Is the Constitution Dead? with Nate Fischer and Timon Cline

The Controversy Over Nate Fischer’s Tweet About the Constitution

Welcome once again to the Conversations That Matter podcast. I'm your host, John Harris. We have a special guest with us today. We have Nate Fisher, though he is driving at the moment, so you're not gonna be able to see his face, but you will hear him.

And he has been on the podcast once before. Hey, Nate, how you doing? How's it going, John? Good to be here. Yeah, I'm thankful that we were able to make this kind of work out. I have a very busy week, as I told my patrons, because my brother's getting married at the end of the week, and we have family staying with us, and it's just crazy.

But this was a controversy. I really wanted to, while the going was good, and people are still talking about it, I wanted to weigh in a little bit and give you the opportunity to weigh in with a crowd that may have seen some of the response to your particular tweet.

So I should just remind everyone, before we get into all that, of course, Nate, you are the founder of American Reformer, the CEO of New Founding. If people wanna check those out, they go to AmericanReformer, I believe it's .com, or .org, rather, AmericanReformer .org.

And what's New Founding's website? Is it just NewFounding .com? That is correct. All right, so check those websites out. There's a lot of good stuff there, and maybe we can talk about that a little later as we get into it.

But let's jump right into the controversy here, because I thought what you said was pretty obvious and tame, but you had a lot of pushback for this. So it starts off with Michael O 'Fallon at Sovereign Nations kind of in an argument with Jack Posobiec, who, he's on Steve Bannon's show a lot, if people don't know who that is, but he's a political commentator.

And they're kind of having this back and forth, and Michael finally says, accuses Jack of advocating for an unbound executive that would end our constitutional republic. And of course, this is the looming threat people accuse quote-unquote Christian nationalists of advocating when they hear terms like Christian prince and that kind of thing.

And then you jumped in and you said, you're stuck in a nostalgic fantasy. We live in an administrative judicial bureaucracy with almost no relationship to the form of government established by the constitution.

And you follow that up with, I understand nostalgia for the constitution or longing to restore the principles the founders established, but if you will not accept the reality that this is long gone, if you judge others based on fidelity to a set of principles that govern no one, then you are a fool.

Strong words there. So what did you mean by that when you said that we do not have a connection or little connection to the constitution of the founders? Well, I think it was a descriptive statement. And that was one interesting point that I think most people tried to reframe it into, many critics tried to reframe it into a prescription.

It was a descriptive statement that first of all, it's just an observation that a government that is primarily run by administrative bureaucrats and judges is radically different than the form of government that was established at the founding, in which the legislature was clearly the preeminent branch and the president was the head of the executive branch and the second most powerful.

And I think they all would have agreed that the judiciary was the least powerful. So here you have, of the three branches named, the judiciary is arguably the most powerful. And then there's effectively a new fourth branch of government or certainly a group of people who have very limited accountability to the other branches who have vast power over large shares of government.

And you look at that and it's just, it's obvious that is a very different set of rules shaping our government than the original founding constitution. And what I meant particularly was, there's sort of this strand of people, you could say on the right, I would say O 'Fallon, it's sort of ambiguous whether he's really on the right.

Maybe you would say classical liberals, certain type of libertarians who regularly try to accuse people who address reality in many ways, who either want to change the order substantially or even who wants to just operate within the rules that exist today to achieve substantive goals.

They'll regularly accuse them of wanting to destroy the constitution. They're effectively trying to hold over their head a set of principles that exist on paper, but don't really exist in practice today.

So it was first and foremost directed at that, that attempt to constrain actors on the right seeking substantive objectives in a way that reflects the reality of our government today. Yeah, you know, I think this is on Saturday.

I quote tweeted the language from the 1606 Virginia charter that talks about Christian princes and potential other settlements from European countries that would be governed by a Christian prince. And of course they didn't mean by that a authoritarian figure who was anything resembling even the Protestant Franco meme we see going around there.

It was just kind of this archetype for what a Christian ruler should look like. And Calvin talks about this in the institutes as well. And you see people freak out about this. And it's, I think it's important to remember this whole controversy we're talking about really is rooted in this freak out over scary terms and people who want to fundamentally, and maybe, well, I guess fundamental is the word.

Yeah, fundamentally change what we have currently because we know it's not working and it's evil and kids are being trans and all the rest. And it just, it's curious to me because many of the people we're about to talk about who responded to you, Nate, seem to think that on some level, all is well, that there's a mechanism for correcting this and whether that's a court case that's going to come up, but somehow the federal government or the central authority is going to limit it itself.

