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One more step for man.

Hello, my name is Keith Flamer.

And I'm Molly Blakemore.

And welcome to our second in a series of podcast called Free Speech with CR. And we are honored to have a guest today of Dr. Ryan Emenaker. And he's a professor of poli sci here at CR. Ryan, this is September. And September 17th, we are, by law, required to have a conversation with faculty and staff in the community about the Constitution. And this is a hot topic right now because some of us believe that the Constitution is under attack, and people are undermining what the Constitution founders had laid down.

Talk to us a little bit about-- and I read your book and great book, by the way, very easy to read. And talk to us about the myths of the Constitution. Because I imagine there are a lot of people that have no real idea about what the Constitution is, what it stands for, and how flexible it may have been originally. So talk about the myths of the Constitution.

Sure. So myths become a really easy thing with the Constitution, in part because it's such a short document. So the Constitution is only 3,000 words. And if you compare that to a Constitution of, even the Constitution of California, that's 120,000 words. So it's much more detailed and it has much more in it. Whereas the US Constitution is relatively brief. And in that brevity, there's lots of ways that you can insert all sorts of different ideas and ways to think about it.

That means that we have to turn to a lot of documents other than the Constitution just to understand the Constitution. Sometimes that's the Federalist Papers, which is the series of articles where they went and tried to explain why they were writing the Constitution. This can be various just historical precedent and other things. But because of the brevity, we have lots of words in there that don't define themselves. It doesn't come with a glossary of one of my students said the other day and I thought that was a really good way of thinking about it.

So, one of the ways of understanding or one of the ways that people misunderstand it, is the idea that people draw this direct line from being ruled by Great Britain, the Declaration of Independence and straight to the Constitution. But of course, the timeline's a little different. The Declaration of Independence comes out in 1776, but it's 13 years before the Constitution is ratified. And in between there, we have the art of confederation.

And much of what people will do is they'll draw this direct line and they'll say, well, we know the Constitution must be about x because they're reacting to y as it states in the declaration. But a lot of the reaction was, what happened in the articles? And so sometimes people make these statements about the governance of the United States government of very limited powers.

But the entire purpose of the Constitution actually was to create a more vigorous, more powerful government. Something they actually state in Federalist 1, which surprisingly, despite being a Federalist 1 is often not read, which is always surprising. But yeah, so part of the point of the Constitution actually creating a much more vigorous, powerful government. A government that has a much more centralized powers, that actually a little bit less powers for the states than which existed under the articles.

A more power to tax, which Americans always have the sort of, distorted view in terms of taxing and taxing power, but much more power of the national government attack. So we actually have a much more powerful government than people often think. But of course, that power there is supposed to also be checked by itself. And so we have all these checks and balances, and sometimes those checks and balances get misunderstood.

And I think we see a lot of that today. We're having lots of debates about what's the proper power of Congress, the proper power of the executive, proper power of the court.

So what is that proper power of each of the three arms of the government?

Broadly speaking. I think this is one of the easiest ones to understand, but one of the ones that's so commonly misunderstood is that Congress is the first branch of government. And so which goes back. So if you read it just in order, Article 1, that's the one that lays out Congress. So often we put this emphasis on the president or the courts of being so power. Article I is Congress.

And then of course, you go beyond that, if you look just even at the structure of the constitution, Article I is by far the longest article. It's one third the length when you get to Article 2 and it explains the presidency. And then one third of that is what lays out the courts. And most of what it says about the courts is Congress decides.

But even when you go further than that, most of the power being housed in Congress, Congress is the only one that gets to participate in constitutional amendments among the three branches of the national government. Congress is the only one that can remove individuals from the other branches, and Congress has the longest list of powers, including the most important powers, which are long power to decide whether or peace and how our resources are deployed, the budget powers.

Two most important decisions in any society-- how do we spend our resources, and how are we at war or peace. Those are directly housed with Congress, and so often we don't think about that. That Congress is supposed to be that primary function. And again, the whole reason for that is that people are the legitimate foundation of power. What Madison writes in Federalist 49, if people are legitimate foundation of power, we've got to house most of that power with the most representative branch.

The presidency with one person picked the electoral college rather than the people directly, is not able to represent people the way that Congress can. The courts also be interesting to people.

I found some sentences in your book and I don't want to get this wrong, but I found it quite interesting. And the first one you quoted an op-ed by Louis Siedman, who wrote that the US obsession with the constitution has saddled us with a dysfunctional political system. I'd like to explore that.

