Hi everyone, Joe for Jaspy's casebreaks.com here coming at you with 2019-2020 Panini Chronicles Basketball Hanger Edition and a Ranitane Break number 32 at the end giving away a $3,700 eminence spot. So we're gonna do the break itself first then we'll re-randomize all of your names and then name on top we'll get that eminence spot for a fraction of the price. A very big thank you to all of these lovely people here for getting into that and there's all the teams right there exactly imagine what $125, $126 filler spot could turn into that. That's a good return on investment. Let's roll it, let's randomize it three and a three six times if you're lucky enough. Hard six one two three four five and six alright there you go after six we got Gretchen down to Sean three and a three hard six for the teams two three four five and six and final time after six we got the wizards down to the he at your wizard Gretchen alright there we go here's the first half of this Robert has the gris in this I'm gonna read up all these names I saved my voice for the that eminence and Gretchen with the Pelicans as well alright so let's alphabetize by team and let's just print and rip give away that spot yeah not bad not bad price points for the for the various fillers that we have most of them are giving away multiple spots and and obviously we got the box itself first so itself as well so there could be some surprises in the actual break itself plus the giveaways not bad deals folks and we still give the high rollers opportunities to get spots straight up in those breaks as well so it works out for everybody teamwork folks teamwork good luck in this one some hot you more is watching Kauai play right now Golden State Warriors at the Clippers there's a luminance John Morant nice Kobe white RJ Barrett Dumboya Reddish Bowl Bowl Dumboya Cody Rui and Eric Pascal nice I think some of you remember it may remember this John Morant dunk that's on luminance when we were doing like group breaks of like Chronicles basketball people were like oh man I was like saying look at that what a great photo and it is it's like what a monster dunk that would have been and then everyone reminded me remember he missed that dunk I'm pretty sure he missed that dunk against against Cleveland I was posturing Kevin Love right there and I was like oh my god that's right I do more than all came back to me do remember that could have been a monster don't flip back to this green right here we got Brian down to Gretchen and everyone in between and 29 sad sad spots after six times one very very happy spot on top after six times good luck one two three four five and good luck sixth and final time after six all these sad people sorry thanks for trying though I appreciate it sorry but the name on top congrats Kobe Chan there you go man Kobe Chan after six you are in imminent basketball thanks for getting in I'm Joe for jazzy's case breaks not common very close to filling that up let's get it done


Assalamualaikum brothers and sisters. Andrew Tate recently appeared in an interview with a PBD podcast that I couldn't help but notice his visibly unwell and disheveled appearance. Surprisingly, out of the over 3,000 comments I read in the video, none of them made any mention of the evident sign of emotional distress that any competent psychologist could observe from Tate's anxious expression and paleo-complexion. I want to emphasize that this is not an attempt to create unnecessary alarm or present a forced portrayal of Tate's mental strength. Despite facing one of the most challenging period in its life, it has demonstrated remarkable resilience. However, the purpose of this video is to raise awareness about the potential dangers of pushing a person beyond their limits. Andrew Tate appears genuinely troubled and I have guarded substantial video evidence to support this observation. Take a look at this video for comparison. God the idea as a force is making the people act righteously so God must exist in some form.  It's like if this much evil, if Satan is going to appear. There are noticeable differences between them. In the first video, things apparent that there is a relaxation of Andrew Tate's cranial nerve as indicated by the absence of visible veins on his head. His overall cranial physiology appears calm and less strained, suggesting that he may not be experiencing hypertension-related issues when it was recorded. However, in the second video of his interview with the PPD podcast team, we can observe signs of strain. We recognize the challenges that Andrew Tate is facing both within the Romanian logo system and internally. These might believe that he may be dealing with such medical conditions such as varicose veins, rossias or hypertension. These conditions can impact the integrity of blood vessels resulting in increased prominence of veins on the head. Meanwhile, the essence of these statements in the recent interview exposed that BBC's alleged impartiality as it appears to actively pursue a substantial amount of potentially non-existence evidence against a top G's leader. This blatant hypocrisy on the part of the BBC was once again brought to fore. Every single day was something negative next to a date.  Because I'm the enemy. And what's scary about this is Lucy Williamson herself, she was begging me for an interview. The BBC were begging me for an interview. I don't need any of these people. The only reason I even sat down with the BBC is because they were begging me. I can go and just say my own words and get plenty of views, right? But the whole time I was in jail, they're begging me for an interview. Can we speak to them on the phone? Maybe we can give an interview from jail. Can we have an interview? Please, please, please, please. And I was saying, why do I want to talk to the BBC? And the BBC were saying, no, we don't want to do a hit piece. We want to come across and we want to be impartial. This is what they're telling me. This is what they're telling me. We want to be impartial. We believe there's a side of the story that hasn't been told. We're really interesting and we're really interested in some of the, let's say, what's the word? I don't want to get this wrong, inconsistencies in the Romanian justice system. We're very interested in his side of the story. There's been enough hit pieces. We want to tell the other side. We want to hear Andrew take story. And I said, no, on repeat. Then they sent me a list of questions. I didn't even ask for a list of questions. That's not who I am. I don't have to script. I never asked for a list of questions. They sent me a list of questions. Here's what we're going to ask. It's about his mental health. It's about the Romanian justice system. It's about the fact he hasn't been charged, his liberty has been deprived, all this stuff. And I thought, well, that's kind of interesting. Maybe it's a bit interesting and the Matrix is obviously printing lies about me. And these are some interesting questions in the Matrix for the first time ever. Okay. They walk in here, all smiles and happy, all smiling faces trying to take me off guard. I already had my list of questions, right? It's all going to be nice and easy. I sit down and they instantly attack me. They put the cameras on first and they attack me, expecting me to stutter and make a fool of myself. I still ponder the reason behind his absence of charges. My belief is that if substantial evidence existed against him, he would have already faced legal charges. The current phase we are observing in the Tate case is a prosecution state. Marina Thorow investigation is being conducted to determine the severity of the alleged crime. In this context, it leads to the responsibility of the public prosecutor's office to act as a state representative and initiate criminal charges against individuals. Prosecutors meticulously examine the evidence collected during the investigation and make our decision on whether to proceed with formal charges. This has not been done. Consequently, these perplexing that the charges have yet to materialize even after nearly six months, the situation backs the question, what exactly is transpiring? Romania has a law, or the law in Romania is basically, if you can prove to a judge that it might have happened, they're allowed to hold you up to six months during the investigation stage. If I was guilty of anything, I would have been charged long ago and we're going to talk about charges soon because I still believe that an attempt to charge me. But we're now approaching the end of the six months they can keep me under a form of arrest for without charge. Typically in Romania, when I was first arrested, the guards said, ah, within two weeks, you'll have your indictment. I was like, two weeks? He goes, yeah, everyone gets charged quickly. Nobody waits six months for a charge.  The fact they've waited six months and gone into my entire life and attempted to find something shows they don't have a case. Why I believe it happened is because they didn't have a case when they were trying to hit me with this garbage and they thought, you know what?  So they were attempting to use the media to find what they wanted. Months go by, months go by, months go by, case files empty, nothing's happening. My lawyer was saying, when we're gonna close this case file, like, yeah, we're just waiting for some papers, we're gonna close it, we're gonna close it, we're gonna close it. Around the time I was canceled, things started appearing in the case file again. They start spying on me again. Very interesting that it happened around that time. I don't know if they understood that I didn't have, I wasn't protected by the political class in the USA, I don't know what happened. They started to build this case and they spied on me for all of these months, spending millions of euros spying on me everywhere I went trying to find evidence of a crime. Eventually they get to the end of their legal limit to spy on me and they don't have any crime, they don't have anything. So in my current court case we have two Americans who lied, the ones who we have the conversations between them saying they're going to Oscar for lying to the police, we have the CCTV of them coming and going, we have their Uber record showing they can travel the country freely, we have their phone calls with their mother where they're saying, yeah, he didn't hurt me and my boyfriend caught me that we have all of it, we have all the evidence, we have those two and then there's nobody else who could possibly even take the stand. I don't believe as high level as this matrix attack is, I still don't believe a Romanian judge is going to put me in jail with the dossiers, I've seen it, it's garbage. I don't think I'm going to end up in jail. Tate exudes a remarkable sense of reassurance, displaying all withering confidence in his defense. Frankly speaking, he may very well be justified in his beliefs, however, if he's during this interview that he delivers a message of utmost significance to both men and women, that he's imperative to lend a keen ear and listen attentively to this. I will say right now in this podcast, I encourage absolutely anybody who believes I've harmed the male or female to go to the police with evidence and will go to court. Let's do it. I don't harm people. If I was harming people, I wouldn't be out here as open as I was. The biggest criminals and the biggest gangsters and the most heinous people on earth don't have social media. You know this. Do I see a guy with an Instagram pretending he's a gangster? He's not a gangster. The real gangster hasn't got Instagram. But that's the reality of it. You think I'm going to become the most Google man in the world if I've been running around hurting people? It's absolutely insane. And I think there has been a shift in the consciousness. I think, especially because of COVID and a few other things, people are starting to understand that all these people do is right. Let's draw the curtain here. Feel free to share your thoughts on this matter in the comments section below. Don't forget to like, share and subscribe. Until next time, assalamualaikum friends.


