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Thank you.

This is Fonteras: A Changing America, I'm KC Counts, thank you for joining us.

As the nation celebrates 250 years of American democracy, we're sitting down with NMSU professors Dr.

Daniel Gomez and Dr.

Jeffrey Williams to talk about it.

From the founding to today, we'll discuss what trends we've seen in the three branches of government and gauge the health of the republic.

Dr.

Daniel Gomez is assistant professor in the Department of Political Science, Public Law and Administration.

Thank you for being with us.

Happy to be here.

And Dr.

Jeffrey Williams is college assistant professor of public law in the, in the Department of Public Law, Political Science and Administration.

I think, I got that a little bit backwards lately, but it's a new department name, right?

Brand new.

No worries.

Thanks for having me.

Thank you for being with us.

And I thought we'd go ahead and start with the founding and then talk about what happened every day up until today, how's that?

Sounds good.

We might be here for a few weeks.

Few weeks sounds right.

But I wanted to just start by asking you about the compromises that were made at the founding and some of the highlights that got us a government at the at the beginning.

Dr.

Gomez, why don't you begin.

Sure, I'd be happy to.

So one of the core problems, outside of government, even just human nature, is that we are inclined to disagree.

There could be totally justified reasons for that.

You and I could disagree regardless of our level of education, are intelligence, there are just so many reasons that we might disagree.

How do we get such a diverse group of people with so many competing interests that are totally reasonable to agree to a grand experiment in democracy?

So many of the compromises related to how our government works, how we interact, with one another and even our connection to the government, we're in a reasonable attempt to manage those.

I think the biggest flaw in American democracy is that the factions, the division that existed 250 years ago, has changed so much point where it would look completely different to the founders today.

So, so many of those compromises were built on this rather germane idea that we need to find some way to manage these differences that are totally reasonable without devolving to just killing each other, so.

Which they did in the streets from time to time?

Of course, yes, back in, way back in the founding, this was a totally justifiable reason to or I guess way to resolve differences.

Let's just kill one another.

Even in the halls of Congress we have stories of one senator beating another Senator to death just to prevent him from voting on something.

So to say that we have managed to resolve these differences, even with these compromises, like having the House and the Senate be separate branches, having different ways we elect the president versus our local governors for example, good attempts, to institutionally manage these differences, but far from perfect, even in the early days.

I think Dr.

Williams, we all grew up learning that the Constitution is a living, breathing document.

And certainly it has changed over time.

But, Americans seem so resistant when you talk about change to our governing document.

Why do you think that is?

And do you feel that there will be changes to our Constitution in the future?

There are always changes to our Constitution, Youre correct the reason that you can have a governing document that lasts for, coming close to 250 years now is because it changes with the time.

The founders problems were rooted in things that they dealt with, really with the British government, and the things that they were worried about, things like creating the Third Amendment, which bans quartering of soldiers in your home, doesn't really apply to us today.

And now today, we see our problems in, in terms of relationships with the government that we know and understand so, I think there's no question that we're always going to change.

We talk a lot about Supreme Court rulings and those rulings, still have to have some public support.

The Supreme Court doesn't have an army or a police force to enforce what it does at times the executive branch, in cases like Worchester versus Georgia, President Jackson opened the door for Native American removal, because he didn't listen to or respect a Supreme Court ruling, so, public opinion is always going to sort of flow and the Constitution's going to do that, even if we have people who say we shouldn't interpret it, more strictly.

Let's talk about that division of the houses of Congress and how, first of all, the Senate, obviously, two senators from every state means that some states with smaller populations get outsized representation.

Do you think the Senate is a representative, chamber of government?

And what changes do you think we should see in the Senate If not?

I would say at the base level, what does it mean for a body to be representative?

At the base level, Senate absolutely checks the boxes.

It is a body of people selected by others to carry out actions on their behalf.

Does the Senate accurately and adequately represent the American public as opposed to, say, the House?

I think the core issue there is these what we call the size of the constituency.

We want different elected officials to care about different groups of people, different areas of the country, because otherwise, how would they those places even get any representation at all, any attention at all.

So at its core the Senate is even from early days, an attempt to balance imbalanced proportional representation that exists out there.

The idea being that just because people don't live somewhere, doesn't mean that that place isn't worthy of someone taking care of it.

Looking out for it, keeping the protection in place.

That being said, land does not vote.

Land, is certainly subject to the consequences of actions taken by politicians, but no more so than people.

The fundamental attempt to balance this sort of imbalance in representation absolutely made sense when we were 13 colonies.

In modern America, in modern politics, I think we should take a serious look at whether or not land in and of itself is worthy of protection and representation, the same way that people are.

That's an interesting way to think of things.

