to welcome everybody excited to have you in class today today is a fantastic class all about the constitutional convention what brought us to the constitutional convention in 1787 and then what happened at the constitutional convention as always the national constitution center's classes love when you ask questions and you share your ideas in the chat so my name is curie sotner i'm going to be kind of your tour guide through this class today and really just chat monitor in a big way as well to send me those questions send me those ideas and we are so lucky because our tour leader is going to be tom donnelly who's one of our top scholars at the national constitution center so tom do you want to kick it off and say hello to all the students hello everyone so glad to have you here so tom we have a lot to go over today the two of us have drank lots of coffee and we're super excited about this content so students i hope you're with us this morning with the same amount of energy we'll start framing some questions for everybody so tom as we dive into this this is a pretty wide range of times so leading up to the constitutional convention in the summer of 1787 and then what happens at the convention but there's a lot that brings us to this point and so we start with a great question is why did the founding generation even need to write a constitution in the first place what was the need for this constitution what did we have before the constitution hint articles of confederation and then what did what were the lived experiences of the founding generation leading up to the constitutional convention that helped them understand what was the new world that they needed to build as a government and then everybody's favorite shea's rebellion and then we'll end with some standard big principles of the constitution that we all hear people talk about every single day how are they mixed into that constitution that we have so that's a lot to do in 30 minutes with questions from the students tom but i have full faith in you so you're ready to get started yeah let's do it okay big idea you lead us through it so the big idea here is that remember the founding generation the founders they were children of the enlightenment so when they were crafting their new constitution they looked to learn from history their own experiences the best political theory of their day and between the declaration of independence and the us constitution the american people were governed at the national level by the articles of confederation and at the state level by state constitutions they learn from both of these experiences and when they created their new constitution they were looking to create a new national government that was more powerful than the national government established by the articles of confederation but also one of limited power so there's a way in which they're looking to learn from old experiences lived experiences of their own but also try to adapt them to this new situation creating this new constitution the big question for us really i think is is you know what did the founding generation learn from that those intervening years from the declaration to the us constitution it's only a little over a decade it's only a little over a decade so the question is how do we get from the declaration of independence in 1776 the constitutional convention in 1787. and i love how you lay that out that you know great invention and great creation doesn't just come like a light bulb going off in the middle of the dark that they're they're reading they're researching and they're watching the experimentation going on across the colonies in the new states to say what is the best we can do and let's cherry pick it from time from other governments and from our own examples in the state so i love that idea that it's not just a blank slate that they're writing but they're coming with so many tools and they come to philadelphia they come to philadelphia in 1787 and this kind of really starts to begin to lay us out into what were we living under on the on the way to the constitutional convention what kind of system of government were we living under you talked about it a little bit but can you dive in a little bit deeper to that road to the convention the declaration to the article absolutely so we're gonna we're gonna go curry i think from the articles to state constitutions to shae's rebellion so we'll do a little bit about each but you know the big frame the big thing to remember here is you know even as we're ticking through all these lived experiences of the founding generation and we can through this looking backwards see a lot of the flaws in these systems of government we have to remember that for the founders this was an unbelievably exciting moment was one of the most exciting moments in the history of the world if you ask them it was an opportunity to create a new nation and through reflection choice reason the input of the american people figure out the best way to build a government at the national level and at the state levels so let's begin at the national level before we have the u.s constitution and the government we have today we have the articles of confederation so if there's one big thing we want to remember about the articles of confederation it's that it was a weak national government remember we just fought a revolution against a distant and powerful king in government in great britain we didn't want to create a new powerful distant government here in america at the national level and so we created this weak framework of government you know in terms of the institutions of this articles of confederation a few notable things one it was it was run by congress so it was run by a single house of congress so there's no u.s house no u.s senate it's a single congress there's also no separate executive branch at the national level no separate judicial branch at the national level and importantly the states themselves had equal power so every state received a single vote whether they were as big as virginia or pennsylvania the really big states