Transcript for:
Constitutional Convention Overview

Okay, it worked finally. Jeez, that was that was painful. It lasted like 90 seconds. I remember back in the day when I was first on the internet, it took like three minutes just to log on. It would it would make these horrible sounds when it was logging on to go. You're like, "What the hell is happening? Why is it so loud? [Music] Whoa. I'm pretty sure those sounds some of them were just made up. Like they just had something on there so that it would make you feel like it was doing something. All right. So when last we left off um the rich insisted on constitutional convention and so Congress agrees to allow for a constitutional convention. So they're going to meet in Philadelphia. It's 1787 and they're going to amend the Articles of Confederation. That's what they've been told to do. They're supposed to make the Articles of Confederation a better Constitution. When they get together, the first thing they do is they elect George Washington to become the president of the convention. Not the president of the United States of America. That will happen. It hasn't happened yet. This is the president of the convention. In other words, he's the chair. He has a gavvel in his hand and he calls the convention into session and tells it when they need to take a lunch break and he calls for votes. He's that guy. So that happens first thing before we go on. There's a question I have to ask. So George Washington wasn't known for his mental abilities. He wasn't a particularly smart guy. He wasn't even a good military strategist. like he was a great leader because he was calm. He was that he was the kind of guy when everything's falling apart and bombs are going off all around you and people are dying. He's just calm. He's just placid. And in combat, that's amazing because it it calms the soldiers down and it helps the soldiers regulate and focus because think about what combat is. There's some jackass trying to kill you. And by the way, you're also a jackass trying to kill the jackass trying to kill you. That that's tough. A normal human being, the average everyday person, like as in probably 85% of the human population, is not going to have a good time doing that. And they're not going to probably come out on the other side wholly intact. Like I think of all my friends who have had, you know, mo combat experience. None of them are okay. I love them dearly, but they're all they're all injured mentally. And so, some of them really badly, like Bobby. Bobby Bobby was the kind of guy that when we would go to kids' birthday party, I would hover near him because if a balloon went off, he was going to end up on the ground and I would need to go over and, you know, just hold him until he could regain his his senses. He was a Marine. Like, we're not talking. He was like, you know, some guy in the back pushing supplies around and he got a little traumatized. This was a guy that was frontline combat marine and for him to be in that bad a shape means he went through a little bit of hell. Anyway, Washington was great for that. But in terms of making decisions, in terms of strategy, in terms of thinking through problems, no, that wasn't his thing. So why are they making him the president of the constitutional convention because the purpose was to actually amend the articles, not to fight all the time. And you need a mediator who's going to be calm maybe. Yeah, that's a that's a good point, right? Like he's he he'll he'll provide a little bit of glue because you're going to end up with factions. We ended up with basically four factions at the convention and so having that guy there definitely helps. That's one reason. There was a more important reason. Well, that was the Continental Congress. So, I've always thought this was weird. We had Continental Congress and then Constitutional Convention. They're both con. And so nobody will ever judge you for mixing them up because they're so similar. You're like, "Dude, couldn't you come up with a different name?" I think they did it on purpose, right? They were trying to they wanted to say like this is kind of a continuation of that. But it but in the process it I think it's confusing. I make the mistake just from you know misspeaking because it's just constitutional convention, Continental Congress. Also, here's a question. If con is the opposite of pro, does that mean Congress is the opposite of progress? But then here's another question that I feel is even more important. Does that mean constitution is the opposite of prostitution? Th these are the kinds of things that make me wonder what was going on in Latin that you could end up with the bad thing leading to a constitution and the good thing led to prostitution. You know, I don't know. I feel like I can actually answer that if you want. Oh my god. Yes. Okay. So, um pro uh is four or two, right? uh and uh I believe stitu means to like it can mean like a body or consisting of. So prostitution is you know using you're giving your body to oh my god that's amazing and con as a a prefix originally meant together. So to or so to constitute is to create a body. Amazing. Thank you. Yeah, no problem. Awesome. Yeah. Okay. So, uh, there's another reason for for Washington. Here's here's a question. Is the convention constitutional convention possibly going to get some criticism? Yes. What will happen when you criticize it if Washington is the president? It'll lack legitimacy. It might not lack legitimacy. It'll it'll is Washington a a beloved person or a ne are people neutral towards him? Like what what are people's feelings towards George? I mean, he became our first president for a reason, right? Ida, he's like well respected. Like, people went back to serve uh in the war because they wanted to serve under George Washington and they wanted to be able to Yeah, people love this guy. He that come under fire really attracted people to him. He's also tall. And as we've already con talked about, height does matter in our species. Um, so between being a tall man, he he wasn't a talkative person, but but he was a calm person. He made a great leader. He was a good he was a good the right guy for the right moment, right? and he compensated for his lack of smarts by he didn't refuse to be president, but we'll get to what he refused to do in a sec. I don't want to get there yet, but he did refuse to do something. Well, I shouldn't say he refused. He said, "I'm I'm not ready to make that step. Let's come back and talk about it later." Actually, you know what? No, I should talk about it because it happened six years earlier. So in 1781, the army approached him when it was clear that the the British were in the process of thinking about surrendering and the army said, "We're ready to make you our next king or our first king. I don't know how to think of it because he'd really be the next king." Because George III was our king, but then he'll be the first king of the United States. And Washington said, "Ben Franklin is writing a constitution. Let's see how that turns out. If it works, then I don't want to be king. If it doesn't work, let's come back in a few years and we'll re we'll rethink this and I'll consider becoming king." So, what happens if I criticize the convention and he's the president of the convention? You're going against him. What was that? That you're going against him? Yeah. It makes me look bad because here's this wildly popular guy and he's the president of convention and I'm criticizing the outcome. It's a way of criticizing him even though he may have had nothing to do with the Constitution. In other words, they've elected him to be president of the Constitutional Convention as a shield. They're trying to reduce the amount of criticism they get. It's a brilliant move. Now, the second thing they do is throw out the Articles of Confederation. What were they sent there to do? Amend it. Amend the Articles of Confederation. They were supposed to fix it. So if I'm throwing the Articles of Confederation out, then I am not fixing it. Yeah, I'm not fixing it. So right from the bat, the Constitutional Convention is doing what it's not supposed to do. It has no authority to do this. So now if they throw the articles out, they need a constitution to replace it. It just so happened there was a guy named James Madison. He was 5 foot one and he stands up. Nobody could tell. It looked like he was still sitting. And he holds up a document in his hand. And he goes, "Y'all are not going to believe this. It just so happens I've written the Constitution and crazy me, I happen to bring it today. You're not going to believe this. a copy for everyone and he starts passing out his constitution to the assembly. In other words, in politics, there are no coincidences. Nobody happens to accidentally do something in politics. I mean, don't get me wrong, people make mistakes for sure, but something like this, there's no way that Madison just happened to bring a constitution with him. This whole thing was staged. It was contrived. This was the plan from the beginning. By the way, what is that called? When you're authorized to do something, when you're authorized to amend a constitution and then you throw the constitution out and attempt to replace it with a brand new constitution, [Music] starts with a C. It's a French word. It's a coup. This is a coup d'eta. The guys at the constitutional convention are without authorization overthrowing the existing constitution. Now don't get me wrong, it was an awful constitution. It needed something to happen, something radical. I But it is worth pointing out that what they're doing is clearly illegal at this point. They have they have crossed over into coup d'eta. And now how bad was this constitution? The convention lasted for three months and was a couple of blocks away from where Congress met. This government that Benjamin Franklin designed was so dysfunctional, so inept, so incompetent that a coup d'eta, it accidentally authorized was taking place two blocks away and there were members of Congress at the coup. So they knew what was going on and they were powerless to stop it. Sometimes you just need to do something radical. When when your government is that inept, that powerless, it's hard to be mad at anybody for the coup d'eta. But it is still a coup d'eta. So they're starting to go through the this constitution that that James Madison has written. And as they're going through it, they're in love. They're like, "Yeah, that's brilliant. This is a good idea. This works." And they're just checking off line after line going, "All right, all right." And then they hit a snag. So, for the record, they'll hit three. There will be three moments at the Constitutional Convention where everything grown grown to a halt. Like, it looked bad and you know, they got through it. What's the first of the three snags? a point where the factions sort of fell apart and nobody could agree what to do next. It has to do with article one. So in other words, they hadn't even gotten out of article one yet. So in in other words, the first couple of weeks they're agreeing to everything, but they're still going slowly. It's not it's not like they're going to knock this constitution out in a in a four week period. There's it's still going to take them a month, a month and a half, two months. Some states have a bill of rights. So that's actually the third snag. So hold on to that. We'll come back to that. What's the first one? What were we super obsessed with? Like to the point where OCD, like mental illness level obsessed starts with an R. Re representation. Representation. Like we lost our minds over this. We wanted representation in parliament. When the English wouldn't give it to us, we're like, "That's it. We're fighting." And then we end up militarily