You called me and you told me cases.

Yes, but they weren't all purely originalist cases.

It turns out that John Roberts's, you know, the 10 biggest cases of the Roberts Court, I actually think I agree with nine of, with John Roberts in nine of them, and five are on the left and five are on the right.

They're not all originalist narrowly understood, but on the l- left, okay, three this term, Cook- And, um, uh, tariffs, um, and birthright citizenship.

And before that, oh, I'm for Obergefell and Sybilious.

And the chief was in all of those except Obergefell.

On the conservative side, I actually, as an originalist, think that Roe was problematic, so, you know, Dobbs, I can, you know, is, is actually, um, uh, sound.

[laughs]

that right? Oh, great.

Yeah, yeah.

And, by the way, I have a podcast, and you can listen to that podcast, too, on Marcus Constitution, and we play some clips from the oral argument this week, and you can listen to them.

So, here's a point.

Never until Trump II, the second Trump administration, has any president tried to de-citizenize, deny a passport, deny a Social Security card to an American-born baby on the grounds that the baby did not have at least one parent who was a citizen or green card holder.

Never in all of American history, they have appointed to two particular individuals from 1885, never litigated situations.

And those individuals, the State Department basically withheld some papers, but they weren't arguing birthright citizenship.

But we'd like to get the view of your view on this matter and where this stands in terms of international law and law in the United States, because there's also the military code of conduct as well that deals with war crimes, as has been pointed out by six Democratic members of Congress who were threatened with a seditious conspiracy and a grand jury refused to just issue a true bail and threw this nonsense out.

and

Sydney, you capture that sort of better than anyone.

And there's nothing wrong with being a politician is how, you know, we achieve things is, is political things, political ends.

So Lincoln early on.

So Lincoln, Lincoln believes there are at least 10 ways to read all men are created equal.

And I give you in Born Equal 10 different readings.

I gave you, I think the best one is Lincoln's.

dred scott is the ancien regime it's

And I guess at the end of the day, the question that I have, why does it matter if we locate unenumerated rights in privileges or immunities or substantive due process or, say, Ninth Amendment, the, the different way-- places in which we can locate it? Isn't it the kind of the same analysis either way? In other words, what's implicit in the concept of ordered liberty? What's a, a long-standing recognized right that existed, say, at the time of the founding or the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment? Isn't that what we're basically doing and then attaching a label to that, attach-attaching a set of words to that?

So two points.

One, I think it's always advantageous if what the court does can be connected to the Constitution.

In a democratic society, it's very nice for ordinary people to understand what is being done, at least in theory, in the name of the Constitution.

I think it's an advantage if an eighth-grader can look at the thing and actually not say, "Huh, I thought substance was the opposite of process," which an eighth-grader might do, or a twelfth-grader.

I know I did in my first semester of law school.

I read Roe versus Wade, and I thought I was the idiot because everyone else was talking about this as if it was a thing, you know, and it was like the emperor's, you know, new clothes, and I thought I was the only fool.

So how would you apply your method to that challenge?

[chuckles]

You know, we're talking about what should be the holiday.

Lincoln should be, actually, he didn't know he was supposed to give a speech.

He just comes here in Philadelphia-... and it's Washington's birthday, and, and so he should be talking about Washington.

But no, he can't do any- he has to talk about the Declaration, 'cause for him, the Declaration is the foundation for the Constitution, so it's really interesting.

It's just impromptu, and, and he does this again, and again, and again.

And you see, they think, you know...

What are your thoughts about the debate over the Declaration today?

If one is an originalist, whatever that might mean, how are we supposed to think about the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the second founding, the post-Civil War Amendments, the 13th, 14th, and 15th, and you add the 19th as well? But really, you start with the Declaration of Independence, but I think it's been this really hard tension for a lot of originalists of what role the Declaration of Independence is supposed to play in our hearts and our minds and our hopes and our dreams.

So that is the biggest and best question about American identity, uh, about our country, and about constitutional law.

So you get an A.

(laughs) So, um, originalists are about our origins.

And I say our.

The first book was called The Words That Made Us, and that was a pun.

It was the US, the United States, we, the people of the United States, and our origins are in July 1776.

How much did the Declaration pl- What kind of role did that moral statement from the Declaration sort of play in the build-up and the lead-up to the Civil War? How much was it, uh, the incompatibility of the moral ideal with the present reality of slavery that weighed on this country?

So you don't feel like this is an exceptionally precarious moment the way that I think a l- I think a lot of people do feel that way.

I, I think it is an exceptionally precarious moment, but so was the 1850s, so was the 1770s, so was the 1780s, so was the 1790s and the, the what ha- ultimately was a-... peaceful transition of power from, from, um, Adams to Jefferson.

So the historian in me says, "Yeah, wow, I'm living in interesting times, but so have a lot of other people." And when I look around the world and I see how much, you know, this is precarious, but, but my parents, my mom passed away three years ago this week, and I think about her all the time.

My dad is 96 years old.

But my parents were born under, um, a British king halfway across the world that didn't care about them enough, and a British Parliament in which they couldn't vote halfway across the world.

And I understand a little bit through my family story what John Adams and Sam Adams and Patrick Henry and, and James Otis and the other people I talk about in the book.

I kinda get a sense of, you know, how they felt 'cause my parents tell me stories about, um, um, what they felt as youngsters.

Is there historical precedent for that?