Consider the Constitution

The Robert H. Smith Center for the Constitution
  • 4.6 (11)
  • Government
  • Updated Biweekly

Consider the Constitution is a podcast from the Robert H. Smith Center for the Constitution at James Madison's Montpelier. The show provides insight into constitutional issues that directly affect every American. Hosted by Dr. Katie Crawford-Lackey the podcast features interviews with constitutional scholars, policy and subject matter experts, heritage professionals, and legal practitioners.

  1. Oct 7

    The Unfinished Constitution

    The Constitution began as an experiment. Once it took effect, Americans had to figure out what it actually meant. They did not agree. Host Dr. Katie Crawford-Lackey talks with Dr. Jonathan Gienapp, professor of history and law at Stanford University and author of The Second Creation and Against Constitutional Originalism. They look at what the word "constitution" meant in 1787, why Madison saw the Articles of Confederation as a treaty rather than a true constitution, and how the First Federal Congress wrestled with questions the document left open: who can remove executive officers, a question the Supreme Court took up again in 2026, and whether Congress could charter a national bank. They also take on the "James Madison problem." Did Madison flip-flop in the 1790s, or did he refine his views through experience? And Gienapp offers advice for anyone who looks to the founders for answers today: assume less, not more.

  2. Sep 23

    The Declaration Is Our Inheritance

    The Declaration of Independence announced more than a separation from Britain. It made a claim about government itself: that people hold rights government did not grant and cannot take away, and that legitimate power rests on the consent of the governed. Those ideas were unprecedented in 1776. Two hundred fifty years later, they are still unfinished business. Judge Douglas Ginsburg joins Katie Crawford-Lackey to consider what the Declaration has meant at home and abroad. He served on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, including a term as chief judge, and hosted the PBS series A More or Less Perfect Union and We Hold These Truths. They trace the document's reach: more than a hundred national founding texts that reference it, the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, drafted by Lafayette with Jefferson at his elbow, Ho Chi Minh quoting it word for word. And they trace its use here — Seneca Falls, Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King Jr. calling it a promissory note come due. Ginsburg also takes up the harder questions. How a document proclaiming equality emerged from a society built on slavery. Why "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" replaced "property." Whether the Declaration carries legal weight today, and what it would mean for courts to start from a presumption of liberty rather than a presumption that the government is right. The Declaration, he argues, is a yardstick, not a finish line. Every generation has to pick it up again.

  3. Sep 9

    You Compromise on Politics, Not on Principles

    We know James Madison the thinker. The architect of the Constitution. The author of the Bill of Rights. But Madison was also a working politician — and a very good one. Dr. Matthew Goetz, senior historian at the White House Historical Association, joins Katie Crawford-Lackey to look at the side of Madison we tend to skip.  With Jefferson, he built the country's first political party and its first partisan newspaper — then wrote attacks on the Washington administration under a pen name and admitted he found the work grating.  Goetz also makes the case for Madison's most overlooked chapter: the War of 1812. The first wartime president in American history never passed a sedition law, never arrested a newspaper editor, and never considered postponing the election. You compromise on politics, he believed. Not on principles. Along the way: a weasel, a mole, and a set of measurements sent to Paris. A deathbed offer Madison turned down. And why the messiest parts of American politics may be exactly what makes the system work.

  4. Aug 26

    The Chapter Between the Revolution and the Constitution

    We tend to jump straight from the Revolution to the Constitutional Convention — from a young James Madison to the Father of the Constitution. But the years in between are where the promises of independence collided with the hard work of governing. Dr. Frank Cogliano, professor of American history at the University of Edinburgh and author of A Revolutionary Friendship: Washington, Jefferson, and the American Republic, joins Katie in the studio to walk through that chapter. They start with the question of who the Revolution actually included — enslaved people, Native nations, women, common people, loyalists — and what independence meant to each. Then they follow Madison home to Montpelier: the Orange County Committee of Safety, the Virginia Convention of 1776, Jefferson's Governor's Council, and a Congress whose failures taught him exactly what needed fixing. Along the way, Cogliano makes the case that Madison's willingness to change his mind is a strength, not hypocrisy. He explains why the Madison–Washington partnership may be more interesting than the famous Madison–Jefferson friendship. And he leaves us with a challenge for the semiquincentennial year: live up to the words, and relearn how to disagree without hating each other.

