Earlier this year, the National Constitution Center hosted an event in Miami, Florida, featuring a series of meaningful conversations about the Constitution with speakers of diverse perspectives. In this episode, we’re sharing one of those conversations with you. During an evening keynote program, five great constitutional experts were asked an important question: Should we break up with the founders? In other words, should we still look to the drafters of the Declaration and Constitution—from Thomas Jefferson to James Madison to George Washington—despite their moral and philosophical hypocrisies, such as ownership of enslaved people, or do they still have something to teach us? And was the original Constitution a flawed but meaningful attempt to realize the ideals of the Declaration of Independence, one made more perfect by Reconstruction—or is the original Constitution so fatally flawed by the original sin of slavery that it does not deserve respect? The five scholars you’ll hear discuss and debate this question are: Akhil Reed Amar of Yale Law School, Caroline Fredrickson of Georgetown Law, Kermit Roosevelt of Penn Law, Jamelle Bouie of The New York Times, and Charles Cooke of the National Review. Host Jeffrey Rosen moderates.
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Today’s episode was produced by Lana Ulrich, Bill Pollock, and Sam Desai. Research was provided by Sophia Gardell, Sam Desai, and Lana Ulrich.
Participants
Akhil Reed Amar, the Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science at Yale University, is the author of more than 100 law review articles and several books, most notably The Bill of Rights (1998), America’s Constitution (2005), America’s Unwritten Constitution (2012), and The Constitution Today (2016). His latest book is The Words That Made Us: America’s Constitutional Conversation, 1760-1840 (2021). He also hosts a weekly podcast, Amarica’s Constitution.
Caroline Fredrickson is a Distinguished Visiting Professor from Practice at Georgetown Law and a Senior Fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice. She served as the president of the American Constitution Society from 2009-2019. She is a member of the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court. Fredrickson is also the leader of the progressive team for the National Constitution Center’s Constitution Drafting Project and a senior congressional fellow at the Stennis Center. She is the author of La Cour Supreme, Le Pouvoir Supreme (2023), The Democracy Fix, Under the Bus, and The AOC Way: The Secrets of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Success.
Kermit Roosevelt III is David Berger Professor for the Administration of Justice at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School. He is a member of the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court and a member of the American Law Institute, and a board member of the Theodore Roosevelt Library and Museum Foundation. His most recent book is The Nation That Never Was: Reconstructing America’s Story (2022). He is the great-great-grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt.
Jamelle Bouie is a New York Times opinion columnist. Before that he was the chief political correspondent for Slate magazine. He is also a political analyst for CBS News, a staff writer at The Daily Beast, and has held fellowships at The American Prospect and The Nation magazine.
Charles C. W. Cooke is senior writer for National Review and the former editor of National Review Online. After studying modern history and politics at the University of Oxford, his work has mainly focused on Anglo-American history, British liberty, free speech, the Second Amendment, and American exceptionalism. He is the co-host of the Mad Dogs and Englishmen podcast and is a regular guest on HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher. He has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times.
Jeffrey Rosen is the president and CEO of the National Constitution Center, a nonpartisan nonprofit organization devoted to educating the public about the U.S. Constitution. Rosen is also professor of law at The George Washington University Law School and a contributing editor of The Atlantic.
Additional Resources
- Kermit Roosevelt III, The Nation That Never Was: Reconstructing America’s Story (2022)
- Akhil Reed Amar, The Words That Made Us: America’s Constitutional Conversation, 1760–1840 (2021)
- Caroline Fredrickson, “A Constitution of Our Own Making,” Washington Monthly (2021)
- Jamelle Bouie, “We Had to Force the Constitution to Accommodate Democracy, and It Shows” New York Times (Oct. 2022)
- Charles C. W. Cooke, National Review, “America’s Founding Changed Human History Forever” (July 4, 2016)
TRANSCRIPT
This transcript may not be in its final form, accuracy may vary, and it may be updated or revised in the future.
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