Okay, so good afternoon everyone, I'm very happy that you spend some time to hear a little bit about the project where I've been involved. I enjoyed this project very much, that's why I suggested to Eden to have probably a webinar about it. It is a project where I was not a partner, I was a consultant for Uken, Uken was a partner. And this is a project where the partners or the consortium tried to evaluate and produce useful materials for teachers that are willing to use digital support in their teaching. So I hope that you enjoyed it, it's nothing, how do I say, out of the ordinary, but it is very structured on one hand. And I think it's very useful for anyone that wants to select digital tools to help teaching and it is, let's say, the result of very honest work and very dedicated work. So why did we do this? In fact, there are many digital and mobile resources that we can use. And sometimes we want to reduce investment in software and hardware and we want to know more about what can we do. These are general motivations that I present on this slide, but as I mentioned, they are general motivations. And I'm going to present in the first part, nothing that it's new trick. Okay, so that's the reason why we have this slide. We recognize the importance, but in fact there's nothing magic or innovative in what was done. It was just an honest analysis of several tools available that can digitally support learning. Okay, this is the general set of aims of the project modern. In fact, we produced four types of outputs in this project and I will stop my presentation at the end of the description of the project. You can make some questions and then I'll show you what was done and possibly how you can use it. This is the partnership. Like I mentioned, I was representing UCan. There was a large representation out of two networks, one for lifelong learning and the other for vet education and the other were universities and two consulting organizations that gave support, mostly in terms of administration and of performing some of the surveys and analysis. Okay, so the first output. This is a very interesting procedure and I hope that someone does it in the near future for other types of learning tools. We picked up about 80 tools, digital tools that could support learning. We had seven criteria to evaluate these 80 tools and we had a classification system for those tools with 10 categories. And these 10 categories, I think, help anyone, but anyone. I include myself in that group and you can try and see if you are also included in that group. Anyone can use this audit to help choosing a digital tool that is more suitable for what you want to do. And that comprises video recording, web conferencing, structuring, e-learning course, anything. The other output that we had was this report and this is a report about 25 of these digital tools. So out of the 80, we selected 25 that seemed to us more interesting and we made the report for each one that it's not more than three pages long. We are aware that everyone is busy, everyone wants to have essential information. But the goal of each one of these assessments of the tools is to help, and I have to look at the camera. I'm looking at the slide, I'm sorry, is to help people finding the adequate teaching tool that they want to use for the delivery of their course. That was basically what this tool assessment did. Like I mentioned, this is some samples of what we did. For instance, we used the TEDEd website with a lot of materials and this is one of the tools that we analyzed and classified. This is just an example. Like I mentioned, 25, this is one of the 25. We even produced for this TED tool a video that is one of the outputs also. That video and other materials that support anyone that wants to use this resource in teaching. You can download it. This is a PDF that you so far when I produced this slide was downloaded about a thousand times already. It is very useful. You can print it. You can also obtain a printed version out of the coordinator. I think they can mail it to you. This is also very interesting if you want to use it as a reference or your task tool to support you in choosing the toolkits. Now, what did we do? We also produced, like I mentioned, some toolkits online that are about one hour or less for each one of the tools that we chose. You have the pedagogic report, which is the assessment output number two. You have an introductory video. You have some examples and you can use the tool. It has all the instructions on how you can use the tool that was studied and makes part of the 25 that we have analyzed. So this is something that it is online. For those that are beginners, and even for me, there were things here that helped me. I don't consider myself a beginner, but to the use of some of these toolkits I was. It was very helpful for me, but you can try and make your own judgment. This is the third output that I want to talk to you about. We also have some training courses online. These were training courses that you can use to train yourself on the use of eight of these 25 learning tools and can help you get in touch and get more acquainted with each one. So basically these were the four outputs and I'm waiting for questions if you have any. Like I mentioned, we have these four tools, the audit of learning tools. We made an assessment. We produce a toolkit to use each one of these 25 that we have chosen. And we also have training courses that you can try. So I see that we have 10 participants. If you want to send me a question by the chat opportunity, please do. And I'll try to answer. If there are no questions, I'll continue with the demonstrations. And how do I say we will probably end earlier than planned. So feel free to ask. I don't see anybody typing. So, okay. Which criteria? How were the 80 tools chosen? Very good. Okay, greetings, Carlos. Okay, very good. How were the 80 tools chosen? They were chosen by the participants and they were among... We used the consultant organizations to select the 80 tools that were more... If you look at the report, you'll see that they are... The 80 tools that were at the time, of course things change in a year or two. This project ended last year. These were chosen by the group as the ones that were probably more useful. We considered several perspectives. Webinars, production events, webinars, web meetings, videos, blended learning, etc. So these were the criteria. Now, what is interesting were the criteria that we used. We had 10 categories that ranged and I'll show you in a moment on the tool assessment demonstration. The criteria were from cost to ease of use to availability to compatibility. There were 10 criteria that we used. These were the criteria that were also obtained from desk research where people will show where the tools were more used and why they were used. So the criteria, the 10 categories that we classify the 80 tools then selected 25 were based on... I wouldn't say popular demand but popular use because they were the ones that were mostly used by people who selected or used these tools. Now, to get the link, of course they are on the project and I'll show you in a moment. If there are no other questions and did I answer Maria and Eva? If not, I'll proceed. Maria, yeah? Okay. So, don't have to thank. We are here for the same cause. I'm glad to do this. You don't have to thank. I'm glad to do this because I think it is important to share a great project. There are projects that stay with you. I've been in dozens of projects, if not hundreds, but I've been in many projects and some stay with us. This is one of them. It is important for me because I think it's useful. It gives not only some criteria to select tools but also it gives support how to use them. And it's, how do I say, a bridging. It covers a lot of... analysis so I think it's very useful. Okay, so I will proceed. Okay, so the first one. Sorry, it's not working. I'll go here. Okay, the first one, the 10 categories that Eva demanded. For instance, are you sharing? Are you seeing what I show right now? Okay, so the categories. These are all on the website. If you go to the website, you have all this available for you. Course creation tools, e-learning authoring tools. So you have to differentiate between the two. And in fact, this was one category that we managed. How do you manage the course? The learning management system or something else. And this was something that was also analyzed. The question of testing, which tools can we use? Squeezing, polling, testing, online assessment tools. The possibilities for software presentation and for animation, which is something that people were very interested in when we did the desk research to understand what is relevant for people. Video hosting services, editing tools for videos. How can you use videos? How can you edit? How can you improve your videos? Like I mentioned, this is something that I think is very important and that's why we are here today. It's the question of the webinar and meeting tools. They were also analyzed. The question of screencasting, audio and capture tools. How can you use this for capturing images and audio and use that for webcast and podcast? How can we collaborate with file and sharing tools? As you know, we live in a network world and this is very useful for cloud computing and cloud collaboration like it's mentioned here on the website. Of course, the question of bookmarking helps you select some of the tools and get interactions and discussions. These were the 10 category classification systems that we used to classify the tools that we examined. Now, let me show you the report that was produced. The report, the audit of learning tools, like I mentioned now, it's a little bit more. It's 3,300 times that it was downloaded. In the previous slide that I used, it was done some time ago. Now it's 3,305 times downloaded. I hope that you download it also and take a look at the report. In fact, it's just a PDF, so you can take a look and read it. If you go to the next output that we had in the project, we had the report about the assessment. Now, this is probably the most difficult one, of course, as you can imagine, because we had to classify for each one of the tools that we chose after the categorization, we had to make a report of each one of the tools. As you can see, this part, I don't know why, it was downloaded only 700 times, about 700 times. In fact, from my point of view, it's the most useful one, because it has an evaluation that it's not very long. It's no longer than three pages of each one of the tools. You can, of course, ask for a printed copy again from the coordinator. I think he has enough speeches with him, but you can download it also and you can take a look. Of course, this question of the pedagogy assessment is very personal. That's something that I've learned recently, is that this question of assessment and evaluation is very personal, very emotional. People get very emotional. This is the work of the consortium. Of course, you may have a different opinion, you may have different opinions, but it is better than nothing. That's my perspective also, because, in fact, we don't have many of these approaches in the area of learning and digital tools. Now, for the third output, like I mentioned, you have the toolkit, and the toolkit will help you use these tools in what is mentioned, which is less than an hour. So, I don't know. You have to try and see if it helps you. In fact, if we structure or if you look at the five steps approach where you have the video to talk about the quick understanding of the tool, and this can also be used for teacher education. Don't forget that you can show this to other teachers, or colleagues, and show what it is for, or even to your students if you're doing collaborative work with them. Read the three-page pedagogic report. Learn from others. The partnership has selected some videos from the use of these tools that can help you understand what are the advantages and disadvantages. Of course, you have a simple step-by-step approach to get up and running with the tool, and there are some follow-up, like test your knowledge or join a session where some of the tools are in action. So, this is the third result, the third