Article I of The Constitution

Maybe you’ve read the Constitution a ton of times. Maybe you’ve never read it. Maybe you even have one somewhere in your home! But, even for us civics lovers, there are times we forget what exactly is in it. However, by the end of this episode, you’ll know each and every part of the largest, and most important, section. Article I, which lays out the powers and restrictions of Congress, is massive. It comprises a full half of the written Constitution, and it’s the part the framers spent the most time debating. Today we’re going through the entire thing, section by section, with the inimitable Linda Monk, JD. Linda is a constitutional scholar and author of The Words We Live By, An Annotated Guide to the Constitution and The Bill of Rights: A User’s Guide. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Nick Capodice?

  Hannah, do you remember when this happened?

• 0:02Speaker 01

  Donald Trump, you're asking Americans to trust you with their future. Let me ask you, have you even read the United States Constitution?

• 0:16Hannah McCarthy?

  Oh, yes, I do.

• 0:19Nick Capodice?

  Do you want to tell everybody what we're listening to here?

• 0:21Hannah McCarthy?

  Oh, I sure do. This was at the Democratic National Convention in the summer of 2016. And onstage, the father of a soldier who was killed in the Iraq War pulled out a pocket Constitution.

• 0:34Speaker 01

  I will gladly lend you my pocket.

• 0:41Hannah McCarthy?

  And in a rare moment of everyone actually thinking about the Constitution, this moment went kind of viral.

• 0:47Nick Capodice?

  So the speaker, Keizer Khan, was referencing the constitutionality of Donald Trump's proposed complete and total shutdown of all Muslims entering the United States.

• 1:01Nick Capodice?

  And I'm bringing this up, Hannah, because at that time, there was no Civics 101 podcast. And for me personally, you know, I'd read the Constitution a few times in my life at that point. I didn't have a tremendous grasp of it. And I'm wondering if there's anyone out there who's like me, you know, the Nick back in 2016, someone who cares about this country and cares about politics and has a pocket Constitution, but you know, doesn't 100% know what exactly is in it and where, you know? But today, today, we're going to fix that.

• 1:42Nick Capodice?

  If you do not know what's in Article One of the Constitution, by the end of this episode, you will. I'm Nikapadij.

• 1:50Hannah McCarthy?

  I'm Hannah McCarthy.

• 1:51Nick Capodice?

  And from NHPR, this is Civics 101. Stick around.

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• 2:28Speaker 04

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• 3:25Hannah McCarthy?

  All right, so Article One, Nick, we're doing the whole thing?

• 3:28Nick Capodice?

  The whole thing, from stem to stern, from the crown to the toe top full. Hannah, I am not going to recite all of Article One to everyone out there, but I did want someone to walk us through it. I wanted someone who knew this thing cold.

• 3:44Speaker 06

  So when we're looking at the US Constitution written in 1787, we have to remember that this is a document in writing with words.

• 3:56Hannah McCarthy?

  Oh, Linda Monk.

• 3:57Nick Capodice?

  Linda Monk, J.D., the Constitution Lady. Linda is a constitutional scholar. She has written many books on the Constitution, including The Words We Live By, Your Annotated Guide to the Constitution, and The Bill of Rights: A User's Guide. And she started our little chat with telling me about how Americans wanted a physical, written in ink, Constitution.

• 4:21Speaker 06

  The American people, pretty early on, actually, even back to 1641 in the Massachusetts Body of Liberties, wanted their rights written down, wanted the government's powers written down. So unlike the United Kingdom, where they have a Constitution that has different written documents that are part of it, it also has a body of kind of unwritten mores and values that they consider their Constitution, but it's unwritten. And to Americans, that would be really unacceptable.

• 5:02Nick Capodice?

  So that's how we got a written Constitution, starting with a preamble, and then Article One, which is the beating heart of our government.

• 5:12Speaker 06

  One of the things we look at when we look at Article One, which sets up the legislative branch, is that it is at least half of the written Constitution.

• 5:23Hannah McCarthy?

  Half of the written Constitution?

• 5:25Nick Capodice?

  Half. If you go down to the National Archives in DC and you look at that original parchment.

• 5:30Hannah McCarthy?

  Which is stretched, dried, animal hide, by the way, which I don't know why I didn't know until I was looking at the plaque next to it in Washington DC.

• 5:39Nick Capodice?

  Well, if you are at the Archives looking at the actual Constitution, Article One makes up two full pages, and the whole Constitution is only four.

• 5:49Speaker 06

  Big part of that fourth page is the signatures. So especially when you take out the signatures and you look at Articles One through Seven, what do they say? Article One with the legislative branch is well over half of the entire document. It's much larger than the executive branch, which is second, and then the judicial branch, which is third. So just looking at the framers of the Constitution, people who actually wrote the document, and then when you look at the legislative history of it too, it's very clear that they intended for Congress to be the dominant branch. And Congress gets the most words and the most explicit powers.

