fund busing for religious schools. And the Supreme Court says actually that is fine because it's not a foul of this principle of separation of church and state, because that's a that's a neutral policy that we're applying to all children regardless. So, you know, for instance, analogously, if a Catholic school were engulfed in flames, the fire department wouldn't refuse to put out that fire just because that's a Catholic school. Yeah. And and but these issues get really tricky because you you might wonder, well, could government dollars fund math education in a religious school? Well, what if the way that they're teaching math is to calculate the area of a cross or a Muslim crescent or Jewish Star of David? Then do you get an intermingling of religion and state in a way that's problematic? And ultimately, the Supreme Court develops this lemon test to try to determine whether there's an undue entanglement of government and religion. But I've I may be getting far afield here, so forgive me. But that what this is one of the more interesting topics, I think, is what are the conditions under which government is neither advancing nor inhibiting religion? And that is a very difficult line for even the best intention state actors to walk.
SPEAKER_00:Is the lemon test still what the Supreme Court uses for the establishment clause?
SPEAKER_01:That is a great question. Judges do what judges do. My wife is a litigator, and one thing I've learned from watching her practice law is that judges have a lot of discretion, and sometimes the courts like to apply the lemon test, and sometimes they pretend that it doesn't exist. And it will be interesting to see over the next 10 or 20 years the extent to which the lemon test continues to guide the court or whether the court increasingly chooses to adopt other tests or more ad-hominum decisions based on the idiosyncrasies of a particular case. But one thing that I can say with a lot of confidence is that questions of entanglement between government and religion will continue in the future as they have for the first 250 years of our experiment in self-government.
SPEAKER_00:So the religion clause in the First Amendment actually has two parts. We just talked about establishment. I've heard arguments that people say the free exercise clause is actually the most important. Thoughts on that?
SPEAKER_01:So I have a bit of a contrarian view on this, and you could probably find a lot of legal scholars and historians who disagree with me, and that's fine. But I believe that the most important clause relating to religion in the U.S. Constitution is actually a different clause, a more esoteric clause, much less well known, which is found in Article 6, and it is a ban on religious tests for office. In other words, the Constitution explicitly opens all federal office, elected and appointed, to people of all faiths or people of no faiths. And the reason I think this is even more important than the free exercise clause is because people might fairly ask, well, Andrew, why is it that a clause that pertains to everybody, like the free exercise clause, would be more important than a clause that pertains to the tiny slice of Americans that actually want to seek federal office? And to answer that question, we need to look at the state constitutions. When America declares independence, the colonies are no longer colonies, they're now states. And so they have to adopt state constitutions for themselves. And many of them do this before 1787. And these state constitutions become a model that the framers look at in the summer of 1787. And in these state constitutions, there are almost invariably clauses that prefigure what we see in the free exercise clause, a broad grant of religious liberty to people. But these same state constitutions, when it gets down to the much more specific question of who is eligible to serve an elected office, often limit the people who are eligible to either Christians or just Protestants or even particular denominations within Protestantism. And so the lesson from the state constitutions is that a broad grant of religious liberty in the abstract means very little if you then suffer a civil disability for having exercised your faith. It's not really a terribly free exercise. What is so radical about the U.S. Constitution is that the delegates do not follow the example of the state constitutions in limiting federal office to certain subsets of people, they open up federal office to people of all or no religious background. It is a major advance for religious liberty, a substantive grant of power in the most important domain of American civic life. And so at a very moment in time, once the Constitution is ratified, where a Catholic or a Jew might not have been eligible to serve in their local state legislature, that selfsame person could be elected president of the United States. It is a testament to the liberality and the commitment to religious freedom from the delegates who met in Philadelphia in that summer.
SPEAKER_00:So states that become states after the Constitution is adopted, do they kind of follow that same model then of anybody? There's no religious tests for office?
