The Invisible Architecture of Our Democracy

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4.5 • 52.8K Ratings

🗓️ 10 November 2024

⏱️ 35 minutes

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Summary

We're in a moment of political change. This change often brings with it a reinterpretation of our democratic values. Those values originate with The U.S. Constitution and its 27 amendments. The words in these documents are the foundations of our democracy and the promises made are powerful, like the right to free speech, the right of the people to keep and bear arms and the promise that a person cannot be tried twice for the same crime. But what do these words really guarantee, especially as they are reinterpreted time and again as the world changes? Throughline, NPR's history podcast, has been exploring the long, fraught history of America's constitutional amendments in a series called "We the People" and in this episode they bring us some of the stories they've uncovered in their reporting.

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0:00.0	Hey, a quick word before the show. The presidential election is over, but we're still here for reliable
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0:37.2	I'm Aisha Roscoe, and this is a Sunday story from up first.
0:41.4	Every Sunday we do something special.
0:43.8	We go beyond the news of the day to bring you one big story.
1:02.0	So I want to tell you about this moment when I discovered something basic about how this country works.
1:07.0	I'm in this big hotel in New York.
1:08.6	Thank you very much, everybody. We've had a great three days at the United Nations in New York.
1:13.4	Donald Trump is president. It's his first term, and he's having a concluding press conference.
1:19.7	And this is quite a gathering. Wow. It's a lot of people. A lot of media.
1:27.6	Just a few days earlier, there had been a big, splashy article with reporting that Trump's
1:35.0	Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein had talked about invoking the 25th Amendment to remove
1:42.1	President Trump from office.
1:43.9	So I raised my hand.
1:46.6	Yes, yes, ma'am. Yes, go ahead. Because that's how you got his attention. Mr. President,
1:51.3	you have another meeting tomorrow with Rod Rosenstein. Are you planning to fire Rod Rosenstein?
1:57.6	I'm talking to him. We've had a good talk. He said he never said it. He said he doesn't
2:03.6	believe it. He said he has a lot of respect for me. And he was very nice and we'll see.
	...

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