result, third output toolkit that I think can help you with each one of the tools. Now, if we go to the fourth output of the project, and again, these are the online training courses, I have two examples here. One is this module one, there are five online training courses where we're talking about innovative teaching. And this module, you can try it. It's based on some points, as you can see on the screen, that has some presentations of the partners, these are the partners that have participated more on these modules. But in fact, what it does is that presents you with a course that you can take to better know and very understand some of the tools that were presented. Of course, the topic of this module is why innovative teaching and why you should think about it and try to produce it more, because some of our students, I just came from a class, some of our students, for instance, love this quiz that you can do online during the class. They ask to present their opinions and they can do it and they can present also their questions while we are presenting our PowerPoints. And this brings more people to the class. That's my personal experience, for instance. I don't know if it is a tool that it's not in modern, by the way. It was not included in modern. But it is something that you can use whenever you want. The other module is e-learning trends. This is another module that tries to talk about the micro e-learning and this new trend. And micro e-learning, for instance, it talks also about game-based learning, talks about video-based learning, social learning, responsive e-learning. But this micro e-learning is precisely the theme of Eden. You know, this is a webinar organized by the steering committee or by the network of academics and professionals of Eden. And the chair, Antonello Polci, approved this webinar that I'm doing. But as you can see, this is something that is also addressed in this project and I hope that it will be discussed during the next Eden conference in January and June. I hope that you show up. And it shows how you can use Movely to do these tools. Of course, there are others, but this is just examples. And like I mentioned, this is a structured way of approaching this question of e-learning tools. So the links are behind the PowerPoint. The links are behind the slide, the text here. If I click, I will go to the proper link, like Maria has made a favor of placing them on the chat. But they are on this set of slides. So if you have access to the slides and I think Eden will place this accessible to everyone, you can have access to all these links. And this is... For those who know me, I generally don't spend much time talking. I hope to have presented as best as I could what we have done in this project and expect that you somehow take advantage of some colleagues of yours. Here are the links to the project and the links to my email address and to Francesca. Francesca is the representative you can that has actively collaborated with me in this project. So any of us can help you explain or get some materials from this project. And now I'm again open for questions if you have any. And I hope that this short webinar was useful for you. Eva is typing, so I'll wait for her question. From the users, we have made several... Eva, we have made several webinars concerning the presentation, not several webinars, sorry, several workshops in the you can conferences. And the response was very good because people most of the times were not aware of the characteristics of some of the digital tools. And for those who are beginning with some of the digital tools, I think this is very easy to use on one hand and very serious. I think the people who did this job and I'm talking about myself. I was just a consultant. I'm talking about the others. They did it with very good intent and they were very open. All these classifications and assessments were done, let's say, with very good intentions of promoting a better learning and a better teaching, of course. Okay, yes, you were there. Thank you. Also, Anna, you can join at any time. This project is maintained for five years, the website. And all the materials are open and self-paced. So feel free to use it. And if you have any questions, you can ask me or Francesca or the project coordinator. So glad to help if we can. Anything else? If not, try to follow the NAP webinars. We have some chats at the end of the day, some weeks, and we also have webinars. So try to join the Eden NAP webinars and the Eden events. I think Eden is... I don't see the secretary general from Eden, but I only see the secretary. But Eden is a great place to network and to exchange opinions and to learn from each other. So try to get involved and let's see if we can meet in Geneva in June. Okay, good, sure. Thank you very much. And we'll keep in touch and, like I said, be glad to help. Okay? Good. See you in Geneva. Thank you.


In Eastern Ukraine, government troops facing Russian-supported separatists in Luhansk, voice concern about whether peace can hold as diplomats continue talks. In Cameroon, officials say at least eight people were crushed to death in a stampede at an Africa Cup of Nations soccer game in Yaounde. In Indonesia, a clash between two groups at a dance place in West Papua results in a fire that killed 19 people. And in Sudan, hundreds of people mourn a young protester killed Monday with two others demonstrating against the military government takeover.


Austin solid afternoon at the plate driving in forward. Did you make any adjustments in the batter's box coming into this afternoon's game? Well, just tweaking the swing a little bit trying to get back to what I was doing last year stay at the middle of the other way Working hard it would add it with Marcus But I mean really just getting good pitches ahead and I was fortunate and went my way today Have you found it difficult to get a rhythm at the plate when not getting consistent playing time? I mean That's the job. I got to find a way playing simple James Paxton six strong innings allowing just two runs from your vantage point what made him so effective Well, I think he came out and he had a different mentality. I think he was trying to drive the ball in He was he had a good good life on his fastball and his back foot slider today was a lot of swinging missed pitches It was nice. It was nice to Get five there in the third and give him a little bit of breathing room some room to work and then really adjust and get After it but I saw a guy out there with the mentality that I'm going at him Like he has been for us early and and was for us today. You weren't the only guy that provided some offense Cameron Maven as well as Brett Gardner. What did you think of their performances professionals both of them? They've been doing this for a long time Cam's always ready to go and it's his name in the lineup.  He's feeling comfortable at the plate and guardies just guardie You know, you're gonna get a professional bat every time he steps in the box Austin. Congratulations on the win. Thanks. My pleasure


Rwy'n iawn am gwybod i'r ddau Cyffan Rhaid Afwr i ar obtenio gweithio gyda disbyn. Yna, mae'r dda i gyfanig Uniddor, mae'n dwi'n gwaith gyda siwtion yng nglynyddiant i ddau'r ddau Cymru, a'r ddau cyntaf i'w gweithio gyda siwtion. Oherwydd mae'n gydych chi, a'r ddau cyffan i gweithio gyda'u gyda siwtion ac oedd yn diolog. Fe gwybod wedi'u ateb ydyb yn Ddiogelol Hynny'r cychwyn i'r diogelol o Brexit regbes the public either don't have a say. With remarkable presence here at the European University we've actually been looking at the public's attitudes to the European Union for 10 years. We've been doing it and I've led this work from the Center for Citizenship Identities in Governance and really what I want to show you then is in 3 steps. First of all, how the public speaks about political issues, then I'm going to tell you about six public narratives on the European Union, probably quite quick, but we might pick them up later on in the discussion, and then let's pick up this one. Are we moving now from representative democracy to direct democracy? Have we got a little bit of a taste for it now in the UK? We've had our referendum and we rather like this. Are these presidents clearly like Twitter and tweets and Prime Ministers? Do we need this whole house of commons things anymore? Or have we been rather bruised by these binaries and would we like to head back now? I think a good place to start then is the 12 objectives that were articulated that Richard referred to then, this idea of a white paper that gives 12 objectives. Some people felt it was a flimsy document, but for analysts like myself it was very useful to have something that starts to frame up the next two years. My priority I think is objective one, which is about providing certainty and clarity. If you look at the section on public and parliamentary involvement in scrutiny, have a look at this one, 1.6. We will continue to build a national consensus around our negotiating position by listening and talking to as many organisations, companies and institutions as possible. Have you spotted a group of people who've disappeared? Interesting. Let's see if we can find them. If you look at 1.11, to enable the government to achieve the best outcome in the negotiations, we will need to keep our positions closely held and we will need at times to be careful about the commentary we make public. Our fundamental responsibility to the people of the UK is to ensure that we secure the very best deal possible from the negotiations. We're not on direct, we're not on representative either. This is one way communication. And the argument here that's being presented I would argue to you is that it's a matter of security now that certain cards have to be played carefully to the chest. We, my colleagues, colleagues like Helene, Paula Battle and Carol Rootsness, what we did is we did a poll just for this Open Minds event. We just asked people, the public, using Twitter, what would you prefer? You've had a taste of direct democracy, but if you had to choose one, which one would you choose? And you can see there the answer, 77%, so they would prefer representative democracy. Now it's 315 people. I did have a quick look to see who they were. It's not easy to work it out on Twitter, but I don't think that one group, if you like, pro or anti group pushed that. I think there is something going on now about people feeling like they'd like a representative process. Now I am a social psychologist and what we do is we do things like this. We show this to our participants and then ask them to comment on it. So take a look at that and tell me where it takes you. Or think about it. I'm not going to ask anyone to say anything, I promise you, but have a think about where it takes you for a minute or so. Gosh, you're all very polite. This is where it took my participants. I have to say I did ask them this round 2012. So a little bit cooler than the conditions we're in now. Well personally what I think it's saying is this is the way forward for the future. Have one world, get rid of all these different nationalities, like what the European Union did. Have one world, one race, human race, a flag for the human race. I'm sure it would reduce all the costs, border controls, people thinking this is my country, not your country, conflict, all that. We'd get rid of all that because you wouldn't be able to say England, Italy, but just be one world. Wherever you want to live, you can live. Look at the ideals there. Don't think too much about the argument and whether you agree with the argument. Just look at the way this person is developing their argument, bringing in other voices, bringing in the economic rationalities and so on to work out their position. Let's move to Glasgow. You'll see those MMC numbers at the top and I'll explain them in a second. This guy, I'd love to show you, play you this recording actually because it sounds like a marketing person. They immediately say no skies, no limits with the European Union. So yeah definitely you know European Union gives you much more opportunities to just do things globally. What most of our countries being part of the European need to do is just adjust their laws, to create some kind