The Constitution Explained by Historian Jill Lepore [0:00-5:06]

In your book, We The People, I think it's fair to say proposed a constitutional amendment based on Senator Gaylord. Gaylord Nelson. Gaylord Nelson's constitutional amendment from the 70s, right? Yeah, you know, I had run for a number of years with some undergraduates and like a Cracker Jack research team. This amendments project where we made a database funded by the National, we end down for the Humanities, this digital research project. It's called the amendments project and you can go search yourself by topic and see all the efforts that people have made over the years to try to amend the Constitution. I got really interested in these environmental amendments. You know, remember Nixon was the environmental president in 1970. He said it was a big environmental decade. You know, most of what it was created then is now being dismantled. But one of the things, Earth Day 1970, we're having Sunday later this month. One of the things that Gaylord Nelson who created Earth Day started Earth Day also proposed was a constitutional amendment, a right to a healthy environment. And it was really just at the cusp of when there had been four amendments ratified between 1961 and 1971, then the ERA passes Congress. It seemed like we were going to keep going, you know, an amendment to a policy electoral college had passed the House. It just seemed like there was a lot of the window, the giant was still awake, you know. And if things had gone differently, we might have had that environmental protection amendment, which would mean that things like dismantling the EPA now just couldn't happen, right. They would have been constitutionalized. So I don't know, it's just a kind of big what if for me. Well, let's hear from our viewers. Jill Lapura is our guest. The book is called We The People, a history of the US Constitution. Jim is calling in from Dixon, Illinois. Jim, you're on the air. Please go ahead. Hi. I have a question for Jill. I'm studying the first amendment. And I wonder how much influence about this five on Jefferson and Madison and getting the first amendment, separation of church and state and the establishment of freedom of religion. Jim, I didn't hear the first part. How much influence? Who had on it? I think that this and John Leland. I think that this is like back is okay. We're in conversation with Jefferson and Madison concerning the first amendment and article one. I wondered if a couple of things really with the advent of Christian nationalism, I wonder if you see that as something that's jeopardized, we seem to be losing article one. But I wonder how much influence. Let's go there. We got lots of calls waiting. Jill Lapura, freedom of religion. Isaac Backus, who is? Yeah. Isaac Backus is an 18th century thinker who was very much in conversation with the framers. I think that actually the first amendments, origins are best understood in the context of the state constitution. And this remember by the time the first amendment is offered by Madison to Congress in June of 1789, the states all have their own constitutions and they have been laboratories for ideas about rights. So including in Virginia where both Jefferson and Madison had been involved in thinking about religious freedom and Jefferson wrote that Virginia's Declaration of Religious Freedom, which I think is the greatest influence on Madison's framing of that amendment. Text from Deborah, Santa Cruz, California. Why is the Knight Amendment so completely ignored and disregarded? And according to my copy of the Constitution here, the Knight Amendment is the enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people. Can you explain what that light debt, because that's lawyer language? Yeah. Yeah. Why wouldn't say the Knight Amendment has been entirely ignored. It's something that people kind of creatively talk about in legal scholarship a lot. I remember, you know, when I was a kid, my mother, I was used to say, you have to do where I was asked to name the seven deadly sins. The one that you can't name is the one that you must be guilty of. It's your favorite. Yeah. So the ninth is not the least attended to. I would say the third is the least attended to John Mulaney has a very great bit about the third amendment. No one can name the third amendment. It's interesting that actually historically the second amendment was the least attended to up until a very recent history up until the last 20 years.