Sure.

But the other one and you quote one of my heroes, Thurgood Marshall, and he wrote and you quote in your book that, "That the constitution was defective from the start." I find that interesting. I hope people understand, especially given where we are today in the whole political question and the political rhetoric about the Constitution. Help us understand how is such a flawed document, and why have we venerated it a flawed document so much?

Yeah well, so a couple of things. One, I think we should be clear. So my book is what's often called a reader. So I put a collection and curate a collection of different arguments. And I always want to be really clear with the students, it's like I'm not endorsing any one of these arguments. I'm talking about that. Here's the panoply of arguments that are out there. And how do we think about them.

And when I think someone makes a really interesting argument, I want to include it. And many of them, I think enrage me, and I think this is terribly wrong. And other ones I am saying, but part this idea of free speech is--

With College of the Redwoods is this idea of, let's explore these different ideas and how do we think about them. And I really like to look for those ideas where they both disagree with each other in some ways, but overlap in others.

So, one of the arguments then from Thurgood Marshall and I think his idea of defective from the start is, it's a document that enshrined slavery. And so often in some discussions, we get into people will be like, well, that's constitutional, that's unconstitutional. And they're almost substituting the word constitutional for good. And I think I always want to be careful with that. Well, at times the constitution is clearly enshrined things that are verifiably bad.

Slavery was constitutional, but that doesn't make it good. At other times, the constitution bars things that we might think are actually good.

Such as?

We could think of things like perhaps the way that representation happens in the United States. So some people argue that we should do, most democracies do, which is the idea of proportional representation, which gets to more direct. One of the reasons we're in a situation we're in right now where we have this partisan gerrymandering going on.

Texas style, Texas in California. Yeah.

Minority Rule

Yeah. That partisanship is happening because of the way the Constitution is structured and the way we do representation. Democracies around the world, no longer do this for the most part. What existed at the time, but no one does that. So to do what is if you have x number of people that get x number of representation in the voting happens in a different way. Here we can draw lines and manipulate all of that.

We sometimes talk about it as our politicians get to pick their own voters, which is a system that just doesn't work in many other countries. And it's becoming more problematic as we have more and more sophisticated computers that can outline where votes are going to happen and so forth. So that's something else that maybe the Constitution makes really difficult. But other things some people propose, maybe we should have term limits for Supreme Court justices.

That seems to be prohibited by the Constitution at least, most people think that is, and that's probably right. I think that's the argument I lean towards. I think that's right. And so if we think that that's a good or something we should have, well, it prevents that. So we have certain things that are prevented that we might think are good. It has other things that are enshrined.

So, sometimes this argument for constitutional, I think, mistakenly thinks for good or bad. And so when we say defective at the start. Thurgood Marshall's argument, one is, well, slavery, clearly verifiable evil, something that's absolutely terrible enshrined in the Constitution. And the way we get rid of, what took us to go through a civil war in order to do that and then some constitutional amendments and so forth.

And so he also makes a quip about the fact that he's giving this speech on the Bicentennial of the Constitution was basically saying it's like, look, if someone's going to do what they did 200 years ago, they're going to make me be the servant that walks around here and hands people stuff. This is true. So let's not just venerate what they did.

And so part of his point then is actually, the Constitution should be celebrated for what we're doing. The fact that we've--

While we're doing current--

Current, that was on throughout history. So when you start thinking of people that have come after those folks that emerged from the room writing the document, I mean, the reason why we get the Bill of Rights, that's not the folks that come out on September 17 with the Constitution. They rejected a Bill of Rights. It was an anti-federalist on the outside of that room that said, no, we won't accept this Constitution without a Bill of Rights. And so they get forced to add a Bill of Rights.

Interesting, yes.

And we don't often celebrate-- those folks, even though we celebrate the folks that rejected the Bill of Rights or those folks then that help abolish slavery or those folks that come along later and make changes so that women get to vote and all that stuff. Those he starts to argue are the things that we need to celebrate. And too often we focus on just this moment in 1787, which again, when he says the fact that the society doesn't say it's completely bad.

He venerates the Constitution, but it's a particular type of veneration. And in part, maybe the best thing they did was allowing us to change it and make that change possible.

So a really, really quite curious about something. We have a lot of people talking about how much the politicians are attacking the foundation of the Constitution. Is that particularly bad? I mean, because right now people who send the Constitution shouldn't be changed.

