The United States Constitution, with Amanda Nelson

Zero to Well-Read - Book Riot

This episode of Zero to Well-Read explores the U.S. Constitution as both a foundational legal document and a literary text, examining its historical context, structure, and enduring relevance ahead of America’s 250th ann

Key takeaways

• The Constitution is short (7,700 words) but profoundly influential

Transcript preview

This episode of Zero to Well Red is sponsored by thriftbooks.com today on the show we're talking about the US Constitution. Let me just say there are a lot of versions you can find on thrift books.com. I particularly like this leatherbound edition, the US Constitution, the US Constitution, other writings you get a bunch of founding documents in there. If you want you can get the US Constitution for dummies, which I hope we're going to exceed that kind of level with the discussion we have on this episode but you never know. about the people by Jillapour, her great book about the US Constitution, and we also talk about Melissa Murray's The US Constitution, annotated edition, where she gives you context and additional information about what you're seeing before you. So you can get just the facts ma'am version of the US Constitution. You can find books about the US Constitution, fill your cart at thrift books. All right, time for the show. about the book you wish you'd, maybe documents, parchment, scrolls, vellum. I am Jeff O'Neill. I'm Rebecca Shinsky, and today as we prepare for America's 250th birthday coming up this July 4th, we are diving into one of the nation's most important foundational documents, the United States Constitution, and we have a special guest joining us. We are delighted, like thrilled to welcome our dear friend and former colleague Amanda Nelson to the show, Amanda Nelson to the show, Amanda. a historical content creator, political commentator, and founder of y'all vote an organization that is dedicated to flipping state houses in the South. Amanda, welcome to Zero to Well Red. The gang's back together. Welcome back to Book Riot, baby. Where it all started, where I learned everything I know. I don't know about that. I don't know about that. You learned more. I actually do make the argument. When I like introduce myself to live audiences, I make the argument that my time in book media taught me how to speak to my time in big tech taught me how to speak to narcissists and that comment that prepared me for politics like nothing else. That's heady stuff there, Amanda. So we're here today to talk about the US Constitution and in addition to your historical expertise and you know thinking about this stuff, modern politics, the other thing I'm super interested here from you is you are interacting with regular folks about how the US government is put together and I'm so curious to hear what people think, what they don't think, what they don't think, what they're they're misconstrued ideas about how this damn country came to be and is put together because I think one thing that struck me about this and Rebecca's notes to be curious about Amanda's takes is there's not a whole lot to the US constitute it's like not Moby Dick necessarily there's just not a lot there and what is and isn't there is super important but then it's taken on in our minds like this is you know front like Mount Sinai like there's tablets it's when really was just a bunch of dudes in a hot Pennsylvania summer trying to figure it out and missing their family and also kind of hating each other? Amanda, what do people think of the Constitution? The sort of in Gen Pop, as I've heard it, sort of through telephone, you referred to people who are genuinely trying to understand how things are put together, but also don't know anything. Is that unfair? No, I think that the thing you were referring to the sort of civic religion that we have for ourselves out of both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution has has just it's just deified and as is often the case with any kind of religion you don't have to read it if you are worshiping it or know anything about it or study where it came from or how it came to be or its impacts because that that makes it harder to be a participant in the civic religion so I think Jen Pop especially right now at least my followers who lean to the left the Constitution so that they can understand what limits we can realistically put on the things that are happening to the country right now. I've not seen a Republican that cares to understand it to be honest, at least not in my, they're not numerous in my audience, I'll say that. They're not making cogent well- sourced arguments about say, I don't know, states rights or something. They're not saying the words birth rights citizenship or anything, you know, like the things that they're... but we're very literal around amendment too, but not Rebecca as a literary, for our purposes here, right, like for the zero to well-read sort of crowd, which this is really our first political document. We've sort of, we're moving out of the sort of straight up, you could study this in English or world-lit class to words that matter in a different kind of way. Why are we doing this? Why are we interested in this outside of like the world and politics and all of our fates? Like as a literary document, as a literary document, something that or what how do you come into this and think about this says let's read this with close reading English nerd glasses I mean in addition to looking for an excuse to get Amanda back into the into the loop with us you know well the 250th for America is really significant and it's the Constitution is one of those documents that most of us encounter in school and never again like spoiler alert for book nerd read when we get to the bottom of the show this is going to be really high 4,400 words, the Constitution itself, if you add in the amendments, it's about 7,700 words. So this makes it the shortest document that we've discussed here. By far, and arguably the most important one. Citizens should always understand how their country is put together. And the US Constitution is the oldest written Constitution in the world because the framers thought it was important for citizens to have access to the country is put together, how