Your Weekly Constitutional

It's been five years since Stewart recorded a Constitution Day episode at Montpelier, and boy, have things changed!

Join him as he walks around the grounds on a spectacular September day, talks to staff members and guests, and even has a chat with President Madison himself.

Kat Imhoff has been the President and CEO of James Madison’s Montpelier for five years. During that time, she’s raised millions of dollars and supervised major improvements to Montpelier's grounds and programs.

Recently, Stewart sat down with her in the brand-new Potter Family Studio at the brand-new Claude Moore Hall at Montpelier's Robert H. Smith Center for the Constitution. Stewart and Kat talked all about her many accomplishments, as well as the challenges that lie ahead.

Join us for a fascinating conversation!

Talk of impeachment seems to be in the air these days, at least among Donald Trump's opponents. But is it likely? What, precisely, is the constitutional standard for impeachment?

We talk to David O. Stewart, author of what the Wall Street Journal recently identified as the very best book on the subject. It's called "Impeached: The Trial of President Andrew Johnson and the Fight for Lincoln's Legacy."

Does it seem to you that the United States is perpetually at war? How did that happen? What, if anything, can we do about it?

Stewart was recently out at Montpelier, where David Adler, the former Director of Boise State University’s Andrus Center for Public Policy, taught a seminar on how the Constitution treats the most significant decision any country can make: whether, and how, to go to war.

The Framers had some very definite ideas on the subject, but modern presidents, and many members of Congress, see it differently.

If the southern states wanted to secede, why didn’t Lincoln simply let them go? One could argue that they were making the same democratic decision that the British American colonies had made in 1776. One could also argue that secession was preferable to war. But Lincoln thought differently, and he was passionate in his belief. Why?

Professor Charles Hubbard, the Director of Lincoln Memorial University’s Abraham Lincoln Institute for the Study of Leadership and Public Policy, tells the fascinating tale.

Can you sue the President of the United States? Sure. But will a court hear the case? In legal terms, is the President immune from civil claims?

We’ll speak with Doug McKechnie, our First Amendment Guy, who’s just written a very timely article on the subject.

We’ll also hear from our good friend, Christopher Phillips, about the latest developments with his ongoing project, Democracy Café.

Do you know the difference between de facto and de jure? They’re Latin terms, the first of which means “in effect,” and the second of which means “according to the law.” The distinction is important, since, generally, there is no constitutional remedy for wrongs that are de facto, only for those that are de jure.

Richard Rothstein of the Economic Policy Institute has written a new book, The Color of Law, which exposes the myth that segregated housing patterns in the United States are simply the de facto results of millions of private decisions; he shows that they are very much de jure results of American law.

Julius Caesar died over two thousand years ago, on March 15, 44 BC. So why are we talking about him now? Well, because our Founders talked about him, and about others involved the Fall of the Roman Republic, and they talked about them a lot.

You see, the Roman Republic was perhaps the most successful republic in history before it failed in the face of demagoguery and tyranny.

Could the same fate befall our republic? We’ll talk to Barry Strauss, professor of history and classics at Cornell University, about his new book, The Death of Caesar.

It’s been a year since the historic referendum in favor of Brexit, the British Exit from the European Union. But while negotiations over this fundamental change to the British Constitution have just begun, that doesn’t mean that our British cousins have just been sitting around. In fact, they’ve just had another historic vote. William Walton of Northumbria University brings us up to date.

You’ve heard of the Shoah foundations, haven’t you? They are organizations designed to record and preserve the memories of Holocaust survivors before those survivors pass away.

There’s a similar project underway for survivors of America’s concentration camps, where over a hundred thousand Americans of Japanese ancestry were incarcerated during World War II. It’s called Densho, and one of its founders, Tom Ikeda, tells us all about it.