SPEAKER_01: Every kid learns differently, so it's really important that your children have the educational support that they need to help them keep up and excel. If your child needs homework help, check out iXcel, the online learning platform for kids. iXcel covers math, language arts, science, and social studies through interactive practice problems from pre-K to 12th grade. As kids practice, they get positive feedback and even awards. With the school year ramping up, now is the best time to get iXcel. Our listeners can get an exclusive 20% off iXcel membership when they sign up today at iXcel.com slash invisible. That's the letters iXcel dot com slash invisible. Some companies are big, others are small. To Robert Half, their hiring needs are equally huge. At Robert Half, our specialized recruiting professionals elevate their expertise with proprietary A.I. tools to transform candidate discovery, assessment, and selection. Whether sourcing talent locally or in any geography that works for you, Robert Half can pinpoint hard to find candidates in finance and accounting, technology, marketing and creative, legal, and administrative and customer support. At Robert Half, we know talent. Learn more at roberthalf.com slash invisible. Squarespace is the all-in-one platform for building your brand and growing your business online. Stand out with a beautiful website, engage with your audience, and sell anything. Your products, content you create, and even your time. You can easily display posts from your social profiles on your website or share new blogs or videos to social media. Automatically push website content to your favorite channels so your followers can share it too. Go to squarespace dot com slash invisible for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use the offer code invisible to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. We get support from UC Davis, a globally ranked university working to solve the world's most pressing problems in food, energy, health, education, and the environment. UC Davis researchers collaborate and innovate in California and around the globe to find transformational solutions. It's all part of the university's mission to promote quality of life for all living things. Find out more at 21st century dot UC Davis dot edu. This is not 99% invisible, but I am Roman Mars. So I created a secret side project podcast with a friend of mine. The goal was to take some of my anxiety about the political news and turn it into something constructive and fun and interesting and share it with people. And I hope you like it. I hope you subscribe. I hope you tell all your friends. Let's send it to the top of the charts. That would be nice. I want to take all of this energy and do something good like learning the U.S. Constitution. So here's the introductory episode. Thanks.
SPEAKER_01: The whole idea for this series came from a tweet. It was by Elizabeth Jo. She's a professor at the UC Davis School of Law, and I know her personally because our kids go to the same elementary school. Elizabeth's tweet read, and I'm paraphrasing a little bit so it sounds better when I read it out loud, teaching constitutional law in 2017 means glancing at Twitter every five minutes before class. First, I laughed. Then I retweeted it. And then I wondered, what does that mean exactly? I mean, I kind of have an idea what constitutional law is. It's a class that's sometimes called the structural aspect of the Constitution.
SPEAKER_00: That is the aforementioned law professor, Elizabeth Jo.
SPEAKER_01: So I talk about things like the separation of powers. What are the different powers of the president versus Congress?
SPEAKER_00: I also talk about federalism. So how much power Congress has as opposed to state legislatures. It's nuts and bolts. It's usually a requirement if you're going to be a lawyer.
SPEAKER_01: It's a class I love teaching a lot. I admit that not every student loves it. And I can see why.
SPEAKER_00: For example, the very first case I assign on the first day of class every year is a case that was written in 1803. It's called Marbury versus Madison. It's a big deal and we'll talk about it at some point.
SPEAKER_01: But all you need to know right now is that the first sentence of that case is 60 words long. And the verb comes in the middle. So it's pretty dry. But this year has been a little bit different.
SPEAKER_00: And why is it different? Oh, you know why.
SPEAKER_01: This is what Trump can teach us about con law, an ongoing series of indefinite length where we take the extreme actions of the chief executive of the United States and channel that chaos into learning our Constitution like we never have before. I'm your fellow student and host, Roman Mars. Coming up, we're going to law school, but in a fun way. And it's meant for everybody. But first, we got to pay some bills. It's still going to be cheaper than law school. Support for Trump con law comes from Squarespace. As you can tell from the existence of this side project podcast of mine, I like to take on new creative projects just because I can't help myself. If you're about to embark on a new project, you should announce it to the world with a cool website from Squarespace. Their award winning templates are the simplest and most beautiful way to present your ideas online. Even someone like me who has no business coding at all can create a beautiful website with Squarespace is all in one platform. There's nothing to install, patch or upgrade ever for a free trial and 10% off your first purchase. Visit squarespace.com slash con law. That's all one word that squarespace.com slash con law. So the bread and butter of law professors are hypotheticals.
SPEAKER_00: Professors love hypotheticals. Crazy things that happen that they think about in their minds. What if? What could happen? And so it's the sort of thing that is not realistic always, but it's a way to get law students to think about what are the limits of the law. For example, here's a crazy hypothetical.
SPEAKER_00: Could a former president sue a sitting president for libel for making false statements about him? I'm sure you're like, well, that's impossible, but it is possible. In this new reality, that's not a crazy hypothetical.
SPEAKER_01: President Trump tweeted that President Obama had illegally tapped his phones during the election process. He said it was at the level of Watergate and he called him a bad or sick guy. Doesn't appear to have any proof, but that's what he tweeted.
SPEAKER_00: And this new window into the mind of Trump has changed the way Professor Joe prepares for class.
SPEAKER_00: Before this year, when I prepared to teach each day's class for constitutional law, typically I would read what I had assigned, look through my notes from the previous year, go teach class. Her procedure is a little bit different this year.
SPEAKER_00: This year I had a little ongoing note to myself. Do not go to class until I have checked whether the president has tweeted. If the president has tweeted, screenshot the tweets and discuss with class. So when Roman, when you brought up the idea of having some basic explanations about con law, I thought, what a terrific idea. There are so many constitutional law issues that this presidency has brought up.