laws work, how laws get made, what rights you have, what rights the federal government has. It's important that this document is written, it's important that citizens engage with it, and as Amanda was saying, most citizens just don't. We also just talk perpetually about we have constitutional rights to do X, Y, Z, and can you point to where in the Constitution most of those rights come from? Or have we just absorbed most of it from culture? So in the thesis of this part of being well read is understanding the greater context that the works that shape our lives exist in. If you live in the United States, this work shapes your life every day. Arguably if you live outside the United States, this work shapes your life in many ways because of the United States influence around the globe. So we're talking about it here for the 250th. We kicked around or I kicked around like maybe the declaration, maybe some other things, but the Constitution is ultimately the one. overlap of my book nerdist and history nerdist thing here is just like, whoa! I'm having a good day! So much of the best American literature is born out of the problems caused by this document for the people who live in this country. From like Melville to Morrison, it is all a constitutional argument in my opinion, or at least nodding to the constitutional arguments and the failures of our leadership to create an accepting culture. the Declaration of Independence. So it's very important, I agree with you for understanding American literature at least. As a reading exercise, one thing I've come to understand is that Conlaw, constitutional law, is essentially an extended close reading exercise with stakes, which really gets my little rabbit heart a pump in so far. So to think about you know the long-term parsing of an ampersand or a comma or what is necessary mean and what is general welfare mean. And why is it's high crime? and misdemeanors, certainly high crimes is a super set including misdemeanors. Like all of this stuff is so fascinating and you realize that again and I think this is the thing, let me back up just a second, of all the things I think we've read and took on, taken on Rebecca, you will be rewarded more by doing research and doing reading behind this text than anything else because I think the story of how this document came to be the actual moment of writing over 12 weeks is super it's more fascinating sort of Melville Scrashing Up, it'll be the script and everything else. That is where the drama is and this is the sort of the result of that. This is the flower that this whole gnarly, brambly, thorny bush was trying to produce and understanding that and how the compromises and the blind spots and the hypocrisies and the contradictions makes it all the richer. And they identified I think and I'm going to pass the mic here to Amanda for what it's all about here in a second. But seeing the original and hearing and reading the original confusions, contradictions and questions is both terrifying and affirming in some way. Like it makes sense. Like they made a lot of mistakes, like a lot of mistakes, but also the mistakes sort of made sense at the time and we don't have answers to a lot of the questions they were trying to wrestle with. So Amanda, with that said, what the hell is this document? How did this come to be, like what was the moment in time? in which like you know all right guys we're getting out a quill pen and some parchment and we're gonna get g w the gavel and we're gonna lock ourselves in the room and figure this shit out. Where gw is never gonna talk. Never gonna talk. The hierarchy of the convention. I just want to say like the well what is the document it's a series of Ampersands as you were saying it's not terribly wordy and you are so right like if you read any Supreme Court decision of any substance or listen to a constitutional law scholar like I've met who's a con law, a professor, who's a representative in Maryland, and you look at some to talk about the Constitution, and it's like being in a sermon. It's just that the parsing, and maybe it means this, and maybe it means that, and maybe the gods from 1776, you know, just like gave us this meaning or this other meaning. It is such a civic religion. But anyway, okay, why do we have it? To fix us screw up, which are the Articles. So if you are like, blank slate, ended the American Revolution, like 1783, right? That's when the treaty was signed with England. We had a system of government, I'm using air quotes here, called the Articles of Confederation before that, which was written in 1777 and ratified in 1781. And the Articles of Confederation were, I mean, functionally a set of treaties, kind of between the colonies or the states. It was not a powerful system of government whatsoever. And from the jump, it was a disaster. It was a complete mother-fin disaster. It did not get they had a unicameral Congress so like one body Everything that had to be changed had to be passed unanimously so it was functionally unamendable My God unanimously all 13 colonies had nightmares Which will give me my hottest of hot takes at the end which is that the Constitution was illegal It was it sort of was. Yeah, I know she has a hot take Amanda I think that's just right, but nobody wants to go about? Listen they say her takes are mild right They couldn't tax right Congress had no power to tax the purse, yeah. They could not raise any revenue, which meant at the time the states that were deeply in debt because of the American Revolution, including to their own citizens, soldiers whose pensions they were trying to pay out, back pay they were trying to give. They couldn't raise money as a Congress to pay those people or to pay those debts. They had no commerce power, like there was no governing of interstate money or how it flowed, which left the states to do things like tariff each other, which was going to inevitably lead to more war. Although. Although, although, although, although, we do we do we do we do we do we do we do under the Articles of Confederation that are still into effect today, mostly between Virginia and Maryland and how we navigate the Chesapeake Bay together. So those still exist. So that's one thing that we got. There was no war between Maryland, Virginia. That came later. And