Randa Abdel-Fattah

Music for this episode was composed by Ramtin and his band, Drop Electric, which includes...

Thanks for listening.

This is America in Pursuit, a limited-run series from ThruLine and NPR.

I'm Randa Abdel-Fattah.

Each Tuesday, we bring you stories about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in America that began 250 years ago this year.

So today we're going back to the moment when the American Revolution ends and the revolutionaries become statesmen and build a brand new government.

So I just want to take a second and sit with the magnitude of that task.

Imagine having to build a brand new nation, a democratic government and all its infrastructure from scratch.

It was a Herculean task.

And like most things that entail a lot of people getting on the same page, it was full of fights and different visions for what the U.S.

government would be like.

And while a lot of what the framers came up with back in 1787 when they drafted the Constitution has stayed the same, like the concept of checks and balances between the different branches of the government,

Some of it looks vastly different.

Take the judicial branch and the Supreme Court.

Today, the Supreme Court has a lot of power dictating the laws of the land.

But back at the turn of the 19th century, not so much.

This is how Alexander Hamilton put it at the time.

In other words, without the sword or purse, the Supreme Court didn't have much power to enforce its decisions, making it the least dangerous and least powerful branch.

That's Larry Kramer, author of The People Themselves, Popular Constitutionalism and Judicial Review.

And that's Rachel Sheldon.