Consider The Constitution: 2025 Year in Review

In this special year-end episode, Dr. Katie Crawford Lackey looks back at 19 conversations from 2025 with historians, lawyers, constitutional experts, and public servants.

Transcript

announcer (00:01):

Welcome to Consider the Constitution, the podcast that cuts through the noise and provides insight into constitutional issues that directly affect every American hosted by Dr. Katie Crawford Lackey. In featuring interviews with constitutional scholars, policy and subject matter experts, heritage professionals, and legal practitioners, we examine the rights and responsibilities of citizenship. Consider the Constitution is brought to you by the Robert H. Smith Center for the Constitution at James Madison's Montpelier.

Katie Crawford Lackey (00:37):

Hello and welcome back to Consider the Constitution. I'm your host, Dr. Katie Crawford Lackey. 2025, 19 conversations, constitutional scholars, legal practitioners, historians, public servants, from TikTok to qualified immunity from the election of 1800 to the power of historic places, what connects them all? One enduring question, what does the Constitution mean for us today? James Madison was remarkably young when he began his political career, only in his mid twenties, just a decade later, in his mid thirties, he played a central role in drafting the US Constitution. By then, he had honed the political insight and constitutional vision that set him apart from his peers, the father of the Constitution, the architect of the Bill of Rights achievements that would define a nation for centuries, but who was Madison really? This year our guest helped us to see him not just as a marble statue, but as a man, brilliant and flawed, visionary and contradictory, a man who understood that democracy required both structure and flexibility, that freedom demanded constant vigilance. Let's start where Madison started with the question of rights. Earlier this year, Dr. Lynn Zel explained how Madison saw individual rights as protections from government power, even when their exercise was messy or imperfect. What Madison

Lynn Uzzell (02:30):

Wanted to defend was a broader notion of freedom of press, which allowed for error. And the reason is because even though he was not in favor of error, he also did not trust any of the branches of government to be the arbiter of truth and falsehood. And that's why the Sedition Act was a violation in Madison's understanding of the First Amendment, because even though he understood that newspapers often were guilty of what he called abuses, and that is a number of falsehoods, he was indeed the target of many falsehoods in the newspaper. And according to Dolly Madison, he generally laughed at them, but he defended the necessity of having to put up with these abuses because the benefits of a free press outweighed the dangers.

Katie Crawford Lackey (03:21):

Madison laughed at the lies written about him. Think about that. The man who wrote the First Amendment targeted by falsehoods chose laughter over censorship. He understood something profound that protecting free speech means protecting speech. We disagree with even speech that criticizes us personally, but Madison didn't create this vision in isolation. He drew on centuries of philosophical thought in his episode Dr. Dennis Rasmussen explored where Madison and his contemporaries drew their inspiration.

Dennis Rasmussen (04:01):

There's a pretty broad consensus now that they drew on multiple sources. I'll name just a couple of them. I think we have to start with John Locke Locke's book. The second treaties of government is in many ways the founding picks of liberalism in the broadest sense or classical sense, and the opening paragraph of the Declaration of Independence is a pretty good summary of Locke and treaties, the four self-evident truths that people are basically equal. We have inalienable rights, government has to rest on consent. There's a right to revolution. All these come straight from Locke. Another pair of thinkers I'll mention are David Hume and Adam Smith, both Scottish Enlightenment thinkers who had a big influence. Hume is often seen today as a kind of epistemologist and a philosopher of religion. Smith often seen as an economist, but both I think would've considered themselves first and foremost, moral and political thinkers, and they influenced the founders quite a bit as well. Then the final figure, I'll mention, I think maybe the single greatest influence of all is Montesquieu, the great French philosopher Montesquieu, whose book The Spirit of the Laws was drawn on. Actually, I mean both sides in the ratification debates, Federalists and anti-Federalists alike cited him all the time. It was almost sometimes like a wrestling match. Who could get Montesquieu on their side? Who could prove that Montesquieu would support their position?