And it's just on the horizon. We just need to wait for it. Maybe it's the election this year is going to do it. But if we just are patient, then we can knock off all this nonsense about the constitution ending because maybe we're teetering, but we're going to fall on the right side somehow.

I see this optimism and I've seen it my whole life. And every single time the court or the executive or the legislative, but mostly the court seems to violate the documents, we're told the same thing over and over again.

And I think young people especially are just sick of it. And I don't understand why a lot of older people are not, that they have such a religious devotion to this. Do you have an idea of why maybe some of the older folks who are against Christian nationalism, especially who should know better, who have seen this train, have such a commitment to this document that doesn't seem to actually be honored?

So I think it's really odd when you consider that many of the same people who most vehemently react to this also did things like express disgust at the Trump Bible. They were sort of, they were establishment figures who tend not to like Trump because they see Trump as not being willing to play by those old rules.

They obviously use the fact that he released a Bible that included the constitution among other things in it as a opportunity to denounce him and then treat him as a heretic. And yet it seems pretty clear that they, maybe more than anyone, come close to treating the constitution as wholly writ.

So I would say it's, in many ways, it strikes me as a tool, what they're really doing when they express this allegiance to the constitution is they're really expressing an allegiance to the current order.

And it's a way for them to indicate that they're not dangerous. It's a way for them to challenge those who would assert a substantive, a request for substantive political leadership. So they've been influential and they've been influential in ways that have allowed them to sort of be seen as, you could call it loyal opposition to the ruling party.

They make clear that they're not in any way trying to upset the system. In many ways, their allegiance to the constitution is either a stand-in for the current regime. So I think one thing you'll notice a lot of times when they talk about the constitution, they're actually talking about a set of post-Warren court rulings, which are substantively a long ways away from the constitution of the founding.

And certainly the way many of those exact words were interpreted for majority of our nation's history. And that's a real irony. That's really, they're using the constitutional label, but they actually mean in many ways our sort of current constitution.

And others will do this and they'll sort of complain about how the constitution's been subverted, but they sort of hang on to a proceduralism that nonetheless ties a hand behind our back and prevents us from substantively challenging the current regime.

And both of those end up, sort of the former one appeals to people who may be, people like David French, let's say, who are really aligned with the current regime. And I would say the latter one appeals to people who might sort of fashion themselves grassroots radicals, fashion themselves sort of a little further to the right, true dissidents, but they do so in a way that remains non-threatening.

And in both cases, it allows them to sort of gain the benefits of being a sort of nominal political leader without any of the risks or responsibilities that go with actually trying to take on a substantive opposition role.

So there's an ingratiation then to the regime and that kind of overrides whatever wisdom should be there from age. Because I guess when you've built up so many years, you've been in a situation of authority, whether it's a Christian ministry or commenting on politics or maybe a political institution itself, then it's kind of hard, I suppose, to look at that and say, I was during that entire time working in a system where there was little hope of transforming it from within.

And I'm wondering, and I'm putting the best spin on it possible, if that's going through their heads. Like, what is my life's work if that's the case, if this is all just kind of dead? So anyway, well, let's move on.

Let's talk about some of these responses so I can let you respond. There was a guy named Wade Stotts who made a video and I'm assuming it was in relation to what you put out there because his video was titled, Yes, the Constitution is Dead.

And it's about 10 minutes long. I would encourage everyone, if you haven't seen this, go on YouTube or Twitter, check it out. It's a great little piece that communicates, I think, succinctly your concerns.

Did you find that video to be the same concern that you have, Nate? Or did you disagree with Wade at all?

I agreed.

I thought it was quite a, it was a very well done piece. And it was just a great, it was a great run through many of the changes that arguably are really numerous successive constitutions. I mean, in the US, we certainly label it.

We keep a higher degree of sort of nominal continuity, whereas say France would just straightforward admit that they moved on from their third republic to their fourth republic to the fifth republic, et cetera.

We've had similar transitions, but treated them on paper like they're just evolutions of the same regime. I think he very clearly lays out exactly what those successive constitutions are and what are effectively evolutions of the regime.

Now, I think there's one important point to make there, and his title is a little provocative. It says, Yes, the Constitution is Dead. I think the point that I really made, and I think that the two tweets together add context is the constitution of the founding is dead.

It's a meaningfully different constitution that governs us today. That doesn't mean we have no constitution. In many ways, the Caldwell thesis, which Wade talks about is that we do live under this civil rights constitution, and it is a meaningful constitution that exists in parallel with certain remnants of the original constitution, of sort of previous constitutions.