And about the House, I mean, it's been, how long since we've changed to the numbers in our House of Representatives?

You might address, Dr.

Williams, the need to grow the House a little bit.

Yeah and I think that, that that's, certainly proportional representation, I like that point about, land that makes a lot of sense in that way, and so, yeah, I think one way to solve the kind of outmoded, power of the Senate would be to add some seats to the House, but you've already got, a large amount of people.

And so how far does that go?

Yeah, they drew the line, at 435 total, and so, you know, how much further can you go, is the question that would be debated.

And then, of course, politics come into that.

It almost goes back to the founding where, the largest compromise was over representation, and under the Articles of Confederation, states were all completely equal.

So it was a compromise for states to have a bit less power and have at least one house in proportional representation.

And it's interesting to me that we seem to have these same debates like I said, we have different concerns, and yet those same debates over, power really flowing from the States are flowing from the people is always a constant.

And you'd have to rebuild the Capitol.

Yeah, but I mean, and that's a concern of a practical concern.

Where are you going to put that many people?

If you've ever watched the house work in person, it's pretty chaotic.

and so how much more would it be?

I would certainly think that in this day and age, we could we could add more, but you would get a lot of pushback from that too.

Before we move on from the early stages of our government, I'd like to talk a little bit about the Electoral College and what the challenges are that exist for the Electoral College way that we elect our presidents today.

Sure, so the original intent behind the Electoral College, was to insulate the executive, someone who was sort of a middle ground elected official.

One hand, we have, you know, judicial, the judicial branch where we dont elect those people and they're presented with lifetime appointments.

On the other hand, we have, say, the House of Representatives, where they're elected directly by the people in their districts.

The presidency was initially intended to be sort of like a boring, high level administrator, not necessarily someone that the public pays too close attention to.

So the Electoral College, granting a handful of votes per state and winner take all system within the state, was a clear attempt to say, the president should be insulated from the whims of public opinion to some degree, especially early on, without a robust system of communication, education, transportation.

It made sense that the public was a little bit, far removed from the administrator.

Today, It almost feels archaic.

That we should not be electing are only elected officials in the United States who represents everyone, regardless of where you're from or where you live.

About your thoughts on the Electoral College?

Yeah, and another thing that's really born in, that the founders would really balk at the fact that we tend to refer to ourselves as democracy.

They would say, no, absolutely not, It's a republic, and they would, they would be correct in the Electoral College, the worry was the founders were very much worried about direct democracy that, we the people would all vote was never really in their mind, as we know, by who they allowed to vote early on.

But they also were, so originally, the idea was to have Congress elect the president.

If you just look at the Constitution, Article one is Congress, article two is the Executive, there's a reason for that, It's an order of importance, so the idea was to maybe have Congress select the president, And they compromised away from that because, James Madison in particular was worried about corruption that you might have in Congress.

So we end up with this compromise, the Electoral College and it's something that I think about a lot as we became more democratic, as we expanded who we the people were, would have been really helpful for folks in this country to look at the Electoral College at that time.

And yet it stayed and now politically, I think we all understand that, at least in the last several elections, it's supported one party, more than the other and so you'r going that you would have a huge political debate to try to get rid of it, but probably would have at any time actually.

One of the things I wanted to talk about today, which is some of the trends that we've seen over time in our government's three branches, and I thought about the Industrial revolution, as one place where we might have seen some, some specific legislation movements in the courts, because of this just erupting change of life.

And we're going to compare that later, of course to our technical, technological revolution.

But what can you say about how government changed during the Industrial Revolution?

Well, we could fill up, weeks with just that question alone.

But we can just think of the Industrial revolution as a fundamental change in the lifestyle of most, though not all, Americans, right?

The move from a more agrarian society into more industrial one, the movement predominantly from the south, up north, outside of rural areas into these sort of centralized cities that have grown and grown and grown.

Fundamentally, that just changes the structure of the country fundamentally.

So when we think of land voting back to the Senate example or proportional representation in the House or even the Electoral College, the system of government and the structure, the rules the process created was one which we constructed from a very rural, very diffuse nation.

Just the industrial revolution alone, changing the way and places where people live fundamentally changes the way they see government and the way they interact with it.

And while, as Dr.

Williams said, we are technically a republic that has sort of warped into being that more of a democracy, the institutions failed to sort of keep up with changing technologies and ways of life in meaningful ways.

Though I would expect Dr.

Williams to have more specific examples here.

All right.

Well, the pressure's on Dr.

Williams.

You know, I was thinking about in terms of the courts, which is more my area of expertise, was a real moment of crisis, for the courts, because, and it's, why is that we're going to compare our technological revolution to the industrial revolution, because these large changes bring about a lot of chaos, and government is designed to avoid chaos.