Katie Crawford Lackey (05:13):

Locke, Hume Smith, Montesquieu. These weren't just names and books, they were intellectual architecture that Madison and his peers built upon ideas about natural rights, about separation of powers, about how to prevent tyranny while enabling effective governance. But here's what we also must acknowledge. Madison was a man of profound contradictions, and this year we didn't shy away from that truth. Sharon McMahon captured this complexity during our conversation this past March.

Sharon McMahon (05:52):

Why can't we do both things about James Madison, right? Why can't we talk about the horrors of enslavement and also his incredible political philosophy? Why can't we do both of those things? Why must he only be held up as a hero and a genius or as solely an enslave? He is both of those things, and to say that he is a very gifted political philosopher does not diminish the horrors of enslavement. It is not an either or, so that to me is very

Katie Crawford Lackey (06:25):

Evident. That's just telling the truth. Both things can be true. Madison's strengths and his failings, the constitution's enduring promise and the injustices woven into its beginnings, this complexity is nowhere more evident than here at Montpelier itself, where Dr. Kelly fto Dietz helped us understand how this place reveals the complete story, not just Madison's story, but the interconnected stories of everyone who lived and labored here. Kelly described the pivotal role. Dolly and the enslaved community played their individual lives and experiences each leaving a mark yet together shaping the broader life and legacy of Montpelier.

Kelley Fanto Deetz (07:16):

I think it's really important to understand the role of these women during this period. They were not out there fighting the wars and getting shot at and all of those things, but they were doing a very sophisticated political dances at home, and those dances dinner table, or whether it was a tea or a supper, were incredibly important for any sort of diplomatic conversation. You have this dynamic sort of charismatic woman who is running the household. She is the one that is sitting people next to one another. She is the one that's orchestrating these conversations. We all know that things are voted on after lots of conversations, things are decided on after building trust. So without her in that pivotal role, I don't see a lot of the things actually moving forward. And there were women in all of these homes and enslaved cooks and servers that were creating these meals to make sure that the guests were satisfied, that they were shown respect on the dinner table as well.

(08:17):

And so all of these connections are incredibly important in the birth of our nation as well. And thinking about the roles of the enslaved cooks, talking to Dolly to figure out what to make that night, I mean, it was a very intricate web of conversations, of stress, of labor, of pain, of pride. All of it was together. I think Mosaic is the perfect sort of phrase, and I use that a lot in my work, but it is important. Each tile is its own story, but together it makes up this big, beautiful, rich image of what actually exists.

Katie Crawford Lackey (08:49):

Madison's vision wasn't perfect, but it was adaptable. He created a framework that could grow, that could be amended, that could eventually include voices that were originally excluded from intellectual foundations. We now turn to how those ideas became institutions, how vision became reality. The Constitution doesn't tell you how to run a government. It tells you who has power and how that power is checked. Three branches enumerated powers, checks and balances. But here's what's remarkable. The founders knew they couldn't anticipate everything, so they created something rare in human history, a government designed to limit its own power while remaining strong enough to govern effectively. This year, we explored how that delicate balance actually works. Dr. Peter Castor described how the founding generation approached the challenge of translating constitutional ideals into practice.

Peter Kastor (10:00):

I often start by saying they made it up as they went along, and I don't mean to make light of what they accomplished. It was absolutely remarkable, and I think it's all the more remarkable because there wasn't a clearly articulated blueprint. The Constitution itself said practically nothing about what kind of institutions of government there would be. But what is particularly striking about the Constitution isn't that its authors failed to see this, but rather that they entrusted their successors to deal with it. They said, we're going to establish a framework, but it's pretty remarkable. I think that they entrusted their successors to do this. Many of them became their own successors. George Washington's at the Constitutional Convention, he becomes the first president. James Madison, principal, author of the Constitution, then becomes a member of the House of Representatives. And of course, Alexander Hamilton immediately moves into becoming the first Secretary of the Treasury. But for every one of them, there are a host of other people who would take on this mantle of creating a federal government.

Katie Crawford Lackey (11:07):

They made it up as they went along. I love that honesty. The Constitution was a framework, not a manual, and thousands of people, not just the famous founders, but ordinary Americans serving in government had to figure out how to make it work. So let's talk about power. Where does it reside in our system? Article one, Congress comes first for a reason, as Dr. Lauren Bell explained.