being defeated after six years. We get lucky. The British surrender anyway because they realize they can solve a problem by us breaking away. Great. So, what's the issue with representation at this first issue in the constitutional convention? how they're going to divvy out representation among the states so it's equal power. Okay, that's it. Well, not so it's equal but so that it so that everybody will agree. So in the constitution James Madison created he made a biccameal congress. Biccameal means there's two houses. Unicameal means there's one. So in the United States there are 49 states with bicamal legislatures and then there's the United States Congress which is biccamearal and then there's Nebraska which has a unicameal legislature. So he created one, a House of Representatives and a Senate. Shocking. Now, here's what he did. The The way you got representation in both the House and the Senate was by population. So, in other words, in the House, the big states were rep had more representation than the small states. In the Senate, the big states had more representation than the small states. So when they got to that section of the constitution, the small states lost their minds. They're like, "This isn't going to work." First of all, Rhode Island didn't even go to the constitutional convention. They declared the thing to be unconstitutional in a coup d'eta and they said they wanted nothing to do with it. So there's only 12 states at the constitutional convention. Of the 12 states there, four were big, eight were small. There really weren't medium states at the time. The four big states were Massachusetts, and I mean by population, not necessarily by land, although in the case of Virginia, it was both. They're Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. If you put those four states together, that was the majority of the population of the 13 states. In other words, if those four states voted for something in the House and then turned around and voted for something in the Senate, they would win. So the small states went, there's a real possibility of majority tyranny. If you guys do this, we can't allow this. So then one of the representatives from the small states, his name was Roger Sherman. He was from Connecticut. He got up and he said, "I have an idea. Why don't we do this? Why don't we have the House of Representatives be by population, but then the Senate will be two senators per state? They vote against it. They boo him. They call him a crazy radical and make him leave the stage. Then at that point, a representative from New Jersey gets up and that person says, "We should do one a unicameal government, one house. We'll call it the Senate, which is right the name of the Roman legislature. And then we'll have one representative, one senator per state. So what would be the size of the United States Congress today if we had done the New Jersey plan? It's not a trick question. one senator per state and it's a unicame 50. The entire United States Congress would be 50 senators. That's it. Because that's all they wanted was one senator per state and there was only a Senate at that point. The big states go, "No way." So they vote against it and so they're in a deadlock and they're stuck shouting at each other and instead of it taking a few hours to resolve like every issue that had come up up up until that moment they're going into days. The days turn into weeks they end up shouting at each other for two weeks. At that point, Alexander Hamilton says, "You know what, guys? Since we're deadlocked here anyway, I would like to make a suggestion. I It turns out I too have written a Constitution." So, he's he's the rep he's one of the representatives from New York and and he was George Washington's brain during the war. So, Washington knew he wasn't smart and One one way you can compensate for that when you're a good leader is you pick a smart person or maybe some smart people to surround you. You don't pick sick of fans who just walk around telling you yes all the time. You you pick somebody who's going to tell you the truth so that you cannot make stupid decisions all the time. So that's what Washington did. He picked Alexander Hamilton. Now, people make a big deal about how h smart Hamilton was. He was definitely not a super genius. Like, I don't want anybody getting carried away here, but compared to the average colonist, he was definitely a smart guy. Like, I don't I don't think he would have scored genius. I don't if he had taken an IQ test, but he was definitely in the gifted or talented range. And as a result, Washington made some decent strategic choices during the revolution because Alexander Hamilton helped him make those choices. So Hamilton gets up and he says, "It turns out I've written my own constitution and I would like to present it in front of this convention." And of course they they're not going to say no to George Washington's brain, right? like that's that's not an option. So he gets up and he reads his constitution to the convention and makes comments as he's going. It takes four hours for him to read the constitution. You don't need to know the details of the constitution and like we don't need to go into detail but I will give you some details to give you an idea of what he proposed. He said there will be a senate. So, it's similar to the New Jersey plan, but I I don't I I don't remember actually how many senators per state. I don't I know I don't think it was one. I think it might have been two. Anyway, um he said the senators will be chosen by the state legislatures. So it's not that we will vote for our senators. We will vote for the state legislators and then the state state legislators will elect the senators that go represent us in the United States Senate. So it'll be indirect representation and they will serve for life. In addition, he made a president and the president would be elected by the United States Senate and the president would serve for life. What was Hamilton proposing? I understand this isn't in the musical. So like it's we've reached your your knowledge dictatorship autocrossy monarchy dict right a dictator is just a one-year a one-year stick this is a lifetime thing he's proposing a monarchy well effectively a monarchy it could be a republic but it'll be a republic where you end up with lifelong members let's be honestly will probably evolve into a monarch even if it doesn't start off that way. So that's what he's proposing. When he's done with his 4hour speech, explaining every detail, reading reading his constitution out loud, he he turns to the convention, he says, "Look, I know that there is plenty of you in this room who will not like what I've proposed. So here's what I want you to do. As soon as I leave the room, and I am about to leave, I want you to vote on it, but I don't want you to have a conversation about it. I don't want you to debate it. And I don't want you to amend it. I want you to vote on my constitution exactly as it is right now. And I won't be here, so I won't know how you voted. So vote your conscience. And I'm leaving not just because I don't want to be here when you vote, but because I'm done watching you guys bicker. I'm not coming back. I'm quitting the convention. You guys shout at each other all you want. I don't see any point in this. I'm out of here. He leaves. They vote no. And that's why Hamilton's Constitution was never adopted by the United States. The very next day, they revisit Roger Sherman's Connecticut compromise with the one where you create a Senate that's two senators per state and a house that's based on population and they vote yes. And that's why it's familiar and that's why you're like, "Oh my god, that's what we did." Why did they go back and vote yes after they had called Roger Sherman a radical and a crazy and said they wanted nothing to do with his plan because they had just seen a worse plan in Hamilton's plan. That that's for sure, Cynthia. No, that's what I was going to say. Okay, now here's the thing. the the Hamilton is proposing what they thought was a worse plan. But for them to actually care what Hamilton proposed meant that there was the possibility that's what they would end up with. Yet they voted no on it in the constitutional convention. So why would they take it seriously? Okay, you you're missing a piece of information that will help you. Remember when Congress disbanded the army because they didn't have any money to pay them and then they gave them the bonds and the army walked off with their musketss in a bond and then they sold the bond to the banks. Well, when they disbanded the army, we we hadn't signed the peace treaty with England yet. That's two years out. But we don't know if it's going to be two years or two months or 20 years. And we don't know if the English won't just change their mind and unsurrender and come back and fight us. But we've just gotten rid of our army. Alexander Hamilton lost his mind. He was like, "Dude, you can't get rid of the army until the British surrender. They've told us they're going to surrender, but we don't know if they really are." And so what he did was he went to every single officer that he could find, not every single officer, but every single officer in his his his friends group and he told them that they would they were going to have to go to every military unit across the United States and write down the name, rank, and home address of every single officer in the United States Army. And then that way if we did need to bring the army back, what we could do is send somebody to every officer's home and then the officer could then call up the non-commissioned officers that lived in his area because units were by village. They were by region. So you'd call up all the non-commissioned officers and then the non-commissioned officers could go find the privates. They could go find the enlisted men and that's how you'd bring the army back. Well, when Hamilton made this list, he didn't run over and hand it over to Congress. He kept it for himself. He's literally the only person in the country who can call the army back because he's the only guy in the country that had the brains to realize you can't just disband the army. You need to know who was in it. And so when he gets up in the constitutional convention, he's actually a really scary guy. Because remember, what do you need to be a state? You need a source of revenue, legitimacy, and the ability to inflict violence. He's the only guy who can do number three. I mean, technically the 13 governors can because they have access to militias, but he has access to all the militias, right? They if you're the governor of New York, you have access to the New York militia. He has access to that and Massachusetts and Virginia and Pennsylvania and all the other ones too. So he gets up and he does his his speech. It was a threat. It was not a hollow threat either because remember what Washington said he didn't want to do. He said, "I'll consider being the king if the Articles of Confederation fail under Hamilton's monarchy. Who will be our first king?" It's not a trick question. Washington. It'll be Washington. Who will be the second king, by the way? Hamilton. Yes, of course it's Hamilton. And everybody in the room knows this. This is how this is going to go down because Washington will pick Hamilton to be his successor. He will hand the baton off to him. So the men in the room know a that Washington is willing to do it. They know that Hamilton wants to do it. They know that Hamilton is in monarchist. They know that the army is in favor of having a king. They even proposed it. And Washington said no. Well, unless the Articles of Confederation have failed. Guess what failed? Why aren't they constitutional convention? The Articles have failed. So this is the