or as small as rhode island or connecticut so each state received the same number of votes the next thing to note so that's the structure but the articles of confederation also just frankly didn't grant a lot of power to the national government so the national government didn't have many of the things we would think of today as things that national governments do it didn't have the power to tax it didn't have the states to raise troops uh for the for the national army um and it actually couldn't even get states to send money to the national government so there were just ways in which the national government itself was quite limited and importantly too though the there was a mechanism for making the articles of confederation better there was an amendment process but it required the approval of every state the amendment process required unanimity and curry we know how easy it is to choose meals with our families trying to do that in and of itself by unanimous vote pretty much impossible uh you can imagine how well that worked under the articles of confederation yeah i was going to say come on we can't even choose pizza toppings in my house with unanimous vote so 100 everybody has to agree to tax people that's just not going to happen a couple of things real quick that i wanted to clarify for our students we talked in the beginning that the founding generation were thinkers of the enlightenment period and i just wanted to make sure our students and sorry i should have asked this earlier what does that mean for our students so the founders were children of the enlightenment what does that mean that they were children of for everybody just so we understand that statement yeah i mean it's really it's growing out of the idea that um the founders believed in the power of reason sort of the power of learning from experience and really because of that we're drawing from a lot of the great political thinkers of what we would call the enlightenment period people like john locke thomas hobbes jean-jacques rousseau but more than anything it's a sensibility it's this idea that the world is out there we have access to our own powers of reason and we can reason together to make the world a better place and that kind of helps the students understand why they started with this very like very very like open group so it's one big group of people is the leadership for each state they all get equal votes they have to do things unanimously it's very like crowd source in the beginning but it doesn't work and so they they talked about taxes and commerce between the states and just to make sure all of our students know what is commerce between the states just so we're clear in in our definition yeah so this is just businesses going back and forth across state lines it's what we take for granted today that we're just one big economy but at this particular point in time and that the national government will play a role in making sure that economy works but at this point in time the national government's given very little power over that got it so it's almost like each state's its own country and there's they're trading and bartering and exchanging money or across state lines and we really don't see that today so it's a very different world that they're living under before the constitution so do you wanna do you wanna talk a little bit about the governments that they're living under how each state is like its own country absolutely i mean one way to think about this is it it's the the the uh articles of confederation the government it's creating is a lot more like today's united nations than the united states of america these are in many ways 13 independent countries kind of brought together under this umbrella um and so with the articles of confederation we have you know some serious problems where the national government can't tax so congress can't fund the national government pay its soldiers the government national government struggles to defend the american frontier and because they these these different states are more like different countries they put barriers of trade between one another and as a result the american economy struggles so that's sort of the framework at the national level and in many ways because the national government is so weak we are really you know america as a whole is governed by 13 separate governments so in 1776 the american colonies set up state constitutions and this again this was where for a lot of the founding generation this is where the action was they felt most connected to their states and what they're being called on to do in creating these state constitutions is think about what their ideal government will look like based on their own experience in the world and what they read about history and then to write it into a constitution so this in a way is a constitutional revolution itself it's our commitment to a written constitution and so you know as we're looking at this um uh you know they're they're they're drawing on certain principles that they all share as they're putting together these different constitutions there are different forms of government in different states but they're drawing on one big idea of what they would call a the theory of a mixed constitution so here they're learning from the british constitution that they lived under as colonists and one that they still thought for the most part worked very well and the idea here is that there are three key sources of political power in society and so if you think about it in the context of great britain there's the one which would be the monarchy the few which would be the aristocracy or in great britain the house of lords and then the many which would be the democracy or in their case the house of representatives and as we translated this into state constitutions we would see the one embodied in the states in what we would call usually a governor and we still do so there's sort of the governor is the embodiment of the one the few is the upper house of the state legislature often called the senate and then the many as is the lower house