Lauren Bell (11:39):

So Congress has this long list of enumerated powers. They can raise an army and a Navy. Congress declares war. Congress can create lower courts. So under Article three, we have a court, but Article three says, and such inferior courts as Congress shall ordain and create. So even in the part of the constitution that's giving rise to our judicial branch is still saying Congress will decide what lower courts should look like.

Katie Crawford Lackey (12:10):

Congress, the People's Branch, the most powerful branch by design, but power distributed isn't power eliminated it's power that requires cooperation, negotiation, compromise. And then there's the presidency. Article two creates an executive, unlike any monarch yet powerful enough to lead a nation. This year, we examined presidential power from multiple angles. Dr. Barbara Perry, for example, discuss the importance of the peaceful transfer of power.

Barbara Perry (12:46):

We have had typically peaceful transfers of power starting with George Washington. And I would note that there was no two term limit on presidents and that George Washington stepped aside willingly and voluntarily he could have been elected for a third term. We now have the 22nd amendment that confines presidents to two terms that came after FDR had been elected four times in sort of a blowback against that. But that concept that someone would step aside from the tremendous power of the presidency, remember, this is an 1800 light part of this 18th century. The elements that are really required, I think in a peaceful transfer of power from one president to another, and particularly from a president of one party to a president of another party, would be the understanding that once all the votes are counted, both the popular vote and the electoral votes, that if there is a clear winner, even if it's controversial, those are the characteristics that we need that each side should say once the votes are counted. I will stand by the decision of this constitutional structure that was set up in 1787 in Philadelphia led by Mr. Madison.

Katie Crawford Lackey (14:02):

We also heard from law Professor Kim Wehle,

Kim Wehle (14:06):

Article two of the US Constitution, which gives the President, his or her job description has a line in there that says that the presidential have the power to issue reprieves and pardons, except in the case of impeachment for crimes against the United States. So for federal crimes, presidents can basically forgive the crime even after a conviction, even after a sentence has been issued or served. So a president cannot pardon a conviction on articles of impeachment, which of course isn't criminal anyway. That's a different kind of remedy, but that's the only express limit on the president's pardon power in the text of the itself. That doesn't mean there aren't other limits or there shouldn't be other limits, but that's the only one. The framers added to the actual text of Article two of the Constitution.

Katie Crawford Lackey (15:00):

Presidential power to pardon to command to lead is vast, but it's not unlimited. Every power is balanced. Every branch is checked and critically, all three branches are supposed to communicate with the people. Dr. Lindsay Cormack showed us how that's evolved in the digital age.

Lindsey Cormack (15:22):

Let's start with how we make ourselves heard. Every individual gets to choose their own adventure there. So you have any ability that you want to contact your representative, whether that's, I want to send them a postcard, I want to call them, I want to email them. I want to show up to town halls. I want to go to Washington DC because it's my house. Taxpayers paid for it. I can go tour it. We have a lot of agency in how we talk to them, but for them, every member of Congress is given a member's representational allowance, which is sort of their pot of money to say, here's how I can tell my constituents I'm doing work on their behalf. A lot of this used to reside in the franking privilege, which would be I can send mail to my constituents free of charge presuming that I'm telling them about what I'm doing on their behalf in dc.

(16:07):

So it might be, here's some legislation I'm pushing, or I met with this trade organization, or these veterans are trying to get this sort of bonus pension thing, and here's what I'm doing on their behalf. Now, most of that comes in the form of electronic communication, and so we see a lot of these communications either pivoting to official emails, and then there's also the plethora of online platform. So we've got members of Congress on Facebook, members of Congress on X, members of Congress, on Rumble, members of Congress, on Snapchat. They're sort of all over the place trying to reach constituents wherever they are. There's a lot of really interesting stuff that happens in direct communications to constituents. So the area that I look@istheirofficial.gov emails that they send to constituents and they send them in mass. Sometimes they'll have thematic parts where it's like, I'm sending this to everyone who clicked. I want to hear about veterans issues, or I'm sending this to everyone who clicked. I want to hear about grants. But often it's just like one e newsletter that goes out to everyone,