• 6:36Hannah McCarthy?

  You know, this is interesting because I think people think of the three branches as, you know, sometimes being equal, at least in theory, and they check each other equally, but you know, they're not. And it sounds like they were not intended to be.

• 6:52Nick Capodice?

  Yeah, Congress was the top dog in 1787. So let us get into it. Article One comprises 10 sections, and we're going to go through each one. And Section One is so short, it's the only one I'm going to read verbatim. Here it goes, quote, "All legislative powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and a House of Representatives."

• 7:17Speaker 06

  Section One sets the basic template of that it establishes the legislative branch, and it even names that legislative branch to be Congress. Well, now, was that a brand new term that they'd never heard before? No, Congress had been called Congress under the Articles of Confederation. It had even been called the Continental Congress during revolutionary times. So this idea that there's a legislative body that's really running things is an old idea. It goes back to England when, you know, England had its Civil War 100 years previously to the American Revolution.

• 8:01Speaker 06

  And the big contention there is, is the king's power going to be absolute? Or can Parliament, the legislative branch of England, have power? And in fact, today, it's known as parliamentary supremacy. Parliament is supreme over the rest of the government.

• 8:20Hannah McCarthy?

  Okay, Section One just says there's a thing called the Congress, and it's got a House and a Senate, and they have all the legislative powers, meaning they make the laws.

• 8:29Nick Capodice?

  Yeah, clean and simple. Sections Two and Three, I'm going to kind of mix them a little bit here. They lay out how the two chambers work respectively. Section Two is the House of Representatives, and Section Three is the Senate. And here's where we got to jump back a little bit and look at the debates that were going on when the Constitution was written.

• 8:48Speaker 06

  In the Constitutional Convention itself, held in Philadelphia, there were two major issues that were at stake. And the resolution of those issues was going to determine whether the Constitution would actually be approved, both by the delegates there and later by the American people.

• 9:09Nick Capodice?

  Now, let's remember, at this point, there was a pre-Constitution Constitution called the Articles of Confederation, which is the framework that was set up during the American Revolution.

• 9:20Speaker 06

  The first was, under the Articles of Confederation, every state was equal. And like 13 coraling brothers and sisters, nobody wanted to give up any of their power. They wanted to all be equal in the new form of government. Now, larger states like Virginia, New York, Pennsylvania, weren't really keen on that idea because they thought, well, we have more people. We have a greater population. And, and so it's only fair that our people get more representation.

• 9:59Speaker 06

  So the resolution of that particular dispute was what's called the Great Compromise, where you had two houses in Congress.

• 10:10Hannah McCarthy?

  And the Great Compromise was that the House has representatives from each state according to its population, AKA proportional representation. And with the Senate, you have senators representing the people, but it's two from each state.

• 10:25Nick Capodice?

  And that the tax liability is portioned out using the House model. That is, the amount that the federal government collects in taxes from people is directly tied to how many people live in your state. And then we run into a famous, or rather infamous, quandary.

• 10:44Speaker 06

  And the second compromise, which many Americans still today find abhorrent, but it was the compromise that was made, rightly or wrongly, was, okay, when you count the population of these states.

• 11:03Speaker 06

  Who are you going to count? Because they quickly agree, well, we're going to count a lot of people that we would call citizens, but they don't vote. And that's white men without property, that's women, that's children. Children are still citizens, even though they don't get to vote. Whole categories. And so the question then becomes, what about enslaved people?

• 11:28Hannah McCarthy?

  Southern states want to count enslaved people toward their populations because that means they will have more representatives in the House.

• 11:37Nick Capodice?

  Yes, and they do not want to count them when it comes to taxes because the fewer people a state has, the lower their tax burden is.

• 11:46Speaker 06

  And here's a deep conflict irony that is difficult for modern Americans to understand is the issue was, would enslaved people be counted as full persons for the purpose of both population and taxation? Or would they not be counted as persons at all? Some northern states says, wait a minute, you say that enslaved people are your property. Well, then if you're going to count your slaves for, for representation, then we're going to count our horses and cows. That makes the same sense.

• 12:26Speaker 06

  The dilemma is, is that if you count enslaved people fully, 100%, does that end slavery? No. And who does it give power to? It gives power to the very states that are holding people in bondage. So again, we think today about, oh, three firsts, three fifths of a person, which was the compromise that came up. Okay, we're going to say three fifths of all other persons.

• 12:58Hannah McCarthy?

  The three fifths clause was in section two, but it was abolished upon the passage of the 14th amendment in 1868. Now, the 14th amendment, of course, granted birthright citizenship to people, meaning that if you were born here in this country, you were a citizen of this country.