of the state legislature often referred to as an assembly and so the idea is that the assembly that lower house of the legislature is going to be the one that's most democratic it's closest to the people it has the greatest representatives and as such what you'll see in state constitution after state constitution during this period is that the state constitution makers place most of the power in the lower house of the state legislatures and the concern here is that you know in the end you're giving too much too much power to a single branch of government and as a result any branch of government receiving too much power is prone to abuse it's a crime to prone to making bad decisions it's prone to sometimes doing things that are good for a bunch of people and really bad for a small number of people and so what the founders learned from this period of time is that this this this move to give a lot of power to one single branch one part of the state legislature basically created bad policy it created bad policy that in many ways wound up harming the american economy and so as they're thinking about how to reconstruct constitutions moving forward they think we need to rebalance the power between the one the few and the many and so what we need to do is we need to give the governor of us of states more power we need to maybe figure out a way in which we can give the upper house legislature some power to check the lower house and furthermore we think that there's going to be great value in there being an independent judiciary to help enforce the limits that we place in the constitution and many of the broad protections of rights and so for the founding generation during this period many of them look to the massachusetts constitution of 1780 which is created a little bit further along it's a few years after the declaration of independence a few years after the first wave of state constitutions and massachusetts is already learning from the experience under the other state constitutions notably the massachusetts constitution is written largely by john adams and so john adams writes this very famous pamphlet during this period called it the thoughts on government where he's asking the big question how do we create a constitution that can find the right balance between the one the few and the many and so what they try to do with the massachusetts constitution is to still give a lot of power to the lower house legislature the assembly the most democratic branch the many but also place more checks in place and so in the massachusetts constitution we see really an important commitment to both the separation of powers and checks and balances with this work the massachusetts constitution creates a more powerful and independent governor that's elected directly by the people and that's given a veto over state legislation which means that the state legislature can pass new laws but the governor can say no and reject those laws so it's an important check put in place if the legislature is making bad policy but they also create a powerful and independent judiciary that sets up another check in there and so as the founders are putting together the us constitution in 1787 they're looking back at the massachusetts constitution as a model for creating separation of powers and checks and balance separation of powers being the dividing the powers of government between three branches of government and checks and balances being the idea that we're going to provide each branch of government with the power to check the others and a little bit of overlap and don't worry students we're going to dive into these separately with a little bit more but what a great example and again you can see why they look to the states to say what are you doing how are you learning what's working what's not so we can take those ideas so they almost went like it's like they went to a government smorgasbord before writing the constitution and picked all their favorite things from this awesome smorgasbord and put it on their plate there's always a food reference when i'm involved um so you're watching this happen in the states and it sounds so much dreamy you know all these little state democracies being tested and explored it's like the best chemistry lab you can imagine but it's actually not so dreamy things aren't going so well so it's a great case study but the reality is it is that most of the states are falling apart and that's what leads us to the story of shae's rebellion and it's just one example of how badly we're falling apart as a league of friendship so tom tell us the story about daniel shea the rebellion and how this kind of energizes that move to write a new national government yeah and thing to remember here is that what the states are doing in creating these new constitutions is new and hard and you would expect over time to get better at it you would expect to make mistakes and hopefully improve but what we're talking about here with shea's rebellion it's a decade after the declaration of independence so it's 1786. we see the national government's burden by a huge revolutionary war debt we see businesses failing we see trade suffering we see state governments that we don't think are responding very well in many ways to the problems we see a national government that basically has very little power to shape policies and ways to address the concerns of the american people and then we have shae's rebellion which is just an important symbol of the chaos of these times so what happens there well it's late 1786 and farmers in western massachusetts are suffering from high land taxes growing debt a feeling that the economy and then the political elites in their state aren't really serving them and so they decide to take matters into their own hands and they're led by daniel shays so who's he he's a 39 year old veteran of the american revolution he poured at lexington he bought at bunker hill and he leads a bunch of farmers in western massachusetts to basically try to march across the state and what they want to do is they want to end up in boston at the