trigger that triggers Washington to become our king. That's why they take him seriously. He has access to the army. He's Washington's brain. And Washington said he would consider being king if the articles failed. Well, the articles have failed. So here's what they know. Hamilton is leaving the convention to go get the army. It's going to take weeks, if not months, to get the army together. But they don't know how long it's going to take. Is it going to take him three months, four months, 6 months? But they have a limited amount of time now because the clock is now ticking. Because remember, he tells them, you have to vote on this without amending it. So if there's something you don't like, I don't care. I I don't care. Vote no. Why is he telling them that? Because he's telling them, "I'm going to go get the army without telling them. He doesn't say a word, right? He just says,"Here's my constitution. Like it or not, vote yes or no. I don't care." And then he leaves. He wants them to know if it gets to the point where there's going to be a coup d'eta, a military coup d'eta, because they're doing a soft coup. He wants to do a hard coup. If they're doing the hard coup d'eta with the military, that's the constitution they're going to end up with. Because go up until that moment with Hamilton, they thought, well, it's okay if we fail in making at Madison's Constitution work. We'll just keep doing the Articles of Confederation. What he just told them was without saying it because he's a savvy politician, what he gave them the understanding was, if you don't make Madison's Constitution work, I'm going to violently overthrow the Articles of Confederation and replace it with this monarchy. So now, from this point on, they're going to rush every issue. So, one of the things that people will say is the Constitution is brilliant because it's vague and that vagueness allows for flexibility. Yeah, that could be true, but it wasn't on purpose. It was an affect of Hamilton lighting a fire underneath everybody in that room and telling them, "Hey, you have a limited amount of time before I create a monarchy." So, they ended up doing a rush job. So, I'll give you an example of what I'm talking about. So when they get to the part where they're in article two where they're talking about how to elect the president, they made a mistake and what they said was you need to win a majority of electoral college delegates to be president. Not the person who gets first place, you had to get more than 50%. A majority is more than 50%. Well, if they had just done a mock election in the in this in the convention and just pretended they were voters and had seven people run for office, they would have realized that wouldn't work. But they didn't do the mock election because they were rushing and they and their intuition told them it would work. And one thing that's amazing is how frequently your intuition will be wrong. And so they put it into the constitution and we had to fix it later. In fact, it it even got somebody killed in the process. It was that bad of a constitutional error. Ironically, the person that gets killed is Alexander Hamilton. I guess sometimes rushing people when they're designing a constitution can be deadly for the person who did the rushing. Either that or we're minor characters in a novel being written by a really crazy person who has a really sadistic sense of humor and and has their characters in the novel kill them end up getting themselves killed by making strange decisions. In any case, let me give you another example. They decide, okay, we should have a vice president. Everybody goes, okay, what's the purpose of the vice president? And somebody says, 'You know what? Replace the president in case of death or illness. Perfect. Great. What else does a vice president do? Somebody went, "Oo, if we're going to have two senators per state, we'll end up with an even number of people in the Senate, maybe the vice president can break ties in the Senate." They go, "Oh, great. Let's do it." And then they start trying to come up with other powers for this for the vice president. And they they realize, "Oh my god, we're getting bogged down in the details. We don't have time for this." So they went, "You know what? We'll just we won't write anything else. We're going to leave it like that. We'll just figure it out once the Constitution's up and running." They get to the part where they want to talk about having a cabinet for the president. So they go, "Should we have a cabinet?" Everybody goes, "Yeah, definitely. Let's do it." Then they start going, "Should we have a minister of the interior, you know, uh, a secretary of state?" And they're, as they're going through them, somebody goes, "Do do we have time for this?" And besides, if we put it in the Constitution, then we're going to have to do constitutional amendments to add cabinet members. We're going to have to do constitutional amendments to modify the cabinet members. Maybe we should just not do this. And they went, "You're right." And they dumped it. They dumped it so hard, they didn't even use the word cabinet in the Constitution. So even though they were clear at the convention they wanted the president to have a cabinet, what they wrote instead was Congress and the president shall have the authority to create institutions that are the institutions that are necessary for running the executive branch of government instead of saying a cabinet. By the way, just a warning, be careful when you look stuff up online. This happened like 10 years ago, but I I needed access. I want I couldn't remember something from the constitution related to this by the way. So I quickly looked it up and I somebody had a constitution on their website and I and I noticed it said cabinet in this constitution and I'm like what the hell? I've read the constitution. It doesn't say cabinet in it. So I'm starting to panic because I'm thinking I must have missed it. I I must have misread it. And then so I found another website that had a had a constitution on it. It's probably the, you know, the congress.gov const constitution and it doesn't have the word cabinet in it. Whoever uploaded the constitution inserted the word cabinet so that you could do a search and find the section that had cabinet that that was about the cabinet. But that's not what the constitution says. So, always be careful when you look stuff up just because somebody may have fiddled with a document that you would have thought shouldn't be fiddled with. Anyway, um that's what we do. We have a rush job, but even though we're doing a rush job now, we still have two more snags we run into. What's the second slavery? The right to own slaves. So, you're not wrong in that the second snag has something to do with slavery, but it has nothing to do with whether or not we have the right to own slaves. not citizenship. No, that's covered by the 14th amendment, even though the president is currently trying to destroy the 14th amendment. Remember the do's decision? Ah, boom. Zab. All right. So, Zab got it. The answer is how to count slaves for purposes of representation in the House of Representatives. Was it like uh three4s of every person? Close. Not three4s. three three three-fifths. So slaves are going to count as 60% of a person for purposes of representation. Before we go on, how many of the 13 states had slavery in 1787? Thank you guys. All of them. Cynthia got it. 13 out of 13. So in other words, Massachusetts, New York, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Rhode Island, they all had slavery. In other words, the North South split hadn't quite fully manifested yet. It was definitely there. We had different accents, by the way, different religions. The south was overwhelmingly Anglican. The north was just a hodgepodge, right? There were Quakers and Puritans and pilgrims and were but the south was very heavily Anglican. We we had a a different economy. The south did the big expensive crops like tobacco and rice and indigo and cotton. So who wanted the I don't know who they is. Arlene. Yes. The snag was how are we going to represent? It's a blue dye. So when we were making blue jeans, we I believe we were originally using indigo. I don't think we use it anymore. It comes from a tree. It comes from the sap of a tree. So uh the second snag that bogs down the convention is how are we going to count the slaves? The north says zero. The south says how can you be like that? There are people too. Why is the north proposing zero if they have slavery? I thought it was the south. No, the south did not propose zero. They wanted to count every slave as a human being. because it gives them more representatives if you count them fully. That's why the south wants them as a full human being. But why is a full human being? Well, they definitely nobody saw them as a full human being. Yeah. But but the north is saying we want zero representation for the slaves. Okay. Ida got it. the even though the North has slavery, it's a tiny percentage of their population. So in Massachusetts, the maybe 2% of the state was made up of slaves. In South Carolina, 60% of the state was slaves. Do you want me to say that again? 60% of the population of South Carolina in 1787 was slaves. slaver slavery was such a giant portion of the population of the south that actually when they did when the British did the census in 1770 so right before the revolution broke out the third largest religion in the United States was Islam it actually went I don't remember if it was Methodist or Baptist first and then whichever one wasn't first was second and then third was Islam and then fourth was the Anglican church because a huge portion definitely not all but a huge percentage of the slaves that were being brought over especially the slaves that were being brought over from West and East Africa were were Muslims. So part of the project that the United States had was the demuslimification of the slave population and converting them over to Christianity. So that's why sometimes you'll hear a black person who's a Muslim in the United States say, "I'm a revert." They're saying revert because they've converted back to the original religion. So that that's why they're not calling themselves a convert. Isn't that wild that Islam at one point was the third largest religion in the United States? Because it's definitely not now. It's about 1.2% of the total population. So the North doesn't want to count the slaves at all. The South wants to count them as a full person. They compromise and they do the 60% the three-fifths rule. But here's the thing. Think this out. So this is this is what I'm talking about. They were because they were doing a rush job. They didn't think these things out. Also, there was a bunch of emotions involved which stops people from thinking. By the way, I'm oversimplifying that because without emotions, we can't make decisions. So, you have to have emotions. I know that we we're we we are a society that says you should be logical and separate out from emotions. The reality is that doesn't work. You need the emotions and the logic combined together if you want to be a functioning human being. Having said that, because people have [ __ ] information, logic doesn't really do you much good if the information you're bringing into the situation is all wrong. Anyway, here's what happens. Think, let's use the population of 1860. So, in 1860, the population in the south that was slave was about three and a half million. The free population was about 5.5 million. Well, if you're doing the three-fifths compromise, uh, three and a half million is 2.1 million. By the way, I did that in my head, so it's probably right, but it might be wrong. Um, right? Because 5 time 3 5 * 6 is 3 and then uh 6 * 3 is 18. 