Katie Crawford Lackey (17:04):

Power distributed, power checked, power, transparent, or at least meant to be. The founders understood that without limits on power, rights disappear and without protections for rights, democracy withers. So let's talk about those rights about how they protect us in practice. The Bill of Rights, 10 amendments added in 1791 just a few years after the Constitution was ratified, but these were not afterthoughts. They were promises, promises that government power would be limited, that individual rights would be protected, that citizens could speak freely, worship freely, gather freely, and challenge authority. This year, we explored how those promises work in the real world in courtrooms, for example, on college campuses and in moments of crisis, because these rights are not just words on paper, they are lived experiences. Virginia public defender, Kendra Johnson, explained what this looks like in practice.

Kendra Johnson (18:16):

Broadly, the Fourth Amendment protects citizens from unreasonable sources and seizures. And then you have the Fifth Amendment that encompasses quite a few rights. So there's right to grand jury indictment. There's double jeopardy. There's also the right against self-incrimination, which most people know from the Fifth Amendment. I plead the fifth. And then there's due process, which is just the right to a fair trial. And then we have the sixth Amendment, and it also encompasses a lot of rights. There's a right to speedy trial. There's a right to an impartial jury, which I think most people maybe associate that with the sixth Amendment, the right to confrontation. So confronting and cross-examining witnesses that are against you in a trial, and then assistance of counsel. So those are the main ones that are encompassed within each of the amendments.

Katie Crawford Lackey (19:02):

Fourth, fifth, sixth Amendments, search and seizure, self-incrimination right to counsel. These aren't obstructions. They're the protections that stand between citizens and government power every single day. But what happens when those protections seem to conflict with public safety? When police officers need to make split second decisions? This is where constitutional law gets complicated and sometimes controversial. Professor hang Chambers helped us understand qualified immunity.

Hank Chambers (19:37):

Qualified immunity as a definition broadly speaking, allows for folks who have engaged in what we would think of as wrongdoing to avoid liability. You don't need immunity unless there's been wrongdoing. The point to immunity is I would otherwise be responsible and I'm being deemed not responsible because of some other societal reason or justification. So if we start with that as a context, that can allow us to get into the idea of qualified immunity when people are not going to be held responsible for wrongdoing and when they are in the broader context, what we have to think about, particularly when we think about police officers, oftentimes it's law enforcement folks, even though qualified immunity can apply to other folks as well, but let's keep it to police officers and law enforcement. So part of the standard for qualified immunity is that the officer's conduct has to violate a clearly established law or practice. And what that tends to mean is, do we have a court case of which the officer should have been aware that would have told the officer What I'm doing is unlawful? And that's the piece of the puzzle. So there are times when folks clearly do knowingly violate the law under those circumstances. Qualified immunity does not help the officer

Katie Crawford Lackey (21:03):

Balance. That word keeps coming up, balance between rights and safety, balance between freedom and order between what the Constitution guarantees and how those guarantees work in practice. Nowhere is that balance more visible right now than on college campuses where First Amendment rights meet complex questions of community safety. Chief Timothy Longo of the University of Virginia talked with us about this challenge.

Timothy Longo (21:35):

I've always said that policing is balancing the rights of individuals against the interests of the government. And the counterbalance is always the expectations of the community that you serve. And when you think about the five protections that are codified within the First Amendment, if you just think about those five things and set the remainder of the Bill of Rights aside, really important things to be able to express yourself expressions, not just word, it's other means of communication that express thoughts and ideas, your freedom to believe, your freedom to push back on the government, the freedom to record the government in action and memorialize it, then have that memorialization find its way into social media. Those things are all important aspects of our constitution in the First Amendment. And then by the same token, while it's important to protect an individual's right to engage in those activities, it can't be at the expense of the safety of others.

Katie Crawford Lackey (22:28):

These are the real world questions. Constitutional democracy asks us to answer, not in the abstract, but in these specific moments on campus in courtrooms. And here's what Dr. Casey Burett reminds us. Sometimes our biggest obstacle to understanding these questions is our own misconceptions about how government actually works.