seat of government because they feel like the state government's not hearing their concerns they want to make sure that they do but as they're marching across massachusetts what are they doing they're seizing control of court buildings making sure that courts can't take possession of people's farms they're forcing debtors prisons to close and they even attempted to get the arsenal the state arsenal of springfield massachusetts and one of the problems here is that under the articles of confederation congress knows this is happening congress the national government knows it's happening but it doesn't actually have the power to raise army or a militia to challenge these farmers in massachusetts so who ends up putting down the rebellion it's a massachusetts militia and so for the founder founding generation people like james madison alexander hamilton especially george washington they're looking at jay's rebellion in horror remember this is massachusetts this is one of the states with a really good constitution a good structure of government and their concern is that this is a turn possibly towards mob rule and you know maybe it's not going to be a one-off maybe it's the first among many and what we have is a situation where many people have legitimate concerns about how their states are addressing their you know the many issues that they care about how the national government is and the national government doesn't really have the power to address those concerns and so we see a growth we see a movement towards wanting to create a new structure of government at the national level and so we see james madison and alexander hamilton trying to get a national convention together and then we see them finally getting congress to call a convention in philadelphia um for the so-called soul and express purpose of revising the articles of confederation and so this is what will become the constitutional convention which will meet in may 1787 and importantly madison and hamilton make sure that in many ways the most important american is there sitting in the room you could see him in the picture right there at the front standing and that's george washington awesome tom and i think phase rebellion is so important that it's not just a bunch of people that didn't want to pay their taxes you know it really is just showing all the flaws and all the issues and i love that you bring up the fact that it constitutes this people this was the best case scenario going on in this state and they're still having this the system fall apart so energizes people to come to philadelphia they all start to come to philadelphia in early may by may 25th they get a quorum and today in today's class we have a constitution 101 class and i can send everybody that as well at the end of the week wrap up so we'll go through in all the details what happened at the convention but today we're going to dive deep into the big principles that the constitution is structured around we hinted to them earlier checks and balances separation of power we've talked about him in weeks prior to the revolution we talked about these over and over again because these are major principles that took years to build in and are still being explored today how are we balancing these pieces and so much of this is a balancing game and a balancing act and seeing if we're in the right level so as we dive into those big principles and the key principles underlying the united states constitution we're going to tick through them one by one from popular sovereignty to republicanism and get clear definitions and see examples of how they work so tom we've got nine minutes we can do it it's perfect yes i think it'll give us just enough to wet everyone's appetite so let's start with the idea of popular sovereignty what do we mean by that well it's just a fancy way of saying that the u.s constitution establishes a government that's driven by us not a monarch not the elites not an aristocracy but by us the american people so where do we see this idea in the constitution just think about the opening words themselves of the preamble we the people so generally speaking when we refer to popular sovereignty we're talking about rule by the people the idea that the ultimate authority the ultimate legitimacy in the constitution is derived from the people themselves this is the idea that sure we have a president we have a congress we have the courts but they're not the boss we are and we get to call the shots in the end they work for us so at its core popular sovereignty it's the idea that people are the source of the government's authority and from that comes a really important responsibility and duty and that's to make the government better over time and so this is like in in a fancy way the founders said it say it it's it's the right to alter or abolish the government but it's the idea that whether it's tyranny or it's whether it's just some flaws in the system that we can make changes big and small whether it's something big like a revolution or creating a new constitution or something smaller like passing new laws or amending the constitution that in the end all of those ways are ways in which the american people the people themselves can shape the government in important ways and i i love that that you use the word duty and now i sound like um that movie that i'm totally liking on the name right now but uh the idea that it's our job part of popular sovereignty is that there's an energetic republic that people are a part of that and saying when they want to change the constitution add new laws and yeah we we can even go to abolish the government but maybe we just start small and add some laws and maybe the 28th amendment or things like that so do you want to kind of i know we're kicking through these really quickly do you want to dive into social contract for a second or jump to the next big idea well yeah i can say one quick thing about social contract theory then next big idea but popular sovereignty is right in the middle like one of the roots of it is social contract theory and so this is the idea