Should We Break Up With the Founders?

Earlier this year, the National Constitution Center hosted an event in Miami, Florida, featuring a series of meaningful conversations about the Constitution with speakers of diverse perspectives. In this episode, we’re sharing one of those conversations with you. During an evening keynote program, five great constitutional experts were asked an important question: Should we break up with the founders? In other words, should we still look to the drafters of the Declaration and Constitution—from Thomas Jefferson to James Madison to George Washington—despite their moral and philosophical hypocrisies, such as ownership of enslaved people, or do they still have something to teach us? And was the original Constitution a flawed but meaningful attempt to realize the ideals of the Declaration of Independence, one made more perfect by Reconstruction—or is the original Constitution so fatally flawed by the original sin of slavery that it does not deserve respect? The five scholars you’ll hear discuss and debate this question are: Akhil Reed Amar of Yale Law School, Caroline Fredrickson of Georgetown Law, Kermit Roosevelt of Penn Law, Jamelle Bouie of the New York Times, and Charles Cooke of the National Review. Host Jeffrey Rosen moderates. 

Resources:

• Kermit Roosevelt III, The Nation That Never Was: Reconstructing America’s Story (2022)
• Akhil Reed Amar, The Words That Made Us: America’s Constitutional Conversation, 1760–1840 (2021)
• Caroline Fredrickson, “A Constitution of Our Own Making,” Washington Monthly (2021)
• Jamelle Bouie, “We Had to Force the Constitution to Accommodate Democracy, and It Shows” New York Times (Oct. 2022)
• Charles C. W. Cooke, National Review, “America’s Founding Changed Human History Forever” (July 4, 2016)

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You can find transcripts for each episode on the podcast pages in our Media Library.