• 13:16Nick Capodice?

  Absolutely. But if you're looking at Article One as it stood when the Constitution was written, that was how it apportioned out representation and taxes. Representation being how many people each state gets in the House. And if you read it, you will notice, Hannah, they never even once use the word slavery. It just says a free person counts as one, and everybody else counts as three fifths.

• 13:41Speaker 06

  You're free to disagree with it, but the rationale was, we're not talking about any slavery. We're not talking about any slavery. We're talking about political representation and power.

• 13:53Nick Capodice?

  So here is the formula, the mathing out of how many representatives a state can get in the House. Quote, "The number of representatives shall not exceed one for every 30,000," end quote. The average member of the House in the 18th century represented about 25,000 people.

• 14:11Hannah McCarthy?

  So right now, there are 435 members of the House of Representatives, and that is where it is staying unless someone passes another act or law, because that's where the number was capped in 1929.

• 14:23Nick Capodice?

  Yep.

• 14:24Hannah McCarthy?

  Just out of curiosity, though, if they had not capped it, Nick, where would we be right now? How many members of Congress would there be?

• 14:31Nick Capodice?

  A lot.

• 14:33Speaker 06

  Today, a member of the House represents about 750,000 people, which is pretty phenomenal. I think using that original proportion, Congress would be somewhere around 5,000 representatives.

• 14:47Hannah McCarthy?

  5,000?

• 14:48Nick Capodice?

  5,000. The House would need to be about 11 times bigger. Anyways, section two also says that members of the House serve for two years, that they have to be at least 25 years old, they have to live in the state that they represent, and they have to have been a citizen in the U.S. for the last seven years. And finally, last part of section two, we get to a power that the House has all to itself.

• 15:14Speaker 06

  The House has the ability to impeach. Impeach means charge. That means that there's a charge laid against them, and it's done in the House of Representatives. That's where it has to begin. And this applies to officers, officials of the executive branch, and of the judiciary branch.

• 15:35Hannah McCarthy?

  And to be clear, impeaching someone does not mean removing someone from office. Three presidents have been impeached so far, but so far, none of them have been removed from office.

• 15:50Nick Capodice?

  Yes, and we are going to get to that removal a little later in the next section, section three, which is all about the Senate. Two senators from each state, they serve six-year terms, and originally, you did not used to have any say whatsoever in who your senator was. You didn't vote for them. Your state's legislature chose senators, no election at all. And unsurprisingly, wealthy and powerful people usually got the job.

• 16:19Speaker 06

  Now, at one time in American history, the Senate was called the Millionaire's Club because it was believed that state legislatures would just pick a millionaire to, that was one of their benefits, was to get the state legislature to put them in, in the Senate. There's other reasons the Senate is called the Millionaire's Club still today in terms of net worth. What was changed is the 17th amendment then gave direct election of senators. So that's another one of those examples where the Constitution of 1787 was made more democratic in the sense of the people, the everyday people who could vote were allowed to directly

• 17:04Speaker 06

  choose more and more of the opposites.

• 17:08Nick Capodice?

  Again, two senators from your state, no matter how big or how small it is. Next interesting thing about the Senate is their length of term. Now, Linda already mentioned that it's six years, but the Senate is on sort of a round robin rotation. So only one-third of the Senate is up for election every two years, sort of maintaining a status quo, like a, this is how we do things around here kind of vibe.

• 17:33Hannah McCarthy?

  Kind of like Theseus's ship.

• 17:35Nick Capodice?

  Yeah, I've had the same broom all my life, just changed the handle and the bristles. It's a good joke.

• 17:43Speaker 06

  And the Senate has the vice president, this is very unusual, you have in the Constitution, a member of two branches. The vice president is in the executive branch, but he's also considered the president, or she is also considered the president of the Senate, which is a very influential job. And when the Congress is divided, or the Senate is divided, the vice president can do tiebreak, make tie-breaking votes, and that has happened repeatedly.

• 18:18Hannah McCarthy?

  How repeatedly?

• 18:20Nick Capodice?

  Well, as of right now, July of 2026, ties in the Senate have been broken by the Veep 306 times. The vice president also tallies the electoral votes in presidential elections. And then we get to the nuts and bolts of who can serve as a senator. Just a tad more persnickety than the House. You have to be 30 years old at least, live in the state you represent, and have been a U.S. citizen for the last nine years. Now, back to impeachment. The House starts it, and the Senate finishes the job.

• 18:52Speaker 06

  The Senate then tries the impeachment. So the House makes its charges, and the House will even act as prosecutors before the Senate. The Senate really acts as like the jury would in terms of having the vote of whether or not the person is guilty and should be removed from office. And that's not a simple majority vote, that's a two-thirds vote. The House can impeach by majority, but the Senate needs the two-thirds vote to remove from office. And that's supposed to be whiz bang, thank you, ma'am, we're done.