of one law, an integrated law. Just make people, the whole of Europe, just a massive part of the globe. Now go smaller to part of the globe, not the whole globe like the person before. We need to go the other way now, don't we? This is a nurse in Gothenburg. She's moved to live in different cities. Come back to Gothenburg and when I've asked her, you know, do you think you're going to move again, she said, no, I'm settled now. For some reason I don't like it. It's the European Union flag, isn't it? I don't agree with the European Union if the European Union is more or less trying to make all countries equal and similar. And I don't think you can do that overnight. I can't even see the reason for doing that. Notice same information but being used differently. European Union spoke about having open borders and it's actually becoming more strict. It feels like the European Union was created because we wanted to be stronger towards the United States. And then she articulates the difference between American federalism and the supranational European Union project really challenges the idea that the ordinary public can't think these things through with a little bit of stimulus material. So one quick slide, this is just to show you how I work. We started as I say early 2008 before the crash by the way in Stockholm in Edinburgh and then building with my collaborators Gothenburg, Glasgow, Dublin, Dusseldorf and London in. Right at the beginning, I must say this, at the early part of the study, it's an interview, about 90 minutes at a game of two halves sort of situation. What we do is we allow people to talk about their degree of mobility. Have they moved? Would they like to move? If they haven't moved, we have 50% migrants, 50% non-migrants and they get to talk that all through before we start asking them questions about the European Union. And what I found, if you can handle this slide, this is the most busiest slide downhill after this, okay? I promise. Okay, what happens when you start asking people about their mobility is that, and this is the one take home I would really recommend, is that the public have degrees of mobility. They are not down that end there, non-migrant generational. Those people do exist but we really struggle to get them in the sample actually. We have to really ask people to find them. Some people have some degree of migrant descent or they're married to a migrant or like the nurse they've been and lived in other countries then they've moved back. They're internal, they've moved between Northern Ireland and Scotland and so on. It's racing ahead of me there, sorry. Let's go back to it actually because we need to finish that one. In Britain we have a lot of this by the way. We have a lot of people who've moved just once and they've really no plans to move again really. They'll just say the kids consider themselves to be Scottish or English and so on, serial settled and then we move to these more mobile positions, people who know already that they're going to go back to the country of origin. I must say I used to work in international relations and involved travelling to Brussels. Lots of people in position 10 in Brussels, people have been moving all along. They were often born in their own as third country children if you've heard of that expression. One parent from one country, another from another country and they're born in a third country and quite often when you ask them, do you think you're settled or do you think you'll move again? They'll instantly say, oh no, we're thinking about moving again so they enjoy movement. So findings then. As I say, we're getting caught on this foxpup public at the moment. The BBC stops someone in the street, they say something that neatly falls between the two binaries, job done kind of thing. What we're finding in our social psychological research is this ability not really to hold on to strong identities that are intractable but rather to move, bring in other perspectives and work with events and political stories. Something that I think is a little bit more stable is world views and that people understand their position across the cities that we've worked in in relation to how they think the world fits together. Last few slides now then. The six ones we've identified in the study and this is all out there by the way and if you're interested in this because I'm moving so quickly then just catch me on Twitter and I can send you these things. So national sovereignty position, that's the one that I think we do, is framing the debate at the moment and that's an anti-position. The nation in Europe position also occurred in our study. We didn't get it so much in England, we got it more in Scotland but I have to say the two countries that we got it in most was Ireland and Germany. The pragmatic institutional position is a position where you're more concerned with what you do for a living and so on and you become quite detached. This is the fourth one, cities end. Some of my participants simply saw themselves as from their city so they would just say look I'm a Londoner, that's who I am. I'm not interested in Europe or any of these debates. That's how I see the world. I see the world. They often saw the world in terms of other cities. Then we have freedom through mobility going a little bit further than the freedom to move. This is this no skies, no limits. This is people whose world they feel the world is made pleasurable, enjoyable and worth participating in through mobility. They see mobility as a source of opportunity rather than constraint. Finally the one world narrative which I think we feel like we're hearing but actually this is the first guy that I showed you who is the one who wanted everybody to move as freely as they could, a border free world. It's not global Britain which of course has that sense of that. That's actually national sovereignty. So to tie up then, have the public had their say. This is the question for us now. There is undoubtedly a disconnect between Parliament and public dialogue and I would propose that that is building a bit of attention. The difficulty for the public now is that they keep getting presented back to them, this Vox Pop public which doesn't really suit them, it's not really representing them. Which is why I think we got that poll result that the public are trying to switch back to representative democracy because what they're trying to do is find a form of democracy that reflects the variety of their positions. So in that case the task for the UK Parliament then is perhaps to reconsider that esprit de corps or to be a little less charitable bunker mentality and give the public an opportunity to express the varieties of their views. Thank you for listening.


Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to critical conversations exploring the separation of powers in the state of American democracy with the National Archives. My name is Rachel Johnson, and I'm part of the public programs team here at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas. To begin, I'd like to state our Indigenous Peoples acknowledgement. At Crystal Bridges in the momentary, we recognize our role as settlers and guests in the Northwest Arkansas region. We acknowledge the Cato, Quapa, and Osage, as well as the many Indigenous caretakers of this land and water. We appreciate the enduring influence of the vibrant, diverse, and contemporary cultures of Indigenous peoples. We're conscious of the role colonization that museums have played. As cultural institutions, we have a responsibility to engage in dismaying of historic and systemic invisibility of Indigenous peoples past, present, and future. We choose to intentionally hold ourselves accountable to appropriate conversation, representation, connection, and education to facilitate a space of measurable change. I would also like to extend a thank you to all of our sponsors of Learning and Engagement Programming for our exhibit, We the People, The Radical Notion of Democracy. Thank you to our sponsors. And finally, I'm pleased to greet our panelists and program partners this afternoon, and I would like to now welcome Lee Glazer from the National Archives to say a few words. Thank you, Rachel, and many thanks as well to the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art for inviting us to partner with you on this important topic today. Greetings from the National Archives flagship building in Washington, D.C., which sits on the ancestral lands of the Anacot tank peoples. I'm Lee Glazer, Director of Museum Programs, and it's my pleasure to welcome all of you to today's discussion, Separation of Powers and the State of American Democracy. The National Archives is home to countless documents that tell the history of our nation through government records, including the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. These three documents from the late 18th century have endured not as historical artifacts only, but as vital articulations of civic ideals. They've been foundational to the structure of our government for nearly 250 years and have survived through many moments of crisis. The framers of the Constitution believe that a separation of powers among the executive, legislative, and judicial branches would ensure accountability and keep anti-democratic tendencies in check. Today's panel of constitutional scholars will discuss how this principle has been tested and what they believe is needed to keep our democracy going. So it's my pleasure now to welcome our distinguished panel. Our moderator is William Howell, Sidney Stein Professor in American Politics at the University of Chicago's Harris School of Public Policy, Chair of the Department of Political Science, and Director of the Center for Effective Government. Joining William as panelists today are Elizabeth B. Widra, President of the Constitutional Accountability Center, Aziz Hope, the Frank and Bernice J. Greenberg Professor of Law at the University of Chicago, and author of How to Save a Constitutional Democracy, and John Michaels, Professor of Law at UCLA, and author of Constitutional Coup, Privatization's Threat to the American Republic. Now just a little bit of housekeeping if you have questions for our speakers and I'm sure you will. Please put them in the chat as they go along and the speakers will address those questions at the end of today's program. And so now it's my pleasure to turn it over to our illustrious panel. Thank you, Lee, and thank you, Rachel, both for the kind introduction and for bringing us together to talk about this important topic. This is clearly a time of heightened anxiety about the health of our democracy and a lot of concern about what might be done to shore up our democracy. And in attending to such concerns, attention naturally shifts towards the design of our political institutions. And in particular, the separation of powers, which to my mind is the defining feature, not just A, but the defining feature of our system of government. It shifts our attention to matters of institutional design. We're going to be talking about institutions, what they are and how they interact with one another. But to kick things off, I think it might be helpful to just kind of level set and get a sense of what do we mean by what is a definition or definitions of separation of powers. And Aziz, can you help us in this regard? When we talk about separation of powers, what exactly are we talking about? I think it's helpful to start by noticing that the separation of powers is a term that doesn't refer just to one particular quite specific arrangement of governance. Rather, it's best to think about the separation of powers as a broad intellectual move in the history of liberalism. Liberalism is a political philosophy that dates back at least to the 17th century. The separation of powers emerges in the late 1600s and early 1700s as an idea about how to respond to the problem of concentrated power in the early modern state. This is a problem that's noticed first and most importantly by the British, the English thinker, excuse me, John Locke and the French theorist, the Baron de Montesquieu. Both Locke and Montesquieu identify a common idea that is the root of what we now call the separation of powers. And that