That remains a constitution. That's not a state of sort of total, pure, real politic without any guiding principles. And that includes, obviously, a set of rules that we live under. Now, I'd say that's a much weaker constitution in some sense, taking a Lindy principle, the principle that sort of the expected life of something corresponds to its life so far.

A constitution that's only evolved over the last 50 or so years is a constitution that is going to have a lot less authority, a lot less staying power than a longer one. But it remains a set of rules that, if recognized, can at least frame certain types of political activity today.

So that would be a certain point I would make is it describes an evolution of constitutions. The thing that's really dead is the original constitution. So would it be similar perhaps for the audience to think of it in terms of the King of England is a figurehead, but does not have the authority that parliament has?

And so to say that England's, the authority of the king is still alive, well, in a sense you could say, I suppose, but not really. And they're governed by parliament and really more so bureaucracies at this point.

I know it's not directly parallel, but maybe that would help people understand. I would say it's a very close parallel. Yeah, I mean, to say that Britain is a monarchy is really, it's ostensibly a monarchy, just like the U .S. has sort of ostensibly maintained the same form of government.

And yet in no meaningful sense is it a monarchy from a political power standpoint. So very, very similar. And that's, I think understanding what is the constitution of Britain. Again, it's an unwritten constitution.

So in some sense, it's actually accepted and taken for granted that you understand the rules as they exist at this time, if you wanna understand the British constitution. I think the idea that the constitution has changed substantially wouldn't really be as controversial in Britain.

They certainly don't have a single anchor point that's the sort of sacred document that you're supposed to express a level of fidelity to, something that was seen as, that some treat as though it represents sort of this perfect visionary form of government.

In England, it's accepted that it's evolved over time. In the U .S., I think a lot of people would say it's sort of moderately been changed, but they wanna imagine that it's a lot closer to this mythical founding document.

Well, we are gonna get into the weeds a little more on this as we continue. And we'll talk about in what ways the constitution has evolved or been re-imagined and why what we have today is different than what we had.

But I just wanna mention, we do have Tymon Klein. I think he's joining us, but his microphone is on or off. If you turn your microphone on, Tymon, I'll add you, and you can weigh in on this. Of course, Tymon's the editor-in-chief at American Reformer.

There he is. Hey, Tymon.

Hey, John, thanks. Sorry, I'm just joining now, so I don't have my bearings on what you guys have covered.

That's fine. Yeah, we're in the beginning. And if you do have access to a camera, feel more than welcome to turn that on. You don't have to, though. So let's look at some of these critiques. And I wanna start with some of the more, the nice way to say this, I suppose, is simple critiques, and then we'll extend to the ones that are a little more compelling, perhaps.

But the first one I wanna talk about is Owen Strand. Owen Strand, for those who don't know, is a seminary professor, and he, I'm trying to remember the name. I'm blanking on it for some reason. I know he was at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.

I think I have to look up the one he's at now.

I think it's called, it's something like Grace, Grace Baptist Theological Seminary,.

Something like that.

It's in Arkansas.

I think you're right, yes. Okay, so, but he has an online presence, and he wanted to weigh in on this. And he has a long tweet thread. It's almost an article. It's got 20 points to it. He also put out a video, and I figured I would show the video.

It's not that long. I don't know if it's incredibly substantive on this, but it does represent at least one of the responses, and I think it's important to respond because there were people who thought this was a good response.

So here it is.

We need to endure. We need to bear up under hardship. We need to honor everyone, love the brotherhood, fear God, and honor the emperor.

We really do.

We need to be good citizens while we're here. We need to, 1 Timothy 2, 1 to 5, pray for rulers and those in authority over us. It's very frustrating to be under godless leaders. That's not a bad instinct when you feel that.

That's a good instinct. But fundamentally, the agency you and I primarily have as believers is not to press a button and make a given country perfect or righteous or a Christian. Our agency is primarily concentrated, according to 1 Timothy 2, at least, in prayer.

You're supposed to pray for rulers and authorities and local officials. You're supposed to pray that God would work through them and in them such that Christ is known and that you and I can lead a quiet life.

Okay, I guess that's it there. So he has a tweet thread in which he gives the reasons for why he said what he said in there and seems to assume that those who are saying what you're saying, Nate, are essentially in favor of dumping the Constitution for a more perfect type of America, and that America is a theonomic America.