3 plus 18 is 21. Move the decimal point over 2.1. That's how I did. So 2.1 plus 5.5 is 7.6. So for purposes of representation in the house, the 9 million people living in the south counted as 7.6 million people. In the north, there were 20 million people. So the ratio then of Yankees to Southerners in the house was about 5-2. So in other words, I don't know I don't know what the house was made up of at the time because right the number changed until we got to 435. Then we locked in 435. So I don't know what the original house size number was or the house size number was in 1860. It might have already been 435, but whatever it was, let's make our life easy and make the math easy. Let's say the number was 276. And I picked that number 276 cuz 20 million plus 7.6 million. So basically every 100,000 people gets a representative. So 27 276 representatives. Well, 76 are from the south and 200 are from the north. Got it? All tw all 76 from the south are white people. There's no black people there. I don't want you getting confused and thinking the slaves have representation. They don't have any representation. Let's say a bill comes up that hates the South. Like it will do awful things to the South. What are the odds that the South with 76 out of 276 representatives will be able to successfully block that bill? Like give me a percentage of how often it'll happen. Like will it happen 40% of the time, 30% of the time, 27% of the time? Like what's the percentage? 0% of the time. There is no possibility in which 76 people out of a body of 276 are going to have the numbers to block a bill from going through. Like think about it. Literally half the Yankees could be sick and not show up and they'd still have a 100 votes to the 76. There's no way for the South to successfully block that bill. It is going to pass. Okay. Now let's say we hadn't done the three-fifths compromise. So that for purposes of representation in the house in 1860 there were 9 million southerners. So let's say that the house was 290 million people or sorry 290 people just so that I can I can keep it like 90 southerners and 200 Yankees. How often will the South successfully block a bill in that scenario where there's 90 Southerners and 200 Yankees? What's percent again? Still zero. There's no possibility. Again, half the Yankees could stay home and not even cast a vote and they'd still beat the South 100 to 90. In other words, the three-fifth compromise had no mathematical benefit to the Yankees. It was purely a foolish waste of time for a symbolic gesture that built into our constitution that black people are 60% of a human being. Now, we amended the constitution and got rid of the three-fifth compromise, but when we do that, we just put a line through it. So, for all eternity, our constitution will still say it. It just has a line through it. And here's the crazy thing. Shaming black people isn't even the real legacy of the three-fifths compromise. The real legacy is the other part that people rarely talk about. This three-fifth compromise did two things. One, it made it so that black people were 60% of a human being. And it ended something in 1808. Importations of slaves. Say now I've got it again. You're on a roll. All right. So, in 1808, there will be no more importation of slaves to the United States. when Virginia and Maryland. Well, let me let me start over. Let me start over. Okay. So, we when we get our independence, shortly afterwards, two of the 13 states abolished slavery. Now, I know what you're thinking. Professor, you just got through telling us 13 of the 13 states still had slavery at the Constitutional Convention. So, how could two of them have abolished it? They phased it out. So there were still slaves in the state. They were just slowly phasing the slavery away. What were the first two states in in United States history to attempt to get rid of slavery? New York. New York's a great guess, right? Is he Yankee State? No, not Pennsylvania. Nope, not Pennsylvania. By the way, Quakers own Connecticut. What? Connecticut. Nope, not Connecticut. Quakers owning slaves really bugs me. Like I feel like, oh, that's bad. So, okay. Vermont wasn't yet a state. It hadn't joined the United States yet. Um, what happened was during the revolution, Vermont declared its independence, but it it wasn't an it wasn't a colony. So, it declared its independence from effectively New York. New York and uh New Hampshire both claimed it, but in in in reality, New York probably owned it. It declared its independence. It fought alongside of us. And then after the revolution was over, it was its own separate republic. And Vermont actually was an independent republic for 16 years, which is longer than Texas was an independent republic. We were only an independent republic for nine years. I know it's painful, but uh when Vermont finally did join the United States as the 14th state, it was the first state in the Union to join that never had slavery. So Vermont was a a a slave-free state, but it wasn't the first state to abolish it because it never had it. I think I saw Massachusetts. It's wrong. It's wrong, too. Pennsylvania is wrong. So, you've named New Jersey. Delaware. No, New Jersey is wrong. You've named a bunch of Yankee states. Virginia. Ah, Virginia. Virginia is the first state in the United States to attempt to abolish slavery. There were two authors for the bill. One of the authors was Thomas Jefferson. The other author was James Madison. Those two men co-authored a bill abolishing slavery. Here's how it worked. Every year after the bill was ratified, you would lo 4% of the slave population would be purchased by the Commonwealth of Virginia and then freed. So the owners would get financial compensation because the slaves would be bought, but then they would be freed. Why did they do 4% and not 100%? Ida, I would think to one have like give the people who relied on slaves for business and stuff more time to adjust to the change and to not get as much complaint immediately so that like it's not I don't know not everyone's like so upset. because they have that time to adjust. That's absolutely a huge piece of it. Um it was probably like 75% of the the justification for what they were doing, but it wasn't Madison and Jefferson's top priority. They they were using that as their excuse. They had another priority. What were they worried about if you freed the slaves all at once? Besides hurting the plantation owners, what would happen to the slaves when you freed them all at once? They could revolt. No rebellion. No. No. Rebellion or uprising was a problem. If you had slavery, if you freed them, they'd be grateful. They'd be like um succeeding. Yeah. Like becoming successful. Exactly. All of a sudden, you freed all the slaves. Where are the jobs? What are their skill sets? What's going to happen to those slaves? Here's what Madison and Jefferson thought would happen. They'd end up being hired back at the plantation they were just freed from for slave wages. And they would still be slaves, just not on paper. They believed that the only way to prevent that from happening was to slowly free the slaves, put them through a job training program and give them a new skill set and then ease them into the economy slowly. So there they could go to the the plantation owners and go, "Look, we're giving you 25 years to sort this out. You can you should start preparing from now. We're gonna buy 4% of your slaves every year. So if you own a hundred slaves, we're going to buy four of them a year. You have 25 years to figure this out. That's that's what they're telling them. But in the meantime, they're going to ease the slave population into the economy so that they don't end up being slaves on the other side. Maryland saw this law and went, "That's fantastic. We love it." And two years later passed basically an identical version. So by the time of the constitutional convention, two southern states were in the process of getting rid of slavery. Virginia was like four years into its program and Maryland was two years into their program and they were both 25 year long programs. Nathan Nathan, did you hear me? I mean, sure, of course. Uh, the reality was one of the reasons why slavery was considered justifiable by most people was that black people were considered to be subhuman. And of course, it's in the government, both the federal government and the local government and the state government for that matter. It's still around today. Uh maybe maybe there are fewer racists, but racism is definitely an inherent part of American politics. I did squint. So after the constitutional convention, the seven Yankee states one at a time will get rid of slavery and Maryland and Virginia stop their abolition laws and freeze them in. So the slaves that had already been freed were just freed. They didn't go back and reinsslave them, but they stopped freeing more slaves. Why? And you could answer either part of it. Why did the North get rid of slavery after the three-fifth compromise? Or why did Virginia and Maryland stop getting rid of slavery after the three-fifth compromise? What was the E component of the three-fifth compromise, Natalie? Did they were they trying to like balance out the voting? Like maybe the South had an um an advantage, I guess, and didn't like that. Or the South had a disadvantage because slaves were three-fifths of a person. If they wanted to fix that, they'd have freed the slaves. So, no, that's not why. Nathan, it was because the northern had a factory-based economy. Meanwhile, the south had an agricultural based one. But since the north didn't use too many slaves, it was primarily just freeing from the north going down to the south because of like the progressive movement of like more we want to be equal, everyone's equal kind of thing. And they saw like slavery as no more needed considering like after like fighting a little bit. So almost the the North definitely didn't see people as equal. Like that's get that out of your mind. The average white person, even the average white abolitionist still thought black people were inferior. What what they didn't like was that there were there were slaveun there were slave own or slaverun businesses. That doesn't make sense. There were people who owned slaves that had businesses that had an unfair competition advantage against people who didn't own slaves because they had to pay their labor force. Now, don't get me wrong, they were playing paying their labor force garbage, right? Maybe they're in today dollars giving them $15 an hour, which is still terrible wages, especially if you live in an expensive city like Austin. Um, but it, you know, a guy owning a slave is probably giving that slave the equivalent of three or$4 dollars an hour in terms of feeding them and clothing them and housing them. So, it meant that the slave owners had an unfair advantage. That's the real reason the North didn't like slavery. Having said that, what was the real reason the North had slavery? Brian and Nathan, sorry, called you by your last name. Was he able to display the market of a cheap cotton exported mainly considering that it was still a newish nation and we had still had some debts left? We definitely have debts, but the South needs the slaves to do the cotton, not the North. They're not growing cotton in the north. So why did the North have slavery before the convention? Obviously, because afterwards they start to abolish it. Hint, three-fifths compromise. Oh, votes. No, no, because if if that was the case, the nor the South would have freed its slaves, right? Because that's that would have given them more representation. But we just got through talking about how it wouldn't have made a difference because when it was 20 million to 9 million freed slaves or three-fifths compromise, you would have still