SPEAKER_01:So it depends on the state. The Bill of Rights did not apply to state governments in these early days. The Supreme Court only really starts applying the Bill of Rights to state governments in the 20th century. And that happens through the ratification of the 14th Amendment. It's a process of doctrine of incorporation. If you want to come to Schedule and get an undergrad or graduate degree, we can get into those granular details. But suffice it to say that at the time, just because the Bill of Rights cabined in the federal government, state governments were free to do what they wanted. Now, many states did follow the example of the U.S. Constitution and moved in the direction of greater inclusion in terms of expanding civil rights towards religious minorities. But there were a number of states where there were holdouts. In Maryland, it was still a live question well into the 19th century whether Jews would be afforded equality. In New Hampshire, Jews were not given formal legal equality until the 1870s. There were open questions well into the 19th century about whether Jews and other religious dissenters are competent to give sworn testimony in a courtroom. And so the direction is generally towards greater religious liberty, but it is by fits and starts, and progress happens at different paces in different places.
SPEAKER_00:That's really it's just cool, like to hear. I mean, I know a lot of this stuff, but just to hear more about it and understanding, you know, especially with religion, like that little clause in Article 6 that says there's no religious test is huge. So the next thing we're talking about the Bill of Rights, that was part of the original constitution. And I'm saying right, I already know the answer, but a lot of people think that you know there's the articles and then the first ten amendments, and that was all in one sitting.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, so the Bill of Rights and the Constitution were different documents and they happen at different moments. The delegates did consider having potentially a Bill of Rights included in the original Constitution. George Mason was a delegate from Virginia who, in the waning days of the convention, floats this idea of having a Bill of Rights. But there was a lot of resistance among the delegates to having a Bill of Rights for a bunch of reasons. I mean, for one, it they had endured a hot, sticky summer in Philadelphia. People wanted to get home, they were eager to return to their families and to their lives. There was also concern that if you start debating the substance of a Bill of Rights, that might unravel important compromises that were tenuously forged earlier that summer. There was also a sense among certain delegates, Hamilton among them, who thought that the Constitution created a government of limited powers. There's no need for a Bill of Rights. And we might actually unwittingly curb liberty rather than expand it by having a Bill of Rights because you can never enumerate every liberty. And so if we only name some, future generations might wrongly infer that any liberties that are not in the Bill of Rights are subject to government encroachment. And so Hamilton and his like were concerned about handcuffing the federal government needlessly in this regard and perhaps actually empowering a future government to impede individual freedoms that were not included in any such bill. When the text of the Constitution becomes made public during the ratification debates, it turns out that the delegates in the Constitutional Convention had badly misread the temperature of the American people. George Mason actually got it right. The people did want their most important liberties enshrined in a Bill of Rights. And state ratifying conventions ratified the Constitution with the popular understanding that a Bill of Rights would be forthcoming. And James Madison, staying true to his promises that he makes, does draft a Bill of Rights for congressional approval to then go out to the states for ratification. However, the states, despite widespread support for Bill of Rights, due to various idiosyncrasies having to do with Patrick Henry, who in many ways was not a fan of the Constitution and wanted a second constitutional convention, manages to stall ratification in Virginia, which is the swing vote on ratification for several years. And it was not at all clear from the vantage point of the early 1790s that the Bill of Rights would ever be ratified. It finally happens in 1791, but we should be wary of making the mistake of reading our own certainty about what happened in the past backwards. At the time, it was very tenuous indeed whether we would have a Bill of Rights. And I'm glad that they were able to get it done. It has been the backbone of our experiment in democracy. But it the story about this bifurcation between the Constitution and the Bill of Rights is a reminder of just how fragile this experiment was in its earliest days.
SPEAKER_00:So is that why Madison came up with the Ninth Amendment? Is just kind of, hey, here's a list.
SPEAKER_01:But yeah, that's right. We have an amendment that says explicitly, do not misinterpret this bill as limiting people's rights to only that which is in the Bill of Rights. And that has helped protect against government encroachment to some extent, but it is undeniable, I think, that it has been easier at moments of government overreach to encroach upon rights that are not expressly enumerated in the Bill of Rights. The courts engage this idea of what they call fundamental rights. And there are different ways that they try to determine what count as fundamental rights. But if something's in the Bill of Rights, there is no question that it is fundamental. And you cannot have government encroachment on it except under very limited and specific circumstances.
SPEAKER_00:Interesting. So our next topic has been in the news quite a bit. The term impeachment, it is something that I think people misunderstand what impeachment is, what it is supposed to do. So can you shine a light on impeachment from the Constitution, please?