Casey Burgat (22:52):

What we're mis looking at or misinterpreting here is that we have a lot of high profile examples of the problem when it is not representative of the entire population. So when I say member of Congress, you're probably thinking of Mitch McConnell or Schumer or Pelosi, right? These are the right tail experiences, the exception, not the rule. And so really, if you're looking at a Congress, the majority of the House of Representatives turns over every eight years, just like what term limits proponents want. The senators serve about two terms, which is exactly what term limit proponents want on average. It is a function of us only looking at the exception of these people who are holding on for literally decades and decades. But these are the less than 1% of the types of members that we're looking at. And so couple that with the fact that the incumbency advantage right now that we used to assume the minute you get the job, you can hold it as long as you want because you have all of these institutional of keeping yourselves in power, whether it's increased fundraising, or you can pass a bill or you can send home pork to the district and be popular.

(23:52):

Those things are actually gone or mostly gone. And in fact, being an incumbent right now is incredibly challenging. You don't want to be serving in Congress because you voters are odd, fundamentally pissed at Congress, right? You have to over explain and you're susceptible to a candidate or a challenger saying, this guy's gone Washington. This girl's gone Washington. He's part of the problem. He's part of the swamp. Send in someone new. If you don't know your members of Congress's name, that's ironically a good sign because they're actually doing the work. The ones that are showing up every single night on the same cable news channels, those are the ones with a different incentive structure that are, let's just say, not spending the hours writing policy to make America a little more effective or functional on a lot of different fronts.

Katie Crawford Lackey (24:34):

Rights are not self-executing. They require active protection. They require citizens who understand them. They require officials who respect them. They require all of us to be informed, engaged, and vigilant. But here's what we also learned this year, the story of who has those rights, who's been included in we, the people. That's been a struggle since the beginning. And that struggle continues. We the people, three words, the opening of the Constitution, but who is included in that? We in 1787, certainly not women who were denied the right to vote, certainly not enslaved people who were counted as three fifths of a person for representation purposes, but had no rights at all, not Native Americans and not many others. The story of American democracy is in many ways the story of expanding that we of people struggling generation after generation to make the constitution's promises real for everyone. And in 2025, we heard those stories. I'm again reminded of our conversation with Sharon McMahon.

Sharon McMahon (25:52):

Many other Americans had very significant contributions in small and mighty ways, despite having backgrounds that perhaps were not what we would regard as perfect, that are not TV worthy backgrounds by today's standards. And I think sometimes we discount our own contributions because we feel like, well, I'll never be a James Madison. I'll never be an Andrew Carnegie. I'll never be Phil in the blank. And that actually is a really good thing. We don't need it. We don't need a second version of any of these people. We need the contributions that only you can bring to the table,

Katie Crawford Lackey (26:31):

Small and mighty. I love that phrase because it really captured what we mean by American democracy. It's not a concept built by the founders alone. It was built and is still being built by ordinary people who refuse to accept injustice, who organized, who protested, who insisted on their rights. And let's be clear about where we all started recognizing the extent to which slavery was woven into the constitution's structure. Dr. Joshua Rothman helped us understand the pressing question. The framers confronted at the Constitutional convention, how to appropriate representation in a nation where nearly half a million people were enslaved.

Joshua Rothman (27:19):

The largest amount of time at the Constitutional Convention is spent on the issue of representation of the states and the people, right? I mean, that's sort of the so-called great compromise that comes out of this, right? They spend almost half the time at the convention just trying to figure this out. But slavery is a component of that because it gets to a basic definition of what do you mean by the people? So if enslaved people count as people, then a place like South Carolina in which the majority of the people are enslaved, nobody's imagining that those people are going to get votes. So do you give representation in Congress to a state like South Carolina based on the number of enslaved people they have? It not only incentivizes slavery gives an enormous amount of political power.