Yeah.

So how can we look at the current political rhetoric against the Constitution? How should we do that?

And do you think it should be easier to amend the Constitution for the times that we're currently in, rather than just having to rely on historical interpretation of the Constitution?

Good question. Yeah. I mean, one of the difficulties with any sort of Constitution or any foundational law is if you want to hit the sweet spot. You want to make it too easy to change, which I would argue maybe California's Constitution is there, where we have 500 amendments that are made to the California Constitution. It's actually easier to amend the California Constitution than it is to pass a budget. That, to me, seems a little bit crazy.

Yeah, it's been the case. Yes, right.

On the other end of the spectrum, you don't want to make it so hard to change because change in any society is going to happen. And if you make the formal channels too difficult, then the changes can happen through other processes. And largely for us, that process has been essentially just reinterpretation, ignoring, or having the Supreme Court changes. And I think there's some problems with doing that rather than the formal process.

The US Constitution is seen as one of the least malleable constitutions in the world. And even someone, I think, again, why I like to put certain people together in my book, Scalia, who comes out venerating the Constitution is-- well, the one thing, though, that I would change that I don't like is that it's too hard to amend. And I have these other authors in there who are really attacking the Constitution and the water isn't so bad. Is it so hard to change?

So you've got these two people, one venerating the Constitution, another one deriding it.

And agree with.

And they're both arguing. A [inaudible] of change.

So they argue that.

So I appreciate when we could do that. I try to put that together for students. But I think our Constitution probably is the amendment process is too difficult. And part of that, again, maybe the framers could not have anticipated that. We have 13 states when they write it, now we have 50. And again, when you go through, it just makes the math much more harder, and you need a lot more people agreeing over a larger space of time. It just gets really difficult.

What that has largely left us with is the idea that it will change has got to happen somewhere. So sometimes we just kind of conveniently ignore the Constitution around like, war powers, for example. We have a process in the Constitution by which we declare war, with almost never die.

Really?

We have been involved in more than 200 conflicts around the world, declared war five times according to the Constitution, in terms of that process. And I think some people make the argument, they're like, well, it's just too cumbersome to go through the proper process. In the modern world, we need to be able to do it quicker. They very well be right about that.

But the fact that we can't go and amend the Constitution so that we can follow a process to do it and have some public debate about it. we just all go, OK, we're just going to-- when it's a president and I agree with and a war, I'm not going to say, yeah, I'll let it by. So this sets up this really difficult problem where we're right. If you agree with Obama and Biden, they take a military action and people are like, well, it's OK.

And if you agree with Trump or Bush or someone else, then all of a sudden you're like, oh, well, then it's OK. But on some level, what I most appreciate is when we get the people that are like, look, I'm on their same side, Rand Paul who's here, or Ron Paul, who see themselves on the side of Trump or Bush, and they're like, but you gotta follow the right process. Or you'll see someone like that Dennis Kucinich or some other Democrats that said, Obama, you got to follow the right process. And I think it's helpful to sometimes have those people making that argument that maybe we need some of those processes.

So that unmalleable part is a real challenge. Again, there are ways to do it. Thurgood Marshall's way is that well, the Constitution is meant to be read differently than a normal law. It's more of a living document. Its vagueness is actually one of its benefits that you can understand the provisions in different ways. I can understand that argument. And that may be a necessary thing.

And do you think that's what the founders intended when they made it so short, that it would be interpreted differently during different times? I mean, it's hard to say, looking back what their motivation was. But it is a very short document and they intended it for it to be, right?

Yeah. Well, and if you look at early interpretations, so in Marbury versus Madison, one of these really important Supreme Court cases. When Chief Justice Marshall looks at the Constitution, he's like, you've got to remember, we're expounding on the Constitution, that we can't interpret it as just the same way that we interpret a normal law. But the idea this has got to work for the ages and so we've got to have some sort of flex in the joint. Essentially, he doesn't use the phrase.

And again, he's one of the people that helped ratify the Constitution. So when I went around state ratifying commissions, he's one of that voted for it. So I think if we think of him as and he had some arguments that he made when they were having the debates in Virginia and so forth. And so I think, yeah, we do have some evidence that they indicated that we wanted this to be loosely interpreted in certain ways that they can.