So it's a critique of theonomy, essentially, or his version of theonomy, what he thinks is theonomy, and that this is not grounded in the New Testament, that we're supposed to pray for our leaders, and this is a revolutionary impulse that you're advocating, Nate, that should not be advocated.

So what do you say to that? Well, I think you'll see a pattern with Owen, which is often an attack against a straw man characterization of, let's say, more sophisticated discussions on the right, and this represents that.

I think there's a couple of assumptions baked in there. The first one is just a sort of odd characterization that what was framed explicitly as a descriptive statement is actually a prescriptive statement and a call to overthrow a constitutional order, and that doesn't follow from this.

If the original Constitution is dead, as I mentioned, we could accept there's a weaker Constitution. At the same time, even if there were no Constitution or no sort of significant Constitution, there's still plenty of reasons to accept legitimate governing authority.

So a legitimate governing authority deserves a degree of respect, Constitution or not, and nothing in the statement suggested otherwise. So again, I think Owen's sort of jumping to a lot of conclusions about what's implied there.

I mean, that just high level, it's not, revolution does not necessarily follow a recognition that there has been a previous revolution or even a previous evolution. There's no need to immediately launch into a campaign for a new form of government.

If anything, I would say, if a statement is true that the Constitution is substantially evolved, well, I'll save this for a later one. The other point I think about Owen is, he framed that entire thing as a biblical response to this.

Right.

It was a descriptive statement. It was a descriptive statement. There's virtually nothing, there's virtually nothing that he cited that has anything to do with a descriptive statement about regime analysis.

It's a total category error. And that I think is, it's an attempt to jump into an attack against a straw man characterization of his opponents. I don't think there's much more to say about this because you can analyze the sort of question about what he critiques.

I would say there's a degree of, there's a pretty strong degree of political abstention, almost sort of an Anabaptist approach to politics in the way he frames this. This almost an admonition against participating in politics in any meaningful sense, assuming that sort of no matter what the political situation is, you're told primarily to put your head down.

That's, you know, there's verses in the Bible that certainly support the good of that quiet life. But I think there's also plenty of reasons to believe that Christians are called to politics, especially in a country where we have a heritage and tradition as citizens that make us meaningful political actors by design, by both the longstanding tradition we come from, and certainly by design of the constitution that Owen would cite so admiringly.

So it's a little incongruent to essentially critique us for engaging in politics, provided that politics goes beyond a very, very narrow bound. Right, yeah.

Can I just say two things on that, John, just to back Nate up here? Two things, I mean, Owen's sort of public branding, you know, he's always involved when whatever it requires for him to stay relevant.

And he's kind of branded himself as being militantly detached from the tradition. He did this back during the Doctrine of God debates, the ESS debates, you know, Aquinas is the devil, these sorts of things.

And it shows, is my only point, is he seems to have no mooring in the tradition. Otherwise he would have recognized even as a theologian that these sorts of discussions are, you know, they're very practical and descriptive discussions, the sort of regime cycle discussions that Nate was mentioning.

And these are commonplace in the tradition, even among theologians. And certainly if Owen was attached to the American tradition itself, he would recognize that, you know, the day of the ratification of the constitution, Ben Franklin basically says something like what Nate has said almost all the founders expressed these similar sorts of, similar sorts of despondency even in their day and recognized as good statesmen that America may be special in many ways, but it's not exceptional in the sense of regular laws of politics.

And so all human regimes are finite, so on and so forth. It may be the case at some point, maybe even very early as Benjamin Rush thought, like, you know, within 10 years that the constitutional order was no longer suited to particular people and that it was being adjusted inappropriately to be something abhorrent to their original design.

So my only point is this is as American as apple pie is what Nate is doing. Many have expressed this and also this sort of regime level analysis is very commonplace in the Western tradition. It's everywhere.

So there's nothing strange going on here.

We often forget too, that we had an articles of confederation before the constitution. It wasn't like we had this war and then all of a sudden the constitution. And so it wouldn't have been uncommon for people to think that, well, maybe this won't last as long.

I wanted to point out something.

John, that's an excellent point because I tweeted the other, this is the point of my tweet is actually what inspired it was the way we do regime change in America is imperceptibly. It just happens. And everyone thinks the forms are the same and everything's continuing.

What happened to the articles of confederation? Can anyone actually tell us what went on there? Does anyone know anything about that period, that sort of intermittent period? No, they don't. It's just kind of gone.

But one way to describe that is America's first coup. That's one way to describe what happened. So I'm just saying more radical things have happened before this is not strange again.