not been able to do anything. I told you there were two parts of the three-fifth compromise. the symbolic gesture that had a meaningless impact other than symbolically reducing black people to subhuman class. And the second part that they weren't importing more of a cheap workforce, so they had to maintain the one they had available, which was through ensment. That's why the south is that's why Maryland and Virginia are getting rid of their abolition laws because now those slaves are going to be really valuable because there's no importation. In fact, think about it. They said 1808. The convention is 1787. So 1808 is in 21 years. Why did they make it 21 years and not two years or 12 years or 42 years? What was the thinking that they went, you know what, let's postpone this for 21 years? Maybe so that the 25-y year program uh is gone by then. Yeah, but Maryland and Virginia undid theirs, right? So that that's off the table. So they don't they don't care what's 21 years considered to be the length of it's how long it takes to become an adult. An adult. Why do I want to wait the length of a generation? Lately, we've been counting generations as 10 years, but but but for like demographic purposes, generations are 20 years long because it it's the t length of time it takes to to generate a new generation, right? That's why you should do war every 20 years because you want to build up a stock of pe of boys mostly. Sometimes a few girls get into this that you can just let die in large numbers and it not have a big impact on your society. If you did wars every year, it would be just devastating and draining. Why do they want to wait 21 years instead of 2.1 years? What was Maryland and Virginia's real reason for getting rid of slavery besides the fact that Madison and Jefferson were abolitionists? There was another reason for it. What was Maryland growing? What was Virginia growing in 1787? Tobacco. No, the land was ruined. That's why we did the revolution. We needed to go to Kentucky. They were growing nothing. So, I'm a slave owner. I own a 100 slaves. Am I happy about owning a 100 slaves in 1787 Virginia? No. Because I might be growing something. It's not tobacco. Hemp was frequently what people were growing. And I'm sure people were smoking it. But the primary reason they were doing hemp was they were turning into rope and clothing and paper. You can make money off of that, but not the kind of money you made off of tobacco. They were making crazy money off of tobacco. So when they switched over to hemp, the reason they did it is hemp will grow anywhere. Like hemp doesn't even care. It just you can you can stick it in the worst soil on the planet and it'll just thrive. So they're like, "Okay, this is great. We'll make some income, but you're not going to be able to pay for your slaves." So little by little, those plantation owners were were burning through their inheritance because they weren't able to make ends meet. It was better than not growing anything, but only barely. So, if the government comes along and says, "We'll buy your slaves from you." You're going to say, "Yeah, that's amazing because maintaining them is too expensive. I'm not making money off of this anymore." And then I'm gonna get I'm gonna get paid to get rid of my slaves because freeing them is going to suck, right? because you just lose the money. So, a lot of plantation owners wanted Jefferson and Madison to get this wasn't shoved down their throats. They were like, "This is amazing." Now, all of a sudden, there's no new slave imports. So, you're a plantation owner looking at those slaves going, "Oh my god, they suddenly have a lot of value." And then, to make things worse, the cotton gin had just been invented. So, now there's been there's actually a surge in the demand for cotton. It doesn't help Virginia that much because Virginia didn't grow much cotton. and the soil is ruined. But it does mean that that Georgia and North Carolina and then we're going to do Alabama and Tennessee and Kentucky and Mississippi that those places are going to need a lot of slaves. So why wait 21 years? You want to build up your slave population. Yeah. In other words, you're going to go buy a bunch of female slaves, impregnate them, in 21 years, you're going to have a bunch of adult slaves to sell. Virginia and Maryland became breeder states. Slaves were going to be their import. They weren't going to grow tobacco and kill their customers, so they'll just breed slaves. Why did the Yankees then, the seven Yankee states, I think Massachusetts was the last one, I don't quote me on that. I'm probably totally wrong. And the way I remember it was Massachusetts 1805. Why did the uh Yankees slowly phase slavery out? Because the big Atlantic ships didn't stop in the south. They went to the north and unloaded their slaves and their finished goods and then the Yankees would bring the slaves to the south to sell. So in other words, Boston and New York wanted slavery as long as they had the ability to sell slaves in the south. As soon as that was done, there was no point in having slavery anymore. So they abolished it. I mean, other than having a domestic servant, but you know, you can just bring over Irish for that. They speak English. You can beat them. Everybody thinks Irish are subhuman. You can pay them. They're like virtual slaves. And then then you don't have to have the institution of slavery. Also, it must have been a little scary having slaves cook for you. I would have been thinking, what's to stop them from dropping a little bit of extra in the food from time to time? You know what I mean? Like that's a lot of trust. That's a lot of trust. Anyway, that's that's what the second snag did. It made it so that the dis difference between the north and south became the issue of slavery because up until that moment it wasn't clear that that was the defining difference. There were differences already and we already hated each other's gods but now we have this big glaring difference in that there's no slavery in the north and there is slavery in the south. What's the third snag issue of the bill of rights? Yes. Okay. So, uh you know what? I I should have thought about this before. I forgot to do this. I'm going to see if I can pull up a graphic. Hold on just a second. Just to help us. If not, I'll describe the graphic because it's actually just a a a chart divided into four quadrants, but I think it's easier if there's a graphic. Hold on. Uh, where did I put the file? I made it. I just don't know where I put it. Uh, it's time to do a search, isn't it? Oh, wait. It might be here. No, that would have been too easy. Of course, it wouldn't be there. Ah, I found it. Okay, let's see if I can I don't know how to share this actually now that I've done this. Is it on the same screen that you're on right now? Yeah. What uh I know how to share. I I don't know if I'm going to be able to do it with this. You know what? Uh let me just try and do it and see what happens. Click. Oh, it wants to share one of my web pages. I want it to share a program. That's Oh, there it is. Ah, let's see. Yes. All right. Cool. So, uh, can you see it's I've got a four quadrant chart, right? And then in the top it says bill of rights. Then no bill of rights in the bottom top row, bottom row. Then the the left hand column is political comm. The right hand column is political crisis. So the F means federalist and the A means anti-federalist. So this is actually a three-dimensional chart which thrills me to no end. So the X axis is whether or not you have political comm. The Y ais is whether or not you have a bill of rights. The zaxis is the three diagonal lines that then split the quadrants into federalist and anti-federalist. So, in other words, I'm measuring three separate things in this chart. That just makes me so happy. Like, how often do you see threedimensional charts? Okay, we're going to start in the bottom right hand quadrant. By the way, do you see my cursor, too? Okay, cool. I wasn't sure that was showing up. Normally, I do this on a on a web page, not on on Paintop Pro. By the way, I'm using Painshot Pro 8 because I hate nine. Progress sometimes sucks. Anyway, all right. So, um we're going to start here in political crisis and we'll do the federalist answer. So, here's what the Federalists said. They said in the event you had no Bill of Rights and you had a political crisis, you would have no rights. Cool. Does anybody have a problem with that? So, there's no Bill of Rights. There's no document protecting your rights. And there's a political crisis that's imperiled the government. The government is actually worried it's in trouble. The Federalists said in that event, you would have no rights. We good with that? Does anybody think like that those stupid Federalists, what were they talking about? Okay, I'll just admit I think the Federalists are right. I think you do, too. So, we'll move on. Okay. So, now let's go to the this top quadrant here where you have a bill of rights, but there's a political crisis that the government is scared of. The government, this isn't a political crisis that the government can manage. This is a political crisis that the government fears could undermine it and maybe even topple it. Here's what the Federalists said. So, the Federalists were Hamilton, Madison, Franklin, Washington never officially was a Federalist, but all his friends were. That means he was a Federalist. Adams was a Federalist. All of those guys were federalists. For the record, Jefferson and Adams aren't at the Constitutional Convention, but most of the people that we remember from this time period were Federalists. So, here's the Federalist answer to you have a bill of rights, but there's a political crisis. The Federalists said you will still have no rights. Here's what the Federalists believed. They said, "In the event of a political crisis that imperiled the government, the government will trample everybody's rights whether or not there is a bill of rights." The Federalists went on to say, "There has never been, nor will there ever be a government that gives a [ __ ] about a document like a Bill of Rights when it comes to its own survival." Okay. So, before we go on, I want to ask, have we ever had a crisis that imperiled the government? And then we'll ask, of course, whether or not in the process our rights were undermined. I mean, I can think of one in the past uh 30 years, honestly. Okay, go for it. Uh well, after 911, uh they signed the Patriot Act, which vastly expanded the rights of intelligence agencies to surveil a populace. Yeah. It effectively destroyed the fourth and fifth amendments. And so boom, there it is. Alec comes out with a winner. I'm not even convinced that 911 was a governmental crisis. I think the government just used an excuse to implement this because I think we came out of 911 with more loyalty from the public than we had before it. So I actually think it was an uncrisis, but it didn't matter because the government pretended it was a crisis and boom, there we are. undermining the fourth and fifth amendments. And then to make matters worse, just five years after that, after the USA Patriot Act was passed, the milit military commissions act was passed that undermined habius corpus. And again, what's the crisis? Where what what's happening that we need to undermine the rights of of the US citizens? And the answer was there wasn't one. But anyway, that's what happened. Um, give me another example of a crisis. Maybe one that actually was a crisis. Don't get me wrong, 911 sucked. I'm not saying that wasn't awful. I just don't see how it was a crisis for the government. Uh, well, the Civil War. The Civil War was a pretty big one. I don't think you get much more crisis crisisy than the United States Civil War. I Abraham