The Second Impeachment of President Trump

I'm Jeffrey Rosen, President and CEO of the National Constitution Center, and welcome to We The People, a weekly show of constitutional debate. The National Constitution Center is a nonpartisan, nonprofit, chartered by Congress to increase awareness and understanding of the Constitution among the American people. This week, the House of Representatives introduced an article of impeachment against President Trump after the storming of the Capitol last week by a pro-Trump mob. On today's episode, we will discuss the constitutional issues raised by the prospect of another impeachment, as well as recent events. We'll also take a broader look at presidential power past, present, and future. I am honored to be joined by two other America's leading experts on presidential power and the Constitution. Michael McConnell is the Richard and Frances Mallory Professor and Director of the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford Law School, and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is the author of the new book, The President Who Would Not Be King, Executive Power Under the Constitution. Michael, it is an honor to have you back on the show. Thank you. Christina Rodriguez is the latent Homer Serbeck Professor of Law at Yale Law School. He is the author with Adam Cox of the President and Immigration Law, which we at a great discussion of in a town hall program last fall. Christina, thank you so much for joining. Thank you for having me. Michael, you have just completed a book called The President Who Would Not Be King, Executive Power Under the Constitution. Is there any historical precedent for last week's events and what do you make of the argument that the storming of the Capitol by a violent mob represents the Founder's nightmare? Well, there certainly is no precedent for a president egging on a mob to attack the Capitol. This isn't the first time the Capitol was attacked by a mob. That happened before the Constitution was ratified by a mob of unpaid soldiers in Philadelphia who mobbed Congress and actually Congress ran to Princeton and then to Camden and then to Annapolis. And this is one of the main reasons they created a federal city, Washington, DC, which would not be under the control of a state which is in order to protect themselves. They did anticipate that a president might use abuse powers in order to stay in office. And principle mechanism, they thought such a president would use would be his control over the military. They were thinking of things like Julius Caesar, who used his personal popularity with the Army to displace constitutional government. I like to say our military has performed admirably, I think, one huge success of the American Republic is to create a non-civilian, non-political army that we do not have to fear even though in a former general Flynn issued, I thought the most horrifying statement of the entire last several weeks when he urged a president Trump to order martial law and have the Army take over the voting machines and rerun the elections and the states were Trump lost by a close margin. But the military, we're having none of it. And so in a sense, this is unprecedented. Christine, at the same question to you, is there any precedent for last week's events and in some sense, do they represent one of the framers' nightmares? We've certainly had hotly contested elections that have provoked violence, but as Michael said, there's no precedent for a president inciting an attack on Congress. During the last few days and really the last couple of months, I've been thinking a lot about the way I thought about the counting of the votes in the 2000 election. And I remember when Al Gore accepted the results when he had to declare that his opponent was going to be the new president and gave a speech where he respected what the Supreme Court had decided in Bush v. Gore, lots of people congratulating him for a seeding to the peaceful transition of power and being willing to accept a loss. And I remember thinking at the time, well, that's not really worthy of congratulation. That is a baseline for our system of government. Of course, everyone would fall online behind that principle. And I still don't think it's worthy of congratulation, but I much less likely, as most of us are not to take that for granted and to see more clearly how the character of the individual does matter greatly to the way the processes play out. And so this is a really stark contrast to that election that was extremely contested and where there were actual legal claims that could have been raised that seemed far more plausible than the ones that were thrown out here, but where there was no intimation of violence or second-guessing the certifications once everything had been said and done through legal processes. Michael, this week, the House introduced articles of impeachment against the President of the United States for incitement of insurrection. You've just studied the history of impeachment in your new book, The President, Who Would Be King. Before turning to the factual question of whether you think the president's conduct meets this standard of incitement for insurrection, tell us, is the charge of incitement of insurrection the kind that the framers were concerned about or would have considered impeachable and then also address some of the technical questions about whether the framers contemplated a trial of a president after he left office? Well, I don't think that the way that the House is drafting the articles of impeachment is very wise or careful or loyally, this is not the way they should be written, but I don't have any doubt that the conduct underlying it is an impeachable offense, that there is a misunderstanding that high crimes and misdemeanors refers to things that are in the United States criminal code, and there is some argument for that, and there have been, the people have been arguing that by the way in contested impeachments way back to the early 1800s, so it's not a new argument, but I think it is not true that I think the framers deliberately adopted