root is the notion that one way of dealing with the threat of centralized power in the form of the state being abused is to fragment that state. Now, Locke and Montesquieu have different ideas about how the state ought to be fragmented. Both of them looked to what was then the English constitutionism model. Locke drew a distinction between executive, legislative and what he called federative power. In contrast, Montesquieu drew a distinction between legislative and executive power and was particularly attentive to the importance of internally dividing legislative power. Both Locke and Montesquieu provide points of reference for the American drafters of the 1787 constitution. And it's important to see that the ways in which those earlier models or ideas can be translated into a new context such as the America of 1787 will turn out to be ambiguous and plural. Today it's worth saying that there are still multiple strands of conversation about the separation of powers. For example, my sense is that when political scientists like Professor Howell talk about the separation of powers, they actually mean something different from what lawyers like Professor Michaels and I mean. The political scientists are often concerned about system level distinctions between parliamentary systems and presidential systems. The lawyers are often concerned at a more micro level and a more granular level about the specific allocation of decisional authority or lawmaking authority between branches of our American government. So there are still today multiple not entirely consistent conversations about the separation of powers going on. And we ought to be careful about the tendency, which is certainly when lawyers talk is prevalent, of consciously or unconsciously switching courses between these different strands of conversation without quite being clear which separation of powers we mean. That's super helpful. So let's try to keep that in mind as we proceed over the next 50 minutes or so. I mean, you've identified a number of things we should be keeping in mind. We talked about separation of powers. We're talking about separation, the fragmentation of authority. You could then immediately think about, well, how far apart, how fragmented? What's the amount of distance between the various units? You've pointed towards the fact that there's been a long standing debates about what those units ought to be and what kind of functionalist role they ought to perform in thinking about legislative versus executive authority. And then ongoing debates. This is about what the purposes of separation of powers are and how we ought to understand them. To bring it home here in the U.S. context, it probably makes sense to think about the constituent elements of our separation of powers, the first three articles of the Constitution, the legislative, executive and judicial. Elizabeth, if you wanted to jump in though, I can see it. Yes, I did. Thank you. Please. I also wanted to point out that I am also a lawyer. Yes. I'm a practicing lawyer. I practice constitutional law. The, you know, one thing that I would just add to what Aziz laid out for us is in the American contribution to separation of powers, you know, adding to, although I think this was a little bit present in Montesquieu, but certainly adding to what Locke laid out, is that most important check and that most important source of power, which is the people. And so while, you know, and Locke, the king was still involved, you know, in our version of separation of powers, all of this ultimately stems from the power of the people on that, I think is the important and at that point in time, relatively unique American contribution to the basic and yes, often vague concept of separation of powers. Right. So where does authority ultimately lie? It may lie in the people, but then there's this vestment of authority in a government. And then how do we ensure that the government doesn't then use that vested authority in order to violate individual liberties and the like separation of powers is part of an answer, an important part of an answer. It's hard to understand the separation of powers without understanding the political incentives of the political actors in their various stations of government. Both in defining, separation of powers, both shapes how they act, but they also play a role in defining what the separation of powers looks like. I mean, the arrows point in both direction. And it might be worth taking some time, I think for us to kind of go through the various branches of government and to start with the first branch, Congress, and to think about, you know, how do separation of powers shape the behavior of legislatures and how in turn do the actions that legislatures take in turn sort of redefine what the separation of powers looks like. And John, could you help us in this regard? This is particularly interesting at a time as we have now, wherein you see huge levels of polarization between two major parties and bare majorities being held by anyone. We've seen this in the most recent election. How those factors figure into the relationship between legislatures and this larger system of separated powers? Yeah, so I'd be happy to. And I just want to pick up on a couple of quick notes that were mentioned. One is kind of marshaling the notion that the Constitution is ours. It's meant for the people it derives from our power. And sometimes that is quite liberating and quite democratizing to think of it that way. But sometimes it's marshaled in ways that are a little bit more complicated, particularly by courts that say we need to allocate power here because that best represents the interest or the proximity to the people. And those are often contested terms. And I think diving into Congress particularly will give us an opportunity to think about that. And then I also hope we can circle back at some point to talk about marshaling history and how important we should think about history, given when that was written and how it resonates or doesn't resonate with us today. So Congress is the first branch. And I think some people give a lot of weight to it being the first branch is the people's branch. And what does that mean? It is the folks who are closest to us, particularly the House of Representatives at the time of the founding. It was understood that many people would know a member of Congress and that they would entrust in their state legislatures the responsibility to pick the United States senators. So there was a sense of closeness and if not familiarity, a localism rooted in the community. And I think we have to consider whether that remains so today. But it certainly was the case that we think of the House in particular that way. And that's why, for instance, spending bills are supposed to originate with the House. But I think it's important to recognize that Congress doesn't necessarily, not that the president does, but Congress doesn't necessarily accurately or fully capture the kind of pulse of the people at any given moment. We are anyone familiar with the kind of debates and arguments over the last many years have been attuned to notions of gerrymandering where districts are misshapen or complicated. There's a complicated design in order to protect certain incumbents to reach a certain demographic design. Campaign finance also distorts the way in which members of Congress are presented and elected. We are currently in a period of active campaigns of voter suppression that makes it harder for folks to vote. And we're kind of chronically dealing with the fact that the Senate accurately represents the equality of states but doesn't accurately represent the equality of the people. So as a Californian, I have two senators, people from Wyoming, which I believe is something to the scale of like 70 or 80 times smaller in population-wise than the Californians has the exact same number of representatives. And then if we want to think about constituent parts that are ignored, the District of Columbia obviously comes to mind and other folks may want to consider places like Puerto Rico as well. Okay, so it is the people's branch and it isn't the people's branch in the ways that I think I've just discussed. Now, Congress has two principal roles if we think about it. One is to do its legislative responsibilities. That's what's designed, supposed to make laws. It's supposed to appropriate funds for the executive branch to use. And then it's supposed to conduct oversight. And in this period of hyperpolarization and hyperpartisanship, both of those become quite complicated. And so I just want to think for a second and I'm going to stop because it'll probably just keep more thinking on other folks' part. But there's not so much cross-partisan cooperation in this moment. Now maybe the really tight elections in the House where we have maybe it's 218, maybe it's 219 Republicans versus 217 or 216 Democrats provide some space for cross-coalition governing. Or maybe things are even more fractured and more, I don't necessarily want to say dysfunctional, but internally paralyzed. That is very hard for the people's branch to really do the people's work in a meaningful way. And I think this is, whether it's a pervasive problem or an intrinsic problem or it's a fleeting problem, it's something we need to grapple with in this particular moment where the country is really in a particularly challenging, I would say, perilous moment. And we could just think about the House, maybe it's 8,000 votes, maybe it's 10,000 votes could have determined whether we had a Democratic House. And with that, with maybe a full 51 members of the Democratic Party in the Senate, there could have been a push for voting rights reform, reform of the courts, maybe even a protection of abortion rights. Or on the other hand, we could get two years of actively investigating this administration, maybe, and also perhaps fishing exhibitions or kind of rabble rousing, we might say, as folks may fear that someone like Jim Jordan, who is known to be more of a, let's say, a bombastic member of Congress, had said that if he gets the gavel for the judiciary committee, he would consider holding impeachment hearings or investigations into the president's family. So that we're a country of 350 million people or maybe more. And if you look around, maybe 8,000 votes, maybe one court decision on whether a particular district was drawn the right way could really shape the trajectory of this nation for a long time. Which has implications then for the representation of people's interest within Congress, changes the internal dynamics of Congress. But as it relates to separation of powers, it also, to the extent that we see greater polarization between the parties, it creates a greater cleavage across the various branches of government. I mean, you identified lawmaking and oversight, both those implicate the second branch of government. And Elizabeth, I'd like to turn to you to talk to, you know, or have us organize our thinking about it. Which is, I think, when we think about threats to democracy, I think more than a few people point towards the presidency is being the potential tip of the spear. And if we think about the unwinding of democracy or the accretion of authority within one branch of government, there was talk at the nation's founding of, you know, demagoguery within the first branch. But boy, our attention has shifted to the second. How are we to think about presidential power, the presidency, presidential politics and separation of powers? Yeah, thank you so much. I think that, you know, if we think just at a fundamental level, you know, the Constitution lays out an article one, two and three, the powers for the legislative branch, which John just went through article two deals with the executive vested in the president. And then of course we'll get to article three, the judiciary. And, you know, I think, which we can talk about more later, I think if you talked to the founders, if they would have, you know, thought which branch would be the most kind of energetic. The most active, perhaps, I wouldn't say the most important, but maybe the primary power of policy, they would have thought that that would be the legislative branch. I think if you ask most