Jeffrey Rosen appears in The Bob Zadek Show not as a guest but as the head of the National Constitution Center, the institution whose commissioned projects supply the subject matter of several episodes. Bob Zadek introduces him in that capacity, describing him as the Center’s president in one episode and as its current executive director in others, and attributes to him a standing description of the Center’s charter. No excerpt contains an interview with Rosen, a quotation from him, or any statement made in his own voice.
The National Constitution Center
Zadek describes the National Constitution Center as the only organization chartered by Congress to further the understanding and appreciation of the Constitution, a formulation he presents as Rosen’s own explanation. In a later episode he gives the same description in Rosen’s name while noting that the Center is nonpartisan, and in two further episodes he repeats it as something Rosen is fond of saying, adding that the Center is funded by Congress for the sole and exclusive purpose of increasing awareness and understanding of the founding document Timothy Sandefur on The Libertarian Constitution (2021) The Libertarian Dream Team - Ilya Somin (2022).
Zadek locates the Center in Philadelphia and recommends it as a destination, calling it the go-to site and the go-to physical place in that city for learning about the Constitution, and citing its exhibitions, its presentations and its interactive constitution 3 Libertarian Ideas to Strengthen Democracy (2022). In the episode with Ned Foley he again places the Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and calls it a must-stop for a visitor to the city where the country was created Enhancing Trust in Democracy (2022).
The Libertarian Constitution project
The first of the Center’s projects to appear in these excerpts is one Zadek calls the Libertarian Constitution project. He says the Center commissioned three teams of scholars — a libertarian team, a progressive team and a conservative team — each working independently, and assigned each the task of writing or rewriting the Constitution in a way more consistent with its respective values. The three resulting Constitutions, he says, differed quite dramatically in some respects while remaining more or less consistent with the current Constitution in structure, and in many ways the teams reached very similar conclusions, which he found surprising Timothy Sandefur on The Libertarian Constitution (2021).
Zadek’s guest for that discussion was Timothy Sandefur, identified as Vice President for Litigation at the Goldwater Institute and a member of the libertarian team. Zadek lists Sandefur’s other affiliations as the Cato Institute, Hillsdale College, the Chapman School of Law and George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia School of Law, and says Sandefur litigates on property rights and individual freedom issues. Sandefur’s own opening remark in the excerpt is that the team rescued the Constitution. The excerpt’s summary states that the discussion covered revisions intended to restore federalism, protect individual property rights, eliminate the income tax, and constrain the administrative state and executive war powers Timothy Sandefur on The Libertarian Constitution (2021).
The Guardrails of Democracy project
A later project, which Zadek calls the Guardrails of Democracy project, asked a different question: what is not working in the system of democracy, and which guardrails have failed or ought to be put in place. Zadek says the Center again convened a progressive group, a conservative group and a libertarian group, each analyzing the question independently and producing its own solutions, and that he would present a member of each of the three groups in turn The Libertarian Dream Team - Ilya Somin (2022).
His first guest on the project was Ilya Somin, described as a professor of law at George Mason University who focuses on constitutional law, property law and the study of everyday people in representative governance, and as the author of Free to Move: Foot Voting, Migration, and Political Freedom. Somin says he does not work for the Center and cannot speak definitively to its motives, but that he takes the goal of the project to have been to recognize serious problems with the democratic system in the United States over the last several years, particularly though not exclusively during the 2020 election and its aftermath. He names the other two members of the libertarian team as Walter Olson and Clark Neily, both of the Cato Institute 3 Libertarian Ideas to Strengthen Democracy (2022).
Somin describes the libertarian report as addressing three aspects of the crisis. The first is immediate threats to the integrity of the electoral system and the political process, such as the efforts he attributes to President Trump to overturn the 2020 result and stay in power after losing. The second is the broader problem of empowering people to have a meaningful say in the policies they live under, which the report approaches through voting with one’s feet in the federal system and through expanded opportunities for decision-making in the private sector, which Somin argues is often more empowering and leads to better decision-making than ballot box voting. The third is increasing opportunities to participate in governance, particularly by strengthening the jury system, which he says the founding fathers and figures such as Alexis de Tocqueville treated as a central mechanism for ordinary people to participate in government and which he says has been lost or degraded over recent decades 3 Libertarian Ideas to Strengthen Democracy (2022).
The progressive team
The third team member to appear in these excerpts is Ned Foley, presented as a member of the progressive team. Zadek identifies him as holding the Ebersold Chair in Constitutional Law at Ohio State University and as directing its election law program. Zadek frames the subject of election law as central to a set of problems: a sitting president questioning election results, a storming of the Capitol to upset the election process, questioning of the balloting process, and allegations that people were denied access to voting or that too many or the wrong people voted Enhancing Trust in Democracy (2022).
The excerpt’s summary states that the discussion covered the erosion of the norm of accepting election results and structural flaws in the electoral system, specifically gerrymandering and the lack of competitive districts, along with potential reforms such as proportional representation and Electoral College changes. Foley’s only quoted words in the excerpt are a reply to Zadek’s introduction, in which he says he was a little worried the expectation setting might be just a tad high but that they would do their best Enhancing Trust in Democracy (2022).
Across episodes: the Center’s projects
The excerpts show the same framing repeated rather than a question argued and developed. In the 2021 episode Zadek introduces the Center and Rosen’s description of it while presenting the Libertarian Constitution project with Sandefur; in the three 2022 episodes he uses the same description of the Center and of Rosen to introduce the Guardrails of Democracy project, first with Somin and then with Foley. What changes between the earlier and later treatment is the project under discussion — from rewriting the Constitution along libertarian lines to identifying failed or missing guardrails of democracy — and the guest advancing it, Sandefur in the first instance and Somin and Foley in the later ones. The excerpts contain no exchange between the guests and no development of Rosen’s own position.