Lincoln had the worst crisis in US history, right? The United States literally almost broke into two. And what did he do? uh he he shut down uh the ability of newspapers and the press to speak critically about uh the the war effort. He did. He limited the first amendment, freedom of press. He also suspended Maryland state constitution and instituted martial law. And he also suspended habius corpus. Habius corpus is the right upon which all other rights depend upon. So even if he hadn't messed with the first amendment freedom of press by suspending habius corpus he already undermined it. By the way just for the record uh we also the United States also set up the world's first ever death camp. It was called Camp Douglas. It was just out of outside of Chicago. There's a dispute about how many people were executed at the death camp, but rail no more than 2,000. I've never seen anybody claim more than 2,000, but it might have been as little as 100 people were executed. What they would do is they would the Yankees would pull up a rail car filled with Confederate prisoners and they would pop open the rail car and they had a gatling gun on the platform and they would just kill them and then go ma dump them in a mass grave. Um, you know, 100 executed prisoners is not a complete crisis, but the city of Chicago could hear the Gatling guns mowing down the Confederate prisoners, and Lincoln was worried that it would cause a riot, so he instituted martial law in the city of Chicago preemptively. Also, in 1862, New York City rioted. the United States Army with Navy support. The Navy was bombarding the city with artillery. The army had to go through the city and estimates are that the probably killed around 2,000 or so New Yorkers and then dug mass graves and dumped them in the mass graves and a bunch of the buildings were destroyed in the process of the artillery bombardment and then New York was put under martial law. It is safe to say Lincoln trampled our rights a bit during the Civil War. It's also, I think, reasonable to say I would have too if I had been president because I don't know how you get through a crisis like that without breaking something. Maybe there's somebody who could have done a better job than Lincoln and me, but I would have definitely broken something. And he definitely did too. You've heard the famous quote, "Power corrupts absolute power corrupts absolutely." The guy who said it was a British libertarian, libertarian, not in the American sense today, but a person who believed in arguing for civil liberties. Um, his name was Lord Actton. He was actually a member of the British nobility. He said it about Abraham Lincoln. World War I, we limited freedom of press. The when we attacked Iraq in 2003, we limited freedom of press. You can go through and you can find all sorts of times when we just trash the Constitution, at least uh even if it wasn't a real crisis, at least a perceived crisis. All right, let's go over to here, this quadrant. So, we have a Bill of Rights, but there's political comm. Their argument was that there's no reason for the government to take away your rights if there's political calm. So in that circumstance, what the federalists argued was you would have rights because the government wouldn't have any reason to take your rights away, but they would be limited because they would be limited to the rights that were written down. So, if you didn't write down all your rights, I'll give you an example. Nowhere in the Constitution does it say you have a right to privacy. Did you know that? I bet if you asked the United States public, does the Constitution provide a right to privacy? 98% of people would say yes. Now technically the Supreme Court has ruled that it's implied but in reality nowhere in there does it say you have a right to privacy. What happened was there was a in 1965 there was a court case that originated in Connecticut uh Griswald v. Connecticut. What happened was a married couple went to the pharmacy to buy birth control and the pharmacy said the pharmacist said we can't sell birth control because in Connecticut birth control is illegal and then the married couple sued and it went all the way to Supreme Court. And here's what the Supreme Court ruled. They ruled that the only way to enforce a ban on birth control would be to look at a person's medical records. But the fourth and fifth amendments both imply that there's a right to privacy and had the founding fathers understood the concept of recording devices and the fact that you could do things like tape record people, they would have given us a right to privacy. It just never occurred to them that this was a necessary step. And there's no legal reason on earth that you should ever have to look at somebody's medical records. So it is a violation of a person's privacy. Therefore, a ban on contraception is by its very nature a violation of the right implied by the fourth and fifth amendments. Therefore, it's unconstitutional. Eight years later, the Supreme Court took that same ruling and applied it to Ro v. delayed but added a level and the level was the 14th amendment due process clause. So it was implied in Griswald v. Connecticut that this was an issue but they wanted to make sure everybody was clear about this. So the 14th amendment says that if you are tried in a court case but your civil rights are violated then you cannot be found legally. you cannot constitutionally be found guilty. So in other words, if I violate you your right to privacy as implied by the constitution and I convict you, then that conviction needs to be overturned because the due process clause in the 14th amendment very clearly states that no conviction that violated your constitutional rights can be upheld. And the reason they needed to say this very clearly was so that if a woman's right to privacy was violated because the state looked at her medical records, then any conviction over a crime she committed concerning abortion couldn't be upheld in a court of law. In other words, the Supreme Court in Roie Way did not rule a woman has a right to control her body. That wasn't on on the table. The question was, is there a constitutional manner by which a state could enforce an abortion ban? And they concluded that that wasn't the case. So when we had the DOS decision in 2022, the only way the Supreme Court could possibly rule to overturn Roie Wade was they would have to either A overturn the concept of there being a right to privacy as implied by the fourth or and fifth amendments or B they would have to accept the concept that women are not protected by the 14th amendment and the due process. this clause. Now, they didn't either. What they said basically boiled down to is, "I'm against abortion, therefore, it's unconstitutional." There's also another premise that was involved in that case, and it's uh called um uh just in my head, and I Oh my god. Uh, you know what? I'm going to stop thinking about it and it'll probably pop into my head if I stop thinking about it. It's It's right there and I can't get it to come out. Star deises. I was right to keep trying. All right. So, star deisis is a is a it goes like this. Let's say there was a Supreme Court ruling in the past that you personally don't like, but it was clearly constitutional and it was legally sound. Then the Supreme Court should not overturn it just because you don't like the outcome of the ruling should h you you need to leave what happened in the past in the past and you should just go along with it. And so the do's decision, that's exactly what it was. It was a violation of star deceases. This the five supreme court justices that ruled to overturn Roie Wayade literally said, "We just don't like abortion. That's why we're doing this." And Roberts, the conser the sixth conservative judge, the the chief justice was freaking out because he's like, "This is a violation of star deasis. I hate abortion. I'm a Catholic, but it's the law, the land. There is no constitutional ground to overturn this. the only way to overturn it would be to say there is no privacy or that women aren't protected by the due process clause and I refused to say either of those two and they ignored him and they went ahead and overturned uh Roie Wade even though they were violating star deceasis. Okay. So in other words, the supreme or the the what what the federalist said was if you write a bill of rights and there's political comm you run the risk of not having written all the rights you should have. So for example, maybe you could have written the right that an individual has a right to determine what happens to their body. An individual has a right to privacy. You could have written those two in. We didn't. So, do we have them? And the answer is when the Supreme Court upheld because there was a Supreme Court case about the the USA Patriot Act. When the Supreme Court upheld the USA Patriot Act in a 5 to4 ruling, was it 5 to4 or 6 to3? It might have been six to three. Um, when they did that, they basically said, "When it comes to your security, we're happy to trash your fourth and fifth amendment rights." In other words, maybe we should have spent a little bit more time on our bill of rights. At least that that would have been the federalist argument for why you shouldn't even write a bill of rights. So, now let's go down to here. Political comm. And you have no bill of rights. According to the Federalists, you would then have unlimited rights, infinite rights, because you would have all the rights in the universe, even the ones that weren't written down, because nothing was written down. And there'd be no reason for the government to limit your rights because it's political calm. By the way, what ideology in the United States would agree with that statement? That's very much a libertarian attitude, right? That as long as we have political calm, there's no reason for the government to trample our rights. So, we should have a huge amount of rights. All right. So, any questions about the federalist argument for why we shouldn't do a bill of rights? Any questions about why people like Hamilton and Franklin and Madison thought we should not have a Bill of Rights? All right. So, now let's do the anti-federalist rebuttal. The anti-federalists, we'll start right here in the same quadrant we started last time. The anti-federalists agreed with the Federalists. They said, "If you had no Bill of Rights and you had a political crisis, you'd have no rights." Isn't that cool that they both agree? So rare when you can get people from opposite ideologies to agree to something. It's so refreshing. All right. Any no questions? Right. That's straightforward. So now let's do this one. I'm going the opposite direction for the anti-federalists. So there's no Bill of Rights. There's political call. The anti-federalists go, we agree partially with the federalists. We do believe it is possible that there will be a portion of the population that will have unlimited rights, but it's only a small portion of the population. They actually say only the rich would have unlimited rights because one of two things would have to be true. either a you went to a fantastic school and got an amazing education and know what your rights are considering that they're not written anywhere. How would you even know what your rights were if they're not written anywhere? You would literally have to probably take a political philosophy course or two or three and in the process figure out what those rights were. Or that's option A. Option B is you're so filthy rich you can hire an attorney who can figure out what your rights are. And of course that's what most rich people do, right? Because why waste your time using your brain when you can hire somebody and pay them to use their brain and then you can just go