All right. I'm Bob Crawford. I'm Ben Sawyer. And this is The Road to Now. And very excited today to welcome back to the Road to Now. Jeffrey Rosen, who is the CEO, executive director of the National Constitution Center.

And we have him back to celebrate the release of his latest book, The Pursuit of Liberty,

how Hamilton versus Jefferson ignited the lasting battle over power in America.

Jeffrey Rosen, welcome back to The Road to Now.

It is wonderful to be back. Speaking of going back, this book takes us back. Every election cycle,

one side says, we're going to expand what the government can do for its citizens.

The federal government will do more for you if you vote for us.

The other side says, we're going to limit the size of government.

The most, what is Ronald Reagan?

I'm going to paraphrase.

The worst words, the worst sentence, the scariest sentence in humanity is, I'm from the government

and I'm here to help you. Jeffrey, your book takes us back to the roots of that argument,

the perennial argument over the size of government and so much more in Hamilton, and it's rooted

in Alexander Hamilton versus Thomas

Jefferson. What made you zero in on this? It's so true that it all goes back to the room

where it happened, not the one that's in the musical where they move the capital and exchange

for assuming the debt. This is a year later,

and it's a dinner party between Hamilton and Jefferson that sets up that eternal battle in

American history between congressional power and states' rights, liberal and strict construction

of the Constitution, and a strong federal government versus strong states. I was just blown away, really, to realize how constant that is.

It's the eternal battle in American politics.

Presidents are invoking it at all the crucial turning points, including most recently, as you said, Ronald Reagan, who said that he left the Democratic Party because

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