  5. Aug 12

    More Than Decoration: What Montpelier's Objects Reveal About Power and Slavery

    What can a bird's nest, a set of porcelain ice cream vases, and a portrait of Confucius tell us about the early American republic? In this episode, host Dr. Katie Crawford-Lackey sits down with Dr. Lisa Goff, Associate Professor of English and American Studies at the University of Virginia and former director of its Institute for Public History, to explore how historians read objects as evidence. Lisa walks us through the furnishings, art, and tableware inside James and Dolly Madison's Montpelier home — from European landscape paintings and portraits of foreign rulers to Dolly's elaborate porcelain ice cream service — and what they reveal about the Madisons' global ambitions, Dolly's political skill as a hostess, and the enslaved labor that made it all possible. We talk about the dining room as a stage for both diplomacy and denial, the archaeology behind the mansion's restoration, and the objects enslaved individuals at Montpelier owned and chose for themselves. Lisa also previews her forthcoming book, Stories in the Soil: Recovering Black and White Histories at James Madison's Montpelier, out this April.

  6. Jul 29

    The Man Behind "We the People": Recovering James Wilson

    The three most famous words in American government — We the People — were written by a founder most Americans have never heard of. Host Dr. Katie Crawford-Lackey sits down with author and journalist Jesse Wegman to recover the story of James Wilson: a Scottish immigrant who arrived in 1765, signed both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, drafted the Constitution's opening words, and sat on the first Supreme Court — then vanished almost entirely from national memory. Wegman's new book, The Lost Founder: James Wilson and the Forgotten Fight for a People's Constitution, is the first full-length biography of Wilson in more than seventy years. Wilson was the convention's fiercest advocate for popular sovereignty. He pushed for proportional representation, one-person, one-vote, and the direct election of the president — positions bold enough to unsettle many of his peers. We owe to him not only We the People but the Necessary and Proper Clause and the Supremacy Clause, the architecture of a strong national government. His 1768 essay on parliamentary authority reached Thomas Jefferson's desk and echoes in the Declaration itself. His end was as dramatic as his rise. A ruinous addiction to land speculation left Wilson holding four million acres he could not pay for. He was jailed twice for debt — the only Supreme Court justice ever imprisoned — and died in 1798 in the back room of a North Carolina tavern, delirious and destitute, with no funeral and scarcely a mention. Wegman explains why Wilson's ideas about equality and self-government still matter, and what we lose when the stories we tell about the founding get too simple.

  7. Jul 15

    Sacred Words: Jefferson, Madison, and the Language of Religious Freedom

    Thomas Jefferson and James Madison agreed on almost everything when it came to religious freedom. But they talked about it in completely different ways. Historian Dr. John Ragosta joins Dr. Katie Crawford-Lackey to unpack that difference — Jefferson's intellectual, almost deistic case for separating church and state, and Madison's surprisingly reverential, scripture-laced language defending the same principle. Ragosta walks through the Memorial and Remonstrance, the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, and Madison's presidential vetoes on church matters, showing how two founders reached identical conclusions from very different starting points. The conversation closes on why that distinction still matters — and why separation of church and state was never, for either man, an attack on religion itself.

  8. Jul 1

    Becoming Madison

    We know James Madison as the Father of the Constitution. But who was he before that? In this special episode, Dr. Katie Crawford Lackey takes the guest seat to explore the formative years that made Madison who he is. At 25, Madison was the youngest major figure of the founding era — small, sickly, quiet, and easy to overlook. He never commanded armies or delivered rousing speeches. What he had were ideas, and a framework for thinking about power, human nature, and government that no one else in the room quite possessed. Where did that framework come from? The answer lies in three Scottish Enlightenment-influenced teachers, a frontier Virginia upbringing, and an unconventional choice to attend the College of New Jersey — the institution we know today as Princeton — rather than William and Mary, where every other wealthy Virginia man of his generation enrolled. Dr. Crawford-Lackey traces Madison's intellectual development from the schoolroom of Donald Robertson, where a 70-mile horseback journey opened a young boy's mind to Locke, Milton, and Montesquieu, through his years under John Witherspoon at Princeton — where he experienced the Boston Massacre and the Boston Tea Party not as distant news, but as live confirmation of everything the Scottish Enlightenment had taught him about human passion and the limits of reason. Madison wasn't born a Founding Father. He was made — by a rigorous education, a world in crisis, and the hardest question anyone could ask on the eve of a revolution: What kind of people is government meant to govern? The answer he arrived at still shapes American democracy today.

See All (73)

4.6
out of 5
11 Ratings

About

Consider the Constitution is a podcast from the Robert H. Smith Center for the Constitution at James Madison's Montpelier. The show provides insight into constitutional issues that directly affect every American. Hosted by Dr. Katie Crawford-Lackey the podcast features interviews with constitutional scholars, policy and subject matter experts, heritage professionals, and legal practitioners.

Information

  • Creator
    The Robert H. Smith Center for the Constitution
  • Years Active
    2023 - 2026
  • Episodes
    73
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Consider the Constitution
  • Show Website
    Consider the Constitution

You Might Also Like