language from British precedent that was not tied to what could be actually a criminal conviction in court. The charges against Warren Hastings that were going on at the time of the foundation of the Constitution were not primarily criminal in nature. The idea was to allow impeachment for very serious grave misconduct, not for policy differences, not for partisan differences, not for mismanagement, but for very serious grave misconduct, and it's hard to deny that egging on a mob to take over the capital and prevent the proper recognition of properly cast votes would fall into that category. Your thoughts about whether or not incitement to insurrection, if it were proven, and we'll turn to that question in a moment, constitutes an impeachable high crime and misdemeanor, as well as any thoughts about those technical questions about issues raised by a trial after the president leaves office. So I don't think there's any question that if it were proven that actual engagement and insurrection, including by deliberate incitement of a mob to attempt to undo the counting of votes and to attack the coordinate branch of government would be a grounds for impeachment, but I also think a relevant question for Congress is whether the president's behavior or just short of that absent proof that that actually occurred under whatever legal standard you're going to apply is grounds for impeachment and I would contend following from the impeachment. We just went through that it most certainly is because it demonstrates contempt for the system of government as a whole and is part of a larger effort to undermine the very integrity of our electoral system and the ability to hold the president accountable in every way. It's intent to evade that altogether. Whether or not it's permissible to try him after he's left office, I think is a subject of debate on which there is conflicting evidence and it's obviously something for which there's no clear precedent when it comes to an impeachment of this sort. The reason for doing it is clearly because conviction would mean that he would no longer be eligible for office and I do think many people across the political spectrum now see that that is something of an imperative for a person who's willing to do all of the many things that this president has done culminating in what happened last week to possibly be voted into office again as a grave threat, a real grave threat to our system and to our well-being as a country, whether or not that would hold after a conviction and whether or not a conviction is actually conceivable is an entirely different question, the possibility that a conviction won't be achievable is not a reason not to proceed with impeachment because the impeachment itself puts on the historical record that what has happened here is extraordinary and something that ought to be condemned by the members of Congress, if not in self-defense and in defense of the constitutional system. Michael, now let's turn to the question of whether or not the president committed incitement, interaction, both under a constitutional standard and under the legal standard, which as the Brandenburg case reminds us, requires that speech be intended to and likely to cause imminent violence. The House's articles of impeachment quote, "the president's statement in his speech on the ellipse. If you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore and save us incited by President Trump members of the crowd," he addressed, "mop the Capitol." So two questions for you first for a senator ruling on the incitement charge. Do you think the incitement standard is met? And then if the president were to be charged in a criminal court with incitement, would his conduct meet the Brandenburg standard? Well, I think the criminal case is difficult. I think if you were actually tried in a criminal case with incitement, that you'd parse every word that he said and Brandenburg sets a very high standard. I just don't think that has anything to do with whether he has done something that is impeachable. I think it was foolish for the House members who drew up these articles of impeachment to word them in ways that get us talking about Brandenburg, because that's not what impeachment is about, and I think they could have worded it in ways which were unmistakably true as a factual matter, an unmistakably impeachable as a constitutional matter. I moved to ask, how would you have worded it if you were trying to achieve that goal? Well, I think there were three basic things that President Trump has done that are serious misuses of his presidential position. The one was to try to frustrate the proper registration and a recognition of the electoral results, and here I do not refer to his challenging them in court. He had a right to do them. He was wrong in the merits, but lots of people in court are wrong in the merits, usually half of them in every case, but once decisions had been made to try to pressure election officials like the Secretary of State of Georgia or the legislators in Wisconsin to disregard the vote after all the channels for proper challenge were completed was wrong. Then secondly, to egg on a crowd, whether it's technically incitement or not, he encouraged the crowd to march on the Capitol under circumstances where it was reasonably foreseeable that violence was going to break out, and that may not be technically incitement, but it is still deeply wrong for the President to do that. Third, he has a take care clause responsibility to protect the law for him to sit back for several hours when this is taking place, and not even make a clear call for his supporters to back down when his own supporters are calling to hang Mike Pence, and members of Congress are phoning into his aides saying that they are in fear for their lives, and he doesn't even use his influence with the crowd to get them to back down is just an unbelievable dereliction. Christina, same three questions to you. First of the President's conduct meets the constitutional standards for insurrection. Second, would it be incitement in a criminal trial, and then if you were