play golf all day or whatever you do as a rich person. But there's no way for the middle class, the upper middle class, the lower middle class, or the lower class to figure out what their rights are because they're not written anywhere. And they're not going to have access to that kind of an attorney. So, they won't have any rights. Any questions about that? Okay. So, this top left hand quadrant, there's a bill of rights. It's political comp. The anti-federalists say yes, you will have limited rights. We agree again with the Federalists. Having said that, at least you'll know what your rights are because they'll have been written somewhere. It's better to have some imperfect rights than none. And then they go on one step further and they say, "And because they're written down, not only can you learn them, but you even might learn them." So, let's do this as a test. Let's see if the anti-federalists are right. Tell me the five rights in the first amendment. Um, protected right to like free speech, um, religion, assembly, I'm remembering one more. Petition of government. Yep. And one more. Oh my god. uh press. Yeah, you got it 100%. Okay. And I I bet you weren't alone. There were probably others of you got them. Although, I have to say, usually people don't remember petition the government. So, kudos for you for remembering it. Usually people get an a B minus, right? Because you got 80%. Um, having said that, when was the last time your freedom of press was trampled? like you went to go buy your favorite newspaper and there there it said censored on it and there were no words on it other than censored or I I mean I have I have some kind of experience. Uh it's not really but uh so there Universal Music Group um my favorite band is uh I really like on one of their albums they have a song called Fall on Me. It's about acid rain, environmentalism, that kind of stuff. It is the only track I have seen to be censored. Uh this isn't the part, by the way, by in their entire catalog. Uh for for from what I can tell, not even by copyright reasons. Uh but when I tried to use the song uh to show that they have censored it, they censored it. So technically technically not that's a kind of an edge case but uh I would argue that's a freedom of speech issue not a freedom of press but yeah I totally get I totally think that's that's a case. Fascinating. Yeah. Okay. Has anybody had their religion canled? Like you went to your favorite place of worship and you showed up and there was like a guy with a military uniform like no no your your religion is canled. you're not allowed to worship here anymore. So, I have definitely had uh censorship events. Um, five and I thought one I s surrendered to four. Um, I haven't had my religion censored per se, but you know, my religious beliefs don't necessarily line up with the majority of the US population. But as a general rule, I think most of us haven't been through an experience where they've had these rights trampled. I have had my first amendment freedom of assembly trampled twice peacefully protesting and I was arrested. But you know it happens. And yet still somehow you learned your rights even if you weren't using them, even if you weren't having the government trample them. In other words, the anti-federalists are clearly not wrong. This having rights written in a time of calm gives you the opportunity to practice and learn your rights. And the reason why they say this is important is because of this quadrant here. When you have rights, but you're in the midst of a political crisis, the antifederalists say, "Yes, it is true. Your government will do everything it can to survive. And if that means trampling your rights, your government will do it. But you have a fighting chance because you know your rights. Your attorney knows your rights. The government knows your rights. The press knows your rights. Your neighbors know your rights. And maybe you'll get lucky and not railroaded. That's the anti-federalist argument for why we should do a bill of rights. Any questions? Okay. So, what if I told you this public argument might have been meant, but it wasn't the real reason the Federalists didn't want a Bill of Rights. In other words, they may have believed this, but this was just the surface argument they used because they didn't want to reveal to anybody what the real reason they didn't want a Bill of Rights was. Anybody want to take a g guess at what the real reason was? I'll give you a hint. It's the thing we were obsessed with at the time. Representation. Representation. Where did we get the idea that we needed representation? Taxation. What about taxation? They were being taxed without their consent. It's not consent, Nathan. I'm going to take a little bit of gander here. In the a little bit of previous medieval past, there is the Magna Carta that limited the power of the king because he was a little overpowered with it. And then they they said we want more representation as like the government formed around that Magna Carta. The US took inspiration from that cuz they see people coming from different territories and representing. And then now that you're this colony all the way across the ocean and you have no representative and then they use you as like an escapegoat to kind of pay for war efforts. Now you say where's my peace in the government? Where's my voice? Kind of. There was a step we talked about in this class that you missed in between Magna Carta and the revolution 1689. sharing your entire screen or browser when it can cause an infinity mirror. Oh man, how come it's not doing that? I want to see that. What happened in 1689? Why did we fight the revolution? English Bill of Rights. And the English Bill of Rights said very clearly, no. N O not K N O W. I don't want you to get the wrong note here. No taxation without representation. That's why we fought the revolution. We wanted our representation. We fight the revolution. We're in a constitutional convention. What do we have an argument about? How are we going to represent the small states? Then we have an argument about representation of black people. We were obsessed. This is the only thing we could think about. How did we get there? Because there was a Bill of Rights. The Federalists did not believe in revolution. The Federalists wanted the our revolution to be the last revolution. Their goal was to make a United States of America that was revolution proof, revolution free. And they thought the best way to do that was to make sure we had no Bill of Rights. so that in the future when the government trampled somebody's rights, it wouldn't trigger a revolution. The anti-federalists were the opposite. They believed the only way you could keep a government honest was the threat of violence. Yes, the government has the means to inflict violence, but so do the people. And what they were hoping was that there was a kind of check and balance that if the government realized it went too far that people could rise up and fight the government. And so the government would go out of its way to not let that happen. And the way you made sure that you kept the government honest was a bill of rights because if they trampled it too much, it just might infuriate the people enough for them to go after you. So the anti-federalists tell the federalists point blank, "We will never ratify a constitution that doesn't have a bill of rights in it." The Federalists were a minority at the constitutional convention. There were three factions of of anti-federalists and one faction of federalists, but the Federalists were a minority. The anti-federalists like 60% of the delegates. So there was no way for the Federalists to pass the Constitution at the Constitutional Convention without getting a bunch of anti-federalists to vote. In other words, even though the Federalists thought they made a good argument for why we shouldn't do a Bill of Rights, they lost. The anti-federalists won the day. So the Federalists came back to the anti-federalists and they said, "Let's make a deal. Here's the deal. bill that Federalist proposed. They said, "Look, what if we promise, we swear on our grandmother's lives that we will give you a bill of rights by the end of the first congressional session." So within two years of the constitution going into effect, if you accept a constitution without a bill of rights, the anti-federalist go, why would we do that? And the federalist said, hear us out. We have a limited amount of time because Hamilton's out getting the army. And that means we're going to have to do a rush job on the Bill of Rights if we include it in the Constitution. If we do a rush job, we might include something we shouldn't have. We might exclude something we should have included, and we might do something silly like put a comma in the wrong place and completely accidentally change the meaning, the intended meaning of a right. If we could do a bill of rights in a time of calm after the constitution's up and running where we can take months to just sit there and argue about every little detail to try to get this thing right, then we might have a functioning bill of rights. And a group of anti-federalists went, "You're right. We accept." and they shook hands on it and they agreed, those anti-federalists agreed that as long as the Federalists promised to give us a bill of rights within two years of the government being up and running, that they would accept a constitution without the Bill of Rights in it. But they said, "Habius Corpus," at which point the Federalists went, "Nobody can argue about ABS Corpus. We're willing to put that in the document." And that's why habius corpus goes into the original draft of the constitution but no other rights. Technically there's a right uh to not have bills of attainer but so I guess there's two rights. Uh a bill of attainer is where the king makes the children of a criminal guilty for the crime. So I if I murder somebody, the king could issue a bill of attainer on my sons and make them guilty of the murder I committed. And we put that we put a ban on that in the constitution. We said no, we're not doing that. So I guess there's two rights. A ban on bills of attainer and and then habius corpus. We good? Okay. So, they they've finished the Constitution. They've written all of the articles they were going to write. They've wrapped this thing up. It's time to vote. The Federalists go around and ask anti-federalists if which way they're going to vote. And after everything, they realize they still don't have enough votes. The anti-federalists believed that what they most of them believed that what they should do is take the constitution, chop it up into pieces, and then run it as amendments to the Articles of Confederation to update the Articles. But they had no intention of passing the Constitution as it was and replacing the Articles of Confederation with it. The Federalists are tearing their hair out because they believe two things. One, the Articles suck and they need to be gotten rid of and replaced by the Constitution. And two, that if they don't do this, Hamilton is going to replace the con the Articles of Confederation with a monarchy. A bunch of the anti-federalists are saying, "We're not scared of that as an outcome because if Hamilton tries, there'll be a second revolution. There's no way the American people are going to accept the monarchy. I mean, they were obviously naive and stupid, but back then, they didn't think it was possible. So, they they're like, "We're willing to take that chance. We don't want this Constitution. It's not good." So, here's what the Federalists did. The night before the the vote, they told everybody not to leave for lunch. So the next day as the session started, somebody proposed that they vote on the constitution whether or not to do