that all power comes from the people and that government itself ends up being a contract between the people and their government so we give away some of our power to the government and then the government then because of that takes on certain duties and responsibilities to us as we explain the declaration of independence in many ways it comes down to safety and happiness and making sure that the government is securing above all all of our right our god-given rights to life liberty the pursuit of happiness and that we are all born free and equal awesome okay so dive into what is federalism yeah so federalism the next big idea here and so this is just a word that's used to describe the fact that we divvy some of our the powers of the national government some of the powers of the government to the national government and some of the powers to the state so it's that division of power between the national government and the states and as a result really the conflicts and debates we see between the states and the national government over time so where do we see this idea in the constitution itself well there's no federalism clause of the constitution really the word doesn't appear in there but once you begin to look at the constitution you can see that federalism is everywhere and so curry listed all of these provisions on the screen take a look at the while i'm talking and you could just see it's everything from article one so near the beginning of the of the original constitution all the way into amendments like the tenth amendment and the reconstruction amendments federalism is everywhere and the reason why is that for the founding generation it was such an important principle it was an important principle in a big and diverse nation one where people felt very connected to their states to their locality to their towns where they didn't travel as much that part of what we wanted to do in creating the new constitution was to ensure that we kept a lot of power and in the government levels closest to the people and this would allow in a nation as diverse as ours diverse even at the founding but all the way through up until today for different states different localities to pursue different parties that are different policies that really suited the needs and desires of their own people and so the the big image here famously comes from justice louis brandeis in 1932 who referred to the states as laboratories of democracy was just such it's such a wonderful statement a wonderful way to think about part of what states are doing is they're shaping policies in education in health in the environment etc etc that they serve as laboratories of democracy and so the idea here is that you might have different states pursue different policies on say taxes or wages or education or what have you and then over time by doing that one of the things that could happen is that we as a nation can learn from that experience that we can develop better policies policies that are really responsive to our concerns and can really help people across the country so one thing that you see the hope is that through federalism sometimes good ideas bubble up and so where do we see this in history the greatest example may be the idea of women's suffrage the women's right to vote that started out west it started in the states and it was state by state women's suffrage expanding further and further east over time including to big states like michigan new york all allowing women's suffrage even before we ratified the 19th amendment so it was a way for women's suffrage women's voting to be an experiment that happened on a state-by-state basis we saw that it worked well and then we made it the rule for the nation the flip side curry is that by creating a national government we can also give the national government power to tell the states no you can't do that no in america that is not the way we do it classic example there is civil rights legislation so we see in the states after the civil war in after reconstruction in the late 1800s jim crow beginning to emerge discrimination against african-americans and it's ultimately the national government both the supreme court and cases like brown versus board of education but congress and the president and the civil rights movement working together to pass landmark statutes like the civil rights act of 1964 and the voting rights act of 1965. so there's the national government checking the states and again it's that those checks and balances so so much of this is about how did they set up a system of federalism to spread out the power from the national government to the state governments to the local government but that spreading out of power is also what happens at the national level so i always think about this as like a layered cake and then a layer cake in this direction as well both vertical and horizontal that is what we would say is separation of powers so that's still about spreading out jobs and spreading out powers how is the national government broken up as well yeah that's that's a great way to think thinking of it correct because part of the fact the founders are concerned about where political power is going to go so yes one is federalism dividing it between the national government and the states and the other is that once we create a new national government it's separating it between three branches of government this is the idea of the separation of powers so just to give quick definitions the separation of powers is us taking political power and dividing it into three branches of government at the national level a legislative branch congress which makes the laws executive branch uh led by a president which enforces the laws and the judicial branch headed by a supreme court that interprets the laws and then at the same time what they do is they also set up what we call a system of checks and balances so here the idea is that the constitution is granting each branch of government the power to check the other branches so just to see this in action the easiest way is think about the law making process so