drafting the articles of impeachment, how would you draft them differently? So I think with respect to the first two questions I quite agree with Michael that the standards are high, and whether the President had the appropriate mens rea or the approach the standards required to show insurrection is difficult to say, and probably would be difficult to win a prosecution on those grounds, but that is beside the point to your third question, which is really what we should be debating. And I doubt very much though, we don't know for certain that criminal prosecutors will pursue the President once he's out of office for his conduct. On the question of impeachment, I think one of the things that we can see from what Michael just said about the President standing by and not trying to stop his reporters is a feature of his character that the last impeachment also brought to light, which is that his concern is for himself and his interests alone. He is not concerned for the interests of the country and has no conception. I don't think of the public good. That is not a description of a ground for impeachment, but it is a way of understanding all of his behavior and why if there is behavior that rises to the level of an impeachable offense, it is in the interest of the nation to get rid of him or to believe that he will only persist in doing those things that he can get away with because he cares only about his self-interest. As we both said, his willingness to lean on government officials to try to change the outcome of an election, plus his exhortation of his supporters to attack Congress, whether that rises to the level of incitement or not, both of those reflect contempt for the system and a willingness and an effort to undo the system of elections that power our constitution and make sure that we continue to have a democracy and on those grounds, I think, he can be removed from office. Much of what preceded things like the phone call with the Secretary of State of Georgia are behaviors or actions that we can debate as violations of norms. I think many of the cases that were filed, if not the vast majority of the cases that were filed, were frivolous and reflect egregious infringements of norms of accepting defeat in a presidential election, particularly as the loss is billed and the willingness to bring cases to court where there is not a shred of evidence and only just Twitter conspiracy theories or belief that the election must have been rigged, demonstrates a form of corruption that's dangerous, but not the sort of behavior that rises to the level of high crimes and misdemeanors, certainly behavior that should be discouraged and criticized. And I wouldn't frame it in the way that Michael has the right of the candidate, especially where there is nothing to the dozens of suits that were filed in that becomes clear over time. But it's really the later events which you and Michael have highlighted that justify what the House is doing, even if they're not articulating the grounds in as legally sound. Wait, I think they're trying to do it quickly. They don't have weeks to come up with articles of impeachment and are trying to make a larger statement about the threat that the president made against the coordinate branch and against their their very legitimacy and and that's why they look the way they do. The articles of impeachment also cite section three of the 14th Amendment, which says that no person shall hold any office civil or military under the United States who having previously taken an oath to support the Constitution of the United States shall have engaged an insurrection or rebellion against the same or given aid or comfort to the enemies. Thereof, some members of Congress are arguing that whether or not impeachment succeeds, section three should be invoked to deny the president the right to hold office. Michael, tell us about the history of section three. What was it attempting to achieve? And if it were invoked today, how would it work? Some have said that one house could pass a resolution. Others that both and other that the president would have to sign a law passed by Congress and others that the courts would simply interpret the disqualification on their own. What's your view? So, Jeff, I don't know and I don't actually think anybody else knows either. Section three of the 14th Amendment has a very specific history and context. It's right after the Civil War, it's referring to the people who were an open rebellion. They called themselves rebels. It was a civil war against the United States. It has never been invoked since then. The amendment itself does not say who would declare that people were in insurrection because there wasn't any doubt. Everybody knew who they were talking about. And so, is this people who are coming convicted in court of the crime of insurrection. That seems the most plausible. The idea that Congress, by some kind of majority vote, has the right to declare that someone's an insurrection and therefore can never hold office, strikes me as committing somewhat the same error that those who thought the vice president Pence could just dispense with the electoral vote was. It's concentrating too much power and political figures to undo elections. If the mere majority of pauses of Congress can decide that folks in the people of the United States elect to office aren't going to hold office, that seems rather extreme. There's elsewhere in the constitution it requires a two thirds vote to expel a member of Congress from this conduct, and so to read this sort of extreme procedure into a provision of the constitution that's never been used, never been applied, has no precedence to support it. It seems to me to be unsupportable when other perfectly straightforward constitutional means are available. - Christina, your thoughts about the history and purpose of section three, how it would apply in practice who would trigger it and do you share Michael's concerns about congressional trigger or not? - I definitely share Michael's skepticism. I think it's a creative argument and the historical analogy is both immediately clear