• 19:34Speaker 06

  We'll see how, since thus far, no president has been successfully removed from office, how that would actually play out.

• 19:43Nick Capodice?

  All right, how are we doing, Hannah?

• 19:46Hannah McCarthy?

  I'm feeling good. And that's it for section three.

• 19:49Nick Capodice?

  That's it, only seven to go, and we're going to get through those right quick after a short break.

• 20:00Nick Capodice?

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• 23:35Nick Capodice?

  You are listening to Civics 101. We are talking about the Constitution. We're clocking through the entirety of Article 1, piece by piece. Where were we before we stopped?

• 23:45Hannah McCarthy?

  We were about to get to Section 4.

• 23:47Nick Capodice?

  Section 4. Okay, here again is constitutional scholar Linda Monk.

• 23:52Speaker 06

  Section 4 is times, places, and manners of elections. What it says is that the times, places, and manners of elections, and by the way, this is all federal elections, including House, Senate, and the President, shall be done by the states.

• 24:10Hannah McCarthy?

  States determine the how, where, and when of elections.

• 24:14Nick Capodice?

  They do. This is how we have things like ranked choice voting in Maine and Alaska, for example. It is entirely up to the states, except...

• 24:23Hannah McCarthy?

  Except...

• 24:25Speaker 06

  Except when Congress wants to make those decisions. In my opinion, as a scholar, Congress should make some of those decisions to get us more uniform. And they absolutely have that power. But the states would still thus far administer the elections. And right now, until Congress makes other provisions, state standards about when you count votes and how you count votes, et cetera, varies from state to state. And there have been some challenges of that.

• 24:59Hannah McCarthy?

  So this is why there are often differences in how different states handle various elements of the voting process. Different rules for mail-in ballots, different timelines for counting votes, different rules for absentee voting.

• 25:12Nick Capodice?

  Yeah, or which states allow same-day registration and which ones don't.

• 25:16Speaker 06

  And thus far, they've been, those variations among states have been upheld, but there's big movements, certainly within the current administration, to change that.

• 25:31Nick Capodice?

  All right, on to Section 5. Section 5 is all about procedure in the House and the Senate, how stuff works operationally. And that includes seating people after elections, as in, you know, they won the election, they're now a senator, or they're now a member of the House of Representatives. You've got the job, kid. Now, this section can read like a little bit of administrative housekeeping, but the first line is an important one. Quote, "Each House shall be the judge of the elections, returns, and qualifications of its own members", end quote. And this, this is where things can get a little tricky, because what that is saying is, if the House decides they don't want to seat a newly-elected representative,

• 26:16Nick Capodice?

  they don't have to.

• 26:18Speaker 06

  It's happened before. It happened around Reconstruction, when suddenly the, the former Confederates, including Confederate generals, were pardoned very quickly by President Andrew Johnson, were having elections, wanted to be seated back in the Senate and the House. And the Republican majority at that point, now people call them, quote-unquote, "radical Republicans," but they were the ruling majority at that time, said, "Wait a minute, wait a minute. We're not gonna have people that were just trying to kill us two years ago and get rid of Congress to suddenly, okay, we, we forgot, come on back," you know? And

• 27:01Speaker 06

  so the Reconstruction Congress used this provision, Section 5, to say, "Wait a minute, we don't acknowledge these elections." And they refused to seat these neo-Confederates. And they weren't even neo-Confederates. They were just Confederates still, in their eyes. They had taken an oath of loyalty to the government as part of their pardon, but guess what? They had an oath of loyalty as military people if they were in the United States Army before. So how do you know they've broken one oath?

• 27:36Nick Capodice?

  This happened again during the Civil Rights Movement. A black legislator named Adam Clayton Powell was accused of mismanaging his campaign funds. So the House majority refused to seat him.

• 27:47Speaker 07

  Adam Clayton Powell was having some work done in a dentist chair today when he got the news the Supreme Court had agreed to hear his case, had agreed to decide if Congress had the power to keep him out of his seat. Congress generally feels it is totally sovereign in these matters, and that the courts have no right to ask any questions or give any opinions.

• 28:07Nick Capodice?

  There was a whole tangle of a back and forth, and it eventually ended in Powell winning a special election to fill his own vacant seat. All this to say, Hannah, in the words of Battlestar Galactica, "All this has happened before, and it could happen again."

• 28:26Hannah McCarthy?

  That's not exactly what they say in Battlestar Galactica, but so say we all.

• 28:30Nick Capodice?

  What do they say in the Battlestar?

• 28:31Hannah McCarthy?

  All of this has happened before, and all this will happen again.

• 28:33Nick Capodice?

  So say we all. Where's my Cylon detector?