then there was no enforcement, right? The Articles of Confederation had no teeth. There was no army. Congress did not have the ability to raise a national army. Laws were recommendations. There was no way to make the state to do anything. It was functionally a series of suggestions. And it was a foreign policy disaster because, you know, in the treaty that we signed with Britain to end the American Revolution, they agreed to give up some of their forts on our border, which they just declined to do. We're actually solid right here, we're going to stick around. And since the Articles of Confederation did not give any sort of national government the right to raise an army, we could not defend ourselves or enforce that treaty in any way. And there was also stuff like, you know, Spain closed the Mississippi river entirely to American shipping. Couldn the Barbary states were pirating American merchants. Could we do anything about that? No, we had no Navy, no. And then there was Shay's rebellion. So in Massachusetts, at the time, Massachusetts farmers, especially in the Western part of the state, were going bankrupt. They were being taxed really, really heavily by the state to try to pay the state's revolutionary war debt. But they didn't have money. They didn't have any currency. Because there was no national currency, because the Arizona Federation did not give Congress the power to do that. So every state was based on minerals. Some of it was backed on by nothing. So there was no exchange rate. It was complete and total chaos. But those farmers could not pay those taxes because they didn't have any currency and so they were losing their farms. So Captain Shea, who was a revolutionary war captain, gathered up like 1,200 people and started storming courthouses and just like refusing to let the foreclosures happens and it was a mutiny, right? It was like a second revolution about taxes just as the first one was. But the government had no power to stop it. The. The. The. The. The. The tears and private merchants had to raise money to hire private militia to go put down Shay's rebellion, which ultimately, I mean didn't amount to much except we got the Constitutional Convention because it was becoming increasingly obvious over time that the Articles of Confederation were not going to cut it were causing more problems than it was solving. So initially the Constitutional Convention in Philly was supposed to just amend the Articles of Confederation. Like we've just had this big rebellion, we had to hang two people, two of our people, revolutionary war people. Like this, this is, this is So they were supposed to just amendment. Instead, they burned it down and started over. So that's where it came from. And Rebecca, so in your research about like sort of getting up to speed, like what stuck out to you is like, okay, why are we doing it this way? Like what is your understanding? Amanda's got the detail. We're Jen Pop here. Like what is your sense of like, okay, what stuck out to you as being relevant to putting in this damn. Melissa Murray, who's a wonderful constitutional scholar and a host of the strict scrutiny podcast, I definitely did not pay enough attention in history in high school, despite having known Amanda for a million years, like still had homework to do. And she talks about the Constitution as being a trauma-informed document that, like, to build on what Amanda was saying, these 55 guys, 39 who actually contributed and signed it, get together in this room and they're like, here's all of my damage from how the Articles of Confederation failed. And we don't want to do that again. Plus how do we revision a new kind of future? So to understand the Constitution as just as much, if not more, about preventing a rerun of the past than, or as it is, about creating a new vision for how the country will function, really critical. That so much of it is addressing exactly how they're living at the time or the moment that they just came out of. And when you think about. Yeah, when you think about that that 250 that 250 that 250 that that 250. years later we are still like governing ourselves based on responses to a really particular moment that's illuminating for why it can be so frustrating and so confusing but also just wow the compromises that they made for slavery like that is it is written into multiple articles of the Constitution it required multiple amendments to correct it over time that they were concerned about getting everybody to agree to sign the damn thing and the only way to do it was to assure the southern slave holding states that the Constitution was not going to immediately nullify their ability to own slaves. So they guarantee it for a period of years up until what 1808 is the original agreement. 20 years plus one. And they do it. And they do it without saying the word slavery at all. So just the creative acrobatics to avoid talking about how this practice, the institution of chattel slavery is found. to how the country was formed, it's foundational to how the economy had worked, and the only way to get the southern states to sign the Constitution or the representatives from the southern states was to allow them to continue it for at least a period of time. And then you start to see as the amendments come in, how we were responding to emancipation and how southern states attempted to hold on to the oppression of black people in one form or another, despite all of the amendments that have been attempted to reverse that. doing. Yes. I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I like live in Virginia. We experience this every day and how the laws of our state work and in the position that Virginia and the rest of the South hold in national governance. We have a constitution, to our state constitution, constitutional amendment on the ballot in November that the referendum that the population is going to vote on to allow felons to get their right to vote back or one of the few states where felons are automatically disenfranchised. And we have to amend our that law that felons were automatically disenfranchised here was a Jim Crow era voter suppression reaction to the 15th Amendment. And that 15th Amendment is there because of the failures of the constitutional convention. So, you know, 1787 