SPEAKER_01:Absolutely. So impeachment has been something that has been on people's minds more than it has for most of American history in recent years. We saw President Trump get impeached twice. There has been discussion of impeaching President Biden. Some people are predicting that impeachment may become part of the ordinary course of political affairs in American life. I'm not a soothsayer. I don't predict the future. But what I can say looking backwards is that there are divergent views on what the true purpose of impeachment is. And there are credible arguments on both sides. So the two main views are either, on the one hand, that impeachment is a political tool. It is part of the ordinary system of checks and balances by which Congress can check a president who is not doing his job terribly well. And the competing view is that it is a narrow criminal proceeding that can be brought against a president under only the most limited circumstances. So let's talk a little bit about the evidence on either side of this issue. And this is some of the evidence that we saw come out in some of the recent impeachment hearings. So, in favor of a more robust, more expansive view of impeachment, we can turn to Hamilton and the Federalist Papers. And he says that the proper basis for impeachment isn't criminality in any narrow sense. He uses the word malconduct. And he says specifically that offenses for impeachment are political in nature, right? He doesn't say legal, he says. Political. And he puts the words the word political in all capital letters, lest anyone miss his point. Hamilton was not one to be soft-spoken. He was he was not afraid to be heavy-handed. So there is a compelling case, a compelling philosophical case for this view, which suggests that members of Congress don't take an oath to us, they take an oath to the Constitution. And if a president's not doing their job well, if if they're if their job's being performed particularly egregiously, if they're guilty of malconduct, even in a political sense, it is well within Congress's right, well within the right of the House to impeach the president and for the Senate to remove the president. But there is compelling evidence from the text of the Constitution itself that suggests actually there's a much more narrow reading of the impeachment power. For one, the senators who sit as a jury in any impeachment trial, they have to take an oath. There is no other oath that they take besides their initial oath of office, except when it comes to the impeachment trial. That's the only time there's a second oath. So when members of the Senate are voting up or down on a presidential nominee to the Supreme Court, they don't take a second oath. When they are voting up or down on a treaty, they don't take a second oath. In other words, when they're exercising their normal checks and balances, they do not take a second oath. They only do it here. Well, who else takes oaths? Jurors. Jurors take oaths to render verdicts according to the law and the evidence. And so this second oath would suggest that impeachment is a legal process and it is confined to narrowly criminal terms. We should also take note that when a president is impeached, the chief justice of the Supreme Court presides, the senior most legal official, which would underscore this idea that it is a legalistic rather than political enterprise. And the underlying philosophy for this view is that we live in a democracy, and the people have a right to the president that they elected. And if they think that president isn't doing a very good job, they can go to the polls and toss him out or her out and put in a new president. And so the members of Congress should only in these small select circumstances of high crimes and misdemeanors usurp the people's prerogative to decide who the president should be, the only official that the entire country votes for. But I think that as with so many issues in our constitutional law, people of good faith can disagree about how to interpret these impeachment clauses.
SPEAKER_00:And I think that's the one of my favorite parts about history and looking at this is people can read things differently. And you can look at the impeachments of Andrew Johnson, Bill Clinton, President Trump, and really, I mean, debate both sides. Like, is it political because, you know, it seems like, I mean, with all four of the impeachments, I think that one political party was trying to do, you know, impeach and try to get this. So it's interesting, especially that you brought up the Federalist papers, which we will get to. But before that, I want to talk about the Second Amendment because it's very hotly contested. And you know, there wasn't a Supreme Court case until McDonald versus Chicago.