Katie Crawford Lackey (28:08):

What do you mean by the people? This question echoes through American history, through the Civil War, through reconstruction, through the women's suffrage movement, through the civil rights movement, through today. And here's something Anita McBride taught us, even women who helped shape this nation, women like Abigail Adams and Dolly Madison had to navigate power without having constitutional rights themselves. Almost a century and a half from, remember the Ladies to the 19th Amendment, which recognized women's suffrage rights. Women did not

Anita McBride (28:49):

Have rights in our constitution. In fact, Abigail Adams really admonished her husband in the writing of the Constitution to remember the ladies. But of course, it was 133 years before that happened, and women really had rights. But yet she was a powerful force and so much so, and recognized that way that she was criticized some for it publicly and call Mrs.

Katie Crawford Lackey (29:12):

President the work of expanding. We the people is not finished. It's ongoing. It's the story of the past. It's the story of the present, and it's the story of the future. Every generation has to fight for inclusion, for justice, for the constitution's, promises to become real, which brings us to the question, what is our responsibility? What's the work that we need to continue? Democracy isn't a possession. It's a practice. It's not something we have. It's something we do every day, every election, every moment. We choose engagement over apathy, understanding over ignorance and connection over division. The Constitution gives us a framework, but we have to make it work. We have to show up. This year, we heard from people dedicated to that work, to education, to preservation, to ensuring that each new generation can engage with these ideas. Let's close with their insights. We heard from Dr. John Ssta about the significance of the election of 1800.

John Ragosta (30:31):

They're having these disagreements about foreign policy, about domestic policy, and they really don't know quite how to handle the disagreements. They needed to understand how you work a democracy. I mean, the idea is still relatively new. I tell people, everybody knows the first rule in a democracy, majority rules. What wasn't so clear was the second rule in a democracy, equally important, which is the minority has to accept the first rule, at least until the next election. And so they're trying to figure out what do we do when we disagree with the government? Because in a democracy, you're going to disagree with the government sometimes. What do you do to be a loyal opposition? It's easy to be an opposition, but what does it mean to be a loyal opposition and to support the country even when you oppose the policy

Katie Crawford Lackey (31:25):

1800, the first time power transferred peaceably between opposing parties. Now, this was not a guarantee. It was not inevitable. People made it happen. They chose democracy over chaos. And here's what Tom Mays from the National Trust for Historic Preservation reminded us. Places like Montpelier aren't just museums. They are active sites of democratic education. They connect us to the origins of our constitutional system.

Tom Mayes (31:58):

Well, the landscape is essential for telling the story of Montpelier, of course, because that's why the Madisons were here. It was their source of income. It was a plantation. There were hundreds of enslaved people here who worked the land, who made the lifestyle that James Ann, Dolly Madison lived possible. And they are also still present in the landscape with the burial ground for the enslaved community, which we are in the process of memorializing even more than it's already recognized.

Katie Crawford Lackey (32:30):

Places like Montpelier aren't just museums. They are active sites of democratic education. They connect us to the origins of our constitutional system. And let's come full circle back to where we started with James Madison with the First Amendment, with the question of how his principles apply to our challenges today. Dr. Ling Zel helped us understand that Madison's wisdom about free speech isn't just historical, it's urgent.

Lynn Uzzell (33:03):

If you look at his original proposal for the First Amendment, he said, freedom of speech being the Bulwark of Liberty.

Katie Crawford Lackey (33:13):

25 years ago in the year 2000, many people predicted democracy couldn't last too fractious, too divided, too fragile. 225 years ago, many people predicted our constitutional experiment would fail, too radical, unprecedented, too ambitious. But here we are. We are still debating, still disagreeing, and still working it out. This year through 19 conversations, I've been reminded of why this work matters, not because the Constitution is perfect. It's not because our history is unblemished. It's certainly not. But because the framework the founders created flawed as it was, gave us the tools to make it better, to expand rights, to include more voices, to correct injustices, that work isn't finished. In fact, it's never finished. Every generation inherits the responsibilities to consider the constitution, to ask what it means, how it applies whether we're living up to its promises. So thank you to every guest who joined us this year. Thank you to every listener, yes, including you who engage with these ideas to everyone working to build a more perfect union. I'm so glad to have you in this with all of us, and the work continues and we're honored that you're a part of it. I'm Dr. Katie Crawford Lackey, and this is Consider The Constitution.