American Seances

This episode examines how Radical Reconstruction leaders—John Bingham, Jacob Howard, Charles Sumner, Lyman Trumbull, and Thaddeus Stevens—redefined American citizenship after the Civil War. They rejected the Taney Court's state-centered, racialized view and pushed a national birthright model through the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the 14th Amendment.By establishing citizenship as an individual right conferred by birth in the United States, their work created a national people, limited state power to exclude, and reshaped the nation from a federation of states into a republic of citizens.

This episode explores how Chief Justice Roger B. Taney and the Dred Scott decision denied birthright citizenship, treating citizenship as state-centered and racially exclusionary, and shows why the 14th Amendment was enacted to create a unified national citizenry.We trace the legal and philosophical shift from a federation of state-defined members to a constitutional guarantee that birth confers national citizenship, explaining how that transformation reshaped American identity after the Civil War.

This episode imagines Karl Marx confronting the American prescription drug market, using insulin as a vivid example of how capitalism transforms essential medicines into profitable commodities. It explores themes like use value versus exchange value, patents and monopoly power, evergreening, and how the state and private profit interact to socialize risk while privatizing gains.The episode argues that high drug prices produce class-based harms—rationing, missed doses, and premature deaths—and asks whether life-saving medicines should be treated as market commodities at all, closing with the provocative question: was insulin always expensive, or only once it became profitable?

This episode traces the shift from the restrictive Taney Court to Salmon P. Chase’s Reconstruction Court, showing how the Civil War transformed the federal government into a centralized force for national survival.It profiles Chase’s role as an abolitionist, Treasury builder, and jurist who expanded federal authority in decisions like Texas v. White, reframing commerce, taxation, and federal spending in service of citizenship.The episode argues Chase’s careful, moralist jurisprudence made laws like the ACA conceivable by emphasizing national stability, conditional federal power, and a reimagined liberty protected from domination.

This episode imagines Chief Justice Roger B. Taney confronting the Affordable Care Act and explains why, in his constitutional framework, the ACA would be unconstitutional. It outlines Taney's limited view of federal power, his narrow reading of the Commerce and Taxing Clauses, and his defense of state police powers and individual liberty.Through historical context and key decisions like Dred Scott and the License Cases, the episode shows how Taney's commitment to state sovereignty and freedom from federal compulsion would lead him to reject the individual mandate, Medicaid expansion coercion, and other core features of Obamacare.

This episode explains how the Fuller‑Lochner Supreme Court (late 19th–early 20th century) defined constitutional liberty as economic freedom — the freedom to contract — and used substantive due process to shield markets from democratic regulation.Reimagining Roe v. Wade on that court's docket, the episode argues the justices would have briskly rejected it as a doctrinal misapplication, returning abortion regulation to the states and viewing Dobbs as a jurisdictional correction that restored their hierarchy: liberty for contracts, not bodies.

This episode argues that the Supreme Court of 1874–1888 (the "weighty" court) would have refused to constitutionalize abortion, grounding its view in the Slaughterhouse Cases and a narrow reading of the 14th Amendment that leaves family, morality, and medical regulation to the states.Rather than moral judgment, the court would emphasize federalism and judicial restraint: striking Roe and agreeing with Dobbs' result as a jurisdictional default, denying national fetal personhood, and leaving abortion regulation to state law or Congress.

This episode examines how Chief Justice Roger B. Taney and the Taney Court would have approached Roe v. Wade, arguing that under Taney's constitutional framework abortion would be a state criminal and medical matter, not a federal rights issue.It explains Taney's commitment to strict federalism, his narrow view of liberty that excluded bodily autonomy and women's individual constitutional status, and why Roe's reasoning would collapse for structural and jurisdictional reasons in that era.

This episode imagines how Anti‑Federalists like Brutus, Patrick Henry, and George Mason would react to Donald Trump’s unilateral tariff actions, viewing them as evidence that the Constitution enabled centralized executive power that bypasses local accountability.It outlines their distrust of national economic planning, their belief that tariffs function as taxes imposed without broad consent, and their warning that consolidated federal authority threatens local liberty and self‑government.

This episode contrasts William Seward’s 19th‑century view of national self‑determination with Jefferson Davis’s aristocratic theory of inherited sovereignty. It explains how Davis, as a Confederate statesman, would likely interpret the Russia‑Ukraine conflict as a struggle to defend a historic political unity rather than a fight for democratic independence.The episode outlines Davis’s two core beliefs—sovereignty in peoples defined by lineage and the illegitimacy of outside interference—and shows how those ideas would lead him to justify Russian efforts to preserve territorial unity while condemning foreign support for Ukrainian independence.