• 28:38Hannah McCarthy?

  You need to watch Battlestar Galactica again.

• 28:43Speaker 06

  But it just goes to show that at a time when the validity of elections are being challenged, right or wrong, when you create enough public doubt about what's happening, who gets to decide? And in the case of the House and the Senate, it's the House and the Senate. And one of the questions is, in this particular climate, who gets to decide? The majority that's already in power gets to decide, oh, well, you knew people that are coming in, we're just not going to see you. We're not going to have a, what would it be now, the 108th Congress or 112th Congress, whatever the number is, that kind of possibility for stalemate.

• 29:28Speaker 06

  So we're living in a time where the stress tests, as they say, on the US Constitution are phenomenal. And in my experience as a constitutional scholar, when that happens, it's really the people that make the ultimate decision.

• 29:47Nick Capodice?

  Last thing about Section 5, and it's a big one. It's that the House and the Senate make their own rules.

• 29:54Speaker 06

  Section 5 also says that the House and the Senate, in addition to determining the outcomes of elections, makes its own rules and procedures. And when it comes down to what piece of legislation won and by how many votes, and is a regular majority required or a super majority required, that's where those rules come into play.

• 30:20Hannah McCarthy?

  For example, the House could say, we only vote on Wednesdays, and everyone has to wear a special little hat. Or, to get real for a second, the Senate could get rid of the filibuster anytime they want.

• 30:33Nick Capodice?

  Anytime they wanted, Hannah. Are you ready for Section 6?

• 30:36Hannah McCarthy?

  I think I am.

• 30:37Nick Capodice?

  All right. All right, let's talk about making money.

• 30:40Speaker 06

  Section 6 is an interesting one because it says, okay, we're going to, you know, we're going to pay the House and the Senate, and they should get some compensation. Now, remember, when the Constitution was written, the idea was that the noble classes, now, they wouldn't call themselves nobility, but they definitely believed in noblesse oblige, meaning that the people to whom much is given, much is required, it's supposed to be like a civic duty. So you're not going to Congress to get paid a lot of money. Well, they'll have a compensation, but it has to be determined by law.

• 31:21Nick Capodice?

  In other words, Section 6 says members of Congress get paid, but it doesn't say how much.

• 31:29Hannah McCarthy?

  Right. Their salary has to be written into a bill and passed like any other law. Right now, for example, a senator makes $174,000 a year.

• 31:38Nick Capodice?

  Yeah, that is more than twice the median American household income. But admittedly, they haven't gotten a raise since 2009 because voting to raise your salary when you're not very popular is not very popular.

• 31:51Speaker 06

  And one of the other interesting updates is that in the Bill of Rights, as originally proposed, there were 12 amendments. And the second amendment in that version was one that said Congress couldn't have a pay raise until the people got a chance to fire them through another election. That's now become the 27th Amendment.

• 32:12Hannah McCarthy?

  Right. The 27th Amendment was ratified in 1992 and is our most recent amendment, but it was actually one of the original 12 proposed in 1789.

• 32:23Nick Capodice?

  What's interesting to me about this is that if you look at the state votes for ratification for the 27th Amendment, the most recent ones were in 1992, but some states go back to 1789.

• 32:34Hannah McCarthy?

  Those 200-year-old votes were still legitimate?

• 32:37Nick Capodice?

  Still legit for this amendment.

• 32:40Speaker 06

  The archivist of the United States said, well, you know, the Supreme Court has said we really need to have contemporaneous ratification, but we're going to let this one pass. Not the ERA, but we'll let this one pass. You can edit that out if you want to.

• 32:58Nick Capodice?

  He didn't.

• 32:59Speaker 06

  The other provision of Section 6 that's really important is not only shall Congress get paid, but when can they be punished? Because it was not uncommon under English circumstances, whether by the king or elsewhere, that members of the parliament would be arrested on the floor of the parliament to keep them from voting. What Section 6 says is, no, while you're on the floor of the Congress, you cannot be arrested except for felony treason. It has to be a big deal.

• 33:43Speaker 06

  It can't just be, oh, you know, we saw him driving too fast on the way to the Capitol, so we got this, you got to come down and be arraigned. No, that's not supposed to happen. And the other big important thing is that they can't be punished for anything based on the speech or debate in the Congress.

• 34:06Hannah McCarthy?

  Oh, okay, this is the speech or debate clause.

• 34:11Nick Capodice?

  Right. This protects members of Congress from someone in the executive branch, like, say, the president, demanding that they be arrested.

• 34:20Speaker 06

  And finally, the interesting thing in this section is that if you're a member of Congress, you're not supposed to also have a job in the executive department. You have to resign from Congress to then be in the executive department.

• 34:34Hannah McCarthy?

  So a senator cannot be the Secretary of Homeland Security?