And, I think that, in their effort to try to support growth, the Supreme Court tended to support, for a long time, big business.

You the Gilded Age comes about, the court is, very much in favor of kind of anything business does.

We talk a lot about liberty in this country.

They came up with the idea of liberty to contract, which basically meant that, workers, when, if you were to protect workers with, some kind of legislation, you know, to just protect safety, then that would impose on their liberty to contract.

and so they ruled all kinds of protections for workers unconstitutional.

And so hopefully, as we start to have some more complex cases and we've had things with the internet, and of course, we'll have things with artificial intelligence, the court recognizes some of that history and is a little more progressive in the way they make those decisions.

I mean, there are states that are kind of easing child labor laws.

Florida comes to mind.

So you don't think that's going to be a trend in the other direction at this point?

Very well could be.

I think that's a really good point.

I guess I'm not willing to say trend in the other direction yet, and we'll kind of see what the courts have to say, which certainly they will, but yeah, it's a very good possibility.

So while we're talking about the Supreme Court, I want to, acknowledge that as we're having this conversation, the court has yet to rule on birthright citizenship.

We expect that by the time this program airs, they will have made that ruling.

So any bets from either a view on how the court will rule on this?

I am not generally a betting man, so I would have stray away from that.

The court recently, I would say, has given us few surprises.

Anyone who's expecting sort of flat deference to the president because they align on what we perceive as political interests or ideological interests, might be disappointed sometimes and might be vindicated others, applying sort of that partizan logic to the court, it's always been difficult.

But even sort of going back to founding, the 14th amendment, birthright citizenship, it has its own sort of, problematic roots, right.

The original intent was not to ensure citizenship for immigrants, but to deny it specifically to American Indians and Native Americans born on sovereign land.

So if we want to go back to a more, original intent of the law, there's already some what some might call problematic elements in its origination.

So that is sort of the core of my hesitance to say one way or another.

All right, Dr.

Williams.

Yeah, I, I've learned over the years not to bet on the Supreme Court.

It was just a dollar, I was.

Yeah, and I'm still, I'm still not certain I think that, the 14th amendment is fairly clear, and we had, a similar case, during somewhat of a similar time when there's lots of anti-Asian immigration, sentiment in the country.

In 1898, in a case called Wong Kim Ark, in which Wong Kim Ark was born in the U.S., and he would go back and forth to China.

And after he'd done that a few times, one time when he tried to come back into the country, he wasn't allowed to come into the country because he was considered a citizen of China.

And the Supreme Court ruled under the 14th Amendment, Wong Kim Ark was born in the U.S.. regardless of these other things, we're going to deem that Wong Kim Ark is a citizen of the United States.

And so that's what, overcoming birthright citizenship would have to overcome the 14th amendment, and Wong Kim Ark, so if had to, bet a dollar on probably, still not really want to, but I would think that, birthright citizenship is going to hold up in some form, but it'll be interesting to see, how that looks.

The graphics will be scrolling on the screen that say the results, so.

Yeah.

At this moment, again, we do not know.

I'd like to spend the last few minutes we have.

Can you believe it's already the last few minutes we have?

Talking about trends in the presidency, the executive, and how, shifts of presidential power have occurred over time.

You know, famously, George Washington, I think, was a reluctant, president.

He did not want to see a two party system in the country, if I remember, that lesson correctly.

And, and then we move over into, you know, the Roosevelt years when you have a president, you know, elected over and over.

And to today, where we have seen, over the last probably three administrations, maybe more, this sort of consolidation of power in the presidency in the form of, executive orders.

What is your take on how presidential power has changed over time?

Sure, not to dominate the entire conversation here but few sort of core points.

The reason that the executive branch and the presidency can shift so much was almost intentional, right?

The Constitution and much of the founding documents around the executive were purposely vague because different factions couldn't decide what version of the president they wanted.

So we left it open to interpretation.

Kick the can down a little bit down the line, much like the founders did, with several questions.

And over time, different presidents with different motivations, different, political realities.

So I've poked at this, check to see whether this boundary was here.

And we see that presidents tend to expand power in a particular few cases.

It's predominantly when the other branches are hesitant to act.

Right now we see Congress that is gridlocked, deadlocked, can't really work together, can't compromise, gives the president more leeway to enact policy through executive order.

And the court, at least in relation to the presidency and the executive branch, I find them the most powerful when they choose to do nothing.

Getting out of the way of the president is when the court, the Supreme Court specifically seems to have the most power, and they've, seemed pretty willing to do so in the past few decisions.

That's a really interesting take.

Dr.

Williams?

Yeah, I tend to agree.

I think that's a really good point, that the Supreme Court, yeah, by not stopping executive power, they they certainly enable executive power.