Again, I think there are some provisions in the Constitution where that's not true. So one great example that a constitutional scholar makes is like, look, the provision that says you have to be 35 years old to be president. There's not multiple ways to read. 35 years, means 35. You can't suddenly be like, well, people today live short/faster or live longer or shorter or slower, and therefore now you've got to be 37.5 is equate to 35 back then.

Back in the 1700s?

So there's clearly preventative. But there's other provisions, if you look at the Eighth Amendment, where it says, we're going to prohibit cruel and unusual punishments. Well, by its very nature, the phrase cruel and unusual is a relative word. What is unusual today is not the same as what's unusual then. But if they wanted to be more direct, they probably could. They could have said, you can't draw and quarter people. You can't do that.

And so I think there are clearly spots where it makes sense to have the flex and the joints, and that seems it's clearly intended. That's got to be the best interpretation of those words. And I think there's other ways where that's not the best way to read that. And so I think sometimes when we're having this debate, it's not just one thing where it's like, oh, people are having this broad interpretation, that's wrong, versus here we should be.

Sometimes it needs to be a broad, and I think other times it needs to be narrow. And I think sometimes the document itself does help explain that.

I think I understand what you're saying. Well, we'll probably segue into this Supreme Court. But who is the arbiter of being flexible in the Constitution? So, if I want to do this, and who's going to tell me no? Who's going to tell me it's unconstitutional or there's not flexibility there?

Yeah, I mean, there are different ways to answer that question. I think the most persuasive way or the most accurate way is comes from this idea of constitutional dialogues. And it's not in one place that we actually have in this conversation is in different places. That when Congress is passing a law on some level, they need to be having a discussion about, what we are doing? Is this constitutional or not?

They're having a discussion about what the Constitution even says. That when the president is supposed to either sign or lead to a law, what are the original conceptions of the veto was actually supposed to be much more limited than we think of it today? The president was supposed to veto a law, not just because they didn't like a law. In fact, they probably had an obligation to sign. He didn't. They didn't like it.

They were supposed to veto it as a check of, oh, I think this is unconstitutional, I'm going to stop you here, Congress, from doing this. Right now, we think of the veto of like, well, it violates my policy. I'm therefore going to go--

With what we see.

But the idea there being is, well, here we've got Congress interpreting the Constitution as it's lawmaking and it should do more of that. I think, sometimes one of the problems with housing, too much of the responsibility at the Supreme Court is that Congress will sometimes be very explicit. Well, if what we're doing is unconstitutional, the court will take care of it later. That's shirking your duty. That can't be right. You have an obligation to the Constitution too.

And putting that down the road and saying, I'm just going to pass a law because it's going to help me get elected or any of these other reasons like that. I think that the problem is mostly how is that too much with this framework because Congress then. Or presidents, the same thing, where they're like, I'm going to issue this executive order, and if I did it wrong, then the court will stop.

Again, I think the court is one of the spots where that discussion happens, but I think it has to happen in multiple places. So I think, it's this dialogue among multiple actors where it happened. And I think ultimately, James Madison's answer, who's often talked about as the father of the Constitution, who's the primary architect of it. He hated the word father of the Constitution, but nonetheless, he was saddled with it.

He argued that the best place of housing liberties is the people themselves. And Larry Kramer, political scholar, made the argument of, I think that's actually the right way to the people themselves ultimately determine the Constitution mean. And that happens during--

Victors find people.

Yeah.

Voters, the power.

Be more explicit. What people are we referring to?

It's one of the great critiques of Kramer's book. I was to say, when you say the people, how do we understand that?

I read that. I remember the book.

Yeah. So that becomes one of the great critiques of it. And I think we could also make that critique of Madison in terms of how do we think about who that is and who's involved. But I think this understanding that the people have an active role and doing it also matters. One of the articles that's in the book is from Howard Zinn, and he's writing on the Bicentennial.

Oh, crappy well.

And he makes everybody's like, look, everybody puts this big focus on the Constitution. It's great, it's wonderful, fine. But it's not the most important thing to how our everyday lives function. He says, there's two important reasons for that. One, it's incredibly short documents, so it's silent on many of the most important rights we have. So if we get into things like the environment or my worker protections. No, that's not in the Constitution.

The fact that I work a 40-hour workweek or an eight hour workday, none of that's the Constitution speaking like that. Those are all laws we've enacted, but that's not the Constitution that dictated that. So many of the most important things that affect my life on a daily basis, outside of the Constitution. The other thing he says is why the Constitution is not the most important thing is, we so often ignore it. So when it's inconvenient, we ignore it. In times of war, that's one of his examples.