congress again under the separation of powers is given the power to make the laws they pass the laws but then also once a law passes congress the president is given the veto power so the president gets the bill it ends up on the president's desk and the president can veto it i can say no i'm not going to sign this particular bill sends it back to congress so that's one check in place the other is that even if congress passes a law even if the president signs a law an individual citizen just one single american who claims that their rights are violated can go to court challenge that law say that it's unconstitutional and federal judges using the power of judicial review can decide whether that particular law passed by congress signed the pres by the president is constitutional or unconstitutional so there's that final check it's uh it's that congress having the power to pass the law the president whether or not to veto a law and the and and the courts deciding using judicial review whether a law is constitutional or unconstitutional finally if we the people disagree what can we do we can use the article 5 amendment process in the constitution to change the constitution itself because the founding generation didn't believe it had a monopoly on constitutional wisdom it also didn't believe that the government branches should should be our bosses in the end the ultimate say is ours perfect and we have a lot of questions so real quickly because i feel like nobody ever talks about this when you're talking about the idea and the principle of republicanism can you kind of explain that to our students because people tend to throw that around on the news and the media but we need a clean definition an understanding of what it means absolutely so i mean at some basic level republican government simply means government by the people to a certain extent so it's an idea of representative government we're not going to have a king or an elite in the end we're going to elect representatives who represent us so there's a there's a an aspect of it and in many ways the most important part of it is that structural point that it's it's providing the people elect representatives who represent us but in a deeper sense it's also for at least for the founders it was a certain there's a moral dimension to the american revolution that and and also to republicanism itself and and it really goes to the character of the sort of constitution they were trying to create and the sort of people that they wanted to be and they looked to the example of classical antiquity they looked at ancient greece they looked at ancient rome and they wanted the new government and american society as a whole to commit to what they call civic republican virtue so that's a mouthful but really what that means is that they wanted the people and their representatives to choose virtue over vice so good rather than bad reason over passion and also commit to the public good rather than the private self-interest so curry it's this combination of a structure of government that's giving the people themselves a say in how government's gonna work so there's a connection between popular sovereignty in that sense and this vision of republicanism it's making sure that structures in place to ensure that the people themselves have an input over time and how the government's going to create policy but a deeper sense it's a vision of what that government and the larger society is going to look like and that's a society and a government committed to virtue not vice reason not passion the public good not private self-interest and the last thing i'll note curry is because they were students of history they knew and they believed deeply that republics were fragile because they look to the example especially of ancient rome and they look to what they just know from history looking at country after country and what they learn and even look at themselves frankly is that people are flawed republics are fragile and that republics often collapse and so they really urge both the leaders in society but the american people as a whole to remain on guard and really on guard against abuses and corruption and government but also on guard within themselves to try to master their own passions their own self-interest and to try to serve the common good so and i think that's so important so they're saying a republican the people have voice and agency in their government at the same time you need to do the right thing as leaders in that government but they're not crazy enough to put in other systems to make sure this works and that's why we have all these principles working together to create the structure of government and to balance all the humans as well as the leadership as well as the needs of the people um from the state level to the national level all those pieces are really really important so thank you tom for walking us through all these pieces i'm going to go over a couple questions real quick one of our students really quickly just wanted us to circle back on the massachusetts state constitution so can you just walk us through the three big ideas around that so what did the judicial branch look like who was the support of the house and kind of how the massachusetts state constitution was laid out and then two more questions for you but students if you have to jump at this time we absolutely understand but we're just going to circle back on a few ideas because we know there's a lot in this one absolutely so the most important thing about the massachusetts constitution remember is it created a powerful and independent governor and so this was different than other state constitutions at the time the two big things there with the governor was that the governor was elected by the voters so governor was not selected by the state legislature as was the case in nearly every other state constitution and that the governor was given a veto power an independent veto power that the governor could exercise themselves over legislation again this was different than the other state constitution so it's creating