SPEAKER_01: Whether you're testing mathematical models or automobile crashes, I think you can learn a lot about something by testing the extremes.
SPEAKER_00: So I like this idea that maybe we have a president who's kind of stress testing the Constitution, really giving us a sense of what are the limits of each of the different provisions that he seems to be challenging in the Constitution. And that's really important because it turns out it's forcing us to think about things and wonder, well, do we have answers to some of these questions?
SPEAKER_01: For example, when can Trump treat the presidency like The Apprentice and declare you're fired?
SPEAKER_00: When can the administration declare it's going to cut off funds to sanctuary cities? When the president talks about so-called courts, should we be worried about that?
SPEAKER_01: Yes, you should be worried. That's a solid yes, but we'll do an episode about it nonetheless. What about impeachment? Is that going to happen?
SPEAKER_00: I think it's actually practically pretty unlikely, but everybody's talking and wondering about this portion of the Constitution. So it's important to understand what it's about. Maybe even more interesting is that we're dusting off parts of the Constitution that people hardly even considered in 200 years.
SPEAKER_00: So, for example, President Trump just went overseas. He got a gold medal while he was in Saudi Arabia. Can he keep that shiny gold medal? Is that the kind of thing that's barred by the emoluments clause of the Constitution?
SPEAKER_01: Or what about owning the Trump hotel or property in other countries? Plus, there's this hardly considered part of the Constitution that liberals are salivating over.
SPEAKER_00: Could a president be declared unfit to serve and then removed from office? That's the 25th Amendment.
SPEAKER_01: These questions don't generally make it into the basic constitutional law textbooks. Because really no one has cared about them before. They're not relevant. That's the basic answer. It's kind of relevant now.
SPEAKER_01: So this is a real opportunity. I think when it comes to the Constitution, this should be a moment to care a lot about the Constitution.
SPEAKER_00: And it's not an onerous task. It's short. It's less than 5,000 words. You know, we're both Californians here, so I'll give you an example of the California Constitution. The California Constitution is 100 pages long. It's one of the longest in the world. So by contrast, the federal Constitution, you can read in one sitting. It's pretty easy. It's also a remarkably stable document. The federal Constitution's only been changed or amended 27 times, and really only 17 times since the first 10 the Bill of Rights were ratified very shortly after the original Constitution. California Constitution, we love changing stuff. We get tired of it. We've actually changed our state constitution over 500 times.
SPEAKER_01: California is a stutty cliche.
SPEAKER_00: So what's my conclusion here? It turns out that in 2017 I've decided that Trump can teach you a lot about con law. So we're going to learn the Constitution together because of Trump, because I need something to hold on to,
SPEAKER_01: and the Constitution is the life raft our forefathers gave us. And damn it, I'm going to learn how it works. A preview of what's coming up this season on Trump Con Law after this. Are you hiring? Are you the president invoking Article II, Section 2, Clause 2 of the U.S. Constitution? Well, with ZipRecruiter, you can post your job to 100 plus job sites with one click. Then their powerful technology efficiently matches the right people to your job better than anyone else. Find out today why ZipRecruiter has been used by businesses of all sizes to find the most qualified job candidates with immediate results. And right now, my listeners, presidents and non-presidents alike, can post jobs on ZipRecruiter for free. Go to ZipRecruiter.com slash Con Law. That's ZipRecruiter.com slash Con Law. This season on what Trump can teach us about con law. Think of a few things that have made the headlines. So-called courts. The president refers to the judiciary as so-called.
SPEAKER_00: He really raises a question about judicial legitimacy. That's going to take us back in time to Youngstown, Ohio, President Truman and the Korean War.
SPEAKER_01: President Trump has threatened sanctuary cities. Why is that even an issue for the federal government to talk about?
SPEAKER_00: That's because of the spending clause.
SPEAKER_01: Trump wants to build a border wall and we're still not sure who's going to pay for it.
SPEAKER_00: But one thing that's absolutely clear is that if you're going to build a physical wall all along the southern United States, you have to take people's private property. And that involves the takings clause.
SPEAKER_01: We are probably going to get a lot stricter with the border in all kinds of places, not just with the physical border of the United States, but also at international airports.
SPEAKER_00: And many more people are raising concerns that their cell phones and laptops are getting looked at by border patrol. What happens when you are asked to provide the contents of your cell phone or laptop? Why can that happen? Can it happen? And that has to do with the Fourth Amendment's so-called border doctrine.
SPEAKER_01: So every week I'm inviting you and Elizabeth Jo over to my house to teach us these topics and so, so many more on what Trump can teach us about con law. It's going to be fun and you're going to get smarter and be a better citizen. Bring the kids. They're going to like it, too. Subscribe now in Apple Podcasts, Radio Public or wherever you get your podcasts. The first full episode is already there. It's waiting for you. Go to TrumpConLaw.com for a link. This show is produced by Elizabeth Jo and me, Roman Mars. All the music in TrumpConLaw is provided by Doomtree Records, the Midwest hip hop collective. The two big takeaway lessons from this show are learn the Constitution and buy Doomtree Records because both will make your life 100 percent better. The tracks this week were from Sims, Dessa and Laserbeak. We are a proud member of Radio-Topia from PRX. Find out more at Radio-Topia.fm.
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SPEAKER_02: Welcome back to our studio where we have a special guest with us today, Toucan Sam from Fruit Loops. Toucan Sam, welcome. It's my pleasure to be here. Oh, and it's Fruit Loops, just so you know. Fruit? Fruit. Yeah, fruit. No, it's Fruuuuoot Loops. The same way you say, Stuuuuuuuuuuudio. That's not how we say it. Fruit Loops. Find the Loopy side.