• 34:38Nick Capodice?

  No, they cannot. You got to keep them separated. All right, only a few remain. We're going to come back after a quick break. Holiday season is coming, and I don't think I have to tell you this might be a tough one because things are expensive in the fall of 2026. Everyone I know is looking for ways to make a little extra money, prowling around the side hustle subreddits. But I will say, if you're looking to sell something, to launch a store fast before the

• 35:17Nick Capodice?

  holiday rush, Shopify is the one-stop-shop platform for making a professional-looking store without touching a line of code. You can sell anything, and you can sell it anywhere that people shop online. You can have it done in minutes, and you can launch before Black Friday, that time of year when more people are already shopping and ready to buy. So if you're ready to launch your business before Black Friday, go to Shopify.com/civics to start your free trial. That's Shopify.com/civics. Just go to Shopify.com/civics today to hear your first.

• 35:54Hannah McCarthy?

  Whenever fall comes back around, it always feels like a fresh start. This year, I've been layering in some styles from the new Lululemon fall drop because the weather is shifting and I find I have to be ready for the entire day and not just one part of it. Lululemon's fall line has some really versatile transitional pieces, so I can just wake up, throw on a matching set, add a jacket or a fleece, and head out, knowing that I'll feel comfortable enough to go wherever the day takes me. Check out the new fall arrivals in store and online now at lululemon.com.

• 36:26Speaker 04

  This podcast is supported by Anthropic, the public benefit corporation behind Claude. Everyone's got a hard question about AI. Anthropic was built to surface those questions and share what it finds along the way because there's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claude.ai/spotify and keep thinking. That's claude.ai/spotify.

• 36:52Hannah McCarthy?

  You're listening to Civics 101. I'm Hannah McCarthy.

• 37:00Nick Capodice?

  I'm Nikita DiJ.

• 37:01Hannah McCarthy?

  And we are tearing through Article 1 at a pretty good clip, I would say, and we are at Section 7.

• 37:08Nick Capodice?

  This is the section that lays out how a bill becomes a law, like the thing we know about the legislative branch, that they write the bills, and those bills go through a fantastic process that we don't have time to summarize here, and they eventually land on the president's desk to be signed into law, or not.

• 37:25Speaker 06

  So the legislative power is predominantly Congress, but guess what? The president gets to veto if you disapprove of legislation?

• 37:35Nick Capodice?

  You want to give us a quick veto summary, Hannah?

• 37:37Hannah McCarthy?

  I do. If a president does not like a bill that is passed in both chambers for any number of reasons, usually political, they can veto it, and that bill does not become law. Then, if 2/3 of both chambers say, actually, we really want this, they can override that presidential veto, and then that bill does become law without the president's signature.

• 38:04Nick Capodice?

  And also, if the president doesn't officially veto a bill but just refuses to sign it, it becomes law 10 days after it reaches the president's desk, which, Hannah, recently was explained to Fox News host Maria Bartiromo by GOP Rep French Hill in maybe one of the only times our show was unintentionally name-dropped by a member of Congress.

• 38:26Speaker 04

  He may sign it, he may veto it, or 10 days after it's transmitted to the White House, it becomes law without his signature.

• 38:34Hannah McCarthy?

  There you go. That's it. Okay. Congressman, good to see you this morning. Thank you, sir.

• 38:39Speaker 04

  Civics 101, Maria.

• 38:40Hannah McCarthy?

  Thank you for that education, Mr. Chairman.

• 38:43Speaker 01

  You did.

• 38:44Hannah McCarthy?

  We finally made it, Nick, just like when a musician gets invited to be on Sesame Street.

• 38:51Nick Capodice?

  Now, there's this other thing called a pocket veto, which is if a president refuses to sign a bill, but before those 10 days pass, Congress adjourns, that bill is vetoed in essence without anybody doing anything. Another thing in Section 7 is that the House, and only the House, can write certain laws.

• 39:13Hannah McCarthy?

  The power of the purse.

• 39:14Nick Capodice?

  Right. "Any bills about taxing and spending must start in the House, the people's chamber." That said, there are some workarounds to this. It's not hard for someone in the Senate to say to their buddy in the House, "Hey, I want you to write this tax bill." Or, another workaround, money can be appropriated by other people, specifically the president, if it's tied to a quote-unquote "national emergency."

• 39:41Hannah McCarthy?

  Do you happen to know how many national emergencies have been declared over our history?

• 39:46Nick Capodice?

  Yeah, since we started declaring them in 1976, there have been 90 emergencies, 51 of which are still in effect. And 11 of those have been declared during Trump's second term. All right, we're on to Section 8, and this is a big one.