But another one is like, look throughout history. We have this First Amendment protection around free speech. We have tons and tons where communists can't get free speech. Anarchists can't get free speech. We violate--

Oh, I have [inaudible].

To done it right. Well, what determines then, whether we actually uphold those rights are there so when we don't ignore the Constitution. And what actually creates those rights that aren't there that when it's something-- That's the actions that citizens take. And it's particularly when citizens in social movements.

So when we have a civil rights movement, when we have an abolitionist movement, when we have a movement towards same-sex marriage. When we have movements pushing for these types of changes. But those are the things that ultimately dictate. And see right. If you go throughout history of the Supreme Courts reversed itself more than 240 times.

So at one point, the Constitution was this and it suddenly means something else. What made that change? I mean, if we take, for example, at the point where the Defense of Marriage Act passed the early 2000, Defense of Marriage Act, says that federal government is only going to recognize marriage between a man and a woman. Now, we've almost always, marriage is one of those things that's largely defined by status.

And so this idea that the federal government, if a state decides to recognize a marriage between two men or two women, that the government is not going to recognize. This seemed like a very good thing, and so we passed the Defense of Marriage Act. Almost every scholar said, well, this is clearly unconstitutional. But the court doesn't take anything up in 2003, in part because it passes by a 90% margin in Congress and about 80% or 90% of the public supports it.

But then you fast forward to 2013, and now basically 90% of Congress opposes it, and 60% to 70% of the public no longer supports the Defense of Marriage Act. And suddenly, the court takes up a case and strikes down the Defense of Marriage Act. But what changed? Very little of the court membership changed during that time. It's one of these time periods where we didn't have a lot of change on the Court.

But what seemed to have changed was essentially what the public wanted. And that often has an influence, I think, on how the Constitution is read. And I don't know that that's always a bad thing.

But the Dobbs, it's not like that. It would really be the makeup of the Court that kind of changed, the abortion decision.

We have a much longer time window because we're going from 72 so the time window becomes much longer. So we wouldn't see it. That would be part of the public debate. I mean, abortion is one of these interesting things in terms from the point when Roe v. Wade is decided to when Dobbs is decided. Public opinion on abortion is pretty stagnant.

There's a few different arguments. One legal theory is that essentially, the Court got involved in the abortion debate too early, that essentially, if you look at the trajectory throughout the country, more and more people were being supportive of abortion being the decision between a woman and her doctor support, for that was going up and up and up. And then the Court stepped in right about when it was about 50-50 and basically support for it just leveled off and then basically never really changed.

And so one argument that came out around the issue, particularly on same-sex marriage, was the Court was operating in the shadow of Roe. And they were very worried that if you step into this debate, that's getting more and more support in public. If you do it too early, that we're basically going to quell that letting people make their decision and figure it out for themselves, so you had that sort of [inaudible].

The other interesting thing about Roe v. Wade that almost no one knows, so I love to point out to students. If you look at public opinion polling in terms of approval, Republicans were much more supportive of abortion being legal than were Democrats, by a wide margin.

That's true. Yes.

And that largely flips over time and you start to see it now. Part of that was many issues, this was seen as a way for Republicans to break up the New Deal coalition of FDR, that how do we reach these voters that we think should be our voters that are all voting for Democrats and they're like, oh, we'll take this issue on. And so many political issues for that reason, sort of taking them.

But anyway, my students are always surprised when I put that date up. Wait, Republicans ruins. Yeah, that's right, that's right. Then it flipped.

Whoa.

I hope I answered. What I said was--

It's good now. I'm trying to frame a question based on what we were just talking about, in terms of, what if one or two branches of government fail? For example, when President Trump was elected, some folks who I talked to said, well, he can do all these orders, but the Supreme Court and the court system will just strike it down as not being according to the Constitution.

And now we see that the court is just handing the administration what the administration wants. And in Congress is also not saying much about it. And so where is the checks and balances when things don't go well?

So there's a lot in that question. The first thing I would say is that we actually don't know a whole lot about what the courts allowing the Trump administration to do. So in terms of how the court functions, we've had lower courts that have ruled often against the Trump administration, and then the Supreme Court will sort of on emergency decision will say, we're going to put that on hold. And again, they've not ruled on the merits on--

Both of those?