this powerful and independent governor in many ways that was seen as the biggest check on basically legislation driven by passion that you would find um you know in the other state constitutions in the era so that's part of it another is if you look at the state legislature and john john adams cared a lot about this what it tried to do is create a distinct upper house so the senate itself they tried to create sort of property requirements and things like that would which would ensure that the upper house the massachusetts state senate would represent the sort of the wealthier and the more elite within massachusetts society so within the state legislature you would have a lower house the state assembly which would be have more representatives fewer property qualifications and would more closely both look like but also represent the views of the people so it'd be very close to the immediate preferences of the people whereas you would have an upper house which theoretically would represent more the property the wealthy the elite and so the hope would be between representing the interests of the many and the few in a closer sense that you would end up with better policy and then finally the judiciary it was independent of various controls um from either a governor or a state legislature and as a result it looked a lot more like what we would find in the u.s constitution itself where there are some protections um for for salary to make sure they can't easily be removed from office by the state legislature and the governor and so the idea being that you would have not just a governor that can veto legislation passed by the legislature but you would actually have an independent judiciary with some power to also exercise checks in two ways one maybe it's representing some of the rights that you would find in the massachusetts constitution but importantly would also police some of the limits that you might find on the power of the state legislature and the governor awesome and then just one more follow-up question that i absolutely loved so federalism that idea of you know my parfait um i was spreading out the power in layers it yurio asked is that costly and i never thought of it like that before all these separation these multiple branches you know the neapolitan of the national government the parfait of federalism getting all the food analogies in here that does put a lot of people into the system and that's a good thing but at the same time is federalism a more costly system it can be i mean if you're looking at so when you're constructing a constitution you can either construct it in a way that makes it very easy to get things done at a national level that affects everyone um and therefore politics can move fairly quickly you could have a single policy that's uniform across the country and if you have the right policy by all means that sort of efficiency and that sort of uniformity is of great value but the founding generation they did want governments that work both at the state and the national level but they were also i think you know they had a lot of intellectual humility in the sense that they were concerned a lot about too much power consolidating international government when you have a very diverse nation the diverse nation very tied closely to their individual states and so federalism makes it more difficult to advance say something like the civil rights act of 1964 the voting rights act of 1965 they have to jump through about a bazillion hoops in the national government to get it in place and shape policy in ways that today we would say are really attractive to advance you know the cause of equality etc and have that be the law of the nation at large uh but the founding generation thought that you know sometimes you're gonna set national policy and set it the wrong way or in a way that's not gonna really work for a lot of different people where they right or wrong isn't nearly as clear and as a result they'd rather err in the side of diversity both for the for the sake of not having the wrong policy set for the entire nation but also that brandeisian what lewis brand i said laboratories of democracy the idea that maybe we don't have the right answer yet and if we just watch what the states do we can come up with a better policy it allows us to be bold in certain states and to learn from that boldness because many people for instance when women got the right to vote out west people said this could be a disaster you know it's going to be bad for women it's going to be bad for these states and when you know we would look at that experience and say that's crazy and we learned from it and as a result we have the 19th amendment and women's suffrage throughout the nation so but yeah you're right all of these checks this division of power between the national government and the states with federalism and then separation of powers at both this frankly both the national and state level dividing power between the branches of government creates a less efficient system sometimes we're not able to act as quickly as many people would like but you know it's seen as a way of checking abuses yeah and it's that slowing down of the system helps is a part of the checks and balances that it takes us longer to make big change across the nation i love this laboratory of democracy and yes we have seen it do good things and do not so good things but the idea is so reflective back on looking at the state constitutions and pulling great ideas from the state constitutions so i love when you can see those patterns in history and those complementary understandings of this is what we've learned from let's figure out how do we use this system again tom thank you so much for going through each one in such great detail and helping us circle back and make sure we had clarity on the different pieces this was such a fun class such an interesting class and i hope all the students enjoyed it as well if you have any questions always feel free to email us and we will see you all next week in class so thank you very much great thanks everyone