• 40:03Speaker 06

  Then, Section 8 is what I call the laundry list of the Constitution. It's where most of Congress's powers are set out, the kinds of things you wanted the Congress to be able to do that it really couldn't do under the Articles Confederation, like tax, borrow money, raise an army, create a uniform rule of naturalization, provide for punishment of counterfeit coins, two coin money, to regulate its value. And that's a pretty big power to say that a nickel doesn't mean what a nickel used to be. Establishing post office in Rhodes, that was Benjamin Franklin's great gift to the country.

• 40:45Speaker 06

  Copyright and patent, protect those rights so that people would be able to enjoy the benefits of their creative work. Create tribunals under the Supreme Court. Also, to declare war. This is another shared power. Congress declares war, but the president's the commander in chief. Raise and support armies. That becomes a big deal in terms of whether or not to have a standing army, a permanent army. Provide and maintain a navy. Provide for the calling forth of a militia. And right at the beginning of that list is to regulate commerce with foreign nations. That's international commerce.

• 41:29Speaker 06

  And among the several states, that's interstate commerce. That's probably become the largest source of federal power.

• 41:39Nick Capodice?

  Hannah, this is what surprised me most talking to Linda, that interstate commerce has become the biggest source of federal power. And this tiny chunk of Section 8, called the Commerce Clause, it's only 16 words, but its effect is tremendous.

• 41:58Speaker 06

  Multiple civil rights laws were in fact not passed under the 14th Amendment, but under interstate commerce. So, the Public Accommodations Laws that says that a person of any color can stay anywhere that the business is open in public, or can eat in a restaurant where it is open to the public. That comes out of interstate commerce. Because what happens? African-American people encountered this. There weren't safe places that would allow them to sleep with an integrated population. So, they had to create the Green Book, a special directory. This hampers the movement of people and ideas

• 42:41Speaker 06

  and products that a vital economy needs. That segregation is a bad idea for so many reasons. And fundamentally, it hurts the economic enterprise and ability to compete of the American people. Because the best people aren't able to offer the best products.

• 43:03Hannah McCarthy?

  And interstate commerce is also tied to things like gun ownership, cannabis possession, et cetera.

• 43:09Nick Capodice?

  It's tied to so much stuff. If you sell something on eBay, if you drive across a state line for work, any transaction that goes from one state to another falls under interstate commerce, and it's under the purview of Congress. So, that's huge. And while we're here in Section 8, the very last item in the laundry list is this, quote, "To make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution the foregoing powers."

• 43:36Hannah McCarthy?

  Necessary and proper always struck me as a little bit vague.

• 43:39Nick Capodice?

  Yeah, it's a little vague, Hannah. And this clause, also called the Elastic Clause, has been interpreted by the Supreme Court to say, "Hey, this laundry list here, that's not everything Congress does." Their powers might stretch, as an elastic band might, around a whole bunch of other stuff.

• 43:59Hannah McCarthy?

  Till it snaps. Makes me wonder exactly how stretchy we want that elastic band to get.

• 44:05Nick Capodice?

  Absolutely, and I'm gonna leave that for our listeners to decide.

• 44:11Nick Capodice?

  All right, we are coming to the close here, Sections 9 and 10. I like these, Hannah, because the first eight were a bunch of do's. Don't do what Donnie Don't does.

• 44:22Speaker 06

  Section 9 is what I call the don'ts of Congress. These are the very explicit things that it says flat out, "Congress, you do not have the power to do this." And tragically, ironically, first thing off the boat, so to speak, is Congress did not have the power to ban the slave trade until 1808, which it did in 1808. But remember, that doesn't end slavery either, because what it creates is a domestic market for the children of enslaved people to be perpetually sold and resold in bondage in the United States.

• 45:10Nick Capodice?

  All right, moving along. Here is another crucial bit of Section 9.

• 45:14Speaker 06

  We have the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus, which Congress cannot suspend except in times of rebellion or invasion. Principle of habeas corpus is that if the government puts you in jail, they have to, within a reasonable time, tell you why you're there, and not just throw away the key.

• 45:35Hannah McCarthy?

  Okay, so let's say you've got a family member. You think this family member has been arrested, but you cannot get in touch with her. You have a right to be told what is going on.

• 45:46Nick Capodice?

  Correct. You get a writ of habeas corpus from a judge, and then...

• 45:50Speaker 06

  The prosecutor, the government, the jailer has to say, "Yes, we have her. And by the way, here's what we're holding her for." We've talked about people who have disappeared under certain governments, because you have no idea where they're being held, if they're alive, if they're dead, what they're being held for, and can die a rot in prison. And now, under expanded powers for ICE in the US about immigration procedures, it's a similar issue of, people are saying, "Wait a minute, they took my husband, my wife, my loved one, my father, my child, and I have no idea where they are, if they're still alive or dead."