and intriguing, but also demonstrates why this is a route down which we are unlikely to go because the provision was there for a very particular historical reason in response as Michael says to open rebellion, secession, war, and decorations of loyalty to seceding power. We don't have anything even coming close to resembling that in these circumstances. And what I would focus on is the difficulty of having anything approaching an objective determination that this individual or any other individual was an insurrection against the United States. I don't know absent the kinds of historical circumstances that existed after the Civil War that you would be able to come to a conclusion about that. And I'm deeply skeptical the courts would actually get themselves involved in this and decide, especially absent a criminal prosecution, but decide themselves that someone like President Trump committed the offenses that make him ineligible for office under this amendment that was clearly intended to address completely different historical circumstance and then preclude that person from running for office that seems dangerously close to the sort of political question that courts aren't going to want to resolve. And then that leaves you with the congressional solution. And again, especially in our polarized times, the notion that you would have a majority of Congress disqualifying someone out of a belief that they don't believe in the country or would be an affimad to the system is just a recipe for back and forth among hyper partisan actors who would believe the same thing about someone who hadn't done nearly the same as President Trump, but who conspiracy channels suggest our terrorist threats to our nation. So I think that it's an interesting debate to be having, but I don't think it will result in anything. But impeachment and removal is the past, the clear path to addressing circumstances like this. - Michael, tell us about the constitutional role of the vice president in counting electoral votes. Before January 6th, the vice president issued a letter concluding that he had only a ministerial role to play in the president's efforts to get him to throw out the results of the election were not consistent with the text of the constitution of the 12th amendment. Do you agree or disagree? - No, I think vice president Pence was absolutely correct. And you don't even have to do more than just read the words of the constitution to see that. The vice president's role is solely that he opens the votes in the presence of the House and the Senate. Doesn't even say he counts them. The notion that he exercises some kind of supervisory authority to decide whether he thinks the elections were properly administered and so forth as it's not there that's a complete fiction. - Christina, your thoughts about the role of the vice president and is his role purely ministerial or does he, in fact, have a substance role to play? - I couldn't have put it better than Michael. I don't think there's any ambiguity about this. There is no role for him to play in judging the votes. We've talked already about the possibility and it's happened before in our history of different slates of electors coming to Congress. But even then, it's not for the vice president to choose which one is going to be recognized that would effectively give the vice president the power to decide the presidency in our day and age when he runs on a ticket with the president. That would be a bizarre way of approaching or creating a process. And so it is a ministerial position and it long has been. - Well, let's talk now about the role of the Electoral College and the Electoral Contact more generally. Michael, team conservative of which you were a distinguished part in the National Constitution Center's drafting project proposed replacing the Electoral College with a national popular vote. Do you personally think that's an urgent national priority to what degree did the fact that several recent candidates have lost the popular vote but won the Electoral College contribute to the current election vexations? And are there any reforms of the Electoral Contact that you think would clarify things? I do favor a national popular election and by the way with ranked choice voting to eliminate the problem of runoffs but you leave out an important part of this is which is candidate selection which I think is actually a worse part of our system by far than the Electoral College our current system of having primaries in which people vote kind of frivolously for to make send a message rather than actually choosing people who would be responsible stewards of the office. I think it's a really terrible way to choose presidents and our proposal was to use the state legislatures as effectively nominating conventions and that they would choose the candidates it's an elaborate proposal. I won't explain it here but the purpose is to try to find candidates who candidates usually who would have the kind of experience and temperament to run the country and the interest of the country rather than people who can just raise money and make a big splash. But I don't actually think the Electoral College is to blame for our current problems. I'm not a big fan of it. We would never if we were a country create an Electoral College today it's just something we are stuck with for historical reasons. It did have, it does have some advantages though in that it does require candidates to travel around the country and not just focus upon places with the high populations, mostly the coasts, but to try to get votes all over and also I think the decentralization of election machinery that the Electoral College brings about turns out to have a great advantages. If everything were centralized in Washington it would be under the control of somebody and I don't trust anybody. So the decentralization has been good. It is, I thought it's so heartening to see the way election officials and judges, both state judges and federal judges taking their oaths of office seriously and administering this election without seeming favoritism to their own party. It's