and we are dealing with the fallout. The thing that, I mean, maybe to go one step, so definitely the historical contingencies on the ground were probably number one with a bullet that shaped the way specifically. But there is, there are philosophical, there are philosophical... you know it's essentially the Declaration of Independence via which is essentially John Locke and sort of the Enlightenment and everything that comes out of that John Locke I mean I didn't know this or I hadn't forgotten this right that's where Jeffers in like cribs exact language from John Locke in the declaration like long train of abuses like come on T. J. We don't need to do this like just come up with something like realism just straight but yeah John Locke I mean this is important it we take it so for granted now for granted now but I think this is important it's we take it's important we take it's this context, if you're interested in understanding, to understand their understanding, like, why did we say stuff like all men are created equal? We shouldn't put to the side, we're going to keep in the halo of understanding that didn't include women, that didn't include slaves, but within the people that they are thinking about, this idea of the toplorasa that you're born blank, that you were not good or bad, or aristocracy or a god when you're born. If that is true, then democracy makes a lot more sense, where if you thought something other than that, then this clash should rule or inherited wealth or whatever else should be. But if you have this idea of the Tablorasa, then the democratic ideal makes a lot more sense because, you know, man exists in a state of nature and anything that happens after the fact is sort of ex post facto and you don't really know, you can't really determine what's going to happen. So let's take it as read, let's take it as something we hold it as something we hold it like a baby rabbit, and try not to correct it. Yeah, okay, it's so condescending. And then, and so then, then what do you do to protect that, right? And that's where John Locke, like, that's where we get this like separation of powers. There should be an executive, there should be a legislative branch, there should be a judiciary, where we should have a bill of rights, like, he did that for hire, even at the same time, he was coming up with this radical stuff. So like I think you just have to hold that there is no reconciling that like that's just a truth you have to hold in your heart about how this document came to be and then from there the other thing they didn't have models like James Madison reading a bunch of books like what kind of governments ever exist like I guess we'll look at the Roman sentence like that was the most proximal stuff they had so like there was no real like the English Bill of Rights in 1689 and the Magna Carta is like that's kind useful but in terms of actually putting a state together that's supposed based on something, they didn't have a lot of precedence. So it's like a little bit of philosophy, throw in some slavery, throw in we need to pay the army, and this, it kind of made, it's like these are the Petri dish of life that you throw the stuff in there, and this is the sludge that walked out. It really is a collection of Ambersands in that way, because you get like, here's the legislative branch, here's the judicial branch, here's what they're allowed to do. By the way, here's how taxes can work. By the way, by the way, like a Hollywood scene of a startup where they've got their whiteboard and all their post-its and somebody's like oh shit we also need to talk about this thing and at some point they're like okay either that's an article on its own or we can add that clause to this other article some of them make sense together a lot of them you're like why are these two things in these articles together? Amanda are there reasons that those things are grouped in articles together that we mere mortals don't know. Or is it a mystery? A lot of it has to do with the trauma that you were talking about. Like this isn't just a Petri dish of Locke and Athens and all of that. It's also a good bit of like, oh, but Parliament really screwed this up. And also that one British soldier was really mean to me when he was quartered in my home. So there's a lot of that. And there's a, you know, the nitpicky way that the committee wrote a lot of the actual text of it, You've been to Dem committee meetings, like do we have a quorum? How do we feel about this word? How do we feel about that way? All in favor? Okay, start over. So like, it's just a mess. I guess it's human. It's a human piece of paper that 55 pew just like got together. And I do want to say the halo of understanding that you were talking about is so important because I mean, there's the example of the president, right. There were proposals at the convention that an amendment be included later after ratification, that the president could only be a white man. And the quotes from those notes are like, what if we get an old lady? Literally, what if we get an old lady? Or a word for a black person that I'm not going to repeat here. And then those were dismissed because they were so outside the realm of possibility. Like, the delegates were like, it's explicit in the document that it's a white man. It's super not. Nowhere doesn't say that anywhere. That's why Homeboy was suggesting it, then we amend it. not it didn't occur to them that any of the people who were not specifically in that room other than some of the native tribes who they had to deal with for like tax and war purposes were worthy of consideration if you weren't property or someone who was going to be attacking us you weren't really going to be in this document represented in any way and at the same time we're gonna say all men are created equal it's kind of a it's hard to wrap your head around it's really hard and in the in the trans so another thing that's interesting about the document construction that affects things throw the mic to Amanda a little bit later about the ratification process is I don't know I don't remember where it was agreed maybe Amanda you remember but that the deliberations would be secret like the documents couldn't get out like they didn't want leaks to the press about you know