What's Melissa Murray's Constitutional Hot Take?

Added: 2026-06-03

[00:00:00]My hot take is the Constitution is a trauma-informed document. If you read the original Constitution, [music] it will become immediately clear to you that these guys were going through some [music] things. They had Parliament taxing them, making it hard to run a newspaper, you couldn't dissent against the government, they had soldiers being quartered in their homes and in their neighborhoods, a standing army in their streets. They were going through it. And when they decided to sit down and create a government, they were thinking about all this. It was basically like going to therapy and being asked to write everything down in a journal. They didn't journal, instead they constitutioned [music] and they wrote this Constitution that basically puts restraints on [music] everything they hated about the colonial period. And this trauma is laced through the other aspects of the Constitution.

[00:00:47]So, the Reconstruction Amendments are born out of the trauma of the Civil War, over the trauma of having to fight about whether or not this country would be free or slave. [music] Section 1 of the 14th Amendment lays out the conditions of birthright citizenship and it's meant to be a repudiation of the trauma of the Supreme Court's decision in 1857 [music] in Dred Scott versus Sanford, where the court said that African-Americans could never be citizens of the United States.

[00:01:16]And Section 1 of the 14th Amendment is meant to address that trauma and to fix it.