And that was supposed to be a perpetual union. The articles literally says that. One of the things I wanted to point out was Dr. James White, who actually teaches at the seminary that Owen works at. So they're colleagues.

I don't have it up on the screen, but I do have it on my phone. I don't know if people can see that. This is from 2015. And it says that we have, so this is I think probably right after the Obergefell decision, but he says, he quotes John Adams and saying that we have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion.

Avarice, ambition, revenge, and licentiousness would break the strongest cords of our constitution. As a whale goes through a net, our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

And James White then says, our IP constitution with flames, a picture of flames engulfing the document. This is interesting to me just because this is one of the colleagues that Owen Strand has been working with.

And it doesn't seem like it was a problem when James White, and I know there were others at the time after the Obergefell decision were saying things like this. But all of a sudden, if someone who's affiliated, associated, or has given any platform or had conversations with quote unquote, Christian nationalists says the same thing, they're in trouble.

And I need to point out that what I think is somewhat of a hypocrisy there. So of course, Owen was not the only one to critique. Other critiques came in. We have Dr. Jordan Cooper, who said that Nate, he said that you were not all, you were critiquing the longing to restore the principles the founders established as well.

So it wasn't just an acknowledgement in a descriptive manner, but you were prescribing that we should not seek to recapture what the founders had. And I'd be curious about your response to that particular critique, since I think this is a little bit more sophisticated than the one we just went over.

I would say it's a straight misreading of my post. I said, I understand a longing to restore the founders and principles put in place. I don't respect attempting to hold people to them when they don't exist.

So I actually think my description there is entirely consistent with efforts to restore the founding principles. There was a great scenario that C .J. Engel gave where he talked about, he essentially gave a scenario of, let's say President Trump came in and took complete control using very aggressive moves to complete control of the executive agencies, fired lots of people, really manhandled in a sense the government into something that actually resembled the executive branches prescribed in the constitution.

That would require a lot of actions that a lot of the people who are very concerned about constitutional procedure would get upset about. And it would effectively be, you could argue sort of extra constitutional action in a direction that would actually move us back toward the constitutional order.

And I think I affirmed that as a positive example. So you can recognize that, you can certainly recognize that it's legitimate to want to restore those principles. I think there's at least a lot of good debates to be had over the extent to which those principles still are possible in America.

All I reject is the idea that those should be imposed as dogmatic when they're not yet effectively, they're not yet in effect as constitutional rules. Yeah, and maybe we can talk about that a little later because I immediately remember the George W. Bush quote about we need to kind of, I don't remember exactly how he phrased it, but we need to kind of go outside of the constitution to save the constitution, which I think was a tool at that point that was used against the constitution.

And we have seen negative fruit from it, but what if someone who had the goodwill and actually valued the principles behind the constitution decided that we're so far gone, I'm gonna use power to kind of roll back everything, would that be a viable option?

And yeah, it's certainly a discussion worth having, but it seems like you can't even have the discussion without people accusing you of betraying the founding somehow, which is what seems to be happening here.

And Eric Erickson was the next one.

He said

And John, on that, I mean, something that most of these people who I think we can categorize as sort of whatever their classical liberals or whatever they would call themselves, when they talk about the constitution and the founding, they may not recognize everything that's happened, the way Christopher Caldwell describes it or whatever, but they're really talking about the post civil war constitution and they venerate Lincoln and they think everything he did was great and perfectly constitutional and any good historian, even ones that do venerate Lincoln themselves will tell you that's simply not the case.

So it was run roughshod over, there were many extra constitutional liberties taken by the executive at that point, simply unprecedented, but all that is fine. I mean, I assume because there's enough chronological distance and it's been accepted,.

But the point is, again,.

They're being sort of hypocritical and inconsistent because all that was great, but if they're really arguing about these ironclad principles that can't ever be challenged in any sense for the sake of the nation in any scenario, which is wrong to say that any structure should control over and against the health and wealth of the nation, but if they're holding to these principles this rigidly, then they should thoroughly reject Lincoln's administration.

And we know they're not gonna do that. And this might be a good time before I get to the critique from Eric Erickson, which really wasn't much, but we maybe should just go over some of the things that have changed or transformed the constitution or what we think of as the constitution.

You mentioned the civil war. Of course, we could go before that, but Lincoln suspended habeas corpus and jailed all kinds of journalists. The first income tax is under Lincoln. We have the war powers greatly extended under Lincoln for the executive, which has been a precedent in future wars.