SPEAKER_01:So McDonald versus Chicago comes in 2010, and that's the first case to address the question about whether the Second Amendment is incorporated into the due process clause of the 14th Amendment and applies to the states. Two years before that, you get DC versus Heller, which is the first time that the court rules on the meaning of the Second Amendment. But because DC is very unique, it's not a state, it there was this open question about well, what does that mean for everyone else in the country who aren't included in the 700,000 people who happen to live in the nation's capital? And so you get this pair of cases that work together and move in the same direction. And in these cases, the court is trying to decide does the Second Amendment guarantee an individual right to gun ownership or a collective right? In other words, does the Second Amendment confer on individual citizens the right to go out and and procure a gun for yourself, or is it a collective right that gives members of militias the prerogative to own and exercise firearms? And they're like with the impeachment clauses, there's really compelling evidence on both sides. If you look at Anglo-American history, if you look at the history of gun ownership in England during the time when America was still part of the British Empire, there is a tradition of a legal right to individual gun ownership. And we can find examples of colonial statutes where that right migrates over across the Atlantic to the New World. But there is some compelling evidence from the debate around the Second Amendment that suggests that it might actually be a collective right reserved to members of a militia. So when Congress was debating the text of what would become the Second Amendment, there was originally a clause that had conscientious objector cast to it. So it read, no person religiously scrupulous of bearing arms shall be compelled to render military service in person. So that was tacked on to the end of what we know as the Second Amendment. And so that clause ended up getting taken out because of concerns raised by Eldridge Jerry, one of the congressmen whose the famous term we all use, gerrymandering, comes from Jerry because he created a district that looked like a salamander. So gerrymander. But anyway, that's a story for another day. The Second Amendment has initially this conscientious objector clause, which begs the question well, it doesn't make sense to have a conscientious objector to an individual right to own a gun. No one's requiring individuals to own a gun. And so the fact that they're even debating whether or not there should be a conscientious objector clause means that this amendment necessarily relates to military service, and that even as that clause is taken out, it has to be read in the context of military service, and therefore it's a collective right. And so I think people on either the the pro-gun side or the gun control side have historical evidence that they can point to. The Supreme Court in in 2008 in DC versus Heller, and then they reaffirmed this in the McDonnell case you mentioned, rule that there is an individual right to own a gun. But notably, the court says that they are willing to entertain significant regulations on that right, for instance, banning guns in schools and other sorts of public venues. And so the question for us moving forward in the next generation isn't whether it's an individual right. The Supreme Court has decided that. The question is going to be to what extent is the court willing to let stand statutes at the state level or at the federal level limiting the extent of that right. And that is going to be a really interesting area of jurisprudence to keep an eye on in the next 10 or 20 years.
SPEAKER_00:Can you, you talked about conscientious objectors. Can you tell listeners what that means?
SPEAKER_01:Oh, sure, yeah. So the idea here is that if you have in this in this particular instance, you can have a secular conscientious objector in theory, but as the framers were talking about at the time, if you had a religious aversion to taking up arms against another person, to committing acts of violence, even in service of defense of the state against the state's enemies, and you know, many Quakers fell into this particular box at that time in the late 18th century, then you could object on religious grounds and not be required to serve in the military.
SPEAKER_00:Interesting. But that did not make it to the final cut.
SPEAKER_01:That did that did not make the final cut. And there have been examples later in American history of people conscientiously objecting to military service.
SPEAKER_00:Muhammad Ali during the Vietnam War.
SPEAKER_01:That's right. That's right. Yeah, Muhammad Ali is is yeah, perhaps the most iconic example. And and there are others. I think before Vietnam, we hadn't had a war that was quite so controversial. Yeah. But when you get back into the historical record, one of the things that I'm struck by is that many m wars that we we memorialize today as having been these great and morally righteous struggles like World War II actually were deeply controversial at the time.
SPEAKER_00:And that's, I think, the interesting thing about history, right? So that kind of takes us to our last piece. We've talked a lot about the Federalist Papers, the musical Hamilton, very famous. People think like, well, the Federalist Papers clearly were so important back in the day of, you know, framing and ratifying the Constitution. But I think you're going to tell us a different story.