Ben Franklin this is something I think Ben Franklin actually did propose which is it the Supreme Court would be elected by the country's lawyers which is just a wild idea which is just a wild idea there was some wild ideas thrown around and like that and and so and then what happened then what happened then what happened states to ratify and they determined in that they got to make up the rules of the ratification in the document which is a wild thing to do too they needed nine of the thirteen states but what they didn't want people is to like adjudicate it and stuff to come out and have to litigate it was kind of a genius in terms of a negotiating tactic to present it whole cloth and it's a straight up yes or down to the states you don't get to attach amendments or vetoes or writers like some of the states like well here's New York did up all these conditional stuff and they're like we're like we're like we're like we're just not we're just not we're just not going to then it could be presented as you have to say yes or no to this whole cloth and I don't know how they would have done it because then you get the state legislatures which are all the reason we're here is because they're inept they cannot have input on this but they did have a shared secrecy around the deliberations so that they could they even say this speculate come up with dumb ideas raise their hand and do something wild and some of that stuff existed we had to change someone and some of that stuff existed we had to change someone there, but I also think that's important to remember, is like they were making stuff up, they were trying to come up with ideas, like the stuff about how, what percentage of what, you need to pass something or three-fifths compromise or all this stuff, really didn't exist as they were just making stuff up at the same time, like we're living in this world, the people that are doing the best they sort of understood, and someone was just like wildly wrong and sort of stupid, but they didn't have a whole lot of precedent. I don't know, that's the thing that's the thing that's the thing that's the thing that's the thing that's the thing that's the thing that really got to me that really got to me that really got to me that really got to me, the whole like how they presented it to the country and like how they put the thing together like the structure of it. There it was there was a lot of secrecy but there was also a lot of machinations beforehand like Madison arrived a few days early so that he could meet with other delegates who were also there early so that they could set up the Virginia plan is like no we're gonna start with this this is gonna be the foundation of the thing. So there were machinations and then yes it was they actually have this weird I have this weird I like to do these mental exercises about was different. Like what if instead of the sweltering Philadelphia summer with all the doors nailed shut or the windows nailed shut they were literally nailed shut they had had the convention over the winter when they hadn't had to have been like in as much of a hurry because they wouldn't have been so hot and sweating disgusting and uncomfortable the whole time and like literally scared of the plague because that was always in a big city a threat like some fever was gonna sweep through so everybody wants to get in and out of town as fast as possible. Also Congress was supposed was supposed to be meeting so some job while they were also it was chaotic and most of them weren't paid like the government like the legislatures wouldn't pay them and like some of them wrote their own ticket like this was a real if you raised your hand you could like showing up is half the battle like some of these people like Benjamin Franklin's nephew nepot little nepotism just kind of showed up and took bad notes and you got to do the thing like that I hadn't thought about the winter time I was thinking about what if it was in Maine or in New York like where Congress was part of the reason why the attendance was so low. They never had the full contingent of delegates in the room at any day ever, because people were coming and going. And some of them were going to New York because Congress was in session. So they had other jobs to do. Like, why would you not just have this in New York? Because they wanted the symbolism of doing it in the same hall where they signed the declaration. And like, that's cute, fine. But like, you would have more help if you had just gone where the people were. Like, it's helpful to me to just remember it's a group project. Like, men. Right, but like, this is a human document produced by a group project of a bunch of guys, as you were saying, nailed into a room in the middle of like, I call this the original wet-hot American summer. Like, you just... Think of the chafing. Think of the chafing. Just the smells alone would have been... By me, you've probably got yellow fever, you freak, like, we all do creative work. Everyone listening to this has been part of a group project of some kind. And you know how that how that This guy gets his pet thing that has to go in there or he's not going to be cool with anybody else's stuff So you gotta wait for Eldridge Jerry to shut up for a little while before you can get anything done Yeah, somebody else is worried about this other pet project these two guys have the same principle But they can't agree on how it should be written down Hello New Hampshire nice of you to join us 60 days late live free and die or show up pick two of the three like just a nightmare project assignment and humility, like it helps me with the humility because it can be so frustrating to be like what were they thinking, why is it written this way, oh my God, like that failure of imagination in some of these places. But like we know how group projects go. It can be. The structure of it makes sense. Like what they ultimately came up with as far as like the articles in the order that they're in it has, it tells a story, I think. Congress on purpose. I have this later on in the notes but I am an Article 1 supremacist. Congress is supposed to be the most powerful branch of government and a lot of the problems we have now are because that is not what is happening. It is not functioning the way that