What they've ruled is basically that we're not going to allow you to stop it in the meantime. That we think there's a higher burden for what's known as an injunction, which means you're going to stop an action from happening, then ruling on the merits and so off. And so the court has, in some sense, handed the Trump administration a victory in the sense of we're allowing the status quo, but we've not said your action is actually constitutional.

So we haven't had a lot of that, actually, where the court's been like, you're actually allowed to do what you're doing. So we're still waiting on that. And it is one of the reasons why it's difficult to rely on the court to be the one that polices everything because they're what's known as a reactive or a passive institution. They have to wait till things get brought to them, they operate in a very slow time scale, whereas the presidency is able to act first under both.

So we're still waiting. The jury's still sort of out on where the court's going to come down on much of what the Trump. Again, we have a few examples where the court has ruled for Trump in terms of the actual ruling. But mostly they said, we're going to stop that court from stopping the president. We're going to let the status quo proceed, and then we'll see where we come down in terms of the merits. And we haven't had a lot of merits-based decisions. So we're just waiting on those.

We did find out today, though, that when a lower federal court had struck down the Trump administration's tariffs in the emergency powers. And we just found out about a half hour ago that the court's going to take that up in November.

That could be interesting.

And so there we may actually get a merit decision from this court, and that'll tell us a lot more.

Is it common for there to be such a kind of friction between the lower courts and the Supreme Court?

I don't think we often have as many examples of the lower courts making as broad a rulings, but I think we also don't often have a presidential administration that's making as broad-- we are seeing the law of norm busting. And I think that's people that vote like what President Trump's doing and people that don't like what President Trump doing, I think both agree on that too. He's busting norms. Some people celebrate that. That's wonderful. Other people are very concerned about that.

So I think that, that's not a very one-sided statement to say we have a norm busting there. And so we're watching that play out. I think we don't have a lot of examples because this is a presidency that's operating in a way that's not super common, and the courts are having to therefore react in a way that's not. And again, we have certain flashpoints in American history, and we're in one of them.

So, is what we're going through now as a nation, normal? And is it particularly unhealthy for us?

So, I think there are several things that we could point to that are unprecedented in terms of the types of things that are going on. But I think the idea of the continuous debate about what the Constitution means, where we go, we have certain moments where they flare up more than others. We can look to history and see there were certain moments in the late 1800s where we have lots of political turmoil that look like this.

We had lots of moments of post-civil war, pre-Civil War. We had some moments in the 1930s that looked like this. We had some moments in the 1960s. So I think we're in a rare moment in many sense, but I don't think like we've never experienced this. So I think there are certain things to draw upon.

But I think for many of us have not lived through a moment like this. Not that they haven't happened in US history, but again, if you're having to go back to the 1960s, where we had maybe lots of these types of turmoil and debates about the powers of the presidency and the powers of-- many of us haven't lived through that before. So it feels very unusual. And it's one of the reasons why history and political science is so helpful, is to be like, hey, this has happened before, we've been able to come out of it. There's some of the ways that happened.

So should our focus of our conversations be less on the Constitution and more about who has the power to dictate or who has the power to run the country?

Yeah, and I don't know that those necessarily have to be in opposition to each other. I think that when we talk about the Constitution, I think we have to also think of it as a document that's empowering the people and allowing people to act, and that people are the ones that really great. Constitutions don't rule by text alone. I think the other thing that political scientists often talk about.

And so our Constitution is rule based on norms, what we do, and I think we do have to combine the actions that citizens are taking and how we engage in the process. That when we go vote, we can't just vote for the person that's promising the stuff we want. I think we should also be voting in a way that Congress should also be voting, what's the Constitution say.

I mean, many people are like, I want Biden to cancel my student debt. But the question should also be, even if I wanted to do that, do I think it's constitutional? And I shouldn't necessarily vote for someone just because they're going to give me what I want, even if it's not constitutional. I think, we bear a burden of also. Most of what any presidential candidate promises, they're not allowed to do, and I think we often don't know that.

They often run around saying, I'm going to do this, I'm going to do this, I'm going to do this and all can hear my head is, well, Congress lets you or Congress lets you or Congress let you. All those things are not things you're allowed to do.

I want to thank our guest, Ryan Emenaker, for joining us. His book is Current Debates in American Government. Thank you very much for coming.

And I loved our conversation today. And please join us for the next episode of Free Speech with CR.

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