SPEAKER_01:It pains me to say this, Liz, because I am a Hamilton biographer and Hamilton is the central figure in the Federalist Papers. But the commonplace assumption that many people make, especially judges today make, that the Federalist Papers are all important for understanding the Constitution is on shaky historical ground. The Federalist Papers were, as I mentioned, written for a New York audience to try to persuade New Yorkers to send pro-constitution delegates, also known as Federalists, to the state ratifying convention in Poughkeepsie. New York was going to be absolutely crucial to this enterprise of re-establishing the country under a new constitution, because even if you met the minimum threshold required for the constitution to take effect, which was nine of the 13 states, the constitution would only take effect in the states that ratified. And New York was central to the union geographically, economically, politically, and without New York's votes, even though the nine-state threshold had been passed before New York State Ratifying Convention, it was very unlikely that the union would survive. And so New York was crucial. And yet, despite the publication of the Federalist Papers, New Yorkers, by a two-to-one margin, send anti-federalists to the state ratifying convention. Even the chairman of the state ratifying convention was an anti-federalist. And it is only thanks to Hamilton's oratorical prowess that he is able to move the delegates in attendance to narrowly, by a 30 to 27 vote, ratify the New York State Constitution for the New Yorkers to ratify the U.S. Constitution. It was the narrowest vote of any of the state ratifying conventions up to that point in time. And it was not at all a foregone conclusion that the Constitution would be ratified. It required a lot of hard work on the part of people like Hamilton. Today we often remember the Constitution in these very reverential tones, and it would, everyone pledges their faith to the Constitution as a kind of secular religion in America. But the truth is it was deeply controversial. Ratification was not at all a foregone conclusion. Many of the anti-federalists suggested, well, it's only been four years since the war with Britain ended. The Articles of Confederation haven't had a proper chance. And they were worried that if we pass the Constitution, we're going to have a much more powerful central government, and that we're going to have a president who acts like a king, and we're going to have a Senate who's like a House of Lords, and their aristocratic arrangement is going to be protected by a standing army, and we will have futilely fought a war for our independence only to revert back to British tyranny. Only it would be conducted by local American elites. And so they were deeply worried about what the Constitution would mean for individual liberty. And I would argue, and I think the likes of Hamilton would argue, that what we see in the U.S. Constitution is that having a federal government that has what the founders would call energy, that is efficacious, that is up to the challenge of leadership, does not necessarily mean that the government is going to encroach on the liberties of the people. It just means that the people have to be vigilant over their government to ensure that their liberties endure in perpetuity. So all of this aside, what I'll say about the Federalist Papers is that they are significant for understanding how the authors of the Federalist Papers thought. And they can be very useful tools for thinking through the original intent of the framers. But if we talk about the original intent from the perspective of original public meaning, which is to say, what did the words of the Constitution generally mean to Americans at the time, which is how some originalists apply originalism. They don't look to framers' intent, they look to original public meaning. I think that the Federalist papers are arguably of more limited value in understanding that original public meaning. Now, the question of the merit of originalism as a school of constitutional interpretation is a separate question than whether a given piece of evidence is useful in service of that particular interpretation. So I'm not here today endorsing or repudiating any particular school. Again, I'm wearing my historian hat very happily. But I do think that if we are going to look at original intent, it's important that judges and citizens be clear about do we mean the intent of the framers? Do we mean the intent of the ratifying conventions that gave the Constitution legal force? Do we mean original public meaning? And once we've determined which we're interested in, then we have to ask, well, what kinds of evidence count as legitimate in discerning that intent?
SPEAKER_00:And that's the first time I've ever heard original public meaning. And I'm like, I can't wait to dig into that because it's so fun. So we are wrapping up. But before we do, one of the jobs you have here at SQL is the director of graduate studies, and we have a master's degree. Do you want to talk a little bit about that? Because I'm assuming listeners are like, this was really fun. Where can I get more of this kind of conversation?
SPEAKER_01:That's a very generous question, Liz. We do have a master's program here at Skettle. It is called the Master's in Classical Liberal Education and Leadership. It is a hugely exciting program that is geared towards K through 12 teachers who are interested in history and civics. It's geared toward people who might want to pick up a master's degree en route to applying to PhD programs. It's a great degree for anyone interested in civic leadership. This is a program where students can come and study the iconic thinkers of the Western tradition from Plato and Aristotle through Locke and Lincoln. We went out and got the best Madison scholar in the country. We went out and got the best Lincoln scholar in the country. And we've brought them here to the desert. We've brought them to Tempe. And we have just a world-class faculty. Our courses are all Socratic methods, small group seminars, and we offer a real content focus that can be hard to find in some other competing master's programs. And so we've been very happy to have great faculty. We've been happy to be able to recruit great students for those people who are interested in picking up the degree part-time. We are very much geared towards your schedule. Our courses are all in the evenings, and we're going to start offering uh summer classes just starting this summer. And we are fortunate to be able to offer significant scholarships to worthy applicants. And so this is a great time while the program is still small, and we have a lot of scholarship money to apply. And I would encourage anyone listening to look me up on the Schedule website, shoot me an email, let's find a time to chat. And I would love to talk to any interested prospective applicants about our master's program.