Americans now, they think about the president, most Americans know more about the president of the United States than they do about probably even their own member of Congress, much less Congress as a whole. And so I think in our minds, and we can talk about whether it's true in reality, the president's power, the president in that separation of powers is kind of at the top of the, you know, pyramid. In terms of actual powers given in the Constitution, you know, that's not necessary if you just read the document if you knew nothing about how things worked on the ground and just read the document. You know, you might not think that the president would be that person at the top of the pyramid because you look at everything that Congress has listed out. And then of course at the end, the necessary and proper authority to not just enforce Congress's own powers, but all powers vested in the American government, you'd think Congress would be the one that people are focused on. I think for many of us today, it's the president and one reason why I think that is so and it gets to kind of that fundamental threshold question of well, what do we mean by separation of powers and it is a rather vague concept that gets filled up by how we and our elected leaders choose to fill it up. And when you end up with a legislative branch that, you know, as John said, for many reasons, whether it's the way that the Senate now is arguably anti-democratic and at the very least kind of democratically dysfunctional in the way that it represents American people, or it's partisan gridlock, or it's the way that voter suppression works. If you think about, you know, the legislative branches being dysfunctional, then the branches that don't need to cross aisles that don't need to necessarily go through the legislative process and convince other people to vote for you, so the executive can be more energetic. And so I think, you know, that is in some ways why many of us certainly in my lifetime, I think of the president as kind of being more energetic and sort of enacting policies. And I think, you know, would not to get too deep into it, but I think that also comes from the development of the administrative state, you know, with congressional delegation of authority to act on all sorts of questions that a modern American society needs to face. And the way in which the executive branch, not just the president, but the executive headed by the president deals with those problems. It does certainly look to us today like the president is the one in this balance of powers that maybe has much more power. Of course, we're seeing the judicial branch, which I know we're going to talk about next, in some ways, but a stop to that. So I want to come back to the administrative state. It's hugely interesting and hugely important. You've identified, though, something crucial, I think, to our understanding, Elizabeth, which is that when we think about power and where it's vested, as soon as we recognize that the ability of one branch of government depends upon and is crucially defined by the actions of other branches of government, then that gridlock has taken hold in the first branch, opens up opportunities for the second branch, for the president to step in and claim all kinds of authority. And so their fates are linked. They're not aligned, but they're linked in really important ways. For sure. I mean, just to take an issue that was very much and still is very much in the national debate, immigration reform. I think, as President Obama said many, many times, he wanted Congress to go and have comprehensive immigration reform. And that was certainly what he was advocating for on the public stage. And then when Congress wasn't able to do that, then with the authority that he'd already been delegated in the immigration laws, he tried to do as much as he can. But that's exactly your point. If a branch doesn't act, then we can see that vacuum either being willingly filled by another branch, maybe eagerly filled, but maybe sometimes as perhaps in the instance of immigration reform, not so eagerly filled by another branch, in this case, the president. But certainly if someone has to act and one branch isn't, then that is a place where the president can step in. Sometimes for good, sometimes very much for ill. And, you know, part of the design was that you would have these checks and balances. But if one branch is not really capable of being in that balance, then you get out of balance. Yeah. And that's a problem. Yeah. The checks and balances don't work through themselves. They work through the initiative of individuals and parties. And if those individuals and parties can't get their act together, well, then that opens up opportunity for presidents to exercise power and then to push outwards on the boundaries of their power. Presidents or courts, I would add. Or courts. Here we go. Exactly. So the courts are interesting because courts have, I mean, judges and justices, they have politically ambitions of their own. That's for short, true. But they also play a crucial role in adjudicating disputes about what the appropriate boundaries of authority are, the conditions into which one branch of government might be able to claim authority that sits elsewhere, or the willingness of them to approve, say, congressional delegations of broad authority. Aziz, help us think through the courts. What role do courts play in protecting the separation of powers, in defining them? How do you think about them? Sure. So just before I do that, let me apologize to Elizabeth for leaving her off. I realize that that's a particularly pernicious thing to do when there are three guys talking. And one of the three guys, like, refers to the other two and fails to mention the woman who's part of the panel. That's a, I want to recognize that as a particularly obnoxious thing. So what I was, here's my weak excuse is that what I was referring to were tendencies within scholarship. So what I should not have said lawyers, I should have said professors in law schools versus professors and political scientists, science departments, but that's a lame and not not it's not meant as an excuse. So sorry. The role of courts in the separation of powers is, again, not a static thing. Again, we can see this by going back to the progenators of the idea that fragmentation in government was beneficial because it elicited a species of political liberty, Locke and Montesquieu. Locke does not have a role for the courts in the separation of powers. Courts are embedded in the British constitution within the legislative branch until quite recently, the highest court of at least the English polity was embedded within the House of Lords. Montesquieu also, although he did think courts were important, had a very different conception of courts. Montesquieu himself was a judge in a French court called a parlement. But parliaments did not play the role that courts, as we are familiar with that play in the French policy, rather they were akin to many conventions that relayed complaints from localities, far-flung localities, to the king and the court in the side. It's a very, very different model of what it is that a court does that's hovering in the background for Montesquieu, given his professional life, than what we are familiar with today. When we turn to the American context, the role that courts have played has dramatically changed over the last 230 years. We see this by noticing that under the terms of the 1787 constitution, the only national court that has to exist is the Supreme Court. And the Supreme Court, by the text of the constitution, only needs to have one person appointed to it. Other than that, the existence of a judicial system is wholly at the discretion of Congress. Indeed, the federal court system at the beginning of the 19th century is extraordinarily weak. It is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a co-equal actor to Congress or the executive branch. And to pick up on a point that Elizabeth and Will have made, the way that the court becomes powerful, the way that it accrues functional authority through new statutes that expand the court, that add to its power, which is called jurisdiction, that give it new resources in terms of administrative capacity, personnel and powers. The way that all of that happens is through the conscious decision of different political coalitions who gain national power at different points in American history, and decide that there is some policy that can be pursued successfully through the courts, but that is very hard to pursue directly through Congress and the executive branch. Courts over time gain power through legislation. Legislation is not passed because of fidelity to some abstract good, say, legality or judicial independence. Legislation is enacted because it advances the immediate interests of a national political coalition. The best example of this is the Republican coalition in the 1870s, which dramatically expands the number and the reach of federal courts, in part because it advances their vision of a commercial rather than an agricultural republic. So today we have a court system, which is much more powerful than it was in, let's say, 1800, but that has a structure of appointment, a structure of jurisdictional change and recalibration that flows through the national political institutions that are, as we've already discussed, highly partisan and deeply polarized. The pressure to use the political appointment mechanism for the judiciary to appoint judges who are capable of achieving policy goals that cannot be directly achieved through the national elective branches is therefore immense. And while it is true that that pressure has been manifested, particularly at the level of the Supreme Court, more on the Republican side of the aisle than the Democratic side of the aisle, this is largely because it has been Republicans rather than Democrats that have had the lion's share of opportunities to make appointments to the court since the beginning of the 1970s. It is good to remember that our courts, our Supreme Court has had a majority appointed by Republican presidents since 1970. That is 50 years in which one party has exercised the whip hand with respect to Supreme Court appointments. So when we think about the roles that courts play, and I think there are two, there's one in addition to what we'll identify, we need to keep in mind that the role of courts is itself a function of not just our institutional arrangements, our separation of powers, our decisions, the decisions that are embodied in the constitutional text about appointments. They're also a function of the way that that institutional architecture interacts with ambient social and political conditions, conditions like hyperpolarization. All that said, let me tee off maybe the next stage of our discussion by identifying the two ways in which the court plausibly plays a role, at least at a very abstract level with respect to the separation of powers. The first is, as Will said, the court resolves ambiguities. The text is not complete. For example, the text of the Constitution says nothing about who has the power to remove officials within the executive branch below the president, arguably. And the court has stepped into that breach of resolving ambiguities. The second, and I think this is a really important but occasionally overlooked aspect of the separation of powers that gets much more attention in the British constitutional tradition, is the idea that the authority that an actor within the executive branch has, particularly when they are using physical violence, particularly when they are using coercion, is only bound by law if that officer is subject to judicial oversight on the same terms as any other person, whether they are an official or not. This is an idea associated with Alfred Dicey, who's an important constitutional figure in the British tradition, and it's associated with the idea of the rule of law. But the rule of law here means the appropriate relationship between executive action and what the legislative branches authorize. And that I think is a distinct and important function that courts are supposed to play quite apart from their role in resolving ambiguities in the overall structure of the Constitution. Courts are super interesting here. They sit in this constitutional order apart from the adjoining political branches of government, but there are deep dependencies between them. They are not independently elected. They have to be appointed. The Congress plays this role in shaping what the quite directly can intervene and set what kinds of issues can be adjudicated within the judiciary. There's a dependence by the courts on the executive branch for, this isn't something that you brought up, but concerns about enforcement powers that they can issue rulings, but the extent to which they are being enforced, they have to look to the adjoining branches of government. They draw their power from laws, laws enacted by Congress, and yet they also have power to overturn those laws, and to say they don't square with the Constitution, or to effectively rewrite those laws to clarify not just ambiguity about the Constitution, but also what the law itself means. And then they play this different role, wherein they're sort of setting rules about when power can be delegated or not. John, if I could come to you on a follow-up on this. When we think about the players, earlier Elizabeth pointed to the president sort of sitting at the top of the constitutional order today in practice.  