• 46:35Speaker 06

  And so, this writ of habeas corpus is supposed to say that if you're representing the United States of America, you have to respond to this. And we're seeing it put into implementation, not always successfully, but at least being raised today.

• 46:56Nick Capodice?

  Habeas corpus is an extremely important don't in Section 9, but there are a few more. No Bills of Attainer, meaning you can't pass legislation designed to hurt a particular person. Also, no Corruption of Blood, which means people can't inherit assets from someone who was convicted of treason.

• 47:15Speaker 06

  The big one that I think is still important is no titles of nobility, because we, the people, are equal. As I say, thank you very much.

• 47:27Nick Capodice?

  And the very last section in Article 1, a shorty but a goodie, Section 10.

• 47:32Speaker 06

  Section 10, no state shall enter into any treaty or alliance. Different states wanted to receive the Minister of France. Who doesn't want to receive the Minister of France, right? And setting all these diplomatic difficulties.

• 47:48Nick Capodice?

  Basically, during the Articles of Confederation, all the states were getting a little too big for their britches. You know, acting like their own little federal government, if you please.

• 48:00Speaker 06

  And that's why we needed Section 10 of Article 1, to say, "No states, you may think you're sovereign, but you're not a sovereign nation. You have certain sovereignty within your sphere under the US Constitution, but you're not an international sovereign, and stop acting like it." And particularly regarding interstate commerce, you've got to stop this business of trying to put taxes and duties on other states to give yourself an advantage. New York, you can't tax New Jersey's goods. New Jersey, you can't tax New York's goods. You can't do that. We're all gonna live together now, under a Constitution,

• 48:45Speaker 06

  and that means there are gonna be things that individual states are not gonna like all the time. But we've already gone through a period where the states had maximum say-so, and look what happened. So, here we are. Did that work?

• 49:06Nick Capodice?

  Did that work?

• 49:08Hannah McCarthy?

  Oh, that worked.

• 49:09Nick Capodice?

  You wouldn't be able to run it all back for me, would you?

• 49:12Hannah McCarthy?

  You want to just record this episode all over again? It's an endless loop for the listener?

• 49:17Nick Capodice?

  Well, I mean, like, the tiniest little...

• 49:18Hannah McCarthy?

  Oh, you really want me to do it? Okay, okay, great. Article 1 is the longest part of the Constitution. And it says, "There will be a legislative branch." It is called Congress. It then tells us how the House of Representatives is set up, how the Senate is set up, how elections work for members of Congress, how procedure works in both chambers, how representatives and senators are paid for their jobs, how bills become laws, and that specifically, spending bills have to start in the House. And then, it is a laundry list of what else Congress does, what they cannot do, and finally, what the states cannot do.

• 50:01Nick Capodice?

  That was pretty great.

• 50:02Hannah McCarthy?

  Thank you.

• 50:03Nick Capodice?

  How am I gonna end this episode?

• 50:05Hannah McCarthy?

  You know, Nick, there are other articles in the Constitution.

• 50:09Nick Capodice?

  Seven, like the Seven Kingdoms.

• 50:11Hannah McCarthy?

  Seven total. We got one down. Do your job.

• 50:19Nick Capodice?

  Well, that is not it for the Constitution, but that's it for Article One. Huge thanks to Linda Monk. If you want to learn more about her and her work, visit her website, lindamunk.com. This episode is made by me, Nikappa Deche, with you, Hannah McCarthy. Thank you.

• 50:33Hannah McCarthy?

  Thank you.

• 50:33Nick Capodice?

  Thank you. Our staff includes Taylor Quimby, Rebecca Lavoy, Dana Cataldo, and Marina Henke. Music in this episode from Blue Dot Sessions, Ebenemic Sound, and the genuine article, Chris Zabriski. Civics 101 is a production of NHPR, New Hampshire Public Radio.

• 50:57Hannah McCarthy?

  So say we all.

• 50:59Speaker 04

  So say we all. Where's my Cylon detector?

• 51:03Hannah McCarthy?

  You need to watch Battlestar Galactica again.

• 51:05Nick Capodice?

  I know every-

• 51:06Hannah McCarthy?

  Where's my Cylon detector? Saul doesn't say that.

• 51:10Nick Capodice?

  That was my Adama impression. He punches, uh, he punches-

• 51:13Hannah McCarthy?

  I thought it was Saul.

• 51:14Speaker 04

  If I was doing Saul Ty, I'd sound like that.

• 51:17Hannah McCarthy?

  I thought it was Saul.

• 51:18Nick Capodice?

  Here's my Adama. He punches him in the stomach and he goes, "Where's my Cylon detector?"

• 51:21Speaker 04

  That was good. But Saul Ty is like these fracking toasters.

• 51:25Hannah McCarthy?

  Yeah.

• 51:28Speaker 03

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• 52:06Speaker 03

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• 52:36Speaker 05

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