it after the lunch break. It was agreed to. So they they they spent the morning session wrapping up details. Then Washington called for the lunch break. A bunch of anti-federalists got up and walked out of the room. very few federal anti-federalists were still in the room because most of them got up to go get lunch, but none of the Federalists left. When the last person who looked like they were leaving was leaving, the ant the Federalist at the back of the room ran over and locked the door. Then somebody called the session back in or asked Washington to call it back in. Washington calls the session back in and then somebody proposes that they vote on the constitution and they vote on it and it passes and that's how the constitution passed at the constitutional convention of 1787 in September 19 a good story now you're like how important was the lunch break I'll give you an example this every state sent a different number of delegates I want to say Virginia sent something like 20 delegates and New York sent three. Two of the delegates were anti-federalists. One of the delegates was Alexander Hamilton, a federalist. Hamilton came back in time for the vote. The two anti-federalists were out buying Philadelphia cheese steak sandwiches because they were doing their lunch break. So when the vote was cast, New York voted for the Constitution one to zero. That's how important that lunch break was. So then at that point, it's time for the closing statements and everybody who is powerful and influential wants to get up and give a closing statement. So Randolph from Virginia gets up and he says, "That thing you did with the lunch break and locking the door, that's dirty. I can't believe you did that." And then he says, "But I know when I've been beaten. And honestly, this Constitution is better than Hamilton's Constitution. And so, even though I voted against it, I am ready to accept this new constitution as the document that governs the United States." In other words, the top anti-federalist in the room surrendered and accepted the constitution. At that point, Washington gets up and he says, "It is good." And then sits back down. Hamilton gets up and he says, "You know, my constitution was better. We should totally do my constitution." But you know what? I like this one. It's good enough. Madison did a good job. I'm ready to support it. Let it go forward. At that point, there's almost no way for anybody to do opposition because you've got Randolph, the top ranked anti-federalist still in United States because Jefferson's in France. By the way, why is Jefferson in France? Why wasn't Franklin in France? Why did Franklin come back? Franklin got kicked out of France for having too much sex with too many women. I'm not kidding. He was literally kicked out for being a man [ __ ] He was 81. Like if I was Viagra, I would just put his face on the tube. Like I don't even like he was the original founding father. Literally the founding father. He must have fathered a thousand children at least. He gets up at the convention and he says, "Let's say a painter paints a sunrise. Now you come and you look at that sunrise painting. You won't know if the painter painted a sunrise or a sunset. I choose to look at this convention as a sunrising and not a sun setting." At which point probably most of the people in the convention turned and looked at each other and go, "Does anybody know what the f he's talking about? What's with the painter and sunset and sunrise paintings?" The reason he's saying this, of course, is he wrote the Articles of Confederation. The sun is setting on his document, but it's rising on Madison's document. He's saying, "I'm going with Madison on this one. I'm glad that he's replacing my document. Then he says, I know not everybody in here voted for the the Constitution, right? Randolph, for example, was one of the people who didn't vote for it. Edmund is in my head for his first name. Don't quote me on that. Anyway, Randolph didn't vote for it. So, Franklin goes, I know not all of you voted for this, but now that it's a done deal, I know all of you support it. So I propose that we write in all capital letters above the signatures unanimous consent. What does unanimous mean? Means like without objection from anyone including Exactly. 100%. But it clearly wasn't unanimous because Randolph for example voted no. There were people in the room who had voted no. They vote on whether or not to put unanimous consent in all capital letters. It doesn't pass unanimously, but it does pass. That's why it says in all capital letters, unanimous consent over the signature page. Cool. And that's how the Constitution got out of the Constitutional Convention 1787. Any questions? Delaware almost immediately ratifies the Constitution. They had decided before the convention started that you needed threearters of the states to to ratify the Constitution for it to go into effect. Sorry. Uh 2/3 twothirds of the states to ratify for it to go into effect. So 2/3 of 12 is 8. twothirds of 13 is nine because you have to round up. So that's why it's nine states to to for the constitution to go into effect. But it was effectively three quarters because Rhode Island made it clear there was no circumstance under which they would ever do this. So they needed nine of the 12 states willing to consider this to go through for this to go. And in fact, Delaware doesn't waste any time. They ratify right away. It takes two years to get the eth and the ninth states there. 1789 uh the early on I think it was actually February might have been even March uh the eth and the ninth states ratify the constitution and then in March we vote for the president for the first time. We don't know the results because the electoral college cast a secret vote and they did it again in uh 1792, but I don't think they did it again in 1796. So, it was only the first two elections that the electoral college cast a secret vote. By the way, John Adams claimed that they cheated and he believed that he should have been the first president. I don't believe that's true, but I do believe they cheated. And here's why. Remember I told you when they designed the Constitution, they made it so that there was an error in how you elected the president and said you needed a majority of electoral college delegates. I even though it's a secret ballot and I can't prove it, I am pretty sure I am confident that Washington did not win a majority of electoral college delegates. He but he did get first place. That's why I think Adams is wrong. I don't think he got first place. I think he got second place, but I don't think Washington got a majority. I don't believe he got a majority in 1792. And of course, Adams didn't get a majority in 1796. And the reason why they ignored that part of the Constitution is after they did the vote, they realized, oh, oops, that was a mistake. We should have never put the word majority in there. So, we will in 1804 a or before the 1804 election. I don't remember what year we implemented. After the 1800 election, we did implement the change so that we wouldn't do that in 1804. But anyway, the change being that the second place person gets the vice president. Adams, I have no doubt, got second place in 1789. In any case, um when we start next time, I want to talk about the Federalist Papers and then uh I want to get our government up and running to show you how it was functioning. I I feel like we're one lecture behind. So, let's see. Next time will be June 2nd. And I said the midterm will be due the 10th, correct? Is that what I put in the syllabus? So, we should be okay. I think it starts the 10th, right? And then you we can we can we can even if it doesn't, we can just aim for that as the start date. That way, if I am a day behind because I really feel like I am, uh we won't have to rush through the material. Ahmed, it is open book. Absolutely. And and I really strongly advise you against using uh any type of AI to write your essays. Just mostly because when I'm reading them, I I can usually tell AI has a style. But that's not the real problem. The real problem is I have yet to see AI answer the my test correctly. Like it is I I in the last two months I've probably done 20 factual checks on AI and 19 of the 19 of the times it was wrong. One time it was it was wrong and then I changed one word and I got the correct answer on the second result and I'm like dude what the hell? It's the same exact meaning. I just changed the wording around. Uh AI wants to please you. I think it doesn't want to give you the right answer. It doesn't have the concept of right answer. Yes, I will post the test in Google Classroom. Eileen, um I had two questions. So, as far as the exam on the essays, um are we allowed to like use I forgot who recommended it, but using like a writer or a writing like tutor kind of thing to help? Oh, absolutely. Yeah. go to the lab. They're fantastic. And then sorry, go ahead. No, like let's say you wrote your essay and then you you you ask AI to correct the grammar. I have no problem with something like that. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about AI coming up with the answers for you. I My experience has been it will ruin your grade even if I don't detect it. What was your second question, Eileen? It was about so on the 60 minute videos that we can pick one one I didn't know that they weren't actually 60 minutes right so it's that's just like the name of okay I was so confused I was like wait a minute um they're like 15 minutes yeah I was like wait I thought it was supposed to be an hour I kind of wrote like jotted down some notes over just some key points over one of the ones I watched uh a few days ago so if it's like about the Israel Iran for example and what Trump's doing or how he's handling at the ceasefires, all that. Um, can I write my essay in terms of kind of like my opinion towards it or that's what you said you don't want us to do? Oh, no. I I I have no problem with you inserting your opinion. What I want is an analysis, a critical analysis. So, in other words, I want you to look at what 60 Minutes has done and then tell me what you think is really at stake. So like you know for example you can go into why are the actors behaving the way they're acting? Uh you know what does the United States get out of this? What are the risks? What what what does the United States losing? You you can ask those types of questions. My goal is to see that you can do a critical analysis of the episode. Um but you should totally insert your opinion in there. I don't know how you can't like you know what I mean? Like if you're saying, "Well, I think this is high risk." That's your opinion. Now, I want you to back your opinion. Like don't just give me an opinion like this is high risk and then don't talk about why it is high risk. But I want you to tell me this is high risk and this is why I think it's high risk. Um but at the end of the day, right, you're inserting your opinion. Everybody does because everybody is subjective. And this this notion of objectivity is kind of foolish. Having said that, there are going to be a lot of professors who are going to make you pretend to do objectivity. So, I'm not telling you my way is the right way. I'm just telling you my way is the way I want you to do it. And one of the reasons is from experience I've discovered when students insert themselves into the paper, the paper is way more interesting. Okay? So, yeah. So, do it. But, but make sure that you back everything up like you're building an argument. Pretend you're an attorney in a courtroom and you're trying to prove a case. That's how I want you to approach it. Attorneys totally give their opinions. All right, I'll see you guys in two amazing, glorious days. You too. Have a good one. You too. Recordings.