Senate Confirmation Hearings and the Missing Fight About the Constitution

Senate Confirmation Hearings and the Missing Fight About the Constitution

Joseph Fishkin and William E. Forbath on the Supreme Court, plus P.E. Moskowitz on antidepressants.

Start Making Sense and Jon Wiener
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The Senate confirmation hearings for Biden’s Supreme Court nominee, Ketanji Brown Jackson, have been following a familiar script: Opponents look for scandal, and nominees say very little about how they’ll decide cases. Progressives instead should be arguing—inside and outside the hearings—that the Constitution requires protecting our “republican form of government” from becoming a “moneyed aristocracy” or “oligarchy,” Joseph Fishkin and William E. Forbath explain. Their new book is called The Anti-Oligarchy Constitution: Reconstructing the Economic Foundations of American Democracy.

Also this week, P.E. Moskowitz talks about the dangers and benefits of antidepressants, from both a scientific and personal perspective. Their piece, Breaking Off My Chemical Romance, is featured in The Nation‘s new special issue on drugs.

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Start Making Sense Start Making Sense is The Nation’s podcast, hosted by Jon Wiener and coproduced by the Los Angeles Review of Books. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts for new episodes each Thursday.  


Jon Wiener Jon Wiener is a contributing editor of The Nation and co-author (with Mike Davis) of Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties.


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