And we pointed towards, you pointed towards earlier Congress struggling mightily. Where do you want to, where do you want to put the courts? Are they major players? Are they to be feared, or are they the least dangerous branch as Hamilton suggested many years ago? So the courts could play conceivably a really important role in maintaining the, so if you were committed to the kind of founding allocation of power, then you might be quite surprised and distressed by this toppling of the presumed pecking order. And if so, the courts could play, which would arguably be a quite small C conservative role and a very traditionalist role in insisting upon the kind of initial allocation of power. You could imagine a court that leans in heavily to the realities of modernity. And I think that's largely what we found in the kind of post-New Deal court up until fairly recently that recognized that Congress is quite compromised by its design, by its internal division, by its disaggregated framework of having 535 members, by the heightened role that partisan politics plays over institutional affiliation. And the court put its thumb on the scale of allowing practical compromises where Congress recognizes there's only so much that can get done. So they're going to delegate responsibilities, hopefully to a responsible president who then has broad discretion about carrying out Congress's big plans that they don't have the wherewithal to actually explicitly implement. And you could imagine the court playing that role because it did play that role, as I said. And now if we get to a moment where the court is no longer abiding by that kind of resolution, that modern compromise, and is going to invoke a founding understanding. But one that also accepts a founding understanding of some powers, but not other powers, is where we get into this really frustrating moment where we continue to have a feeding certain types of presidential power and at the same time greatly limiting legislative power. And I think that's what's causing the problem is when Congress, sorry, when the courts are out of step with the broad strokes of where we are as a country. And I don't know exactly how we put that back together. As Aziz mentioned, partisanship hasn't fully dictated how the court has styled itself in these moments. It has been a kind of a core Republican principle in the post-war era to have smaller government to be fairly skeptical of regulatory power. And yet we've had justices appointed by quite conservative presidents and supported by fairly conservative Senates to essentially abide by this post-World War II New Deal settlement. And now we're not. So I think the pressure is on all of us in some ways, for us as voters, us as citizens, legislators, judges themselves to figure out how we go from here. The members of the court talk a lot about institutional legitimacy and how they need to be kind of not necessarily honored, but they need to be respected in our system. But I think that especially when you're not elected, especially when you are acting in some ways in defiance of the popular will, to the extent we can put our finger on what that is, then that trust and that legitimacy has to be earned and earned time and time again. Yeah, so there's this other body of people who also occupy an increasingly prominent place in the constitutional order. These people are not elected, but they exert all kinds of power. And Elizabeth, you referred to them earlier as members of the administrative state. We had a comment earlier that said, don't confuse the legislative branch with Congress. They're not synonymous. That Congress is a component of the legislative branch. That's true. Boy, when you think about the executive branch, the president is a big part of it. But at mid 20th century, we had the emergence of this massive federal bureaucracy, which is the subject to all increasingly sort of sharp critique. By the courts that whereas 30, 40 years ago, there was a sense that we ought to do is sort of step aside and defer to the expertise in the executive branch in the administrative state. But that appears to be changing. How are we to think about where the administrative state sits in the constitutional order and how it relates to these broader themes about separation of powers? Elizabeth. Yeah, thank you. I mean, that is an incredibly important question, you know, for all of us in our daily lives, because so much of what we often take for granted. Many of us, you know, clean air, safe food, proper workplaces, the enforcement of our civil rights. Most of this in the way that it touches us on a daily basis comes from agencies, comes from part of the administrative state, as you would. You know, this is something that has been part of the structure of government since the founding. You know, the idea that the president would be able to have inferior officers and delegate authority to them was something that was very much part of the founding of how you would have a functional democracy, that you would have a government capable of doing things. And, you know, we often think about the ways in which our constitutional democracy is a break from the British. And certainly that's true. But it's also a break from what came immediately before, which was the Articles of Confederation.  So the idea of having them be able to do things was, in layman's terms, you know, really important to the framers of the Constitution. So, you know, obviously having people carry out laws that have been passed, carry out executive functions was something that was very, was not obviously in the same form it is now and not as large as it is now, but was not foreign to the framers of the Constitution. It has developed obviously into a much more sophisticated, complex, numerous arm of the government. But, you know, the basic conception is baked into the Constitution. Now, there are certainly people, and I filed a brief that says just that with the Supreme Court many times. There are certainly folks who would disagree with me on that, who would say that this is much more a modern invention. I, of course, think that's wrong. But, you know, the court today is very much focused, or I should say the conservative majority on the court is very much focused on cutting back on the ability of agencies to act, to regulate. And one of the ways that they're doing that is through a theory called the major questions doctrine, which says that there was a case last term of the Supreme Court, West Virginia versus EPA, which said that if the EPA in that instance, but it applies to agencies in every context, wants to exercise delegated authority from deriving from an initial congressional enactment, then that congressional enactment needs to speak on the major question. If it implicates a major economic or social matter to the country. Now, this is really an extraordinary power grab from both Congress and the executive agencies. Because what the court has just said is that, you know, if executive agencies today like the EPA want to act to combat climate change, Congress from decades ago needed to envision this particular problem and have spoken explicitly on it. So when we were talking in this whole conversation about the way in which separation of powers can ebb and flow, what the Supreme Court is doing right now with respect to the administrative state is a very clear example of the court shifting that balance to a very substantial degree. And we'll see, you know, we'll see how that plays out. But it has very big implications for the way in which the government is able to act in the public good to get back to my kind of initial overall theme of this is being able to do something. And if Congress is as I'll use the word dysfunctional, as I think our previous conversation intimated that then their ability not just to act but to speak clearly to issues large and small is going to be compromised. And if the rule that the court is implying is it is deploying is one that says absent a clear and explicit delegation of authority, then the president and the larger bureaucracy cannot step in and write rules and regulations.  So I just want to like bring it down to like, yeah, please ask tax here. You know, I think that we would be amiss to not recognize that the justice is no as well as all of us watching our system, that right now the ability of Congress to speak on major questions is is very unlikely. And, you know, we saw this in a few instances, the court saying, oh, we're striking down this part of the Voting Rights Act, but Congress you can redo it. You know, but after a while you've got to realize that they know that Congress, and not because of anything they're saying just because of political dysfunction is unlikely to be able to speak on that. So then you are left with a situation where the court is really the one speaking on so many of these major questions of the day, and not arguably the ones who should be which are the branches that are closest to the people. Okay, so if we could let's let's step back and take stock then of the performance of separation of powers we've gone through the various branches of government the administrative state, we have polarized parties and we've got the courts periodically intervening and sometimes not intervening and deploying different kinds of rules. If you are James Madison, and you're looking at contemporary contemporary state of affairs. Are you taking a deep breath and saying how not only did I basically get it right. But my handy work has has lived, or do you look upon the present situation with a good deal of horror let's let's start from their perspective and then we'll and then I'll invite you all subsequently to say, What do you all think about the let's let's first channel our inner James Madison and say how are we doing is ease how are we doing. I think I lost my energy is Madison somewhere on the midway on a snowy day one year and in February, he's still still out there wondering through the bushes of the Chicago Park District so I'm going to just going to try and answer the question on its on its rather than by channeling anyone. One of the things that's come out in our conversation is the way in which when institutions of a national government are designed the way they will behave that the effects that they produce in the world depend upon the interaction between that design and various background facts, facts like the disposition of the people who sit in the institution, the vectors of political compromise or conflict in which the institution is nested and other factors including social and technological change. Madison and the other framers offered a theory or a practice of constitutional design that rested upon certain assumptions about those extra institutional dynamics and one way to think about where we are today is that the assumptions upon which Madison and his peers at Philadelphia acted have been proved false. Often they've been proved false because ironically of the