really, and to have so many of them involved means that it would be very difficult for a conspiracy at the center to be able to distort the decisions of the American people. Christina, your thoughts about any reforms that you would propose to the Electoral College to candidate selection or to the Electoral Contact or other electoral reforms in the wake of the events of January 6th? Like many people, I would love it if we could get rid of the Electoral College as Michael suggests and he writes about this in his book. The Electoral College was a creation of the framers who neither wanted a president elected by Congress. They wanted some independence in order that they wanted president elected by the people whom they distrusted, but I think is a political culture we've moved past their extreme distrust of the populace were much less elitist as a country than they were in that sense. And so I think popular election is really the only way that makes sense. And I, contrary to Michael, I do think that the Electoral College has contributed in some way to the distrust that has grown amongst people because it has exacerbated the sense among Democrats in particular that we have a system that privileges minoritarian interests, and that it's hard for the majority of the population to actually have there will express it worked out. Well, this time there was not the gap between the popular vote and the electoral college that we saw in 2016 or 2000. I do remember thinking before 2000 that the next time there was the discrepancy between the two that that would be the end of the electoral college, but that's of course, before I was the law school understood, it's not that simple to get rid of the electoral college, but if there were a way to do that, I think that would dramatically improve our system and would encourage the kind of campaigning that that Michael is expressing the value of, which is campaigning to all the people or California matters, where where Texas matters, where New York matters in ways that large population centers don't really seem to, at least in the way the calendar is set up. And yet I also think that Michael's suggestion of thinking of ways to reform our primary system, maybe by having ranked choice voting, so you don't get extreme people. When you have a field of candidates full of lots of mainstreamers whose votes are split, and then you have the extreme person comes through who appeals to the outer edges of the party. Those kinds of reforms, which I think are easier would be easier to realize than an amendment to the Constitution are worth considering, and that that could have a demonstrable effect on the political culture that we've been discussing and in some sense, lamenting the erosion of. Michael, let's talk about media filter bubbles and disinformation. A Fox News poll released in December found that 77% of those who cast ballots for President Trump said they thought the election had been stolen from him, just 10% of Democrats agreed. What are your thoughts about the role of cable television and social media in spreading disinformation through filter bubbles and echo chambers and what if anything can be done about it? I do think that our media culture has been a major part of our problem and it has splintered so that we now have lots more different channels and that seems good and it looked more democratic at the beginning so that we don't just have three networks that basically were all the same and major newspapers that were all pretty much the same. But the effect of this has been that there are very few, maybe zero, institutions left that command trust among the entire population. Now, the mainstream press I have to say has not covered itself with glory. I think it has been too inclined to rely itself with the Democratic Party and then to blame the people for starting to distrust them. I dearly wish that newspapers and other news organs would do a little bit of maybe just reporting the news and not constantly telling us what we're supposed to conclude from that and making themselves into partisan organs. The fact that people don't know where to go, even I, you know, things happen and I'll say to myself, well, I wonder if that's true, that's really important but I think I'll wait a couple of days and find out if it's actually true or not. And this is a very serious problem for a democracy. Chris, you know, your thoughts about the role of media companies, including social media companies in spreading disinformation and what if anything can be done about it? I do think that splintering is a serious problem even though the creation of more outlets has in a sense democratized both the production of and the access to information. But it's a little bit like teaching a class where students don't read the same thing. If they read two different essays, you can't have a common discussion. And the fact that our, we have different groups of people who affiliate with different political parties of reading entirely different sources to understand what's going on in the world means that we don't share a reality that allows us to put pressure on, you know, our lawmakers or the people who represent us to resolve the same reality. And that contributes to the polarization in Congress to some extent. I also think that, and this is, this is a little bit of an armchair diagnosis of the media environment about which I'm not, especially expert, but that the mainstream media, whatever you define that as, but the major networks. And even the mainstream newspapers are an entertainment business and often much more interested in things that people will click on and incendiary things or sensational things that don't actually promote debate or more importantly, in some sense, knowledge production and knowledge dissemination. Very few people will be relative to the size of the whole population sit down and listen to a conversation like this as opposed to reading, you know, a salacious headline about how the, you know, President Trump is destroying the country full stop. So I think that is also a problem that I have no sense of how to solve because it