And this was really the union triumphing over the constitutional republic in the way that people even thought about the United States. And now this is just, of course, accepted along with the FDR regime and the civil rights regime that we have now.

But what are some other things that you could point to maybe court cases or executive overreach or judicial overreach, whatever the case is that really shows you clearly, okay, we don't have the document that we started with anymore.

Tymon, for you, I guess it's you.

I mean, the one that I, of course, it's just a hobby horse of mine. So I'll use it as just, it's mass incorporation, right? Of the bill of rights into the states. This is completely destroys the original model and the structure of the federalist model.

It's dead after that. There's nothing similar about the function of the polity after that. So that's obviously post-Civil War. It's not necessarily Lincoln's doing, but it's something that, and it takes time to develop about 100 years or so to get the significant things incorporated, but that thoroughly changes the polity.

That's not the same constitutional order you had in 1787 or 1791. It's just totally different.

And that's why you have Satan statues erected and you can't have Christmas displays in certain areas. I mean, it all comes down to this.

This is really

It totally undercuts the, I mean, you don't have to be like a lost causer on this. It totally undercuts the authority of what were originally thought of as small nations within a confederation to handle domestic policy, which includes the moral health, so on and so forth of their particular state, which they thought were so distinct that this was necessary.

Of course, the anti-federalists argue that it was impossible for a legislature that was national to legislate over the entire body. It's too different. So you've come into just a totally different thing.

It's something that couldn't have been Well, it's not that it couldn't have been imagined in the late 18th century, but it was thoroughly rejected. So it is necessarily antithetical once you make those developments.

I think of the United States, or not, sorry, the wrong one, Wickard versus Filburn, which essentially extends the interstate commerce clause. This was a New Deal court case to basically regulate what farmers can do because it will impact prices, what they grow and what they don't grow.

I mean, that is an abuse of the interstate commerce clause. There's no doubt about it. The founders would be aghast that anyone would apply it in this way, and yet that's standard now. So we have a number of things that are just like that with an army of bureaucracies who are willing to enforce these extra constitutional rules and departments that have no place in the constitution, overriding the states.

And of course, there's no outcry about this because this is just accepted. And I think that's Nate's point that we've reached a point where the document doesn't really, it doesn't limit the government the way it was intended to limit government, the national government, that is.

So yeah, if any of you wanna add, we can always add more later, but if any of you have examples you wanna put out there that just show, hey, this is egregious, this isn't the constitution that we started out with, go for it.

I mean, I think an early one is Marburn versus Madison. It was at least debatable whether the Supreme Court had that supreme authority to arbitrate these disputes between the branches and not just Marburn, that was obviously sort of an early step, but a number of cases in that sequence that substantially increased the power of the judiciary, the judicial branch, all the way up to the point that you can have a random federal judge in I believe Hawaii issuing an injunction to nationwide injunction to block a presidential order on a matter that is sort of very clearly, actually I believe was at least one of these was Trump reversing a policy of Obama's that itself was sort of on its face unconstitutional.

Trump reverses that and you have a judge issuing a nationwide injunction blocking Trump from reversing that. And you've gotten to the point where I think that that's sort of a comical level of judicial supremacy over the elected president of the United States.

And I think that started with a sort of a sequence of cases, started with Marburn versus Madison and just assertion of judicial authority beyond what was clearly prescribed in the constitution. Yeah, and I just thought of another example too, like Hamilton and Jackson, of course, getting rid of the National Bank because it was unconstitutional.

And now we have the Fed. It's like, that was a debate at one time. People can't believe that, but that really was. And now it's just assumed that there's of course, a national bank and there's a federal reserve that controls interest rates and all the rest.

So, all right, so let's go through some of these other pushback tweets that came against you Nate. There is one from Eric Erickson, who's a radio host down in, I believe Atlanta, conservative talk radio kind of host.

And he says, notice, to your original tweet, notice he thinks we are both not under the system we're still under and also doesn't actually want the system the founders gave us, but something else. And this is very similar to the last one, but he follows it up with this.

This is why I wanted to read this. There is no difference from the Marxists. So Nate, you're Marxist, I guess. I don't understand what the logic is there. Eric is a hysterical guy. I think he has a pattern of excessive responses that display sort of a little connection to certainly a little sober-minded analysis.

He's a very bloodthirsty person, which is concerning. I think he probably has more tweets expressing a desire for sort of mass killings of various groups of people than anyone I've seen. And I think he responds with a similar hysteria to political statements he disagrees with.