The Daily Show Season 4 Episode 12 Jill Lepore

After a string of mass shootings across the U.S., America swaps out "thoughts and prayers" for a left vs. right blame game, Republicans hypocritically criticize the Democrats' "violent rhetoric," and Trump escalates a nonexistent problem by deploying troops to Portland. "Just because we've written [the laws] down doesn't mean that we can't aspire to make things better." Harvard law professor and staff writer at The New Yorker, Jill Lepore, joins Jon Stewart to discuss her new bestselling book, "We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution." She points to the years-long process of trial and error that went into writing the Constitution as an example of how the document was designed with the intention to be changed and improved upon, and emphasizes the foundational right to amend the document as Americans see fit. Lepore also explains how the conservative "originalist" movement has discouraged the addition of any new amendments since the 1970s, how conservatives continue to use originalism as a way of bending the Constitution to their political will through the courts, rather than going through the much harder amendment process, and how this dynamic has put issues like abortion rights and environmental protections at risk.