Jesse Wegman
speaker
281 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 6 Jul
Jesse Wegman’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
It's called the Committee of Detail.
Most of the other delegates go away for 10 days and just take a break because they're all exhausted fighting for the last two months over Congress.
And Wilson and a few other delegates write the first draft of the Constitution.
We have no records of what exactly they discussed.
But what comes out of that committee is Wilson's opening words of the Constitution.
He put the words, we the people, at the beginning of the Constitution.
And what he was doing there, he was making clear that this is a Constitution.
This is a government founded on people, not states, people.
We the people, he understood to be the three most important words in the Constitution.
Wilson very much wanted a powerful central government with several of the other founders on this point.
You know, he said, going back, I think, to 1776, he said, we are not so many states.
We are one large state.
We lay aside our individuality whenever we come here.
And I think that sort of sums up his philosophy.
He believed that the states were, you know, pointless, imaginary beings that deserve no respect.
And Wilson, in the Committee of Detail—
comes up with what we call the necessary and proper clause.
This is a clause that ends up being one of the most consequential in the Constitution.
It gives Congress massive power to legislate for the nation and over the states.
And, you know, there's a huge amount of resistance to it from
Showing 161–180 of 281 · page 9 of 15
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