And I think it's a good point to look at executive order.

Forget how far it goes back, but each president has used executive order more and more.

Some of us thought that the old constitutional law professor Barack Obama, would use it less, and he just went right along with the trend.

And part of that seems to be our expectation as Americans that, that we pay so much attention to the president, that there's pressure on each president to, to do things, and the design founders way of Congress being in control doesn't seem to satisfy our need for change as much.

And so there's pressure on every president also to use the executive order.

For the last couple of minutes, I'd like for get, for you to share what your gauge of the health of the republic is?

I do see a lot more people talking about, well, it wasn't supposed to be a democracy.

Well, it is.

Do we want, how is the health of our democracy today?

Dr.

Williams you start.

I'm still a believer in we the people.

I think that we're still out there, talking about these things, that we can still organize and vote and, despite and also, I guess as a historian, the chaos that's wrought by this change that we saw in the Industrial Revolution and now we're seeing in the technological revolution, doesn't really surprise me.

So I feel like, it's another bump in the road for trying to keep intact, this long running experiment in self-government.

And so, I believe in us, and I think that will, do well.

and I can't predict how things work, but I believe that, things are going to be good, All right, Dr.

Gomez, as a country, we've been in bad shape multiple times throughout our history, and it seems like we always managed to scrape through one way or another.

So that's one point for the side of optimism.

On the side of pessimism to understand democracy, whether it's a hybrid republican form or even its purest sense, is not, we'll call it forward ratchet.

Right?

We don't achieve it, and then we're done.

It requires constant maintenance.

And I hesitate to say that we are more up to the task today than we used to be.

All right.

Well, thank you very much, Dr.

Daniel Gomez, assistant professor in the College of Political Science, Public Law and Administration, for being with us today.

And to you, Dr.

Jeffrey Williams, assistant no, college assistant professor in the same department at NMSU.

Thank you so much for joining us.

It was great talking with you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Each year, over 20 local teens are honored as the Mayor's Top Teens.

Liz Liano KRWG, Public Media's Membership Coordinator spoke with each of them, including Las Cruces High School's Lacey Knight.

Welcome to Mayor's Top Teens.

I'm Liz Liano, and today we're going to be talking to Lacey Knight.

Welcome Lacey and congratulations for being a Mayor's Top Teen.

Thank you.

Thank you for having me.

Yeah, it's wonderful to have you here.

So, we'd like to hear a little bit about you and some of the activities and extracurriculars that have been keeping you busy.

So I'm a senior at Las Cruces High School.

Throughout my high school career I've been really involved in, mostly FFA events and different things around, my school for sure.

But FFA is definitely the most one.

I've grown up around agriculture my entire life.

So I've lived here in Las Cruces and I've done a lot of stuff through FFA, and that's just what I spend most of my time on.

So you said you grew up around agriculture.

What does that look like?

So my, my whole family has been involved in FFA and agriculture, kind of since they've grown up too.

My mom's actually an agriculture teacher, and so was my grandpa.

So, I've come from kind of a long line of that, but I've been exposed to agriculture and I've been riding horses since before I could walk.

So, I have a lot of animals, and, I've just been involved in 4H and FFA since I could remember.

So it's something that's kind of capsulated my whole life and it's something that I'm really happy I have because it's helped me so much.

Wonderful.

It sounds like you're very passionate about it.

Is this influencing what you want to do in the future?

What you want to study?

Oh, for sure.

I know I'm going to definitely study animal science and get my degree in that and then, possibly go on to maybe becoming a vet, going to vet school, or going to into agriculture education, like my mom.

So it's definitely influenced what I wanted to do, and it's given me so many career opportunities to explore what I want to do.

I was really undecided until I really got in deep into FFA, and then that's really helped me decide really what I want to do.

Wow, so it runs in the family and you're very passionate about it, that's wonderful.

Do you know where you want to, pursue your studies?

I'm going to get my bachelor's here at NMSU, and then, afterwards, maybe go on to a secondary college, either for vet school, some somewhere like, Washington State or Colorado State.

And if not, then, stay here at NMSU for my, master's in agriculture education.

Wonderful.

Well sounds like you have it all laid out.

And I'm sure wherever you go, you will find a horse?

No horsing around.

Oh, wonderful.

Well, congratulations again on being a Mayors Top Teen.

Thank you.

Thanks to Liz and Lacey and all the Mayors Top Teens, possibly future congressmen and women, judges, and maybe president.

And thank you for watching and for supporting local programing like this.

You can watch episodes of all our local programs at KRWG.org, where you can also sign up to receive the Friday News Wrap, our weekly newsletter that helps you catch up on our local coverage for the week, from KRWG Public Media.