is related to market incentives. And what people prefer to read and see, which is things that will entertain them as opposed to things that necessarily inform. Well, it's time for closing arguments in this important and illuminating discussion. Michael, the first one is to you how well has the Constitution worked in carrying America through the challenging events that followed January 6, 2021. And if you had to propose a single reform for strengthening one of the guardrails of the Constitution to protect the rule of law, what would it be? So I think the conduct of the election was a real triumph for the system under very difficult circumstances driven by COVID that led to unprecedented numbers of mail-in ballots which do present risks that in person voting doesn't present. But I think we came through this remarkably well. And I say that not because there might not be fraud, I was actually paying attention to the evidence and and struck by how, how little evidence there was. I think it's actually good that some of Mr. Trump's lawyers were able to expose how little support there was for their case in court so that Americans who are actually paying attention should have come from out of those proceedings reassured that the election was really quite almost unblemished. I think Attorney General Barr probably put it best when he said that any level of fraud did not rise to affecting the election results. But it's sure it's hard to see last Wednesday's results as any, as the system working, it was a horrible affair with members of Congress's lives apparently at risk of a police officer being killed with members of Congress cowering and fear for their lives from a mob. One thing we certainly need to do is to improve security procedures for Congress and to be alert for this sort of thing in the future. But the real problem, the underlying problem here is cultural and that is that our country really needs to draw back from the hyperpartisan ship in which people hate each other more than they love the country. That is not something that they're going to be any reforms that can accomplish. I just hope that those horrible events last Wednesday might instill in people a desire to bring the country together again. The last word is to you, has the Constitution worked in the wake of the historic events of January 6th? If you had to propose a single reform for strengthening one of the guardrails to protect the rule of law, what would it be? I think the electoral system, as Michael suggested, performed quite well and that the secretaries of state throughout the country, poll workers, voters all collaborated in a way that produced an election that I believe should be reasonably proud of. I think the point that I've heard a lot in analysis of the election, that is a way of making sense of all of the dire scenarios that were played out in advance, that is persuasive to me, is that had the election been much closer than it was, had it come down to a single state in electoral college, for example, the kinds of things that the president and some of the supporters tried to do might have had more traction and could have led to much more serious conflict And much more reasonable. doubt on, you know, both sides of the election contest about the outcome. And for that reason, I think that an important, it's not a single reform, but set of reforms is to follow through with the kinds of reforms to the systems of elections, to the way votes are cast, to the way they are counted, to the way people are permitted to register. All of those things are things that deserve attention, to ensure that the systems work even better than they do. But then to the bigger question, I don't know, this is the bigger question, but maybe it's the more immediate question about what to do about what happened on January 6th. And I think this is a different way of putting Michael's point that there's no reform to the Constitution, short of switching over to a parliamentary system that would prevent what happened if you have a person with the character of our current president, who is running in the election. And you have more fundamentally a political culture that is as sick and divided as ours. And it's a combination of the polarization, the disinformation, climate, the proliferation of conspiracy theories, the absence of overlapping consensus, which seems to be growing larger and larger, or the overlapping consensus vanishingly small, as the years go by, that is our real fundamental problem, the inability to see commonality in one another. And the fact that people have alternate realities, that they truly believe in evidence not withstanding, those are problems that are not going to be fixed by constitutional reform. But they are related to the kind of political leadership that we have and the way that people talk about politics in our society. And those are things that need rejuvenation. Thank you so much, Michael McConnell and Christina Rodriguez for modeling civil and illuminating constitutional discourse about the remarkable moment in constitutional history that we are all living and learning about together. Michael, Christina, thank you so much for joining. Thanks for having us. Thank you very much. Today's show was produced by Jackie McDermott, an engineer by Greg Sheckler. Research was provided by Matt Taylor and Lana Ulrich. Please rate, review, and subscribe to We The People on Apple Podcast and recommend the show to friends, colleagues, or anyone anywhere who's eager for constitutional enlightenment and who is not during these remarkable days. And always remember, the Financial Constitution Center is a private non-profit we rely on the generosity, engagement, commitment, passion, love of education of people across the country, who are inspired by our non-partisan mission of constitutional education. And debate. You can support the mission by becoming a member at ConstitutionCenter.org/membership or give a donation of any amount to support our work including this podcast at ConstitutionCenter.org/donate. On behalf of the National Constitution Center, I'm Jeffrey Rosen. [BLANK_AUDIO]