SPEAKER_00:And I will put links to your page and to the master's. I did also want to bring up that the James Madison Memorial Fellowship, if that is something that listeners are interested in, they pick one teacher a year per state. And the Madison Fellowship has recognized this master's degree as one that they will help fund.
SPEAKER_01:That's right. This is one of their endorsed master's degrees. And so if you win one of these very prestigious fellowships from the Madison Memorial Foundation, there are a number of universities you can take it to. We prefer that you take it here to schedule. Whether you are out of state or in state, we offer classes not just in person, but we also offer many of our courses online. And so wherever you are in the country, if you are listening to this and you're interested in this master's degree, whether you're a James Madison Memorial Foundation Fellow or otherwise, you can be a part of this program. And one of the reasons that we started just this summer inaugurating a week-long summer institute is so that we can fly in our out-of-state students so they can have a week-long on-the-ground in-person experience.
SPEAKER_00:As a side note, it is not in Phoenix. It is in Flagstaff, correct, where the temperature is much better than Phoenix's.
SPEAKER_01:That's right. For our students, we say, get yourself to Phoenix and we'll take care of the rest. We have a grant. We're funding the travel for everybody to get up to Flagstaff. We're posting up at Northern Arizona University. Your lodging and your accommodation is all is all covered. And in fact, if you apply for the master's program now, it is not too late to get in on our first ever summer institute. And it'll be a three-credit course that I am teaching called Constitutional Controversies. So if you are interested in some of the topics that we've heard today, there is much more to be discussed and debated.
SPEAKER_00:And I love, I mean, I have a master's degree. I got one a really long time ago. And the only reason I'm not doing this one is because I'm doing my doctoral studies, but I have learned from a lot of these professors. And I love that it's content focused. So we're really trying to help teachers strengthen their content knowledge because as a center and as a school, we believe that the more content strength that you have, the better you are as a teacher, the better we can prepare these kids for civic life, all of that fun stuff. So definitely look. I'm going to put all of this stuff in the show notes for you. Even if you're listening to this in a year, check it out. You just never know. Are there any final thoughts that you have, Andrew, before we end our podcast?
SPEAKER_01:I'll offer one thought about the Constitution in closing. You know, one of the things we've discussed today, Liz, is how there is some ambiguity around the meaning of the impeachment clauses. There are compelling arguments on both sides. There are compelling arguments about the meaning of the Second Amendment. There are ways in which the Constitution has become interpreted that may go afield from what the founding generation intended. And what are we to make of these contradictions, these nuances, the indeterminacies of the historical record? It can be frustrating. We want to look to the Constitution to answer the very real dilemmas that bedevil our republic. And we may lament the fact that the Constitution does not give us clear answers to so many of our problems. But I would argue that to lament the shortcomings of the Constitution in that regard would be to miss its point. The framers lived through a moment of history where people stopped yelling at one another and started firing at each other. They saw politics descend into violence. And they created a constitution, not necessarily to resolve all of our debates, but rather to institutionalize the debates, to create legislative chambers, courthouses, and executive offices where the political challenges of our day, of any given generation, can be dealt with peacefully. And they did not suffer any illusion that a country with as much ideological diversity as America's always had would somehow come to harmonize under a single unified view. Indeed, even the very people who were at the Constitutional Convention almost immediately thereafter disagreed about what various constitutional clauses meant. What they have bequeathed to us is not a set of answers. It is not an array of solutions. Rather, it is a set of institutions through which we can channel these fierce debates more peacefully. And here we are now in 2024 on the brink of our 250th anniversary as a country, which makes us actually much younger than a number of other countries, much younger than many other societies. And yet we have a constitution that is the longest serving national constitution in existence anywhere in the world. Its longevity is the ultimate testament to its success, not in resolving our problems, but rather in creating peaceful forums through which to vigorously debate them. And as we approach this next quarter millennium of our existence as a republic, the Constitution endures and that debate lives on.
SPEAKER_00:Perfect. Thank you so much, Andrew. This has been so much fun. And I can't wait to do a Hamilton one with you.
SPEAKER_01:I'm excited.
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