very success of the constitutional project. And so what we have today is a set of institutions that are designed with certain assumptions in mind, but where those assumptions no longer whole, and the institutions move in directions that are unexpected because they're operating in a completely new environment. So let me give you two examples of assumptions that Madison in particular is associated with that are directly salient to the separation of powers, but that no longer hold true. The first assumption is the theory of filtration. This is the idea that framers have designed a system of national elections, partly elective, partly selective. Notice the role, the non elective function role of the Senate and complex design of the Electoral College at the founding, which they thought would yield would filter all possible candidates for national office, selecting for those who would truly public spirited and public minded. I don't think it is controversial now to say that, especially when we're thinking about certain occupants of the Oval Office, the assumption that the Constitution selects for public public mindedness no longer seems to hold. So the first problem is that the theory of representation that the framers had, which assumed that people would be public spirited when they reached national office. And I should add that they would not act in a partisan manner. There wouldn't be national parties. Obviously those assumptions have failed. The second assumption that's failed is Madison's claim that individuals who occupied an institution would merely by dint of occupancy come to identify themselves and their interests with that institution, that they would be loyal to the institution. Now, it seems obvious to us today that a judge who has appointed for life, a person who sits on the bench for decades, is going to have a different relationship to her institution than a representative who must seek re-election through appeal to people far from the Beltway every two years. That seems obvious to us. It was not obvious to the framers. It was assumed that each branch would be characterized by institutional loyalties. So one of the ways of thinking about what the framers would have thought about the separation of power stay, what Madison might have thought about it, is to wonder what he would have thought about an institutional design that he had proposed in large measure. But operating under political conditions of national partisanship, a failure of filtration, and highly divergent degrees of institutional, as opposed to partisan loyalty, what he would think of that institution, what he would think of that set of institutions. One fact that lawyers like to, or law professors like to gloss over about Madison is that he was much more of a political scientist than a lawyer. He comes to Philadelphia after an extensive study of other constitutions in other countries and very much had an experimentalist and an empirical mindset. And so if you cast your mind back to that Madison, then maybe what Madison would say, our contemporary Madison would say is, okay, we build these institutions, we thought they'd work in these ways. They don't. We need to rethink what these institutions do within the bounds of political possibility, given the world we actually have rather than the world we imagine. And therefore the political project, at least when it comes to separation of powers, is not just one of preservation. It's one of evolution and adaptation. And I think with that spirit in mind, if I could turn to John and Elizabeth, if you could each weigh in on your own assessment, put the framers aside, or you could deploy them if you think they got it exactly right. But your own assessment about how well separation of powers is serving us, particularly when we think about a healthy democracy and combating contemporary threats to democracy. John, do you want to go first? And then we'll give Elizabeth you the last word. Sure. And I guess what I would just say on that is that Madison and the framers writ large have a place, but I think the place is that even if even if he were a better predictive analyst of where things would go, I think we need to take some degree of distancing ourselves from the framers because they didn't understand or appreciate and to the extent they would appreciate what the American polity looks like today. It's not clear they would have designed a system remotely similar to the one that they set forth. So I do think it's instructive to look at what they were doing. And it's helpful to think conceptually about what they were going after. But the specifics of the specific design choices, the structures they use may well have been marshaled to engender a caste system that they never thought would ever be replaced or should be replaced. So I think we should take the framers as a starting point to think about what we think about in terms of good governance and accountability. But also be willing to kind of break free from them and recognize their limitations, not just because they didn't envision that parties would become much more prominent, but because they didn't necessarily respect the equality of citizenship that we do today. So where does where does Madison work for me is the is on the conceptual level? Because I think if one of the places where separation of powers continues to resonate most strongly for me is where we've recreated systems of checks and balances where it hasn't been constitutionally required per se, but it's actually worked out extremely well, particularly within the last administration where we had two impeachments but no convictions. We didn't have the courts really stepping in to limit some of the excesses of the Trump administration. But we found the secondary actors who actually put up some some pretty important stop signs. And the two places I'll identify there is to go back to what Elizabeth was saying about administrative governance. So the administrative state is often treated very flatly by the courts and they think about mostly they think about in terms of faceless bureaucrats is usually the the pejorative connotation of it. But if you look inside agencies, it's actually an interplay of career civil servants and political appointees who very much are in constant conversation with and very much subordinate to the powers that be in the White House. And the interplay of those groups actually allows for the politics of the moment to be carried forward with some degree of resistance by those who say that I understand that's what your president wants or our president wants. But but here's the here's the practices that we've always followed. Here are the laws that bind us and here are the precedents that that give us the authority and the credibility to continue to operate six years from now when you're back in, you know, in a law firm or you're back on Wall Street or wherever you're going to go. And the interplay of those two actually help kind of limit some of the excesses, some of the political excesses, some of the arbitrary positions that the president struck out. And that's true. It was particularly true under Trump, but it's true under any administration. And the second place I think it plays out and there are obviously strong indentations in the constitutional text that would note the kind of the the placement of the president as the head of the military as commander in chief. But what we've designed is a very structurally robust system where the military has been depoliticized and that the the the civilian office of the Secretary of Defense is a political position. It does work very closely with the president. But there is the military has removed itself through tradition through laws through customs through looking at other countries, what works and doesn't work have removed themselves from the political sphere. And also, again, serve as a counterbalance in ways that in some places and sometimes might be quite troubling that there might be some friction between the generals or the admirals and the president. But at other times it's been proven to be quite virtuous because the president and the Secretary of Defense have to think, will the generals go along with this half brain scheme or rolling out troops in northwest DC to make a political point, etc. I think the framers structure their structural ideas about separation makes a lot of sense whether the particular devices that made sense in the 1780s make sense today is an open question. So at least two cheers for separation of powers. When we think about maintaining our democracy. Elizabeth, take us out when you think about separation of powers you do. And you particularly as it relates to maintaining a flourishing democracy, do you find solace in it, or do you see it as a potential problem that needs to be overcome. Yeah, so it's a great question and I would just expand our lens on framers from our 18th century framers to include our kind of second founding framers. John Bingham, Senator Jacob Howard, the folks who wrote the post civil war amendments which really revolutionized our American constitutional government in such a significant way that it is often referred to I think appropriately as the second founding. And they added an innovation. They added so many innovations to our written constitution, particularly writing really for the first time the ideals of the declaration of equality and liberty actually into the text of the Constitution, obviously abolishing channel slavery and the 13th amendment, expanding the franchise and the 15th amendment, but they also started something that then was adopted and subsequent amendments to the Constitution but which I think was an important innovation to the separation of powers which they put enforcement clauses. They guarantee equal protection of the laws and they say Congress shall have the power to enforce the provisions of this amendment. They get rid of channel slavery and say Congress shall have the power to enforce and remove vestiges of slavery. And they basically asked Congress to step in to ensure that the fledgling multiracial democracy that they were setting into motion at least trying to set into motion with these changes to the Constitution could be put into place. And you think about that in the aftermath of you know the Dred Scott decision from the Supreme Court which was an abhorrent racist decision from the Supreme Court of course they wouldn't trust the courts to be the ones to enforce equality. So I would look at those framers and think of the way that they thought of how the branches of government would affect the aims of constitutional government they changed significantly the aims of constitutional government to include the equal citizenship that John just mentioned. And then we the people subsequently added more amendments to make our democracy more inclusive more egalitarian. And so I would ultimately look to the foundational framers the preamble starts out with we the people so we are ultimately the continuing framers of the Constitution. And while the Constitution does set up some very clear delineations of power and separateness and checks and balances how we fill those up is very much up to us. So if you you know we talked about the possibility of court reform. The Constitution says that Congress has so much authority with respect to the jurisdiction of the court how many seats are on the court. You know, when we the people are looking at whether our structures of government are actually fulfilling an equal flourishing multiracial democracy where the voices of all of us, no matter who you are are considered equally. I think a lot of us are dissatisfied and dissatisfied is not necessarily bad if it inspires you to act and engage with the purposes of the Constitution and the ideals that you want to see reflected in those who are charged with effectuating the Constitution. And that therefore the work that lies ahead very much takes the form of redesigning and reconceptualizing what those separation of powers are it's not it's not strictly an inheritance the thing that we can alter shape and redefine and this has been a terrific conversation. I want to thank all three of you for for your for your insight and and to our audience members for for for listening in.